The Right Address

by Carrie Karasyov

  Cordelia Vance, with whom Wendy had been making small talk, continued to peruse the rainbow-tinted, buttery offerings.

  “These shahtooshes put pashminas to shame!” Wendy exclaimed, trying to make more conversation with the grande dame of Park Avenue and epitome of impeccable taste. Wendy carefully examined Cordelia’s perfectly assembled outfit: the Oscar de la Renta suit, the Birkin bag slung casually over her arm, and the jewels, always magnificent. She was flawless. Cordelia was married to Morgan Vance, of the Hobe Sound and Locust Valley Vances. How could Wendy not be drawn to such a bona fide fixture of the crème de la crème? But Cordelia had an elusive quality about her, and while her body was dripping in the world’s most glamorous labels and expensive jewelry, her head was often in the clouds.

  Wendy, on the other hand, was always rooted firmly in the social moment, observing every last accessory on every woman in the room, rifling through her mental Rolodex to recall where each one lived, what her husband did, which clubs her grandmother belonged to. Although her own wardrobe was impeccable, she was still using last year’s handbag, and the price of all of her jewelry combined wouldn’t be as much as the simple emerald and diamond ring Cordelia wore on her right pinky.

  “I am a little bit concerned about these being illegal,” Cordelia said to Wendy. “Imagine going to jail for a wrap!”

  Wendy laughed lightly. “It’s ridiculous that the U.S. marshals have pronounced these contraband!” she said, marveling at the sheer insanity of it all. “I mean, don’t they have bigger fish to fry, like, say, crack dealers? Plus, if federal agents could afford this level of softness, you know they’d be greasing palms at customs too!”

  Cordelia looked torn between the different colors she had selected. She felt them all once more to try to decide, as if trying to decide if the seafoam green might be even softer than the apricot.

  “I’m going to take the celadon and the cream,” she pronounced. “Oh, and maybe the rose as well . . .”

  Wendy, who wasn’t even sure she wanted, let alone needed, one, saw Cordelia snatching up four and knew she had to acquire one as well. She settled on pale azure. “Aren’t they fabulous? I mean, it’s never been this easy for me to part with three grand!” Wendy said. Cordelia smiled. “Not to be gauche,” Wendy added nervously.

  Looking out the wall of windows facing the treetops of Central Park, Cordelia drifted over to the cashier’s table with her loot.

  Joan Coddington burst in and made a beeline for Wendy before embracing her dramatically and kissing both cheeks. “What a nightmare!” she exclaimed. Joan hugged Wendy with genuine relief as if she were a buoy and she herself was lost, bobbing and breathless, in the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, they had seen each other as recently as yesterday. “Oh! I had a hell of a time getting here! Fifth was a disaster—the entire avenue is jammed because the doormen are all barricading the tree gardens for the Puerto Rican Day parade!” boomed Joan.

  She fanned her face rapidly with her hand and exhaled, trying to compose herself. Everything about Joan commanded attention: her platinum beehive-ish hairdo that a forties film star might have worn, her bright red lipstick, her gravelly smoker’s voice, and her Jackie O sunglasses. Right behind Joan was Melanie Korn, who had entered with her. Neither Joan nor Wendy acknowledged the dreadful parvenu.

  “I know—it is utter chaos, but we shouldn’t complain. I’d rather have a little bumper to bumper than beer cans and chicken bones in my mums. I mean, why pay sky-high co-op maintenance for landscape designers when these hooligans are going to muck it all up?”

  “Wendy, you are too much!” Joan said, laughing.

  Melanie got a flash of self-consciousness and took a deep breath. She couldn’t forget what she had overheard the other evening. To Joan and Wendy she was just a human piñata. But she refused to be cowed. Somehow, she’d win them over. She’d get them to accept her; she felt she owed it to Arthur. Maybe she wasn’t born as high class as Arty’s first wife, but she was determined to be viewed as an asset—not the embarrassment that this pair had decried.

  “It’s actually the Dominican Day parade,” Melanie piped in. The two women turned to look at her. “The Puerto Rican Day parade is in June.”

  “Why, Melanie, I didn’t know that you were Puerto Rican,” said Wendy.

  “Actually, I’m not!” said Melanie, turning bright red. She gulped and added, “But I have a housekeeper . . .”

  “Well, whatever the ethnicity of those people, it’s still an odious tradition. Why can’t they have a parade in their neck of the woods?” asked Joan. “March on the Bronx or something. I mean, why stomp down Fifth?”

  Melanie thought they probably deemed her just as much of an alien on their avenue. “Arty doesn’t like to be in the city during parades,” Melanie said, trying to side with them. “We’re generally away on weekends anyway.”

  Wendy and Joan, without speaking, exchanged half-hidden glances that seemed to say in facial code, We detest this bitch. They clearly could not abide her presence. Meanwhile, Melanie reddened even more, realizing too late that she might have seemed like a show-off dropping the weekend house.

  “Oh, yes,” Joan replied sarcastically, “I pity the poor souls who are still languishing in Manhattan on the weekends.”

  Joan flashed Wendy an eye roll, and Melanie sensed she was not wanted. Why? What did she do wrong? And why was she obsessing about it so much? On the one hand, these two gossips each had twelve years and twenty pounds on her and dressed like shoulder-padded librarians, so why was she so nervous about their opinions? Because they were quick-witted vipers and she bristled at the thought of anyone hating her. She finally shrugged and walked off in her ass-enhancing size-two skirt and Jimmy Choo heels and decided to browse the goods. Wendy and Joan watched her thin calves as she crossed the room, and sighed.

  “Tell me you didn’t come here with Melanie Korn,” said Wendy.

  “I wasn’t with her. She was in the elevator.”

  “She’s garbaggio,” said Wendy, shaking her head. “Well, on to far more important things. You must, must, must pop over here and claim a few of these shawls before they’re all devoured. I was nervous you’d miss the best of the lot!”

  Joan reached out to feel the shawls. “Oh my god,” she squealed. “These shahtooshes make my pashminas feel like sandpaper. Thank the lord for crooked customs officials.”

  Cordelia, who was leaving with her new purchases wrapped in red tissue, stopped by Joan and Wendy on her way out.

  “Should I be feeling guilty?” she asked them.

  “Of course not,” said Joan. “They’re already dead.”

  “I meant about spending so much.”

  “Don’t be crazy,” said Wendy. “How else is one to keep warm this winter?”

  “Morgan would absolutely insist,” declared Joan firmly.

  “You’re right,” said Cordelia, as if that sealed the deal. “And they are sheer divinity.”

  “I can’t wait to curl up in mine tonight,” said Wendy.

  Cordelia waved and climbed into the burl-inlaid elevator and descended to her awaiting chauffeured car. She hadn’t really been concerned about spending so much but did feel that it was somehow appropriate to feel a sense of something after dropping twelve thousand dollars on shawls. Just acknowledging it once made her feel comfortable enough not to think about the price and to stuff the bag of illicit goods in the back of her closet, where hundreds of unopened shopping bags lay forgotten.

  “It’s time for our favorite chopped salads with truffle vinaigrette,” Wendy reminded Joan.

  “I know,” she said, confirming the hour on her Cartier watch. “Who are we going to steal a ride with?”

  “Oh, it’s only four blocks, Joan.”

  “In Manolo Blahniks, you have to multiply by three, so it’s really twelve blocks.”

  Melanie, who was herself laden with shahtooshes in every color of the spectrum, couldn’t help but overhear. Maybe they would like her if she gave them a lift? �
�Girls, do you want a ride? I have my Bentley downstairs . . .”

  “That’s okay,” said Wendy.

  “We’ll take a taxi,” said Joan.

  “Okay,” Melanie said. These two were going to be tough to win over.

  Wendy and Joan gave Melanie a head start.

  “I’m not spending any more time with that terminally gauche woman than I have to,” whispered Wendy.

  Once they were sure Melanie had left the building, they took the elevator to the grand marble lobby and climbed into a taxi. After the epaulet-wearing white-gloved doorman closed the cab door, Joan and Wendy rolled down their windows as if their lives depended on it.

  “This taxi-driver stench is just unacceptable,” said Joan between lung-filling gasps for oxygen.

  “Ugh—Chanel Number Two.”

  “Do these people have curry-flavor deodorant?”

  “Joan, darling, I don’t think they have any deodorant.”

  “Clearly.”

  Sitting in Madison Avenue traffic moving at a snail’s pace, the two ladies reflected on their run-in with the tacky upstart.

  “Who does that Melanie Korn think she is?” asked Wendy.

  “It’s the second-wife syndrome. She thinks she’s entitled to just march in and name-drop the Bentley.”

  “What a climber,” said Wendy.

  “It makes me shudder,” Joan replied.

  “Get this,” said Wendy, setting the stage for a story. “Last week I was stranded on the corner of Fifty-seventh and Park, trying desperately to hail a cab. Guess who pulls up?”

  “Don’t tell me—”

  “Melanie Korn in her giant Bentley—not the gold one, the steel one. Anyway, I know it sounds irrational, but I needed a ride . . .”

  “You didn’t.”

  “The clouds were starting to look threatening and I had just had a blowout at Fekkai,” Wendy said defensively.

  “Oh, okay, then.”

  “So, I guiltily climb into her chariot. And she says, ‘Oh, I’m just doing a little shopping, it’s sooo great how AmEx Black has no limit. I just love it!’ ”

  “No, she didn’t—”

  “Wait. Then she leans over to her driver and goes, ‘Gunther, can you take this lady to 1002 Park Avenue, please?’ ”

  “She knew your address?”

  “Yes! Total stalkerazzi—I was shocked. She’s so obsessed with who’s who she must’ve memorized the Verizon phone book.”

  “Sad.”

  “It gets worse.”

  “How could it? That little climbing Panhandle slut.”

  “Then, as we’re driving up Park, she asks, ‘When you were married to Chip, you lived at 627, right?’ Can you believe that? That ferret totally investigated my life!”

  “How dare she?” Joan put her hand on her chest as if the news was giving her coronary palpitations. “And to bring up Chip—how odd!”

  “Then, as we’re pulling up to my awning, she has the audacity to say, ‘Chip is remarried, right?’ As if she knows my family!”

  “I can’t take this. I am ill.”

  “I want her dead,” said Wendy, filling with venom. “I just coldly thanked her for the ride and slammed the door.”

  At their destination, Joan paid the cab fare and the two entered the posh bistro. Joan was still reeling from the tale of the recent incident, horrified by the trauma her dear friend had gone through at the hands of a reinvented trailer trollop.

  To Joan and Wendy, Melanie was an interloper, a charlatan, a meretricious social climber with chronic verbal diarrhea. She had come on too strong too quickly. She wanted to be a social doyenne right away, and she threw her money around with such speed so that she wouldn’t have to wait for committee offers and trusteeships. And she touched a nerve with Joan and Wendy particularly, because their position in society had become tenuous. Wendy’s divorce had devastated her. She was completely unprepared when her husband walked out on her for another, younger, woman. The nanny, no less. And Melanie had everything Joan didn’t: a svelte figure (she would die for those hips!) and an indulgent husband who footed the bill. Joan had been bankrolling Phillip since the day they met, and although he had a porcelain pedigree, she wished he would sometimes get off his ass.

  “She enrages me!” said Joan, in the taxi home after La Goulue. Joan and Wendy had discussed many other topics at lunch—Fernanda Wingate’s face-lift; the renowned plastic surgeon Dr. Simon Brooks and his affair with the Palmolive heiress; the Mastersons’ divorce—but had always returned to Melanie, their shared bête noire.

  “I know, I know,” agreed Wendy.

  Joan paused in disgust and looked out the window. They were stopped at a red light outside 741 Park Avenue, the most coveted building in all of New York City, where, not coincidentally, Melanie and Arthur Korn now resided.

  “It’s vile. She was a lowly mall rat who was offering chicken or beef on a 747 and now she’s living the high life in 741 with the crème de la crème. The ascent of white trash,” said Joan. Whenever she was irate, her vitriolic tongue reached new heights.

  Wendy stared at the prewar, fifteen-story limestone building with the Irish green awning.

  “It’s the chicest building in New York,” said Joan. “Arthur Korn never would have gotten past the board if it weren’t for his first wife; it’s only because Diandra was wired that he got accepted. He and Melanie would be laughed out if they applied now.”

  “Laughed out. It really is the best. Everyone lives there.”

  “Morgan and Cordelia Vance.”

  “Olivia Weston, the Fanny’s Pharmacy heiress,” added Wendy.

  “Emma Cockpurse, that senile billionairess who wanders down to the lobby naked.”

  “Mademoiselle Oeuf, the canine who inherited the ten-million-dollar apartment from Mrs. Lloyd,” added Wendy hastily.

  “To think that old bag left her apartment to a dog!” cried Joan.

  “It is a thoroughbred poodle from those exorbitant lesbian breeders in Minnesota,” said Wendy.

  “Still.”

  “Well, it’s still not definite. The children are contesting the will.”

  They glanced again at the building. The doormen, in their crisp gray uniforms, were opening the door for a nanny with a stroller.

  “The Wingates live there,” said Joan, continuing the list.

  “The Powells.”

  “The Rothmans.”

  “The Aldriches.”

  Joan and Wendy knew the list of residents by heart, and in fact recited their names every time they passed the building. They ran through every denizen and always ended up with the Korns.

  “And Arthur Korn!” said Joan, with the lingering disbelief that this man and his wife could make it into such a bastion of exclusivity. Joan tried to be philosophical. “I mean, I pity him. He’s not so bad. He did manage to work his way out of Queens.”

  “What a schlepper.”

  “Well, he is a billionaire.”

  “True, true,” said Wendy, nodding.

  “But he runs the most depressing business!” exclaimed Joan.

  “He does.”

  “I mean, how genius was he to expand that casket business into funeral homes and now retirement homes?” asked Joan.

  “Apparently he owns one out of every three funeral homes in the country,” said Wendy, knowing full well that this fact was true.

  “He really cornered the market on death,” praised Joan.

  “People generally like him; he’s not really the Grim Reaper,” said Wendy, looking at Joan out of the corner of her eye, making sure she agreed.

  “His wife is the only bad egg in the building. It’s a travesty,” said Joan dramatically.

  “She’s a true bitch,” agreed Wendy.

  They continued the conversation uptown by calling Melanie Korn every pejorative adjective that they could think of until they reached their final destinations. Then they got on the phone and continued their tirade of insults until dinnertime.

 
chapter 5

  Under the domed, hand-carved ceiling in the sweeping lobby of 741 Park Avenue, Eddie and Tom, the building’s evening shift doormen, stood by, attentively waiting for a tenant’s car to pull up to the grand double doors adorned with filigreed brass and swirling latticework. The building was completed in 1904 by architects McKim, Meade & White and was registered by the New York Landmarks and Preservation Society in 1946. The limestone facade was built from the best quarry in the world, and every detail in the perfect lobby was approved by not only the hawkeyed board of trustees but also Sister Parish herself, whose firm was commissioned to renovate the public rooms in 1974.

  The stunning splendor of the entrance was not lost on Eddie and Tom; they knew they were not just opening doors for the elite. They were the eyes and ears of the lobby, piecing together gleaned information about the roster of residents whose names appeared not only on the building’s shareholders list but also in Fortune magazine.

  The sons and daughters of these families never had a request denied; everything their hearts desired was granted in a New York nanosecond, often as a substitute for genuine affection. Drew Vance was a preppy girl’s Lilly Pulitzer–laced dream; from his confident stride to his all-American lacrosse status to his sterling lineage, he was the catch of young Manhattan. The country club Muffys he brought in through the lobby were a revolving door of perfect blondes who would kill to be a Vance, so their manicured talons were always in deep, making Drew an accidental serial heartbreaker.

  And Eddie and Tom, the watchers of the hallowed halls, knew it all. They were the star witnesses in everyone’s personal trials: the comings and goings, the friends, the enemies, the purchases, the decorations, the lawsuits. They were the invisible presence in the elevator. Guests would leave a dinner party and gossip about their hosts (She really is in the dark about his extracurricular dalliances) or make commentary on their taste (Awful new Rauschenberg, way too late a piece to collect). The doormen were there to imbibe the dirt and were a repository of information, always cataloging the social snubs, the affairs, the triumphs.