Closing Costs

by Seth Margolis

  “You mean, concerning margin calls?”

  “Essactly.”

  She smiled uncertainly. “Constantly. It’s not ess—Not really what I went to business school for.”

  “And this isn’t what I started a company for, either.”

  She slipped the Goldman letterhead back into the leather portfolio and stood up.

  “We need to move quickly. Do you know when the merger is being announced?”

  “There won’t be a merger.”

  Her tiny mouth puckered to a perfect pink anus. And to think he’d once found her attractive.

  “It might be your best option.”

  “There won’t be a merger.”

  “Then we’ll have to collateralize two million shares, assuming they’re—”

  “Still over a dollar.” Guy stood up abruptly. “I have a business to run.”

  “I understand,” she said.

  But he wondered if she really did.

  “They’re all forgeries,” Rosemary told Esme Hollender, deliberately avoiding “fake,” which sounded pointlessly harsh. The shades in Esme’s library that she’d raised three days earlier had not been lowered, so the room shimmered in bluish afternoon sunlight, exposing a rime of dust on every surface and a crazing of fine wrinkles on Esme’s cheeks and forehead.

  “Which ones?” Esme asked. “You know, I always had my doubts about that lamp I gave you and Lloyd. Ostentatious, I always thought. But everything else is so much more refined.”

  “Not just the lamp. Everything. All the art glass, the paintings, even the furniture.” Squinting, Esme glanced slowly around as if confronting a roomful of traitors. If only she hadn’t brought them that lamp, she might have gone on in happy, trusting oblivion. “Your husband had a very bad eye for value, Mrs. Hollender.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Rosemary made a noise between a gasp and a chuckle. “He bought forgeries, very good forgeries that even an expert—”

  “Bullshit. He knew exactly what he was buying. I don’t know why I let him buy all these…these—what do people call them?—these church keys.” She cast angry glances at the tchotchkes adorning the bookshelf across the room, then stood up and walked over to them. “I always thought most of this stuff looked like crap, but he rattled off names of fancy French artists and designers and I thought, Who am I to argue with such knowledge?” She picked up a small atomizer, a Gallé knockoff that, if real, would sell for fifteen thousand dollars or more. “I’ve seen better knickknacks at Woolworth.” She hurled the atomizer against the shelf, shattering it.

  “Mrs. Hollender, don’t. Even as forgeries they have some intrinsic value.”

  Esme grabbed a ruby-red vase and threw it into the fireplace, where it exploded into a hundred pieces, then picked up a small glass bowl that Rosemary just managed to wrench from her hands before it met a similar fate. Apart from trying to salvage what little value these items might have, Rosemary suspected she’d personally wind up cleaning the room once Esme’s tantrum was over. Thanks to Alden Hollender’s church keys, there was no money left for household help.

  “Oh, what shall I do?” Esme wailed.

  Esme placed her hands on Rosemary’s shoulders and collapsed into her. She was such a tiny bird that even her full weight felt no more burdensome on Rosemary’s shoulders than a winter coat.

  “Mrs. Hollender, come and sit on the sofa. I’ll get you some water.”

  But Esme clung to her, whimpering softly. Rosemary sidled across the room, dragging Esme with her, and lowered her onto the sofa.

  “Nothing he bought ever looked quite right. Once he brought home a Fabergé egg that had a drop of dried glue on the side. He said Karl Fabergé himself had made it for the Empress of Russia. I remember thinking, Would the czar’s own jeweler neglect to wipe glue off the side of an egg intended for the Empress of Russia? Wouldn’t the Empress have mentioned a drop of dried glue? People were sent to Siberia for lesser offenses back then, you know. Or executed. But I gave him the money he wanted. It seemed easier, somehow.”

  “Easier than what?”

  “Than admitting the truth,” she said with quiet misery. “That he never loved me. That he was cheating me, cheating on me.”

  “Have you been able to recall the name of the dealer he worked with?”

  “Of course I remember. He was the other woman.” She smiled primly. “Henry Something. Henry Becton. Or Harold Becton. No, Harold Brighton. No, wait, it was Frederick Brighton. Or maybe not. I don’t have a current address, I’m afraid. Do you think you’ll be able to recover anything from him?”

  “I doubt it. Your husband was the buyer, and he probably knew full well what he was getting. If he chose to overpay, that was his prerogative.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “You were swindled,” Rosemary said. “Perhaps if your husband invested the money he got from you…”

  She shook her head. “He’s been dead ten years. His will left everything to me, and believe me when I tell you, there was nothing.” Esme tottered to the drinks table and poured herself several fingers of Scotch. She lifted the glass to her lips but seemed to change her mind, and returned to the sofa empty-handed. “I might as well tell you, now that we have no secrets…I’m a bit strapped for funds. It’s all I can do to pay the maintenance on this place and buy groceries.”

  “I’d figured that out.”

  “Well, I did my best not to let on.” Esme cast a brief, longing glance at the drinks table. “I wouldn’t have brought you that lamp, only there’s an assessment on the building this month, something to do with repointing the facade, whatever that means. It’s only for a few thousand dollars, but it was enough to put me in the red. Oh!” She put her hands to her face. “You have no idea how rich I used to be. Filthy, stinking rich. What will my children think?”

  No doubt they’ll be bitterly disappointed, Rosemary thought, recalling the phone calls they’d made to Lloyd, urging him to sell as much as possible of what they’d assumed to be a valuable collection, never mind their mother’s apparent reluctance. And Esme would end up taking the blame, Rosemary felt. She’d done nothing worse than trust a scoundrel, but frail old ladies were such easy targets for resentment, they seemed so out of step with life, so irritatingly awkward about things, especially money, and so incapable, for the most part, of fighting back. And they tended to outlive their husbands, often by decades, which could be very inconvenient.

  “You can’t keep this place,” Rosemary said. “You can sell it, however, then buy or rent a smaller apartment, and live off the interest on the difference.” Esme didn’t react. “Mrs. Hollender, do you understand what I said? This place is your primary asset now. You need to unlock some of its value to live on.” Thank heavens real estate couldn’t be forged, or she’d be completely destitute. “Real” estate—she understood the term for the first time.

  “Are you sure none of it’s genuine?” Esme said, pointing to the bookshelves festooned with worthless glass. “You haven’t looked at every single piece. And some of the furniture…I mean, that’s not your specialty, is it?”

  Rosemary shook her head. This was going to be tougher than she’d anticipated.

  Lily worked hard to keep at least a half-block’s distance between herself and Nanny. She was a fast, impatient walker and Nanny was on the slow side, her arms swinging as she made her way down Broadway.

  At Columbus Circle she went into the subway station. Lily waited until Nanny had paid her fare before swiping her MetroCard, which was always amply filled nowadays, thanks to the machines at every station that didn’t distinguish between real and counterfeit twenty-dollar bills. (Vending machines that accepted twenty-dollar bills were a counterfeiter’s best friend; Lily had a drawer full of loaded MetroCards at home, several lifetimes of prepaid bus and subway travel.) She followed Nanny to the platform of the uptown A train, which thundered into the station a few minutes later, and boarded the car behind the one Nanny chose.

  She knew little about
Nanny, other than that her real name was Caroline Griffen, that she was born and raised in Essex, England, and had come to New York, after attending some sort of child-care school in England, because she could make twice as much money “minding children” in America as in England. She had worked for a doctor’s family on the East Side, a “prominent cardiologist,” Nanny had insisted on calling him, until his children were too old for a nanny, and then had found the Granthams through an agency. Lily also knew that, since moving out of their Park Avenue apartment, Nanny lived in Washington Heights with her sister, at the northern tip of Manhattan.

  Nanny got off at the 181st Street station, Lily close behind. There was something vaguely thrilling about tailing someone, a mixed sense of power and danger. And with Nanny as the target, the feeling was doubly satisfying, since Nanny knew so much about the Granthams, having spent ten years in their home, while Lily knew next to nothing about her. For example, who would have guessed that Nanny had such attractive legs? She’d switched from white shoes with crepe soles to a nice pair of heeled pumps in the lobby of 124 West Sixty-seventh Street and now she looked taller, even graceful, a navy wool coat concealing the drab blouse she wore tucked into a plain gray skirt, her usual attire.

  She headed east on 181st Street, then north on Wadsworth Avenue, making slow, unswerving progress along sidewalks teeming with Dominicans returning from work, among whom Nanny looked like a pale visitor from another land—which is what she was, come to think of it. The December evening was unusually warm, the air dry, the fading light casting a sexy, mauvish hue across the blocks of low-rise brick apartment buildings. In front of one such building Nanny stopped to wrap her arms around a tall man, who had apparently been waiting for her. Their faces remained pressed together in a long, passionate kiss. Lily observed them from half a block away

  If Nanny’s attractive legs had surprised her, the sight of her children’s beloved baby-sitter soul-kissing a man at least ten years her junior—about thirty-five, perhaps forty, Lily guessed—was downright startling. And wasn’t he…she waited for them to disengage before deciding. Yes, he was definitely the same man who’d tried to steal the envelope from her, the man she’d seen in Queens that day. Lily made a note of the address and headed back to the subway.

  Thirty

  With Monroe at her side, clutching her arm like a terrified child, Peggy made slow but grateful progress along Broadway. The early evening was unusually warm, the light at once fading and clarifying. The city hesitated between day and night, as if unable to decide between equally compelling alternatives. Monroe had chosen a good moment to step out, after so many months shut away in the apartment.

  “We should think about getting a place for Lily and the children,” she said. “I don’t think I can take so many people living under one roof much longer. Lily mentioned getting her own place, though I can’t imagine how she’d pay for it.”

  “I like that Larry fellow,” was Monroe’s typically irrelevant response, but at least he was talking. “A good head on his shoulders.”

  Monroe had become strangely obsessed with Larry Adler since Sophie’s dreadful birthday dinner, which had roused him from his post-coronary funk. She wondered, without daring to explore the idea out to its fullest margins, whether seeing Larry Adler caused Monroe to imagine that it was 1979 again, if his mind had convinced his body that the past decades had never happened and he was a frisky fifty-year-old again. Stranger things had happened, if you believed what you saw on the television—people waking up from ten-year comas as fresh as daisies, adults suddenly remembering that Uncle Seymour had molested their five-year-old selves before murdering half the village and burying the bodies by the abandoned railroad tracks, where, wouldn’t you know it, the skeletons are dug up fifty years later, just where they were supposed to be. Next thing she knew Monroe would be sidling over to her side of the bed at night, demanding action.

  “We have the money from selling the apartment,” she said. “We could buy her a small two-bedroom in the neighborhood.”

  “Marvin likes to say it’s easier to run a chain of fifty stores than a single location,” Monroe said.

  Marvin was Marvin Feldbush, who used to run a national chain of women’s clothing stores and had been one of Monroe’s biggest customers. Marvin had been dead for at least a decade, the clothing stores were out of business, and the idea that Monroe was still imagining that Larry Adler would expand the Broadway Nut Shoppe into a franchise operation was almost as disturbing as the idea that Monroe might be thinking of reinstating sexual relations.

  “I think ‘Broadway’ has a lot of cachet in Middle America—what do you think, Peg?”

  As they continued their slow progress along that very boulevard, the fading sun just visible at the western end of cross streets, where it resisted the final plunge into the undeserving New Jersey horizon, she could only agree.

  “They should see Broadway now, out there in America,” she said. “Larry would sell out a thousand stores.”

  “I’m losing Positano Software,” Guy told Rosemary on the elevator heading up to their new apartment, as he still thought of it, despite having owned it for five hellish months. As if to punctuate the thought, Patrick, ensconced next to his brother in the double stroller, which they’d only just managed to squeeze into the elevator, decided to stretch his tiny legs, his surprisingly hard little shoe finding the vulnerable mid-portion of Guy’s right shin. The whole world was against him, even his infant son.

  “There has to be someone with money,” Rosemary said.

  “Maybe that old lady with the art glass will lend me twenty million dollars.”

  “If her collection had been genuine, she could have.” The thought seemed to depress Rosemary as much as the prospect of losing Positano brought him down.

  Inside the apartment they performed what had become a twice-weekly ritual: the inspection.

  “The granite is in,” Rosemary said cheerfully in the kitchen, always their first stop. “Oh no.” She ran her hand along an all-too-obvious seam that cut across the longest, most visible portion of the countertop.

  Guy looked at it, then said, “Our kitchen consultant specified that the seam go next to the stove top, where it wouldn’t be noticed. I’ll talk to Ozeri.”

  Guy knew that he’d end up either learning to live with the disfiguring seam or paying for a new slab of granite—somehow he’d managed to found a public company that employed, even in its reduced state, 227 people, but he hadn’t managed to win a single argument with Victor Ozeri. Because of the glacial pace of the renovation, they’d had to move to a temporary rental in their current building. Ozeri, not surprisingly, had refused to deduct the three-thousand-dollar monthly rent from his contractor’s fee.

  “Maybe it won’t be so bad,” Rosemary said as they entered the dining room, where the opening in the ceiling for a planned lighting fixture struck him as egregiously off center.

  “So bad? We paid twenty grand for the granite and it looks like shit,” he said.

  “No, I mean having Positano owned by someone else. You’ve been under so much pressure, it might be better pleasing one owner rather than a thousand shareholders.”

  “I don’t want to work for someone else. Besides, they’ll throw me out on my ass the day the deal is done. It’s been Aquinas’s MO in ten other deals.”

  “Then you’ll start something else. You’ll still have all those shares…”

  The twins were flailing inside the double stroller, which rocked violently; from the back it looked as though some sort of powerful, feral beast, not two infant boys, had been strapped into it. He hadn’t told Rosemary about having to put up two-thirds of his dwindling net worth against the apartment loan. Was he afraid of appearing like a failure in front of her? And if that were the case, if even Rosie needed him to be a big success, at least in his mind, then was anyone on his side?

  As if heralding an answer to the question, his cell phone chortled. The LCD screen read Ventnor Place.


  “My man,” Derek Ventnor greeted him.

  “Your man,” Guy replied.

  “We hit an important milestone today, Guy. Our five thousandth subscriber.”

  “It’s a horny country. Warmest congratulations.”

  “That’s cumulative subscribers—we have some attrition, everyone does.”

  “Is there something I can do for you?”

  In the master bedroom, he saw Rosemary add “crack in crown molding” to her punch list. They’d had every bit of molding replaced, at a cost that now amounted to approximately thirty-five thousand shares of Positano, give or take a few hundred, so even a hairline fracture was unacceptable; 227 employees had toiled for something like six and a half hours for that molding.

  “I notice that our stock was up fifteen percent today.”

  Our stock. Leave it to Ventnor to further cheapen, simply by uttering its name, a stock that had already lost more than ninety-five percent of its value.

  “No big deal,” Guy said. “It’s thinly traded.”

  “There’s no news? Because if this baby is on the way up, I’m buying more. I can bring my average cost down to two bucks if I buy just—”

  “Nothing’s happening.” A lie, of course. Rumors of a takeover had sent the price up two days in a row. The announcement was expected tomorrow.

  Rosemary was scribbling furiously in the master bathroom, and he immediately saw why. Their plans specified that the floor tiles—off-white, Italian-made, no two identical—be laid on a diagonal, with two-thirds of an inch in between each tile for grouting. The tile men had laid them in straight rows, with minimal space for grouting, upsetting the rustic, Tuscan feeling that their bathroom designer and architect had jointly intended and which they’d enthusiastically bought into (and paid handsomely for, rusticity being staggeringly expensive). Guy left the bathroom before Rosemary was done writing.

  “Now I have a question for you,” he told Ventnor. “How would you like to buy Positano Software?”