Hot Property

by Michele Kleier

  “Wants it all but maybe doesn’t have the money to buy it? Do you think she’s maybe not for real?”

  “Well, I don’t know, she buys me lovely presents and she always comes in her white stretch limo—I know no one here uses limos anymore, but it seems fitting for her, she always seems so known and liked everywhere we go . . .”

  “Maybe she has an allowance from the count that enables her to buy gifts, but not the reserves to buy real estate. This Fritzie might have her on a short leash because, well, who knows why. And so she likes to look at all these apartments, just to convince herself that she has more freedom than she actually does.” Elizabeth hesitates. “But I could be wrong, of course. . . . Unfortunately, the person who would probably get the best read on the situation is Teddy, but we can’t really trust him anymore. He’s dealt with lots of enigmatic people and has a special—let’s call it affinity, for them.”

  “That’s because he’s an enigma himself,” says Tom, who’s joined them at the table now.

  “Mom,” Isabel says, “what’s going on with Teddy, anyway? Or have you stopped trying to figure him out?”

  “Well, we still don’t have much to go on, except that he’s really in with LEX.” Elizabeth shrugs.

  “Do you think he wants to go work for them?” Isabel asks.

  “Then he should go and work for them,” Tom says, and shakes his head.

  “I agree,” Elizabeth says. “But something’s keeping him from doing it, and that’s what’s driving me crazy.”

  “I’ll tell you what it is. After all the hard work he’s put into getting us Luxury Estates, maybe he wants to wait around until the announcement’s made and get all the glory and the business that’s to come.”

  “I can’t say I’d blame him,” Elizabeth agrees.

  “So then what, exactly, do you think he’s up to?” Isabel says.

  “Jonathan password-protected our computers so that he can’t look up our leads on clients and listings anymore. I don’t know what else we can do,” Tom says.

  “Anyway, enough of him,” Elizabeth says. “I just thought of something for the countess. You know my new listing, the condo in the Millennium Tower?”

  “101 West 67th?” Isabel knows it’s an exclusive on the fifty-fourth floor, with 360-degree views. “Yeah, it’s fabulous,” she says.

  “I think you should show it to your countess. Why don’t the three of us meet at the apartment next week? Let the countess see it. And let me meet her and see what I think of her.”

  “Perfect!” Isabel says, and, at that moment, Michael brings over breakfast and they all sit down to eat.

  Because Michael has to work on his lines for a call-back tomorrow at the Cherry Lane Theatre in the West Village, Isabel spends part of the afternoon—which turns out to be a perfect fall day, the leaves already turning a golden orangey brown—walking around the Central Park Reservoir with Dixie, whose playful romping is always such fun for her. Despite the beauty of the day, Isabel feels a tiny bit sad—all the Chase women do when fall comes; there is something about the end of summer, the change of season, that makes them nostalgic.

  On the way home, she stops for a quick latté at Yura on Madison, and then crosses over to the Corner Bookstore on the east side of the street with Dixie snuggled in her arms. All the Chases love the quaint, old-fashioned charm of the store and consider it “their” place—the bell rings when you open the door, they all have house accounts, and it’s the only spot in all of New York where Elizabeth cannot speak on the phone. On a small hand-painted sign on the door, in beautiful red script, it reads, “Cell Phones Are Not Permitted.”

  Isabel picks out a book of old movie stills for her father, and a gorgeous, lavishly illustrated volume on Coco Chanel for her mother. Like Elizabeth, both girls are believers in “no-special-occasion” presents; sometimes, Isabel thinks, those are the sweetest and most meaningful of all.

  Her apartment is getting dark when she returns home around five thirty; Kate is still not home, and it feels quiet. She must still be with Scott. Isabel calls just to make sure, and Kate tells her that they are having a snack at the bar at JG Melon, so not to wait for her to order Chinese, their usual Sunday-night dinner if they are not out with their parents or at the Chases’ home having Elizabeth’s chicken cutlets or Tom’s spaghetti with meatballs. Isabel can hear the happiness in Kate’s voice even in their twenty-second call.

  Later, Isabel orders in shrimp and garlic sauce and a wonton soup from Our Place on 79th, making sure there will be enough for Kate just in case she’s hungry when she gets home, then applies a Bliss oxygen mask to her face and gets in bed early to reread Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving, an all-time favorite she hasn’t read in years. In the background, her iPod is playing Billy Joel’s “She’s Got a Way”; he, too, is one of her all-time favorites. The whole family goes to his concerts every time he’s in New York, and they always get the best tickets because he also happens to have been a client of her mother’s years ago. The new books from the Corner Bookstore are on her nightstand, because even though she isn’t ready to open them, she loves the way books look arranged on a nightstand. There is nothing worse, she feels, than seeing an apartment that doesn’t look lived-in. Dixie snores beside her, and every now and then Isabel rubs her pink belly. The only good thing about Kate not being home is that she gets Dixie. When the two girls are home, they alternate whom she sleeps with. Maybe they should get another puppy, Isabel thinks as she looks at the clock—

  11:32. Still no Kate. She puts on her Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Cream—a tradition passed down from Elizabeth’s mother; hers sits in a beautiful jade glass jar by her bed—turns off her lamp, and goes to sleep, thinking how happy she is that Kate and Scott are together again.

  First thing at the office a few days later, Isabel gets a text message confirming the information she’s been so diligently seeking. Yes, Kimby Bennett delivered her twins at Lenox Hill Hospital at the end of August. It’s taken Isabel a while to track down and verify this information: the babies, both boys, are named Blaine and Maximilian. They were a little underweight at birth, not uncommon for twins, of course, and spent some extra time in the neonatal unit, also very common. Now Kimby and her sons are back in the same apartment on East 83rd Street that Isabel knows the Bennetts are eager to leave; it was too small for a family of four, and it is definitely going to be too small for a family of six.

  Isabel has a couple of hours before her next appointment, where she’s meeting a new seller about to list what sounds like a darling mint-condition pied-à-terre at 125 East 74th Street, a beautiful little prewar on a tree-lined street. The owner, a sixtyish woman who has decided she wants to leave New York for San Francisco, where her son and three grandchildren live, has wooed Isabel with talk of a wood-burning fireplace, two bedrooms, and a Juliet balcony off the living room. Isabel decides to use the time until she heads over there to shop for a gift for the Bennett babies. She hasn’t heard from them since that doomed showing so thoroughly sabotaged by the seller back in April, but Isabel’s sources have also confirmed that the Bennetts haven’t found a new place yet. Which means that they are still looking.

  She tells her mother her plan, and calls Kate, who is on her way to show on East End. “Can you come shopping with me when you’re finished?” she asks her sister.

  “Would I ever say no to shopping?” Kate teases, and they arrange to meet at Promises on Second Avenue, their favorite place to buy baby gifts because they will monogram and hand-paint just about everything. They pick out two charmingly old-fashioned wooden rockers for the Bennett baby boys and a pair of pretty flowered hairbands for the girls, so they won’t feel left out when a gift arrives for their little brothers. (Isabel spends over three hundred dollars, but her parents always taught them to be generous with presents, especially when it comes to clients.)

  After the mini shopping spree, Kate jumps in a cab to get to
her next appointment—a wreck off Fifth and 67th—and Isabel walks to 74th. She’s arranged for the gifts to be sent directly to the Bennetts. When the Bennetts get in touch to thank her—and Isabel feels quite certain that they will thank her, how could they not?—she’ll mention that she would love to help them in their apartment search, and if they ever think they might be in need of her services, she hopes they’ll give her a call.

  Michael phones excitedly now from the set of Law & Order SVU. The makeup artist is on a break and he has a little downtime, so he’s able to call Isabel with the good news: he got the part at the Cherry Lane! “I think this job is a sign,” he tells her. “Even though it’s a tiny part, not much bigger than this one today on Law & Order, I still think it’s a really strong sign about the future.” And Isabel can’t help but think that he’s right, and even if he isn’t, she loves that he is so damn optimistic!

  The apartment on 74th Street is a huge disappointment. Not that it doesn’t have great bones—quite the contrary, it has amazing bones—the disappointment is that the seller thinks the apartment is in wonderful shape and should sell accordingly, when all Isabel sees is peeling paint, an ancient kitchen, a bathroom that hasn’t been touched in decades.

  “It’s also, I’m sure you know, the location,” Alyssa Ostrow says as she follows Isabel around the apartment, practically stepping on her heels in her enthusiasm. “The location is perfect—near the museums, the park, shopping—everything a person could possibly want. And then of course there’s the balcony—” She gestures to the tiny outdoor space that would definitely be an asset were it not cluttered with empty planters and a bag of soil that’s been ripped open, its contents strewn everywhere.

  “Yes, Alyssa, the location is perfect,” Isabel agrees, “but I have to say it needs quite a bit of work. We can’t price this at a ‘mint’ price.”

  “You mean a little paint job and a some freshening in the kitchen and bath? I would hardly call that ‘quite a bit of work,’ as you say.”

  “The kitchen,” Isabel says evenly, “everyone is going to gut. The bathrooms, too.” Isabel is impressed with her own conviction—so like Elizabeth, she thinks proudly.

  “A gut?” Alyssa seems shocked to hear this. She scurries into the kitchen, with Isabel just behind her, and rummages around in the cupboard. Isabel is puzzled until the bottle of Johnnie Walker Red comes out, and the ice is tinkling in the glass. Despite the fact that it’s not even noon yet, Alyssa Ostrow apparently feels the need to pour herself a stiff one. “Can I get you a drink?” she asks.

  Isabel shakes her head no, and tugs the straps of her black Chanel bag over her shoulder. “Why don’t you think about what I’ve said,” she suggests. “I really think we need to lower the price, or you could do some minor renovations—I have an amazing team that could do it for you quickly. But you’d need to skim-coat and paint the walls, you need to replace things that are falling apart, new tiles on the floor—I just don’t think it makes sense. The price is the issue. Oh, and you have to clean off your balcony—it’s a great selling point, but you can hardly tell it’s there.” She takes out her business card and leaves it near an overflowing ashtray on the table; in fact there seem to be overflowing ashtrays everywhere in the apartment. In addition to all its other woes, the place reeks of cigarette smoke, an odor that, Isabel knows, is extremely difficult to eliminate and a major turnoff for buyers. One of Kate’s best friends from Horace Mann—Ben Meier—virtually stole an apartment in Carnegie Hill because not only did the apartment reek of smoke through and through but the seller sat in her chair in the kitchen at every showing, leaning over her Formica table like she was about to tell a big secret, her wrinkled face looking even more pruney in contrast to the bright yellow laminated wallpaper, sucking each cigarette like it was a piece of chocolate, licking her lips and saying how she couldn’t wait to move to Florida to golf. Ben, desperate to live in a prewar in Carnegie Hill (he grew up in the rental building at 1085 Park) was a closet real estate broker, spending lunches at his finance desk perusing and redoing floor plans (Kate nicknamed him Frankie Floorplan). This apartment was the one for him. It was in a Rosario Candela building (the best of the best), the proportion of the rooms was incredible and grand, the ceilings were close to ten feet, and everyone else walked in and walked right back out. Not Ben. He got it, and then he bought it.

  Isabel stops for a second now to say, “Thank you, Alyssa, speak to you later!” and then thinks to herself, Ben is actually very good-looking, hysterically funny, and wickedly smart (albeit a bit of a hypochondriac, à la Woody Allen). She makes a note to herself to ask Kate if he is still single; she thinks she has a girl for him.

  Out of the apartment, finally! Isabel doesn’t bother waiting for the elevator, but takes the stairs down to the lobby and then hurries out into the October sunshine. What a relief to be in fresh air!

  As she walks back to the office, she thinks about utterly deluded sellers like Alyssa.

  Isabel’s thoughts are interrupted by her cell. “Hi, Kate,” she says to her sister. “The place on 67th is a disaster? Well, let me tell you about the apartment I just saw—” Isabel has a call waiting. “Wait, I’ll call you back, okay?” she says, before answering the second call.

  “Isabel?” says a quivering female voice.

  “Yes,” Isabel answers. She doesn’t immediately recognize the voice and didn’t look at the number when it rang.

  “Isabel, it’s Alex! Alex Fein.”

  “Alex,” says Isabel. She is not happy to hear her voice, not at all. “How is everything?” she wills herself to say.

  “Terrible!” Alex says plaintively. “Totally terrible! You won’t believe what I’ve had to endure.”

  “What happened?” Isabel asks her. “Did the deal fall through?”

  “Fall through?” Alex is practically screeching. “Isabel, you have no idea!”

  “What happened, Alex?”

  “Well, you know how much I loved, loved, loved the apartment,” Alex says. “But there was just one little thing—”

  “Yes?” Isabel says. She remembers just how picky Alex was, and how this apartment had been, in her words, absolutely perfect.

  “Well, when Brad and I were on vacation in Aix-en-Provence, I found this amazing suite of painted eighteenth-century furniture. An armoire, a bureau, two nightstands, two bergères, and a gorgeous desk. I’d never seen anything like them outside of a museum. And Brad bought them for me as an anniversary gift.”

  “Sounds beautiful,” Isabel says, waiting for the point of the call.

  “It is!” Alex wails. “But the master suite in the new apartment wasn’t quite big enough to accommodate all of it, and I really didn’t want to split the pieces up, they’re just so stunning together. So I thought I would have the bedroom enlarged just a little bit. Which meant some work on the hallway, of course. And as long as we were doing that, it seemed to make sense to add some built-ins, as well, and to reconfigure the closets. Then we decided the master bath really needed some alteration. The colors were all wrong for the new furniture.”

  Which was not going to be in the same room anyway, thinks Isabel.

  “So I found the architect and the contractor, and everything was perfect, until I discovered that the building has summer work rules and so this job, instead of taking just a few months, was going to drag on for close to two years. I’ve already sold my place, and guess what, I’m pregnant! I can’t afford to have my life on hold for two years, Isabel, I canNOT!” Alex says, suddenly sounding tearful. Isabel imagines her stamping her foot for punctuation.

  “What an ordeal,” Isabel says. She knows the building on Fifth—and knows all about its draconian rules, especially those governing renovation. She would never have let Alex buy there without first making sure she understood just what these rules would mean if she ever wanted to have any work done on the apartment.

  “Oh, Alex,” she
says. “How horrendous. Your broker didn’t tell you about the work rules in that building? Anyone who knows anything about that building knows that the work rules are horrific. I would never have let you buy there without telling you that. You poor thing.”

  “Oh, Isabel, this is such a mess. I never should have done this, you never would have had me in this situation. An unbelievable ordeal! And it’s not over yet. My place sold in a heartbeat, and it’s already in contract. So now what am I going to do? Brad’s mother says we can stay with her. She’s got a huge ten at 983 Park, but the truth is”—here Alex lowers her voice—“that woman hates me and always has. The feeling’s mutual, clearly, I mean who in their right mind likes their mother-in-law? There’s no way in hell I’m staying with her! No! But the baby’s due in February, that’s only four months away. I’ve got to get an apartment before then,” she whines, and Isabel again imagines Alex Fein stamping her skinny foot.

  “Do you want me to help you find one?”

  “Could you?” Alex says, her voice suddenly meek and pleading.

  Isabel is silent for a moment before she replies, just to make poor Alex Fein twitch. Oh how she would love to say, I’d sooner see you living in a tiny postwar than help a vile, whiny, disloyal client like you! But Isabel is not Elizabeth’s daughter for nothing, and she understands completely that, as delicious a moment as this well-deserved revenge might be, it’s simply not worth the many possible repercussions. To say nothing of a nice commission and teaching Alex a good lesson—never leave a Chase!

  “Of course I can help you,” Isabel tells her. “I’ll go through all the listings and see what I can find that might be right for you—and won’t need an ounce of work, of course.”

  “Oh God, thank you, Isabel,” Alex says, the relief in her voice palpable. “This really means a lot to me. I know you must have been upset when I suddenly turned around and bought from someone else.”