Closing Costs

by Seth Margolis

  She’d become a counterfeiter first and then a thief, she thought with some contentment as the train hurtled northward. She glanced around the half-empty subway car and wondered what the other passengers would make of her, if they bothered to notice her at all. She’d put on ten pounds since moving out of 913 Park Avenue, as if her body sensed that it would need a thicker layer of protection from the cold wind of impoverishment. Well, relative impoverishment. Her fellow A-trainers might note her shoulder-length brown hair, which she now got cut at a Jean Louis David outlet on Broadway, where the stylists, nearly all of them newly arrived Russians (was that the dream of former Communists, to move to America and cut hair?), handed her a glossy catalog of coifs and asked her to “choose, please, how you want.” Today she wore a felony-appropriate black T-shirt and black jeans and a pair of flats she’d had made for her in London, relics from Park Avenue that had set her back something like eight hundred dollars a few years ago and had held up well despite near-daily use since moving to the West Side, which at least proved that sometimes it really was worth paying more.

  She walked quickly from the subway stop to Nanny’s building and began pressing buttons on the intercom panel until someone buzzed open the door without asking her to identify herself. Before entering, she pressed the button for Apartment 4A, identified on the panel as belonging to a C. Griffen, and was relieved not to receive a response. She climbed to the fourth floor of the nondescript but well-maintained building, where she noted with relief that Nanny’s door was secured by a basic Medeco and knob lock, with no safety strip to deal with. Like a golfer selecting her club, she carefully considered the entire pouch of picks before opting for a midsize number and got to work. After only a few moments of reaming, the Medeco cylinder gave way and it was all she could do to keep from blowing on the extracted pick like a victorious duelist. The knob lock succumbed even faster.

  The apartment was dark, and her first impression was of the sickly sweet smell of potpourri. She flicked on a light switch in the living room to reveal wicker chairs with chintz cushions, framed botanical prints, floral chain-stitch carpet. The room could have illustrated a “Cozy Country Living on a Budget” article in Good Housekeeping, she thought—uncharitably, really, given that Nanny’s budget had been set by her. Lily tried to picture her in the room—on the sofa, standing before the Bombay Company bar table pouring drinks from one of the several bottles of premium-brand spirits, lowering the moiré silk Austrian shade, replenishing the ubiquitous bowls of potpourri—and failed. It was like discovering that Nanny had a heart-shaped ass and sexy legs. It didn’t fit, somehow. And there was, of course, no sign of a second woman, the “sister” Nanny had claimed to be living with.

  Business called. Lily doubted that Nanny would stow evidence of embezzlement in the bucolic living room or tiny kitchen, so she headed for the bedroom, which was even more oppressively potpourried than the rest of the apartment. A canopy bed dominated the small room, which also held a pine dresser, a makeup-laden vanity, two night tables, and a desk. She started with the desk, and in the third drawer she opened she found what she wanted.

  To roasting potatoes, printing money, and breaking and entering she could now safely add criminal investigation, she thought as she raised the small stack of documents to her lips and kissed them. Statements from banks in the Cayman Islands, Belize, and Switzerland, arranged chronologically, showing three balances that she’d bet every phony buck she had amounted to three million dollars, plus interest. There was no name on the account, only a long series of numbers, and they’d been sent to a post office box in Manhattan.

  She secured the statements in her purse and left. She’d take a cab back to the apartment and confront Nanny directly, calling Jay DiGregorio at the Federal Prosecutor’s Office on the way to arrange for him to meet her at the apartment. Unfortunately, taxis weren’t as plentiful in Washington Heights as they were downtown. She spent several minutes waiting for one to appear and had just resigned herself to taking the A train when she felt a tap on her shoulder.

  “Mrs. Grantham?”

  Her insides went into free-fall. The man she’d seen Nanny suck face with the other day—had he caught her leave the building? She turned and saw that it wasn’t Nanny’s lover.

  “Mrs. Grantham. I’m Howard Breslin from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. And this is my colleague, Rick Conklin.”

  Alcohol. Tobacco. Firearms. Three things she never went near, save the occasional glass of Chardonnay.

  “What do you—”

  “You’re under arrest, Mrs. Grantham.”

  “Under—What for?” Suddenly the pick set in her purse felt impossibly heavy. What was the punishment for breaking and entering? Not that she’d actually broken anything. And what did any of that have to do with liquor, cigarettes, and guns?

  “Knowingly passing counterfeit currency,” said Howard Breslin. “If you’ll come with us, I’ll read you your rights in the car on the way downtown.”

  Arrested for passing counterfeit currency with a pick set in her pocket, having only moments earlier uncovered a diabolical plot by a trusted household employee to defraud her husband and have him take the blame—life didn’t get more ironic that that. Or did it. A yellow cab, its “For Hire” sign turned on, drove slowly past.

  Thirty-two

  “One pair of khaki pants and one pair of white socks, seventy-four dollars at the Gap, Sixty-eighth Street. Six coffee mugs at Crate & Barrel, Sixty-ninth Street, fifty-two dollars. One haircut and blow-dry, Jean Louis David”—Gene Lewis Dayvid—“on Broadway and Seventy-sixth Street, twenty-five dollars…”

  As Howard Breslin enumerated her recent purchases with allegedly counterfeit twenties, it occurred to Lily that the list was a perfect symbol for what had become of her life. Clothes from the Gap, household accessories from Crate & Barrel, hair styled by refugees from the former Iron Curtain. True, she’d have had to have printed hundred-dollar bills by the truckload to finance her old life, but it seemed a bit pathetic to risk—to risk what, ten years in prison? Twenty?—for shopping sprees at what amounted to a suburban mall of chain stores. Wouldn’t she, perhaps, have felt the teeniest bit better about going to jail for “one cashmere sweater from Barneys, twelve hundred dollars”?

  Well, perhaps not.

  “I have no idea where the cash came from,” she said with all the confidence she could muster, interrupting the shopping list. “I didn’t check its authenticity. Who does?”

  “We find that highly improbable, Mrs. Grantham.” Like the men who had arrested Barnett a lifetime ago, Breslin was lean and pale, as if interrogating suspected counterfeiters left little time for either food or sunlight. He looked at her from across a beat-up wooden table in a small, windowless federal building downtown, not far from the site where Barnett had been arraigned, his expression a squirm-inducing blend of pity and scorn.

  “You find it improbable?” she said. “How about me? Think about what it must feel like to learn that your every move…”

  She thought of her nightly shuttle between Larry’s apartment and her parents’. She’d managed to keep that aspect of her affair with Larry from her parents and children but not, she feared, from the federal government.

  “Tell us about this man, Mrs. Grantham.” Breslin slid a photo across the table. Mohammed stood in front of a height chart. He looked terrified and very sad and, at five-six, much shorter than she’d realized.

  “How can I tell you about him when I don’t—”

  “Cut the crap,” said the other man, Rick Conklin. He was as thin as his colleague and almost as pale, wearing an identically formless dark suit and plain tie. He slid another photo across the table, this one a picture of her leaving Mohammed’s garage-cum-printing-plant. She looked gray and furtive and defeated, even with a handbag stuffed with several thousand dollars of self-created currency.

  The game was up. She thought of all the people who would have to learn about her recent history: parents, children, Lar
ry, all her former “friends.” And, despite everything, she felt her lips slowly pulling back to a smile. If only she could be there when they found out that Lily Gimmel Grantham wasn’t exactly what they’d been led to expect. She’d defied expectations once again.

  “I’d like to call my lawyer,” she said, though she doubted Morton Samuels would take her call, and couldn’t imagine who else she’d want. It sounded like the right thing to say.

  “That’s fine with us,” Breslin said. “You can call an army of lawyers. But you’re in very deep trouble, Mrs. Grantham. First the business with your husband—”

  “Different department,” Conklin chimed in, as if it mattered. “But it doesn’t look good, a second offense.”

  “I had nothing to do with that. In fact, I just learned—”

  A plan took shape, not gradually but in a single moment, revealing itself to her not like a movie over time but like a Torah scroll unfurling in one smooth movement—from what memory pit had she excavated that image? She would save herself, and Mohammed.

  They left her alone to call a lawyer. She removed her address book from her purse and found the number she wanted.

  “Federal Prosecutor’s Office,” said the woman who answered.

  “I’d like to speak to Jay DiGregorio,” she said. “Immediately.”

  Guy entered his office to find the tank empty.

  “Where are the fish?” he asked Dinitia, his assistant, out in the hallway.

  “Oh, Guy, it was awful,” she said, and indeed she looked on the verge of tears. Given her distress, he couldn’t help imagining a terrible fate for his beloved fish, perhaps removal, one by one, from the tank, then a heartless thrust into the gaping maw of Sumner Freedman’s open mouth. “I tried calling…”

  Rosemary had insisted on a family outing to a park in Westchester County, without cell phones, during which the twins, deciding for their precocious selves that they were ready for solid food, had spent most of the day ripping fistfuls of dead grass from the near-frozen ground and stuffing them into their tiny mouths. The company, on the verge of being sold out from under him, had run without him for a day. But who could have anticipated ichthyic genocide?

  “The fish are okay, Guy,” Dinitia said. “That’s the important thing.”

  Nod, he told himself. Just nod. The company was slipping away from him, more layoffs were a virtual certainty, and his own finances were looking precarious. But the fish were okay. He nodded.

  “They came with plastic bags, which they filled with water from the tank, and then they—”

  “I need to see Freedman,” he said.

  “—put one fish in each bag.”

  He turned and charged down the hall, but not before registering her look of bottomless disappointment at his disregard for his former charges.

  “I insisted on one fish in each bag, not two,” she called after him.

  Sumner Freedman was in his office. When he noticed Guy he sat back and placed his hands on the edge of the desk, as if bracing for an impact.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Guy inquired.

  “You weren’t reachable yesterday.”

  “Where are my—” He couldn’t quite bring himself to finish the question: Much more was at stake than tropical fish, though symbolically they carried much weight.

  “The fish will be okay, Guy. Mount Sinai has a children’s ward with a big tropical tank. The move went very smoothly.”

  “Why wasn’t I consulted?”

  “We called, but you were unreachable.”

  “I’m sure the sick children could have lived another day without the fish.”

  “I don’t know, Guy. Some of these kids are very ill.”

  How had they tumbled down this conversational hole?

  “What’s going on?”

  “Aquinas assumed control yesterday, officially. They’ve called for an immediate thirty percent reduction in overall expenses. We haven’t drawn up the plan for achieving that amount yet, but the fish seemed like a good place to start. We’re on a very aggressive schedule. In fact, Mel Armitrage wants to meet with you this afternoon.”

  “He’s here?”

  “At the company suite at the Carlyle. He’d like you to be there at two o’clock.”

  “Am I being fired?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you know.”

  “It’s complicated, Guy.”

  “No, it’s not. There’s a children’s hospital somewhere with a big tank full of technology company founders. The sick kids get a real lift seeing these once-powerful creatures swimming about with big fishy frowns on their faces.”

  “I’m sorry, Guy.”

  “Or maybe they’ll just sell us to the fish market—fillet of founder.”

  “I’m glad you still have your sense of humor.”

  “It’s all that’s left. You stole my company and my balls.”

  Sumner held his hands up in protest, revealing dark sweat stains under his arms, an unexpectedly mammalian response. Though bloodless, he had sweat glands.

  Rosemary was inside the elevator of 218 West End Avenue when she saw Peggy and a man who was most likely her husband Monroe, crossing the lobby. She jabbed at the close-door button but to no avail.

  “Hello!” Peggy called across the marble lobby. Reluctantly, Rosemary pressed the open-door button as the couple approached. The old man was walking with difficulty.

  “We’re visiting the Weinsteins on eleven. How are you enjoying the apartment?”

  “We’re scheduled to move in next month.”

  “Next month? But it’s been…” She glanced at the twins in their double stroller, half expecting teenagers. “It’s been forever.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  The Gimmels squeezed around the stroller and Rosemary released the door.

  “Oh, look, Monroe, I’ve pressed six by accident,” Peggy said. She made no move, however, to press eleven.

  After a brief silence Rosemary gave in. “Would you like to see the apartment?”

  Walking through the empty but nearly finished apartment, Monroe and Peggy Gimmel were like emigrants revisiting the old country, marveling with a mixture of awe and sadness at how much had changed.

  “What the hell did you do to the foyer?” Monroe asked. “Where did it go?”

  “It’s part of the great room now.”

  “What’s a great room?” He didn’t wait for an answer, tottering into the forty-by-forty-foot ocean of gleaming white plaster and molding. He looked so small and tentative, Rosemary expected him to vanish into another space-time dimension.

  “Come on, Monroe, I hear they made a powder room.”

  “It’s this way,” Rosemary said, wondering if that was what people gossiped about on the Upper West Side, the appearance of new rooms in old buildings.

  “Imagine, having to get directions in our own apartment,” Peggy said. “Well, technically it’s not ours anymore.”

  Technically. Rosemary had to smile.

  “Where did this come from?” Monroe demanded when all three had squeezed into the tiny half-bath.

  “We took the guest-room closet and combined it with…” What had they combined it with? Already the original contours of 6D were a fading memory.

  “I always wanted a powder room,” Peggy said, caressing the edge of the pedestal sink.

  Rosemary caught a glimpse of herself in the small mirror over the sink. She looked haggard and drained, but the light was more forgiving of the Gimmels, who looked pink and healthy as medium-rare lamb.

  “Your daughter is Lily, right?”

  “Last I checked.” Peggy said. “Why?”

  “I found her name inscribed in the floorboards in one of the bedrooms.”

  “Well, don’t forget you had a full inspection before the closing,” Peggy said quickly, squaring her shoulders. “I’m sorry if you—”

  “No, no, it’s not a problem. It’s just that…well, it said, ‘Lily plus Larry forever.�
�� I wondered what happened to them.”

  Peggy seemed unable to reply at first. “She became Lily Grantham,” she finally said.

  “She came to all our benefits at the auction house. I think she chaired one or two.”

  “But not lately,” Peggy said.

  Rosemary decided not to bring up the scandal.

  “Would you like to see the inscription? I didn’t let the floor men remove it.”

  Both Gimmels nodded.

  For a while the three of the them stood silently over the etched words, as if meditating over the tomb of an ancient prophet. Finally Peggy broke the silence.

  “I would have killed her if I’d known she was ruining my floors.”

  “I wonder how she pulled up the carpet,” Monroe said. “Wasn’t it tacked down?”

  “I recall reading about your daughter, but I don’t remember reading that she married her high-school sweetheart. Isn’t her husband a banker or something?”

  “Was a banker or something. Now he’s a fugitive.”

  “Oh.”

  “She changed after she wrote this. She wanted nothing about her life to last forever, not Larry or this room or this apartment or this neighborhood. And she did it, she changed it all.”

  “You should have seen her place on Park Avenue,” Monroe said. “Like a museum, only she let you sit on the chairs.”

  “She thought you could change everything just by moving across town and buying a big place, one apartment to a floor, the elevator opens and there you are, inside. But you can move across the country and you’re still who you were in the beginning. She was wiser when she wrote this”—Peggy pointed a Nike-d toe at the inscription—“than she’s ever been since then. The room you were raised in, that’s forever. You can tear down the walls, put new ones up, but you can’t run from it.”

  “I get so tired of real estate,” Rosemary said. “Half the city is either buying or selling their apartments, and the other half are real-estate agents helping them do it.” People changing their skins, as Esme Hollender put it. “Maybe everyone should put an inscription in the rooms they live in, and there should be a law that you can’t remove it.”