Primates of Park Avenue

by Martin,Wednesday

  It all would have made me feel like Marion Cunningham on Happy Days, but for the fact that I knew I was ultimately the one deciding where we would live. It was a woman thing, the home sphere. That’s why all the brokers and potential buyers were women. The men were there to provide gravitas and a bit of frisson, and then disappear, and then sign off. Or not. After which we would do whatever we wanted. Welcome to the Upper East Side.

  As I pondered these gendered divisions of work and meaning in what would be my new habitat, I couldn’t help but focus on more practical matters as well. Namely, in spite of a budget that in Atlanta or Grand Rapids would get us a mansion with a pool, many of the apartments were disappointments. There was a pattern: a gorgeous, gilded, attended lobby at a “prestigious” address on Park or Madison or Fifth. We went up, entered the apartment . . . and I thought I might faint. Is this where all the well-turned-out women of the Upper East Side were living? I frequently wondered in disbelief. Some of the places were immaculate, even “triple mint,” but many if not most were in a state of gentle or not-so-gentle neglect. Frayed rugs and old carpeting. Worn kitchens. Yellowed paint. And, almost always, a maid dusting or polishing the silver or folding laundry.

  And then, every time, without fail, the framed photos and mementos in the living room told the same story. I was transfixed by them, in apartment after apartment: a picture of a young women next to a diploma from Brearley or Spence. A young man in his graduation photo . . . near a framed diploma, all gold-leafed letters and Latin script, from Horace Mann or Buckley or St. Bernard’s. The perfect hair. The unlined young faces. The airbrushed smiles and teeth adjusted to perfection by orthodontia. It hit me like a sledgehammer at a place on Madison Avenue in the low Eighties one day—these people were downsizing or selling because they had to. Their kids, in whom they had invested so much, so intensively, had finally graduated and fledged. The parents had pushed themselves to their outer financial limit for . . . housekeepers and private schools. They’d rather move than give up either. So now they would sell and move into a smaller place. And bring the diplomas and housekeepers along.

  “Can you believe it?” I said to my husband on the night of my big realization as I flopped into bed, exhausted and depressed from seeing four consecutive apartments with gilded lobbies, frayed carpets, and fancy diplomas.

  “I can,” he said with a sigh. A Brooklynite who had moved to the Upper East Side as a teen, he was a New York but not a Manhattan native, fluent in the desires and beliefs and strivings and anxieties and priorities of the people whose apartments I was in every day, yet also able to see the strangeness of it all. “All that stuff, the housekeepers and private school diplomas—isn’t just window dressing,” he told me now. “It’s who they are.”

  He yawned, but I was suddenly wide awake. I remembered an anthropology professor trying to help us understand the concept of honor among the tribe he studied in Yemen. “It’s not an abstract idea,” he explained to the roomful of us in the undergraduate seminar that day so many years before. “When someone sullies your honor, you can’t ignore it and go on, just feeling embarrassed.” No, he told us, it’s like someone has hacked away a piece of your flesh. Something is missing, and you are damaged and injured. Private school diplomas and housekeepers, I realized now, were clearly not just fetishized markers of status, not merely something to wear or have or display with pride. They were utterly intrinsic to one’s identity on the Upper East Side. So crucial, so fundamental, that you would forgo fresh sisal and a kitchen redo and an apartment in “triple mint” condition to hold onto them.

  So that explained it, then. The way, all around me, women—brokers with kids, women whose apartments I was looking at, friends of friends on the Upper East Side—talked about where their kids went to school, and used their children’s ages and school affiliations during introductions. Yes, it was a way to describe themselves and do a little coalition-building in the process. But it was also who they were. Period. “Hi, I’m Alicia. My kids Andrew and Adam go to Allen-Stevenson—I think yours do too?”

  “No, my kids go to Collegiate”—[Bam! Here she establishes superior rank owing to her child’s enrollment in a TT—top tier—school] “but my friend Marjorie’s four boys are all at AS [subtext: “My friend Marjorie is really rich—you have to be to have four kids—and by association, so am I.”]. Maybe you know her, how old are your kids?”

  “Oh wait, really? My nephews are both at Collegiate.” [Here she reveals that she is a mere degree from TT school status herself, since her sister’s kids go to a TT school, and thus she is something like an equal] “They’re twins, in second grade, Devon and Dayton?” And so on.

  Private school affiliation was so important that, without exception, these women seemed dumbfounded that I planned to send my son to the neighborhood’s excellent public school, PS6, when the time came. They might raise their eyebrows and say politely, after a pause, “Yes, you’ll see at the time where he ends up.” Others were more blunt. “Come on,” one broker said with a forced smile, sounding a little exasperated, as she opened kitchen cabinets to show me they were lighted inside. “You’re going to send your kid to private school like everybody else. You’ll drop him off with your driver. Like everybody else. So you can buy anywhere.”

  But my husband and I were adamant. We had gone to public schools, and so could our son. It seemed normal and sensible and we continued to push for a place near the excellent public school on East Eighty-First Street between Madison and Park. This is an area brokers refer to as “Upper East Side Prime.” Which just made our quest that much harder.

  Now that we had come this far, I needed some tutoring from my husband and Inga. I had bridged the first, fundamental divide in Manhattan real estate social identity, the one that separates “renters” from “owners,” I knew, when I got married. My husband had put me on the deed to his house, and it became ours, and that was that, but apparently it meant a lot in our town. Many people who rent in Manhattan keep it a secret, or at least don’t talk about it, owing to some sense of inferiority, a feeling that renting is second-class and contingent. “You own, correct?” was one of the first questions brokers asked me (or, more often, asked Inga about us before agreeing to show us an apartment), wanting to make sure we weren’t presenting them with an additional hurdle, pleased to have it confirmed that we were already members of the tribe of owners.

  An additional distinction was prewar versus postwar buildings. Sure, I thought, it would be nice to live in a beautiful old building with beautiful original details, built by an architect of note, storied and historic. But I wasn’t going to make a federal case out of it. Now came another essential distinction, one that largely broke down along the prewar/postwar distinction: co-op versus condo. Living in a house downtown, I was untutored regarding this particular binary opposition, one of the fundamental distinctions that organizes Manhattan buildings and Upper East Side identity.

  In a co-op, Inga and my husband explained, board members decide who gets to live there and who doesn’t, and what the rules are. Some of the rules are straightforward and logical. For example, “summer rules” ensure that apartment renovations take place only in summer, when it’s easier to escape the noise by going outside or even to your country place for the whole summer. We live right on top of each other and under each other in Manhattan, so construction can wreck your quality of life. Summer rules are “very Upper East Side,” Inga informed me; almost no West Side co-ops have them. And they make sense.

  Other co-op rules are more arbitrary, more cultural than functional. For example, in a co-op you can’t just sublease your apartment or let your twenty-something move in. The board has to approve such things. And a particular building’s co-op may require that an applicant document astronomical liquid assets. Or not. They “require” this (when they choose not to overlook the requirement) as a kind of “insurance,” in spite of the fact that they essentially have a lien against every apartment
in the building. That’s because nobody owns an actual apartment in a co-op. They own “shares”—a bigger apartment generally means mores shares. Shares are power. People who want to buy a co-op apartment almost always have to be interviewed by the board. And at a board interview, my husband and Inga warned me, the board members could ask you anything at all. Or decide not to let you move in for any reason at all. So that’s why the rare apartments in co-op buildings on Park and Fifth we looked at that advertised “No board approval” were mobbed, I realized, wondering whether owning shares in a co-op felt like having a housekeeper and a child in private school.

  Condos are a little more expensive, I learned, generally allow more financing, and you really own them. They are also a little more free-and-easy. You can sublet your place, or use it as a pied à terre, if you choose. And in a condo, a management company scrutinizes your application, which feels less personal and invasive, somehow, than a bunch of your possibly future neighbors poring over every detail of your financial and personal life.

  Whether it was a co-op or a condo, prewar or postwar, I considered as I made my way from the West Village to the Upper East Side daily, it was time to settle on a place. The cab fare was killing me. We had to move uptown so I could stop getting there every day.

  And then one day, I found a place I thought would do. It was a modern building on Park Avenue, not a “prestigious” prewar building by a famous architect. I didn’t care—after all, it was less than two blocks from Central Park. The apartment itself initially seemed a little dark. But that was just the paint and I could “see through it.” The kitchen was “top of the line,” as brokers say, if on the small side. There were “open city views,” meaning there was no view of the park, but there were no buildings right in front of your window, either; they were all a good distance off, giving you plenty of light and a pleasant feeling of space and company at the same time. It had the right number of bedrooms, one of them with a cute little table and chairs and an arts-and-crafts project in progress—buttons and pieces of dried macaroni and glitter on pink construction paper. This little girl’s room could easily be my little boy’s room, I realized, taking it in. The warm feeling of the kid-friendly mise-en-scène overrode my dislike of the lowish ceilings, busy street-corner location, and less-than-ideal layout.

  I walked through the place a second time and a third, my excitement growing. “The broker couldn’t be here,” Inga explained—I knew it was a diss of some sort in the world of brokers and buyers and sellers, a communication that Inga and I didn’t merit her time, she was busy elsewhere or something—but I didn’t care. A second visit was arranged with all haste, so the broker—harried, indifferent, unfriendly—could meet and approve of me. Once she had, we scheduled yet another viewing, this time with my husband in tow.

  My first clue that the owner was home, as we opened the door for our couple’s “viewing,” was the sound of her admonishing her daughter. Peering down the hall, I could see she was blond, like me, and about my age and build. She was saying, “Leda, if you’re eating, offer some to the other people in the room first!” Apparently she was referring to the broker, a large woman with short reddish hair I had met briefly on my previous visit, and who now stood between us and the family like a Jean Schlumberger–accessorized pit bull. Rings and bracelets flashing, she literally tried to block me as I walked toward the owner, who had her hand extended and gave me a friendly smile, to introduce myself. “I’m Abby,” she said, sounding harried and polite at once, a cadence and way of being that was becoming familiar to me as I met Upper East Side women on the street and in their apartments. Apparently it was important to Abby to set her eyes on the person or persons who proposed to buy the space she was trying to sell, and I was glad I had dressed nicely, relatively speaking. Her outfit was beautifully chic—fitted black capri pants, a snug lavender blouse, and a perfect, glossy light pink pedicure on her bare feet. From the looks of it, she had a hair and makeup artist. And this was just a Wednesday afternoon. “This is Sharon,” Abby told me, and the broker took my hand limply, looking past me. “Hello. We meet again,” I offered in a voice I hoped was pleasant.

  It wasn’t the first time I had seen a broker be overtly and theatrically protective of her clients and strangely hostile toward a potential buyer. Brokers were the self-appointed guardians of the family in transition, I had come to understand, their guides through a liminal state as they segued from owners to sellers to buyers to owners again themselves. Brokers wanted to be in on all points of these big transitions because they were also big transactions, with large commissions hanging in the balance. They were petrified of anything messing up a deal in the works, including contact between the owner and a potential buyer. And of being cut out. But there was something else, too, something stranger about brokers and clients on the Upper East Side, and I saw it now, as Abby told me she had to go check on her daughter, who had wandered down to her bedroom. I turned to Sharon and, just to be polite, asked her little Leda’s age.

  “She’s three and she goes to Temple Emanu-El Nursery School,” she responded shortly, and as haughtily as if she were reporting that she herself had just won a Nobel Peace Prize. I had noticed the tendency of brokers, architects, and nannies on the Upper East Side to act as though their status and that of their client or boss were one in the same—here it was again. When I asked if Temple Emanu-El was nearby, giving clue to the fact that I didn’t know anything about it, Sharon gaped at me in disbelief. I smiled, hoping to soften the blow of my obvious ignorance. And indifference. But internally I was rolling my eyes and thinking, C’mon, lady. This isn’t your house. Or your family. She wanted the commission, no doubt, but she likely had several other interested parties lined up to buy the place. Sharon was a rich lady, like so many Upper East Side brokers. Her commission on every sale was 6 percent, and her personal take was 3 percent. In the midst of an economic and real estate boom, I was nothing to her, and it showed. I disliked her. We just stood there.

  Thankfully, Abby soon returned offering apologies and a sparkling water. We talked about our children—her daughter was a bit older than my son—as she walked me around the apartment, chatting about what she liked and what she didn’t, with a straightforwardness I found winning. The broker had fallen back behind us. She was no match for mommy talk. Inga, who told us my husband had called to say he was held up in traffic, had known to hang back all the while and now made parallel chitchat with her colleague, who, I thought with a bizarre flash of pride, could never hope to be in her league. Inga was the better broker in every way—poised, socially and professionally skilled, beautiful. Ha!

  “The people who work in the building are okay,” Abby told me as she led me down the hallway toward the master bedroom, “not great but okay.” She explained that they were staying in the building but moving up to the penthouse, which had one more bedroom than this one did, and park views. I felt a little jolt of embarrassment—she was moving into a better place, we were moving into her castoff—and then I pushed it away. Who cared? I surmised she was pregnant when she told me the plan, but didn’t ask. Instead I murmured something about how I’d just be relieved to have a lobby and an elevator—life in a town house, all those stairs and so on, was not easy with a little one and a stroller. She lit up. “You live in a town house? That’s my dream!” she pronounced emphatically. Somehow, I felt I had now righted myself from the injury of moving into her discarded husk of a house, like a needy hermit crab. Here we reached the bedroom and she began opening cupboards and closets, narrating them to me. These cubbies were for purses—I saw flashes of Gucci and Louis Vuitton and Goyard—and here were the shoe shelves, row after row of them.

  “Do you want to keep the safe?” she asked me, leaning down to show me how it worked. I paused. What would I put in a safe? I wondered. I wasn’t much of a jewelry person. On our first vacation together, my husband had said he wanted to buy me some jewelry and I told him, “Thanks, but I don’t really like . . . gem
s.” It was true. He had had to talk me into a relatively modest diamond engagement ring, which initially struck me as an odd and entirely unsubtle and distasteful semaphore: I am someone else’s property. Eventually I capitulated because it was just easier that way and because it gave me a certain sense of security to be part of the tribe. And because, well, it was pretty.

  “Sure.” I fumbled now, somehow not wanting to let on to Abby that I wasn’t like her in this or any other regard, and she quickly explained, “It’s good for the basics. Your big stuff you can have stored at the private bank on the corner, that’s what I do.” I took in the stilettos and the carefully folded cashmere sweaters arranged by color as she went on.

  “I had the closet customized but I made some mistakes,” she summarized, standing up again. “I can show you how I’d do it again if you want, so it’s more efficient.” Here she sighed and apologized for the “mess,” though I couldn’t see one. In fact, it was something all the women I met on the Upper East Side always did—apologize for a mess that wasn’t there. Note to self: figure that one out.

  Abby was smiling and extending her hand again. “Well, I’m really glad I got to meet you.” She explained that she had to run out with Leda and was sorry not to be able to meet my husband just then. “But I hope it all works out,” she pronounced meaningfully. “And . . . I’ll look for you in Palm Beach. You’re going, right? We’ll be at The Breakers.”

  I was confused. “Um . . .” I cast my eyes about the room, letting them rest on the blue toile wallpaper as if it might hold some type of explanation. “We’re going . . . but not until May,” I said finally, recalling on the spot that in the late spring we were going to a conference my husband had there, wondering how on earth she knew about it.