“Lily?”
The sound of her name sent a buzz of alarm down her back. No one knew about her bird watching in the Rambles. It was one of the few completely private aspects of her life. She looked to her left and saw a man, jogging in place, panting. Early forties, she guessed, her age, with shaggy brown hair, a loose, sweaty, Hershey-logoed T-shirt tucked into those skintight Lycra running shorts that turned even an average endowment into a mortifying codpiece. She had no idea who he was, which was a relief.
“Lily Gimmel?” How long had it been since anyone had called her that? There is no such person, she almost said. “Larry Adler,” he said.
Suddenly she was so nonplussed—the loss of her red-eyed vireo, being recognized, hearing her name, her old name, then his name—she could only nod dumbly.
“How have you been?”
He stopped jogging in place and placed his hands on his hips, as if presenting the codpiece for her consideration.
How had she been? A throwaway line from anyone else, but from Lawrence Adler, the question seemed huge, impossible.
“I’ve been…and you?”
He winced. The last time they’d been together, almost twenty-five years ago, they’d made love three times on the floor of the maid’s room of her parents’ apartment at 218 West End Avenue while Peggy and Monroe slept obliviously down the hall. Three times in one night…the memory gripped her in a dizzy sadness.
“I’m great,” he said. “Put on a few pounds, but I’m running again.” He patted his stomach like an old dog. She used to love watching him run around the track when he’d been the star athlete on the Bronx Science track team. Competing so earnestly had been terribly uncool back in the seventies, and there hadn’t been many people on the bleachers with her. As Larry passed her he’d shoot her a quick glance, his face all nervous concentration and focus. Like a bird’s, she thought now.
“I read about you in the paper sometimes,” he said.
She felt another shiver of vulnerability; after all, she knew nothing of him. Then again, what did he know of her, except the name of her husband, the parties she attended, the dresses she wore? (What else is there to know? a voice asked her. A little birdie, she thought with a panicked glance at the maple branch.)
“What have you been doing?” she asked.
“Same old same old. I’ve been running the store since my dad died six years ago.”
“The Broadway Nut Shoppe,” she said softly. The words felt like a sigh as they left her lips “I didn’t realize it was still there.”
“Remember how you used to visit me when I was working behind the counter? I offered you whatever you wanted and all you’d take was one nonpareil. Never more than one.”
“The Broadway Nut Shoppe,” she repeated, recalling the comfy smell of roasting nuts in the back, the taste of the nonpareil as it slowly melted on top of her tongue until only the tiny dots remained.
“I even moved into my parents’ old apartment on West Eighty-second Street. My father had just died and I needed a place to live. I think my dad would have died a second time if I’d let a rent-controlled apartment leave the family.”
“My parents are still in their place,” she said. And then she remembered that Peggy was determined to sell the apartment and felt an inexplicable jolt of insecurity.
“I guess this apple never fell far from the tree,” he said without a trace of embarrassment. “But you’ve really gone places. I mean, look at you.”
She actually glanced down, feeling suddenly absurd next to his Lycra’d casualness. Khaki trousers, pale blue Turnbull & Asser oxford shirt, Ferragamo boots—all she needed to complete the picture was a riding crop.
“I have to get back,” she said.
“I wouldn’t have pegged you for a bird-watcher.”
“Oh, this.” She raised the binoculars. “It’s just something I do. It’s…I mean, it’s nothing.”
“You look fantastic,” he said.
So do you, she almost said, but instead she gave a little wave with her free hand and turned eastward.
“We never talked about what happened,” he said. “I must have called about sixty times. Your mother said you weren’t home, or you were home but you were sleeping, or sometimes you were in the shower.”
She turned back to him. “I didn’t know what to say.”
He looked pensive for a few moments, during which she dreaded his recrimination, which she deserved. She’d sent him a Dear John letter from Mount Holyoke and then avoided him over Christmas vacation until he stopped calling. But he finally smiled.
“You look great,” he said again, and she wished to God she didn’t, though she knew she did, albeit in a horsey. Town & Country way. He jogged off to the west, and she began walking home to the east.
Four
Prying Monroe from the apartment on a Tuesday night was like luring a gopher from its hole.
“It’s just for a few hours,” Peggy assured him. “Our new broker has a hot prospect who needs to see our apartment.” She’d picked a restaurant on the East Side, to justify the interim stop she had planned, which set off a new round of grumbling.
“It’s the East Side of Manhattan, Monroe, not Tokyo. You’ll be back in time for the ten o’clock news.” He returned to the money channel, or whatever it was called, with a surly growl.
At seven that evening they took the Seventy-ninth Street crosstown bus to the East Side. When they got to Fifth Avenue, Peggy stood up.
“You said the restaurant’s near Second.”
“We have a stop to make,” she said. “Come on or we’ll miss it.”
They debussed from the front. She took Monroe’s hand and led him up Fifth. Ahead, in front of the Metropolitan Museum, a swarm of vehicles, many of them black Town Cars, jammed the avenue. Flashbulbs flickered like fireflies in the night air.
“We’re not going to the museum, are we?” Monroe said. “Looks mobbed.”
“It’s an opening, Monroe. And the only way we’re getting in there tonight is if we pay a thousand bucks apiece.”
“That include dinner?”
Mister Big Shot, she thought, with his shrinking portfolio.
Most of the action was on the museum side of Fifth, so they had the facing sidewalk to themselves. As they slowly moved uptown, the noise from the other side of the street grew louder. Car after car pulled up and deposited guests, then sped off downtown to God knows where to wait out the night. Photographers with big, old-fashioned cameras stood to the side of a long red carpet that ran from the sidewalk up the staircase and into the museum. A banner over the doorway read DUTCH ART FROM THE AGE OF EXPLORATION, whatever that meant. Peggy supposed she’d see the exhibit eventually. Ruth Firestein would sooner skip a grandson’s Bar Mitzvah than miss a big museum show, and Peggy didn’t mind accompanying her, though she could live without the highbrow commentary that Ruth had picked up from an art-appreciation course she took a hundred years ago at the New School.
“What a hullabaloo,” Monroe said. “Where are we going?”
“To dinner, eventually. Let’s wait here a minute.”
They stopped directly across from the museum staircase.
“I need to sit down.”
“You sit all day. Look!”
She stepped behind a narrow tree and pulled Monroe after her. She’d rather die than be spotted by Lily and Barnett—and vice versa, she didn’t doubt.
Lily wore a long, backless gown of some sort of shimmering fabric; it glistened like chain mail whenever a flash went off. Her hair was swept up onto her head, with a few wisps on either side hanging down helter-skelter; she’d probably paid someone a lot of money to decide just which strands to leave alone. A flash went off and Peggy thought she spotted diamonds twinkling on Lily’s ears. Barnett had on a tuxedo, of course. They stopped just before ascending the stairs, turned to their left, and posed for a few shots. Barnett put his arm around her waist—he could probably circle it with both hands—and they just stood there, smiling. At
one point he reached over and adjusted her hair, repositioning one of those free-standing wisps. A second later he did it again.
“What a nerve,” Peggy said. “She should tell him to suck in that gut of his.”
“That’s Lily!” Monroe said, just getting it. “Let’s catch her before she goes in.” He started for the street but Peggy grabbed his elbow.
“Are you off your rocker, Monroe?”
“But it’s Lily and—”
“I know who they are. And I also know that they wouldn’t appreciate us intruding on their evening.”
They were slowly climbing the grand staircase as the photographers turned their attention to the next arriving couple.
“Is that why you brought me here, to spy on them?”
Lily and Barnett disappeared into the museum and Peggy felt a huge weight descend on her. What a stupid, humiliating thing she’d done.
“I just wanted to see what she was wearing,” she said quietly.
“You could ask her next time.”
She looked at him and frowned. “Or I could shoot myself. Let’s get a taxi, Monroe. And promise me one thing, you won’t ever tell her we were here, okay?”
“We’ll take this down for sure,” Guy Pearson said, rapping on the wall that separated the Gimmels’ living room from their guest bedroom.
“Loftlike,” Lucinda Wells purred.
“We’ll open up the kitchen to the foyer, definitely.”
“A California kitchen.”
“You think there’s room for a Jacuzzi?” he asked in the master bathroom.
“You’ll have to incorporate a closet,” she replied, “but you could add a whole wall of closets to compensate. It’s doable. Everything’s doable.”
Everything’s doable—that could be her motto, Guy thought. And his. He almost told her about the fish tank but decided he’d let her discover it for herself—he’d insist they hold the closing in his office. She thought she’d seen everything, but he’d bet the price of the co-op they were looking at she’d never seen a nine-hundred-gallon aquarium in place of a wall. He wanted the apartment. It was way bigger than the house he’d grown up in in Flatbush, Brooklyn—the entire house, not just the first floor his family had rented. It was easily five times bigger than the closet they lived in now. Just imagining the four of them ensconced in such an abundance of square footage made him light-headed.
“What kind of financing are you considering?” Lucinda asked him when they returned to the living room. She sat on the big sofa and motioned with a proprietary sweep of an arm for him to sit next to her.
“All cash,” he said with a touch of bravado. “Goldman Sachs is lending me the money.”
“Against your shares in Positano?”
She was good. He watched her cross her long, thin legs, her right kneecap forming a perfect circle under sheer stockings. She was sexy in a harsh, aggressive way that might once have intimidated the hell out of him. Now he had three million publicly traded shares and Goldman Sachs throwing money at him and he almost wished he were single again, just for one night—an hour would do—to show Lucinda Wells just how manfully unintimidated Guy Pearson was.
“They’ll lend me whatever I need to buy this place,” he said. “Obviously I won’t have to put up all of my holdings as collateral.”
They shared knowing smiles.
“Co-op boards are leery of collateralized loans,” she said when the smiles had subsided. “If the price of the shares drops, and the loan is called…”
“That’s ridiculous. I’ll be pledging less than ten percent of my holdings. And Positano’s not dropping. Our revenues this year are running at twenty-four million, we’re on a path for breakeven in Q4 of next year. And this is West End Avenue, for Christ’s sake, not Park or Fifth.”
“Excellent point. I’m just raising the kinds of issues the board will be raising. The issue of running revenues, for example.”
“What?”
“You mentioned that your revenues were running at twenty-four million. But you haven’t actually achieved that level of revenue as of yet.”
She was very, very good and he hated her. “Run rate refers to annualized revenue based on the most recent quarter. In our most recent quarter we had six million in sales, so we’re running at—”
“Twenty-four million. I get it. And so will the co-op board, if we present the issue in the right context.”
Guy looked around, irritated. The apartment hadn’t been touched in thirty years at least, the owners had probably bought as insiders for a pittance and couldn’t afford to buy it today if they scraped together every cent they had, and now his worthiness was in doubt?
“The Gimmels—they’re the owners—want two-point-three. I tried to get them to ask less, but they had this price in mind even before I entered the picture. They’re very shrewd, so if you’re serious—”
“I’m serious.”
“Then I suggest we offer something close, say two-point-one-five. We’ll work our way up to two-point-two. That’ll settle it.”
Guy imagined the wall facing him succumbing to a sledgehammer, big chunks of plaster plunging messily onto the rust-colored shag carpet, plaster dust settling on the workmen like powered sugar as they hacked away at this deplorable impediment to his manifest destiny of wide-open square footage.
“Make an offer,” he said, barely moving his jaw, which had the desired effect of forcing his voice down an octave.
“Two million one-five?”
Her use of the m for the first time that night gave him pause, but he managed to toss off a dismissive “Whatever.”
Across town at the Met, dinner was served. Normally, Lily Grantham loved fund-raisers at the museum, the heady impertinence of relegating priceless artworks to an unnoticed backdrop for a crowd of begowned and bejeweled society folk raising money for some charity no one knew or cared anything about. Surrounded by dozens of round tables set with good china and elaborate arrangements of spring flowers, the Temple of Dendur, squat, unnoticed, and completely out of context, glowed preternturally, like a meteor just fallen to earth. But tonight she felt restless and bored. Her thoughts turned with maddening regularity to her parents selling the apartment, to Larry in the park, to the theft of her red-eyed vireo.
“Darling.” Barnett kneed her under the table. “Alan and Kate have invited us to Connecticut next weekend.”
“That would be lovely,” she said without any notion of what she’d just agreed to. Alan was Alan Flutterman, of Flutterman, Petrovsky & Wald. Kate was Kate Grier Flutterman, wife of Alan Flutterman of Flutterman, Petrovsky & Wald.
“It’s sooo beautiful right now,” Kate Flutterman was saying. “We had ten thousand daffodil bulbs planted last fall, all the same color, yellow with white centers.”
“White with yellow centers,” her husband corrected.
Why are they telling me this? Lily wondered. Nothing was making sense. She glanced at the Temple of Dendur, which looked small and embarrassed. Whose idea was it to drag that homely pile halfway around the world, only to have it end up as a party decoration? Everything and everyone seemed out of context.
“The children love riding,” she heard Barnett say. “What’s the name of the stables where they take lessons?”
“Claremont Riding Academy,” she said, surprising herself. Kate and Alan Flutterman nodded. Barnett brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. A young waiter with the blandly handsome face of a soap opera actor put a plate of food in front of her. Salmon and sweet peas and potato croquettes.
Conversations lurched forward all around her as she ate. Normally she was the galvanizing center of a table, the focus. She could talk to anyone about anything. True, some nights, as she took off her makeup and gown in her dressing room, she wondered if she’d gone too far in making everyone feel included, important. She wondered if other women in other dressing rooms on Fifth and Park were complaining to their husbands that Lily Grantham had monopolized attention with her encouraging questio
ns and too-ready laugh.
“Barnett Grantham?”
All around the table ten sets of eyes turned to a man standing behind her husband. He wore a shapeless black suit, white shirt, dark tie.
“They’re feeding the security staff in the kitchen,” Kate Grier Flutterman said, as if referring to farm animals. She was a cochair of the event. Lily noticed two similarly dressed men flanking the one who’d spoken her husband’s name.
“Did you want something?” Barnett said, his torso twisted to face the men.
“My name is Jay DiGregorio, from the Federal Prosecutor’s Office. We have a warrant for your arrest. Please come with us.”
“What?”
Lily looked at him, then at the three men, and then, unaccountably, at the Temple of Dendur.
“What is going on here?” Barnett asked. One of the men who hadn’t spoken placed a hand on his shoulder.
“Get your hand off me!”
“Come with us, please,” Jay DiGregorio said. Beginning at their table and radiating outward, a wave of silence unfurled to the far corners of the room. “We don’t want to use the handcuffs.”
“What?”
“What are the charges?” Alan Flutterman said. “I’m Alan Flutterman of Flutterman, Petrovsky & Wald.”
“He’ll be charged downtown,” Jay DiGregorio said. “You can meet us at Foley Square.”
“Down—I’m not his attorney,” Alan Flutterman said quickly.
Jay DiGregorio’s two colleagues all but lifted Barnett out of his chair by his elbows.
“Take your hands off me this instant!” he said. “I demand to know what the charges are.” Lily had to wince. Even under the circumstances—arrested in front of all of New York society—Barnett was overdoing the dignified-under-pressure bit.
“Let’s go,” Jay DiGregorio said. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say may—”
“Barnett, what’s going on?” Lily said.
“Call Morton Samuels.”
Closing Costs Page 4
