Closing Costs

by Seth Margolis

  “I would have thought helping Barnett would be the last thing on your agenda.”

  “Don’t be stupid. I need to help myself and my children. Once I find out who took that money, I’ll have access to his partnership interest and then—”

  “Barnett took it. There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind.”

  “We don’t have a cent, Manny. If Barnett took the money, where is it?”

  “Wherever he is.”

  “No, I don’t believe that.”

  “Lily, the man abandoned you and the kids. Next to that, stealing a few million dollars from his partners is hardly surprising.”

  How could she explain to him that, for Barnett, abandoning his family was more in character than stealing from the firm he’d built from scratch and loved at least as much as his children?

  “Anyway,” Manny was saying, “what do you think he’s living on, wherever he is?”

  The question had plagued her since Barnett’s disappearance. She couldn’t imagine the grandson of Sell ’Em Grantham sleeping in fleabag hotels, much less on the sidewalks of whatever city he’d landed in, as appealing as those images might be.

  “You must have records, files, something I could look at. I know my husband’s signature, I know his handwriting. If you’d just let me see the documents in question—”

  “That’s impossible, Lily. My hands are tied.”

  “Stop saying that.” He quickly clasped his hands behind his back.

  “We’ve been under a lot of pressure these past months,” Manny said. “The markets are flat at best…no one’s making money…I was insulated to some extent, but Barnett couldn’t pick up the phone without hearing from an irate pension fund manager or foundation trustee.”

  “Siphoning money from the firm would only make things worse. Barnett’s not that stupid.” Spineless, cowardly, perverted, but never stupid.

  “Sometimes the pressure gets to you. You do things that aren’t necessarily in your best interests. And don’t forget, our compensation is tied to the markets. You have a very expensive lifestyle—the apartment, the house in Southampton, private school tuition, household help, the—”

  “We’ve cut back,” she said, a monumental understatement. Given that they were living rent-free, a welfare check could cover their monthly nut.

  “You need to put this behind you.”

  “Not until I find out who took the three million dollars from the firm. And I can’t do that without your help.”

  “I’m sorry, Lily, my hands—” He shoved them in his pants pockets. “I can’t help you.”

  No one could. It was perhaps the biggest difference between her current life and her former one, bigger than sleeping on a pullout sofa in her parents’ living room, bigger than finding herself dropped from the invitation lists of all the charities she’d raised so much money for, bigger than sending her kids to a school whose only entrance requirement was no weapons. It was the sense, the reality, of being on her own. In the past people lined up to help her (though their motives, she now realized, were anything but altruistic), but now, with no money and no husband—translation: no way to reciprocate—she was truly, definitively, terrifyingly on her own.

  “Good-bye, Lily,” Manny said. “And good luck.”

  The 104 bus was pulling into the Eighty-second Street stop when Peggy decided not to get on. She’d returned to her old neighborhood, which was only fifteen blocks from her new one, to do some shopping. So much had changed in her life—Monroe’s deterioration, the new apartment, Lily and the kids moving in—she needed a little continuity. She wanted to see 218 West End Avenue, just a quick once-over before heading back to her new home in a modern high-rise that looked as if one stiff breeze could send it toppling onto Lincoln Center, which they were talking about renovating anyway, even though it seemed like just yesterday it was built. But as she approached the building she caught sight of the doorman, Afternoon José, as everyone called him (there was a Night José, too, and a José who worked the service elevator), and decided she couldn’t face him just then. He’d ask her about Monroe and Lily, whom he’d known since she was a baby, and what could she say that wasn’t completely depressing? The one had lost his health, the other her husband. And what if he asked why she was back—what would she say? That she wanted to make sure the building was still standing? He’d think she’d lost her mind, like those old women you saw on the streets pushing shopping carts full of rags and empty boxes, telling anyone who’d listen that they’d been abducted by aliens or Elizabeth Taylor. So she turned back toward Broadway, and that’s when she saw her kitchen, right there on the curb. Her cabinets, range, refrigerator, dishwasher, even her sink, for God’s sake, all piled in a huge Dumpster. She stepped closer and saw jagged slabs of black and white linoleum. Dizzy, she grabbed on to the side of the Dumpster, filthy as it was. Why? Hadn’t Lucinda told her the apartment was in mint condition? Triple mint. Why pay two-point-two for an apartment and then just throw it all—Wait, that sink, and that medicine cabinet…the second bathroom, also discarded. She glanced around. What if someone in the building recognized this cast-off rubbish as her precious kitchen and bathroom, which she’d kept immaculate—triple mint—for thirty-nine years? Frieda Brand in 12B, who’d renovated a perfectly nice kitchen two years ago and couldn’t stop crowing about how happy she was, you’d think she’d traded in her ferkrimpt husband for a new model, please God don’t let her see this.

  “Get away from here!” she shouted at a homeless man who had begun to poke through her kitchen. “I said get away from here!”

  Rheumy eyes considered her from behind a greasy curtain of bangs.

  “Help yourself,” he said finally, slamming shut a cabinet door. She half expected to hear her good china rattle. “It’s all crap, anyway.” He trundled off toward Broadway.

  She glanced back at the Dumpster. It was like standing over an open casket—horrifying, but you couldn’t quite turn away. From the corner of her eye she spied someone emerging from 218 and decided she wouldn’t wait around to be pitied. She walked a few yards toward Broadway, stepped off the curb, and flagged a passing taxi.

  Fifteen

  “Rosemary, this is the one! This is definitely it.”

  Lloyd gestured to the most unusual—make that hideous—sink in the Il Bagno showroom. A rustic bowl made of what appeared to be hardened porridge sat atop a slab of pebble-studded concrete. The spigot was a sawed-off pipe, the faucets lumps of jagged rock.

  “It looks like a goat trough,” Rosemary said. “I mean, what’s the matching toilet, a slop pail?”

  “It’s perfect for a small powder room,” he said.

  “In Kabul, maybe.” She found the price tag. “Lloyd, this is…” She checked again to make sure she hadn’t transposed a decimal point. “This is twenty-six hundred dollars.”

  He frowned. “You invited me along for my opinion.”

  A mistake, perhaps, but Il Bagno was located near Atherton’s, so a lunchtime consultation with Lloyd had seemed a good idea. His taste was usually impeccable, though apparently it didn’t extend to bathroom fixtures.

  “Let’s take another look at the sink Donald Acheson recommended.”

  Acheson was the architect she and Guy had retained. His plans specified every detail, down to switch plates, but she and Guy wanted to bless every selection.

  Lloyd clutched the rim of the goat trough. “I’m not leaving until you buy this.”

  She took his arm and pulled him across the showroom to the elegant pedestal sink Acheson has specified.

  “What’s this model called, The Scarsdale?”

  “Actually, it’s part of the Parthenon Collection, and it’s beautiful,” she said. “I could be very happy with this in the powder room. Just having a powder room will make me very happy.”

  “The Parthenon. You’ve lost your edge, Rosemary. It’s those twins, sucking the taste right out of you. Have you thought of adoption? You know, there are some very nice young couples looking for a
set of healthy boys.”

  “Has Atherton’s started a Contemporary Babies department since I’ve been gone?”

  “It’s a thought.”

  “Anyway, this is just four hundred dollars. We’re already three weeks late and way overbudget.”

  Lloyd dismissed her concerns with a shrug. “It’s an investment, Rosemary.”

  “I’m not investing twenty-six hundred dollars in something that looks like it earned an S for ‘satisfactory’ in first-grade art class.”

  “It’s a classic, or will be. And speaking of investments…”

  “Were we?”

  “What’s with Positano’s stock?”

  “Software stocks have been out of favor for a long time. Do you like polished or unpolished brass with this sink?”

  “Polished, but I still hate it. I should have listened to my broker.”

  “You don’t need a broker to buy ‘friends and family’ shares, you—Lloyd, you didn’t.”

  “I did. After we had lunch at your apartment. You implied that the company was on the verge of turning around.”

  “It doesn’t need to turn around. But I did mention that there was a big contract in the works. Is that why you bought more?”

  Lloyd closed his eyes and nodded. “I simply couldn’t resist.”

  I simply couldn’t resist. Precisely the phrase he used whenever he blew a month’s salary on a piece of vintage Daum glass.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything that day.”

  “Please, I bought a thousand shares. No one goes to jail for buying a thousand shares of anything, and besides, I lost money. They’re going to send me to jail for losing money?”

  “You bought a thousand shares?” The stock had been selling at $21 around then. Twenty-one thousand dollars was a huge sum for someone on an appraiser’s salary, not to mention that the stock had since fallen to nine.

  “It could have been worse.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He shook his head. “Let’s cruise the tiles.”

  “Lloyd.”

  “I happened to mention the…opportunity to a few coworkers.”

  “What?”

  “Please don’t get all moralistic on me, Rosemary. You get that lurid Pre-Raphaelite coloring on your cheeks and forehead. Not becoming. Besides, this kind of thing goes on all the time.”

  “This kind of thing? You mean insider trading?”

  “If you must call it that. People like you and me, we spend our days—or you did, before the arrival of what’s-his-name and what’s-his-face—we spend our days around people who are always having inside information whispered in their ears. That’s how you make it these days.”

  “That’s so cynical.”

  “That’s so the truth. But no one whispers anything in our ears, other than how much to bid on their behalf for some objet they wouldn’t know from a Pottery Barn tchotchke. So when you mentioned that Positano was about to be awarded a big contract, I had to act.”

  “And you had to share your good fortune with…how many people, Lloyd?”

  “A few.”

  She glared at him until he fessed up.

  “Arthur in Decorative Arts. Susannah in Old Masters. Fred in Greek and Roman. The Franklin sisters in Near Eastern. Celia.”

  “From the cafeteria?”

  “Her arthritis is getting so bad, Rosemary. How much longer can she stand there making tuna sandwiches? A small windfall would have liberated her from hell.”

  “Oh, Lloyd.”

  “I’ve been eating at my desk every day for a month to avoid facing her. And the saddest thing is, right after we all bought, the stock started climbing. I looked like some kind of hero.”

  “Well, of course it climbed—half the art world was buying. God only knows how many people your friends told to buy. I’m surprised the SEC hasn’t called you.”

  “But then it fell.” He closed his eyes and lips, shaking his head slowly, as if remembering a departed friend.

  “Did anyone in the Lloyd Lowell Investment Club happen to sell?”

  His eyes opened wide.

  “Should we?” He grabbed her arm. “Tell me.”

  “I don’t know anything, and if I did I certainly wouldn’t tell you, Lloyd. This isn’t gossip about some widow with late-stage cancer and a houseful of old masters. This is about the law.”

  “So I shouldn’t sell.”

  She was tempted to tell him to sell just to be done with it, but then, what if the stock went up? Sometimes it was hard to resist the thought that life had been much simpler when they’d been poorer.

  “I don’t know how I’m going to come back to Atherton’s, now that half the people I work with have lost money on Guy’s company.”

  “It’s me they blame. You’re the wealthy wife.”

  “Oh, great, that makes me feel so much better.”

  “Any idea when you’re coming back? It’s been forever…”

  “Soon,” she said. “I was hoping to wait until the renovation’s finished.”

  “That could be five years from now.”

  “So glad I invited you along.”

  “Face it, Rosemary, it takes longer to gut-renovate a New York apartment than it took to build the Panama Canal.”

  “We’ll be done by the end of the year.”

  “What year? Don’t answer. Just promise you won’t keep me hanging and then tell me you can’t bear to leave the twins with a nanny.”

  “I promise.”

  “Good, now let’s look at tiles.”

  Lily entered the Broadway Nut Shoppe and, finding it empty, headed to the back room. Larry was hunched over his desk in the tiny, windowless office. She felt briefly disoriented: Was this Larry or his father—both tall, lean, narrow-shouldered men with sandy hair invariably in need of a trim, both partial to white or blue oxford shirts? She hadn’t been back to the Shoppe since moving in with her folks six weeks earlier. Too much going on to add another complication. But that morning a visit to Larry had suddenly struck her as the opposite of complicated, a return to a familiar, simpler place.

  “Hello,” she said from the door.

  “I’ll be right with you,” he said without turning around.

  “Take your time. Remember when we screwed on the floor in the living room, how when we were done we noticed the boy across the street staring at us through binoculars?” He turned around so fast she caught him mid-flush. “Remember?”

  “You walked over to the window and pressed your breasts against the glass.”

  “I think the boy fainted.”

  “I think he died. Happy.”

  “The youngest documented case of cardiac arrest.”

  “You were a bad girl.”

  “And then I became a good girl,” she said with unintended wistfulness.

  He just stared at her and she found herself tempted to say something stupid and embarrassing like “And now I want to be bad again.” She resisted, but he must have sensed what was on her mind, for he stood up, placed his hands on her shoulders, and kissed her lips.

  The phrase melted in his arms sprung to mind, less because she felt suddenly weak with desire and relief and perhaps even happiness, all of which happened to be true, than because she felt her life, her old life, melting away like grime from an old pan. The moment was so fraught with import, at least for her, that she had to force herself to concentrate on the physical. His lips on hers. His hands squeezing her arms. The press of his hips, the smell of him, musk and chocolate, distantly familiar.

  She heard the front door squeak open and bang shut.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “Where?”

  He’d always asked questions for which anyone else could plainly see there were no answers, or no answers required.

  “I have errands.”

  “Can’t they wait? I haven’t seen you in months, and now you swoop in here, stir things up, and then fly away.”

  He kissed her again. This time she found hersel
f trying to recall when she and Barnett had last kissed, really kissed, standing up. Standing-up kisses were so much more erotic than in-bed kisses, which she suspected Barnett had always viewed as a series of small down payments on fucking. Standing-up kisses were their own justification.

  She parted her lips just enough to allow his tongue to slip between them. Why couldn’t she just lose herself in the moment? Focus.

  “Is there anybody here?” came an old woman’s voice from the front.

  “Yes!” He was breathing heavily. “I’ll be right there.”

  She followed him to the store, where a very short old woman with wispy white hair was already haranguing him in a scratchy, high-pitched voice.

  “I just wanted to know when you got these nuts in. The last batch I got from you were so stale I almost broke a tooth, so I…oh!”

  Lily’s presence shut her up her momentarily. She glanced back and forth between Lily and Larry, as if sizing up a conspiracy of stale-nut vendors.

  “The nuts arrive fresh each week, Mrs. Dickson.”

  “So you say.”

  Lily edged around her and headed for the door, marveling that even owners of candy stores had to take shit from customers. Was there no shit-free profession?

  “Wait,” Larry said.

  “I’ll…” She couldn’t quite finish: I’ll call? I’ll stop by? I’ll go get my diaphragm and be right back? So she merely waved with her back turned and left.

  Peggy returned home to find Nanny (did she have an actual name, or had Nanny been inscribed on her birth certificate in response to the patently obsequious and servile nature she’d exhibited right there in the delivery room?) perched on the living-room sofa watching television. She sat forward, back rigid, legs crossed at the ankles, as if she weren’t merely watching a soap opera but serving tea to a visiting delegation of royals.

  Peggy put down her bags in the hallway and went directly to the master bedroom, where she found Monroe sleeping on top of the bedcovers. Since returning from the hospital, he slept like a hibernating bear. When she managed to get him into the shower (once or twice a week was all she had the energy for), she was surprised he hadn’t grown a coat of winter fur.