Mohammed looked at her as if she had said something very stupid and checked his watch. “I must start driving now. The queue at International Awivals will be very long if don’t hurry. Let me pay you now before I forget.”
She followed him into his house, where he disappeared upstairs, returning quickly with a small stack of twenty-dollar bills.
“Remember,” he said solemnly, as he always did, “it is wery important that you don’t spend it all in one place.”
She smiled as she took the bills.
“My father gave the same advice when he paid my allowance.”
“It’s a fake,” Rosemary said. Lloyd peered at her as if she’d morphed into a faux Chippendale footstool from the Bombay Company. “Everything she owns is fake. Even her husband was a fake, a fake heterosexual. He was running a scam, along with his dealer. They persuaded Esme to buy truckloads of lamps and furniture and paintings, paying top dollar for cheap reproductions. They pocketed the difference.”
“What about the cover?” Lloyd asked. “The Gallé was our cover.”
They were in Lloyd’s twelve-by-twelve-foot studio in Greenwich Village. He’d been renting for a decade, waiting for the real-estate market’s widely anticipated crash before buying. Each year for five years running he had managed to put away ten thousand dollars toward a down payment, no small accomplishment for an art appraiser, and each year the cost of an entry-level apartment rose even faster than his savings, first by twenty thousand, then thirty, and so on. It was as if some cruel law of physics (or optics) was in effect: The closer he got to the finish line, the faster it receded into the distance.
“I think Esme is flat broke. Her apartment is way too big to take care of by herself, but I’m pretty sure she can’t afford to hire help.”
“We’re two days from going to press,” Lloyd said. “I fought like hell to get the cover. Decorative never gets the cover. It’s always furniture or paintings or even”—he paused to shake his head before uttering the awful truth—“jewelry. I mean, jewelry on the cover? It’s absurd. We’re the stepchild of the auction business—nobody understands us.”
“Lloyd, this poor woman is destitute. She was counting on us to bail her out.”
“What are we going to do?” he wailed, propping his head in his hands.
“I suppose we could help her find somewhere else to live.” She couldn’t help surveying Lloyd’s apartment, which could easily fit into Esme’s foyer. Lloyd’s lanky frame seemed built to the wrong scale for this particular doll’s house.
“About the cover!”
“Oh.”
“I thought it was tough during the nineties, when pimply yuppies fancied themselves collectors just because they could afford to snort coke off Meissen plates. At least the money was good. Now no one has that kind of money, dot-com money, and suddenly everything real is fake.” He unleashed a sigh that sent a visible shudder down the length of his body. “I must have put on twenty pounds wining and dining Esme, and for what?”
His self-absorption and overall lack of perspective were appalling, though hardly surprising.
“I’m going to help Esme work things out,” she said. “She can’t go on living there.”
“I suppose that Lalique vase could work on the cover. But I just know those sharks in Furniture are going to take advantage of this situation to slap some fucking commode on the cover.”
The growing pressure in her breasts signaled that the twins were hungry. She’d decanted a few pints of breast milk that morning, but they didn’t always take a bottle from a sitter. She was finding it harder to wean them than she’d expected, and much as she’d looked forward to the independence it would bring, she was at least partly relieved that their first small step toward independence was delayed. In the silence that followed Lloyd’s commode outburst she felt certain she could hear the boys wailing from uptown like distant sirens. Bring milk! Bring milk! Bring milk! Her breasts began to throb. She imagined a daisy chain of babies up and down the length of Manhattan, all alert to her lactating breasts, wailing their hunger and anger. Bring milk!
“Where are you going?” Lloyd wailed when she stood up.
“Home.”
“You’re leaving me?”
“Don’t be melodramatic.” She slipped on her jacket. “I’m not even on the payroll.” She traversed his apartment in two modest strides.
“Speaking of which, when exactly are you planning on coming back?”
“Soon,” she said, heading for the door.
“Have you weaned those boys, Rosemary?” He gave her breasts a squinting, pursed-lipped appraisal. “You haven’t, have you? You’ve still got tits like Pam Anderson. I knew it! How will I manage to put out the winter catalog without you? And we have the February auction to think about.”
Guy stood in the center of the new apartment’s great room and felt small and vulnerable, a leaking dinghy adrift on a sea of soon-to-be-stripped-and-polyurethaned parquet. He’d give anything to have the walls put back up, to feel enclosed and secure. Furniture and window treatments would help, of course. But would the space ever feel cozy? Could a room of such immense proportions ever feel cozy? Oh, how he longed for cozy.
“We’re getting there,” Victor Ozeri said as he entered the room. Lost in a fantasy of reappearing walls, Guy hadn’t heard him enter the apartment. “This is some fucking room we’ve made for you.” Ozeri smiled paternally at the vast emptiness, a reverse alchemist who created voids where there had been architecture.
Ozeri’s voice sounded small and muted, as if it had traveled a great distance to reach him. Carpets and upholstery, Guy reassured himself. Carpets and upholstery and lots of big, comfy pillows.
“You’ll be moved in by Christmas,” Ozeri said. “Lock, stock, and barrel.” He clapped his hand and Guy feared the ceiling would collapse on top of them. It wasn’t right, tampering with seventy-year-old architecture. Ozeri looked starkly defined against the endless white walls, recently skim-coated at a cost of forty-five thousands dollars and change, the plaster like virgin snow. Ozeri was as vivid as raw meat against the blizzard of smooth white plaster. They’d repaint the walls a soft color, perhaps a pastel. Yes, a pastel, creamy yellow or peach. They’d hang pictures, lots of pictures. Pastel paint and pictures. Pastel paint and pictures, plus carpets and upholstery and lots of big, comfy pillows.
“You don’t look well, my friend. Perhaps the paint fumes?” Ozeri crossed the room and opened a window.
The sudden infusion of fresh air and ambient street noise was in fact refreshing. Perhaps that was all that it was, paint fumes interfering with his ability to fully appreciate—tolerate—what hundreds of thousands of dollars had done to the apartment. He reached into his pants pocket and took out a crumpled sheet of paper.
“I have a punch list to go over with you.”
Ozeri took the list from Guy, gave it the shortest of glances, as if it were a modest restaurant check, and said, “Isn’t it early in the project for a punch list?”
Ozeri was one of those blessed people with a knack for intimidating, browbeating, and even humiliating his employers in just such a way as to make them more, not less, solicitous of him. Somehow, his grumpy condescension caused the Park Avenue titans who engaged his services to bow and scrape to stay in his good graces. Successful auto mechanics and the best-tipped building superintendents had the same talent.
“I’d like to clear these things up,” Guy said, mustering his full authority. “In the kitchen, for example…” He headed toward the room in question and was disheartened by the absence of footsteps behind him. “Hello? I want to show you something in the kitchen!”
Guy thought he heard a sigh as Ozeri crossed the great room in no great hurry.
“I couldn’t help noticing that there’s only one wire in this opening,” Guy said, pointing to a hole in the wall near the entrance to the kitchen that would, one day that year, if Ozeri was to be trusted, be a light switch.
“Yes, it’s a switch for
the overhead light.”
“What about the under-the-counter lights?”
Ozeri frowned, knitting his eyebrows into a single dark thatch. “Who said anything about under-the-counter lights?”
“They’re in the plans,” Guy said, though he wasn’t sure this was true. He was sure of nothing anymore: his job, his company, his sexual prowess, under-the-counter lighting. He and Rosemary had certainly discussed them with the lighting designer their architect had recommended, but had they actually been specified in the plans?
“And the sconces over the dining area,” Guy said. “We wanted to be able to turn them on and off from the entrance.”
“Why?” Ozeri frowned and took two giant steps from the site of the future light switch to the site of the future dining area. “There, that is all that is involved. Two steps from the door to the closest sconce, on which we will put a switch. Not too difficult.”
“We want to be able to control all the lighting from here.”
“Then we’ll have to reopen the walls to run the wires. I will have to call back the electrician for a full day at least. Then the plasterer and then the painter. If that’s what you want…”
The issue, of course, was money. Someone would pay, and if the past months were any guide, he would be that someone. Guy had taken Ozeri’s standard contract to his six-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer, who had managed to fatten the document from a straightforward six pages of boilerplate to forty-five densely worded pages crammed with contingency clauses and warranty statements and holdback provisions, none of which had, to date, done Guy a bit of good. A simpler, more accurate, and far cheaper contract could have contained just one line: The contractor always wins.
“We’ll check the specs,” he said.
“Of course. If they clearly indicate that the switches go here, by the door…” Guy felt a rumbling of defeat making its way southward toward his bowels. Unfortunately, following his urinary desecration of the wallpaper in the maid’s bathroom, which had led, inevitably, to the decision to renovate it, there was no longer a working toilet in the apartment.
“Okay,” he said, consulting the punch list. “Now, I wanted to ask you about the dining-room door. The way I see it, if it swings open, into the dining room, it will hit the radiator cover.”
Ozeri traipsed through the opening that would one day contain a swinging door.
“I think you are right. We will have to move the door two more inches to the right. Let’s hope we don’t touch the supporting steel in this riser, or we won’t be able to do that without bringing down the entire building.”
Ozeri grinned ghoulishly, but Guy felt certain that he had already calculated in his mind not only what he’d charge to move the door but also his fee for rebuilding all of 218 West End Avenue, should the structural steel give way. For a contractor, at least, there was no such thing as a bad day.
Twenty-eight
What an unlikely group they made, Lily thought, crowded together in Peggy’s small dining area, lack of elbow room forcing them to hunch over the table like paranoid card players. Peggy presided at the head of the small table. Next to her was Sophie, and next to her, her boyfriend, Paco. There was pouty, sullen William. Silent, shlumped Monroe. Resolutely upright Nanny, who had stayed for dinner in honor of Sophie’s fifteenth birthday, focusing intently on her plate except for the occasional stolen glance at Larry, sitting opposite Peggy in the place of honor, the target of everyone’s curiosity.
A few weeks earlier, shortly after Thanksgiving, Sophie had dyed her once-lustrous, naturally auburn hair a sickly, metallic red that flaunted its artificiality. Whatever coloring agent she’d used had leeched all the body out of her hair, so that it hung like old curtains on either side of her face. Her shirt, a bandage-sized expanse of polyester with the word Juicy sequined across the chest (a brand name, not an adjective, Lily had been relieved to learn), exposed two inches of pale, adolescent flesh. Booker T. Washington High School forbade belly shirts, so each morning Lily made sure that Sophie’s shirt covered her midriff, as that formerly forbidden territory had once been known. But by the time Sophie returned from school, her pants had somehow drifted downward and her shirt in the opposite direction, exposing a generous swath of skin. Lily took some modest consolation from the fact that the midsection that her daughter chose to reveal to the world was pleasingly flat—a few of her friends had tummies that flopped brazenly over the tops of their pants. No sooner had Lily inured herself to the belly shirts, however, than Sophie had appeared at dinner a week or so ago sporting a belly ring, a silver band that, though tastefully simple, caused Lily’s abdominal muscles to clench in sympathetic pain and her jaw to clench in maternal disapproval. She’d made a minor fuss over the ring but hadn’t insisted that Sophie remove it, because that would have done no good—there was nothing like having your husband desert you, and then moving back in with your parents, to rob you of what little authority you might once have had with your children.
“Lily, these are awesome,” Paco said through a mouthful of the roasted potatoes to which Lily assumed he was referring. “There’s like this flavor, you know?”
When had she granted him permission to call her Lily?
“Rosemary,” she said.
Paco glanced around the table before smiling and pointing to his mouth.
“Oh, rosemary, like the flavor, I thought you meant a—” A poke from Sophie shut him up.
Paco was in the tenth grade at Booker T. Washington High School, but he looked much older than Sophie. He was handsome—ominously so, Lily thought—with lustrously dark skin and very fine features, but she couldn’t help focusing on the silver ring through his right eyebrow and the disturbing fact that he never blinked when looking at her, which seemed of a piece with calling her Lily. She’d attempted a mother-daughter talk with Sophie when Paco first appeared on the scene, but Sophie had brushed her off. “Mom, I know about safe sex, okay? I’m not a child.” Lily, who had planned to address the pros and cons of having sex at age fifteen, not strategies for having it safely, had backed off. She was, however, pleased that Paco’s approval of her roasted potatoes had elicited an enthusiastic nod of agreement from Larry. Roasted potatoes was one of the half-dozen dishes in her repertoire, a holdover from the days when she would help her mother prepare seders. She’d also managed to roast a tolerable chicken and prepare string beans without overcooking them.
Nanny looked stiff and uncomfortable at the table, taking tiny, birdlike pecks at her food and saying nothing. Her reticence didn’t stop Peggy from casting hateful glances at her, as if she were dominating the conversation rather than doing her best to remain inconspicuous.
“Larry looks so handsome,” Peggy had said in the kitchen as she helped Lily serve dinner. “Just like always.”
Peggy had always liked Larry. At a time when most Jewish mothers on the Upper West Side dreamed of their daughters marrying doctors or lawyers (while they inured themselves to the idea that their daughters might become such things), Peggy had overlooked his lack of ambition and focused instead on his straightforward openness. He’ll never disappoint you, she used to say, as if that were the highest praise.
Lily wondered if she herself weren’t perhaps the strangest figure of all at the table—abandoned by a husband who was on the lam from the federal government, living with her parents at age forty-two, carrying on an affair with her high-school boyfriend twenty-three years after high-school graduation, and strangest of all, risking a long prison sentence by spending three days a week in Queens with a counterfeiter named Mohammed.
“Larry, you still have the best nuts on Broadway,” Peggy said, triggering immediate giggling from William, Sophie, and Paco. “What’s so funny? It’s true. Everyone in the neighborhood loved his father’s nuts, too. Oh…I see.” Peggy frowned. “You’ll have to forgive the repartee at the table, Larry.” Peggy had become ludicrously coquettish since Larry’s arrival. Lily wondered just how unintentional her references to his family’s nuts had be
en.
“Nut jokes were a cross I bore all through adolescence,” he said.
“So you and my mom were, like, boyfriend and girlfriend?” William sounded more accusatory than curious.
“All through high school,” Larry said.
William turned to her and squinted.
“Yes, Will, I was in high school once, and yes, I even managed to have a boyfriend.”
“Not just any boyfriend, a star athlete,” Peggy added. “And a top student.”
“Then how come you’re still at the candy store?” William asked.
“The Broadway Nut Shoppe,” Peggy said.
“The ‘shoppie,’ we used to call it,” Lily added.
“The best nuts,” Paco guffawed, drawing a thigh smack from Sophie.
“No, seriously, if you were this great athlete and student, how come you’re working in a candy store?”
“As opposed to starting for the Yankees?” Larry said with no apparent defensiveness.
“As opposed to…I don’t know, like working for, like, a company or something.”
“I’m sure he had many opportunities,” Peggy said. “He chose to enter the family business.” She lingered over the last two words, transforming the Broadway Nut Shoppe into an enterprise of Wal-Martian scale.
“Well, it wasn’t much of a choice, really. My father died during my senior year at Cornell. I took over the shoppie right after graduation, figuring I’d run it until I got a real job. But I found I liked it. So I stayed.” He glanced at Lily. “I guess I was never all that ambitious.”
“Ambition,” Peggy said. “Look where it gets you.” She gestured first at Monroe, Exhibit A in the Gallery of Failed Ambition, and then at Lily, the gallery’s true masterpiece.
“So what are you all saying, I shouldn’t bother trying to get anywhere?” William asked.
“That’s not what anyone’s saying,” Lily said, frowning at Peggy.
“You just have to know what you want, what makes you happy,” Larry said.
Closing Costs Page 28
