“This candy man, he has a wested interest in keeping your husband on the run,” Mohammed observed one morning as she hung a fresh batch of newly bathed twenties on the line to dry. Increasingly, Mohammed relaxed in an old patio chair in the garage, smoking cigarette after cigarette while she scanned, printed, cut, washed, and dried. He never seemed pleased to see her, but he’d stopped complaining, treating her like a frequent visitor to be endured, if not enjoyed—a mother-in-law, perhaps. “If you prove that your husband is innocent, he will come back and reclaim you.”
“Like dry cleaning.”
“Do you want him to come back?”
She avoided asking herself that question, and God knows Larry hadn’t gone near it. Barnett had become like a serious illness in remission; no one knew if or when he’d be back, so it seemed best just to avoid the topic and get on with life.
“I want justice,” she said after a long pause, but that sounded pompous and hollow. “Well, I want our money back, our things. As for Barnett…”
“Do you love this candy man?”
“He’s sweet,” she said.
“Yes, but—Oh, I see, a joke.” He offered a strained approximation of a smile.
“I like to suck on him.”
“Good grief, you—Oh, yes, I see, another joke. Perhaps you are awoiding the issue I raised in my question with witticisms. Do you love the candy man?”
“You ask the tough ones, Mohammed.”
“We are here, printing money, for which we could go to jail for a long time. Asking tough questions is easy, when you think of it.”
“At this stage in my life I don’t ask tough questions,” she said. “I just do what I have to do.”
“But you could do nothing about this investigation and your husband will stay in Europe and you will be with the candy man indefinitely.”
“I would miss the…miss Larry very much if I couldn’t see him. Is that love?”
“It is funny when you think of it.” He drew on yet another Marlboro, his lean body distending for the few seconds in which he held the smoke. “Our spouses are both abroad. Here I am, risking prison to have money to send for my wife. Your husband ran away to awoid prison. Maybe they should get together to wait and see what happens.”
She smiled at the image of Barnett and—
“What is your wife’s name?”
“Kassim. She is called Kassie by most people.”
“I hope I get to meet her one day.”
“Oh, you will, do not doubt it.” He smiled shyly at this first admission of an ongoing relationship between them. Otherwise, each time she left him, there was no acknowledgment on his part that she’d be returning. He was like a bad boyfriend in that respect. “I have a photograph.”
He handed her a picture from his wallet. Kassie was a small woman with dark skin, long, straight black hair, big eyes, and a broad smile. She sat, legs crossed at the ankles, on a long sofa surrounded by four boys of varying sizes who stared unsmiling at the camera, like a phalanx of bodyguards.
“You have a beautiful family, Mohammed.”
He took back the photo and studied it, as if to confirm her comment.
“I hope I am doing the right thing for them,” he said.
“Making a better life?” she said, omitting the fact that he was doing so by breaking a big-ass federal law. “How can that be wrong?”
“Yesterday there was a stabbing at the local high school. In Guyana the schools are poor, but the students wear uniforms and no one takes a knife to anyone else. Sometimes I wonder if they are better off where they are.”
What a sad state of affairs, when immigrants from Third World countries consider their children safer back home.
“When I wake up at night and can’t sleep, I sit on the front steps and smoke a cigarette and worry that my sons will hate me for leaving them. Children do not concern themselves with making a better life. They only want you with them. They do not take the long perspective. And then I think, Will they hate me more when they get here? Will they think it has all been worth it, or will they miss their old life and their old friends? How do you know what is the right thing to do? And Kassie, what must she be going through? At night, in fact all day long, my body desires her, it is like an ache in the joints, what I imagine it feels like to have arthritis in every joint and muscle.”
Lily smiled sympathetically.
“It is true, my body aches everywhere from missing her.” He held his hands in front of him and observed them clinically. “My fingers, my arms…it is like I am not getting some important nutrient or wegetable.”
“It won’t be long before you see them.”
“Do you think she feels the same way?” he said, still studying his fingers.
“I’m sure she does.”
He looked at her, brow furrowed. The thought of a wife living a thousand miles away whose body ached with lust wasn’t, perhaps, comforting.
“I think I’m done for the day,” she said. After flicking off the scanner and shutting down the computer, she removed her apron and hung it on its customary nail, as if she’d just transferred the last batch of cookies to a rack. “Let me ask you something, Mohammed. All the checks drawn against my husband’s firm’s accounts were written while we were out of town.”
“Ah, you are onto that again. It doesn’t look good for the candy man.”
“Why would that be, Mohammed? Why were the checks written when we were out of town?”
“Because it would be harder to determine that it was your husband depositing them.”
“Yes, but Barnett traveled all the time, three or four times a month at least. The checks were written when we were both away, which was much less frequent. Why would someone care if I was out of town?”
“Could it be coincidence?”
She shook her head. “There were twenty-six checks, written over a period of years. It’s as if someone was tracking our movements.”
“Perhaps your husband did cash those checks, and wanted to be in a foreign place to deposit them. Holidays with you were a perfect cover.”
“He didn’t cash those checks.”
Mohammed looked at her as if she had said something very stupid and checked his watch. “I must start driving now. The queue at International Awivals will be very long if don’t hurry. Let me pay you now before I forget.”
She followed him into his house, where he disappeared upstairs, returning quickly with a small stack of twenty-dollar bills.
“Remember,” he said solemnly, as he always did, “it is wery important that you don’t spend it all in one place.”
She smiled as she took the bills.
“My father gave the same advice when he paid my allowance.”
“It’s a fake,” Rosemary said. Lloyd peered at her as if she’d morphed into a faux Chippendale footstool from the Bombay Company. “Everything she owns is fake. Even her husband was a fake, a fake heterosexual. He was running a scam, along with his dealer. They persuaded Esme to buy truckloads of lamps and furniture and paintings, paying top dollar for cheap reproductions. They pocketed the difference.”
“What about the cover?” Lloyd asked. “The Gallé was our cover.”
They were in Lloyd’s twelve-by-twelve-foot studio in Greenwich Village. He’d been renting for a decade, waiting for the real-estate market’s widely anticipated crash before buying. Each year for five years running he had managed to put away ten thousand dollars toward a down payment, no small accomplishment for an art appraiser, and each year the cost of an entry-level apartment rose even faster than his savings, first by twenty thousand, then thirty, and so on. It was as if some cruel law of physics (or optics) was in effect: The closer he got to the finish line, the faster it receded into the distance.
“I think Esme is flat broke. Her apartment is way too big to take care of by herself, but I’m pretty sure she can’t afford to hire help.”
“We’re two days from going to press,” Lloyd said. “I fought like hell to get the cover. Decorative never gets the cover. It’s always furniture or paintings or even”—he paused to shake his head before uttering the awful truth—“jewelry. I mean, jewelry on the cover? It’s absurd. We’re the stepchild of the auction business—nobody understands us.”
“Lloyd, this poor woman is destitute. She was counting on us to bail her out.”
“What are we going to do?” he wailed, propping his head in his hands.
“I suppose we could help her find somewhere else to live.” She couldn’t help surveying Lloyd’s apartment, which could easily fit into Esme’s foyer. Lloyd’s lanky frame seemed built to the wrong scale for this particular doll’s house.
“About the cover!”
“Oh.”
“I thought it was tough during the nineties, when pimply yuppies fancied themselves collectors just because they could afford to snort coke off Meissen plates. At least the money was good. Now no one has that kind of money, dot-com money, and suddenly everything real is fake.” He unleashed a sigh that sent a visible shudder down the length of his body. “I must have put on twenty pounds wining and dining Esme, and for what?”
His self-absorption and overall lack of perspective were appalling, though hardly surprising.
“I’m going to help Esme work things out,” she said. “She can’t go on living there.”
“I suppose that Lalique vase could work on the cover. But I just know those sharks in Furniture are going to take advantage of this situation to slap some fucking commode on the cover.”
The growing pressure in her breasts signaled that the twins were hungry. She’d decanted a few pints of breast milk that morning, but they didn’t always take a bottle from a sitter. She was finding it harder to wean them than she’d expected, and much as she’d looked forward to the independence it would bring, she was at least partly relieved that their first small step toward independence was delayed. In the silence that followed Lloyd’s commode outburst she felt certain she could hear the boys wailing from uptown like distant sirens. Bring milk! Bring milk! Bring milk! Her breasts began to throb. She imagined a daisy chain of babies up and down the length of Manhattan, all alert to her lactating breasts, wailing their hunger and anger. Bring milk!
“Where are you going?” Lloyd wailed when she stood up.
“Home.”
“You’re leaving me?”
“Don’t be melodramatic.” She slipped on her jacket. “I’m not even on the payroll.” She traversed his apartment in two modest strides.
“Speaking of which, when exactly are you planning on coming back?”
“Soon,” she said, heading for the door.
“Have you weaned those boys, Rosemary?” He gave her breasts a squinting, pursed-lipped appraisal. “You haven’t, have you? You’ve still got tits like Pam Anderson. I knew it! How will I manage to put out the winter catalog without you? And we have the February auction to think about.”
Guy stood in the center of the new apartment’s great room and felt small and vulnerable, a leaking dinghy adrift on a sea of soon-to-be-stripped-and-polyurethaned parquet. He’d give anything to have the walls put back up, to feel enclosed and secure. Furniture and window treatments would help, of course. But would the space ever feel cozy? Could a room of such immense proportions ever feel cozy? Oh, how he longed for cozy.
“We’re getting there,” Victor Ozeri said as he entered the room. Lost in a fantasy of reappearing walls, Guy hadn’t heard him enter the apartment. “This is some fucking room we’ve made for you.” Ozeri smiled paternally at the vast emptiness, a reverse alchemist who created voids where there had been architecture.
Ozeri’s voice sounded small and muted, as if it had traveled a great distance to reach him. Carpets and upholstery, Guy reassured himself. Carpets and upholstery and lots of big, comfy pillows.
“You’ll be moved in by Christmas,” Ozeri said. “Lock, stock, and barrel.” He clapped his hand and Guy feared the ceiling would collapse on top of them. It wasn’t right, tampering with seventy-year-old architecture. Ozeri looked starkly defined against the endless white walls, recently skim-coated at a cost of forty-five thousands dollars and change, the plaster like virgin snow. Ozeri was as vivid as raw meat against the blizzard of smooth white plaster. They’d repaint the walls a soft color, perhaps a pastel. Yes, a pastel, creamy yellow or peach. They’d hang pictures, lots of pictures. Pastel paint and pictures. Pastel paint and pictures, plus carpets and upholstery and lots of big, comfy pillows.
“You don’t look well, my friend. Perhaps the paint fumes?” Ozeri crossed the room and opened a window.
The sudden infusion of fresh air and ambient street noise was in fact refreshing. Perhaps that was all that it was, paint fumes interfering with his ability to fully appreciate—tolerate—what hundreds of thousands of dollars had done to the apartment. He reached into his pants pocket and took out a crumpled sheet of paper.
“I have a punch list to go over with you.”
Ozeri took the list from Guy, gave it the shortest of glances, as if it were a modest restaurant check, and said, “Isn’t it early in the project for a punch list?”
Ozeri was one of those blessed people with a knack for intimidating, browbeating, and even humiliating his employers in just such a way as to make them more, not less, solicitous of him. Somehow, his grumpy condescension caused the Park Avenue titans who engaged his services to bow and scrape to stay in his good graces. Successful auto mechanics and the best-tipped building superintendents had the same talent.
“I’d like to clear these things up,” Guy said, mustering his full authority. “In the kitchen, for example…” He headed toward the room in question and was disheartened by the absence of footsteps behind him. “Hello? I want to show you something in the kitchen!”
Guy thought he heard a sigh as Ozeri crossed the great room in no great hurry.
“I couldn’t help noticing that there’s only one wire in this opening,” Guy said, pointing to a hole in the wall near the entrance to the kitchen that would, one day that year, if Ozeri was to be trusted, be a light switch.
“Yes, it’s a switch for the overhead light.”
“What about the under-the-counter lights?”
Ozeri frowned, knitting his eyebrows into a single dark thatch. “Who said anything about under-the-counter lights?”
“They’re in the plans,” Guy said, though he wasn’t sure this was true. He was sure of nothing anymore: his job, his company, his sexual prowess, under-the-counter lighting. He and Rosemary had certainly discussed them with the lighting designer their architect had recommended, but had they actually been specified in the plans?
“And the sconces over the dining area,” Guy said. “We wanted to be able to turn them on and off from the entrance.”
“Why?” Ozeri frowned and took two giant steps from the site of the future light switch to the site of the future dining area. “There, that is all that is involved. Two steps from the door to the closest sconce, on which we will put a switch. Not too difficult.”
“We want to be able to control all the lighting from here.”
“Then we’ll have to reopen the walls to run the wires. I will have to call back the electrician for a full day at least. Then the plasterer and then the painter. If that’s what you want…”
The issue, of course, was money. Someone would pay, and if the past months were any guide, he would be that someone. Guy had taken Ozeri’s standard contract to his six-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer, who had managed to fatten the document from a straightforward six pages of boilerplate to forty-five densely worded pages crammed with contingency clauses and warranty statements and holdback provisions, none of which had, to date, done Guy a bit of good. A simpler, more accurate, and far cheaper contract could have contained just one line: The contractor always wins.
“We’ll check the specs,” he said.
“Of course. If they clearly indicate that the switches go here, by the door…” Guy felt a rumbling of defeat making its way southward toward his bowels. Unfortunately, following his urinary desecration of the wallpaper in the maid’s bathroom, which had led, inevitably, to the decision to renovate it, there was no longer a working toilet in the apartment.
“Okay,” he said, consulting the punch list. “Now, I wanted to ask you about the dining-room door. The way I see it, if it swings open, into the dining room, it will hit the radiator cover.”
Ozeri traipsed through the opening that would one day contain a swinging door.
“I think you are right. We will have to move the door two more inches to the right. Let’s hope we don’t touch the supporting steel in this riser, or we won’t be able to do that without bringing down the entire building.”
Ozeri grinned ghoulishly, but Guy felt certain that he had already calculated in his mind not only what he’d charge to move the door but also his fee for rebuilding all of 218 West End Avenue, should the structural steel give way. For a contractor, at least, there was no such thing as a bad day.