One Fifth Avenue

by Candace Bushnell

Lola sighed dramatically. “It’s been awful,” she said. “If it weren’t for Philip, I don’t know what we’d do.”

  “Philip’s a peach,” Schiffer remarked, and Lola agreed. Then, rubbing salt into the wound, Lola added, “I’m so lucky to have him.”

  Now, thinking about the encounter, Schiffer glared at herself in the mirror. “You’re done,” the makeup artist said, flicking Schiffer’s nose with powder.

  “Thank you,” Schiffer said. She went into the bedroom, put on the borrowed dress and the borrowed jewelry, and called to her publicist to help zip her up. She put her hands on her waist and exhaled. “I’m thinking about moving out of this building,” she said. “I need a bigger place.”

  “Why don’t you get a bigger place here? It’s such a great building,” Karen said.

  “I’m sick of it. All these new people. It’s not like it used to be.”

  “Someone’s in a mood,” Karen said.

  “Really? Who?” Schiffer asked.

  Then Schiffer, the publicist, and the hair and makeup people went downstairs and got into the back of a waiting limousine. Karen opened her bag, took out several sheets of paper, and began consulting her notes. “Letterman’s confirmed for Tuesday, and Michael Kors is sending three dresses for you to try. Meryl Streep’s people are wondering if you’ll do a poetry reading on April twenty-second. I think it’s a good idea because it’s Meryl and it’s classy. On Wednesday, your call time is one P.M., so I scheduled the Marie Claire photo shoot for six in the morning, to get that out of the way—the reporter will come to the set on Thursday to interview you. On Friday evening, the president of Boucheron is in town, and he’s invited you to a private dinner for twenty. I think you should do that, too—it can’t hurt, and they might want to use you in an advertising campaign. And on Saturday afternoon, the network wants to shoot promos. I’m trying to push the call time to the afternoon so you can get some rest in the morning.”

  “Thank you,” Schiffer said.

  “What do you think about Meryl?”

  “It’s so far away. I don’t even know if I’ll be alive on April twenty-second.”

  “I’ll say yes,” Karen said.

  The makeup artist held up a tube of lip gloss, and Schiffer leaned forward so the woman could touch up her lips. She turned her head, and the stylist fluffed her hair and sprayed it. “What’s the exact name of the organization again?” Schiffer said.

  “The International Council of Shoe Designers. ICSD. The money is going to a retirement fund for shoe workers. You’re giving the award to Christian Louboutin, and you’ll be sitting at his table. Your remarks are on the teleprompter. Do you want to go over them beforehand?”

  “No,” Schiffer said.

  The car turned onto Forty-second Street. “Schiffer Diamond is arriving,” Karen said into her phone. “We’re a minute away.” She put down the phone and looked at the line of Town Cars and the photographers and the crowd of bystanders roped off from the entrance by police barricades. “Everyone loves shoes,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Is Billy Litchfield here?” Schiffer asked.

  “I’ll find out,” Karen said. She talked into her cell phone like it was a walkie-talkie. “Has Billy Litchfield arrived? Well, can you find out?” She nodded and snapped the phone shut. “He’s inside.”

  The car was waved forward by two security men, one of whom opened the door. Karen got out first and, after consulting briefly with two women dressed in black and wearing headsets, motioned for Schiffer to come out of the car. A ripple of excitement went through the crowd, and the blazing flashes began.

  Schiffer found Billy Litchfield waiting just inside the door. “Another night in Manhattan, eh, Billy?” she said, taking his arm. Immediately, she was accosted by a young woman from Women’s Wear Daily who asked if she could interview her, and then a young man from New York magazine, and it was another half hour before she and Billy were able to escape to their table. Making their way through the crowd, Schiffer said, “Philip is still seeing that Lola Fabrikant.”

  “Do you care?” Billy said.

  “I shouldn’t.”

  “Don’t. Brumminger is at our table.”

  “He keeps turning up like a bad penny, doesn’t he?”

  “More like a million-dollar bill,” Billy said. “You can have any man you want. You know that.”

  “Actually, I can’t. There’s only a certain kind of man who will deal with this,” Schiffer said, indicating the event. “And he’s not necessarily the kind of man one wants.” At the table, she greeted Brumminger, who was seated opposite her on the other side of the centerpiece. “We missed you in Saint Barths,” he said, taking her hands.

  “I should have come,” she said.

  “We had a great group on the yacht. I’m determined to get you on it. I don’t give up easily.”

  “Please don’t,” she said, and went to her seat. A plate of salad with a couple of pieces of lobster was already set at her place. She opened her napkin and picked up her fork, realizing she hadn’t eaten all day, but the head of the ICSD came over, insisting on introducing her to a man whose name she didn’t catch, and then a woman came over who claimed to have known her from twenty years ago, and then two young women rushed over and said they were fans and asked her to sign their programs. Then Karen arrived and informed her it was time to go backstage to get ready for her speech, and she got up and went behind the platform to wait with the other celebrities, who were being lined up by handlers and mostly ignoring each other. “Do you need anything?” Karen asked, fussing. “Water? I could bring you your wine from the table.”

  “I’m fine,” Schiffer said. The program began, and she stood by herself, waiting to go on. She could see the crowd through a crack in the plasterboard, their eager and politely bored faces lifted in the semi-darkness. She felt a creeping loneliness.

  Years and years ago, she and Philip would go to these kinds of events and have fun. But perhaps it was only because they were young and so wrapped up in each other that every moment had the vibrancy of a scene in a movie. She could see Philip in his tux, with the white silk scarf he always wore slung over his shoulders, and she remembered the feel of his hand around hers, muscular and firm, leading her out of the crowd and across the sidewalk to the waiting car. Somehow they would have gathered an entourage of half a dozen people, and they’d pile into the car, laughing and screaming, and go on to the next place, and the next place after that, finally heading home in the gray light of dawn with the birds singing. She would lie halfway across the seat with her head on Philip’s shoulder, sleepily closing her eyes. “I’d like to shoot those birds,” he’d say.

  “Shut up, Oakland. I think they’re sweet.”

  Peeking once more through the crack, she spotted Billy Litchfield at the front table. Billy looked weary, as if he’d tilted his head too many times at too many of these events over the years. He had recently pointed out that what was once fun had become institutionalized, and he was right, she realized. And then, hearing the MC announce her name, she stepped out into the lights, remembering that there was not even a warm hand to lead her away at the end of the evening.

  When she was able to return to the table, the main course had been served and taken away, but Karen made sure the waiters had saved a plate for her. The filet mignon was cold. Schiffer ate two bites and tried to talk to Billy before she was interrupted again by the woman from the ICSD, who had more people Schiffer had to meet. This went on for another thirty minutes, and then Brumminger was by her side. “You look like you’ve had enough,” he said. “Why don’t I take you away?”

  “Yes, please,” she said gratefully. “Can we go someplace fun?”

  “You have a seven A. M. call tomorrow,” Karen reminded her.

  Brumminger had a chauffeur-driven Escalade with two video screens and a small refrigerator. “Anyone for champagne?” he asked, extracting a half-bottle.

  They went to the Box and sat upstairs in a curtained booth. Schiffer
let Brumminger put his arm around her shoulder and lace his fingers through hers, and the next day, Page Six reported that they’d been spotted canoodling and were rumored to be seeing each other.

  Returning to Philip’s apartment on Tuesday, Lola dug out the old Vogue magazine with the photo spread of Philip and Schiffer (he hadn’t, at least, tried to hide it, which was a good sign), and looking at the young, handsome Philip with the gorgeous young Schiffer made her want to march down to Schiffer’s apartment and confront her. But she didn’t quite have the guts—what if Schiffer didn’t back down?—and then she thought she should simply throw out the magazine, the way Philip had thrown out hers. But if she did that, she wouldn’t have the pleasure of staring at Schiffer’s photographs and hating her. Then she decided to watch Summer Morning.

  Viewing the DVD was a kind of divine torture. In Summer Morning, the ingenue saves the boy from himself, and when the boy finally realizes he’s in love with her, he accidentally kills her in a car crash. The story was somehow supposed to be autobiographical, and while Philip wasn’t actually in the movie, every line of dialogue delivered by the actor playing Philip reminded her of something Philip would say. Watching the love story unfold between Schiffer Diamond and the Philip character made Lola feel like the third wheel in a relationship where she didn’t belong. It also made her more in love with Philip, and more determined to keep him.

  The next day, she got to work and enlisted Thayer Core and his awful roommate, Josh, to help her officially move into Philip’s apartment. The task required Thayer and Josh to pack up her things in boxes and plastic bags and, like Sherpas, carry it all to One Fifth.

  Josh grumbled throughout the morning, complaining about his fingers, his back (he had a bad back, he claimed, just like his mother), and his feet, which were encased in thick white sports shoes that resembled two casts. Thayer, on the other hand, was surprisingly efficient. Naturally, there was an ulterior motive behind Thayer’s efforts: He wanted to see the inside of One Fifth and, in particular, Philip Oakland’s apartment. Therefore, he didn’t object when Lola required him to make three trips, back and forth, dragging a garbage bag filled with Lola’s shoes down Greenwich Avenue. In the past two days, Lola had sold off everything in her apartment, posting the details of the sale on Craigslist and Facebook, and presiding over the sale like a dealer of fine antiques. She took nothing less than top dollar for the furnishings her parents had purchased under a year ago, and consequently, she had eight thousand dollars in cash. But she refused to pay for a taxi to transport her belongings. If the last month of penury had taught her anything, it was this: It was one thing to lavishly spend someone else’s money but quite another to shell out your own.

  On the fourth trip, the trio ran into James Gooch in the lobby of One Fifth. James was pushing two boxes of hardcover copies of his book across the lobby with his foot. When he spotted Lola, he reddened. Her visits and text messages had stopped abruptly after his encounter with Philip, leaving James confused and hurt. Seeing Lola in the lobby with what appeared to be a young asshole and a young loser, James wondered if he should speak to her at all.

  But in the next minute, she’d not only engaged him but convinced him to help her carry her things. So he found himself squeezed next to her in the elevator with the young asshole, who glared at him, and the young loser, who kept talking about his feet. It could have been his imagination, but holding a box of old shampoo bottles in his arms, James swore he felt waves of electricity coming from Lola and commingling with the electricity from his own body, and he imagined their electrons doing a little sex dance right there in the elevator in front of everyone.

  Putting down the box in the foyer of Philip’s apartment, Lola introduced James as “a writer who lives in the building,” to the young asshole, who immediately began challenging James about the relevance of every successful living novelist. With Lola as his audience, James found himself easily rising to the occasion, putting the boy in his place by citing DeLillo and McEwan, whom the young asshole hadn’t bothered to read. James’s knowledge infuriated Thayer, but he reminded himself that this James person was insignificant, nothing more than a member of the hated boomer tribe who happened to live in this exclusive building. But then Lola began gushing about James’s new book and his review in The New York Times, and Thayer figured out exactly who James was, sighting him in the crosshairs of his ire.

  Later that evening, after Thayer had consumed two bottles of Philip Oakland’s best red wine and was back in his dank hole of an apartment, he looked up James Gooch on Google, found he was married to Mindy Gooch, looked him up on Amazon, found that his yet unpublished novel was already ranked number eighty-two, and began constructing an elaborate and vicious blog entry about him in which he called James “a probable pedophile and word molester.”

  Lola, meanwhile, still awake and bored, sent James a text message warning him not to tell Philip he had been in the apartment because Philip was jealous. The message caused James’s phone to bleat at one in the morning, and the uncharacteristic noise woke Mindy. For a moment, she wondered if James was having an affair, but dismissed it as impossible.

  On most weekday mornings in One Fifth, Paul Rice was the earliest riser, waking at four A. M. to check the European markets, and to wheel and deal fish. His tank was completed and installed, running nearly the length of Mrs. Houghton’s ballroom, and the interior was a model maker’s dream, a replica of Atlantis half buried under the sea, complete with old Roman roads leading out of sandy caves. The acquisition of his coveted fish was a cutthroat business and required viewing videos of hatchlings and then engaging in bidding wars in which the best fish went for a hundred thousand dollars or more. But every successful man needed a hobby, especially when most of his day entailed either making money or losing it.

  On an unusually warm morning on a Tuesday at the end of February, however, James Gooch was also up early. At four-thirty A. M., James got out of bed with a stomach full of nerves. After a night of tossing and turning in anticipation, he had finally fallen asleep only to awaken an hour later, exhausted and hating himself for being exhausted on the most important day of his life.

  The pub date for his book had finally arrived. That morning, he had an appearance on the Today show, followed by several radio interviews, and then a book signing in the evening at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square. Meanwhile, two hundred thousand copies would be released in bookstores all over the country, and two hundred thousand copies would be placed in iStores, and on Sunday, his book would be featured on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. The publication was going exactly according to plan, and since nothing in his life had ever gone according to plan, James was seized with an irrational sense of doom.

  He showered and made coffee, and then, although he’d promised himself he wouldn’t, he checked his Amazon rating. The number shocked him—twenty-two—and there were still five hours left until it was technically released. How did the world know about his book? he wondered, and decided it was a kind of mysterious miracle, proof that what happened in one’s life was absolutely out of one’s control.

  Then, just for the hell of it, he Googled himself. On the bottom of the first page, he came across the following headline: GOOFY BOOMER HOPES TO PROVE LITERATURE IS ALIVE AND WELL. Clicking on it, he was taken to Snarker. Curious, he began reading Thayer Core’s item about him. As he read on, his jaw dropped, and the blood began pounding in his head. Thayer had written about James’s book and his marriage to Mindy, referring to her as “the navel-gazing schoolmarm,” followed by a cruel physical description of James as resembling an extinct species of bird.

  Gaping at the item, James was filled with rage. Was this what people really thought of him? “James Gooch is a probable pedophile and word molester,” he read again. Wasn’t this kind of statement illegal? Could he sue?

  “Mindy!” he shouted. There was no response, and he went into the bedroom to find Mindy awake but pretending to sleep with a pillow over her head.

/>   “What time is it?” she asked wearily.

  “Five.”

  “Give me another hour.”

  “I need you,” James said. “Now.”

  Mindy got out of bed and, following James, stared sleepily at the blog entry on his computer. “Typical,” she said. “Just typical.”

  “We have to do something about it,” James said.

  “What?” she asked. “That’s life these days. You can’t do anything about anything. You just have to live with it.” She read through the item again. “How’d they find out this stuff about you, anyway?” she asked. “How do they know we live in One Fifth?”

  “I have no idea,” James said nervously, realizing that the item could be traced back to him. If he hadn’t run into Lola that day when she was moving, he would have never met Thayer Core.

  “Forget about it,” Mindy said. “Only ten thousand people read this stuff, anyway.”

  “Only ten thousand?” James said. Then his phone bleeped.

  “What is that?” Mindy demanded in annoyance. She stared up at him with her pale, mostly unlined face, the result of years of avoiding the sun. “Why are you getting text messages in the middle of the night?”

  “What do you mean?” James asked defensively. “It’s probably the car service from the Today show.” When Mindy left the room, James grabbed his phone and checked the message. As he’d hoped, it was from Lola. “Good luck today,” she’d written. “I’ll be watching!” followed by a smiley-face emoticon.

  James left the apartment at six-fifteen. Mindy, unable to help herself, reread the blog item on her and James, and her mood became increasingly foul. Nowadays, anyone who committed the crime of trying to do something with her life became a victim of Internet bullying, and there was no retribution, no control, nothing one could do. In this frame of mind, she sat down at her computer and began a new blog entry, listing all the things in her life over which she had no control and had made her bitterly disappointed: her inability to get pregnant, her inability to live in a proper apartment, her inability to lead a life that didn’t feel like she was always racing to catch up to an invisible finish line that moved farther away the closer she came. And now there was James’s impending success—which, instead of relieving these feelings, was only bringing them into sharper focus.