One Fifth Avenue

by Candace Bushnell

  Now, putting down the magazine and looking around the small waiting room, Lola imagined her next interview would go very much like the last. An efficient middle-aged woman would explain what the requirements would be if a job were to become available and if she were to get it. She’d have to get to the office by nine and work until six P.M. or later; she’d be responsible for her own transportation and meals; and she might be subjected to the indignity of a drug test, although she had never touched a drug in her life, with the exception of several prescription drugs. And then what would be the point of this job? All her time would be taken up by this work business, and she couldn’t imagine how the standard salary—thirty-five thousand dollars a year, or eighteen thousand after taxes, as her father pointed out, meaning under two thousand dollars a month—could possibly make it worthwhile. She glanced at her watch, which had a plastic band with tiny diamonds around the face, and saw that she’d already been waiting forty-five minutes. It was, she decided, too long. Addressing the girl seated across from her—the one with the inch-long roots—Lola said, “How long have you been waiting?”

  “An hour,” the girl replied.

  “It isn’t right,” the other girl said, chiming in. “How can they treat us like this? I mean, is my time worth nothing?”

  Lola reckoned it probably wasn’t, but she kept this thought to herself. “We should do something,” she said.

  “What?” asked the first girl. “We need them more than they need us.”

  “Tell me about it,” said the second. “I’ve been on twelve job interviews in the last two weeks, and there’s nothing. I even interviewed to be a researcher for Philip Oakland. And I don’t know anything about research. I only went because I loved Summer Morning. But even he didn’t want me. The interview lasted like ten minutes, and then he said he’d call and never did.”

  At this information, Lola perked up. She, too, had read Summer Morning and listed it among her favorite books of all time. Trying not to appear too keen, she asked slyly, “What did he want you to do?”

  “All you basically have to do is look things up on the Internet, which I do all the time anyway, right? And then sometimes you have to go to the library. But it’s the best kind of job, because you don’t have regular hours, and you don’t have to go to an office. You work out of his apartment, which happens to be gorgeous. With a terrace. And it’s on Fifth Avenue. And, by the way, he is still hot, I swear to God, even though I normally don’t like older men. And when I was going in, I ran into an actual movie star.”

  “Who?” the second girl squealed.

  “Schiffer Diamond. And she was in Summer Morning. So I thought it had to be a sign that I was going to get the job, but I didn’t.”

  “How’d you find out about it?” Lola asked casually.

  “One of my mother’s friends’ daughters heard about it. She’s from New Jersey, like me, but she works in the city for a literary agent. After I didn’t get the job, she had the nerve to tell her mother, who told my mother, that Philip Oakland only likes to hire pretty girls, so I guess I wasn’t pretty enough. But that’s the way it is in New York. It’s all about your looks. There are some places where the women won’t hire the pretty girls because they don’t want the competition and they don’t want the men to be distracted. And then there are other places where, if you’re not a size zero, forget about it. So, basically, you can’t win.” She looked Lola up and down. “You should try for the Philip Oakland job,” she said. “You’re prettier than I am. Maybe you’ll get it.”

  Lola’s mother, Mrs. Beetelle Fabrikant, was a woman to be admired.

  She was robust without being heavy and had the kind of attractiveness that, given the right lighting, was close to beauty. She had short dark hair, brown eyes, and the type of lovely cherry-brown skin that never wrinkled. She was known in her community for her excellent taste, firm sensibility, and ability to get things done. Most recently, Beetelle had led a successful charge to have soda and candy vending machines removed from the public schools, an accomplishment made all the more remarkable by the fact that Beetelle’s own daughter was no longer even in high school.

  Beetelle was, in general, a wonderful person; if there was anything “wrong” with her, it was only the tiniest of flaws. She tended toward an upward trajectory in life and could occasionally be accused of being a tad too conscious of who was where on the social ladder. For the past ten years, Beetelle, Cem, and Lola had lived in a million-dollar McMansion in the Atlanta suburb of Windsor Pines; in an uncensored moment, Beetelle had let slip that one had to have at least six thousand square feet and five bathrooms to be anyone these days.

  Naturally, Beetelle’s desire for the best in life extended to her daughter; for this parental ambition, Beetelle forgave herself. “Life is the question and children are the answer” was one of her favorite mottoes, a homily she had picked up from a novel. It meant, she’d decided, that doing everything for your child was the most acceptable and unassailable position one could take.

  To this end, Beetelle had now established her little family in two large adjoining rooms at the trendy Soho House hotel. Their first three days in New York had been spent in an intense search for an appropriate abode for Lola. Lola and Beetelle wanted a place in the West Village, both for its charms, which couldn’t help but inspire a young person, and for the neighbors, who included, according to the celebrity magazines, several movie and television stars as well as fashion designers and musical artists. Although the ideal abode had yet to be found, Beetelle, always efficient, had already begun furnishing it. She’d ordered a bed and various other items, such as sheets and towels, from the vast warehouse of a store called ABC Carpet. The loot was piled up in the entryway of the hotel room, and in the middle of this, Beetelle lay exhausted on a narrow couch, thinking about her swollen feet and wondering if anything could be done about them.

  The Fabrikants, after endless discussion, had decided the most they could pay in rent was three thousand dollars a month, which was, as Cem pointed out, more than most people’s monthly mortgage payment. For this price, the Fabrikants imagined they’d find a spacious apartment with a terrace; instead, they’d been shown dirty little rooms that were reached by several flights of stairs. Beetelle imagined Lola living in such a space and being attacked at knifepoint in the stairwell. It wouldn’t do. Lola had to be safe. Her apartment must be clean and at least a reasonable facsimile of what she had at home.

  Across the room, Cem lay facedown on the bed. Beetelle put her hands over her face. “Cem,” she asked, “did you get the reservations for Il Posto?”

  There was a muffled groan into the pillow.

  “You forgot, didn’t you?” Beetelle said.

  “I was just about to call.”

  “It’s probably too late. The concierge said it can take a month to get a reservation at a Mario Batali restaurant.”

  “We could eat at the restaurant here,” Cem said hopefully, despite the fact that he knew another dinner at the hotel would result in a very chilly evening with his wife and daughter.

  “We’ve already eaten here twice,” Beetelle scolded. “Lola so wanted to go to Il Posto. It’s important. If she’s going to succeed here, she needs to be exposed to the best. That’s the whole point of New York. Exposure. I’m sure most of the people she meets will have gone to a Mario Batali restaurant. Or at least a Bobby Flay one.”

  Cem Fabrikant couldn’t imagine that this was true—that recent college graduates regularly frequented two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-person restaurants—but knew better than to argue. “I’ll call the concierge,” he said. And keep my fingers crossed, he added to himself.

  Beetelle closed her eyes and folded her lips as if trapping in a sigh of frustration. This was the typical construct of their marriage: Cem would agree to do something and would then take so long to do it that Beetelle would have to take over.

  An impatient ringing of the buzzer, which sounded like an angry wasp trying to get into the suite, broke
the tension. “Lola’s back,” Beetelle said with relief, getting up and making her way to the door. She pulled it open, and Lola brushed past her, a large yellow shopping bag slung over her shoulder. She let the bag slip to the floor and held out her hands excitedly. “Look, Mom.”

  Beetelle examined her daughter’s fingers. “Black?” she asked, commenting on Lola’s choice of nail color.

  “No one’s forcing you to paint yours black. So it doesn’t matter,” Lola said. She knelt down and extracted a shoe box from the bag. “Aren’t these amazing?” she asked, lifting the cover and tearing away the tissue paper. She held up a gold platformed boot with a heel at least five inches high.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” Beetelle said with dismay.

  “What?”

  “It’s summer.”

  “So what?” Lola said. “I’m going to wear them to dinner tonight. We’re going to Il Posto, right?”

  The combination of the boot and the mention of Il Posto roused Cem from the bed. He was a short, round man who resembled a hazelnut and tended to blend into the background. “Why would you buy winter shoes in the summer?” he asked.

  Lola ignored him, taking off her current shoes—black leather sandals with a Lucite heel—and slipping on the boots.

  “Very nice,” Cem said, trying to get into the spirit of things. After so many years of marriage, however, he knew better than to reveal any vestiges of male sexuality. He aimed to be neutral and enthusiastic, a delicate balance he had learned to attain years ago, shortly after Lola was born. If memory served him correctly, it was precisely at the moment of her birth that his sexuality had effectively been neutered, save for the four or five times a year his wife allowed him intercourse.

  “I told you,” Lola said, examining herself in the large round mirror above the couch. She didn’t go on to explain the meaning of her comment, but it didn’t matter. Standing up, Lola towered above her parents, and confronted with the sight of a creature so stunning that she had to remind herself that this girl was indeed the result of her very own genes, Beetelle immediately forgot her dismay over the black fingernails and the gold boots.

  Having grown up in an era when young women pampered themselves as vigorously as Roman royalty, Lola was like a piece of granite that had been rubbed and polished until it nearly resembled marble. She stood five feet eight inches tall, had a surgically enhanced chest, wore Victoria’s Secret lacy bras, and weighed 130 pounds. Her teeth were white and perfect, her eyes hazel with long mascaraed lashes, her skin buffed and moisturized. She’d decided her mouth wasn’t wide enough, but the lips were plump, made more so by regular injections of collagen.

  Satisfied with her appearance, Lola plopped down on the couch next to her mother. “Did you get those sheets I wanted?”

  “Sheets and towels. But how was the interview? Did you get the job?”

  “There was no job. As usual,” Lola said, picking up the clicker for the television and turning it on. “And the woman who interviewed me was kind of hostile. So I was kind of hostile back.”

  “You must be nice to everyone,” Beetelle said.

  “That would make me a hypocrite,” Lola said.

  A muffled chortling came from Cem’s vicinity.

  “That’s enough, you two,” Beetelle said firmly. She turned once again to her daughter. “Darling, you have to find a job. Otherwise…”

  Lola looked at her mother. Wishing her mother wouldn’t hover so much, she decided to punish her by delaying the news about the possible job with Philip Oakland. She took her time changing the channels on the TV, and after she got to four hundred and decided there was nothing worth watching, finally said, “I did hear about something today. Working for Philip Oakland. The writer.”

  “Philip Oakland?” Beetelle repeated with fervent interest.

  “He’s looking for a researcher. I met a girl at the interview who e-mailed me his information. Then I e-mailed him myself, and he e-mailed me right back. I have an interview next week.”

  Beetelle was nearly speechless. “Darling, that’s wonderful.” She pulled her daughter into a smothering embrace. “Philip Oakland is exactly the kind of person you came to New York to meet. He’s an A-list screenwriter. Think of the people he must know—and the people you’ll meet through him.” Gaining momentum, she added, “This is everything I always wanted for you. I just didn’t expect it to happen so soon.”

  Lola wriggled out of her mother’s grasp. “It hasn’t happened yet,” she said. “He still has to hire me.”

  “Oh, but he will,” Beetelle insisted. She sprang up. “We’ll have to get you a new outfit. Thank goodness Jeffrey is right around the corner.”

  Hearing the word “Jeffrey,” Cem shuddered. Jeffrey was one of the most expensive stores in Manhattan. “Weren’t we just there?” he asked cautiously.

  “Oh, Cem,” Beetelle scolded. “Don’t be silly. Please, get up. We need to shop. And then we’ve got to meet Brenda Lish. She has two more apartments to show us. I’m so excited, I don’t know what to do.”

  Fifteen minutes later, the threesome exited Soho House and came out on Ninth Avenue. Lola had decided to break in her new boots; in the gold platform heels she elicited gaping stares from passersby. After a few feet, they were forced to stop when Cem brought up a map on his iPhone. “We go straight. And then we veer to the left at the fork.” He looked down at the iPhone again. “At least I think we do,” he added. His few days in the West Village had been a continual exercise in navigational frustration.

  “Oh, Daddy, come on,” Lola said, and strode off ahead of them. She had officially outgrown her parents, she thought, teetering along a cobblestoned street. They were just too slow. The evening before, it had taken her father ten minutes to work up the confidence to flag down a cab.

  The Fabrikants met the real estate agent, Brenda Lish, in front of a plain white brick building on West Tenth Street, one of many constructed all over the city in the sixties as middle-class housing. Brenda would not normally have dealt with such small potatoes as the Fabrikants, who were only seeking a rental, but Cem was an acquaintance of one of Brenda’s major clients, who had asked if she would help them out. Since the client was spending several million dollars on an apartment, Brenda was happy to be generous to these nice people with the beautiful daughter.

  “I think this will be perfect for you,” Brenda said in her happy, flighty voice. “It’s a twenty-four-hour doorman building, and it’s filled with young people. And you can’t beat the West Village location.”

  The apartment was a studio with a separate kitchen and dressing area. The exposure was southern, which meant good light. The cost was thirty-five hundred a month.

  “It’s so small,” Lola said.

  “We like to call it cozy,” Brenda said.

  “My bed will be in the same room as my living room. What if I want to have people over? They’ll see my bed,” Lola protested.

  “You could get a foldout couch,” Brenda said cheerfully.

  “That’s awful,” Lola said. “I don’t want to sleep on a foldout couch.”

  Brenda had recently returned from a spiritual journey to India. There were people in the world who slept on thin mats made of plant materials, there were people who slept on cement slabs, there were people who had no beds at all. She kept a smile on her face.

  Beetelle looked at Lola, gauging her mood. “Is there anything else?” Beetelle asked Brenda. “Anything bigger?”

  “Honestly, I’ve shown you everything available in your price range,” Brenda said. “If you want to look in another area, I’m sure you can find a one-bedroom for the same amount of money.”

  “I want to live in the West Village,” Lola said.

  “But why, honey?” Cem asked. “It’s all Manhattan. It’s all the same, isn’t it?”

  “Some people might look at it that way,” Brenda said. She waited.

  Lola crossed her arms and stood with her back to her parents, looking out at the street. “Carrie Bradshaw lived
in the West Village,” she said.

  “Ah,” Brenda said. “There is another apartment in this building. It’s probably exactly what you’re looking for. But it’s much more expensive.”

  “How much more?” Cem asked.

  “Six thousand a month.”

  Cem Fabrikant did not sleep well that night. He hadn’t slept so badly for years, from around the time when he’d purchased the McMansion in Windsor Pines with an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar mortgage. Back then, Beetelle had convinced him that it had to be done for the future of the family in this highly competitive world where appearances were as important as reality. Where reality was appearance. The thought of owing so much money made Cem sweat, but he never expressed his fears to his wife or daughter.

  Now, lying next to his soundly sleeping wife in the big bed with the starched hotel sheets, he reminded himself that the whole world, or rather, his whole world of decent, upwardly mobile and righteous people, ran on fear. Even his livelihood ran on it—the fear of a terrorist attack or a school shooting or a madman run amok. Cem was a tech man and for the past three years had been working on a system to alert people to these dangers via a text message, so they could at least avoid arriving needlessly into danger. But he sometimes wondered if these larger fears masked the smaller and less worthy fears that drove everyone in his world: the fear of not making it, of being left behind, of not utilizing one’s skills or potential or advantages to the fullest. What everyone wanted, after all, was a happy, carefree life full of pleasant and wonderful things, a life in which no one was hurt or died needlessly, but most of all, a life in which no one was denied his dream.

  And so, he realized, he was going to have to refinance his mortgage again to pay for Lola’s dream of a big life in New York City. Cem did not understand why she wanted this dream or even exactly what this dream was and why it was important, but he did know that if he did not support it, then for the rest of her life Lola might be unhappy, might have to wonder “what if?” and “if only.” And even worse: Is this all there is?