One Fifth Avenue

by Кэндес Бушнелл

  Both she and Philip had moved on years ago. There was no going back.

  With a glance at Lola, who was sitting blithely in the director’s chair, completely unaware of her faux pas, Schiffer stepped onto the set and tried to put Philip and his girlfriend out of her mind. The scene she was shooting took place in her office at the magazine and involved confronting a young female employee who was having an office affair with the boss. Schiffer sat down behind her desk and put on a pair of black-framed reading glasses from the props department.

  “Settle,” the director called out. “And action.”

  Schiffer stood up and took off her reading glasses as the young actress approached the desk.

  “Ohmigod. It’s Ramblin Payne,” Lola squealed from behind the monitors.

  “Cut!” the director shouted. He looked around, spotted the interloper in his chair, and strode over to confront Lola.

  Schiffer scooted out from behind the desk and tried to intervene. “It’s okay. She’s a friend.”

  The director stopped, looked at her, and shook his head, then saw Philip standing next to Lola. “Oakland?” he said. He went over and shook hands with Philip and patted him on the back. “Why didn’t you tell me Oakland was here?” the director said to Schiffer.

  “I wanted to surprise you.”

  “How’re you doin’, man? I hear you’re getting Bridesmaids Revisited made.”

  “That’s right,” Philip said. “We start shooting in January.”

  The director looked at Lola in confusion. “Is this your daughter?”

  he asked.

  Schiffer tried to catch Philip’s eye, but he refused to look at her. Poor Philip, she thought.

  Later, in the car going back to the city, a black cloud of melancholy descended over Philip of which Lola was seemingly unaware. She chattered away, ignorant of his silence, nattering on and on about how she’d had an epiphany standing on the set. It was, she realized, where she belonged. She could see herself in front of the cameras, doing what Ramblin Payne did, which wasn’t so hard, really. It didn’t look hard. But maybe she’d be better off on a reality show. They could do a reality show about her life — about a young woman taking on the big city.After all, she pointed out, she did have a glamorous life, and she was pretty — as pretty as all the other girls on reality shows. And she was more interesting. She was interesting, she asked Philip, wasn’t she?

  “Sure,” Philip said, his response automatic. They were crossing the Williamsburg Bridge into lower Manhattan, which presented a very different view than the famous midtown skyline. Here, the buildings were brown and gray, low-slung, in disrepair; one thought of desperation and resignation as opposed to renewal and the fulfillment of one’s dreams.

  The sight of these buildings caused Philip to have his own epiphany.

  Schiffer Diamond had returned to New York and taken up her new life with ease; she was celebrated and had even found a relationship. But what, Philip thought, of his own life? He hadn’t moved on at all; he’d taken no new steps in years. The subject matter of his work changed, his girlfriends changed, but that was it. Thinking ahead to Christmas, he became more aware of his discontent. His Christmas would be spent with his aunt — usually, they went to the Plaza for dinner, but the Plaza was no longer the Plaza, under renovation as an exorbitantly priced condominium — and now he didn’t know where they’d go. Schiffer was going to Saint Barths. Even Lola was going home to her parents’. He felt old and left behind and had to forcibly remind himself that this wasn’t like him. And then he saw a way out of his depression.

  “Lola,” he said, taking her hand. “How would you like to go to the Caribbean for New Year’s?”

  “Saint Barths?” she asked eagerly.

  “No,” he said, not wishing to spend the holiday running into Schiffer Diamond and her new lover. “Not Saint Barths. But someplace just as good.”

  “Oh, Philip,” she said, throwing her arms around him. “I’m so happy.

  I was so worried we weren’t going to do anything for New Year’s — I thought maybe you forgot. But I guess you were saving it as a surprise.”

  Unable to contain her excitement, she immediately called her mother to give her the good news. Her mother had been funny lately, and Lola thought this would cheer her up.

  Three days later, Lola, in a haze of excitement, flew down to Atlanta. Her thoughts were concentrated on her trip with Philip; she would leave on the twenty-seventh and fly directly to Barbados, where she would meet up with him and fly to Mustique. Everyone knew that when a man took you on vacation, he was testing you to see how you got along when you were together all day for several days; if the trip went well, it could lead to an engagement. And so, in the week before she left for the trip, she had almost as much to do as a bride: She needed to buy bathing suits and resort wear, wax herself from head to toe, have her calluses scraped and her elbows scrubbed and her eyebrows threaded. Sitting on the plane, she imagined her wedding day. She and Philip would marry in Manhattan; that way they could invite Schiffer Diamond and that funny novelist James Gooch, and the wedding would get into The New York Times and the Post and maybe even the tabloid magazines, and the world would begin to know about Lola Fabrikant. With these happy thoughts firmly in mind, Lola collected her bags from the carousel and met her mother at the curb. Each of her parents drove a new Mercedes, leased every two years, and Lola felt a swelling of pride at the easy superiority of their lives.

  “I missed you, Mother,” Lola said, getting into the car. “Can we go to the Buckhead Mall?” This was a Christmas tradition for mother and daughter. Ever since Lola had gone away to Old Vic University, she and Beetelle would go straight to the mall when Lola came home for the holidays. There, mother and daughter would bond over shoes and accessories and the various outfits Lola tried on while Beetelle waited outside the dressing room to exclaim over the “cuteness” of a pair of jeans or a Nicole Miller dress. But this year, Beetelle was not dressed for shopping. It was her personal edict never to appear in public without her hair straightened and blown dry and her makeup applied, and wearing midpriced designer clothes (usually slacks and a blouse and often an Hermès scarf and several heavy gold necklaces), but today Beetelle wore jeans and a sweatshirt, her naturally curly hair pulled back in a scrunchy. This was her “work” outfit, donned only at home when she jumped in and helped the housekeeper with special chores, such as polishing the silver and washing the Tiffany crystal and moving the heavy oak furniture for a thorough vacuuming of the rugs. “A scrunchy, Mother?” Lola said with affection and annoyance — living in New York had made her mother’s flaws all too apparent — “You can’t go to the mall like that.”

  Beetelle concentrated on maneuvering the car through the line of holiday pickups. She’d been preparing for this scene with her daughter for days, rehearsing it in her head like the psychologists suggested in anticipation of a difficult conversation. “Things are a little different this year,” she said.

  “Really?” Lola said. She was deeply disappointed, having imagined getting started on her shopping spree right away. But then she was distracted by the satellite radio, tuned to seventies hits. “Oh, Mother,” she said. “Why do you listen to this sentimental crap?”

  Beetelle had adjusted to Lola’s dismissive remarks long ago, brushing them away with reminders that this was her daughter who loved her and could never mean to be deliberately hurtful; Lola was, after all, like all young people, occasionally unaware of the feelings of others. But this time the characteristic remark hit Beetelle like a blow to her solar plexus.

  “Mother, can we please change the station?” Lola said again.

  “No,” Beetelle said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I like it.”

  “But it’s so awful, Mother,” Lola whined. “It’s so ... out of touch.”

  Beetelle took her eyes off the road for a second to regard her daughter, sitting impatiently in the front seat, her eyes narrowed in annoyance.

>   An irrational anger overwhelmed her; all at once, she hated her daughter. “Lola,” she said. “Will you please shut up?”

  Lola’s mouth opened like that of a little fish. She turned to her mother, unable to fathom what she’d just heard. Beetelle’s face was hard, set in an expression Lola saw rarely and only in brief flashes, as when the head of the school board had dismissed Beetelle’s suggestions to serve only organic lettuce. But her ire was never turned on Lola herself, and Lola was shocked.

  “I mean it,” Beetelle said.

  “All I said was ...” Lola protested.

  Beetelle shook her head. “Not now, Lola,” she said.

  They were on the highway. Beetelle thought about the forty-minute drive in traffic and decided she couldn’t go on. Lola had to be told. Beetelle took the next exit. “Mother!” Lola screamed. “What is wrong with you?

  This isn’t our turn.”

  Beetelle pulled in to a gas station and parked the car. She reminded herself that she was a courageous person, a person of honor, who could face the most devastating of circumstances and come out a winner.

  “What’s going on?” Lola demanded. “It’s Daddy, isn’t it? He’s having an affair.”

  “No,” Beetelle said. She looked at her daughter, wondering what Lola’s reaction would be to the news. She would likely scream and cry.

  Beetelle had screamed and cried when she’d first heard as well. But she’d gotten used to it — the way, she’d been told by the hospice patients she occasionally visited, one got used to constant physical pain.

  “Lola,” Beetelle said gently. “We’re broke. We’ve lost all our money.

  There. I’ve said it, and now you know.”

  Lola sat silently for a moment, then erupted into hysterical laughter.

  “Oh, Mother,” she said. “Don’t be so dramatic. How can we be broke? I don’t even know what that means.”

  “It means we don’t have any money,” Beetelle said.

  “How can that be? Of course we have money. Did Daddy lose his job?” Lola asked, beginning to panic.

  “He quit,” Beetelle said.

  “When?” Lola asked in alarm.

  “Three months ago.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Lola said accusingly.

  “We didn’t want to upset you,” Beetelle said. “We didn’t want to distract you from your work.”

  Lola said nothing, allowing the irony of the situation to sink in.

  “Daddy can get another job,” she muttered.

  “He might,” Beetelle said. “But it won’t solve our problems. Not for a long time.”

  Lola was too frightened to ask her mother what that meant. Beetelle started up the car, and they rode the rest of the way in silence.

  Windsor Pines was an idea more than an actual town — a continua-tion of the strip malls and fast-food restaurants that spoked out from Atlanta like the legs of a spider. But in Windsor Pines, the shops were upscale, and the downtown strip sported Mercedes, Porsche, and Rolls-Royce dealerships. There was a Four Seasons hotel and a new town hall built of white brick and set back from the road and fronted by a wide green lawn with a bandshell. The “town” of Windsor Pines, incorporated in 1983, had fifty thousand residents and twelve golf courses, the most golf courses per capita in Georgia.

  The Fabrikant manse sat on the edge of one of these golf courses in a gated community. The house was an amalgamation of styles — mostly Tudor, because Beetelle loved all things “English countryside,” with a nod to the great plantation architecture in the form of tall white columns flanking the entrance. There was a three-car garage and, above it, an entertainment center that had a pool table, a giant flat-screen TV, a bar, and sectional leather couches. The large kitchen had marble countertops and opened into the great room; in addition, the house had formal living and dining rooms (hardly ever used), four bedrooms, and six bathrooms. A white gravel driveway, replenished and resurfaced each spring, made a sweeping turn to the columned entrance. As they came up the road to the house, Lola gasped. A FOR SALE sign was poked into the lawn on either side of the driveway.

  “You’re selling the house?” she asked, aghast.

  “The bank’s selling it.”

  “What does that mean?” Lola asked. It began to dawn on her that her mother was serious after all. Dread rose to her throat; she could barely speak.

  “They take all the money,” Beetelle said.

  “But why?” Lola wailed.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” Beetelle said. She popped open the trunk and wearily lifted out Lola’s suitcases. She began carrying them into the house, pausing on the landing, where she appeared dwarfed by the columns, by the house, and by the enormity of her situation.

  “Lola,” she asked. “Are you coming?”

  Sam Gooch never looked forward to Christmas. Everyone he knew went away, while he was stuck in the city with his parents. Mindy said it was the best time in New York, with everyone gone and just the tourists, who rarely ventured into their neighborhood. Sam would return to school after New Year’s to find a classroom full of kids chattering about their exotic vacations. “Where’d you go, Sam?” one of them would joke. Someone else would answer, “Sam took a tour of the Empire State Building.”

  One year, the Gooches had gone away to Jamaica. But Sam was only three then, and he barely remembered it, although Mindy sometimes brought it up with James, making a negative reference to an afternoon he spent with a Rastafarian.

  Walking back to One Fifth from Washington Square Park, where Sam had taken Skippy to the dog run (Skippy had attacked a Rottweiler, which gave Sam a perverse sort of pride), he wondered why they couldn’t go away this year. After all, his father was supposedly getting money from his book — but it hadn’t changed their Christmas plans. As usual, they would drive to Pennsylvania early on Christmas morning to visit his mother’s parents; after a traditional Christmas dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, they would drive to Long Island to see James’s father. James’s family was Jewish and didn’t celebrate Christmas, so they would have dinner at a Chinese restaurant.

  Skippy was attached to a retractable leash; when walked, he liked to be as far away from his owner as possible. He ran into One Fifth several feet ahead of Sam; by the time Sam got into the building, Skippy had tangled his leash around Roberto’s legs. “You’ve got to train that dog, man,”

  Roberto said.

  “He’s my mother’s dog,” Sam reminded him.

  “She thinks that dog is a child,” Roberto said. “By the way, Mrs. Rice was looking for you. Something’s wrong with her computer.”

  Annalisa Rice was on the phone when Sam knocked on her door. “I’m so sorry, Mom,” she was saying. “But Paul wants to go away with these people ...” She motioned for Sam to come in.

  Every time Sam stepped into the Rices’ apartment, he’d try to summon up a nonchalance at his surroundings, but he was always awed. The floor in the foyer was a sparkly white marble; the plaster walls were yellow cream and looked like frosting. The foyer was deliberately spare, though an astounding photograph hung on one wall: an image of a large dark hairy woman nursing an angelic blond baby boy. The woman’s expression was both maternal and challenging, as if she were daring the viewer to deny that this was her child. Sam was mesmerized by the woman’s enormous breasts, with areolas the size of tennis balls. Women were strange creatures, and out of respect for his mother and Annalisa, he pulled his eyes away. Beyond this foyer was another entry with a grand staircase, the likes of which one saw only in black-and-white movies. There were a few duplexes in the building, but they had narrow, sharply turning staircases, so anyone over the age of seventy-five always moved out. This staircase, Sam guessed, was at least six feet wide.

  You could have an entire party on the staircase.

  “Sam?” Annalisa asked. She had a sharp, intelligent face, like that of a fox, and she was a fox, too. When she’d first moved into the building, she’d worn jeans and T-shirts, like a
regular person, but now she was always dressed. Today, she was wearing a white blouse and a gray pencil skirt and velvet kitten-heeled shoes and a soft, thick cashmere cardigan that Sam, from his experience with private-school girls, surmised cost thousands of dollars. Usually, when he came up to help her with the website, she spent time talking to him, telling him about when she was a lawyer and had advocated for runaway girls, who were usually running away from abuse, and how they often ended up in jail. She’d traveled to every state to help these girls, she’d said, and sometimes it made her question human nature. There were people out there who were capable of terrible things, of abandoning their children or beating them to death. To Sam, the people she talked about must have lived in a different era, but Annalisa said it was happening every minute — somewhere in America, a girl was abused every nineteen seconds. And then sometimes she’d tell the story of meeting the president. She’d met him twice — once when she was invited to a reception at the White House, and another time when she’d spoken before a Senate committee. It sounded much more interesting to Sam than Annalisa’s life now. Just last week, she told him, she’d gone to a lunch for a new handbag. She found the concept funny and said she was surprised the handbag hadn’t been given its own chair and a glass of champagne.

  Annalisa always made jokes about it, but Sam suspected she wasn’t thrilled with this new life. “Oh, I am,” she said, when he asked her about it. “I’m happy to organize a luncheon to raise money to send computers to disadvantaged children in Africa. But all the women attend in their fur coats, and after the luncheon, they all leave in their chauffeured SUVs.”

  “New York’s always been that way,” Sam volunteered helpfully.

  “There’s no use fighting it. And there’s always some other lady who’d be happy to take your place.”

  Today, however, Annalisa was in a rush. “Thank God you’re here, Sam,” she said, starting up the stairs. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. We’re leaving tonight,” she said over her shoulder.