Soon Monique arrives at the party, in head-to-toe Chanel. Elizabeth has already told her that Kate was able to find out the name of the real estate broker who allegedly drugged Teddy after he suddenly broke up with her, so Monique (never shy) discreetly points out the stunning young woman, who is now chatting with a LEX broker.
Elizabeth finally excuses herself to find Teddy, who is talking with Robby Browne, one of the top ten real estate brokers in the city, famous for arriving by bicycle at even his most expensive listings and has degrees from both Princeton and Harvard.
When Elizabeth approaches, Robby’s face lights up. “Elizabeth!” he says warmly.
“Robby was telling me about the apartment he sold to one of the Rockefellers,” Teddy begins. “And he—”
Just at that moment, Christopher McKinnon comes over and taps Teddy’s shoulder. “Somebody wants to meet you,” he says.
Elizabeth suddenly feels a nervous flutter in her stomach. It now seems obvious that something of significance is going on between Teddy and LEX.
Chapter Ten
Kate
Park Avenue Princess
80s east. XXX Mint 3 bedroom, two-and-a-half baths, enormous EIK with adjacent family room in full-service doorman building. $4.1 million.
Kate loves the summer. She’ll take 100 degrees and humid any day over freezing. But today, sitting in the back of a poorly air-conditioned taxi in bumper-to-bumper traffic, her tanned legs sticking against the ripped black vinyl, the driver screaming in another language on the phone, the smell of his lunch (is it Indian food? onions?) permeating the backseat, she feels hot, bothered, and nauseous.
The ordinarily friendly doorman opening the door of 973 Park Avenue (deliciously air-conditioned, thank goodness, if only she had a moment to just sit on the marble bench in the lobby to cool off, but no . . .) where she and Isabel have sold a half dozen apartments over the past couple of years knows perfectly well who she is—and yet, oddly, this generally lovely middle-aged man with short silver hair ignores her.
“Thanks, Leon,” she says, “Oh, I nearly stuck to the taxicab, it was so hot!” she says, trying to get him to react. He stares at her. Oh, well, Kate tells herself, it couldn’t have anything to do with her. She gets into the elevator and takes it to the tenth floor, where her client, small, slender K. K. Pearlbinder, is waiting to discuss her fourish-million-dollar apartment one more time before officially putting it on the market.
K. K., the divorced stay-at-home mother of two small children, is in her thirties and on the receiving end of what was apparently a very generous settlement from her husband, an orthopedic surgeon who happens to be one of the official doctors for the Mets, and who gave her the co-op as a parting gift before exiting their marriage. It was K. K.’s mother, a friend of Elizabeth’s from their childhood days in Pittsburgh, who suggested she call Kate. When she greets Kate in the doorway this morning, K. K.’s wearing denim short shorts and a skimpy white tank top, her highlighted brown hair twisted into a low ponytail. Her feet are bare, her toenails ornamented in the chicest new color—silver gray (gorgeous for a dress, hideous for the toes, the Chase girls say). K. K.’s children are nowhere in sight, nor is their nanny, but there is in fact someone else in the entrance hall—a hunky, muscular thirtysomething in sweatpants and a basketball shirt, no shoes. He looks vaguely familiar, but Kate doesn’t know why.
“How are ya?” K. K. says, and as she and Kate have a seat at the kitchen table, the man nods at Kate, murmurs his name (Anthony), and then busies himself at the marble island in the center of this vast room, where he’s squeezing fresh orange juice for what is apparently a late breakfast.
“So where are your little angels?” Kate asks. She has her eyes on this man she assumes must be K. K.’s boyfriend, so enthusiastically crushing one orange after another directly into one of two crystal Tiffany wineglasses arranged on the marble. She knows she’s seen Anthony before, not once but numerous times, but she can’t figure out where.
“Oh, Blake and Taylor are with my parents and the nanny out in Sag Harbor for a couple of days,” K. K. tells her, and smiles—a smile seeming to say, What a relief, I sure need a break! “And next week they’ll be back in the city at a new summer dance program for two weeks, all day—so excited.”
“I actually kinda miss them,” Anthony says.
“Come on, you do not,” K. K. teases him. “Don’t lie to me, babe.”
Kate doesn’t understand why so many people have children and never seem to want them around.
Gazing idly around the kitchen, at the chandelier dripping glass overhead, at the beautiful zebra wood cabinets and the stainless steel Wolf stove that looks as if it’s never been used (and probably hasn’t been), Kate catches a glimpse of a man’s brimmed gray cap sitting next to a crystal bowl of bananas, and then it hits her, in that instant, where she’s seen Anthony before. The cap isn’t just an ordinary cap, it’s a doorman’s cap, and the reason she hadn’t been able to place this man named Anthony is because she’s never seen him without his uniform on! Oh, the scandal! K. K. Pearlbinder, Upper East Side mom and owner of a multimillion-dollar Park Avenue apartment, is sleeping with—in love with, too?—her doorman. The very man who’s paid to open the door for her as she approaches the building, to smile at her politely in the lobby, to address her as “Mrs. Pearlbinder,” to rush out to her taxi in the rain with an umbrella and carry her packages to the elevator.
“OJ?” Anthony is saying.
“Sorry?” Kate says.
“Fresh-squeezed,” Anthony says, and offers her a crystal wineglass after wiping it down first with a linen cloth and placing the other glass carefully in front of K. K.
“No, thank you, I have seltzer,” Kate says, and smiles. She pulls out her liter bottle of Vintage seltzer from her big silver Fendi bag (her mother bought one for each of the girls last week just because she thought it was the greatest bag—lightweight, goes with everything, perfect for summer!) and takes a sip. “So, K. K.,” she says, trying to focus now on getting K. K.’s apartment ready to go to market rather than worrying about what the other doormen must think, or people on the board, for that matter, seeing Anthony, after a dinner at Nobu, sauntering into the lobby with his tanned arm around K. K., only to reemerge the next morning in his crisp gray uniform with the white stripes down the sides, his cap covering his dark eyes. “Remind me of the renovations you did. Everything, right?” Kate says.
Throwing her arms across the table like Quinn on Glee when she gets cut from the Cheerios because she is pregnant, K. K. announces, “I hate this building more than you can possibly know! Honestly, you can’t imagine the people who I thought were my friends but turned out to be the biggest losers.”
“Oh, I can imagine,” Kate murmurs, and takes a peek at the yellow legal pad Anthony has just slid over in her direction. There’s a handwritten list of the renovations K. K. and her ex clearly invested a fortune in before their marriage took a dive: Poggenpohl kitchen with automatic cappuccino and espresso machines and a 124-bottle, thermoelectric wine cooler; one bedroom changed into a windowed, walk-in dressing room; all new Crestron system, new hardwood floors, new windows, Rainhead shower . . . On and on; there is not an inch of the apartment that hasn’t been redone.
“Wait, you can imagine? What do you mean?” K. K. is saying, and lifts her head to look at Kate.
“Well, I just—” Kate gestures toward Anthony, who’s standing behind K. K. and massaging her shoulders now. “K. K., I’m not saying I agree with them at all, but you can’t be shocked that they may be a little, I don’t know, taken aback—you live in a fancy Park Avenue co-op . . .”
“Taken aback because Anthony and I are a couple? ‘Taken aback’ is an understatement,” K. K. says. “You wouldn’t believe some of the icy looks I’ve gotten, not to mention the shitty things that have been whispered into the ears of the co-op board. And I mean vicious! One of my best
friends in the building is on the board, and I talked her into telling me what she’s been hearing these past three months or so since Anthony and I have been together. You’d think this was, I don’t know, Fargo!” K. K. says, naming perhaps the only small town she has ever heard of, thanks to the Coen brothers’ famous film.
Then she really begins to spiral.
“This is New York City—don’t these idiots have better things to do than pass judgment on me and my wonderful boyfriend? Who gives a shit if he didn’t go to college? So what if his father works as a security guard at MoMA? Do I care? The co-op board is insane.”
“Babe, don’t let them get to you,” Anthony is saying.
“K. K., let’s just get you out of this building so you don’t have to deal with it anymore, okay?” Kate says. “Maybe you can even move to the beach for the summer?”
“Your shoulders are so tight, you gotta relax, babe,” Anthony says, and kisses K. K.’s ear.
“Okay, K. K., let’s focus on getting your apartment on the market and you out of here, okay? When can I come in to do photographs and floor plans? I imagine it’s easier for me to do that while the girls aren’t here?” Kate says.
But K. K. doesn’t hear her. She is now in a total meltdown. Kate takes another sip of her seltzer.
“Just try and imagine what it’s like to live with these nosy, narrow-minded, judgmental morons,” K. K. says. “How dare they! I’ve got the money, I pay my mortgage and maintenance on time and don’t vacuum naked at four in the morning blasting Lady Gaga, so who the fuck does the board think they are?”
“Come on, chill, K. K.,” Anthony advises her. “Do you want me to make you some herbal tea or something?”
“No, I don’t want tea. You know what I want? I am going to hire a lawyer and sue the board,” K. K. says defiantly, rubbing her toes.
“Let’s not go there,” Kate says. “Listen, let me take care of selling the apartment, and you can start over somewhere totally different—I bet you’d love Tribeca or the West Village, even,” she says hopefully. Because she already suspects that if K. K. tries to buy in another building like this on the Upper East Side—where the board members and even the super of her co-op might be contacted by the boards in buildings where she wants to buy—well, let’s just say the Upper East Side is a very small town in New York.
“Whatever. If I could move out today, I would,” K. K. says. She has calmed down a bit, and takes a sip of her freshly squeezed juice.
“Not me, babe. This place is a palace,” Anthony proclaims, gesturing with a dramatic sweep of his arm.
And there you have it, Kate thinks to herself, as she gathers her seltzer and her Fendi bag, blows a kiss to K. K. and Anthony, and walks out the door.
As Kate strides past Leon the doorman on her way out, he hisses softly, “So how is the happy couple?”
Kate doesn’t respond, and walks out to find a taxi herself. Her phone rings, and she can’t find it in her bag, then notices she didn’t put the cap back on the seltzer all the way and that it’s fizzing all over her workbook and her Louis Vuitton makeup bag. Where is her phone?
“You know the Fiermans?” Isabel begins, when Kate finally finds her phone. “The ones who were so obsessed with having a Park Avenue address before their daughter’s bat mitzvah so that the invitations would say Park Avenue on the back of the envelope?”
“Oh yes,” Kate says, and has to laugh. “Only in New York—did you find them anything?”
“Well, nothing fabulous, clearly, but they’re so desperate, they’re taking a back apartment, and I mean back—as in facing walls on the second floor of a building, a two-bedroom, not even a classic six. With three kids!”
“They don’t care?” Kate says.
“They’re thrilled!” Isabel says. “Can you imagine? All she cares about is that the back of those hand-calligraphed invitations say 465 Park Avenue.”
“It’s one for the books,” Kate says. “Okay, I need to go find a taxi, I’m dripping. Talk to you later,” she says, and gets into a taxi, air-conditioned perfectly, thank goodness, because she can deal with only one meltdown on this steamy summer day.
Sitting in a Burger Heaven near Bloomingdale’s with her best friend Steven Bauer, Kate picks at his curly fries, and he sticks his fork in her Greek salad, having tired of his turkey club. She has been best friends with Steven since they were twelve years old, when he transferred to Horace Mann from a prep school in Greenwich with both legs in casts from a water-skiing accident that summer. His mother, Binnie Bauer, became a legend in the school (even written about years later in the senior yearbook) because she had all of Steven’s third- and fourth-floor classes in Tillinghast (the oldest building on the Horace Mann campus, filled with lovely high-ceilinged classrooms) moved down to the basement of the building, because Steven couldn’t possibly walk up, and it was too many flights for the gentleman who accompanied him to school to carry him.
Despite his broken legs, Steven became an instant hit at Horace Mann. All the girls ran to carry his backpack, fetch him a Coke out of the cafeteria vending machine, walk him to the car Binnie had pick him up every day because he couldn’t get on the school bus. He and Kate became best friends instantly. Years later, they went off to Penn together, living (by coincidence, or fate, you might say) two flights away from each other in the freshman dorm. By junior year, they were living in neighboring town houses on Pine Street—Steven’s window was literally perpendicular to Kate’s, and instead of calling her, he would often yell out the window to her or open his window and play one of her favorite songs to get her attention, like “Total Eclipse of the Heart” if they were depressed about breakups or “Pour Some Sugar on Me” if he wanted her to come out with him that night. They had one “hot night” together, as they called it—a long, long kiss to Meatloaf’s “I Would Do Anything for Love,” but that was it—they much preferred to be best friends.
Kate takes another French fry now and contemplates getting a milkshake.
“So Pippa is over?” she says.
“You know what,” Steven says, “I can’t be bothered. She was fine when it was casual, and I mean fine, not great, fine, she was fun. I don’t need her spending the morning with me, I barely want her sleeping in my bed all night, but it would be too awful to ask her to leave. Come nine a.m., I want her out!” He loosens his tie and fixes his suit jacket, which is slipping to the floor. “Oh, they’re all the same, they all turn into such stalkers. Whenever we have sex, the entire time she’s yelling ‘Oh my God’ and ‘It feels so good’ and then when she’s about to, you know, she screams in a sort of staccato machine-gun way ‘I love you, love you, love you . . .’ I feel like I’m in a bad porno movie every time we have sex. It’s like all I want to say is, ‘Would you mind shutting up for like two seconds so that I can pretend that I’m actually having sex with a girl who is not incredibly annoying?’ I mean, do girls think guys like this sort of behavior?”
Kate is now laughing hysterically. No one can make her laugh like Steven does. Her mom and sister always know when they are on the phone together because they say her whole voice changes. “At least you have a lineup of suitors,” she tells him now. “I’ve got no one.”
“First of all, Kate, that is absolutely not true—you refuse to go out with anyone—that Charlie Marcus guy, and Paul Frank’s cousin, who you decided not to see after all, just because you weren’t in the mood to meet someone new. There’s a lineup of guys who are dying to go out with you. But you choose not to because you’re too busy spending all your time watching old movies at your parents’ house and going to Atlantic Beach to sunbathe by your pool.”
He motions to the waitress to bring over another Coke.
“I need you to try and move on from Scott,” he says. “You know you’re getting nowhere with him. Surely your mother and sister tell you the same thing.”
“Everyone does,” she says,
“but I don’t know what to do—why is he like this?” she says, and starts to cry. “I mean, it’s been so many years, what is he waiting for?” Her tears are falling into her Greek salad, and she wipes her eyes with her hand. “I hate that I keep crying over him.”
“Oh, Katie,” Steven says. He is the only person who has ever called her Katie, and he only does it when they are alone together. “I don’t want to say this because it sounds like a cliché, but he has commitment issues. The guy fell in love with you the first night you met at Smoke’s. It isn’t that he doesn’t love you, he just needs to get his own life together and figure out who he is before he gets completely overwhelmed by you and all the Chase women. I’m sure it’s no surprise to you to hear that the women in your family are a lot to handle—any guy who chooses you is choosing a whole family. Scott will come back, I know that, but you need to use this time to get out there and be sure this is what you want. And anyway, you’ll look more attractive to him if you’re out there and happy, not moping around in your pink bathrobe and slippers.”
“I haven’t heard from him since he called me in April . . . so it doesn’t look like he’s coming back—this is the longest it’s ever been.”
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