With Friends Like These

by Sally Koslow

  “I’m deeply sorry,” Mrs. Shelbourne said, and took my hand as she had Dr. Walter’s. “It’s the most devastating way to go. Did you and your father help each other get through it?”

  “He passed away when I was a kid,” I said, aware of how pitiful it sounded when I played the orphan card.

  She continued to clutch my hand. “If you could have seen Eloise years ago, holding court the first Sunday of every month at a musicale. The most glittering minds, razor-edged wit.” This explains why she was too busy to have the place painted, a small, nasty part of me thought. “Now she’s alone, in every way.”

  “No family?” I asked. Horton, I noticed, stood back from the conversation.

  “Her closest tie’s her banker, her legal guardian, who’s put the apartment on the market. As soon as it’s sold, he’ll move Eloise to a nursing home.”

  We followed Mrs. Shelbourne down to the lobby, where she returned the key to the doorman. The three of us stood awkwardly in front of the entrance. It had started to drizzle, and we crowded under her large umbrella.

  “What did you think?” Horton asked. I sensed that he’d been working to contain himself.

  “The apartment’s very … unusual.”

  Mrs. Shelbourne corrected me. “It’s extraordinary. Frankly, the price should be thirty percent higher, but her banker wants a quick sale with minimal fuss. I can’t show this apartment aggressively, you see,” Mrs. Shelbourne added. “Hordes traipsing through—I’d never trample on Eloise’s dignity that way.”

  She pinned me in her gaze. I got the point and stammered, “I—I love the apartment, but my husband needs to see it, too.”

  “When?” Horton asked.

  “Saturday?” Today was Thursday. The brokers’ eyes spoke in code I could not decipher.

  “I’m showing the apartment again tomorrow at five, and then I’m off to the country and won’t be back till Monday. That’s when the listing will circulate within the larger real estate community. I’d expect the apartment to be gone by the day’s end.”

  “Could you bid without Jake?” Horton asked.

  For the biggest purchase we might ever make as a couple? “I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

  • • •

  As I walked home, Jake returned my call. “What’s wrong?” I could feel his worry from seven hundred miles away.

  “Not wrong, right.” I was afraid I squealed. “I’ve found it. The apartment.” I offered succulent details—the view, the dimensions, the price, the lofty ceilings, the view, the fireplace, the moldings, the price, the view. I repeated the building’s name.

  “Isn’t that where Jules’ new boyfriend bragged about living?”

  “I don’t know—you were the one talking to him.” Since Jules de Marco’s breakup she’d introduced us to so many men I’d learned not to overinvest in any of them, but I remembered now that the bald guy who boasted about his derring-do in advertising had said he lived there. The coincidence could be fortunate. We’d need to pass the review of a co-op admission board. Maybe he could write us a reference letter, skilled copywriter that he claimed to be.

  “If you like this place so much,” Jake said, “we’ll see it next week. I’ll check my schedule.” The seconds moved slowly. “Monday and Tuesday are going to be hell,” he said, “but Wednesday after work … Tell your pal Holden I’ll see it then.”

  “Wednesday?” I shouted “This place’s going to be snatched up by then. And it’s Horton.” The silence sliced down between Chicago and New York.

  “Spit it out, Q,” Jake said. “What do you want from me?”

  “Get on a plane after your morning meeting so we can see it tomorrow. The other broker’s showing the apartment at five and I don’t want to be outbid.” I followed with a sigh. “Again.” I reminded Jake about the river-view condo that we’d lost because of shamefully civilized behavior.

  Jake started to hum. A good sign. “Okay, make an appointment for four tomorrow.”

  “I love you, Jake,” I said. “Thank you, honey.”

  “You’re breaking up, Q. Did you just say you were giving me the best blow job of my life?”

  “I did, Jake. That’s exactly what I said.”

  I reached Horton. “Jake and I can see the apartment tomorrow afternoon,” I said. “Could you make an appointment for four?”

  “That late?”

  “He’s cutting a business trip short.”

  “I’ll try to work it out,” he said. “You never know with Fran, but confidentially, I think you made a good impression—and she’s the intuition witch.”

  “Let’s hope,” I said as my phone indicated a second call. “Sorry. Will you please call me back the very second the appointment is confirmed? I’ve got to take this.” I clicked to the waiting call.

  “Where are you?” Jules asked, annoyed.

  “Oh, God, I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m waiting fifteen minutes already—are you showing or what?”

  I had a lunch date downtown—I’d completely forgotten—and Jules was not a friend to be kept waiting. To get to Soho by subway would take a half hour at minimum. While I was cursing my behavior—self-absorbed, thoughtless—a taxi stopped at my feet to discharge a passenger. I silenced the frugal Minneapolis girl within me and opened the door. “See you in twenty minutes,” I said to Jules as I sped away.

  Later, I wondered why I hadn’t identified that taxi as an e-ticket to hell.

  CHAPTER 2

  Jules

  I was parked on a crimson banquette, sipping wine, trying to talk myself out of ordering frites. The longer I waited, and the more I smelled the overflowing paper cones being delivered to every other table, the more I wanted what was in them—salty and crisp on the outside, tender and mushy inside. Which was exactly how I’d described myself the year before in a personal ad that attracted no one I’d want to lie next to, even on a gurney.

  Finally Quincy showed. “Jules, I’m so sorry,” she said, bending to kiss me on the cheek, the rim of her cap bumping my face.

  That she was wearing faded Levi’s I could overlook, but sneakers? Not that a leggy, 118-pound woman can’t get by with minimal effort. “You’re forgiven,” I said, because that’s what I do, forgive people, providing they aren’t my blood family. “But this isn’t the first time, you know.” Ever since Quincy Blue and I’d shared an apartment she’d run behind schedule by the same forty minutes. I waved over the waiter. “Drink?”

  Quincy cast a dubious eye on my wine’s salmon tint. I suppressed an urge to lecture her on the current cool quotient of rosé. “Sauvignon blanc, please,” she said.

  “We should order. I’ve got a lot going on today.” Officially I might have forgiven her, but I felt cranky nonetheless.

  “In the time it takes me to make a list, you’ve knocked five items off yours.”

  “Why, thank you,” I said. It’s true that I am efficient, a woman who’s learned to power her life by insomnia, a woman with a lot of balls in the air—though as far as that kind goes, only one set at the moment. Whenever I need to complete a form identifying occupation, I’m never sure what to write. Personal shopper/actress/hand model?

  This afternoon Quincy and I were celebrating that I’d gotten my first residual for a commercial I’d filmed six months ago. I’d played a bride ecstatic about drain cleaner, and the irony wasn’t lost on me, since on the day we wrapped, Ted moved out, disengaging at the moment when I was sure he was going to ask me to become attached forever. I might be smart, but not about men. Thirty-four sessions of couples counseling had convinced Ted to quit law school. Now he was in Hawaii, finding himself in the surf, and I was dating Arthur Weiner.

  “What’s going on?” Quincy asked as we waited for a two-tiered seafood platter accompanied by, yes, a double side of frites.

  “I have an audition at three, a client at five, and dinner with Arthur.”

  “How’s it going with him?”

  I searched her words for an edge o
f condescension. A few weeks ago, when I’d introduced Arthur to Quincy and Jake, I’d caught a judgy whiff. I’d been seeing Arthur for two months. He is older, shorter, and balder than Ted—shorter and balder than most men. The mastermind behind our relationship was our fourth former roommate, Chloe—Arthur used to be her boss at an ad agency—and despite his high negatives, it was she who’d badgered me into giving him a shot. Now, on a daily basis, I allow Arthur to tell me that I’m the best thing to happen to him since puberty. On his arm, I see myself as he sees me—as a girly brunette goddess, not a candidate for a weight-loss scam.

  “I like Arthur,” I said. “He’s talented, he’s smart, he worships me. He might be a keeper.”

  Quincy laughed. “Still so cheap?”

  The trouble with confiding in friends—Chloe excepted—is that they tend to discount the good and fixate on the bad. It’s true that when my birthday rolled around last month, Arthur wasn’t playing at four-star level. Not that a woman doesn’t appreciate an inflatable travel pillow, but she’d also like the trip to go with it.

  “I’m working on it,” I said as our food arrived. Quincy liberated two fries, then three more. Forget married; I’d settle for her metabolism. “Arthur strikes me as the type who’ll learn to respond to my powers of persuasion.”

  I have my own set of rules to follow—Jules’ Rules. I recognize what I want—which may explain why I’m self-employed and live alone—and recognize when I’m right, which occurs on an uncannily regular basis.

  “If you like Arthur, I like Arthur. You know I wish you only the best.” Quincy has proven this. When Ted dumped me, it was she who’d dragged me out of bed and listened day and night, in person, by phone, by text, and by e-mail, as I deconstructed where he and I had gone astray and figured out how I could reconstitute my granulated self-esteem. We have our differences, blah, blah, blah, but Quincy, Chloe, and Talia are true friends.

  “How’s the book?” I asked.

  “Crazy Maizie?” she said, stuffing more frites in her pretty little mouth. “Forget the book. Something much bigger and better’s happening.”

  “Oh, my God,” I said. She was pregnant. Quincy and Jake had been trying for several years. She’d had two miscarriages, and after each she’d retreated into a private funk. “Tell me all about it,” I said as I swiped a glance at her stomach. It looked as concave as ever.

  While it isn’t on my own to-do list, motherhood consumes Chloe and Talia. Quincy wanted to join their tribe, trading belly-button-baring maternity clothes and pontificating about kiddy joggers and organic teething biscuits. I’ve never been able to understand the gravitational pull most women feel toward wanting to reproduce—people say I’m narcissistic?—but I’ve learned the hard way to keep my big mouth shut. “Tell me everything,” I said.

  “It needs a complete gut job and isn’t huge, but the minute I looked outside I had that Time and Again sensation, like this was my destiny, as if I’d lived there in an earlier life. That’s how much I love it.”

  It took a few seconds for my wires to connect. “An apartment,” I said, like a cretin. I might have guessed. During the past year Quincy had Monday-morning-quarterbacked countless open houses whose apartments she blew off as either too dark, too small, or too graceless. This was when she wasn’t being outbid, which had happened to her every time she tried to buy something.

  “Not just an apartment,” Quincy mimicked. “The apartment.”

  “Which building?”

  Quincy had a look on her face that I could imagine on mine only if someone was begging for my hand in marriage. “Arthur’s,” she said, “and the apartment has a view of the reservoir.” Which Arthur’s does not.

  Everyone wishes they lived in a building like Arthur’s, collecting their mail alongside boldface names as well as those simply stinking rich. I’d stopped counting the times he’d retold the story of how perspicacious he was to buy his apartment two decades ago, because now its price tag was in the ozone. He’d rattle on. If he sold, he could make a killing, the number growing with each telling of the tale. The vexing question was, where would he move? Arthur had arrived in his neighborhood when it was a dump, but now he couldn’t bear the thought of migrating to a lesser address. He was trapped by entitlement.

  But I was confused. “Isn’t that building pricey?” Yes, I was indelicate, but Quincy is an old friend, and unless something had recently changed in her fiscal spreadsheet, Arthur’s building was out of her league.

  “That’s the other half of the miracle—we can afford this particular place.”

  Had Jake’s year-end bonus arrived with zeroes she’d forgotten to mention? Had another relative died who’d left her a pile of dough? I gave her a dubious look.

  “Don’t ask,” she said.

  My brain was working fast now. “I’d love to see it—you know how much I like looking at apartments.” Not that I’d ever gone with Quincy to scrutinize any of the others. I myself am happily nested in a sweet suburban townhouse.

  She paused. “I don’t know,” she said, offering me the last frite. “Jake hasn’t been there yet. He’s coming home early from Chicago. We have an appointment tomorrow.”

  “When?”

  “Late afternoon.”

  “I’ll join you.”

  You’d have thought I’d suggested sex with a goat. Finally, she talked. “The woman who lives there is old and sick and the brokers don’t want a lot of people around.”

  “Brokers, plural? I thought you were just working with that guy. Who’s the other broker?”

  I waited for Quincy to drop the name or change her mind about having me accompany her. All she did was finish her wine and say, rather primly, considering that I’m a friend who’s held her head when she was puking, “If Jake and I go ahead with this, I’ll be thrilled to get you in to see it, but not now.”

  “Right.” We began discussing my latest shopping client, a television producer who wanted a wardrobe worthy of her face-lift. We moved on to Quincy’s tribulations with Maizie May, the ninety-five-pound drama queen whose book she was ghostwriting. Soon enough the subject came up of where we should all go on our next girls’ getaway. Inexplicably, Chloe was lobbying for Las Vegas; I suppose she’d heard about the excellent stores there. Talia wanted to drive up to that rubbish heap her husband’s family owns in Maine. I’d proposed a quick hop to Heaven, Italy—that would be Rome. Quincy wanted Graceland.

  The check arrived. She grabbed it. “This one’s on me.”

  “Hey, I’m the one with the big payday.”

  “I forgot to even ask about that!” Quincy said.

  “True.”

  “All the more reason for me to take this,” she said. “Besides, I’m feeling lucky.”

  I thanked her and we said goodbye in a snowstorm of cheek kisses. For the next two hours I wandered in and out of shops in Soho, but I kept tripping over the four-leaf clover on steroids that Quincy had found that now gave her the chance to buy what must be an extraordinary bit of real estate.

  I realized I wanted to tell Arthur the whole implausible, inequitable story. Was that wrong? It wasn’t illegal, and all I was going to do was share the information—and maybe, for kicks, take a peek at the place.

  I began to feel like a child waiting for her birthday party, and soon enough my need became an itch I couldn’t ignore. “Hi there,” I said, catching Arthur on the first ring. We were still in that primitive state of romantic thrall when he wouldn’t have the balls to tell me I’d interrupted him at work, which I probably had. “You’re not going to believe this,” I began, using my most seductive voice, “but guess who may become your neighbor?” I retold the saga, possibly mentioning—I recall—that Quincy insinuated the apartment was a steal. But who was I kidding? The real point was that, given Quincy’s lousy track record on having bids accepted, she’d eventually lose out on this apartment and a stranger would land this deal. I couldn’t let that happen.

  “Which floor’s it on?” he asked.

/>   “She didn’t say.”

  “If it has a reservoir view, that narrows it down.”

  I detected excitement.

  “Who’s the broker?”

  “Howard something.”

  “Is that his first name? What company is he with?”

  I could see where this was going and felt a spasm of guilt on Quincy’s behalf. On the other hand, she was the same friend who’d forgotten to congratulate me on my starring role in a major commercial, the friend who didn’t want me to see the apartment with her. Also—and this seemed far more compelling—I kept returning to the point that Quincy would eventually get outbid on this apartment, and this place sounded too good to let float away when Arthur was a resident in that very building, as well as maybe my future. If that apartment had anyone’s name on it, it was Arthur’s.

  “I’ve got to see this place,” he said. “If I could sell my apartment for a bundle and stay in my building but get a place with a million-dollar view, well, all around, that’d be a pretty fair trade. My apartment has no view, but it’s huge. I’d definitely come out ahead.”

  And with my subtle guidance, I thought, he’d invest that profit in me—travel, jewelry, a rental in the Hamptons, or a house in, say, Dutchess County? I briefly pictured myself riding to hounds, and then shook away the fantasy. De Marcos bet on horses; we don’t ride them.

  “Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself here?” I asked him, as I thought the same thing of myself. But perhaps not. I’m past forty. Arthur is fifty. Sometimes in life you have to stop overthinking and just haul ass.

  He laughed. “Hang tight, kid. I’ll see you at dinner.”

  Four hours later I walked into the bistro I’d suggested on Columbus Avenue. Arthur was waiting, along with two chilled glasses of champagne, a most un-Weiner-like flourish. “What’s going on?” I asked.