Closing Costs

by Seth Margolis

“Put it—Mother, we’re broke, I’m sleeping in a pullout sofa in your living room, my husband is an international fugitive from justice. I need to find that money so I…” She sipped coffee.

  “Finish.”

  Lily finished silently. She needed to find that money to reclaim their old life. But was that possible? Was that even desirable? Her needs had telescoped radically in recent months: her own bedroom, decent schools for her children, enough money to put food on the table without turning to Peggy every time she went shopping.

  “Can’t you just turn Chapter 11 and start over with a clean slate?”

  “He didn’t steal that money, Mother. I wish you’d accept that.”

  “Of course he didn’t. He abandoned his wife and children in their hour of need, but God forbid he should be a thief.”

  She’d awakened convinced she was being crushed by a truck, had learned that her son was being threatened at school, and now her mother was urging her to declare bankruptcy. Lily craned her neck to see the clock over the kitchen stove. Not even 6:55 A.M.

  “Nanny can watch Daddy while I’m out,” Lily said.

  “Your father won’t like that.”

  “I’ll be here most of the time.”

  Nanny had refused to be fired. “I’ll be deported, I can’t go back, I simply can’t,” she’d whined, as if England were Afghanistan and she’d be forced to wear a burkah the rest of her days. “Keep me on part time at least, I’ll live with my sister up in Washington Heights. I’ll take half my old pay, just don’t sack me altogether.”

  “It’s hard to believe we have a nanny at our age,” Peggy said.

  “Think of her as a housekeeper with a British accent,” Lily said.

  “We don’t need a housekeeper. I can vacuum the entire apartment without changing outlets. If I thought I needed help, I’d have kept my girl when we moved.”

  Her “girl” was a sixty-eight-year-old Ecuadorian.

  “I just wish she wouldn’t wear that white uniform. Your father thinks she’s a nurse, which makes him anxious. And those white shoes. And that accent.”

  “She’s British.”

  Peggy harrumphed. “She’s lived here since VE Day. You’d think she’d drop it after all this time.”

  “It’s an accent, not a hairstyle.”

  “You’re funny. She looks down her nose at me every time I ask her to do something. Who does she think she is, Julia Andrews looking after the little princes?”

  “It’s Julie Andrews, but I think you mean Mary Poppins.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “No, you said—Forget it, I have to check on the children…” Before I kill myself or you.

  “She’s always underfoot, follows me around the apartment with those white shoes that squeak like mice on the parquet—not that there’s a whole lot of privacy here even when she’s not around. Some days I think I’ll jump out the window, if only I could figure out how to open the damn things.”

  Fourteen

  Guy wanted to be present when the wall came down. He’d arranged his entire week’s schedule around the event, which Victor Ozeri, the contractor, had assured him would take place promptly at nine o’clock on Tuesday.

  Of course, even at this very early stage of the renovation, he had learned that “promptly” was an astonishingly elastic concept for Victor Ozeri. Phase I of the renovation, which involved ripping out and carting away bathroom fixtures, kitchen cabinets, appliances, crown moldings, base moldings, floorboards, floor tiles, linoleum, ceiling fixtures, and radiator covers, had gotten off to a bad start when the Dumpsters hadn’t arrived on schedule. Unfortunately, by the time Ozeri had shown up at ten, his crew of small but improbably strong Peruvian men had already begun moving things down to the street. Rather than haul it back up, they’d left what was essentially the entire Gimmel kitchen on the sidewalk—cabinets, appliances, countertops, hunks of black and white linoleum—drawing a five-hundred-dollar fine from New York City’s Sanitation Department. That fine had sparked their first disagreement, with Ozeri claiming that Guy and Rosemary were contractually obligated to pay all ancillary expenses, Guy arguing, reasonably, that since Ozeri had forgotten to order the Dumpsters, the fine was his responsibility. “I can’t work this way,” Ozeri had said in a histrionic whine that had become all too familiar. “If this is how it’s going to be.”

  Guy had paid the fine rather than risk losing the most sought-after contractor in Manhattan, reminding himself that five hundred dollars was a pittance compared to the renovation’s total cost of $250,000. But after that small defeat he saw his influence with Ozeri melt away as new skirmishes were fought and lost. Ozeri was late for every appointment, at first by fifteen minutes, then by a half hour, and then, just two weeks into the project, by an hour or more. He never apologized, and Guy kept his mouth shut. He’d had to beg Ozeri to take the job, even after agreeing to a ten percent up-front “signing bonus.” A mere six weeks into the project and they were, somehow, nine weeks behind schedule.

  Guy had spent an uncharacteristically relaxing morning in their old apartment with Rosemary and the twins before heading over to 218 West End Avenue. Lucinda Wells had sold their apartment quickly and had negotiated for them to remain in it for two months, by which time the renovation of the new place was supposed to have been sufficiently advanced to allow them to move in. With no end in sight, he’d begun looking for temporary quarters.

  He arrived at the building at 8:45. Out front, two Dumpsters brimmed with the wreckage of apartment 6D. Upstairs, four workmen were engaged in ripping out the remaining vestiges of the Gimmels.

  “When do you think you’ll get to the living-room wall?” he asked the man in the kitchen, who was hacking away with a chisel at yet another layer of linoleum on the kitchen floor. A few more layers and Guy had no doubt they’d find fossils and arrowheads.

  “When Mr. Victor get here,” the man said.

  “He said start without him.” A look of horror came over the man. “He told me explicitly that he wouldn’t have to be here.”

  “Last job, we take down the wrong wall,” the man said. “I think the whole building will fall on top of my head.”

  “You took down a bearing wall?”

  The concept of bearing walls had become central to Guy’s life. As their architect had explained whenever Guy made a suggestion for reconfiguring the apartment, bearing walls held up a building and couldn’t be taken down or weakened in any way, no matter how inconveniently located they happened to be. Inevitably they were located between two spaces that Guy wanted to combine.

  “This time we wait for Mr. Victor.” The workman resumed chipping at the floor.

  Guy went to the living room and called Ozeri, cell phone to cell phone.

  “Your men won’t start without you.”

  “Bullshit, tell them I said they could start.”

  “Apparently they took down the wrong wall on the last job.”

  “They told you that?”

  “Funny, you never suggested we call those owners for a reference.”

  “Okay, listen, I’ll be right over.”

  Right over could be anywhere from ten minutes to a week.

  “I can’t stay long.”

  “You don’t have to be there.”

  “I want to.”

  “Whatever floats your boat. Listen, have the markets opened?”

  “It’s only nine o’clock.”

  “Right. How’s Positano going to do today? You think it’s a bargain at nine and change?”

  His beloved company had been marked down to the price of a movie ticket. Any lower and he’d be hearing from Goldman Sachs about selling shares to pay down the loan he’d taken for the apartment.

  “I can’t talk about the company’s stock price. And how would I know what it’s going to do?”

  “Insiders always know before the rest of us,” Ozeri said, a touch irritably. “Thank God we didn’t do that deal I suggested, huh?”

  The deal had in
volved granting him Positano stock options instead of his contractor’s fee. People seemed to think a company’s CEO could dole out shares of stock like Rockefeller handing dimes to children. If Positano hadn’t tanked, he wouldn’t have been surprised if his dry cleaner had asked for stock in lieu of cash. No one seemed to understand that ownership was a finite thing, that each newly issued share diminished the value of the originals. No wonder the market was going nowhere.

  He got off the line and corralled the three workmen in the living room.

  “This is the wall that’s coming down,” he said, giving it a firm rap with his right fist. The wall felt dauntingly solid.

  “We wait for Mr. Victor,” said the man from the kitchen.

  “Victor said start.”

  The three men exchanged glances that Guy took to mean, This tall gringo with too much money thinks everyone works for him.

  “We have other work now,” said the kitchen man.

  Guy flipped open his cell and pressed Redial.

  “Tell your men to start,” Guy said when Ozeri answered. He handed the phone to the kitchen man. A conversation ensued in Spanish.

  “Okay, we start,” the workman said, handing Guy the phone.

  The men left the room and returned moments later with two menacingly large axes and a sledgehammer. After some discussion in Spanish among them, they gathered at the center of the wall.

  “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” Guy said.

  “Qué?” asked one of the workmen.

  The kitchen man, apparently the foreman, gestured for Guy to step back. All three put on plastic goggles. The foreman, looking as if he were about to execute an innocent man, raised the sledgehammer above his shoulders.

  “Wait!” The men turned to Guy, the foreman with a gratified I-told-you-so expression. “I’d like to take the first swing.”

  The sledgehammer felt ridiculously heavy, and when he hoisted it overhead, it took all his strength to keep the tool from continuing its trajectory and crashing into his lower back. He put everything he had into the first swing, feeling not only the heft of the sledgehammer but the full symbolic weight of what he was doing. He was staking his claim to this space, felling the first tree, as it were, to build his cabin.

  The head of the sledgehammer all but bounced off the wall, as if repelled by it. Guy staggered back. When he regained his footing he saw, with dismay, that his colossal effort had resulted in an unimpressive dent in the wall—the sort of damage a toddler might inflict with an errant throw of a toy fire engine.

  “Let’s try that again,” he said with a collegial smile for the workmen. This time his effort sent several deep cracks zigzagging along the wall, and a gratifyingly large chunk of plaster fell to the floor.

  All three workmen began to clap. One of them patted him on the back. He heard what sounded like congratulatory expressions in Spanish. But as he handed the sledgehammer back to the foreman, he suspected they were mocking him, or at least patronizing him, and when the foreman, a good head shorter and at least fifty pounds lighter than Guy, practically broke through to the next room with his first whack, his suspicion was more or less confirmed.

  His cell phone chirped Für Elise between the third and fourth blows.

  “Guy here.”

  “It’s Henry.”

  “Can I call you back in a—”

  “I have news.”

  Inevitably bad. A narrow shaft of light glinted through from the next room, but the transcendent moment was lost.

  “What is it?”

  “I just hung up with an inspector at the SEC. There’s an investigation—”

  “What?”

  “Just before the MyJob announcement there was a spike in price on unusually heavy trading volume. They want to know why.”

  “Nice to know the government has nothing better to do than keep an eye on Positano Software.”

  “This stuff is easy to track. A computer spits out a variance report at the end of every trading day. Any security that doesn’t behave is called to the attention of a—”

  “I understand. We looked into it ourselves. No one at Positano was involved.”

  It was all so ludicrous, given that the stock’s price, which had spiked in the trading days leading up to the announcement of the MyJob contract, had wilted within a few weeks, and then given back even more. There had been no corresponding spike in volume as the stock slid in value, so whoever had tried to take advantage of inside information—assuming such a person existed—had lost his or her shirt along with everyone else who owned Positano. Vice was its own punishment.

  “The SEC wants to know everyone involved in pitching the MyJob account.”

  “Half those people don’t even work for us anymore.”

  The MyJob contract had been a hollow victory. The company had decided to use Positano’s solution at the very moment its business was peaking. They’d cut back their commitment dramatically just weeks after the contact was announced. Positano had laid off one-fifth of its workforce.

  The workmen had managed to squeeze a hacksaw through the small opening in the wall.

  “Doesn’t matter to the Feds. We’ll have to talk to everyone who was involved, find out who may have told someone who told someone. There were four full trading days between when MyJob told us verbally we had the contract and when we announced it publicly. That’s when the stock spiked, and that’s the period the SEC is looking into.”

  The men had cut out a near-perfect square of plaster. One of them pulled it from the wall and dropped it into a waiting wheelbarrow. As Henry discussed strategy for dealing with the investigation, Guy imagined laboring alongside the Peruvian workmen, prying blocks of plaster from the wall, transporting them down to the street, repeating the process until the wall was gone. Nothing at Positano had been as satisfying lately as personally removing the wall, piece by piece, would be. He’d step back, physically spent but mentally charged, and survey his creation: space. Raw, problem-free, non-SEC-regulated space. An invigorating void that asked nothing of him. Every decision in recent weeks involved cutting something: ad spending, R&D budgets, head count. How much can we cut without inducing coma? was the prevailing theme. He lived in triage hell. Even his sex life had withered in lockstep with Positano’s market cap.

  The foreman was having difficulty prying a large block of plaster from the wall. Guy made excuses to Henry and hung up. He grabbed one side of the block and pulled along with the foreman. When the block was almost free the foreman said, “I got it.”

  “No, I’ll do it.” Guy positioned himself at the center of the block, flexed his legs like a mighty Russian weightlifter, gripped the bottom edge, and lifted. Perhaps he’d take the day off and help out at the apartment, let Henry—

  A spasm of hot pain sizzled from deep inside his left butt cheek down through his left leg and almost to his ankle. Instinctively he released the plaster, which fell to the floor, barely missing his feet, and smashed into several smaller chunks.

  He felt as if someone had shoved a hot poker into his ass and twisted it all the way down through his leg.

  “Chew okay?” the foreman asked.

  Guy had heard that burning pain in the left arm meant heart attack. What about the left leg? He managed to nod while preparing for imminent death. Was there time to call Rosemary and apologize for his recent inattention? Perhaps the twins could hear his voice one last time. A call to Henry Delano, firing him.

  “Conjon, the floor,” the foreman said, pointing to a small crater in the parquet. “Chew tell Mr. Victor this is not us who fuck up your floor.”

  Taking the tiniest bit of comfort in the fact that he wasn’t dead, Guy promised to do just that, then limped slowly to the front door, his left leg completely stiff and burning painfully from the inside. He heard a chorus of Spanish whispers behind him.

  Manny Zelma, one of Barnett’s partners, greeted Lily with forced warmth in the small but tasteful reception area of Grantham, Wiley & Zelma on the sixteenth floor
of 11 William Street.

  “Lily, what a surprise,” he said.

  “You haven’t returned any of my calls,” she said, ignoring his outstretched hand.

  Zelma’s smile soured. He was about Barnett’s age, mid-forties, but a foot shorter. His head was precariously large for so small a frame, but his features were bunched tightly in one small area about halfway down, leaving large, uninterrupted planes of smooth, pink skin. Barnett had called him The Mole, a reference to the bunched features as well as the smooth, pink skin, which appeared never to have seen sunlight. And perhaps it hadn’t. Manny was the brains of the firm, the partner who had developed the financial models the rest of them used to buy and sell stocks. While Barnett had entertained clients at restaurants and golf courses, Manny tapped away at his computer in his corner office, pausing only to chirp instructions to a crew of similarly pale, nervous grinds. While Lily sipped white wine at gala benefits in hotel ballrooms, always remembering to smile for the ever-present New York Times photographer, right foot angled outward, in front of the left, Manny’s wife, Cynthia, cooked dinner for her four sons in Short Hills, New Jersey, keeping a plate warm for her husband, who rarely arrived in time to dine with them. Lily saw Cynthia and Manny once a year, at the firm’s Christmas party, where they regarded her, she felt, as a benign alien from another planet—precisely the way she had always regarded them.

  “I wasn’t aware that you had—”

  “Cut the bullshit, Manny,” she said, surprising both of them. “I left three voice messages.”

  He hiked up his khaki pants, purchased, perhaps, at Gap Kids, and cleared his throat. Manny was so skinny his body seemed not quite up to the task of holding aloft his outsized head.

  “My hands are tied, Lily. I’m not free to discuss this…situation with you.”

  “Can we speak somewhere private?” she asked, nodding at the receptionist, who glanced away.

  “I’m afraid there’s someone in my office right now,” Manny said. Behind him, the firm’s glass-walled boardroom sat patently empty.

  “I need to clear Barnett of these charges, since he obviously isn’t doing anything to help himself.”