Nanny placed one of Sophie’s tiny tank tops on the small pile and lovingly smoothed it.
“On Park Avenue we had a laundry room in the apartment. Now I spend half my time in the elevator, traipsing back and forth to the basement.”
“On Park—” Peggy had a fleeting but enormously satisfying vision of swinging the oranges-and-bread-laden Fairway bag at Nanny’s face. “Monroe, get dressed. And you…” She couldn’t think of anything useful for Nanny to do. The apartment was clean, the children’s laundry done (and she certainly wasn’t going to ask Camilla Parker-Whosit to hand-wash her underwear). Kill yourself with a bread knife was a tempting suggestion, but she wasn’t sure she could take any additional disobedience in her own home. On the way to her bedroom, if you could be “on the way” in a dark and narrow six-foot-long hallway like the one that connected the apartment’s two bedrooms, she heard noises from behind the closed door of Sophie and William’s room. She stopped and listened. Perhaps it was only street noise. Though they lived on the sixteenth floor, a constant din found its way through the apartment’s large windows, a continuous hum, one long, undulating chord of car engines and horns and the beeping of reversing trucks and footsteps and conversations and barking. Sometimes at night, lying awake in bed, listening, she thought she knew what it must feel like, or sound like, to live underwater, the tiny movements of billions of fish uniting into a giant, deafening roar. But this wasn’t street noise coming from Sophie and William’s room. She rapped on the door and opened it.
At first she was aware only of frantic movement, as if she’d disturbed a colony of giant mice. But it was only Sophie and another person, a boy, leaping from her bed, more or less clothed, thank God.
“Grandma!” Sophie said as she took a giant step away from the boy.
“What are you doing home?” she asked, though she well knew the answer.
“It’s lunchtime and we—This is Paco.”
He was about Sophie’s height, Hispanic-looking, very thin, with dark eyes and dark, close-cropped hair. His baggy blue jeans clung perilously to the bottom of his narrow hips, exposing a swath of white underwear with the letters 2(x)ist stitched in blue on the waistband. She squinted: If he had an erection, which she strongly suspected, it would have to be frightfully large to make itself known behind so much denim.
Sophie’s getup was equally disturbing: loose jeans and a skimpy T-shirt, squared-off shoes with clunky platform heels that forced her to move with a stilt-walker’s slow, knee-lifting strides. In the front closet her old school uniforms hung like clothes for a giant, old-fashioned doll.
“Does your mother know you’re home?” Peggy asked.
“She’s here?” Sophie’s eyes widened.
“She’s out. Not that there’s room for her, anyway, with the crowd we always seem to have. I just thought she should know that you and your…you and Paco were coming home for lunch.”
“I always came home for lunch at Convent.”
Peggy winced at the C-word, though she had to admit she missed the blue plaid dirndls and pristine white blouses and the plain shoes that didn’t look like they belonged on a circus clown or hooker.
“Yes, well, this is different.”
“How?” Sophie squinted one eye and shook her head while thrusting it forward, a familiar gesture from her extensive repertoire of nonverbal insults.
“Everything’s changed,” Peggy said. “You lived in a different world, a safer world.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“You used to live in a very homogenous community. Now there’s a lot more going on and you need to be more careful.”
“That’s true,” Paco said.
“This is, like, the West Side, not Baghdad.”
“No, really.” Paco stepped closer to Peggy, who almost, but didn’t, back away. “My cousin, the one I was telling you about, Soph? He’s, like, bad news, you know, holding up kids for their lunch money and shit and roughing them up on the way home from school. When I tell him, Ray, leave this neighborhood alone, you know? You don’t, you know…” He glanced uncomfortably at Peggy. “You don’t, like, do it where you sleep, you know? Like, go over to the East Side, okay, where they have, like, more money and shit. And he’s like, no way, they got more cops over there and the mothers, they have these patrols and shit going on, they wear these orange, like, T-shirts over their clothes and they stand on the corners and stuff with whistles and cell phones.”
Peggy didn’t know what to make of Paco’s story, which seemed to support her side of the argument but in a decidedly unsettling way. And she couldn’t help returning to the waistband of his boxer shorts: What in heavens name did 2(x)ist mean? What sort of statement was it sending out from that dangerous region? Best to change the subject.
“What did you have for lunch?”
Sophie glanced quickly at Paco.
“Nothing, we were just…”
Peggy didn’t need or want to hear what they were just.
“I’ll make you sandwiches,” she said. “Tuna fish okay?”
Five sandwiches, she thought as she walked to the kitchen. Two cans. Well, she couldn’t very well make lunch for the entire household and exclude Nanny, satisfying as that would be. She could ask Nanny for help, of course, but that would mean having to stand side by side with her in the narrow, windowless kitchen, like stewardesses in an airplane galley. Anyway, she wouldn’t be much use. Didn’t the English slather butter on their sandwiches? Imagine buttering bread and then slapping on roast beef, pale, fatty roast beef at that. She’d make the five sandwiches herself and try not to think about how her life had gone to hell in a handbasket since leaving 218 West End Avenue.
Nineteen
“You need to ramp up your strategy for monetizing Positano’s intellectual capital.”
Guy nodded with what he hoped was a thoughtful I’ll-take-that-excellent-idea-under-consideration expression, not the stop-slinging-the-tired-clichés look that more accurately reflected his thinking. It was important that the consultant, Sumner Freedman, leave with the conviction that Guy was paying attention. Though he affected a collegial, we’re-in-this-together stance, Sumner doubtless reported back to the board at regular intervals, and never with news that put Guy in a favorable light.
“Positano spends over three mil a quarter on R&D, with only one new release planned this year and next.” Freedman, who looked about twenty-five, with straw-colored hair, pinkish skin, and very faint blue eyes, had the pasty, watery good looks of the severely overbred. “A lot of companies would pay top dollar for that intellectual capital. You could outsource your software engineers for two, three hundred dollars an hour easy.”
Is that, Guy wanted to ask, the best that your phalanx of consultants could come up with—turn Positano’s best and brightest into code-writing whores? The mood at the company, which had been deteriorating in lockstep with Positano’s stock price, had turned almost suicidally dismal with the invasion of the suit-and-tie-wearing Lansdale, Bucks & McKinney consultants, armed with cell phones and Palm Pilots and laptops and calculators and BlackBerrys and the unshakable conviction that they knew better how to run Positano than the people who actually worked there.
“We’ll never get off another release if we start renting out our engineers.”
“With all due respect, you’ll never get off another anything if you don’t start getting your P&L in shape. We’re talking the s-word here.”
For some time, survivability was breathed among tech firms the way plague had been whispered in fifteenth-century Europe. The s-word could send employees fleeing for their professional lives, impel suppliers to demand cash on delivery, cause analysts to downgrade a stock to the deceptively innocuous-sounding “hold” rating, which investors easily recognized as code for “Dump this crap with all due speed.” More to the point, the s-word could aggravate sciatica in an anxious CEO. Guy shifted in his chair but couldn’t get comfortable. He should have left demolition to the experts. He turned to the tank an
d was pathetically reassured to see that Positano’s marine life, at least, was surviving.
“We could sell the rainbow tetras to Le Bernardin,” he said. “They’d make very nice appetizers.”
“I don’t think…Oh, I see. Ha-ha.” Freedman attempted a smile, but his tight, fine-featured face seemed ill-equipped for the job.
“I will not go into the outsourcing business,” Guy said. “That’s not what I had in mind when I founded this company…” He paused to let “founded” sink in. Freedman was a Wharton MBA who’d worked for Lansdale, Bucks & McKinney his entire “career.” Guy suspected the only thing he’d ever founded was the New Canaan chapter of the Young Republicans. “It’s not what I have in mind now. We’re a software company, a solutions provider.”
The opening strains of William Tell’s Overture signaled a cell call.
“Guy speaking.”
“It’s Ventnor. We need to talk.”
“So talk.” Guy glanced at Freedman, who was doing his best not to look put out.
“In person. Tomorrow night. Eight o’clock. The McDonald’s on Seventh, across from Penn Station. One other thing—bring a check, ten grand.” The line went dead.
“The CEO of one of our largest customers,” Guy said, reholstering the phone. “It’s not easy being mission critical.” This was meant as irony, albeit feeble irony, but Freedman nodded earnestly and waited a few thoughtful seconds before speaking.
“That phone call brings up another point. In reviewing your management structure, we find that too much hands-on operational control is centered at the top. With you, actually. My colleagues are putting the finishing touches on a new org chart that puts more day-to-day management in the hands of a chief operating officer.”
“We don’t have a chief operating officer.”
“Yes, well…that’s another thing we’re going to be recommending.”
“Let me get this straight. Our overhead’s too high, we need more layoffs, and you want me to hire a COO at what, a buck seventy-five a year?”
“The candidate we have in mind would run you more like two hundred thousand a year, plus options, of course. And benefits.”
“We’ll never find someone who knows the business and—” Something in Freedman’s expression…he was so pallid, Guy thought he could see blood pulsing through the capillaries of his cheeks. “You?”
Freedman cleared his throat. “I think I could bring some operational structure to the company, an external, objective perspective that could—”
“You’re twenty-five years old.”
“Twenty-eight, actually. But that’s besides the point, really. I’ve led engagements with dozens of the top software, infrastructure, and content companies.”
William Tell overtured and Guy again answered without checking.
“Guy? Guy? Can you hear me? It’s Rosemary.”
“I can hear you.”
“It’s a nightmare, Guy. One of the capped-off pipes in the second bathroom leaked, and before anyone found out, it had dripped all the way down to the third floor. I have six of our new neighbors in our dining room, or what used to be the dining room, ready to lynch me. You have to help.”
“That may not be possible.”
“They’re going to kill me. I’m not talking figuratively here, Guy.”
“I’m in a meeting—”
“Please, Guy. I can’t get Ozeri to return my calls and they want answers.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” He clicked off. “Family emergency,” he said.
“I completely understand. And I firmly believe that family always comes first.”
“I’m sure your parents will be gratified to hear that.” Guy stood up and headed for the door.
Lily was unaccustomed to using a bus pass, so it took her several tries to get it properly in the slot, attracting contemptuous glances from the passengers in the seniors-and-disabled seats at the front of the M79 crosstown bus. A harsh beep drew her attention to the digital readout, which flashed Insufficient fare—another chapter heading. Even her MetroCard was out of money. She foraged in her purse for change but came up twenty cents short. By then the seniors and disabled appeared to be on the verge of mutiny, so she stepped off the bus and, as it abandoned her at the corner of Lexington Avenue, realized she had no choice but to walk home.
A drizzle began just as she entered Central Park, and by the time she reached her (or rather, her parents’) apartment, she was soaked, chilled, aching, and deeply resentful of the entire world and its every inhabitant, beginning with her mother, who met her at the door and, ignoring her patently desperate condition, assaulted her with the news that Sophie had been discovered with a young man in her room. “And I don’t think he’s a Rodeph Shalom boy, either.” In the living room Nanny launched into a lengthy complaint about Peggy’s attitude as Lily searched in her one chest of drawers for dry clothes, ignoring the drone of an afternoon soap opera. Unable to locate the sweater she was looking for, she slammed the drawer shut and went to her parents’ room. Monroe was propped on the bed, a magazine on his lap, sleeping. She found Peggy’s pocketbook and took out forty dollars. In the elevator on the way down she retrieved from her purse the taxi receipt from last night.
The global headquarters of MTS Taxi Corporation turned out to be a small house in the Richmond Hill section of Queens, one Van Wyck Expressway exit short of JFK Airport. The house was identical to countless others on the street, which was identical to countless other streets she’d once been vaguely aware of from the leathery comfort of a hired Town Car en route to JFK. Narrow, two stories high, it had a three-step cement stoop leading to an awninged door. In front was a neatly tended patch of grass about the size of the Laver Kirman in her old living room. A short driveway led to a one-car garage in back. In front of that garage sat a yellow taxi, a splash of garishness in an otherwise colorless neighborhood.
She’d expected a fleet of cabs and wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that MTS Taxi Corporation was apparently one person with a medallion. For that matter, she wasn’t sure what she was doing there at all. The attempted robbery on William Street, then the rejection of her twenty-dollar bills, ATM card, and MetroCard had shattered something—her sanity, perhaps—that had, remarkably, remained intact through bankruptcy and Barnett’s desertion and moving in with her parents. She’d been propelled from the West Side of Manhattan to Richmond Hill, Queens, still soaking wet and now bone-chilled, by pure breath-shortening, stomach-tightening, altogether brainless rage. A more sensible course would have been to report the counterfeit twenties to the police—or, wiser still, to ignore the whole situation. Getting caught passing counterfeit money was the kind of story she could have dined out on for weeks, back when she dined out.
The man who opened the door looked Indian or Pakistani, which jibed with the accent she recalled from last night. He was in his early thirties, she guessed, about five-seven, of slight build but with a round, fleshy face that overwhelmed his small, dark eyes.
“Were you…were you driving your taxi last night…in Manhattan…about midnight?”
“Why do you want to know?” His right hand gripped the edge of the open door.
She recognized the surly tone.
“It was you. You drove me from downtown to the West Side.”
“That may be true.”
“I gave you a hundred-dollar bill and you gave me back four twenties. They were fake, counterfeit.” She started to reach into her bag for the evidence, then thought better of it. His hand slid off the door and now hung at his side, balled in a fist. “All the twenties are at home, with my family, and…and I left instructions that…that if for some reason I don’t come home, they should…”
An enormous plane shuddered overhead, making conversation impossible and casting a slow-moving, foreboding shadow over the entire street. She saw Air France written on the side of the fuselage and felt a pang of nostalgia—not long ago she would have been at the window of such a plane, one of the front windows,
looking down at row after row of tiny, identical houses and wondering idly who lived in them and what they did and whether the noise of landing planes drove them crazy. Now she knew.
“People give me twenty-dollar bills all the time,” the driver said once the plane was gone. “I don’t check to see if they are counterfeit or not.”
“People don’t give you four fake twenty-dollar bills. One twenty, maybe, but what are the chances of four separate people all giving you fake twenties?”
“From the airports many people pay me with twenties.”
She hadn’t thought of this, though she clearly should have, and the notion that he might be unaware that he was passing counterfeit money deflated her somewhat. She’d blown thirty-eight dollars on the cab ride out to Queens…for what? The driver looked at her as if she were pathetic or crazy or both.
“I’ll report you to the taxi commission,” she said.
“That is your prerogative. Would you like me to give you the telephone number and address to make it easier for you?”
She almost said yes just to annoy him. Instead, she turned and headed toward the street.
“Would you like a lift back to the West Side?” he called out after her in a Caribbean-inflected Indian accent that turned every line into inappropriately cheerful iambic pentameter. “I go on duty in twenty minutes, you could be my first fare of the day.”
Insufficient funds! she almost called out as she headed for the corner, unsure where the nearest subway station was. Perhaps she’d follow the trail of landing jumbo jets all the way to the airport and take a shuttle bus home. Then she changed her mind and hurried back to the driver’s house—she’d get his full name after all if only just to piss him off. The taxi was locked, however, and she was unable to read anything through the closed windows. She was about to resume her trek across Queens when she saw the driver dart across the small backyard and enter the garage through a side door. There was something furtive about the way he scampered from the house to the garage, glancing behind him. A moment later a light went on inside.
Closing Costs Page 19
