“Liberty Street is a terrible location.”
“That’s not what you said the last time I saw you. Tribeca is so hot.”
“It’s not in Tribeca.”
“It’s southern Tribeca.”
“Hah!” I said. “It’s nowhere near Tribeca. You can’t even get a cab down there.”
“So you’re not going to go any higher than six-fifty?”
“Well, I’m not going to negotiate against myself,” I said.
She told me to hold again.
In less than a minute she was back. “Storm’s up to seven,” she said. “But she said her client wants me to throw in my grandmother’s armoire.”
“Seven-fifty,” I said, cheerfully. “Buckass neckid.”
“What?”
“No armoire. No furniture. No dishes. No Parmesan cheese. Broom clean. Totally empty.”
“You might not be too happy about something.”
“What?” I said.
“They put in a strange fridge. The shelves rotate.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “I’ve had worse.”
“Hold on,” she said. I waited. Finally Juliet came back on the line. “Storm said her client’s at seven-fifty but she won’t go any higher.”
“Is Storm still on the other line?”
“No,” she said. “But she said her client would pay the whole seven hundred and fifty thousand in cash. She’s going to call me back.”
“Juliet, a cash offer doesn’t make any difference in this case. Storm probably hasn’t even qualified her customers properly. And do you really want a stranger living there?”
“I don’t care anymore,” she said. I knew how she felt.
“I’ll give you eight hundred thousand dollars but you have to accept my offer right now,” I said.
Suddenly she laughed. “Offer accepted,” she said.
41.
FULLY RENOVATED
Juliet and I closed in a lawyer’s office on lower Broadway. The lawyer, whose nickname was Oz, was known in the business as a deal maker rather than a deal breaker. He was a legend in real estate law. I had heard so much about him I was surprised when I saw him, just a nice, gentle-looking man with a framed picture of himself on a boat off Montauk. He reminded me of my father. Deep down my father was just like this man. He wasn’t a larger-than-life celebrity you had to look perfect for. He was just a man behind the curtain. Maybe I had been afraid to see that all along, to see that all men, including Peter Kellerman, were just men behind their curtains.
Before I signed up for real estate school I had thought about calling my father and asking him to stop me from disgracing myself and the family by becoming the worst thing a person could be. He could get me a job in his fashion house or even hook me up with a job on a movie set.
Just as I was about to hand over my check for the real estate course, I said, “Just a second,” to the woman at the desk, and ran to a pay phone in the lobby. I called him.
“Dad,” I said, “I have something to ask you.”
“Anything,” he said.
“It’s a really big favor,” I said, my voice getting higher and higher.
“Whatever it is, it’s yours,” he said.
I want you to love me, Dad, I thought. Be my father. We’ll start over. Spend time together. Get to know each other. We’ll have Chinese food and you can teach me to use chopsticks all over again, put makeup on me, show me India, zip up my raincoat. Look at me, Dad, I wanted to say, I’m still the same girl you used to love.
What was the point of being loved as a child if it just petered out in the end? With every year more of the love evaporated until it was all condensed to a small “love you” the size of a bullet at the end of a phone call. Suddenly I understood why I cried every time I got off the phone with him. My father hated me. He hated me for the same reason my husband hated me, and Andrew hated me. Because I had glimpsed them, albeit briefly, behind their curtains.
“What is it, Liv?” he asked.
“Uh.” I stopped. “Can you get me tickets to Lion King?” I asked.
“Of course. That’s it?” he asked.
“That’s it,” I said.
“Bye,” he said. “Love you.”
“Love you, too,” I said.
What had I been so afraid of? I wondered. Maybe never seeing him at all was better than seeing him drunk, the last to leave Spago, each arm wrapped around a blond model. I was better off with my eyes closed. What I wanted didn’t even exist. What would happen if I finally tracked him down in a fog of dry ice on a fashion runway in Paris or Miami or Milan? The answer was nothing. Nothing would happen. In my best dress, in my highest heels, even packing my gun, nothing would happen. He wasn’t there. I couldn’t see him and he couldn’t see me. We were as blind as Jerome. The best I could do was tell it to the judge.
____________
When we left Oz, Juliet and I went to lunch at a diner where the waitresses wore beehives and the photos of the winners of the old annual “Miss Subway” beauty queen competition lined the walls. I had eaten there after I took the real estate exam.
“Where’s your new apartment?” I asked Juliet.
“It’s in Brooklyn and it’s so exotic. The building is round!” she said. “It even has round windows.”
Before we said goodbye she asked for the name of the real estate school I had gone to. “I’ve been thinking about it ever since my divorce. It just seems like the thing to do,” she said.
With my new keys in my pocket, I stopped in at Tortolla to have Tom do my hair. He blew it out straight for the first time. My long black wavy hair became as straight and Japanese-looking as Timothy’s. I had him chop it up a little on the bottom. I loved it. I sat beaming in the chair. “I always want my hair like this,” I said.
“You can’t do this all the time,” Tom said. “It’s much too much work. You’ll never be able to blow it out like this yourself.”
“Then I’ll come here and have you do it,” I said. I had been going to him for seven years and he had never done anything new to my hair, except for one terrible French braid incident. He had never done anything new to his hair either. I loved Tom but I was starting to think the only thing worse than a reluctant bridegroom was a reluctant hairdresser.
“You’ll have to book two appointments back to back in order for me to do this. It’s way too high maintenance for you,” he said.
“I want high-maintenance hair,” I said. “I can handle it.”
“What have I done?” Tom asked, smiling back at me in the mirror. “I created a monster.”
On my birthday I moved to Liberty Street.
It was my birthday but it felt like Independence Day. I stood on my roof deck in the tight vintage leopard suit I had bought for the occasion. I half-expected to see fireworks. I was sure the city would provide fireworks for my housewarming. I looked for them over the East River, in Brooklyn, and all the way over in New Jersey. I could see them in my mind. The sky turned into a giant screensaver. I imagined the waterfalls of stars and stripes and sparkling chrysanthemums.
With my own hammer and nails I hung the freshly framed photographs of Olivia in our new loft. “Who knows,” I told her, “maybe we’ll even move again. This isn’t the only apartment in the world.” One thing real estate had taught me was that there was always another apartment. And if there were other apartments, then maybe there were other men.
And if there were other apartments and other men, maybe there were even other cities. But then I caught a glimpse of my new view. No, I thought. There are no other cities.
In just two weeks the maintenance would be due and I would mail it from my own shiny brass mail chute in my own private foyer. But I would need stamps. I would have to go to the post office to buy myself some Love stamps. I unpacked the box I had labeled “firearms” and lifted the gun out of its nest of bubble wrap and New York Ti
mes real estate sections. I had heard that if you brought a gun into a police station they took it, no questions asked, and even gave you a small amount of reward money, which most people probably used for sneakers or crack, not Love stamps.
I got on the elevator and pressed L, fingering the Braille dots. The elevator went down one floor and then stopped. A great-looking man got on. He was wearing a tie with puppies on it and no wedding ring. “Nice suit,” he said.
We went down one more floor and the elevator stopped again. And another great-looking guy got on. This one was tall with beautiful black moussed-up hair like a model.
On the next floor down, a man with hair as long and dark and straight as mine got on. I had never dated a man with long hair. The thought made me nervous.
On every single floor the elevator stopped and another gorgeous man got on. They made cute little comments. “Room for one more?” “I see we have a full house.” “I guess this is the local.” Standing in my suit, with my gun in my pocket, I felt like a female leopard on a man-watching safari. I felt grateful for everything that had happened, grateful to be alive with my eyes and ears and eggs still intact.
Liberty Street was not a terrible location at all. It was in the financial district! For a single girl in New York, there was no such thing as living too far south. All the men in New York filtered down here to the bottom. I just prayed that the elevator had a habit of getting stuck.
I’d do my errands and come home later and unpack. I’d call my father and tell him my new address. Explain that the only thing left of my marriage was the wedding video, which I would send him for his archives. And ask him if he happened to know anybody who wanted to buy an apartment, or sell one.
Maybe I’d even watch the video The Long, Long Trailer. I finally felt ready to watch it alone. Because I wasn’t alone; I was in New York.
With thanks to Tina Bennett, Julie Grau, Craig Burke, Shari Smiley, Nicholas Weinstock, and Jill Hoffman. Also to Susan Petersen Kennedy, Liz Perl, Louise Burke, Dan Harvey, Lennie Goodings, Jens Christiansen, Bree Perlman, Svetlana Katz, Elizabeth Tippens, Amanda Weinstock, Debra Rodman, Scott Jones, Robert Steward, Kit McCraken, Dan Ehrenhaft, Doug Dorph, Stephanie Emily Dickinson, David Lawrence, Jayne Jenner, Steve Moskowitz, Ronald Wardall, Charlotte Brady, Paul Wuensche, Patricia Volk, Rick Schneider, David Khinda, Elizabeth Gibbons, Brendan O’Meara, and my family.
And especially to Stefanie Teitelbaum—thank you.
Jennifer Belle’s first novel, Going Down, was translated into many languages and was named best debut novel by Entertainment Weekly. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Ms., The Independent Magazine (London), Harper’s Bazaar, Mudfish, and several anthologies. She lives in a Lrg Rent Stab 1BR in GVill w/Emp St Bld Vus & WBFP. High Maintenance is her second novel.
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