One Fifth Avenue

by Candace Bushnell

  And busy they had been. There were so many tiny details to put together: bathroom tiles handmade in South Carolina to complement the marble floors (the apartment held five bathrooms, and each needed its own theme), rugs, window treatments, even door handles. Most of Annalisa’s days were spent in the furniture district in the East and West Twenties, but there were all the antique shops on Madison that had to be explored, as well as the auction houses. And then there were the renovations themselves. One by one, each room was being torn apart, rewired, replastered, and put back together. For the first month, Annalisa and Paul had moved an air mattress from one room to another to get out of the way of the construction, but now, at least the master bedroom was finished, and she was, as Billy said, “beginning to put together a bit of a closet.”

  The intercom buzzed exactly at noon. “A man is here to see you,” Fritz said from below.

  “Which man?” Annalisa asked, but Fritz had hung up. The intercom was in the kitchen, on the first floor of the apartment. Annalisa ran through the nearly empty living room and up the stairs to the bedroom, where she quickly tried to finish dressing.

  “Maria?” she said, sticking her head out of the bedroom door and calling down the hall to the housekeeper, whom she’d heard rustling around in one of the back bedrooms.

  “Yes, Mrs. Rice?” Maria asked, coming out into the hall. Maria was from an agency and cooked and cleaned and ran errands and would even, supposedly, walk your dog if you had one, but so far Annalisa hadn’t felt comfortable asking her to do much of anything, not being used to having a live-in housekeeper.

  “Someone’s coming up,” Annalisa said. “I think it’s Billy Litchfield. Do you mind answering the door?”

  She went back to the bedroom and into the large walk-in closet. The beginnings of the closet were not the closet itself but its contents. According to Billy, she was to have an array of shoes, bags, belts, jeans, white shirts, suits for luncheons, cocktail dresses, evening gowns, resort clothes for both mountain and island, and any sport in which one might be called upon to participate: golf, tennis, horseback riding, parasailing, rappelling, white-water rafting, and even hockey. To help her get her wardrobe together, Billy had hired a famous stylist named Norine Norton, who would pick out clothing and bring it to her apartment. Norine was famously busy and wasn’t able to schedule their first appointment for two weeks, but Billy was thrilled. “Norine is like the best plastic surgeons. It can take six months to get an appointment with her—and that’s only for a consultation.”

  In the meantime, one of Norine’s six assistants had begun the task of dressing Annalisa, and on a low shelf were arranged several shoe boxes with a photograph of the shoe pasted on the front of the box. Annalisa selected a pair of black pumps with a four-inch heel. She hated wearing high heels during the day, but Billy had said it was necessary. “People expect to see Annalisa Rice, so you must give them Annalisa Rice.”

  “But who is Annalisa Rice?” she’d asked jokingly.

  “That, my dear, is what we’re going to find out. Isn’t this fun?”

  Right now the visitor was not Billy Litchfield but the man coming to see about Paul’s aquarium. Annalisa led him upstairs to the ballroom and glanced regretfully at the ceiling, painted in the whimsical Italian view of heaven, with puffy clouds in a halo of pink on which sat fat cherubs. Sometimes, when she had a moment, Annalisa would come up here for a brief rest, lying on the floor in a patch of sunlight, utterly contented, but Paul had declared the ballroom his private space and planned to turn it into “command central,” from where, Annalisa teased him, he could take over the world. The French windows were to be reglazed with a new electrical compound to render them completely opaque with the touch of a button—thus thwarting any attempts to photograph the room or the actions of its occupant by the employment of a long-lens camera from a helicopter—while a three-dimensional screen would be installed above the fireplace. On the roof, a special antenna would scramble cell and satellite transmissions. There would be a state-of-the-art aquarium, twenty feet long and seven feet wide, which would allow Paul to pursue his new hobby of collecting rare and expensive fish. It was a shame to destroy the room, but Paul wouldn’t consider any arguments to the contrary. “You can do what you like with the rest of the apartment,” he’d said. “But this room’s mine.”

  The aquarium man began taking measurements, asking Annalisa about voltage and the possible construction of a subfloor to support the weight of the aquarium. Annalisa did her best to answer his questions but then gave up and fled downstairs.

  Billy Litchfield had arrived, and five minutes later, they were sitting in the back of a crisp new Town Car heading downtown.

  “I have a welcome surprise for you, my dear,” he said. “After all that furniture, I thought you might like a break. Today we’re looking at art. Last night I had a brilliant idea.” He took a breath. “I’m thinking, for you, feminist art.”

  “I see.”

  “Are you a feminist?”

  “Of course,” Annalisa said.

  “Either way, it doesn’t matter. For instance, I doubt you’re a cubist, either. But think how much cubist art is worth now. It’s unaffordable.”

  “Not for Paul,” Annalisa said.

  “Even for Paul,” Billy said. “It’s only for the multibillionaire, and you and Paul are still working your way into the multimillionaire category. Cubist art isn’t chic, anyway. Not for a young couple. But feminist art—that’s the future. It’s just about to break, and most of the really great work is still available. Today we’re going to look at a photograph. A self-portrait of the artist nursing her child. Wonderful shock value. And striking colors. And there’s no waiting list.”

  “I thought a waiting list was good,” Annalisa said cautiously.

  “The waiting list is excellent,” Billy said. “Especially if it’s a particularly difficult list to get on. And you do have to pay cash up front for a painting you’ve never seen. But we’ll get to that in time. In the meantime, we need one or two spectacular pieces that will increase in value.”

  “Billy?” Annalisa asked. “What do you get out of this?”

  “Pleasure,” Billy said. He looked at her and patted her hand. “You mustn’t worry about me, my dear. I’m an aesthete. If I could spend the rest of my life looking at art, I’d be happy. Every piece of art is unique, made by one person, one mind, one point of view. In this manufactured world, I suppose I take solace in it.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Annalisa said. “How do you get paid?”

  Billy smiled. “You know I don’t talk about my finances.”

  Annalisa nodded. She’d tried to bring up the topic several times, but every time, he changed the subject. “I need to know, Billy. Otherwise, it’s not right, your spending so much time with me. People ought to be paid for their work.”

  “On art, I take a two percent commission. From the dealer,” Billy said, pressing his lips together.

  Annalisa was relieved. Billy occasionally mentioned a million-dollar sale in which he’d been involved, and after doing the math, she came up with twenty thousand dollars as his fee. “You must be rich, Billy,” she’d said, half joking.

  “My dear,” Billy said, “I can barely afford to live in Manhattan.”

  Now, in the gallery, Billy took a step back and, folding his arms, nodded at the photograph as if he approved. “It’s very modern, but the composition is classic mother and child,” he said. The photograph was a hundred thousand dollars. Annalisa, feeling the sharp pang of guilt that was always under the surface due to her own good fortune, bought it. She paid with a MasterCard, which Billy said everyone used for large purchases in order to get extra airline miles. Not that any of these people needed airline miles, as most of them flew in private planes. Nevertheless, leaving the gallery with the bubble-wrapped photograph in the trunk of the car, Annalisa reminded herself that it was two thousand dollars in Billy’s pocket. It was the least she could do.

  Lol
a sat at the long counter in the window of Starbucks, reading through a printout of an article she’d found on the Internet. She hadn’t been able to work herself up for a trip to the library after all. As she’d suspected, it would have been a waste of time anyway. There was plenty of information online. Lola adjusted her glasses and prepared to read. On the way to Starbucks, she’d purchased a pair of black frames in order to appear more serious. Apparently, the glasses were working. As she was reading about Queen Mary’s obsession with Catholicism, a nerdy young man sat down next to her, opened a laptop, and kept jerking his head above it to stare at her. Lola did her best to ignore him, keeping her head down and pretending to be absorbed in the text. From what she could gather, Queen Mary, who was described as “sickley and fraile,” which Lola interpreted as anorexic, was some kind of sixteenth-century fashionista who never appeared in public without wearing millions of dollars’ worth of jewelry in order to remind the masses of the power and wealth of the Catholic Church. Lola looked up from her reading and saw that the nerd was staring at her. She looked down at the pages, and when she looked up, he was still staring. He had reddish-blond hair and freckles but was better-looking than her first assessment. Finally, he spoke.

  “Did you know those are men’s?” he asked.

  “What?” she said, giving him a glare that should have sent him away.

  The nerdle wasn’t put off. “Your glasses,” he said. “Those are men’s glasses. Are they even real?”

  “Of course they’re real,” she said.

  He rolled his eyes. “Do they have a real prescription in them? Or are they just for show?”

  “It’s none of your business,” she said, adding, for good measure, a threatening, “if you know what I mean.”

  “All you girls wear glasses now,” the young man continued on, unabated. “And you know they’re fake. How many twenty-two-year-olds need glasses? Glasses are for old people. It’s another one of those fake things that girls do.”

  She sat back on her stool. “So?”

  “So I was wondering if you were one of those fake girls. You look like a fake girl. But you might be real.”

  “Why should you care?”

  “I think you’re kind of cute?” he asked sarcastically. “Maybe you can give me your name, and I can leave you a message on Facebook?”

  Lola gave him a cold, superior smile. “I already have a boyfriend, thanks.”

  “Who said I wanted to be your boyfriend? Christ, girls in New York are so arrogant.”

  “You’re pathetic,” she said.

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “And look at you. You’re wearing designer clothes at a Starbucks, your hair is blown dry, and you have a spray tan. Probably from City Sun. They’re the only ones who do that particular shade of bronze.”

  Lola wondered how this kid knew about the subtleties of spray tans. “And look at you,” she said in her most patronizing tone of voice. “You’re wearing plaid pants.”

  “Vintage,” the kid said. “There’s a difference.”

  Lola gathered her papers and stood up.

  “Leaving?” the kid asked. “So soon?” He stood up and fished around in the back pocket of his hideous plaid pants. They were not even Burberry plaid, Lola thought, which she could have excused. He handed her a card. THAYER CORE, it read. In the bottom right-hand corner was a 212 phone number. “Now that you know my name, will you tell me yours?” he said.

  “Why would I do that?” Lola asked.

  “New York’s a tricky place,” he said. “And I’m the joker.”

  9

  A few weeks later, James Gooch sat in the office of his publisher. “Books are like movies now,” Redmon Richardly said, waving his hand as if to dismiss the whole lot. “You get as much publicity as you can, have a big first week, and then drop off from there. There’s no traction anymore. Not like the old days. The audience wants something new every week. And then there are the big corporations. All they care about is the bottom line. They push the publishers to get new product out there. Makes them feel like their people are doing something. It’s heinous, corporations controlling creativity. It’s worse than government propaganda.”

  “Uh-huh,” James said. He looked around Redmon’s new office and felt sad. The old office used to be in a town house in the West Village, filled with manuscripts and books and frayed Oriental carpets that Redmon had taken from his grandmother’s house in the South. There was an old down-filled yellow couch that you sat on while you waited to see Redmon, and you leafed through a pile of magazines and watched the pretty girls go in and out. Redmon was considered one of the greats back then. He published new talent and edgy fiction, and his writers were going to be the future giants. Redmon made people believe in publishing for a while—up until about 1998, James reckoned, when the Internet began to take over.

  James looked past Redmon and out the plate-glass window. There was a view of the Hudson River in the distance, but it was small consolation for the cold, generic space.

  “What we’re publishing now is an entertainment product,” Redmon continued. Redmon hadn’t lost his ability to pontificate about nothing, James thought, and found comfort in this fact. “Oakland’s a perfect example. He’s not so great anymore, but it doesn’t matter. He still sells copies—even for him, not as many. But it’s the same story with everyone.” Redmon threw his hands into the air. “There’s no art anymore. Fiction used to be an art form. No more. Good, bad, it doesn’t matter. The public is only interested in the topic. ‘What’s it about?’ they ask. ‘Does it matter?’ I say. ‘It’s about life. All great books are about only one thing—life.’ But they don’t get that anymore. They want to know the topic. If it’s about shoes or abducted babies, they want to read it. And we don’t do that, James. We couldn’t even if we wanted to.”

  “We certainly couldn’t,” James agreed.

  “’Course not,” Redmon said. “But what I’m saying is…Well, you’ve written a great book, James, an actual novel, but I don’t want you to be disappointed. We’ll definitely get on the list, right away, I hope. But as to how long we’ll stay on the list…”

  “It doesn’t matter to me,” James said. “I didn’t write the book to sell copies. I wrote it because it’s a story I needed to tell.” And I won’t be corrupted by Redmon’s cynicism, he thought. “I still believe in the public. The public knows the difference. And they’ll buy what’s good,” he added stubbornly.

  “I don’t want you to have your heart broken,” Redmon said.

  “I’m forty-eight years old,” James said. “My heart’s been broken for about forty years.”

  “There is good news,” Redmon said. “Very good news. Your agent and I agreed that I should be the one to tell you. I can offer you a million-dollar advance on your next book. Corporations are bad, but they’re also good. They have money, and I intend to spend it.”

  James was so shocked, he couldn’t move. Had he heard correctly?

  “You’ll get a third on signing,” Redmon continued, as if he gave away million-dollar advances all the time. “With that and the money we’ll get from the iStores’ placement, I think you can expect to have a very good year.”

  “Great,” James said. He still wasn’t sure how to react. Should he jump out of his chair and do the watusi?

  But Redmon was being calm about it. “What will you do with the money?” he asked.

  “Save it. For Sam’s college education,” James said.

  “That will about use it up,” Redmon agreed. “Six, seven hundred thousand dollars—what does it get you these days? After taxes…Christ. And with those guys on Wall Street buying Picassos for fifty million.” He put up his hands as if to push away this reality. “It’s our new world order, I suppose.”

  “I suppose,” James agreed. “But one could always pursue the teenage fantasy. Buy a little sailboat in the Caribbean and disappear for a few years.”

  “Not me,” Redmon said. “I’d be bored in two days. I can hardly stand to take a va
cation. I like cities.”

  “Right,” James said. He looked at Redmon. How lucky to know one’s own mind. Redmon was always pleased with himself, James thought. While James did not, he realized, know his own mind at all.

  “I’ll walk you out,” Redmon said. Standing, he made a face and put his hand to his jaw. “Damn tooth,” he said. “Probably needs another root canal. How are your teeth? It’s extraordinary, getting old. It is as hard as people say.” Exiting the office, they came out into a maze of cubicles. “But there are advantages,” Redmon continued, his overweening confidence firmly back in place. “For instance, we know everything now. We’ve seen it all before. We know there’s nothing new. Have you noticed that? The only thing that changes is the technology.”

  “Except we can’t understand the technology,” James said.

  “Bullshit,” Redmon said. “It’s still a bunch of buttons. It’s only a matter of knowing which ones to press.”

  “Like the panic button that blows up the world.”

  “Wasn’t that disabled?” Redmon said. “Why can’t we have another cold war? It was so much more sensible than a real war.” He pushed the button for the elevator.