Damn him. He’d signed those checks, dozens and dozens of them. And now he was doubtless trotting the globe, from Switzerland to Belize, visiting his accounts, while she slept on a pullout couch with a mattress manufactured by a sadist during the Civil War.
Later, with an envelope containing photocopies of the checks tucked under her left arm, she left the building and walked quickly along William Street toward the subway. The sidewalk was deserted; downtown Manhattan felt spooky at night, all gated stores and empty lobbies, as if abandoned not for the homeward commute but due to panic or plague. Two blocks from the subway station she thought she heard someone behind her, but when she turned there was no one.
A block later she heard footsteps moving closer. This time, when she turned around, there was someone—a tall, stocky man in a long dark coat with a wool cap pulled over his forehead. Nothing alarming about him except the way he seemed to look away from her, down and to his left, even as he seemed to be walking straight at her. She turned back and focused on the subway stop half a block ahead.
Suddenly he was right next to her, and then she felt him tugging at the envelope.
“Stop that!” she yelled. Still glancing down, making it all but impossible to identify him, he made another grab for the envelope. This time she cradled it to her chest, protecting it with both arms, and began running to the subway. She fully expected to feel a hand on her shoulders, if not a knife in her back. But she heard rapid footsteps heading south; she briefly turned and saw him running away. Just then a yellow cab appeared at the corner. She jumped into the street and flagged it down.
Inside, she caught her breath and tried to make sense of what had just happened. It seemed unlikely that a random pickpocket had targeted a manila envelope. So he had been following her, and wanted those check photocopies. Who was it?
At Fourteenth Street the taxi ran a red light and almost collided with a sanitation truck.
“Are you trying to get us killed?” Lily said as she strapped on her seat belt. Her second brush with death that night.
“You are kidding me? Please, sit back and enjoy the ride, okay? I will handle the driving.” The driver’s accent was formal Indian mixed with lilting Caribbean.
His weary, patronizing tone reminded her of Barnett whenever he’d deigned to respond to her inquires about the family finances. Sit back and enjoy the ride, okay?
The fare came to just over fifteen dollars. Though she had a twenty in her wallet, she gave him a hundred-dollar bill—a handout from Peggy—without apology and was surprised and disappointed when he made change without protest: four twenties and a five.
“I’d like a receipt with your medallion number,” she said. Not that she had any intention of reporting the driver to the Taxi and Limousine Commission. She just wanted to piss him off.
“You see, solid as a rock.”
Victor Ozeri rapped an enormous knuckle on a portion of the dining-room wall next to the kitchen door.
Rosemary heard the dull, architectural plan-destroying thump of flesh making contact with an unmovable object, in this case a support beam in her new apartment at 218 West End Avenue.
“No way we can move the door four inches. Not unless you want the building to come down on top of us.”
Ozeri grinned—inappropriately, she thought. Falling buildings were no longer a laughing matter, if they ever had been. He seemed to delight in delivering bad news—or was it rather that bad news was the only kind he dealt in? Did contractors ever call clients to tell them a job was progressing ahead of schedule and under budget? Were floor tiles ever easier to remove than anticipated, paint faster to dry than expected, appliances delivered early and with all necessary parts? Or were contractors like those saintly doctors you read about who dealt only with the terminally ill, delivering bad news as dispassionately as a weather forecast.
Ozeri was at least six-five and so barrel-chested and bandy-legged, he looked like he, and not the building, might topple over. His head was a geography of outsized features: huge, deep-set boulders for eyes beneath an unbroken thicket of eyebrow, a long, craggy arête of a nose jutting from a pale, undulating desert of hairless cheeks. Though he towered over most people, he positively dwarfed his workmen, most of them shortish South Americans who regarded him as if he were a large, frisky dog.
“But we were assured the door could be moved,” Rosemary said. The use of the passive voice disguised the fact that she couldn’t recall precisely who had done the assuring. Their architect? Ozeri? Or Guy himself, who had spent a good two hours one morning pounding, with proprietary zeal, on every wall in the apartment to determine which ones could be safely obliterated, until the downstairs neighbors had complained to the doorman?
Ozeri rapped the wall again. “You were mis-assured,” he said, his lips curling into a smug grin.
She retrieved the architect’s plans from the double stroller, which was parked just inside the front door, and in which the twins slept soundly. Back in the dining room, she unfurled the plans on the radiator.
“If we can’t move the door,” she said, “then we can’t put the Sub-Zero over here. And if we can’t put the Sub-Zero over here, it has to go there, which means the breakfast area—”
“Which means there is no breakfast area.”
For want of four inches, a breakfast area is lost—Rosemary leaned against the wall until she realized it was caked with plaster dust.
“Can’t you just…” She brushed off her sweater, but the plaster dust seemed to have bonded with the angora. “I don’t know, shave a few inches off the beam?”
He shook his head and rapped the offending section of the wall.
“Please stop doing that,” she said, rubbing her temples at the first dull throb of a headache. “What are we going to do?”
The opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth trilled from Ozeri’s waist. In one practiced motion he unholstered his cell phone and flipped it open. While he consoled what was clearly a deeply distressed client, she went into the kitchen and looked around. Without appliances and cabinets the room looked smaller than she remembered. How were they going to squeeze in a table and chairs? In one corner she saw a small patch of linoleum that had somehow eluded the workers’ efforts to strip the floor down to the original plywood under-floor. She counted five layers of linoleum and thought wistfully of her mother’s holiday au gratin potatoes. Along the ceiling, moldings had been ripped off, leaving angry scars. Capped-off pipes jutted pointlessly from the wall, wires hung limply, awaiting connections. Strange, that one had to completely destroy a room in order to improve it, the way a cult breaks down a target’s emotional stability, removing all positive memories and associations, in order to begin constructing the desired mental framework. Moving the door had been such a small thing next to the tectonic shifts their architect had proposed for the rest of the apartment. Entire walls had already been destroyed, and new ones would be constructed—of plaster, of course, not Sheetrock—with rounded corners, gently contoured recesses, and big swaths of opaque glass blocks here and there to channel sunlight to places in the apartment where nature and the building’s original layout had not heretofore allowed it to penetrate. (Guy had particularly liked this part of the plan, ingeniously illuminating the dark kitchen by what he probably viewed as redirecting the course of the solar system.) Floors would be re-parqueted to eliminate clues to the apartment’s earlier configuration, new moldings installed to seamlessly gird the new, more open spaces. With such grand transformations in the works, moving the kitchen door four inches to the left had been too small a detail to pay much attention to.
She speed-dialed Guy’s office on her cell phone and left the kitchen while it rang. But the open expanse of the apartment, where formerly there had been discrete and, she now felt, cozy rooms, left her feeling small and vulnerable, so she retreated back to the problematic but hearteningly four-walled kitchen and left Guy an urgent message.
“Look, we could push that wall out six inches,” Ozeri said as he
reholstered his phone. “Or we could just rip it down and install an island, a California kitchen like the one I put in 12D.”
There was something unsettling about the way Ozeri breezily proposed destroying walls that had been in place for seventy-five years. Her education and professional life had been dedicated to appreciating the past, maintaining it.
“I’m guessing you never met a wall you didn’t want to tear down,” she said.
“They begin to quiver when I enter a room.”
“Doesn’t anyone ever ask to you leave things alone?”
His face darkened. “Where would I be without these old rabbit warrens?”
“These rabbit warrens worked just fine for a lot of people.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Tearing down walls is the new status symbol.”
“It is?”
“It’s a sign of wealth. If you’re strapped for space but you can’t afford to move to a bigger place, what do you do? You make one bedroom into two, you put up a wall! Say you need a home office but can’t afford an apartment with a library. You put up a wall in the living room to make two small, cramped rooms out of one. But if you’ve really arrived? Ah, now you buy a place with more rooms than you need and start combining them. Two small bedrooms become one big master suite. A guest room becomes a closet. A walk-in closet becomes a central-air-conditioning hub. Now we’re talking luxury.”
“But the architects who designed these old buildings, they had a reason for what they did.”
“And the people who are buying them today have their reasons, too.”
“I wonder if the people who move in after us will put the walls up again. Restoring apartments to their original floor plans will be the new luxury.”
“Speaking as a contractor, that would be just fine with me.”
He smiled broadly but Rosemary was vaguely discomfited by the thought of walls going up and down in Manhattan apartments like hemlines.
“We have cabinets arriving on Wednesday,” Ozeri said. “I need to know where they’re supposed to go.”
Rosemary promised to let him know once she and Guy had consulted their architect.
Eighteen
“What’s this?” Peggy asked the morning after Lily’s raid on Grantham, Wiley & Zelma, waving a piece of paper.
“It’s a dry-cleaning receipt.”
“I can see that. From a place over on Lexington Avenue. What’s the matter with the cleaners here on the West Side?”
“It’s from before,” Lily said. Before the sky fell. “Check the date.”
“Well, you better go and get it, otherwise they’ll hit you with a storage charge. Celia Krasnow had to pay over twenty dollars last year in storage, even after she explained to that nice Chinese man at the Belnord Cleaners that she’d been in the hospital and then rehab for six weeks after her stroke.”
“I don’t really need—”
“Well, truth be told, her speech is a little slurred, and I don’t think that Chinese man speaks very good English, either. Maybe he didn’t understand that she would have picked up her cleaning if only she could have. And don’t get me started with the Spanish at Gristedes.”
Lily was still too rattled by the attempted mugging the night before to argue. She’d called Jay DiGregoiro at the Federal Prosecutor’s Office first thing that morning. He hadn’t been impressed by her story. File a complaint with the city, he’d told her. See how far you get.
She’d never been to the Savoy Cleaners on Lexington Avenue—Consuelo had handled that aspect of her former life. Behind the counter stood a surly-looking man of about fifty, with unruly black hair and narrow, wary eyes that widened with distaste when she handed him the ticket.
“This is three months old.” He had an accent—Eastern European?—that sharpened old into ault.
“We moved.”
He continued to study the receipt, shaking his head as if reading positive biopsy results.
“I hope I can find this one.”
And she hoped he couldn’t. He disappeared into a hanging garden of plastic-sheathed garments.
“Lily?”
“Hellohowareyou!” she said as she tried like mad to recall the name of the attractive, well-groomed woman standing before her.
“Veronica Selig,” the woman said. “Rachel’s mom?”
Rachel had been Sophie’s good friend at school. She might have met Veronica Selig at Parents’ Nights, or perhaps not. People she didn’t know recognized her all the time; she’d been a minor celebrity, after all.
“Of course. How is Rachel?”
“She’s great. And Sophie? Where is she at school this year?”
“Washington,” Lily said quickly, turning to see if the dry cleaner had returned with her dresses.
“D.C.? Is she boarding?”
“No, actually it’s Booker T. Washington, on the West Side.”
“Oh!”
Veronica Selig had never moved in Lily’s circle. Like many of the non-working wives of law partners and doctors and investment bankers, she would undoubtedly have known who Lily Grantham was, having seen photos of her in the Times and elsewhere. And she undoubtedly had followed the expulsion of Barnett Grantham from the Temple of Dendur and had perhaps seen in the Post (the New York Post) the photo of the Granthams’ household belongings waiting on the sidewalk in front of 913 Park Avenue to be loaded into a moving truck bound for a federal depot in Maryland.
“I’d heard that you moved,” Veronica Selig said lightly. “Rachel would love to hear from Sophie.”
“I’ll pass that on.” Lily had encouraged the children to keep in touch with their old schoolmates, but both seemed determined to make a clean break. She didn’t know which hurt more, the idea that they were embarrassed about their new circumstances, or that their old life had never really meant all that much to begin with.
“Here, I got them for you.”
Lily turned to the counter and nearly swooned at the site of her black Saint Laurent dress, with the bias-cut neckline and exquisite beadwork along the bodice, a relic from her former life. Behind it was a maroon Oscar de la Renta. It seemed unthinkable and also painfully real that less than a year ago she’d not only worn Oscar de la Renta, she’d lunched with him. She wanted to tell the man to keep the dresses but there was no turning back. She handed him two twenties, which he held up to the overhead light after removing his glasses.
“Is not good,” he said. Ees nod goot.
“What do you mean?”
“Is counterfeit.” He placed the unwanted twenties on the counter.
“You must be kidding.”
“The stripe says five dollars—these are twenties.”
“Really?”
“Is fake.”
“That bastard,” Lily whispered, thinking of last night’s cabdriver. Sit back and enjoy the ride. She had only six dollars left in her wallet, six genuine dollars in addition to the two other no-doubt-fake twenties.
“I’ll have to get more cash and come back,” she said, stuffing the fake twenties into her jacket pocket.
“Come back before tomorrow or I will have to start adding storage.” Storatch.
“Here, I’ll lend you the twenty,” offered Veronica Selig with, Lily thought, a trill of amused pity.
“Thank you so much, but I’ll just go get more cash and come back.”
“Don’t be silly, you can send me a check. We’re still at 680 Park.”
Lily felt her face flush as she backed away from the counter.
“No, really, I’ll just get more cash and be right back.”
She even tripped over the door saddle on her way out.
Instead of cash, the ATM on the corner of Seventy-third Street and Lexington Avenue disgorged a receipt imprinted Insufficient funds.
If the current chapter of her life had a title, that would be it: “Insufficient Funds.”
Peggy returned exhausted from her errands. She still hadn’t adjusted to the new neighborhood and was beginning to wonder if she ev
er would. It wasn’t exactly a practical location, she was discovering. Within a few blocks of her apartment were a huge Barnes & Noble bookstore, a Victoria’s Secret, a Virgin record store, something like six Gaps (Baby Gap, Gap Kids, just plain Gap Gap…any day now, they’d open an alter kaker Gap), and a string of Starbucks. Which was all well and good if you happened to be in desperate need of a book, negligee, or latté, but what if you just needed a couple of nice Florida oranges and a seeded rye? You had to get on a bus and head for Fairway. Imagine, getting on a bus for oranges and bread!
So even a quick trip to the deli had become a major undertaking, and as Peggy entered her apartment, she looked forward to lying down for a few minutes before making lunch. Then she saw Nanny What’s-her-name and Monroe in the living room, side by side on the sofa, staring numbly at the television like a miserable old couple.
“What are you doing?” she said, still holding the plastic Fairway bag.
Both heads turned with obvious reluctance from the screen.
“I’m folding the children’s laundry,” Nanny said.
Peggy hadn’t noticed the ridiculously small pile of clothes on the coffee table, one day’s worth of laundry. She felt contradicted and foolish.
“Monroe, you’re not even dressed.”
He glanced down at his pajamas, then back at her.
“Why, are we going somewhere?”
She thought she saw a smile crack Nanny’s pasty face.
“You shouldn’t allow him to sit around all day in his pajamas,” Peggy said.
“That’s not—”
“I know, that’s not your job. Your job is to do a load of laundry every single day, if you could call a handful of underwear a load, which accounts for fifteen minutes of your precious time.”
Closing Costs Page 18