“That’s what I was asking. If I were to buy just ten thousand shares at—”
“No, the entire company.”
“You’re joking.”
Of course he was. And yet the notion of a pornographer owning his beloved creation was somehow less horrifying than the notion of that lapsed seminarian taking control and firing half the staff in the name of a “divine rationalization,” or whatever bullshit theory he was foisting on Wall Street these days.
“Thirty million dollars and it’s yours.”
“I don’t have thirty million dollars.” He said this in the manner of a man who, asked for change of a five, realizes he only has four singles.
“Some of your friends must.”
“Neville over at Platinum Escorts, he could scratch together thirty mil in an afternoon. He was a first mover on the Internet, and he really gets how to create intuitive user interfaces, but enterprise software? I don’t see it.”
“Why dirty your hands in enterprise software when you’re pimping what, a hundred girls a night?”
“Then there’s Hussein at Omarthetentmaker dot-com. Richer than God—like I was telling you, the real money’s in gay. You serious about selling?”
“Of course not,” Guy said, disappointing himself.
“’Cause if you were to sell, I think I could put together a consortium…”
Guy could only imagine what a Ventnor-assembled consortium would look like, a bunch of greasy middle-aged lechers in gold jewelry and hairpieces taking time out from art-directing beaver shots to pay sales calls on systems analysts in central Tennessee. Or maybe there was something in it, a truly rational merger, for a change. A two-hundred-thousand-dollar license fee includes four years of free upgrades, seventy-five hours of on-site customer support, and five on-site blow jobs from Krystal. They’d never lose a bid.
“Guy, look at this,” Rosemary called from the twins’ room after he’d hung up. “They put the air-conditioning vent right in the middle of the wall.” Rosemary pointed at the offending orifice. They’d had central air installed at a huge cost, putting a big generator in what had been a closet off the kitchen and running ducts into every room. You could buy a starter home in some of the outer suburbs of New York City for what they’d paid to have central air.
“It looks centered to me,” Guy said.
“Exactly. How can we put a picture on that wall? Anything we put there would cover the vent. It was supposed to go under the crown molding and to the right.”
“Wasn’t that specified in the plans?” Their HVAC consultant, engaged for the price of a triple bypass at NewYork-Presbyterian, had meticulously detailed every inch of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning. And still they’d end up paying.
She nodded as she furiously added to the punch list, which was beginning to resemble a supermarket receipt. When had they become such perfectionists? Only a year ago the air conditioner in their bedroom had begun to make noises that resembled food being uncomfortably digested by a three-ton rhinoceros and they’d decided to live with it rather than buy a new one at the then-staggering cost of four hundred dollars. After a few days they’d added the dyspeptic air conditioner to the repertoire of urban noises they didn’t register anymore: the angry growl of garbage trucks compacting, the beeping of trucks backing up, the exasperated sigh of a bus kneeling to ingest an old person. Now the misplacement of a single vent in the boys’ room was cause for torment.
Lily reboarded the express train at 181st Street, and as it hurtled downtown, she contemplated Nanny and her tryst. Why was it so shocking to discover that the woman had a lover, not to mention a sexy, heart-shaped ass, almost as appalling as the firming conviction that she’d stolen several million dollars from her employer? After all, she herself was en route to her own lover’s apartment, and hers, unlike Nanny’s, would be an adulterous liaison, at least technically (surely marital desertion had its privileges). Wasn’t Nanny entitled to a life of her own, apart from taking care of two children well past the age of needing taking care of?
After changing trains, she emerged from the subway at Eighty-sixth Street and headed along Broadway to Larry’s place. She’d left him under a cloud of tension last time and was looking forward to clearing things up with some quick, restorative sex.
At Eighty-fourth Street she passed a florist shop and decided to buy a peace offering. As she turned into the shop, she saw a man hesitate, then continue on his way. What caught her attention was his attire—dark, formless suit, white shirt, narrow tie; his grooming, everything about him, including his clipped black hair, identified him as an alien in the land of denim and running shoes—and the fact that he’d been staring at her, of this she was quite sure.
She bought a bunch of tall white lilies with a fresh twenty. Then, as she resumed her walk to Larry’s place, she saw the man again, this time heading south, in the opposite direction. He avoided her glance—studiously, she thought. She gave him a few seconds, then turned and followed him.
He turned into the florist shop.
Thirty-one
“You’re going to adore this place!”
Esme Hollender managed an obedient nod to Lucinda Wells as she and Rosemary were herded into the elevator at 333 East Sixty-ninth Street.
“Thank God you called when you did.” Lucinda clutched one of Esme’s elbows and leaned toward her, thrusting her sharp breasts into the older woman’s startled face. “Can I tell you something? Junior fours in postwar doormen don’t come on the market every day,” she whispered, as if imparting the secret password to an ancient fraternal organization.
Esme could only re-nod. She looked utterly disoriented, eyes practically unblinking, mouth ajar, one leather-gloved hand busily yanking at the glove on the other. Rosemary began to have second thoughts about the expedition, which she’d set up shortly after discovering that Esme owned one of the world’s finest assemblages of fake art glass, with passable collections of fake English furniture, reproduction Oriental carpets, and bogus eighteenth-century portraits.
Lucinda unlocked the door to Apartment 3L and charged in.
“Voilà,” she said, posing at the center of the main room, both arms raised, palms up, like a Hindu deity. “How about this light?”
Esme placed a tentative foot inside the apartment and glanced around.
“Southern exposure, the best kind!” intoned the deity.
Rosemary acknowledged, once she had managed to enter the unfurnished apartment behind a very reluctant and slow-moving Esme, that the living room was indeed illuminated by natural light, but it had a phony, grayish cast, like bedrooms in movies after the lamps have been supposedly turned off, leaving the actors still visible through a murky haze.
“Twelve by twenty, top of the line for postwar, size-wise,” Lucinda said. As if to prove this point, she walked the length of the room, then the width, stiletto heels percussing the bare parquet floors. She took an ostentatiously deep breath after completing the exhausting trek.
Esme followed the broker’s every move with astonished eyes. It was possible, Rosemary realized, to spend a lifetime in New York City and never meet the likes of Lucinda Wells. First, you had to avoid buying an apartment, of course, but more than that, you needed enough money to cushion yourself from the sharper edges of the city, where bargains were offered and purchased and deals proposed and struck. With piles of money you got Lloyd Lowell, fawning and soft-spoken and quick to grab the check. With only a modest hoard, by New York standards, anyway, you got Lucinda Wells, loud and aggressive, her every phrase and gesture urging the merely well off to take it or leave it.
“It is generously proportioned,” Esme said. The empty room gobbled up her words.
“What?” demanded Lucinda, cupping a hand over one ear.
“And you don’t often seen a foyer with a window. I like that.”
“Did she say ‘foyer’?” Lucinda said to Rosemary directly over Esme’s shoulder.
“She thinks this—”
“This is the living room, Mrs. Hollender!” Lucinda shouted. “The. Living. Room.”
Esme retreated a few steps and glanced around. “You mean this is the—”
“THE LIVING ROOM!” If the room had had a chandelier, it would have trembled. As it was, Esme herself appeared to vibrate.
“We’ll offer eight-fifty,” Lucinda said at the conclusion of the tour, which took a full three minutes. “A lowball but the apartment’s been empty for six weeks. They’ll come back with eight seventy-five, we’ll settle at eight-sixty and change. I’m assuming you love the place.” Inexplicably, they were having the strategy discussion in the apartment’s smallest room, its kitchen, which was the size of a Boeing 727 galley, only windowless. “You’ll put in new appliances,” Lucinda said, perhaps registering the doleful look on Esme’s face, though it was hard to imagine Lucinda noticing anything about another person. Esme could have sprouted stigmata right there in the narrow kitchen and Lucinda would have continued extolling the huge number of closets and the extraordinary fact that utilities were included in the monthly maintenance. She rapped the vintage refrigerator with an egg-sized hunk of turquoise attached to a ring on her right hand and stepped closer to Esme. “Trust me, appliances are easy.”
“Oh, I see,” Esme said, retreating a step.
“I could show you others, but I began with the best in your case. Usually I prefer a slow build—you know, start with drek to lower expectations and work our way up—but I didn’t know if you had the…stamina for a full day of shopping. Do you want to see others, Mrs. Hollender?”
“No!”
“I didn’t think so. Now, about the offer…”
“I hope I’m doing the right thing,” Esme said in the cab on the way back to her apartment.
“You don’t have much choice,” Rosemary said. “Anyway, your apartment is too big for one person. You don’t need all that space.”
“Need? I think I would shrivel up and die in that…that shoe box.”
“It’s got southern exposure,” Rosemary said with the dispiriting sense that she was spouting enemy propaganda. “And a roof deck.”
“I wouldn’t know myself in that place. I’m not an old lady who lives in a small apartment in a new building on Second Avenue. I’m an old lady who lives in a big apartment in an old building on Fifth Avenue. That’s who I am.”
“You’re Esme Hollender, no matter where you live.”
“Nonsense. You can’t create a life for yourself apart from the place you live. I don’t care if it’s a palace or a tent. You can’t take a plant used to sunshine and force it to live in the shade. It will die. You can’t move a penguin to the tropics any more than you can put a zebra in Gramercy Park.”
“But we’re much more adaptable than animals, Mrs. Hollender.”
“Only to a point. The lives we create are defined by where we live, what we choose to surround ourselves with. We accumulate things that are like statements to the world—this is who I am, this is what I am. You take all that away, especially at the end of a life, and what’s left? All those fakes I’ve been living with all these years? Nothing could say more about my life. You never met my late husband…”
“No.”
Her sigh was bottomless.
“My father, Frederick Packard—did I ever tell you about him?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Shortly after he made his fortune, he built a mansion on Fifth Avenue, six blocks from where I live now, coincidentally. We lived in a perfectly nice place near Gramercy Park—I was just a child, mind you, but my mother told me all about it later. Plenty of room for the three of us, plus servants, of course. She never understood why we had to move. My father spent five years of his life building that place, fought like the dickens with the builders, a succession of them, actually, and by the time we moved in, he was quite ill with diphtheria and died a few years later.”
Well, at least they’d invented a cure for diphtheria, if not for the more debilitating renovation hell.
“My mother kept asking him why we had to move. Every weekend they’d drive uptown to survey the construction site. ‘Why do we have to put ourselves through all this?’ she would say. ‘Because that’s who I am,’ he’d tell her, pointing at the new house. You see, Rosemary, we move from place to place, thinking we’re improving our surroundings. But what we’re really doing is slipping into a new skin.”
Rosemary pictured the vast, white great room at 218 West End Avenue, the master bedroom ringed by pristine new moldings, the Italian-tiled master bathroom with its Jacuzzi throne. Her new skin. She was squirming as the taxi pulled up to Esme’s building.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Hollender,” said the doorman, holding open the taxi door.
“Hello, Eddie.”
Rosemary watched her toddle into the lobby, slipping back into her skin.
Lily lay in her sofa bed, unable to fall asleep. The chemical glow from the curtainless living-room windows seemed to electrify the room. This must be what living in Lapland is like, she thought; perpetual, insomnia-inducing daylight. Though she imagined the Lapps had curtains, not to mention comfortable mattresses. An hour earlier she’d returned late from Larry’s, as she did most nights. The lilies, and every bit of charm she could muster, had eased the tension between them.
A shadow moved across the small, dark hallway that led to the front door. Everyone was asleep, or so she’d thought. The shadow was headed toward the door—was one of the children sneaking out? She sprang from the bed.
“Who’s there?” she said as she lunged into the hallway.
The shadow jumped, then froze.
“Damn, you almost gave me a fuckin’ heart attack, Mrs. Grantham.”
“Oh, Paco…I thought you were William or Sophie.” So intense was her relief that it wasn’t one of her children sneaking out at one in the morning on a school night that it took her a few moments to comprehend the implications, none of them positive, of Paco’s leaving the apartment at that hour.
“What are you doing here this late?”
“Me?”
Lily looked behind her, then past him.
“There doesn’t appear to be anyone else with us.”
“No, there…” He turned around, then back to her, and gave an embarrassed smile. “I was with Sophie,” he said.
“Really? I assumed you were playing mah-jongg with my mother.”
“No, seriously, I was with Sophie,” he insisted. “You can ask—”
“And where was William?”
“In his room, I guess.” His side of the room. Poor William, having to…to hear his sister and Paco on the other side of the dresser they’d positioned to bifurcate the bedroom. “Don’t worry, we didn’t make noise or nothing to disturb him.”
“How considerate. I’m going to get Sophie. We need to have a talk.”
“Don’t wake her up.”
“She can’t be in a deep sleep, considering you just left her.”
“She’s been sleeping for like an hour. Seriously.”
“Two hours?”
“Yeah, I like…I like being with her, you know, when she’s sleeping. It’s, you know, it’s nice.”
Nice. In the darkness of the hallway Paco’s eyebrow ring was a glistening pinpoint of light. She could barely make out his features, just the dim shadow of his lips when he spoke, and she noted that his shoulders were almost cartoonishly broad for someone of such short stature. With only that eyebrow ring and his lips and those wide shoulders visible, he seemed entirely sexual, a nocturnal creature built exclusively to attract and repeatedly impregnate the opposite sex, which wasn’t exactly how she wanted to think of the boy who had just left her daughter’s bed, even if he’d allegedly been doing nothing more than watch her sleep.
“You must be a light sleeper, ’cause, see, I took my shoes off and my mother always says I walk like an Indian, on account of my never making any noise when I moved.”
“I was awake, yes.” Lily was suddenly conscious of the fact that her T-shi
rt, which barely covered her hips, was all that she had on. She yanked it down and crossed her arms in front of her.
“Paco, have you ever…have you ever had to…can you get into someone’s apartment when it’s, you know…”
“Locked? You think I’m like that, breaking into people’s apartments and shit?”
“No, of course not.”
“I may not live in a place like this, you know? But that don’t mean I steal shit.”
“I wasn’t suggesting you steal…anything. Forget I even mentioned it.”
“But if you want a pick set, okay, I can get you that.”
“Pick set?”
“Don’t be thinking just because I can get you one, that means I use it, right?”
“No, of course not.”
“Seriously, you know how to use a pick set, Mrs. Grantham?” The eyebrow ring sparkled.
“Is it…difficult?”
“Not if you know what you’re doing.”
“Could you…”
“Teach you? No problem. Seriously, you just choose the right pick and—”
“Can you bring the picks tomorrow?”
“Not a problem. Whose apartment you trying to bust into?”
“Whose—Oh, our old place. The government has it locked up, you see, but I need some…papers.”
“That sucks, breaking into your own place.”
It sucked more, breaking into your own nanny’s place, but she spared him that observation.
He brought the picks the next day after school. They were basically metal files no thicker than emery boards. He demonstrated their use on the front door of the apartment, which he opened with unsettling ease. He handed her a pick, and as she felt the cylinder on the front door of her parents’ apartment give way with a hugely satisfying though nearly imperceptible sigh of a click, like the moment when a piece of intractable gristle finally succumbs to the probing of a toothpick, she had a brief surge of self-confidence in which she felt certain that nothing was beyond her grasp.
Still high from her newfound competence in a second dark art, she waited for Nanny to report for work, then left the apartment and boarded the A train.
Closing Costs Page 31
