When Harry Met Minnie

by Martha Teichner

  Carol’s directions said to turn left when I saw the New York Stock Exchange. On a Sunday afternoon, its grand columns loomed over an empty street, cobbled not paved, barricaded at each end since 9/11, the shadow of a tall building slicing across its light at an angle. Here and there, people posed themselves for selfies. I saw lovers kiss and then look around to see whether people were watching. Police marched a couple of German shepherds back and forth on short leashes. To my right, in full sun, who was standing over me but George Washington in all his glory, a giant bronze George Washington on a pedestal, at the very spot, or so it’s believed, that he was sworn in as the first president of the United States in 1789.

  I read Carol’s email again. Once I turned left, it said, if I got to Hermès, I had gone too far. Okay. She lived at 15 Broad Street, directly across from the Stock Exchange. I found the door, but because I was early, I cupped my hands around my eyes and looked in the windows of the closed store at the belts and handbags and ties. I got bored, so I tried to call Carol. No answer on her landline. No answer on her cell. I waited and tried again. Still no answer. I stared up the street at George Washington. With his right hand slightly raised, he seemed to be bestowing his benediction on an empty arena, a strange, quiet place on a Sunday, deserted by commerce and its bustle, this spot millions of people visit every year, where billions of dollars change hands. It didn’t seem possible that people could actually live here, that they might wave to their neighbors and say hello, but they do. In the distance I saw Carol and Harry passing George, familiar as they ambled my way, as if they were walking down any street in any neighborhood. Carol had a bag from the pharmacy.

  In a previous life, 15 Broad Street was the headquarters of JPMorgan, the investment bank. The French designer Philippe Starck turned it into a luxury condominium development. Carol led me through the doors into a tunnel of trendiness. We passed possibly the biggest chandelier I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t hanging down from the ceiling. It was rising up from the floor, like an enormous, gold Christmas tree, dripping with crystals instead of ornaments. The corridor opened out into the kind of lobby you’d expect in a repurposed, former bank building, restyled so that it was over-the-top and minimalist at the same time. A couple of uniformed men looked small behind a gargantuan wooden chest, fancy, like something out of Versailles times ten, marble topped, encrusted with gilt curlicues. It was the reception desk. They waved at Carol and Harry as the three of us made our way to the elevator. Harry was clearly a city boy with a lifetime of experience riding elevators. He walked in, turned around, and calmly faced front just as the other passengers did. Everybody in the car knew him by name and greeted him, which he seemed to like. They chatted with Carol until, one by one, they got off at their respective floors. I’ve lived in buildings where residents just stare stone-faced at the changing numbers as they go up or down, as if there were a rule that people in elevators are supposed to ignore one another. What did it say that in a huge building with hundreds of apartments, Carol and Harry were known and liked?

  Carol’s apartment on the tenth floor was bright white, a studio large enough to be called, in real estate speak, a loft. I looked around and thought with relief, She’s a maximalist, like me. She had loads of stuff everywhere, interesting stuff that couldn’t all be taken in at a glance. By the door, a banquet chair, its seat covered in navy-blue fabric printed with white bull terriers. A pile of cocktail napkins embossed with gold bull terriers on a little cocktail table. A wonderful painting of a woman leaning against a chest of drawers. Pictures halfway down the side of a partition, at eye level if you were sitting. Bookshelves to the ceiling crammed with books. Things I recognized from the Elle Decor article: her idea wall relocated to the doors of a wardrobe, a spiky sculpture that looked like a tangle of sea urchins dipped in gold paint. Different apartment, same building. Carol told me the one in the magazine was bigger. She’d been renting it. When the owner sold it, she moved to this studio.

  I felt pulled to the windows at the far end of the room. There were no curtains. Who would want curtains with a view like Carol’s? Looking out at layer upon layer of tall buildings from ten stories up was like seeing New York in an IMAX film through 3D glasses. Mesmerizing.

  I instantly coveted Carol’s dining table, a long, slim marble oval on a pedestal stretching between those windows, more a sculpture than a surface for place mats and salt shakers. Later, I learned it was designed by Eero Saarinen, who was as well-known for Washington Dulles Airport and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis as he was for his furniture.

  Most kitchens are square or U-shaped. Carol’s lined one wall in the middle of the apartment: sink, dishwasher, stove, counter, refrigerator, all in a row. Instead of cereal boxes or jars of peanut butter, her shelves held designer plates, art objects. Stretched out on the white countertop was a tufty-looking cat she introduced as Bruno, twenty-two years old. Nearby, Harry’s crate. Minnie’s crate is the kind airlines accept, dull gray plastic with a metal-grid door. Ugly but practical. It’s got stickers on it left over from past flights that say LIVE ANIMAL, THIS SIDE UP, old shipping manifests and baggage tags, some half-torn-off. Harry’s, on the other hand, was a fashion statement. A big rectangle on wheels made out of stainless steel wire, inside it had decorated wall panels, on one, his SIR HARRY FERTIG crest blown up and printed in black, on another, a knight, a lady, and a peacock next to a gold sunburst. Spread out on his cushions, an array of toys. Hanging over the open door, a string of painted wooden letters, the kind you’d find hanging over a baby’s crib, spelling out HARRY. Carol’s bed was a mattress on a platform. It was covered in decorative pillows, disguised as a couch. Slightly sultan’s palace.

  I found myself wondering what it would be like living there. The place was cool, so cool. I felt a little envious, but why? I have an apartment I love, with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a den, two working fireplaces, and a garden, complete with a tree, for heaven’s sake. Small, by suburban standards, big for New York City. It’s filled with all my belongings and the stories they have to tell. Rugs I’ve brought back from Middle East war zones, art from my three years in South Africa, antiques from my nine years in England. My apartment has appreciated so much in value that if I were moving to New York now, I couldn’t afford it. Why would I even speculate about life in Carol’s studio apartment? I realized it was her taste, her artist’s eye, that made it so enticing.

  She had on a slightly shiny, gauzy black dress. Her design? Vintage? It was sleeveless, so her pain patch showed. The dress looked Greek or Roman, as if she’d stepped out of the antiquities hall at the Metropolitan Museum. She wore it with a cord belted at the waist, flat sandals, and a narrow black leather band wrapped triple around her wrist as a bracelet. She seemed to wear a lot of black, but then I do, too. It’s New York.

  She got a bottle of rosé out of the fridge, opened it, and carried it over to her beautiful dining table along with two small glasses, delicate, old looking, surrounded by fine lines of beading. The cheese board she put down next had two small cheeses on it, one round, one square, some dried cranberries, a mound of raw almonds, and a few plain crackers, all placed exactly the same distance apart in an elegant line. We drank to bull terriers. Harry came over to me and thrust his bowl and ball into my lap, chattered his teeth on the metal, wanting me to play with him. He had a different bowl from the one Carol had brought to my apartment. This one was shallower and wider, with room enough for more tennis balls. I put it on his head and said it would make a nice World War I helmet should he need one.

  What Carol told me as we sat eating the perfectly runny cheese, talking about her work, startled me. “Fashion is unbelievably aggressive and competitive. It’s brash and ruthless. It’s coarse and rude,” she said, “but magazine publishing is worse. It’s more polite on the surface but much, much more treacherous. I prefer working for myself.” So her career hadn’t just been smooth sailing, success after success. The anger, the implied hurt she wasn’t explaining. I wondered who had disappointed
her, and where cancer fit in her sense of how her life had gone. For all her wit and sophistication, she had an innocence about her, a vulnerability. I began to see that Carol lived for art and beauty at her own peril. No matter what the cost, she couldn’t help herself.

  She said she wanted to lend me a book about the death of luxury. We’d been moaning about how a designer label slapped on a garment made sloppily in China devalued that label, how it was no wonder department stores were going out of business when they’d all been renamed Macy’s and sold the same merchandise. So why not just go for markdowns? She got up from the table and went to her bookshelves. Instead of looking up at the books, she looked down at the various gatherings of her belongings leaning against nearby furniture. Finally she found what she was looking for and brandished it over her head like a sword. “This was my last year’s Secret Santa present in the building,” she said, smiling. It was a grabber, by far the best grabber I had ever seen, with a sturdy trigger-grip handle, a nice long reach, and wide, rubberized duck-bill pincers. I wondered who in her building had thought of such a practical present. “I have a grabber,” I said, “but it’s not nearly that nice. I had my hips replaced about ten years ago. The hospital gave me one after the surgery, but I had to get a second one, to pick up the first one, because it kept falling over. Goose chewed one of them up.”

  Carol laughed loudly as she used hers to extract the book from the top shelf and handed it to me. “I want to show you something.” She led me to her laptop, which was open on top of a trunk that she had placed on her desk. I guessed that working standing up instead of sitting down hurt her back less where she’d had radiation. After a few clicks, she said, “Look.” What was on her screen looked like an extreme close-up of the inside of a terrarium. It was vivid and green, jungly, dense with ferns and trailing vines and lacy, fine-veined leaves, dotted with insects and butterflies and blossoms, each detail distinct and hyperreal. “This is for the women’s bathroom in the Morgans hotel, for the tiles I’m working on.” Then she showed me the design for the men’s room. Same idea, but no insects and butterflies. They were wonderful and hypnotic. I could imagine people going into those bathrooms and not wanting to come out. God help anyone under the influence of a controlled substance. Or a bit drunk. I vowed right then and there to go and visit the hotel on my next trip to London to see at least the women’s bathroom for myself.

  Carol said, “I’m not going to show you the armorial for Minnie. It’s not done yet.” But, of course, she did. I said I was reminded of when I was little and would get so excited about the Christmas presents I’d made or bought for my parents that I couldn’t help showing them before Christmas. I always asked them to forget about what they’d seen.

  Minnie’s crest matched Harry’s, sort of. A rippling banner across the bottom said LADY MINNIE TEICHNER instead of SIR HARRY FERTIG. Like Harry’s, hers had crossed bones hanging from a chain. Harry straddled a large crown. Ms. Minnie Herself, as I call her, was perched on a bed of flowers and, like Harry, was surrounded by ceremonial flags topped with cute little animals. But unlike Harry, Minnie was wearing something on her head. I looked and saw it was a kind of dog tiara, trimmed with three grand, Victorian-looking ostrich-feather plumes. “Just her style,” I said. “That’s fabulous.” Snowflakes and stars and flowers decorated the circle in the center of Harry’s. Carol called it “the roundel.” Minnie’s roundel had a tree in it and what … a mango? “Yes,” Carol said. “You said she liked mangoes.” I couldn’t stop laughing.

  I looked at my watch and realized the afternoon was almost gone. I told Carol I needed to start thinking about getting home to feed Minnie. “I should show you how I feed Harry,” she said, stalling. She mixed two kinds of prescription diet dry food together, one for delicate stomachs, the other for fiber. She kneaded his various pills into wads of prescription canned food, including a couple of yellowish capsules she said were for his colitis. “Tylan.” Right, the capsules she made with her capsule machine while watching CBS Sunday Morning. “Next time, I’ll give you a lesson.”

  Harry gobbled up his food. “We’ll go out when you leave, but first I want you to see how we play.” Carol attached his leash, then collected pickup bags, her keys, and Harry’s World War I helmet bowl. We took the elevator down to some sort of nether floor, to a semi-basement below the lobby. It was a large space, empty, apparently unused. Carol unhooked Harry. He looked at her, clearly expecting something to happen. She took his bowl and flung it as if it were a Frisbee. It clattered on the concrete floor. Harry bounded after it, pushed it to a corner with his nose, picked it up, wiggled it, then ran back to Carol and me. He tried to taunt us into grabbing it from him. Carol threw it for him again and again. He skidded against walls and banged the bowl around, making as much noise with it as he could and seemed happy. After about fifteen minutes, he abruptly lay down, the bowl still in his mouth. “Okay, he’s done,” Carol announced. “That’s what he does when he gets tired out. I try to give him a workout like this every day.”

  We took Harry outside. Carol handed me his leash. “I want you to walk him.” He cooperated, stopping to do another runny, bloody big business. I cleaned it up. When we got to the subway stop, Wall Street again, I handed the leash back. Carol and I agreed to do dinner again the following Wednesday, August 17. I gave Harry a kiss on the top of his head and waved goodbye.

  six

  THE NEW NORMAL

  Wednesday, August 17, 2016. I mixed all the dry ingredients for the peach crisp in the morning before I went to work. My intention was to leave the office early, at five instead of seven, so that I could get the peaches cut up and the dessert baked before Carol and Harry arrived. Carol said she would bring a rotisserie chicken from Eataly, an Italian market and food hall located in one of the new World Trade Center buildings built after 9/11, not far from where she lived. It is, no exaggeration, a palace of edible overload. “They brine them for six hours,” Carol told me when she offered to go and get a chicken for our dinner. “They’re the best chickens I’ve ever had. Really juicy.” Where food is concerned, New York is all about knowing where to get the good stuff. By late morning, we were emailing each other and joking about Harry stealing the chicken.

  At about five-fifteen, as the bus inched down Ninth Avenue, my cell phone rang. It was Carol. She, too, was on a bus, headed home. Between the noise of her bus and mine, I could barely hear her. “I’ve got the chicken,” I made out, “but it’s been a very difficult day.” Her voice was faint and sounded sad. She seemed to be pleading, not asking, “Please, do you think we could postpone dinner till tomorrow night? It’s been so … tiring … today. I’m exhausted. I need to go home and go to bed. I’m so, so sorry.” I said, “Sure, fine. I hope you feel better. Get some sleep.” The playful emails, then the plaintive phone call. My answering machine was blinking when I got home. Same message. Same tone of voice. For the rest of the evening I felt rattled, not quite sure what to do with myself. I’ve never erased her message.

  In the morning, Carol let me know she felt better, rested enough to come to dinner with Harry. She arrived that night with a large carrier bag. First, she lifted out the chicken, then mango slices for Minnie, who refused to take them from her. How impolite. Next, she produced Harry’s bowl and enough tennis balls to keep a juggler happy, but he paid no attention and went straight to the kitchen, where, he remembered, the treats were kept. Also impolite. Carol and I laughed. For me, she had a pad of place mats. “For your place in South Carolina,” she said.

  I had never seen anything like it before. It was something she had designed.

  The label said:

  Carol Fertig’s HAPPY

  50 SHEETS

  Paper Placemats on a Pad.

  And in the lower left-hand corner:

  Made in the U.S. of A.

  The place mats were gold, covered with branches of coral in black and white. The look was a little more beach house than I would have chosen, but then she didn’t know that my home in South
Carolina doesn’t look like a beach house. The idea was fabulous and ingenious. You tear one off, use it, then throw it away.

  At dinner, Carol told me she had gotten herself overtired the day before. “I’ve always been a really active person. I haven’t slowed down. I haven’t really acknowledged I’m sick. I have to learn to pace myself, scale back.” She sighed. “It’s the new normal, I guess.” Each little capitulation to her cancer, I thought, is a step closer to the end, and she knows it.

  She’d been to her pain doctor to try to figure out whether she could lower the dosage of her pain medication. “I don’t want to rely on it till I have to.” She told me, for the second or third time since I’d met her, “I think I’ll go back to Pilates. The doctor said it would be good for relieving stress, and that will help with the pain. He suggested yoga, but I told him I’m not a yoga person.” She wanted to go back to Pilates. Wishful thinking, I suspected. I doubted she could. She admitted, “I don’t know how to deal with stress. Before this, I’d have a vodka martini, but now I don’t know what to do.” I said, “Coming home at night and listening to audiobooks while I cook is one way I deal with stress, and taking my dogs to the Hudson River early in the morning. My job can be very, very stressful, but it’s not the same as the stress you’re feeling.” I was thinking about how she felt facing her cancer, but I came to believe that she had always internalized stress and that anxiety was a constant in her life.

  “The hotel people are driving me crazy,” she said. “The woman I have to deal with in London, she’s maybe, maybe twenty-five. She’s unbelievably disrespectful, officious. There’s no courtesy, no deference to my work. I’m a consultant, not a servant. She’s dictatorial, makes pronouncements. I’ve gotten my designs back with arrows across them and orders in the margin. Move this flower … here!” Carol pointed. “Never, please move the flower.” She held up an arm as if she were about to do a “Friends, Romans, countrymen” declamation. “The men’s room is supposed to be”—here Carol parodied the woman’s English accent—“a totally green moment.” I laughed. “That’s the kind of pretentious nonsense people throw around in art school,” she said, then sighed again. I remembered the beautiful green images I’d seen on her laptop.