Closing Costs

by Seth Margolis

  A row of small, square windows in the main garage door had been covered from the inside by cardboard, but the corner of one piece had curled up a bit. She peeked through this opening and saw the driver pull a sheet off a computer setup and large printer.

  He’s printing money, she realized. He’s printing money!

  And suddenly the whole crazy world seemed so much simpler. Barnett had always made the financial system, and his exalted role within it, seem impossibly complicated, as if he were some sort of MBA’d alchemist turning rumors and calculations and educated hunches into gold. But money wasn’t complicated at all. Certainly not to the driver and, as of ten seconds ago, to her.

  You simply printed it!

  She went to the side of the garage and opened the door.

  “Oh my, good grief, why did you come back now?” he lilted.

  Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?

  She stepped into the garage and nearly swooned from the vinegary smell of ink.

  “MTS Taxi Company has a new partner,” she said, proffering her right hand. “I’m Lily Grantham.”

  “I hope you filed your plans with the City Housing Authority,” said the man from 4D.

  “And got board approval,” added 3D, a woman.

  Guy nodded yes to both of his future downstairs neighbors.

  “How about insurance?” asked the third member of the welcoming committee, an elderly man whose apartment, 5D, was directly below theirs.

  “We have insurance,” Guy said. “And I’m very sorry for the inconvenience.”

  “Inconvenience?” said 3D, a thickset woman in her fifties who cradled a tiny white dog tight against her breast. “My bathroom ceiling is on my bathroom floor. I never heard such a crash. We thought…we thought the building was coming down.” She gave the dog a consoling head pat.

  “Our insurance will take care of that,” Guy said, hoping it was true.

  “I don’t know why you didn’t leave the bathtub where it was in the first place,” said 3D. “Whoever heard of moving a bathtub?”

  This evoked frowns and shrugs from all of his neighbors, and a bottomless sigh from 4D.

  “Moving all those pipes around is asking for trouble,” said 5D.

  “We’ve never had a problem with the tub where it was meant to be,” said 3D.

  “We’re dividing the bathroom in two,” Guy said. “A full bath and a powder room.”

  “Powder room?” said 5D as all three glanced around, awestruck, as if Guy had announced the discovery of a fourth dimension, right there in 6D.

  “How in hell are you going to fit two bathrooms in?” asked 4D, a stocky man of about seventy whose face was hardened in a scowl of paranoid belligerence.

  “We’re incorporating the hall closet to add space,” Rosemary said. Guy rapped on the soon-to-be-eliminated wall that separated the closet from the bathroom.

  “Then…then where will you put your linens?” asked 3D, cosseting the little dog to her breast.

  “We’re opening up the big closet in the second bedroom to the hallway,” Guy said.

  “But then there won’t be a closet in that room,” 5D said. Her neighbors nodded approvingly at her grasp of D-line architecture.

  “We’re adding a full wall of closets,” Rosemary said.

  “But won’t that make the room kind of small?” asked 5D. “What’s the point of moving into a place and making it smaller?”

  “The overall footprint of the apartment remains the same,” Guy said.

  “Footprint?” said 5D with a suspicious glance at the floor.

  “And we’re opening this bathroom, the full bath, into the second bedroom.”

  “So even though it will be smaller, it’ll have its own bathroom,” Rosemary added.

  Guy couldn’t believe they were justifying their renovation to a bunch of people, none of whom had paid more than fifty thousand dollars for their apartments, who clearly regarded moving a towel rack as tampering with God’s unfathomable design.

  “The point is, we’re very sorry for the damage our crew has done,” he said. Turning to Rosemary, he added, “Speaking of which, where are they?”

  “They left as soon as this came to light.”

  “Probably fled the country,” 5D said.

  “Back to Ecuador or Bolivia,” added 3D.

  “Or Colombia,” whispered 4D. This elicited ominous nods from his neighbors.

  “I don’t know,” said 5D, “it all seems like a lot of effort for a powder room. And what happened to your kitchen? I didn’t see it when I walked in.”

  “It’s…” Guy decided not to go there. Now that the doorway between the kitchen and dining room was determined to be unmovable, he himself wasn’t sure exactly where in the apartment the kitchen would end up. If they canceled the kitchen renovation and instead ordered in three meals a day for the next thirty years, they’d easily come out ahead financially, not to mention psychically. “Let’s go find the super and see about cleaning up the mess downstairs.”

  “You’re the fellow from Positano Software,” said 5D as they waited for the elevator. “My son put me into Positano at fifty-seven,” he said, as if recalling his committal to a nursing home during the Eisenhower administration. “What the hell happened?”

  “It’s a tough market.”

  “First the stock market, and now my ceiling falls down. What’s next?”

  “I wish I knew,” Guy said, though he might have replied “Outsourcing programmers” or “A new chief operating officer.”

  Or the simpler, more descriptive, and invariably accurate “Nothing good.”

  Twenty

  Mohammed T. Satywatti, proprietor of MTS Taxi and part-time counterfeiter, dropped Lily Grantham off at her building (or rather, her parents’ building) opposite Lincoln Center.

  “Now, don’t forget,” she said before leaving the back of his cab, “I told my parents about getting the fake twenties from you, and I told them where I was going today, and I told them your name and medallion number, so if anything happens to me, they’ll know exactly who to blame.”

  “Good grief, I am not going to murder you, if that is what you are suggesting to me. But maybe if you don’t leave my cab soon, I will reconsider.”

  “And as soon as I get upstairs, I’m going to write everything down,” Lily continued from the backseat. “How you distribute the bills through other cabdrivers around the city. Then I’ll put the paper in a safety-deposit box but leave instructions with my parents to open it up in the event anything should happen to me.” It occurred to Lily that a counterfeiter might have no problem murdering not only her but her parents. “And I’ll leave instructions with friends, people whose names you don’t even know.”

  “Now I am seriously considering killing you. Please get out before I do something that both of us will regret.”

  He seemed disconcertingly mild-mannered for a criminal: small of stature, gentle of voice, with an attitude more weary than threatening. He had a wife and four young sons in Guyana and was saving money (well, printing it) to send for them.

  She finally left his cab but decided not to head home just yet. She walked across the street to a Banana Republic, grabbed the first thing see saw, a tan cashmere sweater, and brought it to the counter.

  “Eighty-nine dollars plus tax,” the cashier said.

  Fighting an urge to flee so intense it caused her legs to tremble, Lily handed over five freshly printed twenties, her very first handiwork. During the long drive in from Queens, Mohammed had warned her not to pass off fake twenties at small retailers like the dry cleaners. “They always check because when they take the money to the bank to deposit, they get stuck with it. But at big chain stores no one really cares because no one is accountable.” The advice fell on receptive ears: Lily felt vaguely better about foisting bogus twenties on a big company like Banana Republic than on a small-business owner. In any case, she imagined the counterfeit twenties circulating endlessly through the economy, acquiring l
egitimacy and value as they purchased groceries and clothing and packs of cigarettes and movie tickets, bouquets of flowers and bottles of wine and packages of condoms. Her shiny new twenties were tiny pebbles tossed into the great economic pond, sending out ripple after ripple of financial satisfaction at the nation’s cash registers.

  When the cashier handed her four dollars and seventy cents in change—real money, she noted—as well as a bag containing her new sweater swaddled in tissue paper, she felt a shiver of guilty pleasure and knew she couldn’t go home (to her parents’ home) just yet.

  As Lucinda Wells led her through the empty rooms of the former Grantham apartment on the ninth floor of 913 Park Avenue, Rosemary felt like a tourist in one of those English stately homes reluctantly opened to the paying hoi polloi. Wasn’t there something fundamentally wrong in gawking at the lapsed extravagance of the newly impecunious? Their contractor, Victor Ozeri, had suggested the expedition. He’d handled the Grantham renovation many years earlier, and when Rosemary had voiced her qualms about how their architect’s choice of kitchen countertops (gray honed granite) would go with their cabinets (butter cream–painted walnut), he’d recalled installing a similar configuration for the Granthams. She’d mentioned the idea of calling the Granthams to Guy, who immediately recognized Barnett Grantham as a former Positano shareholder who’d sold his stake at a sizable loss. Later, during a phone call with Lucinda about a mortgage issue, Rosemary had mentioned the Grantham kitchen.

  “It’s my exclusive!”

  “They’re selling?”

  “Not they, the government. Didn’t you read what happened? It was all over the papers.”

  “Current events stopped the day the twins were born.”

  Lucinda sighed her bottomless disappointment and immediately began recounting the Grantham saga in breathless, schadenfreudian detail, finally getting around to the real point of the entire narrative: Thanks to the lobbying of the husband of a second cousin, who worked for the Justice Department’s New York office, Lucinda Wells had been given an exclusive on the Grantham apartment.

  “Trust me, it’s not an easy sell,” she told Rosemary in the apartment’s foyer. “Scandal means bad karma, and the feng shui’s all fucked up. Still, at nine-point-five, someone’ll bite.”

  The foyer was the size of an old-fashioned bank lobby, and about as cozy, with a marble floor as shiny-white as freshly Zambonied ice. The walls were glazed a luminous burgundy. A gnarled wire dangled from the ceiling where a lighting fixture had been removed.

  “Architectural Digest ran ten pages on this place,” Lucinda said. “I’ve never had a client bag that much real estate in AD. The article said it took eight coats of paint to get the walls like this—you paint it on, then sand it off, then paint it on again, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.” She tapped the wall with a pink fingernail as incandescent as the burgundy glaze. “I don’t know, it feels très nineties to me. Everyone I show it to agrees. They bring their decorator along on the second walk-through, even before the husband, and the decorator always says the same thing—these burgundy walls have to go, the white marble floor, yuck, we’ll have to install new moldings, and what if we moved the doorway to the dining room just a foot to the left to let more light into the foyer? Suddenly it’s a gut renovation and for nine-point-five that’s a turn-off in any market. You want to see the whole place, or just the kitchen?”

  Before Rosemary could answer, Lucinda was heading for the living room. She had on a dark gray pantsuit in some rich, shiny new microfiber that looked like it could withstand a napalm attack. Her thick, glossy brown hair framed her face like a headdress. The heels of her stiletto-toed boots, which Rosemary thought she’d have trouble getting over the twins’ tiny feet, clattered irritably as she crossed the room.

  “All the public rooms face the Avenue,” she said, tapping a window with a fingernail. “The light’s not bad for Park Avenue, especially in the morning.”

  “Well, for nine-point-five, you can’t expect afternoon and morning sun.”

  “You’re catching on.”

  Rosemary followed her dutifully from room to room, wondering if it wouldn’t be wise to leave a trail of rice. She’d come to think of their new apartment on West End Avenue, scene of a near-riot by neighbors earlier that day, as palatial, and compared to the place they were living in now, it was, but it could easily fit into the “public rooms” of the Grantham’s former abode. In New York there was always something better than what you had, something just beyond reach; the moment you’d finally climbed to the top of the ladder, still panting from the effort, someone would haul up a new and taller ladder right next to you. New York was a city of parallel ladders getting taller and taller and taller.

  “The master bedroom,” Lucinda announced as she crossed the large room. A king-size bed had left four deep footprints in the cream wall-to-wall carpet. “They converted a bedroom into closets and a dressing area. Did you know he was having an affair?”

  Rosemary gasped.

  “It shocked me, too.”

  But the gasp was for Lily Grantham’s vast closet, an Escher-like configuration of mahogany shelves and drawers and hanging racks and shoe slots that could comfortably display the merchandise of a Banana Republic.

  “A client told me. Everyone knew except Lily herself—surprise, surprise. She wasn’t someone in their crowd, the girlfriend. Wall Street type, I wasn’t told the name.”

  “Did she leave the country with him?”

  “Well, no one’s missing! It looks like mahogany but it’s really the aromatic wood from some rain-forest tree that’s practically extinct now. They paid a fine for importing it, a few thousand dollars, I think, but that’s what people did back then.”

  “Back in the nineties.”

  “Today everyone’s sooo eco-conscious. Anyway, this will all have to come out, and Barnett Grantham’s closet, too. His shoe slots were made for a man’s size eight-and-a-half, not an inch to spare—one of my prospective buyers had her decorator measure them—and how many men have feet that small, or will admit to it?”

  In the kitchen Rosemary quickly reassured herself that honed gray granite countertops went beautifully with butter cream–painted walnut cabinets. She liked the pewter cabinet pulls and drawer handles, too.

  “Where is Lily Grantham now?” she asked Lucinda as they waited on the private landing for the elevator.

  “In a postwar closet near Lincoln Center with her parents. I sold them the place. In fact, the Gimmels, who you bought from? The Gimmels are Lily Grantham’s parents.”

  “No kidding?” Rosemary almost added, “What a coincidence,” but of course it was nothing of the sort. Lucinda, it seemed, had her expertly manicured hands in every move in the city. Rosemary pictured her angled Gepetto-like over the island of Manhattan, working the strings as people jumped from apartment to apartment, climbing one ladder, skidding down another, or leaping across the bottomless chasm of failed expectations to an even taller ladder to begin still another hopeful ascent to the top.

  “How’s the reno going?” Lucinda asked.

  “Slowly, very—”

  “You could move. Cut and run. I could get you two-point-eight like that. Throw in a few shekels and I’ll have you in a comparable place already done over. You’d have to move uptown a few blocks, but so what?”

  “Move?”

  “The market’s up thirty-five percent since you bought, haven’t you heard?”

  “No, I—”

  “Right, you’re in art. Most of my clients—most of the world!—they read the real-estate section first on Sunday, before the news. Before the business section! I mean, who needs scandals and deficits and stocks going nowhere when the place where you put your head down at night is gaining value every single day without your having to do a thing about it?”

  “But it’s just paper.”

  “Get out of here, it’s real estate. Real estate.”

  “It’s insane.”

  “And paying ten-point
-five for a swatch of canvas that some alcoholic threw paint at isn’t? You can’t sleep on a painting.”

  “Where do you live?” Rosemary asked as they got into the attended elevator. Funny that the subject of Lucinda’s own living arrangements had never come up before.

  “Me? East Seventies, rent-controlled junior four, doorman, views, don’t ask me what I pay, you’ll be sick.”

  Guy wrote a check for ten thousand dollars payable to Derek Ventnor, put it into a plain envelope, and addressed it to Ventnor Place. The check was drawn on a new account he’d opened up to pay for the purchase and renovation of apartment 6D at 218 West End Avenue, which had been funded by a two-million-dollar loan from Goldman Sachs, with one hundred thousand shares of Positano Software as collateral. Earlier that day Kristin Liu had called from Goldman with the delightful news that, because of Positano’s recent plunge (to just under seven bucks a share), he would have to put up an additional thirty thousand shares. He had six million shares in all, so this was only mildly alarming, the movement of paper from one account to another, although he couldn’t help but think that paying for something—an apartment, a renovation, a bribe to a pornographer—with a currency that was more or less constantly being devalued could not, in the long run, be a good thing. Just ask the Argentineans. He’d actually sunk so low as to resurrect the idea of a zero-cost collar with Ms. Liu, a concept that he’d scoffed at only months ago. “That might be difficult to do right in the current market environment, but I’ll bring it up with my managing director at our next staff meeting,” she’d said. Goldman-speak for No fucking way.

  Ventnor had margin issues of his own, he’d informed Guy, and if he went down, so would Positano. Guy knew he shouldn’t make another payment to Ventnor, but he didn’t have the energy, much less the time, to figure out what else to do. Positano was pitching a major new customer—the largest online magazine subscription company—and couldn’t afford any kind of negative publicity. Even after laying off a tenth of the workforce, Positano was burning through two million dollars a month, which meant that the IPO proceeds, which only last year had seemed like a bottomless cookie jar of funds, would be depleted in six months, after which he’d either have to sell out or…