Well, he wasn’t wearing ten thousand dollars of couture. He hadn’t been eating like a prisoner of war all week to fit into it.
“I introduced him to half his clients at those parties. He wanted to go.”
“That’s not what he told me.”
“You were his mistress. You’d believe anything.”
“You didn’t know him.”
“I won’t argue with you,” Lily said, and proceeded to do just that. “I was married to him for sixteen years. We have two children together, a history.”
“You had more time with him than I did, that’s all. A few nights before this whole scandal broke out, we were cooking together and he told me that he’d always wanted to learn to fly a plane. We decided that when…when we were together, we’d take lessons.”
“You cooked together?”
“He was a magician in the kitchen. We had very few evenings together, and when we did we always ate in.”
“How discreet.” Not to mention inexpensive. No wonder Barnett had been smitten.
“He loved to make halibut with a fennel sauce. It was our…” She glanced demurely at her lap.
“Your what? Oh, for Christ’s sake…” Lily had to look away to avoid either laughing or doubling over in horror. Halibut with fennel sauce had been their aphrodisiac. She’d never known Barnett to make toast, much less get a hard-on from fish. Clearly, it was time to regain control of the conversation, and then get out of there.
“Where is he? You must have heard from him.” Half of her hoped that Barnett had been in touch, the better to track him down and recover the money. The other half desperately wanted him to have stiffed his mistress as well as his family. God, she was tired of shouldering so many conflicting emotions.
The mistress’s eyes began to water unbecomingly, and when tears finally spilled over onto her cheeks, she made no effort to wipe them away. Lily handed her a tissue from her purse. The mistress shook her head, shedding teardrops onto her lap.
“Dry yourself off, for heaven’s sake.”
She took the tissue and dabbed at her face.
“So he hasn’t been in touch with you, either. Well, at least you know where you stand.”
“He’d call if he could.”
“I imagine there’s phone service wherever he is. But if it helps to believe that…”
“They might be bugging my phones, watching me. He can’t take the chance.”
“He could face his accusers like a man.”
“He was being railroaded.”
“His investments were in free-fall—I don’t suppose he told you that.”
“They were down an average of sixteen-point-three percent for the year on the day he left,” she said through sniffles. “That’s net return, after fees. We talked about it the Saturday before the scandal, when he came here for lunch. He brought two bags of produce”—sniff—“from the farmers’ market on Union Square and made pasta niçoise. It took forever to prepare”—sniff—“because he parboiled each vegetable separately before tossing them with the linguini.”
Lily could scarcely picture Barnett striding through the Union Square farmers’ market in his weekend uniform of polo shirt, freshly pressed khakis, and penny loafers, as disdainfully incongruous as a khakied colonial emissary in a Moroccan casbah. She certainly couldn’t picture him tossing individually parboiled vegetables into linguini.
“We talked about the market that day and he seemed so optimistic, he was sure everything was going to turn around. We talked about the possibility of hedging with index futures and shorting ETFs.”
Shorting EFTs…was that what Barnett had missed, not her third input but hot talk of index futures and hedging strategies?
“He radiated such confidence. He would never have stolen from his own firm or his investors.”
“But things haven’t turned around. We’d be broke now even if he hadn’t left, so stealing a few million dollars wasn’t such a bad idea after all.”
“I wish you’d go.”
Though she hated to give the impression of obedience, Lily stood up. As she crossed the living room she couldn’t help glancing into the kitchen. She pictured Barnett in that narrow, windowless space, parboiling beans and broccoli from the Union Square farmers’ market while his mistress looked on admiringly, breaking the comfy silence only to whisper sweetly of index futures and net returns.
The mistress remained on the sofa as Lily let herself out.
Guy and Rosemary hired a sitter and went to inspect their new apartment.
“I guess this qualifies as a date,” Rosemary said as they walked in early-evening darkness along West End Avenue. “So tell me, Guy, what is it you do?”
“I’m the CEO of a software company!” We enable porn sites to communicate more effectively with their customers, straight and gay, vanilla and kinky. “How about you, Rosemary?”
“I’m on leave from Atherton’s, where I specialize in decorative arts.”
“I hope that’s not a maternity leave, because I don’t date women with baggage.”
Rosemary took his hand. “Is everything all right, Guy? You seem miserable, but you never say anything.” She decided not to mention Lloyd’s call from the SEC, which would take Guy down even further. It was bound to blow over, once the government realized Lloyd had lost money on Positano.
“Business sucks.”
“Let’s talk about it.”
“You don’t want to know.”
She retracted her hand and they continued in tense silence. Five minutes later they entered 218 West End Avenue. Inside the apartment, Guy fumbled for the light switch and felt a cruel letdown when he finally managed to find it.
“Nothing’s changed,” he said. “It’s just how we left it last week.”
They toured the empty apartment in dejected silence. The kitchen floor had not been laid, which meant the cabinets and appliances had not been installed. The gashes in the ceiling where the wall had been taken down between the living room and guest bedroom had not been plastered, which meant that painting could not begin. None of the plumbing in any of the bathrooms had been touched, so of course none of the new fixtures were installed, much less the new tiles. Toilets and tubs and unopened boxes of Italian ceramic tile waited in the hallway outside the guest bathroom like women at a Broadway intermission.
“Victor gave me his word that everything was on track,” Rosemary said when they regrouped in the kitchen.
Guy unholstered his cell phone and speed-dialed Ozeri’s number. After one ring he got his voice mail.
“Can we fire him?” Rosemary asked when Guy hung up. “We still owe him a lot of money.”
“But we’ve already paid him fifty thousand dollars. If we walked away now, he’d still have our fifty thousand dollars and we’d have to start over with someone else.”
“Lucinda said we could sell the apartment for something like a six-hundred-thousand-dollar profit. All that money and we never even moved in. It’s like someone’s paying us just for existing.”
“That’s real estate,” Guy said. “But we’re not selling.”
“I was going to measure the windows in the boys’ room for shutters tonight. Seems pointless now.”
“You might as well. We have the sitter.”
Rosemary went to the bedroom they’d earmarked for the twins and took a measuring tape from her purse. Something on the floor near the window caught her eye. She bent down for a closer look. It was handwriting, etched in a corner of the parquet floor, which had until a week ago been covered by rust-colored wall-to-wall carpeting. She blew away the plaster dust that coated every surface of the apartment and read the inscription: Lily and Larry, 5/25/75 and forever.
She called Guy and showed him the inscription. “She must have pulled up the corner of the carpet and secretly done this.”
“Nineteen seventy-five…Lily must be the Gimmels’ daughter.”
“She wanted to leave something behind, something permanent about their love.”
“Nothing’s permanent in a New York apartment, not the walls, the plumbing, the wiring, and certainly not the floors.” Most of the apartment’s floors were slated to be sanded down to raw wood and polyurethaned, though in the foyer their plans called for removing the seventy-five-year-old parquet and replacing it with honed slate.
“We can’t just…remove this,” Rosemary said. “She must have been bursting with love, and wanted some way to commemorate it.”
“Never fear, at the rate Ozeri’s going, Lily’s inscription will last another quarter-century.”
“Lily Gimmel became Lily Grantham, a society figure until her husband got caught up in a financial scandal.”
“Well, her parents just became overnight multimillionaires, thanks to us.”
Rosemary frowned. “I wonder if she and Larry did in fact manage to last forever. Larry Grantham…the name doesn’t sound right. I don’t think that’s the guy she married.”
“Probably just a high-school crush.”
“I suppose.” Rosemary licked the tip of her finger and rubbed it across the inscription, clearing away a film of dust. Guy knelt beside her.
“We could add our own inscription, once all this work is done.”
“I like that idea.”
He wrapped his arms around her and they kissed.
“As long as we have the sitter…”
“I was thinking the same thing.”
“There’s some sort of canvas sheet in the other room,” Guy said.
He led her to what their architect called the “great room,” a newly-vast space formed by the demolition of the wall that had once separated the living room from the guest bedroom. On one end, an expanse of built-in cherry bookshelves had been installed, an absurd bit of progress amid the otherwise moribund renovation—the cabinetmaker had insisted on delivering the bookshelves in order to clear his workshop for the next project. Though it must have fundamentally shaken his sense of cosmic order to complete even one small facet of the job ahead of schedule, Ozeri had blessed their installation. In the opposite corner of the great room Guy found the canvas sheet, which would one day protect the floors from dripping paint, assuming that day ever arrived, and spread it on the floor. Rosemary undressed as far from the uncovered windows as possible.
“Let’s fuck in every room tonight,” Guy whispered into the pregnancy-deepened gorge between Rosemary’s breasts. “Including the bathrooms.”
“I’m not sure my back could take that,” she whispered.
He rolled off her, onto his back, and pulled her on top of him.
“Better?”
“Hmmm, much.”
“God, I’m so freakin’ horny, Rosie,” he said as she began gently gnawing at his nipples. “How long has it been?”
“How old are the twins?” Slowly she worked her way down his arched midsection and took his hard cock in her mouth. He felt thrillingly exposed, there on the floor of the great room—the great room! They were having sex on the floor of the great room! His great room! The greatest great room in the greatest city in the greatest country in the world! He imagined the scene Web cast to horny browsers around the world, a million hands gripping mouses and dicks as they watched, lustful, perhaps even jealous of the passion, the vigor, and (among Manhattanites, at least) the square footage.
“This is so fucking hot, Rosie. Oh, God, Rosie, don’t stop.” He let his head loll to one side. “Oh, God.”
She moaned in sympathy. “Oh, God.”
How could he have missed it? The center portion of the bookshelf unit, an enclosed cabinet with precisely calibrated compartments for the fifty-two-inch flat-screen television, the TiVo, the VCR, the DVD, the tuner, the equalizer, the CD player, the DVDs, the videotapes, and the CDs, was misaligned.
“Oh my God,” he moaned.
“I know, I know, oh…I want you, Guy. I want you.”
The enclosed cabinet should have been centered along the wall. But one corner of the wall had a sixteen-inch build-out that concealed a steel riser. Instead of accounting for this anomaly, the cabinetmaker had simply centered the unit between the built-out corner and the other corner. The entire unit, fifty-five thousand dollars of tongue-and-grooved cherry, was off-center by a hideously obvious sixteen inches.
“What’s the matter?” Rosemary asked from a distant region of his now-motionless body.
He turned from the misaligned cabinets to Rosemary, who held his withered prick in her hand.
“The bookshelves,” he said. “They’re all wrong. Don’t you see, the center unit is too far left.”
“Oh, Guy.” She refocused her attention on his dick, but to no avail. She rolled off him with an exasperated sigh, stood up, got dressed, and stomped out of the not-so-great room. Guy put on his clothes and looked for the architect’s plans, which might reveal who was responsible for the misaligned bookshelves, which would have to be rebuilt at someone’s expense.
“Rosie, have you seen the blueprints?” he said when he found her in the twins’ room. She was kneeling over the inscription in the corner. “Have you seen the plans?” he repeated when she didn’t answer. Then he noticed that she was crying. He placed a consoling hand on her shoulder, which she shrugged off. He headed for the bathroom off the maid’s room, which contained the apartment’s only working toilet and was, in fact, the only room not affected by the renovation. It was tiny but in decent shape, with faded wallpaper that Rosemary had pronounced charming. Midway through a long, urgent pee (at least his dick was good for something) a water bug the size of a hamster skittered across the wall facing him. Startled, he stepped back, spraying the wall, but not the water bug, with piss. Now even the maid’s room wallpaper would have to be replaced.
Twenty-three
When it came to Nanny, Peggy constantly surprised herself with what she was learning to tolerate. The drone of the afternoon soap operas from the living room—Nanny’s precious “stories.” The meagerness of the meals she prepared for the children: slices of turkey breast as thin as plastic wrap, tiny scoops of pallid “mash,” two or three flaccid string beans, which the children sensibly ignored, despite Nanny’s braying encouragement to “Eat your veg, dears.” The way she vacuumed the entire apartment in under five minutes, idly sashaying from room to room as if in the arms of a dance partner. Peggy supposed she should be grateful: The only chore Nanny volunteered for was “hoovering.” And who knew British was such an irritating language?
But tying up the phone flicked her tolerance right over the edge.
“You know, you really should try to restrict your phone calls to one or two a day,” Peggy said, reasonably, shortly after the kids had left for school, followed closely by Lily on one of her mysterious new “errands.”
“They’re local calls,” Nanny replied with that insinuating accent that turned a simple word like calls into a multisyllabic whine. “I do have a life, you know, apart from looking after the children and whatnot.”
What kind of life? Peggy wanted to know. Having made an unavoidably close study of her over the past several months, she’d come to realize that Nanny wasn’t nearly as old as she seemed—perhaps only fifty, or even late forties, though she dressed and acted like she’d been looking after Queen Victoria’s children.
“I’m expecting a call from…” Peggy futilely racked her brain for a plausible name. “It’s an important call.”
“You might consider call waiting.”
Blood surged into her head.
“On Park Avenue we had three phone numbers, plus dedicated lines for the children’s computer and Mr. Grantham’s.”
“Well, we have just one line here on Broadway,” Peggy said.
“Then there will be tie-ups. If I have to ring my sister, I’m going to use the telephone. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. Now, I’ll just get back to tidying up.”
She left Peggy in the kitchen to resume “tidying up,” which, apart from “hoovering,” involved nothing more strenuous than flitting about with a fe
ather duster. Later, Peggy heard her on the phone in the living room, talking, as she always did, in a conspiratorial hush. She picked up the bedroom extension and was about to inform Nanny that she needed to use the phone when she realized that her presence on the line had gone undetected.
“I’m thinking of sheer white for the curtains,” she heard Nanny whisper. “I like to imagine them billowing in the breeze when the windows are open in the warm months.”
“You’re such a romantic, Caroline,” came a man’s voice.
Caroline. So Nanny did have a first name.
“I want it to be all light and sunny, not like this place I’m in now. We’re up on the sixteenth floor and you might think we’re in a church basement, it’s that gloomy.”
Peggy couldn’t help glancing around the bedroom. The queen-size bed, on which Monroe was napping, was covered with the ivory chenille spread she’d had in the old place. The headboard was upholstered in a matching fabric. She’d had the drapes from her old room refitted to the new windows, and recalled the name of the color even after thirty years: burnt sienna. Classic and elegant were the words she’d use, perhaps even timeless, though Monroe, with his open mouth and spittled chin, did add a gloomy touch. Still, you couldn’t include him as part of the decor, even if he moved as infrequently as the mahogany highboy he kept his underwear and socks in.
“There’s nothing gloomy about you, Caroline.” His voice was American, quite deep, and laced with a gruff innuendo.
“I don’t know how much longer I can stand it here. She’s always underfoot.”
I’m underfoot? Peggy almost shouted into the phone.
“We can’t afford to have you leave now,” the man said. “Just be patient and keep your eyes on what we’re working toward.”
“A white settee and matching armchairs,” Nanny said dreamily. “All clean and crisp.”
“And impractical.”
Closing Costs Page 23
