Closing Costs

by Seth Margolis

  “One pound, mixed nuts, unsalted,” her savior said, depositing what looked like a half-dozen plastic bags from various local merchants on the counter. Larry walked to the nuts section and began scooping. The old woman followed him step for step from the other side of the counter and leaned so close to the case, her breathing fogged the glass.

  “Don’t give me all peanuts,” she croaked. “Last time I couldn’t find a single cashew or filbert.”

  “It’s all mixed together,” he said as he continued scooping.

  “When you pay for mixed nuts you want mixed nuts,” she said with a confirming nod, examining the scooping process so closely, she might have been watching a pharmacist mixing her heart pills. He placed the small bag on the scale.

  “One pound exactly. That’ll be six ninety-five.” He took the bag off the scale and added a few more nuts.

  “What was that?”

  “I gave you a few extra,” he said.

  “Why?” she demanded.

  “Because you’re such a pleasure to serve.” She looked at him doubtfully, then followed him as he headed back to the counter, still watching intently lest he remove anything from the bag now that it had been weighed. She dug into her purse, paid him the exact amount, gathered up her plastic bags, and left the store. Lily had managed to collect herself during the transaction, though she still couldn’t fathom why the single nonpareil, or the memory of so many single nonpareils, had unhinged her.

  “Customers like her are what make running this place such a joy,” he said. “She comes in the same time every week, orders the same thing every time, warns me not to shortchange her, then demands to know why I gave her extra nuts for free.”

  “Why do you give her extra, then?”

  “Like I said, I’m allergic to change.”

  “That’s kind of obvious,” Lily said, looking around.

  “Is that why you dropped me, because I wasn’t going to change?”

  Did he have to bring that up again?

  “Who can remember what was going through one’s head then? That was over twenty years ago.”

  He nodded, but his expression told her he wasn’t buying. She did remember, of course, and he was right about her motivation. Even at eighteen she had created a fully imagined life for herself, and a candy store owner allergic to change just didn’t figure in it.

  “I remember what was going through my head at the time,” he said. “I was destroyed. In my head I always imagined the rest of my life with you. When you stopped returning my calls, it was like you had died. Suddenly I had to rethink everything.”

  “We were just kids, we would never have worked out in the long run.” she said. “God, I can practically hear the violins.”

  “I read about your husband. This must be a difficult time for you.”

  “We’re coping,” she said, then sighed. “Barely.” She glanced at the door, hoping to be rescued by another customer. Why didn’t she just leave? “He’s innocent, of course, my husband, it’s just a question of some missing funds. Once they turn up…look, I really have to go,” Lily said. “Thanks for the nonpareil.”

  Larry ducked through the opening under the counter in one impressively agile motion.

  “I’ll walk with you. I’ve haven’t been out all day.”

  He flipped the sign hanging on the door from WE’RE OPEN! to BE RIGHT BACK! a typically, and infuriatingly, Victorian touch, she thought. They walked a few blocks together. Absurdly, she felt vulnerable strolling up Broadway with him. What if her mother saw them, or one of her mother’s legion of neighborhood spies? How would she explain walking along Broadway with her high-school sweetheart so soon after her husband had been arrested for embezzlement? What was she doing, walking along Broadway with her high-school sweetheart so soon after her husband had been arrested for embezzlement?

  “Have you had many serious relationships…since?” she asked.

  “One serious, several not so serious.”

  “Tell me about serious.”

  “Her name was Karen. She was a lawyer at a big firm on Wall Street. She specialized in bankruptcies, only she called them reorganizations. We were together for a few years. She wanted to get married, I didn’t. End of serious.”

  “Why not get married?”

  “Karen viewed marriage as the first step in remaking me in her own image. She dropped hints about my selling the store, giving up the apartment, going back to school for something like law or business. And the truth was, back then I thought about doing all those things, too. I just didn’t want to change for someone else. Besides, you don’t give up a seven-room, rent-controlled apartment—that’s asking way too much of anyone. Sell the business, suck it in and go to law school, fine. Give up an eight-hundred-dollar rent? That’s insanity.”

  They were now a block from her parents’ building, dangerous territory.

  “I need to get back,” she said, and before he could say anything else, she stepped into the street and hailed a cab. He held open the door for her but neither said anything as she got in.

  “East Side,” she told the driver as Larry closed the door.

  Eight

  “I’ll tell you what’s criminal. What’s criminal is what happened to your daughter. Humiliated like that in front of the whole world.”

  Lucinda Wells glowered at a crooked painting in the living room of the apartment she was showing to Peggy Gimmel. She straightened it, then crossed the room in two long strides and shoved a small pile of old magazines into a drawer.

  “I mean, arresting your son-in-law so publicly. Why?” She frowned at a sagging sofa pillow before plumping it with two swift jabs of her left fist.

  Three weeks had passed since the arrest. Barnett had a platoon of lawyers working on his case. He was banned from the office, so he was home all the time, which probably explained why Lily was gracing her parents with her presence lately—not that she needed to travel all the way across town to avoid someone in that apartment of hers, you could avoid the entire New York Philharmonic in there if you wanted to.

  “The prosecutor felt he needed to make a statement,” she said, parroting several of the articles on the incident, including a four-page abomination in New York magazine that included snide descriptions and unflattering photographs of Lily that made her out to be a Prada-obsessed Marie Antoinette. The article even had the gall to mention her “humble beginnings in a dreary West Side rental apartment,” which infuriated Peggy even more than the implication that her daughter deserved the guillotine. The prosecutor, named Jay DiGregorio (who Monroe, infuriatingly, kept calling Joe DiMaggio), was considering a run for mayor, and a public arrest of a Park Avenue ganof could only help his chances.

  “If Barnett Grantham isn’t safe from the government, who is?” Lucinda asked. “How do you like the view?”

  “Not bad,” Peggy said, and felt a twinge of pleasure at the way Lucinda’s lipsticked smile slackened at her lack of enthusiasm. In fact the view from the nineteenth floor was superb. The Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and RCA Building (or whatever they were calling it these days) presented themselves in the distance like old friends assembled for a party in her honor. So much had changed, it wouldn’t have surprised her one bit to find them hidden by taller, pushier buildings, or simply torn down to make way for something newer. But there they were, just as she remembered them. Fellow survivors.

  They were touring the fourth apartment of the day, or was it the fifth? They all began to blur together, these boxy apartments in cold postwar buildings with long corridors that smelled like shoe boxes. White walls without moldings, parquet floors, narrow kitchens without windows. She suspected Lucinda was losing patience with her, but she’d collect a fancy commission from selling the apartment on West End, which had “gone,” as Lucinda put it, in one day for more than two million dollars. Peggy had to place a steadying hand on the window ledge at the thought of such a sum.

  “It’s an estate,” Lucinda said as Peggy continued to admir
e the view.

  Of course it was—death was as pungent as mothballs. Peggy had paid so many shiva calls to the apartments of the recently deceased; death was like lingering perfume that soured a bit each day. The worn furniture, the dogeared books, the clothes hanging in closets and jammed into drawers, the dented pans and unopened cans and chipped glasses in the kitchen, the ticking clocks, the limp towels and the dripping faucets that left lurid blue stains in porcelain sinks—all of these called out for the one who was gone.

  “I like this one best,” Peggy said, glancing around the living room, trying to overlook the tired upholstery and heavy, faded drapes, the worn carpet, happy grandchildren aging awkwardly from one framed photograph to the next.

  “I thought you might,” Lucinda said, arching her tweezered eyebrows in a self-satisfied way that made Peggy want to change her mind or perhaps slap her.

  “It’s fourteen hundred square feet, which is humongous for postwar, BTW. Both bathrooms have windows, which you don’t see a lot, either. The kitchen isn’t bad—you could spruce it up if you wanted to, Nu-Face the cabinets, some granite, terra cotta for the floor would look nice, but you don’t have to.”

  “Oh, thank goodness.”

  Lucinda looked at her uncertainly. “A fresh coat of paint, hang a few pictures, not that you’ll actually be spending much time here.”

  “I have a few good years left.”

  “No, no, no, I didn’t mean—What I meant to say was, you’ll be at Lincoln Center every night. Listen, my mother’s just like you, she’s out every night. She’d die to live this close to Lincoln Center.”

  The thought of anyone bearing maternal responsibility for Lucinda Wells gave her pause.

  “How much did you say this costs?” she finally said. Like asking the price of a coat at Loehmann’s.

  “Nine seventy-five. We’ll offer nine forty-five and split the difference. Common charges and taxes together are twelve hundred and change, which is nothing. Did I mention this is a condo? No board approval, a blessing, let me tell you. I had a turn-down last week, nice young couple, money up the wazoo, they both work, traders on Wall Street—or was it M&A? Anyway, you wouldn’t believe the money they throw at people down there. I chose the wrong profession, trust me, you kill yourself in real estate and for what? But the board wanted applicants who can manage on one salary, you see, and you can understand their position, what if she decides to have a kid and then stays home to raise it? That leaves one income, and no matter how much he pulls down, one income is more vulnerable than two—I mean, what if he gets canned?”

  “Who?”

  “I was heartbroken, devastated, truly devastated, and you can imagine how I hated having to break the news to them. I can have you in here in a month.”

  It took Peggy a few moments to leap from Lucinda’s broken heart to her own impending move. A month? But there was so much to do. And where would everything go? She’d need a month just to decide what to take and what to…sell? Give away? Throw out? She looked at Lucinda, dressed in a severely tailored black pantsuit that fit her like tight armor, barely rippling when she moved, which was constantly. Her hair was pulled back in an angry fist of a bun. I can have you in here in a month. If only she could just go to bed one night at 218 West End Avenue, surrounded by a lifetime’s random accumulation, and wake up the next morning in this shiny new place, everything neatly stowed away, but less encumbered, freer, sunlight washing the perfectly smooth white walls, the way she’d always imagined heaven, one endless room, sunny and white, with no flaking paint or cracked moldings. Moving would be a kind of death and then a kind of rebirth, but without the pain and dementia and incontinence. God’s favorites die in their sleep—how many times had she heard those words at services lately? Why couldn’t God’s favorites move in their sleep, too?

  “Mrs. Gimmel?”

  She blinked and Lucinda Wells came back into focus, Elijah in Prada with keys to the promised land. She wondered, not for the first time, if Lucinda was Jewish. Usually she could spot an MOT from a mile away—Jewdar, her friend Belle called it. They all had it. Even today, when Members of the Tribe had names like Felicity and Clark and Tiffany and, God help them, Christie, she could usually tell. Lily might think she was fooling people with her silky accent and WASPy friends and that name, Grantham, like some town in Connecticut with a village green, and maybe the goyim didn’t notice, but a Jew could always spot a fellow traveler.

  Although she was having trouble with Lucinda Wells. Somehow she transcended religion, or perhaps her religion was real estate, the great interfaith equalizer. Not that it mattered, of course. But it would be nice to know.

  “I forget, where did you say you grew up?” Peggy asked.

  “I didn’t say. I grew up on Long Island.”

  “Ah,” Peggy said.

  “Oyster Bay, actually.”

  “Oh.” She’d have to ask Belle about Oyster Bay, but a town named for a shellfish didn’t sound promising. “I’d like to bring my husband here.”

  “Of course. I could show it to him tomorrow morning.”

  “I’ll check his schedule,” Peggy said with a touch of sarcasm that was lost on Lucinda Wells. Tomorrow morning? At seventy-three she was used to a slower pace. You called the doctor on Monday, maybe he could fit you in the following Thursday. Out of fresh oranges? A slow walk down to Fairway, an exploratory squeeze of twenty or so candidates before settling on the perfect half-dozen, a quick check in cheeses to see what they were sampling, a pitted olive from one of the big vats when no one was looking, a leisurely inspection of the deli counter, then the slow walk back home. Half a day for six nice Florida oranges, but who was complaining? Now it seemed she spent more time selecting a brisket than an apartment. Peggy glanced out the window. There they were—Empire State, Chrysler, RCA. Even the Citibank building with that ridiculous slanted top like some kind of appliance was comforting after all these years. Amazing what you could get used to.

  On the way out Peggy paused at a console table in the foyer. A large photograph showed an old, large-breasted woman seated on a sofa she recognized from the living room, flanked by a family—her daughter and son-in-law, three grandchildren. They all smiled stiffly in their dresses and suits—she could practically smell the holiday chicken soup or roasting brisket. She was momentarily deflated—what was the point of it all? To live for eternity in a color photograph, first on the console table of your forlorn home, gawked over by nosy apartment shoppers, then on an end table in your daughter’s never-used living room in a big house out in the suburbs, still later, if you were lucky, in the home of a sentimental grandchild, and then, finally, inevitably, in a drawer in a house in Oyster Bay, under old diplomas and class pictures, pawed over every decade or so by strangers carrying a few of your genes but with names like Madison and Alexandra and Cody, who would wonder, for the moment it took them to turn to the next picture or document, Who is that fat old woman on the sagging brocade sofa?

  And then it hit her. These stiffly smiling people would be the recipients of her $975,000! She studied their faces more closely, particularly the parents of the young children. Their eyes gleamed with avarice.

  “Let’s offer nine twenty-five,” she said, turning to Lucinda Wells. “Not a penny more.”

  Barnett had spent the past weeks sequestered in his study, gazing at his computer screen, only occasionally taking or making calls. Once or twice a day he’d take long walks with no apparent purpose. His phone seemed to ring less often each day, Lily thought, which felt ominous. Her own phone rang less often as well. She’d begged off several events they had planned to attend, to the ill-disguised relief of the hostesses. And new invitations had dried up altogether, except for the ones to charity events: These would continue to arrive as long as they could afford to buy a table (which they couldn’t, but no one knew that yet).

  Several times each day she entered the study to inquire, with nervous tact, into the status of their situation. “I’m working on it,” Barnett woul
d growl without looking up from the computer monitor. Wouldn’t he make faster progress by getting out and seeing people, asking questions? He shot her a pitying look. Ever heard of e-mail, Lily? How about these nifty new machines they call faxes?

  Other than these brief and increasingly hostile exchanges about their “situation,” as they’d begun to refer to Barnett’s impending trial and the family’s possible homelessness, their interactions had dwindled to mumbled greetings at the breakfast table and chaste good-night kisses in bed. While finding herself an overnight pariah in New York society was unexpectedly liberating, she was growing more and more anxious about the future. How long before the money ran out? Barnett seemed completely divorced from the new realities of their lives. She was the one who put their Southampton house on the market (they found a renter almost immediately). She was the one who arranged a line of credit with their bank. And it was she who arranged for refunds from the various charities to which they’d pledged what now seemed like fantastic sums.

  “We could hire a detective,” she suggested. “Time is against us, Barnett. I’m not sure you’re fully aware of the extent of our monthly—” She almost said “nut,” but the word felt ludicrously insufficient for what amounted to basically a flood, a torrent of outgoing funds. In her mind a stream of money cascaded from all twenty-two windows of their apartment, showering Park Avenue with dollar bills like confetti that quickly filled up the canyon between buildings. “Nanny alone costs a thousand dollars a week, which is insane, given the age of the children and the fact that—Will you please stop tapping on the keyboard, Barnett? This is serious.”

  “And so is this,” he said imperiously, but at least he’d stopped typing.

  She considered him a moment. The scandal had taken its toll. Though he showered every morning, his hair looked greasy and unkempt. He’d acquired dark, veiny crescents under his eyes, and scowling had etched seams that ran south from the corners of his mouth. He’d been eating less but his face looked, if anything, more jowly, his body almost doughy. There were men who could get away with grooming lapses, the handsome WASPs they knew in Southampton whose hair, when they neglected to brush it after a swim at the club, looked tousled rather than messy, men on whom a five o’clock shadow looked insouciant but never seedy. Barnett was a WASP whose appeal lay not in congenital handsomeness but in a kind of willed perfection. It was part of what had drawn them together, she’d always thought, their shared effort at self-creation.