We stopped at a red light. She had a clear plastic change purse with a blue plastic diamond ring in it dangling from a clip on her knapsack.
“Are you coming home tonight?” she asked, excitedly. I looked at her face to see if I could tell what his answer was. Her face didn’t change.
“Daddy, guess what. I have something exciting to tell you. Oh wait, that’s my call waiting, hold on a second.” She took the phone from her ear and pressed a button. “Hello? Hi, Mommy, I’m on the other line with Daddy. We’re having a nice conversation. Can I call you back later? Okay.” She pressed the button again. “Hi, Daddy, are you still there? It was just Mommy. I decided that when you pick my new room it should have a nice view and a big walk-in closet. Because, because, because it makes me feel happy if I can see the Umpire State Building and some dogs. I can’t talk anymore, I’m here.”
I looked up and found that we had reached the school. “Bye,” she said. She put the phone in her big coat pocket and joined a group of other children climbing down the three steps to the door.
It occurred to me that I should have given her my card.
The Liberty Lines bus was parked outside the office, waiting to take all the agents to my old apartment. I stood across the street trying to decide what to do. Part of me dreaded it but part of me felt excited, like it was show-and-tell day at school. I pictured the bus pulling up in front of the building’s canopy and me filing out last, the smallest clown in a circus Volkswagen. I would march past the doorman, proud to be with my dignified colleagues. “Hi, honey, I’m home,” I would say to my husband, as I slipped off my boots at the door.
Kim spotted me across the street. “What are you waiting for?” she shouted.
I boarded the bus and took a seat across from Marti Landesman in the second row.
As I sat there I looked at myself in the bus’s wide rearview mirror and straightened my posture. I was in the unfortunate seat where the whole bus can see you in the mirror. I thought about a girl I knew in high school who told me that I had a short neck. If I asked her now, she probably wouldn’t remember saying it. Sometimes a person can say something to you and you never see yourself the same way again.
Kim balanced herself in the front and passed out sheets of paper with addresses for six other apartments that we would look at that day with brief descriptions, maintenance charges for the co-ops, taxes/common charges for the condos, and asking prices.
I wondered if he would be home. I suddenly imagined us all parading into the bedroom and finding Jack on our old bed with some kind of girl. I remembered everything. The day we bought the bed, the day the bed was delivered, the day we bought the air conditioner, the day the air conditioner was delivered, the day we had sex in the walk-in closet because we didn’t have curtains yet, the day we bought the curtains, the day the curtains were installed.
I looked over at Marti Landesman writing confidently in her organizer. She handled it crudely and expertly, like an old woman handles raw chicken.
“Is your Forty-nine West Tenth Street still available?” the woman sitting behind her asked.
“Accepted offer, but I’m taking backups,” Marti said, without looking up. Her voice was the worst of New York, gravelly, flat, uncaring, like a shit-bottomed shoe being scraped on the sidewalk.
I had actually had a dream about her. When I woke up I couldn’t believe that Marti Landesman had gotten into my dream. In the dream we were in separate elevators that moved horizontally and she was chasing me with a syringe like a crazed nurse.
I thought about telling her about my dream. “Marti,” I said.
“Yup,” she said, without looking up.
“I had a dream about you.”
She looked at me. “Oh yeah?” she said. She wore an expression of complete disgust.
“So what was the dream?” she asked a few minutes later.
“Oh, you were trying to kill me with a big needle.”
I could tell she was pleased.
“Isn’t that a little pathetic?” she said. She looked over her shoulder as if she might need a witness.
I wished more than anything that I hadn’t told her my dream. I didn’t know what I could have been thinking. It was my worst real estate faux pas since I showed an apartment to an entire Japanese family and accidentally called it a condom instead of a condo.
“I think you oughta have your head examined,” she said.
A cell phone rang. Of course it was Marti’s.
“Marti Landesman,” she said loudly, as if she were the only person on the bus. “No, Harrison Street is a good street because it’s nice and wide. Thomas Street is narrow.” She hung up.
I wanted to know what streets were wide and what streets were narrow.
We rode the rest of the way in silence.
Go on up, he’s expecting you,” the doorman said to Kim. He was new, I had never seen him before. We all followed after Kim and stood reverently waiting for the elevator.
I compared this lobby to my new lobby, a tiny vestibule that smelled like cat urine and shawarma. I had felt safe in this lobby, with its big brass trolley to carry my bags. Now I carried laundry up five flights of stairs. My husband hadn’t liked to talk in front of the doormen or the neighbors. I had kissed Andrew in my new vestibule one night when we were fighting and I wouldn’t let him come upstairs. I was wearing a cocktail dress and no bra. He slipped the straps off my shoulders and the dress fell down to my waist and we stayed that way, kissing, for an hour.
You don’t realize how fake fake flowers look until you see them again after six months have passed.
When the elevator opened onto my old floor, a boy, about eight or nine, was playing with marbles. He had placed eleven trophies in an S shape like cones on an obstacle course.
“Hi,” I said as if I were his new neighbor. The other agents clucked over the trophies and headed toward my old front door. “Are all those yours?” I asked the kid.
“Yes,” he said. “Plus one more that’s silver that’s in my house.”
“What did you win them for?”
“Soccer, basketball, and baseball, and bowling,” he said.
“How long have you been living here?”
He thought for a moment. “I don’t know.”
“That’s how I feel,” I said.
I walked down the hall, careful not to knock over the trophies. I knocked one over. I bent down to fix it.
“I’ll do it,” he said, annoyed.
“Sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay, I’m a klutz, too,” the little boy said. I had never thought of myself as a klutz.
The door was open a couple of inches. I pushed it tentatively and found myself standing where I had stood so many times before.
When we first moved in my husband marked both of our heights on the wall with a pen. “This way we can measure every year to see if we’re shrinking,” he said. It was the first time I liked the idea of growing old with someone. We had kept those marks through two paint jobs. Now they were gone.
The apartment was a duplex. The front door was on the upper level and opened onto a sort of grand mezzanine landing that overlooked the huge living room with its double-height ceiling. It made for a dramatic entry.
“I know, it’s like a castle,” an agent said to me when she saw the look on my face. “I feel like it should have a suit of armor somewhere.”
It does, I thought: its owner.
“I wonder what these are,” one agent said. She lifted a large egg made out of some kind of polished stone from a large wooden eggcup stand. There were dozens of them all over the living room like evil pods. I had never seen them before.
There were only a dozen agents on the bus but now it seemed as if they had multiplied. They were crawling all over my things.
I decided not to go in the bedroom. Watching Marti Landesman in there measuring it with her big feet would give me
another nightmare. I went to the kitchen. Kim was looking in the pantry.
“Is the owner at home?” I asked.
“Whoever designed this kitchen is an idiot,” Kim said.
The granite, the marble, the paint, the tiles, the glass, the shelves, the island, the fridge, the faucets, the recycling bin. I had spent days, weeks, months personally choosing each one. The ice maker was still set to “crushed.”
“Look,” Kim said, “the refrigerator opens the wrong way.”
“No it doesn’t,” I said.
“Yes it does.”
“The owner’s left-handed,” I said.
“Oh, you think that’s why they did it?”
“I know that’s why they did it.”
“All right, Liv, how do you know that?” Kim asked, annoyed.
“Because I married him,” I said.
“You married the owner.”
“Yes. He was my husband.”
“Did you live here?” she asked.
“That’s right,” I said. “I’m the idiot who designed this kitchen. And that’s why I think I should be the one to sell it.”
Our maid, Charitable, stood in the doorway.
“Hello, Miss Liv,” she said to me.
“Is Jack at home?” I asked her.
“No, he left before I got here this morning.” I wondered if she was just too polite to tell me that Jack’s bed hadn’t been slept in. “Would you like me to make you a cup of coffee?”
“Yes, thank you, Charitable, please make coffee for everyone.”
Kim watched the conversation like she was at Wimbledon.
“We don’t have time for coffee,” she said. “But thank you,” she added awkwardly.
“So, I’d like to be the one to sell it,” I repeated.
“If it’s all right with the own … your husband, it’s all right with me,” she said.
I suddenly felt dizzy and sat on a metal stool. Charitable brought me a cup of coffee.
And then it hit me. Jack was selling the apartment. It would no longer be our apartment. It would no longer even be his apartment. He was going somewhere else. I would no longer know exactly what chair he was sitting in or hear his cereal bowl hit the sink at three a.m. all the way from my tiny apartment. He would sit in new chairs and have new sinks. He would be unchartable. Our marriage would be like a plane crash with the black box left undiscovered somewhere on the bottom of the ocean. It had meant nothing.
The least I could do was get a commission.
The phone rang, and Charitable, Kim, and I all jumped as if we were going to answer it. I was closest. It was my phone. I bought it. The receipt was in a drawer somewhere. Charitable took a step toward my phone.
“Hello?” I said.
“Hello?” It was Jack. “I’m sorry, I must have the wrong number,” he said and hung up.
I hung up, too. “Wrong number,” I told Kim and Charitable.
The phone rang again. “Hello?” I said.
“Hello?” It was Jack again. “Liv?”
“Hi, Jack,” I said. We had a bad connection. “Where are you?”
“I’m on an airplane. I was calling to tell Charitable that I had to go out of town for a week. Is she there?” he asked, sounding worried that I had tied her up and stuffed her in a closet.
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you mind if I ask why you dropped in? Did you come for the curtain rods?”
“Never mind that,” I said. “I’m here with Smoothe Transitions to preview the apartment. I’m a broker now.”
“Good for you.”
“Good for you,” I mimicked.
Kim looked like she was going to take the phone away from me. She obviously thought I was going to keep Transitions from getting the exclusive.
“Liv, be nice,” Jack said.
“So you were just going to move without talking to me?”
“I was going to talk to you. There’s a lot I want to talk to you about. I started meditating. I’m moving to India. I’m moving to India to live with a swami.”
“Really,” I said. How did a man void of emotion suddenly become interested in meditating? I pictured a group of robots sitting cross-legged in front of another robot wearing a turban. “Does this have something to do with all these new stone eggs you’ve got?”
“Those are lingums, Liv. A symbol of male sexual energy.”
“Really,” I said. I move out and he fills the house with male eggs.
“I’d love to talk to you about it. Maybe we could sit down and—”
“Maybe.” I stood up. “Jack, I want you to give me the exclusive.”
He laughed. “Well! The exclusive! Don’t you sound different.”
“No, I do not sound different,” I said, mimicking him again.
“So you’re a broker now,” he said. “All grown up.”
“I want the exclusive. Don’t give it to anyone else.” I felt like I was begging him not to cheat on me.
“How long do you think it will take you to sell it?”
“We generally ask for a six-month exclusive right to sell.”
“I’ll give you one week.”
“One week,” I said.
“Let’s see if you can do it in one week. I’ll fax Kim from the hotel and you can send me any papers that need signing.”
“Fine,” I said.
“I have to go. Can you please tell Charitable that I’ll be back Wednesday and ask her to come to the apartment every day while I’m gone? Tell her it’s okay for her to stay in the guest room.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Bye, honey,” he said and hung up.
“That was Jack,” I told Kim and Charitable. “He gave me the exclusive, for a week,” I told Kim. “And, Charitable, Jack said there’s no need for you to come to work this week but he’ll pay you anyway when he gets back.”
Charitable took off her apron. “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown,” she told me.
37.
OPEN HOUSE WED 12-2
There is one last apartment I could show you,” I told Noah Bausch.
“Where is it?” he asked.
“Well, that’s the thing. I really don’t think you’d like it. It’s not in your preferred neighborhood and it’s way out of your price range.”
When you look at apartments in Manhattan for as long as the Bausches had looked, an extra half-mil here and there doesn’t seem like a lot.
“It’s on the Upper East Side,” I said, for the first time making that sound like a good thing. “It’s on Fifth Avenue. And it’s easily over a million dollars.”
“No,” Noah Bausch said.
The next day Noah and Audrey Bausch met me in my husband’s lobby, as I knew they would. We walked into the apartment silently. It looked beautiful, even with them in it.
For once they weren’t condescending. They didn’t knock on any walls or turn on any faucets to check for water pressure. They didn’t open any closet doors and shake their heads in disgust or look up at the bathroom ceiling as if something might be dripping on them. They just assumed all the windows opened and that they could in fact get cable. As much as I loved lofts, there was something reassuring about a real apartment. Lofts had a certain smoke-and-mirror aspect to them.
“These are nice,” Audrey mumbled, about the bathroom tiles I had brought home from Provence. “Aren’t they?” I said.
“We’d like to see it again,” Noah said. “And we’d like to bring Flannery.”
I wasn’t aware that their three-year-old daughter had been the decision-maker all along.
Then I called Storm. “How’s life treating you at the Dakota?” I asked. I had heard from another broker who also hated her that the deal had fallen through. She had annoyed the owner with her endless inane questions and insulted him by offering him tiny amounts of money for his furniture, wh
ich he had no intention of selling. Storm had behaved so horribly that the deal had become infamous among brokers, a sort of case study.
“It didn’t work out,” Storm said.
“You’re kidding, that’s awful. I had no idea. Well, that’s all water under the bridge, Storm. You know, something just occurred to me. I actually just thought of a place I could show you….”
Storm’s limo pulled up at my husband’s building and I brought her into the apartment.
“Your dining room table could go here,” I said, opening the French doors to the dining room. “Or here,” I said, on the landing at the top of the stairs that led down to the living room. “Or here,” I said, in my husband’s study, climbing a few rungs of a bookcase ladder and making a dramatic sweeping gesture with my arm as the ladder slid across the bookcase like we were in a musical.
This apartment could even weather Storm.
“It smells so nice here,” Storm said in the kitchen. I turned off the cider on the stove. I put a cinnamon stick in a mug and poured her a cup. I had been simmering the cider for hours, an old realtors’ trick that would only work on someone like Storm. It made the whole house smell like Christmas. “I don’t know why I feel so cozy here,” she said. “I love these mugs.”
“Of course the owner said whoever buys the apartment can have them,” I said.
“Hmmm,” she said, examining the mug more closely. “The only thing is I’m not sure Fifth Avenue is safe. That was one of the problems I had with the Dakota. I’ve heard Central Park can be dangerous. I’d like to see this apartment again at night,” she said.
When the Bausches came back for their second showing I noticed that they had dressed up. Noah was wearing a sport coat, and Audrey had made an attempt with concealer. They shuttled Flannery around from room to room.
I gave her the stuffed sheep my husband had bought for me on a drive Upstate and some wooden bracelets he had brought me from Japan and his childhood toy train he kept wrapped in tissue paper, which he considered his prize possession. I found a present for her in every room.
High Maintenance Page 29