Buvlovski suddenly stopped and turned around. “Why are you following me, Ms. Chloé Ombra Allegra Verdi?”
He always insisted on calling me by my full name, which I didn’t particularly like; my mother addressed me that way when she was mad at me. Instead, the general rule in the office was to go by first name, except for Buvlovski, who asked to be called by his last name.
“Is there anything else I can do, Mr. Buvlovski?”
He grunted and gestured and as I followed him down to the library, he grew increasingly agitated. The firm’s library was organized on two floors; you needed a map to find your way around it. Buvlovski started pulling books from their shelves, dropping them on the floor and kicking them around in the corridor.
“Finally, here it is! This was not in the right section!” he yelled, holding the treaty he was looking for, Privatization & Direcho. He threw a blue booklet at me. “Check everything.”
I opened the booklet. It was the library’s index, which listed over fifteen thousand works.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Please make sure that every book is in its right place by tomorrow morning.”
A little past midnight, when like a girl in a fairy tale I was struggling through my completely overwhelming yet useless task, Buvlovski left the building. As I had learned from one of the other associates who every dawn delivered hundreds of pages of photocopies to his home, this is what the senior partner did every night.
He would leave his office past midnight, to check that the cleaning services would start at 12:15 on the dot and that the florist would replace only the white gardenias in the lobby (and not the rest of the flower decorations). Without asking for a car, he would walk out to Lexington Avenue, sinisterly glaring at the firm’s drivers, who were playing cards on the shiny hoods of the limousines, and he would head to the Times Square—Forty-second Street subway station. If it had been up to him, none of that bullshit of limousines and white gardenias would be there. Although he was SL&B’s rainmaker, he had been outvoted on any policy that had to do with “appearances.” He was the firm’s brain, not its looks.
After a fifty-five-minute subway ride, he would get off at the last stop of the Q line. Out there, in the cold Coney Island air, everything was dark and empty, as if the train hadn’t stopped an hour outside of Manhattan but somewhere deep in old Russia. Low, anonymous storefronts, which once hosted freak shows and were now selling household appliances; a wooden roller coaster, which had already collapsed twice, curving above the ocean…You were wrong if you thought that the most overpaid lawyer, after work, would walk to his townhouse off Park Avenue.
“Dimitri, Dimitri…,” a voice would call from inside the house.
And Buvlovski would push open the heavy front door of his home and walk on the worn rugs. The streetlamps’ light filtered onto the Jugenstil vases and the cracked profile of a Byzantine Madonna, and onto a golden ostensory. Every night you could hear the echo of the same polonaise.
In the large, candle-lit living room an old woman was sitting at a piano. She was 102 years old and wore a long organza dress. Some people argued that she was demented, some that she was an eccentric, others said that she was living in Tolstoy’s books, which she had been rereading every day since the age of nine after her parents left Russia in 1915. Her shoulder-length white wig always looked perfectly coiffed and luminous.
When he walked in, she would say, “Finally, Dimitri, I’ve been waiting all day.” And she’d ask him to sit next to her at the piano and play the polonaise à quatre mains, as a duet. Sometimes she would bend over an old gramophone to play a rendition of the Kreutzer Sonata (because it had inspired a novella by Tolstoy). Then they would start to dance. The woman clung to him, she yielded, and then, despite her old age, again picked up the tempo without missing a beat. Her steps were so light and precise they seemed to lead, mocking his stiff ones.
“A polka?” she asked sometimes at the end of the first dance.
“I haven’t had dinner yet, Mama,” said Buvlovski.
“Dimitri,” she would invariably answer in a firm but loving way. “If you are hungry, you have to come home on time. You know that dinner is at seven-thirty.”
went to the cafeteria around noon the next day. The librarian had not showed up yet. I had been working nonstop. Although it was January 15, the day was mild. The cafeteria windows were open and the other associates were lingering with their trays in the squares of sunlight. Looking over the buffets with Greek Cypriot cuisine, the honey torcetti from Lanzo, and the waiters in striped uniforms, I found it hard to believe that this was a law firm cafeteria.
Adhering to the rules of “business casual” attire, no one except for the partners wore a jacket and tie. The men, in sports shirts, and the women, in knee-length skirts, seemed all to have stepped from the cover of Vanity Fair. In fact, among female graduates with similar grades, SL&B would hire only the good-looking ones. The most hardworking guy in the whole building seemed to be the boy who was cleaning out the rooftop swimming pool. Law firms that looked like country clubs, lawyers who looked like models, first-year associates like me who were being compensated $165,000 a year to rearrange the books in the library…Buvlovski was rig ht, who was paying for all of this?
“Two slices of swordfish, please,” Franz said, raising his hand.
His arm—wrapped in a close-fitting, tailor-made poplin sleeve—immediately attracted the chef’s attention. Franz wore a gray gabardine suit, deviating from the business casual rule, to look more senior. Who would have guessed that he had been the master of parties? That a ball without him at dawn was a failed ball? Now, in his jacket and tie, he could easily be mistaken for a junior partner.
“I should have eaten at my desk,” he said, nervously checking his Blackberry, which was blinking on his tray.
“Relax,” I said, aiming for his upper lip.
The chef gently laid the serving of swordfish on tinfoil.
“You kiss me, here in line, in front of everybody?” Franz whispered blushing. He had been caught off guard.
“Yes, what else are lines for?” I said, kissing him again. “You taught me that.”
My spontaneity seemed to shock the entire cafeteria. Dimitri Buvlovksi, who was reviewing a document by the elevator, slowly turned his large square head and looked back at us.
Our first kiss had been kind of awkward too (standing in line, to be exact). I assume that’s always the case between two friends who, at some point, cross boundaries, but in this case it was more than that. It was about passing customs. It happened on September 8, at around 5:43 p.m., at JFK. We had flown back to New York after Sachin’s award, and my H-1B visa (sponsored by SL&B) was questioned at immigration. “You don’t look like a lawyer,” said Officer José Gonzales curtly, checking my fingerprints. Immigration officers have some power of life and death over people hoping to enter the United States. Franz showed his H-1B visa to the officer. “Yes, Ms. Verdi has been hired by Sinclair, La Touche & Buvlovski in my same department,” he said. The sergeant slightly frowned with his reddish eyebrows. “You hear so many stories…How can you prove you know her, sir?” he asked. In response, the master of parties kissed me. “Next! Please move on!” said the officer, annoyed as Franz wouldn’t stop kissing me.
And we have been going out ever since. I received the offer from SL&B a week before my starting date and had no time to look for an apartment, so Franz asked me if I wanted to stay at his place in Brooklyn Heights.
The first five months went by like one big holiday (unless assigned crazy useless tasks). The weekend usually began on Monday, if Franz finished early. We’d go eat mozzarella sandwiches at JG Melon’s and gossip about the office, fantasizing about what we’d do as grown-ups. On Tuesdays he was typically busy and I went by myself to the movies, and on Thursdays to a Broadway show, or vice versa. Fridays the real weekend started with a bunch of (thank God) nonlawyer friends
(writers, indie producers) at El Faro downtown in front of a pitcher of sangria with fat slices of peach inside. Because I wasn’t used to drinking I would eat the peach slices until I became fun to talk to.
On Saturdays we usually spent the day together in Astoria, Queens. We went shopping for the week at Titan’s and bought olives in large plastic containers (much cheaper than in Manhattan). In the evenings we had dinner at Uncle George’s and, after the baklava, we danced with some fishermen between the Greek flag by the entrance and the map of Rhodes posted on the toilet door. Or we went back to Manhattan and crashed the parties of the super-rich on Fifth Avenue, where there were more Picassos on the walls than guests. The master of parties always knew his way in. So I was joining him, and even learning how to dance.
It was beautiful to go home at dawn and make love while watching the skyscrapers change color. It was beautiful to do what I had never done before, and to do it with Franz, someone I now felt so close to, although so different from: he did everything well.
While Franz headed toward the elevator with his tray—he would eat in front of his computer while preparing an S-4 merger filing—I returned to the library. I picked up where I’d left off before lunch, though I was uninspired. My social life had been taking off, not my work. Ever since joining SL&B I studied the Securities Act of 1934 and attended all the seminars in the firm, but I had yet to do anything useful. My assignments varied from reorganizing folders to rearranging the library. Had I graduated in chemistry instead of law, it would have been exactly the same thing.
“Anyway, it’s not a good year, Bob: we’ve done only two IPOs…One second…Hey, Ms. Chloé Ombra Allegra Verdi, you don’t knock on doors?” said Buvlovski, trailing off as I walked inside his office.
The senior partner had not eaten his lunch yet, and his tray stood on his desk. He had already cut his swordfish into three pieces—apparently he planned to swallow the fish in three bites. Did the Russian have teeth in his stomach? Next to the tray was a document with Buvlovski’s comments. His handwriting was round and neat, almost childlike. Anyone who didn’t know that it was a merger agreement between two steel giants would have assumed it was a first grader’s notebook.
“What do you want?” Buvlovski asked, inspecting his horrible tie, which dangled from his neck like a cow’s tongue. “Did you finish your job in the library?”
“I did.”
“By the way, is it the firm’s policy to kiss in the cafeteria? Are we not keeping you busy?”
That’s what I was hoping to hear.
“There should be…,” said Buvlovski.
“Yes?” I said, holding my breath.
“…the firm’s soccer tournament at Chelsea Piers to organize.”
CHLOÉ VERDI
May 4, 2009, New York City
id Rosso Fiorentino go back to New York to start a company or to follow you, Ms. Verdi?” As the prosecutor detected a smile on my face he added, “Should I remind you that he’s facing 137 years in jail?”
ROSSO FIORENTINO
January 2, 2008, New York City
do have a damn room!” said Uncle Spiro with the same hostility as if I had told him he was homeless; I was only asking him if he had a vacancy in his hostel. “Sixty dollars a night.”
It was my first morning in New York since January 1989 and the cold burned my face like stinging nettles. Everything looked quite the same way I had left it. Bicycles were ridden on the wrong side of the road, taxis continued to ignore ambulance sirens just as they did back then, and the client was always wrong. The key difference since the late eighties—I was told by the bus driver from the airport who was somehow alarmed—was that the ratio of single girls per guy had dropped from 7.3 to 7.2.
My bank account had also dropped, to $235. I had used my last chunk of euros to buy the plane ticket from Milan to JFK. I needed to find investors for my company. I needed to make cash, fast.
I followed Uncle Spiro to the back of his courtyard in Queens, and behind an iron door I found my assigned room. It contained a sink, a mirror, and a couple of bunk beds where some old Greek men were snoring loudly.
“Sixty dollars for this?” I asked.
“It’s no longer 1989, dude.”
Over the next couple of days I followed Uncle Spiro’s advice. According to him, the gold rush started in a restaurant. “You have better chances to find an angel investor at Le Cirque than at Citibank,” he said. I therefore applied to all of the French places on the East Side, from Le Chat Noir to Le Bilbouquet, including Le Cirque, to all of the steak houses, Morton’s, Bobby Van’s, and Smith & Wollensky. I researched in detail every restaurant I applied for, but nobody seemed to be hiring. The response was always the same: “We’re staffed.”
One day I showed up at the hottest spot of the moment: Madiba in Brooklyn. It served good South African food and mojitos with fresh mint. A large yellow poster of Nelson Mandela welcomed you at the entrance. The restaurant was so popular that you had to book a month in advance to get a table. After carefully reviewing my résumé, where I had listed that I was just two exams short of graduating from university, the manager said, “I’m sorry, you’re overqualified.”
t seven on the clear morning of January 10, I showed up at Gino’s, on Sixtieth and Lexington, my last Italian before going Asian. I waited approximately an hour in front of a shutter bolted by a lock until Michael, the restaurant’s cashier, showed up.
“Twenty percent of Harvard Business School graduates are without jobs. Don’t take it personally,” said Michael as he opened the lock after a couple of tries. “Where are you from?”
“New York,” I said.
I followed the cashier inside. He switched on the restaurant’s lights.
As the lights came on, I was flashed by a herd of zebras, chased by arrows, running on flamboyant red wallpaper.
“Good, you don’t have a visa problem,” said Michael. Then he turned to the old man who had just walked in and pointed at me with his chin: “He’s asking if we can use him…Bruno called in sick. We’re missing a waiter.”
Gino’s was a true Italian-American restaurant. It had the most eccentric wallpaper and served the heaviest tortellini with cream in town.
“We don’t need anybody,” said the old man, who was also Gino, the owner. “I don’t care if Bruno is sick. Eight waiters can do the job of nine. I’ve always worked for one and a half.”
“Lucien Verger has booked for tonight,” said Michael.
“Verger booked,” Gino said, pondering. Immediately the name of Lucien Verger acquired a biblical stature in my imagination. Who could it be? What kind of big shot if they need one waiter just for him? Gino pointed to the wallpaper, testing me. “Do you know why the zebras are missing a stripe?”
I nodded. As part of my in-depth restaurant research, I had read several New York Times articles on that wallpaper. “In 1947 the designer messed up the design and it was too expensive to redo it,” I said.
“Yes.” Gino smiled. “It became famous by mistake, like the leaning Tower of Pisa. Do you remember in which movies it’s featured?”
As the articles pointed out, over the years that wallpaper had become a bit of an obsession for him.
“I do,” I said. “Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite and The Royal Tenenbaums.”
Gino nodded. “You seem awfully in the know,” he said, squinting. “Are you here to spy so you can open a restaurant like mine?”
“No, being a waiter is just a starting point,” I reassured him smiling. “I want to conquer a girl. I want to make lots of money.”
“Well, that’s not going to happen here,” said Gino, smiling back at me. Then he looked at Michael. “Let’s give him a shot for one night.”
Since I had a couple of hours before starting my first paid job, I decided to go and see where she lived. I pulled out the address I had gotten from the secretary of th
e University of Chicago. I had written it on a wrinkled paper napkin, which to me felt more important than the Magna Carta.
It was a cold, electric day. There was that mineral smell in the air of when it’s about to snow. I tried not to smile as I walked past my reflection in the windows of Bloomingdale’s, and for no reason I felt like waving to the hot dog vendors. I wanted to jump up and down as if I had just been offered a job at JP Morgan.
I got off the subway at Borough Hall and, after checking the address three or four times, I sat on a bench.
“Here I am!” I shouted, answering to the last words Chloé had said to me in Italy. “I’m here to teach you how to dance.” Across the river the sun had just come out from behind the clouds and lit Lower Manhattan, and the skyscrapers were glittering like inaccessible sanctuaries. You’re there now? I thought with a shiver. You did go places.
To fuel myself I had a couple of glorious daydreams while gazing at the skyline. I was good at that. I could already hear my admirers praise me as if I were Mick Jagger: “His best move? Not finishing school.” I could hear my enemies saying what studio chief Jack Warner had said about Reagan when he was elected president: “It’s our fault, we should have given him better parts.”
Then I checked the address on the paper napkin for the fifth time and looked at the door just a couple of steps away. It had just been repainted blue. Tonight you’ll walk in there, I thought. I felt a match light in my stomach.
When I showed up at Gino’s it was five in the afternoon and already dark outside. The temperature was dropping and on the pavement a glaze of frost was beginning to sparkle. Michael gave me a worn cotton jacket and a couple of tips on how to clear tables.
Gino’s was a good place to start waiting. You learned the ingredients of the Secret Sauce and met loads of people, from downtown literary agents to some Democratic Party financiers to all of the city’s bums. Every night they stood in front of Gino’s waiting for the garbage. I had already become friends with one of them, “Martin, the bum-economist,” as he had introduced himself, claiming an expertise in finance.
Something Great and Beautiful Page 9
