One Fifth Avenue

by Candace Bushnell

  And so Sammy became a computer whiz, which impressed his parents and all other adults born before 1985. “Sam was on the Internet before he could talk!” his mother boasted.

  At six, having been admitted to one of New York City’s most exclusive schools—a bonus secured by the often obnoxious, unwavering determination of his mother to set him on the right track (Mindy was one of those people of whom others eventually said, “It’s easier to give in to her just to get her to go away”)—Sam realized he would have to make his own pocket money in order to survive his artificially heightened status. At ten, he began his own computer business in the building.

  Sam was tough but fair. He charged the residents, the Philip Oaklands, the quiet doctors and lawyers, the woman who managed the rock band, a hundred dollars an hour for his services, but he helped the doormen and porters for free. This was to make up for his mother. The doormen considered the most egregious residents the bad Christmas tippers, and Sam knew his mother was one such Scrooge. When she doled out the twenty-and fifty-dollar bills for Christmas tips, her mouth would turn down in an unhappy line. She would check and recheck her envelopes next to the list of the twenty-five doormen and porters, and if she found she’d made a mistake—and she usually had, in taking an extra fifty or twenty from the cash machine—she would snatch up the bill and carefully lay it in her wallet. But Sam’s efforts paid off. Sam was loved in the building, and Mindy was tolerated, the word being that Mindy wasn’t as bad as she seemed. “She has a nice son, after all, and that says a lot about a woman,” the doormen said.

  But now there was trouble between Mindy and Enid, which Sam would have to fix as well.

  In the lobby, Sam ran into a strange girl standing before the elevators, looking down at her iPhone. He knew everyone in the building and wondered who she was, why she was there, and whom she was going to see. She was wearing a green halter top, dark jeans, and high-heeled sandals, and was a certain type of beautiful. There were girls in his school who were beautiful, and there were models and actresses and sometimes just pretty college girls on the street. But this girl, he thought, with her poochy lips turned up at the corners in a manner that was almost obscene, was a little different. Her clothes were expensive, but she was a little too perfect. She glanced down at Sam and looked away, back at her phone, as if she were embarrassed.

  The girl was Lola Fabrikant, and she was on her way to her interview with Philip Oakland. Sam had caught Lola in a rare moment of vulnerability. The walk down Fifth Avenue to One Fifth had left her disconcerted. Having developed a keen sense of status, she was attuned to both blatant and subtle differences between all kinds of residences, products, and service providers, the result being that in strolling down Fifth Avenue, the glaring differences between this avenue and Eleventh Street, where she now resided, assaulted her sense of entitlement. Fifth Avenue was so much nicer than Eleventh Street—why didn’t she live here? she wondered. And then coming upon the towering gray mightiness of One Fifth, with not one but two entrances and a wood-paneled lobby (like a men’s club), and three doormen all over her in uniforms and white gloves (like footmen in a fairy tale), she thought again, Why don’t I live in this building?

  Waiting for the elevator, she decided that she would live here somehow. She deserved it.

  She looked down and saw a teenaged boy staring at her. Did kids live in the building as well? Somehow she’d imagined New York City as a place for adults only.

  The boy got into the elevator after her. He pressed the button for thirteen. “What floor?” he asked.

  “Thirteen,” she said.

  Sam nodded. The girl was going to see Philip Oakland. It figured. His mother always said Philip Oakland had it easy, and life was unfair.

  Shortly before Lola arrived for her appointment, Philip got a call from his agent. “Oh, these people,” the agent said.

  “What’s the problem?” Philip asked. Despite his trouble with the material, he’d managed to turn in a draft of Bridesmaids Revisited the day before.

  “Nobody knows what the hell they’re doing,” the agent said. “I’m giving you a heads-up. The studio wants an emergency conference call this afternoon.”

  “Fuck them,” Philip said. “Sounds like a power play.”

  “It’s all a power play. If anyone knew how to make a good movie these days, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  His agent hung up, and an assistant from the studio called. Then he was on hold for ten minutes, waiting for the head of the studio to get on. She had graduate degrees in both business and law, degrees that should have been irrelevant when it came to understanding the creative process, but now seemed to be the equivalent of having won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. “Philip,” she said, not apologizing for keeping him waiting, “something happened between the last draft and the current one.”

  “It’s called a rewrite,” Philip said.

  “We’ve lost something with the main character. She isn’t likable anymore.”

  “Really?” Philip replied.

  “She has no personality,” said the studio head.

  “That’s because you’ve insisted I take out anything that would give her personality,” Philip replied.

  “We have to think about the audience. Women are very, very judgmental. As you know. They’re harsh critics of other women.”

  “That’s too bad,” Philip said. “Maybe if they weren’t, women would rule the world.”

  “I’ll need another draft in two weeks. Just fix it, Philip,” she said, and hung up.

  Philip called his agent. “Can I quit this project?” he asked.

  “Forget your ego and just give them what they want. Then it’s their problem.”

  Philip put the phone down, wondering, as he often did these days, what had happened to his courage.

  His intercom buzzed. “Miss Lola Fabrikant is downstairs,” the doorman Fritz said. “Shall I send her up?”

  Damn, Philip thought. In the confrontation with the studio, he’d forgotten about his appointment with the girl who’d e-mailed him requesting an interview. He’d seen ten candidates for the job, and every one had been a disappointment. This girl would likely prove another waste of time, but she was already downstairs. He’d give her ten minutes just to be polite. “Send her up,” he said.

  A few minutes later, Lola Fabrikant was perched on Philip’s couch, attempting to be on her very best behavior. Philip Oakland was no longer as young as his author photo on the back cover of her tattered copy of Summer Morning, but he wasn’t old, either, and he was certainly younger than her father, who would never wear a faded black T-shirt and Adidas tennis shoes and sport hair past his earlobes. Folded up in his chair, feet on his desk, Philip alternated between tapping a pen on a pile of papers and tucking his hair behind his ears. The girl who had given Lola his e-mail had been right—Philip Oakland was hot.

  “Tell me about you,” Philip said. “I want to know everything.” He was no longer in a rush to get rid of Miss Lola Fabrikant, who was not what he’d been expecting and who, after his lousy day, was more than a welcome relief, almost like the answer to his prayers.

  “Have you seen my Facebook page?” she asked.

  “I haven’t.”

  “I tried to look you up,” she said. “But you don’t have a page.”

  “Should I?”

  She frowned at him as if concerned for his welfare. “Everyone has a Facebook page. How else can your friends keep up with you?”

  How else indeed, he thought, finding her charming. “Do you want to show me your Facebook page?”

  She tapped quickly on her iPhone and held it out to him. “That’s me in Miami.” Philip stared at a photograph of a bikini-clad Lola standing on a small boat. Was he being seduced deliberately or inadvertently, he wondered. Did it matter?

  “And then there’s my bio,” she said, coming up behind him to tap once again on the small machine. “See? My favorite color: yellow. My favorite quote: ‘My way or the Henry Hudson
Highway.’ My dream honeymoon: sailing on a yacht around the Greek Islands.” She swung her long hair, and a strand touched his face. She giggled. “Sorry.”

  “It’s very interesting,” he said, handing the iPhone back to her.

  “I know,” she said. “My friends are always saying big things are going to happen to me.”

  “What kinds of big things?” Philip asked, noting her smooth, unblemished skin. Her presence was turning him into an idiot, he thought.

  “I don’t know,” she said, thinking how different Philip Oakland was from anyone she’d ever met. He was like a real person, but better, because he was a celebrity. She sat back down on the couch. “I know I should know, because I’m twenty-two, but I don’t.”

  “You’re a baby,” Philip said. “You have your whole life ahead of you.”

  She dismissed this by blowing a small puff of air through her lips. “Everyone always says that, but it isn’t true. These days you have to make it right away. Or you get left behind.”

  “Really?” Philip asked.

  “Oh yes,” she said, nodding her lovely head. “Things have changed. If you want something, a million other people want it as well.” She paused, holding out her sandaled foot and cocking her head to admire her black toenail polish. “But it doesn’t bother me. I’m very competitive. I like to win. And I usually do.”

  Aha, Philip thought, suddenly inspired. This was what his character was missing in Bridesmaids Revisited. This unbridled confidence of youth.

  “So what is this job?” she asked. “What do I have to do? I won’t have to pick up your dry cleaning or anything like that, will I?”

  “Worse, I’m afraid,” Philip said. “I’ll expect you to do some research for me—but I’ll also want you to be an assistant. When I’m on a conference call, you’ll be on the other line and will take notes. If I make handwritten notes on a manuscript, you’ll retype it. I’ll expect you to read every draft before it goes out, checking for typos and continuity. And occasionally, I’ll use you as a sounding board.”

  “Meaning?” Lola asked, tilting her head.

  “For instance,” Philip said, “I’m working on a screenplay now called Bridesmaids Revisited. I’m wondering how obsessed a twenty-two-year-old woman would be with her wedding.”

  “Haven’t you ever seen Bridezillas?” Lola asked, flabbergasted.

  “What’s that?” Philip said.

  “Ohmigod,” Lola said, warming up to this discussion about reality shows, which was one of her favorite topics. “It’s about these women who are totally obsessed with their weddings, to the point where they literally go crazy.”

  Philip tapped his pen. “But why?” he asked. “What’s the big deal about getting married?”

  “Every girl wants to get married now. And they want to do it while they’re young.”

  “I thought they wanted to have careers and take over the world by thirty.”

  “That was older Gen Y,” Lola said. “All the girls I know want to get married and have kids right away. They don’t want to end up like their mothers.”

  “What’s wrong with their mothers?”

  “They’re unhappy,” Lola said. “Girls my age won’t put up with unhappiness.”

  Philip felt an urgency to get back to work. He unfolded his legs from the desk and stood up.

  “Is that it?” she said.

  “That’s it,” he said.

  She picked up her bag, a gray snakeskin pouch that was so large Philip guessed it must have been made from the entire skin of a boa constrictor. “Do I have the job?” she asked.

  “Why don’t we both think about it and talk tomorrow,” Philip said.

  She looked crushed. “Don’t you like me?” she asked.

  He opened the door. “I do like you,” he said. “I like you very much. That’s the problem.”

  When she was gone, he stepped out onto his terrace. His vista was south. A chunky, modern medieval landscape of gray-blues and terra cottas lay before him. Just below was Washington Square Park, a patch of green populated with tiny people going about their business.

  You must not do this, he scolded himself. You must not hire that girl. If you do, you’ll sleep with her, and it will be a disaster.

  But he finally had a grip on his screenplay. And gathering up his things, he headed out to the small library on Sixth Avenue, which was open late and where he could work uninterrupted.

  Schiffer Diamond was finished on the stages at seven P. M., and during the ride back to the city, she found the attachment from Mindy’s blog, sent by the makeup artist on her BlackBerry: “I don’t have it all, and I’m coming to the realization that I probably never will. Perhaps my real fear lies elsewhere—in giving up my pursuit of happiness.”

  No, one must never do that, Schiffer thought, and arriving at One Fifth, she went right up to the thirteenth floor and rang Philip’s bell. He wasn’t home. Back in her apartment, her phone rang, and picking it up, she thought it might be Philip after all—he was one of the few people who had the number. Instead, it was Billy Litchfield. “A little bird told me you were in town,” he scolded. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I’ve been meaning to. But I’ve been working nonstop.”

  “If you’re not working right this minute, let’s have a drink at Da Silvano. It’s a gorgeous evening.”

  It was a gorgeous night, she realized. Why should she sit alone in her apartment? She would meet Billy and check back with Philip later. Maybe he’d be home.

  She arrived first at Da Silvano, ordered a glass of wine, and thought about Billy. She loved Billy—everyone did. She felt proprietary in her friendship with him. Although years could go by during which she barely saw him, this was never a reflection of her feelings, especially as Billy was one of the first people she’d met in New York.

  Indeed, if it weren’t for Billy, she wouldn’t be where she was today.

  She’d been a student at Columbia, studying French literature with a minor in photography, when she’d wrangled an internship with a famous fashion photographer during the summer of her sophomore year. It was on one of these debauched photo shoots in a loft in SoHo that she’d met Billy, who was then an editor at large at Vogue. Champagne and cocaine were staples in those days, the model was three hours late, and, in the middle of the afternoon, engaged in sex with the photographer in his bedroom while an endless tape of Talk Talk played over and over.

  “You know you’re more beautiful than the model,” Billy said to Schiffer while they waited for the photographer to finish his business.

  “I know.” Schiffer shrugged.

  “Are you always this confident?”

  “Why should I have to lie about my looks? I didn’t choose them. They just are.”

  “You should be in front of the camera,” Billy said.

  “I’m too shy.”

  Nevertheless, when Billy insisted she meet his friend who was a casting director, she went along with it. And when the casting director set her up with an audition for a movie, she went along with it, and when she got the part, she didn’t turn it down. She played a spoiled rich suburban girl, and on-screen, her beauty was riveting. Then she was on the cover of Vogue, and had a cosmetics campaign, and broke up with her boyfriend, a nice, good-looking boy from Chicago who was going to Columbia med school. She was signed by the biggest talent agent at ICM and told to move to Los Angeles, which she did, renting a small house off Sunset Boulevard. Right away she got the iconic part of the tragic ingenue in Summer Morning.

  And met Philip, she reminded herself.

  Now Billy, her dear old Billy, came hurrying down the sidewalk in a seersucker suit. She stood up to embrace him.

  “I can’t believe you’re here. And I don’t believe you’ll stay in New York,” Billy said, sitting down and motioning to the waiter. “Hollywood people always say they’re going to stay, and they never do.”

  “But I never considered myself a Hollywood person,” Schiffer said. “I always thought
of myself as a New Yorker. It was the only way I managed to live in L.A. for so long.”

  “New York has changed,” Billy said, a mournful tone creeping into his voice.

  “I’m sorry about Mrs. Houghton,” Schiffer said. “I know you were close.”

  “She was very old. And I think I may have found a couple for her apartment.”

  “That’s nice,” Schiffer said, but she didn’t want to talk real estate. “Billy,” she said, leaning forward. “Have you seen Philip Oakland?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean about New York changing,” Billy said. “I almost never see him anymore. I see Enid, of course, at events. But not Philip. I’ve heard he’s a bit of a mess.”

  “He was always a bit of a mess,” Schiffer said.

  “But at a certain point, the mess needs to go away. Even Redmon Richardly got married.” Billy brushed a speck of dirt off his seersucker trousers. “That was one thing I’ve never understood. Why didn’t you two end up together?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You didn’t need him,” Billy said. “A man like Philip wants to be needed. And you were a great actress…”

  She shook her head. “I was never a great actress. I watch Summer Morning now, and I cringe.”

  “You were wonderful,” Billy said.

  “I sucked,” Schiffer said with a self-deprecating laugh. “Do you know what Philip Oakland said to me once?” she asked. “He said I’d never be a great actress because I wasn’t vulnerable.”

  “There’s your answer,” Billy said. “Philip was jealous.”

  “Can a man who’s won a Pulitzer Prize and an Oscar be jealous?”

  “Of course,” Billy said. “Jealousy, envy, ego—those are the things success is made of. I see it all the time in these new people who come to New York. I suppose in that way, New York hasn’t changed.” Billy took a sip of his wine. “It’s too bad about Philip Oakland, though, because he really was talented.”