“I’ll tell you what’s criminal. What’s criminal is what happened to your daughter. Humiliated like that in front of the whole world.”
Lucinda Wells glowered at a crooked painting in the living room of the apartment she was showing to Peggy Gimmel. She straightened it, then crossed the room in two long strides and shoved a small pile of old magazines into a drawer.
“I mean, arresting your son-in-law so publicly. Why?” She frowned at a sagging sofa pillow before plumping it with two swift jabs of her left fist.
Three weeks had passed since the arrest. Barnett had a platoon of lawyers working on his case. He was banned from the office, so he was home all the time, which probably explained why Lily was gracing her parents with her presence lately—not that she needed to travel all the way across town to avoid someone in that apartment of hers, you could avoid the entire New York Philharmonic in there if you wanted to.
“The prosecutor felt he needed to make a statement,” she said, parroting several of the articles on the incident, including a four-page abomination in New York magazine that included snide descriptions and unflattering photographs of Lily that made her out to be a Prada-obsessed Marie Antoinette. The article even had the gall to mention her “humble beginnings in a dreary West Side rental apartment,” which infuriated Peggy even more than the implication that her daughter deserved the guillotine. The prosecutor, named Jay DiGregorio (who Monroe, infuriatingly, kept calling Joe DiMaggio), was considering a run for mayor, and a public arrest of a Park Avenue ganof could only help his chances.
“If Barnett Grantham isn’t safe from the government, who is?” Lucinda asked. “How do you like the view?”
“Not bad,” Peggy said, and felt a twinge of pleasure at the way Lucinda’s lipsticked smile slackened at her lack of enthusiasm. In fact the view from the nineteenth floor was superb. The Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and RCA Building (or whatever they were calling it these days) presented themselves in the distance like old friends assembled for a party in her honor. So much had changed, it wouldn’t have surprised her one bit to find them hidden by taller, pushier buildings, or simply torn down to make way for something newer. But there they were, just as she remembered them. Fellow survivors.
They were touring the fourth apartment of the day, or was it the fifth? They all began to blur together, these boxy apartments in cold postwar buildings with long corridors that smelled like shoe boxes. White walls without moldings, parquet floors, narrow kitchens without windows. She suspected Lucinda was losing patience with her, but she’d collect a fancy commission from selling the apartment on West End, which had “gone,” as Lucinda put it, in one day for more than two million dollars. Peggy had to place a steadying hand on the window ledge at the thought of such a sum.
“It’s an estate,” Lucinda said as Peggy continued to admire the view.
Of course it was—death was as pungent as mothballs. Peggy had paid so many shiva calls to the apartments of the recently deceased; death was like lingering perfume that soured a bit each day. The worn furniture, the dogeared books, the clothes hanging in closets and jammed into drawers, the dented pans and unopened cans and chipped glasses in the kitchen, the ticking clocks, the limp towels and the dripping faucets that left lurid blue stains in porcelain sinks—all of these called out for the one who was gone.
“I like this one best,” Peggy said, glancing around the living room, trying to overlook the tired upholstery and heavy, faded drapes, the worn carpet, happy grandchildren aging awkwardly from one framed photograph to the next.
“I thought you might,” Lucinda said, arching her tweezered eyebrows in a self-satisfied way that made Peggy want to change her mind or perhaps slap her.
“It’s fourteen hundred square feet, which is humongous for postwar, BTW. Both bathrooms have windows, which you don’t see a lot, either. The kitchen isn’t bad—you could spruce it up if you wanted to, Nu-Face the cabinets, some granite, terra cotta for the floor would look nice, but you don’t have to.”
“Oh, thank goodness.”
Lucinda looked at her uncertainly. “A fresh coat of paint, hang a few pictures, not that you’ll actually be spending much time here.”
“I have a few good years left.”
“No, no, no, I didn’t mean—What I meant to say was, you’ll be at Lincoln Center every night. Listen, my mother’s just like you, she’s out every night. She’d die to live this close to Lincoln Center.”
The thought of anyone bearing maternal responsibility for Lucinda Wells gave her pause.
“How much did you say this costs?” she finally said. Like asking the price of a coat at Loehmann’s.
“Nine seventy-five. We’ll offer nine forty-five and split the difference. Common charges and taxes together are twelve hundred and change, which is nothing. Did I mention this is a condo? No board approval, a blessing, let me tell you. I had a turn-down last week, nice young couple, money up the wazoo, they both work, traders on Wall Street—or was it M&A? Anyway, you wouldn’t believe the money they throw at people down there. I chose the wrong profession, trust me, you kill yourself in real estate and for what? But the board wanted applicants who can manage on one salary, you see, and you can understand their position, what if she decides to have a kid and then stays home to raise it? That leaves one income, and no matter how much he pulls down, one income is more vulnerable than two—I mean, what if he gets canned?”
“Who?”
“I was heartbroken, devastated, truly devastated, and you can imagine how I hated having to break the news to them. I can have you in here in a month.”
It took Peggy a few moments to leap from Lucinda’s broken heart to her own impending move. A month? But there was so much to do. And where would everything go? She’d need a month just to decide what to take and what to…sell? Give away? Throw out? She looked at Lucinda, dressed in a severely tailored black pantsuit that fit her like tight armor, barely rippling when she moved, which was constantly. Her hair was pulled back in an angry fist of a bun. I can have you in here in a month. If only she could just go to bed one night at 218 West End Avenue, surrounded by a lifetime’s random accumulation, and wake up the next morning in this shiny new place, everything neatly stowed away, but less encumbered, freer, sunlight washing the perfectly smooth white walls, the way she’d always imagined heaven, one endless room, sunny and white, with no flaking paint or cracked moldings. Moving would be a kind of death and then a kind of rebirth, but without the pain and dementia and incontinence. God’s favorites die in their sleep—how many times had she heard those words at services lately? Why couldn’t God’s favorites move in their sleep, too?
“Mrs. Gimmel?”
She blinked and Lucinda Wells came back into focus, Elijah in Prada with keys to the promised land. She wondered, not for the first time, if Lucinda was Jewish. Usually she could spot an MOT from a mile away—Jewdar, her friend Belle called it. They all had it. Even today, when Members of the Tribe had names like Felicity and Clark and Tiffany and, God help them, Christie, she could usually tell. Lily might think she was fooling people with her silky accent and WASPy friends and that name, Grantham, like some town in Connecticut with a village green, and maybe the goyim didn’t notice, but a Jew could always spot a fellow traveler.
Although she was having trouble with Lucinda Wells. Somehow she transcended religion, or perhaps her religion was real estate, the great interfaith equalizer. Not that it mattered, of course. But it would be nice to know.
“I forget, where did you say you grew up?” Peggy asked.
“I didn’t say. I grew up on Long Island.”
“Ah,” Peggy said.
“Oyster Bay, actually.”
“Oh.” She’d have to ask Belle about Oyster Bay, but a town named for a shellfish didn’t sound promising. “I’d like to bring my husband here.”
“Of course. I could show it to him tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll check his schedule,” Peggy said with a touch of sarcasm that was lost on Lucinda Wells. Tomorrow morning? At seventy-three she was used to a slower pace. You called the doctor on Monday, maybe he could fit you in the following Thursday. Out of fresh oranges? A slow walk down to Fairway, an exploratory squeeze of twenty or so candidates before settling on the perfect half-dozen, a quick check in cheeses to see what they were sampling, a pitted olive from one of the big vats when no one was looking, a leisurely inspection of the deli counter, then the slow walk back home. Half a day for six nice Florida oranges, but who was complaining? Now it seemed she spent more time selecting a brisket than an apartment. Peggy glanced out the window. There they were—Empire State, Chrysler, RCA. Even the Citibank building with that ridiculous slanted top like some kind of appliance was comforting after all these years. Amazing what you could get used to.
On the way out Peggy paused at a console table in the foyer. A large photograph showed an old, large-breasted woman seated on a sofa she recognized from the living room, flanked by a family—her daughter and son-in-law, three grandchildren. They all smiled stiffly in their dresses and suits—she could practically smell the holiday chicken soup or roasting brisket. She was momentarily deflated—what was the point of it all? To live for eternity in a color photograph, first on the console table of your forlorn home, gawked over by nosy apartment shoppers, then on an end table in your daughter’s never-used living room in a big house out in the suburbs, still later, if you were lucky, in the home of a sentimental grandchild, and then, finally, inevitably, in a drawer in a house in Oyster Bay, under old diplomas and class pictures, pawed over every decade or so by strangers carrying a few of your genes but with names like Madison and Alexandra and Cody, who would wonder, for the moment it took them to turn to the next picture or document, Who is that fat old woman on the sagging brocade sofa?
And then it hit her. These stiffly smiling people would be the recipients of her $975,000! She studied their faces more closely, particularly the parents of the young children. Their eyes gleamed with avarice.
“Let’s offer nine twenty-five,” she said, turning to Lucinda Wells. “Not a penny more.”
Barnett had spent the past weeks sequestered in his study, gazing at his computer screen, only occasionally taking or making calls. Once or twice a day he’d take long walks with no apparent purpose. His phone seemed to ring less often each day, Lily thought, which felt ominous. Her own phone rang less often as well. She’d begged off several events they had planned to attend, to the ill-disguised relief of the hostesses. And new invitations had dried up altogether, except for the ones to charity events: These would continue to arrive as long as they could afford to buy a table (which they couldn’t, but no one knew that yet).
Several times each day she entered the study to inquire, with nervous tact, into the status of their situation. “I’m working on it,” Barnett would growl without looking up from the computer monitor. Wouldn’t he make faster progress by getting out and seeing people, asking questions? He shot her a pitying look. Ever heard of e-mail, Lily? How about these nifty new machines they call faxes?
Other than these brief and increasingly hostile exchanges about their “situation,” as they’d begun to refer to Barnett’s impending trial and the family’s possible homelessness, their interactions had dwindled to mumbled greetings at the breakfast table and chaste good-night kisses in bed. While finding herself an overnight pariah in New York society was unexpectedly liberating, she was growing more and more anxious about the future. How long before the money ran out? Barnett seemed completely divorced from the new realities of their lives. She was the one who put their Southampton house on the market (they found a renter almost immediately). She was the one who arranged a line of credit with their bank. And it was she who arranged for refunds from the various charities to which they’d pledged what now seemed like fantastic sums.
“We could hire a detective,” she suggested. “Time is against us, Barnett. I’m not sure you’re fully aware of the extent of our monthly—” She almost said “nut,” but the word felt ludicrously insufficient for what amounted to basically a flood, a torrent of outgoing funds. In her mind a stream of money cascaded from all twenty-two windows of their apartment, showering Park Avenue with dollar bills like confetti that quickly filled up the canyon between buildings. “Nanny alone costs a thousand dollars a week, which is insane, given the age of the children and the fact that—Will you please stop tapping on the keyboard, Barnett? This is serious.”
“And so is this,” he said imperiously, but at least he’d stopped typing.
She considered him a moment. The scandal had taken its toll. Though he showered every morning, his hair looked greasy and unkempt. He’d acquired dark, veiny crescents under his eyes, and scowling had etched seams that ran south from the corners of his mouth. He’d been eating less but his face looked, if anything, more jowly, his body almost doughy. There were men who could get away with grooming lapses, the handsome WASPs they knew in Southampton whose hair, when they neglected to brush it after a swim at the club, looked tousled rather than messy, men on whom a five o’clock shadow looked insouciant but never seedy. Barnett was a WASP whose appeal lay not in congenital handsomeness but in a kind of willed perfection. It was part of what had drawn them together, she’d always thought, their shared effort at self-creation.
A memory: Shortly after they were married, while vacationing in Barbados, Barnett insisted they rent a small sailboat, just the two of them. When she prudently mentioned his lack of sailing experience, he looked puzzled and a tad put off, as if the ability to tack and come-about had been part of his genetic endowment, along with a strong jawline and the Protestant work ethic. The excursion was a terrifying disaster, the boat almost capsizing a dozen times, the boom nearly taking off their heads as it whipsawed back and forth. Finally a launch was sent by the resort to tow them in. Her legs buckled when she staggered onto shore, but Barnett leapt off the boat like Hernando Cortés laying claim to Barbados for Greenwich, Connecticut. “That was fun,” he said jauntily, and she was about to challenge him—indeed, she nearly grabbed an oar to pummel him—when she realized there was no point: Barnett had already transformed what was patently a near-death experience for both of them into “fun.”
Which made his inability to find the bright side in his current situation inauspicious to say the least.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she suggested, still standing in front of his desk. “It’ll be fun.”
“Fun?”
“We’ll go to the park.” She almost mentioned the towhee nest. She’d been to the Rambles every day since she’d discovered it. Any day now the three chicks, all beak and eyes, were going to hop off the edge of the nest and, after a terrifying plunge, begin to fly.
“First you want me to work harder, apparently, and then you want me to take a walk. I’m getting mixed signals here, Lily.” He pressed an index finger to his temple, as if bleeding a radiator. “I have enough on my mind.”
“I want to help, that’s all.”
His face softened. “Come here, sweetheart,” he said gently. He clicked a few keys and took one last, longing glance at the screen as she circled the desk. She placed a consoling hand on his arm. Perhaps some quick afternoon sex would restore his color, not to mention his resolve.
“At least my eyesight isn’t going,” he said as he brushed the front of her blouse. “You’ve got a stain, right here.”
She withdrew her hand. “I’m going out. Don’t forget, you promised William you’d take him to baseball practice today.”
“I did?” His eyes drifted back to the computer screen.
“Four o’clock. He knows the place.”
Guy had almost forgotten how to knot a tie. Back in the New Jersey veal farm, he’d been too insignificant to have to wear one, and now, as CEO of Positano Software, he was the dress code and ties were banished from the office, even when calling on a major client—no one, not even a C-level executive on Park Avenue, trusted a tech guy in a tie. But Rosemary had insisted that he wear one to the co-op board interview and after some debate he’d agreed. He had two: a butter-yellow one that screamed “eighties investment banker wannabe” and a striped one from the Gap that whimpered “loser.” He went with loser and, after several false starts, managed to fashion a passably tight knot.
“I feel like I’m choking,” he told Rosemary. “Who said beware of any enterprise that requires new clothes?”
“Thoreau. I wonder what he’d say about a board interview to buy a two-point-two-million-dollar co-op.”
Just weeks had passed since their bid on the apartment was accepted. Lucinda Wells had been eager to close the deal quickly, preparing an exhaustive “board package” that included their tax returns, statements from their bank, brokerage accounts, letters of reference. It was like applying to college, only Columbia had never cared how much money he made and how much he’d managed to save. Becoming CEO of a public company had made him feel exposed, even vulnerable—suddenly his salary and benefits and options were public knowledge, instantly available to any voyeur with an Internet connection. Worse, he had to watch what he said about the company, lest he be seen by regulators as making “forward-looking statements.” Imagine having laws to prevent people from making “forward-looking statements.” Where would America be without the forward-looking? (Guy was a Democrat and would remain one, no matter how high Positano’s stock rose. But sometimes the government went too far, he was beginning to think.) If going public had made him feel exposed, applying to live in a co-op was a humiliating striptease performed not for mere strangers but prospective neighbors. At least investors didn’t care what you wore or whether you smoked or if you had a dog or how many times a month you screwed your wife.
Lucinda had called both of them every day that week, often several times a day, with advice and strategy for the interview. Every possible objection the board might have was raised in advance and dealt with. His salary was on the low side—not unusual for a tech CEO, whose compensation was primarily stock, but a major concern to co-op board members, whose overriding interest was that all residents make their monthly maintenance payments. Lucinda’s advice: Tell them that the board, the company’s board, would be reviewing his compensation in a month, and that he had begun a regular plan of share divestiture. Neither happened to be true, of course. Thorough Lucinda had done her own credit check on Guy and Rosemary and come up with quite a bit of credit-card debt, fifteen thousand dollars’ worth, divided among several cards, money he’d needed to get the company started. Lucinda’s advice: Be honest (for a change). Regale them with tales of buying computers and office equipment and supplies with personal credit. “You’re Steve Jobs and the pathetically tiny junior four you’re trying to escape from is the garage in which an empire was founded. They ought to put a plaque on the door.”
And so on. Guy wondered if Lucinda ever slept, her feverish brain working 24/7 to prepare innocent clients for the horrors of the Inquisition.
He decided halfway through the preparation process that he hated her. She tried mightily to adopt a commiserating tone with them when discussing the board interview, and she obviously wanted the sale to go through, but in the real-estate war in which they were now engaged, she was clearly a collaborator, working both sides. She might hedge conversations with “I know this is ridiculous…” or “This is absurd, however…” But she quite obviously bought into the stupid rules and “concerns” of these boards who lorded their power over hardworking people like him, young men (well, youngish men) whose entrepreneurial companies were growing a shitload faster than their arthritic old banks and insurance companies. (Young women, too: Even in his thoughts he was evolving, thanks to Rosemary.) It’s a game, Lucinda liked to say, just play by the rules until you’re in. But it was more than a game to her, he felt certain, much more than a game.
Barnett was with William at his baseball practice in Central Park, and Nanny was picking up Sophie from a friend’s place on East End Avenue. That left only Consuelo in the apartment; she spent afternoons in her sunless slot of a room behind the kitchen, emerging only to begin dinner preparation at around five. Restless, Lily began walking through the apartment. They’d hired a well-known decorator when they’d bought it sixteen years earlier, and it hadn’t changed significantly since then. Lily had added a few chairs, a painting or two, family photographs in every room, but the apartment seemed impervious to her. In a lavishly illustrated feature on the apartment in Architectural Digest, their decorator had described the process of doing the Grantham home as a collaborative undertaking with her clients, but she’d been as collaborative as Napoleon, ignoring or scoffing at every one of Lily’s suggestions.
She passed by the study, her least favorite room, with its shelves of books-by-the-yard and myriad photographs of Barnett’s relatives wielding fishing rods, racquets, golf clubs, and cocktails, but on second thought decided to have a look. It was so rarely unoccupied these days. The computer monitor was black, and there was a disturbing absence of papers on the desk. She would have liked some indication that Barnett was mounting a vigorous defense. She picked up an envelope, which turned out to be a solicitation for an investment newsletter, and as she replaced it her hand brushed the mouse. A faint crackling sound, and then the monitor lit up, startling her. Like the children, she was under orders not to touch Barnett’s computer. Consuelo wasn’t even allowed to dust it, as if one inadvertent key stroke would erase all their wealth.
Well, there wasn’t any wealth to erase, as it turned out.
The browser went right to some sort of financial site. On the left of the screen was a long list of stock symbols. She was dismayed to recognize several tech stocks—you couldn’t buy a candy bar for what some of these losers were selling for. She opened Barnett’s mailbox next and skimmed his in-box for evidence that he was working on clearing himself. It was surprisingly empty, and the few e-mails she read were solicitations for still more investment advice. She clicked back to the browser and opened up a list of the sites he’d most recently visited. The site at the top of the list, the one, apparently, he’d been visiting when she’d reminded him it was time to take William to his practice, was something called Womanimations.com. She opened it.
After a few seconds’ delay the page loaded. She read a brief warning about adult-oriented content and then clicked on the words “I Agree,” thereby attesting to her adult status and desire to view sexually explicit material. This took her to a new page consisting of a menu without any sort of illustration, a commendably spare, even elegant design, she had to admit. She began to read the dozen or so choices: Anal, Dildos, Fucking…The list, helpfully, was alphabetically arranged.
What the hell, she thought, and selected “Dildoes.” She was instantly greeted with a page of small photographs, at the top of which was a banner ad for something called Premium Escorts. Each of the photographs showed a woman, either alone or with another woman or, in surprisingly few cases, with a man. She clicked on one at random and, in a new window, it filled the screen instantly—God bless the cable modem. An unfashionably voluptuous platinum blonde crouched on all fours, glancing back at another woman, this one not quite as blond, who was inserting a dildo the size of a rolling pin into her. Lily leaned closer to the screen to discern which orifice the dildo was penetrating as it moved back and forth, back and forth, at least five or six times a second. She quickly realized that the same action (and the recipient’s blissful, mouth-distended reaction) was being repeated over and over. This wasn’t a video but an animation of a photograph. Thus, the name of the site: Wom-animations. Clever. Well, cleverish. And boring, though in an admittedly hypnotic way. How could anyone (how could Barnett?) watch this sordid little scene for more than a second or two? Or was repetitiveness perhaps the point, distilling an entire erotic scenario into one infinitely repeated action, eschewing any sort of foreplay and follow-up and, by relentlessly focusing on the act itself, freezing time at the very instant of satisfaction—wasn’t this, really, what sexual participants, or at least men, longed for?
Lily considered this and a variety of related issues as the two women continued to thrust and react, thrust and react. For example, was Barnett into dildos? And if so, why hadn’t he ever mentioned it? (Well, thank God he hadn’t, but still.) Or did he patronize the anal page? Or the fucking section? Shouldn’t she know this about the man she’d been sleeping with (albeit it rather conventionally) for seventeen years? Thrust and react. Thrust and react. And what in the world did this have to do with finding the missing money and restoring his reputation and their security?
Nothing, obviously. She re-opened the list of Barnett’s recently visited sites and explored one, and then another, and then another. All were sex sites, protected by stern but ineffectual warnings, and all began with lists of very targeted options spelled out in clinical detail: Interracial/Anal, for example, or Lesbian/Threesomes. She supposed it must be comforting to learn that you were not alone in your desire to watch a video of a man sliding his penis between the balloony breasts of a bouffanted transvestite (Tit Fucking/She-Men). Or that others shared your passion for watching the amazingly elastic mouth of a sad-eyed woman accommodate two elephantine penises simultaneously (Oral/Two Cocks). Did anyone (did Barnett?) want to do these things, or was observing them on a computer screen gratification enough?
She found herself disgusted and fascinated. And quickly bored. After fifteen minutes exploring the sites Barnett had recently visited, she could have sworn the same woman showed up in all of them (teased platinum hair, turgid red lips, a figure that took the concept of hourglass to a cartoonish level), doing pretty much the same thing in an inexhaustible number of positions in animations, videos, and still photographs. Each page was festooned with banners advertising escort services and “toys” and the occasional offer for discount plane tickets or low-interest credit cards. She and her family were about to be thrown off Park Avenue while platinum-haired sluts with tits the size of the medicine ball D’Arcy once threw at her abs twice a week were getting rich as Croesus selling banner ads to airlines and banks.
She logged off and sat there for a few minutes. Barnett had been doing nothing to advance his case since he’d been dragged from the Temple of Dendur. All those hours at his desk, when she’d assumed he been tracking down the missing funds, had been spent instead trolling the Internet for sex. Their money was raining down on Park Avenue like confetti and he was passively jerking off to a multimillionaire with 44D tits who could painlessly give birth to a Lexus. She felt furious and hurt and afraid…
…and (she could hardly believe it herself) free. In a few short weeks all the ties to everything that was familiar in her life had been cut free, save those that connected her to the children. Her entire life was up for grabs, and now, with no money, their friends deserting them like rats, their reputations obliterated, her husband addicted to online sex, she was free to conduct her life in an entirely new way—or not, as she pleased.
She felt light-headed, giddy with freedom, and wanted to do something right away to acknowledge her new status. But what? A jolt of panic shot through her: Perhaps she wasn’t free, just trapped—what was that line from the Janis Joplin song, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”? Perhaps she’d buy a Janis Joplin CD and blast it through the apartment’s state-of-the-art sound system. Picturing Barnett’s reaction, not to mention the kids’ and Nanny’s, gave her momentary pleasure, but playing “Bobby McGee” for the first time in three decades wasn’t exactly storming the Bastille. Perhaps she’d buy a dildo, a big, ugly one the size of a rolling pin. Well, perhaps not. She considered logging onto the Internet again to find sex sites that turned her on…but what would such sites contain? Naked men? Couples? Lesbians? The truth was, on those rare occasions when she surfed the Internet, she searched for sites advertising homes for sale in places like Paris or Santa Barbara or Santorini. Real estate was her porn. How unfair that men could meet their needs so easily—and, with a cable modem, so quickly. She could run away for a while, just disappear, but she’d have to take the children with her, so in the end that wouldn’t be running away at all. She checked her watch. It wasn’t yet six o’clock. She picked up the phone, dialed information, and asked for the number of the Broadway Nut Shoppe. When a recording offered to call the number automatically, she happily pressed “one” to activate the service, never mind the seventy-five-cent fee, which counted as an extravagance, given their current circumstances. She was free.