Closing Costs

by Seth Margolis

  Peggy bent down and traced a finger across the inscription.

  “She left so early this morning, Monroe,” Peggy said after a while. “I wonder where she is?”

  Lily finished her story, after speaking for thirty uninterrupted minutes, and glanced around the room. Jay DiGregorio from the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, along with Special Agent Sammet, who’d come to her apartment (her former apartment) on Park Avenue that night a lifetime ago to inform her that her husband had skipped town. Howard Breslin and Rick Conklin from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms—she still couldn’t get over the name. No one said anything, and for a moment she feared she’d just dug herself a deeper hole than her work with Mohammed had already excavated. She’d told them about Nanny, and the proof she now had. How she’d guessed it was Nanny when she’d realized that all the checks had been written—and, presumably, deposited—on Thursday, Nanny’s day off. About a year earlier Nanny had insisted on Thursdays off (not the traditional Saturday or Sunday—something about physical therapy for lower-back pain) just as she’d insisted on following them to the West Side to keep tabs on the family. That’s how she discovered that Lily was going to break into Manny Zelma’s office, looking for evidence, and she’d almost succeeded in having her boyfriend steal the envelope with the canceled checks on William Street that night.

  She threatened to use all of her old media contacts to go public with a story sure to garner front-page coverage: innocent, high-profile family attacked by a trusted employee (treacherous child-minders always made headlines), unfairly persecuted by the federal government, forcing the head of said family to flee the country or face unfair imprisonment, and condemning the wife and mother to a life of crime that she would never, under any other circumstances, have pursued. “You’ll look cold and unfeeling,” she’d said to DiGregorio, and when this didn’t get a reaction, she’d added “and completely incompetent,” which turned his pale face a sickly purple.

  She hadn’t expected them to break down in sobs of remorse, though that wouldn’t have been an unwelcome reaction. The ability or inclination to apologize had probably been drilled out of them during basic training. Still, some reaction would have been nice.

  “So, are you going to pursue these…charges against me? Because if you are, I’d like to call my…” She almost said lawyer. “My publicist.” In her old life, few of her friends had had paying jobs, but many of them had had publicists whose responsibility it was to get their client’s name and, ideally, photo in the right newspapers and magazines. Counterfeiting twenty-dollar bills seemed a far saner way to make a living, she now thought, than securing ink for indolent socialites. She’d never actually had a publicist, but she knew a few names, and any one of them would be more than happy to take her on, under the circumstances.

  “That’s it,” she said after a long pause, standing up. “I’m calling my publicist.”

  The word cast a shadow of anxiety across the four horsemen of the federal government.

  “We need to talk,” said Conklin of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. They left her.

  Several hours later she was allowed to go home (well, to her parents’ apartment), after stern warnings not to leave Manhattan without consulting the Bureau, as they called it. As soon as she got home she called Morton Samuels, who consented to help her out once he realized that she stood a good chance of being rich again. She repeated to him the deal she’d concocted while detained downtown: She’d agree not to pursue harassment charges against the government—which had all but thrown her and the children onto the street—if the Feds dropped all counterfeiting charges against her and Mohammed. Samuels, it turned out, was the perfect emissary to offer the deal. Only a month earlier, one of his patently guilty clients had been found not guilty of insider trading, and that client was not only making the rounds of talk shows, he was suing the federal government for fifty million dollars in damages, and he wasn’t nearly as telegenic as Lily. Moreover, he hadn’t been evicted from his home, nor had he been forced—forced—by the U.S. government to print money to feed children. “If you had turned tricks, that might have been worth more,” was Samuels’s unironic lament. “But we’ll work with what we have.”

  Thirty-three

  Lily stood among a swarm of livery drivers in the waiting area of Terminal 4 at JFK. Each time the swinging doors flew open, the drivers waved cardboard or plastic signs containing the handwritten name of their charges. She briefly considered making a sign of her own: MR. GRANTHAM. Would Barnett recognize her otherwise? She’d put on ten pounds since he’d fled the country—poverty pounds, she thought of them—and her low-maintenance, gray-flecked hair now fell casually to her shoulders. The Banana Republic cashmere sweater and Gap jeans, purchased with homemade money, would look equally unfamiliar to him.

  The unraveling of their lives had been swift, and so had the…reraveling? Nanny had been arrested in the living room at 124 West Sixty-seventh Street the day after Lily had been detained and released. The Feds had apparently spent the night plotting strategy and obtaining a search warrant for Nanny’s apartment. As the federal agents led Nanny out in handcuffs, Lily had leapt at her. But one of the Feds stepped between them, preventing a physical confrontation.

  “It was ’im what made me stay in this…this dump,” Nanny snarled at Lily as she was led away, stress coarsening her accent from Poppins to Doolittle. “Me boyfriend—didn’t I tell him we should get the hell away from this place? ‘You can’t bolt right after they arrest ’im, it’ll look suspicious like,’ is what ’e said. Then when the mister flew the coop, it was the same story. ‘Stick around to see what the bitch knows.’ Fat lot of good it did me.”

  Lily could only gape at the seething tower of rage that had lovingly diapered and bathed and fed shepherd’s pie to her children. But Peggy exhibited no such paralysis.

  “Dump? Who do you think you are, calling my home a dump?”

  “She called me a bitch, Mother.”

  “Yes, well…” Peggy shrugged and ran into the hallway, where Nanny was being led toward the elevators.

  “I’ll have you know this dump, as you call it, cost us almost one million dollars. And since we’ve lived in this dump, it’s gone up twenty-eight percent—it was in the paper this week. That’s two hundred and twenty-three thousand dollars, just for living here! Just for living! It’s like they’re paying us, every day”—Lily watched her mother do the math in her head, lips moving quickly as she totted up what they were paying her—“two thousand dollars every day, we get paid two thousand dollars every single day we live in this dump, and we don’t have to do anything! Think about that while you’re rotting in prison.”

  And now the final loop in the rewinding of their lives: Barnett’s return.

  Each time the swinging doors flew open, Lily was reminded of a fun-house attraction; would the doors reveal a clown or a monster? Why so nervous? After all, Barnett had asked her to be there. Morton Samuels had contacted him the day Nanny was arrested—funny, how he suddenly remembered his client’s address—and Barnett had left a voice message a few hours later with flight information. “Can’t wait to see you at the airport, sweetie,” he’d said a bit tentatively.

  And he looked a bit tentative when he finally strode through the swinging doors, hesitating a few long seconds after spotting her in the crowd. He’d lost weight in Switzerland; his navy blazer and khaki pants, which she recognized from Before, hung limply on him. He appeared older and tired, but in fact it was his familiarity that startled, even angered her. So much had changed—he’d become a different person to her—it struck her as unfair that he hadn’t morphed in appearance to reflect that. Instead, it was the same Barnett she’d last seen at 913 Park Avenue: a bit less doughy but with his pampered, hygenic WASPiness intact. It seemed wrong. At the very least he should have gone gray, or bald, or be covered in oozing boils.

  After his initial hesitation he smiled at her, a broad, confident smile for the future, for their future, for the Granth
am Restoration.

  It was a smile aimed at her. You’re a very lucky girl.

  She’d come to JFK not knowing what she was going to say or do, half-hoping that he’d make the important decisions for her. And he had, in a way, with that proprietary, presumptuous, it’s-all-been-a-bad-dream smile. That smile let her know just what she had to do.

  “Darling,” he said.

  She deflected his kiss, which landed behind her right ear.

  “Looks like we’re out of practice,” he said, and tried again. This time she stepped aside, causing him to lose balance and stagger forward.

  “I shouldn’t have come,” she said to his back as he righted himself. “What was I thinking?” She turned and headed for the exit.

  “Darling…”

  She turned back to him. “Don’t call me that.”

  “Dar—Lily, if this is about my leaving, you need to understand…”

  “Leaving?”

  “And I understand from Morton that you know about Francine, but what you don’t know is that it’s over, it was never—”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “In fact, it’s not about you at all.”

  “It’s not…” He looked crushed, his expression darkening as his eyes glanced up and down her new form, evidence that life had, amazingly, gone on without him.

  She had to say it again, slowly and out loud, just to remind herself that it was true.

  “It’s not about you.”

  His shoulders sagged and he seemed about to say something but didn’t. Lily shook her head and walked away.

  She was almost out the door when she heard her name. But it wasn’t Barnett.

  “Oh my, good grief, who would have imagined meeting you here, on this of all days.”

  The collision of worlds made her briefly dizzy. Instinctively she spread her arms, and after a momentary hesitation Mohammed stepped into the embrace, their first physical contact. He wore a tie and jacket and his hair had recently been cut.

  “Are you meeting someone?” she asked him.

  “Yes, but you notice, no sign?” He held up both patently empty hands. “I have sold my medallion and cashed in my inwestments. Very successfully, I might add. I am here to meet Kassie and the boys. Their plane landed fifteen minutes ago.”

  “How wonderful!”

  “Yes, yes,” he said a bit too quickly.

  “It will be fine,” she said. “I’m sure they can’t wait to see you.”

  “I still haven’t bought a new home for us, you see. But I couldn’t wait any longer. After that business with the American government, I decided I must see them, never mind that I am living in a shack.”

  “It’s not a shack, Mohammed.”

  “We will shop for a suitable home right away. I want to inwest my cash in real estate.”

  “People are saying that housing prices are already too high.”

  “Nonsense. Everybody will always want a home, the bigger, the better. The American dream is not a bubble.”

  “Here we are, discussing real estate on the most important day of your life.”

  “What is more important than the place you live? Anyway, what brings you here, Lily?”

  She loved how her name floated from his lips like a lover’s sigh.

  “I came to meet my husband’s flight.” She glanced back and saw Barnett standing where she’d left him, staring at her with a look of affronted incredulity.

  “Ah, so the candy man is out of the picture.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  He frowned. “You have not progressed wery far since we last spoke. Remember we talked of the need for a plan.”

  “Yes, but my new plan is to see what happens.”

  “Not much of a plan.” He shook his head slowly, then his face lit up. “Good grief, here they come. Oh…”

  She turned and saw four boys walking toward them, their bodies rigid with uncertainty. Behind them, as if hiding, was a small, pretty woman with long, straight black hair. All five wore jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers.

  Mohammed began walking toward them, then broke into a run. Lily waited until he’d reached the first son, the smallest, and scooped him up, before turning to leave.

  Thirty-four

  “All the principal rooms face Park Avenue,” Lucinda Wells said as she crossed the grand sitting room of Apartment 9A at 913 Park Avenue. She tapped a fingernail on the double-insulated windows. “Major sunlight,” she said, for Park Avenue.

  The paunchy investment banker and his pretty wife joined her at the window. Clients always followed her like young children on a class trip to the zoo, huddling close lest they get left behind.

  “Wasn’t this the Grantham apartment?” the wife asked.

  “A million years ago.” Ten months. Barnett Grantham had regained control of the place from the Feds and decided not to move back in. Since she already had the listing, he agreed to let her sell it for him. During his exile in Switzerland, the apartment had increased by a fourth, or something like one-point-nine million, which came to about six thousand dollars for every day he was out of the city. Try making that kind of money on Wall Street!

  The wife turned and studied the empty sitting room with newfound reverence. For a certain species of aspiring socialite, Lily Grantham had once sat atop the evolutionary chain.

  “The sitting room is twenty by twenty. Square is very rare, you know, and quite desirable. This apartment nailed ten pages in Architectural Digest, and three were devoted to this room.”

  “Do they ever cover the same apartment twice?” the wife asked anxiously. “I mean, after it’s been done over, of course.”

  Damn, she shouldn’t have brought up the Ark Digest feature. She never made mistakes like that, but the karma on the Grantham apartment was for shit.

  “If you do it right,” she said lightly, and ushered them back into the gallery. “The coat closet is nicely tucked away, don’t you think?” She opened it to reveal a mirror on the back of the door. The three of them froze in contemplation of their reflections, startled by the sudden evidence of life amid so much arid real estate. She was several inches taller than the wife, who was herself a good head taller than her husband, who stood between them like a fat child squeezed into a new suit for an outing with two stylish aunts. Still, he had pulled in twenty-six million dollars last year running a hedge fund, the new cliché. She always checked these things, since there was no point in showing an apartment to people who couldn’t afford it. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who liked to tour apartments just to see how the other half lived.

  The hedge hog was the first to step away from the mirror. Well, who could blame him?

  “Where to?” he huffed.

  “Whatever happened to Lily Grantham?” the wife asked. “Didn’t I hear that the husband came back?”

  “He was exonerated,” the husband said. “Turns out it was the baby-sitter or something who stole the money. She’s locked away for twenty years.”

  “You can comfortably entertain twenty-six in here,” Lucinda said in the dining room, pulling the number from a mental hat.

  The wife ran a finger along the glazed walls.

  “The color’s called Caravaggio Red,” Lucinda said. “It was all the rage a million years ago. It took like twelve coats to achieve this luster.” She saw the banker’s jowls start to quiver and quickly added, “But it comes off like that. Not a big job, trust me.”

  “Where are they living now?” the wife asked.

  “Separately,” Lucinda replied. “Notice the light. Very bright.” For Park Avenue.

  “They’re not together?”

  Lucinda sighed. She hadn’t brought up the Granthams, but she hadn’t nipped the story in the bud, either. Now she’d have to rehash the whole sordid tale, which would do zero for the apartment.

  “He came back to New York all set to pick up where he’d left off. Lily Grantham said no dice.”

  “Didn’t he have a girlfriend?”

  “Didn’t w
ant to marry her, apparently.”

  “Lily Grantham was a major rainmaker for Grantham, Wiley & Zelma,” said the husband. “She brought the firm more business than the three principals combined. Why ditch her?”

  “The kitchen,” Lucinda said, unfurling one arm like a car-show model. “Custom millwork, honed granite countertops, Sub-Zero, Viking, Miele.” The husband made a beeline for the Sub-Zero.

  “Where is she living?” the wife asked.

  “That’s a long story,” Lucinda said. It was always a long story—where you lived told the story of your life. “She took up with an old flame. High-school sweetheart. Neighborhood boy.”

  “What neighborhood?”

  “Upper West Side. She moved into his rent-controlled classic six.” The real-estate broker’s nightmare.

  “Who is it?” Meaning, Do we know him? Does anyone?

  “Nobody. Owns a candy store on Broadway. I was showing an apartment in the neighborhood and happened to walk by. Lily was behind the counter, dishing out nuts.”

  The husband was methodically opening and closing drawers in the vast Sub-Zero. A twelve-million-dollar apartment, and fatso was inspecting the fridge for freebies. Visibly frustrated, the wife turned back to Lucinda.

  “Lily Grantham is working in a candy store?”

  “She looked radiant. And her boyfriend…”

  “What about him?”

  “A major improvement in the looks department.” Lucinda couldn’t help glancing at the porcine husband, now rooting through the empty cabinets. “To die for, really. He was just returning from a run when I walked by. Tight shorts, T-shirt all clingy with sweat. You should have seen the kiss he gave her.”

  “A lot of women are going for physical attraction these days,” the wife said somewhat wistfully. “I read somewhere it’s a trend.”

  The husband opened the microwave. Perhaps the Granthams had left a bag of popcorn behind on their flight from the East Side.