Elizabeth was a graduate student in social work at Columbia University, working for Mayor Lindsay. There is a photo of them together, the mayor giving her a Social Worker of the Year award, sitting on the Chases’ piano, Elizabeth—hair middle-parted and down to her waist, brilliantly tan in a very Jackie Kennedy lemon shift dress—gazing up at him with such infatuation that Kate used to tell her blond little sister that the mayor must be her father. Of course this was not true, but it was fun to torture her little sister sometimes. When Elizabeth was held up with a gun a few years later by her favorite social work client, Tom told her, “This is it, Elizabeth.” So Elizabeth became, quite briefly, a lady of leisure before following her destiny into real estate.
Monique has a considerable personal fortune and is on the board of the American Ballet Theatre; over the years, she’s sent Chase Residential many of her wealthy contributors, who buy and sell fabulous trophy properties in Manhattan. Elizabeth invites Monique out to lunch at least once every couple of months, and always insists on paying.
Monique enjoys catching up with Elizabeth’s girls, particularly weighing in on their love lives. Excited at the news of Isabel’s engagement, she goes on for a few moments about possible wedding venues—the Plaza, the Metropolitan Club, the Maidstone Club in East Hampton—until Elizabeth gives her a look. Monique nods her head ever so slightly, as if to acknowledge the delicacy of the situation, one daughter newly single and the other newly engaged. “Okay, girls, I think it’s time for some champagne,” she says, just as the waiter arrives with a bottle of Cristal (which she’d obviously prearranged, Elizabeth understands). “This is my treat,” Monique tells Elizabeth. “So don’t you dare try to pick up the tab today.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Elizabeth says, laughing.
The Chases have their favorite dishes. For Kate and Isabel, it’s pollo patanato, chicken with a thin potato crust. Elizabeth absolutely adores food, and is in a constant state of dieting; although she can certainly appreciate a good spoonful of caviar, she always says the one thing she can’t resist is a plate of crispy French fries with the perfect amount of salt and a basket of warm bread with soft, salted butter. And then, of course, there’s the chocolate—specifically, rich milk chocolate. Today, at Oriente’s urging, she’s dining on tagliatelle with white truffles. Monique, picking at her penne Sette Mezzo, addresses Kate, saying, “Listen, sweetheart, I was so sorry to hear from your mom about you and Scott. But I’m sorry—what an ass.”
Kate is visibly withering in her chair, reluctant, Elizabeth knows, to discuss the tender subject of her relationship with Scott but also not wanting to offend Monique or make her think she’s not close enough to the family to discuss such things. Elizabeth recalls, all too well, how utterly devastated Kate sounded two weeks ago when she shared with Elizabeth the latest chapter of Scott’s breakups. The news was delivered to Elizabeth over the phone late one night last month, their final conversation for the day just as Elizabeth was getting into bed. Elizabeth couldn’t sleep all night after hanging up with her firstborn; she lay, with all three girls on her—Roxy on her head, Lola on one side, and Dolly tucked at her hip—thinking of how hard it was to see her daughter’s heart broken yet again.
“How about we change the subject?” Elizabeth suggests now, and both her daughters look relieved.
“Okay, but let me just say one more thing,” Monique says. “Next time Scott calls you, Kate, I don’t think you should answer or return his call. You need to just plain ignore him for a while.” She dips a piece of sourdough bread in olive oil.
Elizabeth doesn’t try to silence her friend—she does, in fact, agree with her completely.
This sort of girl talk is something that Kate, Isabel, and Elizabeth prefer to share mostly with each other. They are so alike in their thoughts that people often call them “Chase in Stereo,” because they all talk over each other and say the same things, like, “We hate the color brown.”
Luckily, Monique is also obsessed with Teddy Wingo, whom she finds irresistibly attractive as well as fascinating in his moving target of a love life, and so the conversation turns quickly to him. Elizabeth confides, “Teddy was supposed to show up at a walk-through a few weeks ago and didn’t. He made some kind of weird excuse about a soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend drugging him.”
“She drugged him?” Monique says, taking a sip of champagne, leaving a perfect imprint of her lipstick on the glass, and then leaning in like she was about to be told the city’s biggest secret. No one loves a secret more than Monique.
Aware of the complicit looks on the faces of her daughters, Elizabeth smiles. “Oh, who knows? We don’t necessarily believe his story—it sounds a bit ludicrous—and I have to say he’s not always reliable about showing up when and where he’s supposed to, though, in spite of that, he’s extremely successful,” she says.
“He’s a really big producer, right?” Monique says.
Isabel says, “Let’s put it this way, if he were to leave us, we would make less money, but have a lot less aggravation. He’s extremely high-maintenance and very demanding.”
“But he has so much cachet,” Monique says, stroking the three Hermès enameled bangles on her deeply tanned arm. “That’s why I always thought he was such a good fit for Chase Residential.”
Elizabeth, Kate, and Isabel shrug simultaneously, and Kate says, “And that’s exactly why Mom always indulges him.”
“Yes,” Isabel goes on, “he’s incredibly polished. But he can also be very cutthroat—”
“It’s a little unnerving,” Elizabeth agrees. “It’s one of the reasons you want him with you, not against you. And he does get great listings. Oh, he had the most charming ten-room at 149 East 73rd, with Juliet balconies off nearly every window—I sold it to a twenty-nine-year-old couple for just under five million.”
“I bet the client’s mommy and daddy paid,” Monique says.
“Oh no, the husband makes more than three million a year, just a couple of years out of Harvard Business School,” Elizabeth tells her.
“He’s a wolf,” Kate says, “but people adore Teddy.”
“Oh, I’m tired of talking about Teddy,” Elizabeth says. “So, did you want to see our new gem on Fifth Avenue?” she asks Monique as she finishes her champagne.
“You mean the penthouse? I think that would be nice to take a look at, after a bit of shopping, perhaps?”
“We can’t,” Isabel says—the listing is actually hers. “I got a call from the owner just as Kate and I were coming in. There is a leak from the terrace. She’s frantic. The place is a mess. She asked me not to schedule any showings until it’s fixed.”
Monique runs her fingers through her helmet of bleached platinum hair—such an unnatural color, Elizabeth thinks to herself—and says, “Well, the pictures of it look wonderful, and just remember, my friends the Campbells from Toronto might very well be interested. Courtney just adores terraces.”
Isabel nods her head. “Call me in a few days, it should be okay, I hope.”
“Just let me know.”
Elizabeth finds herself staring at Monique’s diamond and wondering if her friend actually dares to wear that rock when she goes to work. Elizabeth and her daughters are known for dressing exquisitely, but Monique is in a different category altogether, with all her custom-made clothing and collection of $3,000-a-pair crocodile Manolos in every color of the rainbow.
“Why don’t you and Tom come out to East Hampton this weekend?” Monique is saying. “Just relax, walk on the beach, it’s supposed to be beautiful.”
Elizabeth smiles and says, “You know me, Monique—I don’t need to relax, I need to work. That’s my relaxation.”
Kate and Isabel laugh. Elizabeth avoids the Hamptons if she can help it—if she’s going away, even for a weekend, she doesn’t want to be somewhere she’s likely to run into half her clients. It’s too much of a social scene, and she an
d her family much prefer their very low-key gem, Atlantic Beach. Atlantic Beach is like the 1950s; the Atlantic Ocean on one side, sprinkled with beach clubs straight out of The Flamingo Kid, the bay on the other side, and two blocks of houses in between. The Chases have been going out there for years; Elizabeth used to take a cabana with the children and two girlfriends and drive out weekdays even when the Chase family had a house in Southampton. A few years later, they sold the Hamptons house and bought one in Atlantic Beach, three houses from the ocean, on a block that has the entrance to the divine boardwalk, where Kate, Isabel, and Jonathan spent summers riding bikes as children and holding hands with dates as teenagers. The girls never went to camp, not for one day, not even day camp. They moved out to the beach on Memorial Day every year, with the car packed so high with suitcases that their feet were in the air, and returned on Labor Day. Elizabeth once asked them, “Do you want to go to sleepaway camp? They’ll throw you in the freezing lake at six a.m.” Terrified, Kate and Isabel said, “No, Mommy,” and that was the end of the camp conversation. Their summers in Atlantic Beach were just heaven. It’s still their favorite place to go all these years later, only they no longer move out for whole summers, where they would always wait for Tom to come over the bridge so they could light the barbeque and put his wine on the table.
They still go every weekend in the summer, and they absolutely adore their neighbors out there; on one side, a famous hedge fund icon and his wife, who owns a fabulously cool designer boutique called Edit, in a beautiful town house on Lexington Avenue (coincidentally, the family of five also live in the Chases’ Park Avenue building in the city), and right across the street Doug and Susie, who live out there year-round (and will call Tom at 2:00 a.m. if the alarm at the Chase house goes off), and whose three adorable teenage sons shovel the snow in the driveway when there’s a storm.
“I’m going to stay in the city this weekend,” Elizabeth says, “but thank you so much, I promise we’ll come another time.”
As Monique shakes her head and tilts it back slightly, Elizabeth sees her plastic surgery scars and thinks, Oh, I hope I never go there! Then the four of them get up to leave.
The girls extend an invitation to Monique to come shopping with them, and are secretly happy when she says she needs to get back to her apartment at 1088 Park, where she lives with her bichon frisés Sunny and Snowy and her daughter, who is taking a year off after graduating from Oxford. Not that they don’t adore Monique—they do—they just always prefer it to be the three of them.
As soon as Monique leaves, Elizabeth and her daughters stroll toward Madison Avenue, delighting in the balmy May air that makes them feel full of excitement that winter is far gone. Spring is the Chase ladies’ absolute favorite time of year. Elizabeth is completely compulsive about answering her cell phone, so having a two-hour lunch or going shopping never gets in the way of negotiating a deal. Once, in the midst of having root canal in Dr. Zane’s office next to the Regency Hotel, she actually answered Kate’s call and spoke to her for at least three minutes before saying, “Is it anything important? I’m in the middle of having root canal.” Another time, she negotiated a $30 million deal at 1030 Fifth Avenue while shopping for monogrammed Ralph Lauren towels with their personal shopper, Karen Lomerson, at Bloomingdale’s. (They met Karen at the Ralph Lauren Black Label department on the third floor and have since used her everywhere in the store—whenever they emerge off the escalator, she plucks them like flowers and sings, “Ladies, I have the three silver sweaters you wanted!” or “Ladies, we are in presale today for forty percent off!”)
Elizabeth does call to check her office voice mail—by habit, she does this every half an hour or so when she isn’t there—as they walk down Madison. Today there are five messages, three from Violeta confirming appointments, one from her vet, Amy Attas, about blood work for Lola, and one, of course, from Bart Schneider. Glancing at her daughters, who are listening to their messages and e-mailing, she decides to give Bart five minutes of her time. She’s relieved when a woman answers his cell phone, thinking that he’s obviously too busy to talk. But after the woman says hello, she asks, “Is this Elizabeth?”
“It is.”
“Bart’s with some European clients, but he told me to call him to the phone if it was you on the line.”
“Please don’t interrupt him,” Elizabeth says. “He can call me back.”
“No, he needs to talk to you. Please hang on for another moment.”
A frantic-sounding Bart Schneider is soon telling her that he’s been unable to sleep, racked once again over choosing between three radically different apartments. To make matters worse, nobody in his life has a strong opinion about any of them, each of the properties possessing its own virtues: a town house, a penthouse, and a duplex. But Elizabeth has told him this numerous times already, and it has done little to relieve his anxiety.
“I’m with my daughters,” she explains now. “We’re on our way to a showing, Bart. Can we maybe speak later? I just wanted to check in.”
“I just need to hear your voice,” Bart says. “The sound of it’s really soothing. I wish you worked for me. I’d probably sell ten times the amount of art I normally do.”
“Why don’t we speak about this when we see each other Thursday?” she suggests. The two will be going out yet again to look for apartments.
“Okay. I just need to sit with it all a little more.”
He is perhaps her most time-consuming and irritating client, but he means well, she reminds herself. And Bart Schneider was recommended to her by a very important friend, and she would never abandon a referral like that. It is what the Chase family business was built on—“friends and family,” they like to call it.
Her phone beeps with another call coming in from one of her close friends, a broker at Sotheby’s from whom she’s expecting an offer on a duplex at 155 East 72nd just off Lexington Avenue.
“Bart, I have to jump,” she tells him. “I have a possible bid, and the other broker is on the line.”
“Okay, talk soon,” he says, sounding let down.
“Hi, darling, what do you have for me?” Elizabeth says to her friend Roger Erickson, one of the only men whom she calls “darling.” The Chase ladies don’t believe in calling the men in their lives names like “honey,” “darling,” or “sweetie”—they think there is something reminiscent of The Stepford Wives about it—knives in their apron pockets poised to stab their husbands. “I hope you’re calling with good news,” Elizabeth says.
“Yes, they’re putting in an offer of $2.8 million, noncontingent, and financing between thirty and forty percent,” Roger says. The full ask on Elizabeth’s listing is $3.2 million.
“Okay, Roger, but that better be opening,” she says in the singsongy voice they use when they speak to each other. “Can you put it in writing for me and e-mail it to the girls?” Elizabeth is legendary for not owning a computer or a BlackBerry—ironic, the girls often muse, as Elizabeth’s first job was as a computer programmer for IBM. She has never sent an e-mail in her life; Kate and Isabel do it all for her.
“Yes, I’ll send over the offer with all their financials when we hang up,” Roger says. “And one more thing, they want to close in about three months. Their lease expires, and they can’t renew it.”
“Okay, let me run. I’ll speak to the seller and get back to you.” They make a big kissing sound and hang up.
The three Chases are now on Fifth, chatting about clients, and what might be the first weekend they are all free to sleep at the beach. The girls love to shop. On rainy weekends they can spend an entire day between Saks, Bloomies, and Bergdorf’s, buying, returning, and sometimes just looking—there is something about being in a department store in particular that they just love. No matter the weather or your mood, the lights, the shoes, the music just lift you, they think. Today, they stop at the window of Bergdorf’s to gaze at a pair of five-inch purple plat
form Louboutins in glass—“To die for,” they all say at the same time.
Then Kate looks at her watch. “Mom, what time is your showing at 52 East 4th?” she says. 52 East 4th is the luxury steel-and-glass new construction whose apartment listings Teddy has supposedly been trying to maneuver away from LEX, the much larger agency that rivals Chase Residential but is totally different—whereas Chase is owned and run by New Yorkers, LEX is owned by a corporate conglomerate in the Midwest whose name Elizabeth conveniently can’t recall when anyone asks her. LEX’s top brokers have to go through ten layers of management before being able to take a reduced commission, or sign an exclusive. Chase brokers simply have to call Tom or Elizabeth.
“Not until four o’clock,” Elizabeth says, and glances at her gold Cartier Panther watch, a gift from Tom for her fortieth birthday.
“We thought we’d come with you,” Kate says. “We want to preview the building for a few clients.”
“Okay, so we have almost two hours,” Elizabeth says. “Let’s skip Bergdorf’s and go back to the office. I have some phone calls I need to return, and Dan Wollman needs to speak to me.”
When they get off the elevator, they can hear Teddy from the landing. He is sitting at his immaculately organized desk, the phone cradled to his ear, gesturing wildly. “Your client has got to be more flexible about showing the town house, Leslie. I know she says she’s super busy, but she has to leave when I show it. She just can’t be there. If you want my opinion, I think it’s a case of one celebrity giving attitude to another—a big-deal newscaster thumbing her nose at a major ABC TV star. Really, it’s rude and counterproductive. Does she want to sell or not? I hated canceling my client, who rearranged his entire schedule for the showing. . . . Okay, fine, please get back to me with some alternatives.”
Teddy puts down the phone and smiles adorably at Elizabeth.
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