One Fifth Avenue

  “Bad weather, eh, Fritz?” Schiffer said.

  “It’s only going to get worse.”

  James stepped outside and stood under the awning. He looked up the street. Nothing. No taxis at all.

  Schiffer Diamond came out behind him. “Where are you going?” she asked.

  James jumped. “Chelsea?” he asked.

  “Me, too. Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”

  “No, I—”

  “Don’t be silly. The car’s free. And it’s pouring.” Fritz came out and opened the door. Schiffer Diamond slid across the backseat.

  James looked at Fritz. What the hell, he thought, and got in.

  “Two stops,” she said to the driver. “Where are you going?” She turned to James.

  “I, uh, don’t know exactly.” He fumbled in his jeans pocket for the slip of paper on which he’d written the address. “Industria Super Studios?”

  “I’m going to the same place,” she said. “One stop, then,” she informed the driver. She reached into her bag and pulled out an iPhone. James sat stiffly beside her; luckily, there was a console between them so it wasn’t as uncomfortable as it might have been. Outside, the rain was coming down in buckets, and there was a rumble of thunder. This is nice, James thought. Imagine never having to worry about getting a taxi. Or taking the subway.

  “Horrible weather, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s so wet for August. I don’t remember it being this rainy in the summer. I remember ninety-degree heat. And snow at Christmas.”

  “Really?” James said. “It doesn’t usually snow until January now.”

  “I guess I have a romantic memory of New York.”

  “We haven’t had snow in years,” James said. “Global warming.” I sound like a putz, he thought.

  She smiled at him, and James wondered if she was one of those actresses who seduced every man. He remembered a story about a journalist friend, a real regular guy, who had been seduced by a famous movie star during an interview.

  “You’re Mindy Gooch’s husband, right?” she asked.

  “James,” he said. She clearly wasn’t going to introduce herself, knowing, obviously, there was no need.

  She nodded. “Your wife is…”

  “The head of the board. For the building.”

  “She writes that blog,” Schiffer said.

  “Do you read it?”

  “It’s very touching,” Schiffer said.

  “Really?” James rubbed his chin in annoyance. Even here, in an SUV with a movie star going to a photo shoot, it was still about his wife. “I try not to read it,” he said primly.

  “Ah.” Schiffer nodded. James had no idea what the nod meant, and for a few blocks, they rode in stiff silence. Then Schiffer brought the topic back to his wife. “She wasn’t the head of the board when I moved in. It was Enid Merle then. The building was different. It wasn’t so…quiet.”

  James winced at Enid’s name. “Enid,” he said.

  “She’s a wonderful character, isn’t she? I adore her.”

  “I don’t really know her,” James said carefully, caught in the middle of betraying his wife and alienating a movie star.

  “But you must know her nephew Philip Oakland,” Schiffer insisted. There she went again, she thought, bringing up Philip’s name, digging for information. “Aren’t you a novelist as well?” she asked.

  “We’re different. He’s much more…commercial. He writes screenplays. And I’m more…literary,” James said.

  “Meaning you sell five thousand copies,” Schiffer said. James was crushed but tried not to show it. “Please,” she said, touching his arm. “I was kidding. It’s my bad sense of humor. I’m sure you’re a wonderful writer.”

  James didn’t know whether to agree or disagree.

  “Don’t take anything I say seriously. I never do,” she said.

  The car stopped at a red light. It was his turn to come up with a conversational gambit, but James couldn’t think of one.

  “What’s happening with Mrs. Houghton’s apartment?” she asked.

  “Oh,” he said, relieved. “It’s been sold.”

  “Really? That was quick, wasn’t it?”

  “The board meeting is this week. My wife says they’re as good as approved. She likes them. They’re supposedly a regular couple. With millions of dollars, of course,” he added.

  “How boring,” Schiffer said.

  The car arrived at the destination. There was another awkward moment as they stood waiting for the elevator. “Are you working on a movie?” James asked.

  “TV show,” she said. “I never thought I’d do TV. But you look around at your peers and think, Is that how I want to end up? With the plastic surgery and the adoptions and the crazy tell-all books that no one really wants to read? Or else with the dull husband who cheats.”

  “I’m sure it’s difficult,” James said.

  “I like to work. I stopped for a while, and I missed it.”

  They got into the elevator. “Do you shoot the TV show here?” he inquired politely.

  “I’m here for a photo shoot. For the cover of one of those over-forty magazines.”

  “Don’t you get nervous?” James said.

  “I just pretend I’m someone else. That’s the secret to all this.” The elevator door opened, and she got out.

  An hour later, James, having submitted his face to the basting and flouring of makeup, sat on a stool in front of a blue roll of paper, his face stiffened in a death mask of a smile.

  “You are famous author, no?” asked the photographer, who was French and, although a good ten years older than James, in possession of a full head of hair, as well as a wife thirty years his junior, according to the makeup artist.

  “No,” James said between gritted teeth.

  “You will be soon, eh?” said the photographer. “Otherwise your publisher wouldn’t pay for me.” He put down his camera and called to the makeup artist, who was hovering on the side. “He is so stiff. Like a corpse. I cannot take a picture of a corpse,” he said to James, who smiled uncomfortably. “We must do something. Anita will make you relax.” The makeup artist came up behind James and put her hands on his shoulders. “I’m fine,” James said as the young woman dug her fingers into his back. “I’m married. Really. My wife wouldn’t like it.”

  “I don’t see your wife here, do you?” Anita asked.

  “No, but she—”

  “Shhhhh.”

  “I can see you are not used to the attention of beautiful ladies,” said the photographer. “You will learn. When you are famous, you will have the women all over you.”

  “I don’t think so,” James said.

  The photographer and the makeup artist began laughing. Then it seemed that everyone in the studio was laughing. James reddened. He suddenly felt eight years old. He was playing on the Little League team at the neighborhood baseball diamond and had let the ball roll through his legs for the third time in a row. “C’mon, buddy,” the coach said to James as he was laughed off the field. “It’s all about picturization. You got to picture yourself a winner. Then you can be one.” James sat on the bench for the rest of the game with his rheumy eyes and his runny nose (he had hay fever) and tried to “picturize” himself hitting a home run. But all he saw was that ball rolling between his legs again and again, and his father asking, “How’d it go, son?” and James replying, “Not so good.” “Again?” “That’s right, Dad, not so good.” Even when he was eight, it was obvious to him that he was never going to be more than Jimmy Gooch, the kid who didn’t quite fit in.

  James looked up. The photographer was hidden behind his camera. He clicked off a shot. “That’s very good, James,” he said. “You look sad. Soulful.”

  Do I? James thought. Maybe he wasn’t so bad at this famous-author business after all.

  That evening, Schiffer knocked on Philip’s door again, hoping to catch him at home. When he didn’t answer, she tried Enid. “Philip?” Enid called out.

  “It’
s Schiffer.”

  “I was wondering when you’d come to see me,” Enid said, opening the door.

  “I have no excuse.”

  “Perhaps you thought I was dead,” Enid said.

  Schiffer smiled. “I’m sure Philip would have told me.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “Only in the elevator.”

  “That’s a shame. You haven’t been to dinner?”

  “No,” Schiffer said.

  “It’s that damn girl,” Enid said. “I knew this was going to happen. He hired some little twit to be his researcher, and now he’s sleeping with her.”

  “Ah.” Schiffer nodded. For a moment, she was taken aback. So Billy had been right after all. She shrugged, trying not to show her disappointment. “Philip will never change.”

  “You never know,” Enid said. “Something might hit him over the head.”

  “I doubt it,” Schiffer said. “I’m sure she finds him fascinating. That’s the difference between girls and women: Girls find men fascinating. Women know better.”

  “You thought Philip was fascinating once,” Enid said.

  “I still do,” Schiffer said, not wanting to hurt Enid’s feelings. “Just not in the same way.” She quickly changed the subject. “I heard a new couple is moving into Mrs. Houghton’s apartment.”

  Enid sighed. “That’s right. And I’m not very happy about it. It’s all Billy Litchfield’s fault.”

  “But Billy is so sweet.”

  “He’s caused a great deal of trouble in the building. He was the one who found this couple and introduced them to Mindy Gooch. I wanted the bottom floor for Philip. But Mindy wouldn’t hear of it. She called a special meeting of the board to push them through. She’d rather have strangers in the building. I saw her in the lobby, and I said, ‘Mindy, I know what you’re up to, changing the meeting,’ and she said, ‘Enid, you were late three times last year with your maintenance payments.’

  “She has something against Philip,” Enid continued. “Because Philip is successful, and her own husband is not.”

  “So nothing has changed.”

  “Not a bit,” Enid said. “Isn’t it wonderful? But you’ve changed. You’ve come back.”

  A few days later, Mindy was in her home office, looking through the Rices’ paperwork. One of the pluses of being the head of the board of a building was access to the financial information of every resident who had moved into the building in the last ten years. The building required applicants to pay 50 percent of the asking price in cash; it also required they have an equivalent amount left over in bank accounts, stocks, retirement funds, and other assets; basically, an applicant had to be worth the full price of the apartment. The rules had been different when Mindy and James had moved in. Applicants had needed only 25 percent of the asking price and merely had to prove that they had liquid assets to cover the cost of the maintenance fee for five years. But Mindy had pushed through a referendum for change. There were, she argued, too many layabout characters in the building, the unseemly residue from the eighties when the building had been filled with rock-and-rollers and actors and models and fashion types and people who had known Andy Warhol, and it was the premier party building in the city. During Mindy’s first year as head of the board, two of these residents went bankrupt, another died of a heroin overdose, and yet another committed suicide while her five-year-old son was asleep. She’d been a sometime model and girlfriend to a famous drummer who had married someone else and moved to Connecticut, abandoning the girlfriend and child in a two-bedroom apartment where she couldn’t afford the maintenance. She’d taken sleeping pills and put a dry-cleaning bag over her head, Roberto reported.

  “A building is only as good as its residents,” Mindy had said in what she considered her famous address to the board. “If our building has a bad reputation, we all suffer. The value of our apartments suffers. No one wants to live in a building with police and ambulances rushing in and out.”

  “Our residents are creative types with interesting lives,” Enid had countered.

  “There are children living in this building. Overdoses and suicides are not ‘interesting,’” Mindy said, glaring at her.

  “Perhaps you’d be happier in a building on the Upper East Side. It’s all doctors, lawyers, and bankers up there. I hear they never die,” Enid said.

  In the end, Enid was defeated by a vote of five to one.

  “We clearly have very different values,” Mindy said.

  “Clearly.” Enid nodded.

  Enid was nearly forty years older than Mindy. So how was it that Enid always made Mindy feel like she was the old lady?

  Shortly thereafter, Enid had retired from the board. In her place, Mindy installed Mark Vaily, a sweet gay man from the Midwest who was a set designer and had a life partner of fifteen years and a beautiful little Hispanic girl adopted from Texas. Everyone in the building agreed that Mark was lovely, and most important, he always agreed with Mindy.

  The meeting with the Rices would include Mindy, Mark, and a woman named Grace Waggins, who had been on the board for twenty years, worked at the New York Public Library, and lived a quiet life in a one-bedroom apartment with two toy poodles. Grace was one of those types who never changed but only aged and had no apparent expectations or ambitions other than the wish that her life should remain the same.

  At seven o’clock, Mark and Grace came to Mindy’s apartment for a pre-meeting. “The bottom line is, they’re going to pay cash,” Mindy said. “They’re financially sound. They’re worth about forty million dollars…”

  “And they’re how old?” Grace asked.

  “Young. Early thirties.”

  “I always hoped Julia Roberts would buy the apartment. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have Julia Roberts here?”

  “Even Julia Roberts probably doesn’t have twenty million dollars cash to buy an apartment,” Mark said.

  “It’s a shame, isn’t it?”

  “Actresses are not good tenants,” Mindy said. “Look at Schiffer Diamond. She left her apartment empty for years. It caused a huge mouse problem. No,” she went on, shaking her head. “We need a nice, stable couple who will live in the building for twenty years. We don’t want any more actors or socialites or someone who will attract attention. It was bad enough when Mrs. Houghton died. The last thing we need are paparazzi camped outside the building.”

  The Rices arrived at seven-thirty. Mindy brought them into the living room, where Mark and Grace were sitting stiffly on the couch. Mindy had brought out two wooden chairs and motioned for the Rices to sit. Paul was more attractive than Mindy had imagined he’d be. He was sexy, with the kind of dark curly hair that reminded Mindy of a young Cat Stevens. Mindy distributed small bottles of water and perched between Mark and Grace. “Shall we begin?” she said formally.

  Annalisa took Paul’s hand. She and Paul had made several visits to the apartment with the real estate agent, Brenda Lish, and Paul was as enamored of the apartment as she was. Their future lay in the hands of these three odd people staring at them with blank, slightly hostile faces, but Annalisa was not afraid. She’d survived rigorous job interviews, had appeared in debates on TV, and had even met the president.

  “What’s your typical day like?” Mindy asked.

  Annalisa glanced at Paul and smiled. “Paul gets up early and goes to work. We’re trying to start a family. So I’m hoping to be busy with a baby soon.”

  “What if the baby cries all night?” Grace asked. She was childless herself, and while she adored children, the reality of them made her nervous.

  “I hope he—or she—won’t,” Annalisa said, trying to make a joke. “But we’d have a nanny. And a baby nurse at first.”

  “There’s certainly enough room in that apartment for a baby nurse,” Grace said, nodding agreeably.

  “Yes,” Annalisa said. “And Paul needs his sleep as well.”

  “What do you do in the evenings?” Mindy said.

  “We’re very quiet. Paul
gets home at about nine, and we either go out to dinner or we eat something at home and go to bed. Paul has to be up at six in the morning.”

  “Do you have a lot of friends?” Mark asked.

  “No,” Paul said. He was about to say “We don’t like a lot of people,” but Annalisa squeezed his hand. “We don’t do a lot of socializing. Except on the weekends. Sometimes we go away.”

  “One has to get out of the city,” Mark agreed.

  “Do you have any hobbies we should know about?” Grace asked. “Play any musical instruments? You should know that there’s a rule in the building—no playing of musical instruments after eleven P. M.”

  Annalisa smiled. “That rule must be left over from the jazz era. And One Fifth was built a little before that fun was over—Was it in 1927? The architect was…” She paused as if thinking, although she knew the answer by rote. “Harvey Wiley Corbett,” she continued. “His firm also designed much of Rockefeller Center. He was considered a visionary, although his plans for elevated sidewalks in midtown didn’t work out.”

  “I’m impressed,” Grace said. “I thought I was the only one who knew the building’s history.”

  “Paul and I love this building,” Annalisa said. “We want to do everything we can to maintain the historical integrity of the apartment.”

  “Well,” Mindy said, looking from Grace to Mark, “I think we’re all in agreement.” Mark and Grace nodded. Mindy stood up and held out her hand. “Welcome to One Fifth,” she said.

  “That was easy. It was so easy, wasn’t it?” Annalisa said to Paul in the Town Car, riding back to the hotel.

  “How could they reject us?” Paul said. “Did you see them? They’re freaks.”

  “They seemed perfectly nice to me.”