Seven
Rosemary had been meaning to straighten up the apartment all morning, but when the doorman buzzed to announce Lloyd Lowell’s arrival, she had only seconds to make the place look presentable. The morning had simply…vanished, as mornings tended to do when infant twins were involved. Mornings, afternoons, evenings, nights. Nights were particularly elusive. In the master bedroom she used her foot to rake various items of dirty clothing into one pile, then scooped it up with both arms, pried open a closet with an elbow, and hurled the pile at the back wall. The doorbell chimed. What next—the dishes in the kitchen? The towering archive of unread newspapers on the living-room coffee table and floor? The pungent diaper pail? The bathroom?
The doorbell rang again, disrupting her mental triage. She ran to the boys’ room and hoisted the bag of diapers from the can. It weighed as much as she did. How was it possible for two tiny creatures to produce so much crap? What was truly astounding and depressing was that the entire stinking mess of it had originated in her breasts. She twisted the bag and tied a tight, odor-blocking knot at the top. Guy commented proudly on the heft of the diapers every time he emptied the container. “Can you fucking believe the weight of this?” he’d ask dumbstruck friends and family, holding the diaper bag aloft. Then he’d sling it over his shoulder like a macho Santa and head for the garbage chute. Rosemary opened the boys’ closet and a stack of unopened baby gifts tumbled out, two of everything. She heaved the bag into the closet, kicked the boxes back in, and managed, barely, to close the door.
As she caught sight of herself in the hall mirror on the way to the front door, hair disheveled, eyes unmade-up, the shoulders of her shirt encrusted with the twins’ regurgitated milk, she realized she’d overlooked one important task. The doorbell rang again, an angry, throat-clearing sound that lasted several impatient seconds. On second thought, too late for a makeover. All she could do was smooth back her hair and, inhaling deeply, zip and button her pants.
“You look wonderful,” Lloyd told her after they hugged.
He sounded wholeheartedly insincere but it buoyed her nonetheless to be complimented on anything other than milk production.
“So, where are they?” Lloyd asked. “Where are they?”
He might have been inquiring after a Lalique vase or Tiffany lamp, the way his lips puckered in anticipation. Lloyd was the head of Atherton’s decorative arts department, and her boss.
“Sleeping, thank God,” she said. “I’ll show you if you promise not to wake them up.”
She led him into the living room, where both boys were rocking in their electric swings, serenaded by the purr of the motors. Lloyd squeezed her arm. He hadn’t seen them since visiting her at Mount Sinai.
“How old?” he whispered, ever the appraiser.
“Sixteen weeks.”
“I can’t decide which one I like better.” He glanced back and forth, a deliberative finger touching his bottom lip. “I guess I’ll have to take the pair.” His decision made, he followed her into the small kitchen.
“I couldn’t find a sitter, so I thought we’d eat here,” Rosemary said.
“Perfect.” Lloyd looked elegant and put together, as always, in a light-blue shirt tucked into charcoal gray pants. He was tall and very thin, with a narrow, equine face, deep-set blue eyes, and full lips that were his most expressive feature. After working for him for five years, Rosemary could read those lips like a user’s manual. She’d present him with a Gallé vase she’d found, or a piece of old Cartier jewelry, and would know exactly what he thought of it by the way his lips squashed to one side (Don’t waste my time), puckered (Let’s take a closer look), or curled inward, all but disappearing (At last, we’ve found our catalog cover).
He brought her up to date on his tireless exploits in New York’s upscale, downtown gay community. They gossiped about the office while she decanted several small plastic containers of salads from Zabar’s into bowls. She set them down on the small table in the hallway, from which she cleared a month’s worth of mail. As they ate they talked about the impending spring sale for which she’d done most of the research and written the catalog copy before beginning her maternity leave.
“You should come,” he said.
She told him she’d try but she knew she wouldn’t. She’d only left the twins twice with a baby-sitter, once for a follow-up with her gynecologist, the other time for dinner at a restaurant with Guy. Both times she’d felt breath-shortening pangs of anxiety. Hailing a cab, ordering wine, walking home holding hands with Guy—what did any of this have to do with who she was, now that she had two tiny boys to look after? It wasn’t guilt at leaving the twins that unsettled her (how could she feel guilty about something that gave her so little pleasure?), it was a strong feeling that she had changed fundamentally that evening in Mount Sinai Hospital, and that any replication of her old, pre-twins life was fraudulent, somehow. Or at the very least amateur play-acting.
“I do need to know that you’re coming back to work,” Lloyd said. “You can hedge on the date, but I must have your word that you’re not going to bail once your leave is up.”
“I’m coming back,” she said. “It might be a bit later than planned—the boys were on the small side at birth and I’m kind of hoping—”
“You don’t have to explain, just don’t leave me in the lurch six months from now.”
“I won’t,” she said. It was equally hard imagining herself back at work and imagining herself not working. Depending on her mood and the twins’ disposition at the moment, one or the other seemed a cruel fate.
“It’s just that I’ve been burned so often in the past,” he said with a tragic sigh. “Our business attracts so many debutantes—I mean, who even knew such creatures existed anymore? Pretty blond girls from Duke and Skidmore with barrettes and pearls who swear they’ll come back to work directly from the delivery room, and then call up, tearful, three months later and whine that they can’t leave little Spencer for one moment, they never thought they’d become so attached. And Cliff or Roger or Trip is so busy at Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs, where, by the way, he makes enough to support a family of forty, they’d never see each other if they both were working. But trust me, they knew all along they weren’t going to mix a career and motherhood, as they inevitably refer to it. A few years at Atherton’s is the ultimate preparation for childbirth, you see, like one very long Lamaze class.”
She smiled and debated whether to defend her barretted and pearled colleagues, at least a few of whom were quite serious about their work.
“How’s Guy?” he asked before she could decide.
“Busy.”
“It’s all I can do to keep from checking Positano’s stock price every five seconds, I sometimes wish they’d never invented the Internet. Guy must be beside himself.”
“It’s not about the stock price, it’s about building the company.”
“Oh, of course.” He spooned cold shrimp in dill sauce from the bowl onto his plate.
She’d persuaded Guy to give Lloyd five hundred “friends and family” shares when Positano went public. He’d been able to buy them at the offering price of $15 a share—without the directed shares, he’d have had to buy them on the open market, and since they closed their first day of trading at $28 a share, Guy’s gesture (hers, really) had netted Lloyd a tidy profit. It had been the best first-day performance of any post-bubble IPO, a fact heralded in numerous news articles. But as the stock continued to climb, he’d become a bit obsessed, lavishing on Positano’s share price the kind of attention he usually reserved for a piece of vintage Lalique. At one point he had a fifty-thousand-dollar profit. Now he was back to where he’d started. They all were—well, not Guy, actually; as a company insider he’d been able to purchase his shares for less than a nickel apiece.
“I told you to sell,” she said. But no one sold, it seemed. Not her parents, who were “friends and family.” Not even their friends who weren’t “friends and family” but bought anyway, pay
ing retail. Not the individual investors around the country who used to send Guy e-mails filled with gratitude and praise (one happy shareholder had sent him a fruit basket), and now lobbed e-mails at him filled with expletive-laced invective and histrionic tales of financial distress. What were they thinking, investing their kids’ college funds in a company with barely any revenue and big losses, a company named after the town where its CEO had spent his honeymoon? Hadn’t they learned anything in the nineties? Guy’s shares were locked up by law, but not theirs. Was everyone crazy?
“The company is strong, though, right?” Lloyd asked.
“Growing like a weed. There’s some big contract coming—” She stopped herself before treading further on treacherous ground. “Well, Guy is very optimistic.”
“What kind of contract?”
“I’m pretty sure I could go to jail if I said anything more.”
“To me? Who would make the connection? I sell tchotchkes for a living.”
“I’m Caesar’s wife now, I need to be above suspicion. Having to keep quiet about this kind of thing drives Guy crazy. If he could, he’d stop people in the street to talk about how great the future is for Positano. He’d be grabbing the beggars in front of Zabar’s and telling them to take their coins out of the coffee cup and put them into Positano stock. But he can’t. There are all sorts of rules and regulations about fair disclosure and forward-looking statements and conning homeless people into investing their last dimes.”
“A big contract for a company Positano’s size…”
He hadn’t listened, no one did anymore. No one at Atherton’s made much money, but they’d always taken a perverse pride in that. Their customers had truckloads of money but no taste, while they were paupers but rich in taste—the universe was a benign place. Then, sometime in the nineties, as the NASDAQ began to take off, everyone, it seemed, was getting rich, not just boring old plutocrats in baggy Brooks Brothers suits but cool people in jeans and T-shirts. And not just rich but private-plane-and-art-collection rich. Gratifyingly, many of them had lost it all when the bubble burst, but plenty had cashed out, and suddenly it wasn’t so easy or satisfying to deprecate the rich—the rich were exactly like them, only they had money. Fast, easy money. They’d sweep into the showroom at Atherton’s, aggressively grungy, clutching a bottle of water in one hand, their assistants checking off items in the catalog as if circling dishes on a Chinese take-out menu. It drove a lot of people crazy, including Lloyd. It was one thing to kowtow to dyspeptic Vanderbilts and Mellons; half the time these people were selling, anyway, to raise money for taxes or the tab at Betty Ford. You could almost feel sorry for them, which was always reassuring. But these new people in stained T-shirts and running shoes were at once so studiously unpretentious and appallingly arrogant. Somehow they seemed less deserving of stupendous wealth than the fifth-generation Rockefellers behind whose backs they’d always snickered. So when the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of Positano came along, even in a small way, Lloyd snatched it.
It was a shame, really, because one of the things she’d loved about the auction business was its complete separation from what she’d always thought of as the real world. Oh, money was a big part of it, naturally, but ultimately it came down to spending hour after hour with rare objects that only a handful of people could appreciate or even desire. Her specialty, and Lloyd’s, nineteenth- and twentieth-century decorative arts, was particularly obscure. Old lamps, strange-looking vases, garish jewelry, candlesticks, decanters, bowls—there were perhaps a few dozen people who focused on this area at the professional level, and she’d always liked that. She felt comfortably isolated, ensconced in a world all of whose inhabitants she knew well. And then along came the NASDAQ, the great leveler, offering everyone, even decorative arts specialists, the pipe dream of easy riches, and suddenly her world wasn’t so comfortably isolated. The sudden dive in the NASDAQ only intensified the sense of desperation. The chips they played for were changing. Once, discovering a rare vase or chandelier was the ultimate objective—a small bonus might follow, enough to buy a pair of fake Mission chairs at Pottery Barn. Now the chips were big-time money, fast, over-the-counter money. Everyone was in the game. A certain innocence was gone—strange to think of the glitzy world of art auctions as innocent, but that’s how she’d always seen it.
“I sometimes wish Guy had never started Positano,” she said. “We were a lot poorer back then, but happier.”
“Please,” Lloyd said with a roll of his eyes. “Everyone always pines for simpler times, it’s part of being filthy rich, like complaining about taxes or the help.”
“I never see Guy anymore.”
“It’s just a stage. Once the company is more established, he’ll hire people to run it and then you’ll be complaining that he’s always underfoot.”
“I suppose you’re right. Did I tell you we’re moving? At least we’re hoping to move. We put an offer in on a co-op on West End.”
“So much for the simpler life.” He gave the narrow, dark foyer a slow, puckered-lip evaluation. “Does this new place have an actual dining room? Because if you have an actual dining room in New York, then it is in incredibly bad taste to complain about anything, ever. Your life is perfect. End of story. Shut up.”
All the way from Central Park to the West Side, Lily fully intended to visit her parents. She hadn’t dropped in on them, unannounced, in years, but lately, since Barnett’s arrest and the impending sale of her parents’ apartment, she’d been seeing somewhat more of them. However, when she reached her parents’ corner of West End Avenue, she turned around. Two blocks later she entered the Broadway Nut Shoppe.
Larry was standing behind the counter, as she’d hoped he would be, but what struck her immediately, what caused her to freeze just inside the front door, was how little, if at all, the place had changed since she’d last been inside over two decades earlier. The same unfinished wood floor. The same glass-front display cases along the right, crammed with containers of fresh chocolates and nuts and other forbidden treats. The same glass shelves along the mirrored wall behind the counter, brimming with boxes and tins of candy and nuts. The same smell, a salty-sweet blend of roasting nuts and chocolate. She felt at once comforted and disturbed that this narrow slice of New York had never changed. Everything and everyone changed over time, for better or for worse. They’d redone all the bathrooms in their apartment fifteen years ago, six in total, and already tiles were cracking in places, the finish was coming off the polished brass fixtures, the mirror in the master bath was silvering in one corner. Fifteen years ago she’d assumed they’d never have to touch the bathrooms again. But at forty-two she already understood the cruelest lesson of age: Time chipped, cracked, yellowed, abraded, wrinkled, shrunk, scuffed, rusted, tore, frayed, loosened, stiffened, buckled, coddled, grayed, thinned, thickened, weakened, and silvered—all with a ruthlessly democratic disregard for wealth, character, or quality of fixture.
What made the Broadway Nut Shoppe exempt?
“May I help you?”
She almost missed the irony in his voice. “No, I’m…oh, hi.”
He stood behind the counter, at the end closest to the front door where the glass display cases were highest, revealing only his shoulders, neck, and head. She was struck a second time by his youthfulness. He was her age, which meant he was Barnett’s age, but he looked a generation younger. This, too, was a bit disturbing. Perhaps the fountain of youth was not a bubbling spring somewhere in Florida after all but a narrow candy shop on the West Side.
“I was in the neighborhood,” she said. He motioned for her to join him at the far end of the store, where the only thing between them would be a long, waist-high counter and the old NCR cash register.
“That’s better,” he said when they were face-to-face again. “Look at you.”
She did just that, courtesy of the mirrored wall behind him. The long walk from the Rambles had taken its toll. A halo of frizzed hair ringed her head, sweat glistened unat
tractively on her face and neck, the collar of her shirt had gone limp. Larry, in contrast, looked cool and relaxed in a crisp white oxford shirt and blue jeans.
“You’ve been bird watching,” he said, pointing to the binoculars around her neck. “I wouldn’t have thought there’d be much to see on Broadway, other than pigeons, of course.” His smile revealed slightly crooked teeth.
“I was on my way to…” She didn’t want to lie about why she was there, nor did she completely understand, or care to find out, what an honest explanation might be, so she changed the subject. “This place is exactly the same.”
“Since my father died I’ve contemplated renovating the store, but I never quite get around to it. I think maybe I’m allergic to change.”
Or ambition, she thought, and immediately regretted the unkindness.
“It looks just as I remember it.”
“Close your eyes,” he said.
Surprising herself, she obeyed. A few moments later she felt something on her lips—not his mouth, thank God. Something small, very thin, and hard. He pressed it between her lips. She smiled with recognition and opened her teeth to let it in.
“Just one nonpareil,” he said as she ran the tip of her tongue over the dotted surface of the candy. “Every day after school for three years, my father offered you whatever you wanted and you always asked for a nonpareil, but just one. He never could get over that.”
“I’m a creature of habit,” she said.
“No, it was that you only had one. I mean, you were the proverbial kid in a candy store and you had just one, every time. That was amazing self-control for a teenager.”
The semisweet chocolate melted across her tongue. She wanted to swallow but felt a thickening at the back of her throat that was only partially chocolate-induced. She was going to cry. Confused and embarrassed, she turned away, as if to examine the display on the opposite wall. Thankfully, the front door opened and a very old woman entered the shop. She walked directly to the counter in front of Larry.
Closing Costs Page 7
