Closing Costs

by Seth Margolis

  “No, I don’t want Hilary or anyone else involved. I need some sort of check that Ventnor can cash but that can’t be traced back to us.”

  “Christ, this is Mafia shit, like paying a bribe.”

  “Don’t forget, we have the MyJob contract coming up. It’s down to us and Vignette Software. A dead heat. They’re looking for a reason to go with one company over the other. I don’t want to give them Ventnor. How soon can you get me a check?”

  His cell phone chirped from its holster on his belt.

  “It’s me.”

  Why wasn’t there a law that only spouses were allowed to begin phone conversations with that line?

  “Hello, Lucinda.”

  “I just heard from the board. You’re in!”

  “Great.”

  “Maybe you didn’t hear me, I said the board accepted your application.”

  “And I said ‘great.’”

  “There’s great and there’s great. You’re not having second thoughts…”

  “Of course not. I’m in the middle of something.”

  “Oh, well…” She seemed flummoxed by the concept that something might be more important than being accepted by a co-op board. She probably interrupted quadruple bypass surgery to tell the doctor that his application had been accepted. “We’ll talk later,” she said. “You’ll want to get your financing ducks in a row ASAP. And start looking for a contractor. You’ll want to submit your plans to the board before you move in. Okay, G2G. Congrats.”

  “So,” he said to Henry after reholstering his phone, “where were we?”

  “I can get you a check this afternoon. I’ll have to work out who to make it payable to…You going to messenger it over?”

  “Make it out to cash. I’ll take it over myself.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend that. The less you have to do with that scumbag—”

  “I need to make it clear that this is the last time.”

  After Henry left, he called Rosemary.

  “I just heard from Lucinda. We’re in,” he said.

  “Great.” He heard his own lack of enthusiasm echoed in her voice. At least she was speaking to him, though admittedly she couldn’t just nod over the phone.

  “Maybe we should go out and celebrate tonight.”

  “I’ll never get a sitter on short notice. Oh, I hear them waking up now. Bye.”

  He hung up, thinking that he’d have to find a way to seduce her that night; he didn’t think he could endure the cold war another day. He could also tell her about Ventnor, which might be easier than trying to coax her into sex. He glanced at his computer screen. Positano was up a full point on heavy volume. Something was happening. A jump in a company’s stock price was like a rising fever, nothing alarming necessarily but an indication that something more serious might be going on. Positano was running a fever, no doubt about it. He clicked over to his digital calendar and saw a solid mass of yellow covering all the remaining hours of the day—meetings, back to back. He added the words “find contractor” to his to-do list and minimized the calendar to a small icon at the bottom of the screen. Then he picked up a pencil and tossed it at the tank, whipping the fish into an utterly gratifying frenzy.

  Eleven

  Peggy knelt before the dresser in Lily’s old room, grimly resolved to begin throwing things out in order to successfully downsize from seven spacious prewar rooms to four smallish modern ones. She opened the bottom drawer and decided to segregate the old clothes into two piles: one earmarked for Goodwill, the other for keeping. The first thing she pulled out was Lily’s sweatshirt from P.S. 87. The fabric felt age-brittled. Lily would probably want her to give away the sweatshirt, but who would want it? Might as well hang on to it. Next out of the drawer was a peasant blouse, once white, now a sickly ivory. The embroidery still looked good, little tulips and daffodils trailing across the shoulders and chest. Lily had practically lived in peasant blouses in the seventies, though they made her appear perilously top heavy.

  Peggy paused to contemplate her daughter’s breasts. Where had they gone? She’d been so zaftig, teenage boys had flocked to her like filings to a magnet, making dopey conversation as they stood in the foyer and gaped at her chest. Now she barely filled out a b-cup. Between West End Avenue and Park Avenue she’d lost a good twenty pounds, ten in each breast, apparently. Peggy sighed and held up the capacious blouse. Had she been overly critical of Lily’s figure, back when she had one?

  Enough. You could make yourself nuts second-guessing how you raised your child. She folded the blouse and placed it on top of the sweatshirt.

  Twenty minutes later the drawer was empty but the Goodwill pile contained only one item, a pair of thick wool socks. She eyed the tall pile of keepers with a sense of dread. What had she been thinking, selling the apartment? She began stuffing the clothes back in the drawer, thinking of that self-storage place on Amsterdam Avenue. But she couldn’t bear the thought of condemning Lily’s things to a commercial storage place, or her things, for that matter. That defeated the whole point of keeping things, didn’t it, not to mention the bugs and rodents and thieves she felt sure had the run of the place.

  She closed the drawer and stood up. She’d make lunch and then figure it all out.

  “Tuna fish okay with you, Monroe?” she said as she passed the guest room-slash-trading floor. The markets were open, so she didn’t expect an answer. In the kitchen she’d just opened the tuna when the phone rang.

  “It’s just me,” said Ruth Greenhill in her usual way.

  “How are you, Ruth?”

  “I’ve finally turned the corner.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said, hoping Ruth was recovering from a cold and not something dreadful like cancer, which would call for further exploration. It was getting harder and harder to keep up with her friends’ ailments, not to mention those of their husbands.

  “How are you holding up?”

  “I’m fine,” Peggy said, wondering if Ruth was referring to the impending move or to Barnett’s legal crisis.

  “The newspapers have finally dropped the story, which is a blessing.”

  And no doubt a disappointment to you, Peggy added silently. “Well, there isn’t anything to write about.”

  “It’s probably just a bookkeeping error. Last week at the cash machine I asked for sixty dollars and got just forty, two twenty-dollar bills. I made quite a stink, let me tell you, but the bank insists I got what I asked for.”

  “What did the receipt say?”

  “The receipt? The receipt said it gave me forty.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “But I asked for sixty.”

  “Then you should have asked again, for twenty.”

  “But it was the bank’s mistake, not mine.”

  “Maybe you pushed the wrong button.”

  “What button? You tap on the screen. I don’t trust these new models with the screens you touch.”

  Conversations with Ruth often drifted along unanticipated but deeply regretted paths.

  “At any rate,” Peggy said firmly, “I’m having an awful time sorting through everything for the move. I just can’t seem to throw anything out.”

  “I know what you mean. When Walter was alive and we—”

  “Yes, well, that was a long time ago, and you never had a place as big as ours to begin with.” With Ruth Greenhill it was always best to take firm control of the conversation. “And I’ll tell you what else is bothering me. My friend Natalie, who you don’t know, Ruth, told me that these young people, they move into an old place like ours and rip out all the moldings and tear down all the walls and replace the kitchen and the bathrooms—”

  “Your place is immaculate, mint condition.”

  “Triple mint, actually. Our broker told me. Sounds like an ice cream flavor, I thought, but it’s what buyers look for. But even triple mint’s not good enough. Everything has to be new.” She ran a finger along the front of a metal cabinet, as smooth as polished nails. �
��I just hate the idea of all of this ending up in a Dumpster on West End Avenue, after all the years I’ve taken care of it. People picking through my cabinets and whatnot like vultures.”

  “Like when you die,” Ruth said unhelpfully.

  “I took a peek at an apartment upstairs, in the same line as this one, while they were still working on it. Nothing was the same—the dining room was a bedroom, the guest room was a den, the kitchen was in the hallway, the hallway had these rounded walls…I tell you, I got lost in my own apartment.”

  “But it wasn’t your apartment.”

  “I understand that, Ruth,” she said.

  “It must cost a small fortune to redo these apartments.”

  “But what’s a small fortune these days? The people buying our place, I don’t know about her, but he’s the founder of a computer software company. He’s paying all cash. Monroe was so impressed he bought a hundred shares.”

  “What’s the name of this company?”

  “Positano Software.” Ruth repeated the name slowly, as if writing it down. “You’re not thinking of buying it?”

  “Listen, people say these Internet stocks are about to turn around, and if this person can afford to move your kitchen into your guest room and make your corners round, he must know something. Walter always said investing isn’t rocket surgery, you know.”

  “Whatever you say, Ruth. Just keep a little aside for food and shelter.”

  “Well, of course I will, I wouldn’t think of—”

  “Was there some reason you called?”

  “Just to see how you were holding up.”

  “Well, I’m fine. I’ll call you in a few days.”

  She hung up and made two tuna sandwiches on rye, which she placed on the kitchen table.

  “Come and get it, Monroe,” she called. He didn’t respond, which meant either the market was up a lot or crashing through the floor. She walked to the guest room and found him slumped over the keyboard.

  “For heaven’s sake, Monroe, it’s not even one o’clock.”

  She crossed the room and touched his shoulder.

  “Monroe?”

  She shook his shoulder. He didn’t move. Above him, stock prices marched obliviously across the screen. For a moment she took that as evidence that he was still alive.

  “Monroe, wake up!” She shook him harder, then put a hand to his cheek, which felt warm, thank God. Still, he was obviously unconscious. “I’m calling an ambulance,” she announced as she left the room.

  Back in the kitchen, she dialed the emergency number and was disconcerted when a Caribbean baritone answered with “What city, please?” Damn. But then again, in her entire life she’d never once dialed either 411 (which cost seventy-five cents, last she checked) or an ambulance, thank God.

  She hung up, took a deep breath, and dialed 911.

  Guy pressed the button marked Ventnor Place on the small, dilapidated console outside a run-down four-story building on East Twenty-ninth Street. A man’s voice through the rusted intercom asked who it was, and after he shouted his name, a loud buzzing unlocked the front door. He climbed two dimly lit flights of stairs and found that one of the two doors on the second-floor landing was partially open. He entered the apartment. A tiny vestibule led to a very narrow room straight ahead, once the bedroom, presumably, and a slightly wider main room to the right. In the former bedroom, atop two long desks constructed of unpainted plywood boards placed on filing cabinets, sat an array of computer equipment—monitors, keyboards, processors, a scanner, a printer—all connected by a dense linguini of cords.

  Guy saw Derek Ventnor in the other room and was immediately struck by how ordinary he looked. They’d met several times before, of course, in Positano’s earliest days, but since then Guy’s memory had recast him from the blandly unmemorable figure before him into a villain of Shakespearean stature, Iago and Richard III and the all-too-appropriate Shylock rolled into one snarling, invincible monster. Guy couldn’t help feeling a twinge of disappointment at Ventnor’s short stature, his pathetic comb-over, and his bulbous midsection, contained, just barely, by a stain-flecked white T-shirt. The only thing remarkable about Derek Ventnor was his forehead, a ledge of rippled flesh that cast his face in gloomy shadow.

  Ventnor motioned for Guy to join him in the larger room, where Guy refused his offer of a handshake. His intention was to hand over the check, deliver a short speech to the effect that this would be the final payment, and then be out of there. Although he should have anticipated what would be going on in the room, he was startled speechless by what he saw.

  At the far end of the room, beneath two windows whose shades had been drawn, a naked woman was listlessly administering a blow job to a naked man. He was lying on his back on a twin bed, eyes closed, hands clasped behind his head, as if napping in a hammock, while she knelt between his splayed legs and went about her task with a steady if unenergetic rhythm. Only the occasional groan from the man indicated that he was awake and deriving pleasure from the exercise—that, and an impressively durable erection. Whether the woman was deriving any satisfaction was hard to tell, as a glistening mass of long, platinum hair swirled around her face as she bobbed up and down, like seaweed undulating in a strong current.

  Capturing the action, if you could call it that, was a single video camera on a tripod positioned about six feet from the bed.

  “They’re our most popular performers,” Ventnor whispered, smiling parentally. “We pick up a dozen new subscribers every time we feature them.”

  Guy glanced at a monitor connected to the video camera. The two figures filled the entire screen. Jar lamps mounted to the ceiling cast a clinical light on the performers that was only partially softened on the screen.

  “And our regulars never miss them. Apart from their obvious physical charms, they’ve got a chemistry going that burns right through the fiber optics.”

  Remarkably, the woman managed to devour her partner’s entire shaft, eliciting a long, shuddering moan from its owner.

  “Tracy and Hepburn,” Guy said softly. He couldn’t see the woman’s face, but her body’s lush “charms” were quite evident. As she bent over her partner’s groin, as if in supplication, her swollen breasts grazed the tops of his thighs. And the man’s erection, re-revealed when she came up for air, had a similarly outsized charm. But the two had about as much chemistry as a surgeon and an anesthetized patient.

  “Our average subscriber logs in right at the start and stays with us for the full hour,” Ventnor continued in the resonant hush of a golf commentator. “All I can say is, thank God for Viagra.” He gave Guy a collegial nudge on the shoulder and checked his watch. “We’re just about winding up the hour now.”

  Guy glanced back at the male performer, still magnificently tumescent after a full hour. Ventnor should get Pfizer to sponsor his Webcast.

  “I brought the money you asked for,” Guy said as he removed the check from his pants pocket. “But this is the last payment, period.”

  Ventnor took the check and glanced at the monitor of a laptop sitting atop a small computer desk.

  “Our viewers are getting impatient for the finale,” he whispered. He tapped the screen. “The spelling in these messages…it’s a crime. Then again, it isn’t easy typing with one hand.” He winked at Guy, scribbled something on a piece of paper, and held it up to the performers, clearing his throat to get their attention.

  Start fucking now, read the admirably economical message.

  The actors turned briefly to read their instructions, then got to work. The woman detached herself from her partner, shimmied forward a few inches, raised herself up a bit from her knees, and then lowered herself easily onto her Viagra’d companion, whose position and expression had changed not at all in response to the new procedure.

  “Excellent, just fantastic.” Ventnor was showing far more interest in the proceedings than either of the two participants. Guy wondered if drugs or boredom or perhaps both were responsible for their apparent
lack of interest.

  “We pioneered audio in sex cams,” Ventnor whispered. “Most of our competition still don’t have it. We get a twenty percent premium over other sites, and it’s mostly the audio.”

  “Did you hear what I said?” Guy asked. “This is the last payment, and by the way, it’s a loan,” he added pointlessly, knowing he’d never see a dime of it back.

  “We’ve come a long way, you and me,” Ventnor said, glancing at the check before slipping it into his back pocket. “Your software, it’s a fucking miracle. Every time we get a new subscriber, automatically he’s logged into our GetItLive dot-com database with all his preferences recorded.”

  “Preferences,” Guy snorted.

  “Anal, dildos, feet—nothing kinky. Our customers are mostly vanilla, you come right down to it.”

  Anal, dildos…Guy spent his days meeting with senior banking executives to discuss how to track and monetize preferences for fixed or variable loans, or consulting with e-commerce honchos about how best to acknowledge and capitalize on preferences for fiction versus nonfiction, overnight versus regular delivery. But his first customer, the one whose patronage had been instrumental in getting Positano launched, was happily—and, almost alone among Positano’s customers, profitably—tracking men’s preferences for anal versus dildos.

  “With your software, we maintain a community. Men from all walks of life, with different interests—fucking, oral, interracial—they all come together at GetItLive dot-com.”

  “It’s a small world after all.”

  “I know what you mean. We got twelve thousand subscribers currently at nine ninety-five a month—you do the math.”

  Guy did the math as the woman clasped her hands behind her head, arched her back, and began to moan. Almost a hundred thousand a month times twelve months, that was a million-two…

  “One million two hundred thousand,” Ventnor whispered. “And I run it all myself. No secretarial help, no producer or director, just a part-time accountant to make sure I’m kosher with the IRS. You think it’s easy dealing with that much money?”