With Monroe at her side, clutching her arm like a terrified child, Peggy made slow but grateful progress along Broadway. The early evening was unusually warm, the light at once fading and clarifying. The city hesitated between day and night, as if unable to decide between equally compelling alternatives. Monroe had chosen a good moment to step out, after so many months shut away in the apartment.
“We should think about getting a place for Lily and the children,” she said. “I don’t think I can take so many people living under one roof much longer. Lily mentioned getting her own place, though I can’t imagine how she’d pay for it.”
“I like that Larry fellow,” was Monroe’s typically irrelevant response, but at least he was talking. “A good head on his shoulders.”
Monroe had become strangely obsessed with Larry Adler since Sophie’s dreadful birthday dinner, which had roused him from his post-coronary funk. She wondered, without daring to explore the idea out to its fullest margins, whether seeing Larry Adler caused Monroe to imagine that it was 1979 again, if his mind had convinced his body that the past decades had never happened and he was a frisky fifty-year-old again. Stranger things had happened, if you believed what you saw on the television—people waking up from ten-year comas as fresh as daisies, adults suddenly remembering that Uncle Seymour had molested their five-year-old selves before murdering half the village and burying the bodies by the abandoned railroad tracks, where, wouldn’t you know it, the skeletons are dug up fifty years later, just where they were supposed to be. Next thing she knew Monroe would be sidling over to her side of the bed at night, demanding action.
“We have the money from selling the apartment,” she said. “We could buy her a small two-bedroom in the neighborhood.”
“Marvin likes to say it’s easier to run a chain of fifty stores than a single location,” Monroe said.
Marvin was Marvin Feldbush, who used to run a national chain of women’s clothing stores and had been one of Monroe’s biggest customers. Marvin had been dead for at least a decade, the clothing stores were out of business, and the idea that Monroe was still imagining that Larry Adler would expand the Broadway Nut Shoppe into a franchise operation was almost as disturbing as the idea that Monroe might be thinking of reinstating sexual relations.
“I think ‘Broadway’ has a lot of cachet in Middle America—what do you think, Peg?”
As they continued their slow progress along that very boulevard, the fading sun just visible at the western end of cross streets, where it resisted the final plunge into the undeserving New Jersey horizon, she could only agree.
“They should see Broadway now, out there in America,” she said. “Larry would sell out a thousand stores.”
“I’m losing Positano Software,” Guy told Rosemary on the elevator heading up to their new apartment, as he still thought of it, despite having owned it for five hellish months. As if to punctuate the thought, Patrick, ensconced next to his brother in the double stroller, which they’d only just managed to squeeze into the elevator, decided to stretch his tiny legs, his surprisingly hard little shoe finding the vulnerable mid-portion of Guy’s right shin. The whole world was against him, even his infant son.
“There has to be someone with money,” Rosemary said.
“Maybe that old lady with the art glass will lend me twenty million dollars.”
“If her collection had been genuine, she could have.” The thought seemed to depress Rosemary as much as the prospect of losing Positano brought him down.
Inside the apartment they performed what had become a twice-weekly ritual: the inspection.
“The granite is in,” Rosemary said cheerfully in the kitchen, always their first stop. “Oh no.” She ran her hand along an all-too-obvious seam that cut across the longest, most visible portion of the countertop.
Guy looked at it, then said, “Our kitchen consultant specified that the seam go next to the stove top, where it wouldn’t be noticed. I’ll talk to Ozeri.”
Guy knew that he’d end up either learning to live with the disfiguring seam or paying for a new slab of granite—somehow he’d managed to found a public company that employed, even in its reduced state, 227 people, but he hadn’t managed to win a single argument with Victor Ozeri. Because of the glacial pace of the renovation, they’d had to move to a temporary rental in their current building. Ozeri, not surprisingly, had refused to deduct the three-thousand-dollar monthly rent from his contractor’s fee.
“Maybe it won’t be so bad,” Rosemary said as they entered the dining room, where the opening in the ceiling for a planned lighting fixture struck him as egregiously off center.
“So bad? We paid twenty grand for the granite and it looks like shit,” he said.
“No, I mean having Positano owned by someone else. You’ve been under so much pressure, it might be better pleasing one owner rather than a thousand shareholders.”
“I don’t want to work for someone else. Besides, they’ll throw me out on my ass the day the deal is done. It’s been Aquinas’s MO in ten other deals.”
“Then you’ll start something else. You’ll still have all those shares…”
The twins were flailing inside the double stroller, which rocked violently; from the back it looked as though some sort of powerful, feral beast, not two infant boys, had been strapped into it. He hadn’t told Rosemary about having to put up two-thirds of his dwindling net worth against the apartment loan. Was he afraid of appearing like a failure in front of her? And if that were the case, if even Rosie needed him to be a big success, at least in his mind, then was anyone on his side?
As if heralding an answer to the question, his cell phone chortled. The LCD screen read Ventnor Place.
“My man,” Derek Ventnor greeted him.
“Your man,” Guy replied.
“We hit an important milestone today, Guy. Our five thousandth subscriber.”
“It’s a horny country. Warmest congratulations.”
“That’s cumulative subscribers—we have some attrition, everyone does.”
“Is there something I can do for you?”
In the master bedroom, he saw Rosemary add “crack in crown molding” to her punch list. They’d had every bit of molding replaced, at a cost that now amounted to approximately thirty-five thousand shares of Positano, give or take a few hundred, so even a hairline fracture was unacceptable; 227 employees had toiled for something like six and a half hours for that molding.
“I notice that our stock was up fifteen percent today.”
Our stock. Leave it to Ventnor to further cheapen, simply by uttering its name, a stock that had already lost more than ninety-five percent of its value.
“No big deal,” Guy said. “It’s thinly traded.”
“There’s no news? Because if this baby is on the way up, I’m buying more. I can bring my average cost down to two bucks if I buy just—”
“Nothing’s happening.” A lie, of course. Rumors of a takeover had sent the price up two days in a row. The announcement was expected tomorrow.
Rosemary was scribbling furiously in the master bathroom, and he immediately saw why. Their plans specified that the floor tiles—off-white, Italian-made, no two identical—be laid on a diagonal, with two-thirds of an inch in between each tile for grouting. The tile men had laid them in straight rows, with minimal space for grouting, upsetting the rustic, Tuscan feeling that their bathroom designer and architect had jointly intended and which they’d enthusiastically bought into (and paid handsomely for, rusticity being staggeringly expensive). Guy left the bathroom before Rosemary was done writing.
“Now I have a question for you,” he told Ventnor. “How would you like to buy Positano Software?”
“That’s what I was asking. If I were to buy just ten thousand shares at—”
“No, the entire company.”
“You’re joking.”
Of course he was. And yet the notion of a pornographer owning his beloved creation was somehow less horrifying than the notion of that lapsed seminarian taking control and firing half the staff in the name of a “divine rationalization,” or whatever bullshit theory he was foisting on Wall Street these days.
“Thirty million dollars and it’s yours.”
“I don’t have thirty million dollars.” He said this in the manner of a man who, asked for change of a five, realizes he only has four singles.
“Some of your friends must.”
“Neville over at Platinum Escorts, he could scratch together thirty mil in an afternoon. He was a first mover on the Internet, and he really gets how to create intuitive user interfaces, but enterprise software? I don’t see it.”
“Why dirty your hands in enterprise software when you’re pimping what, a hundred girls a night?”
“Then there’s Hussein at Omarthetentmaker dot-com. Richer than God—like I was telling you, the real money’s in gay. You serious about selling?”
“Of course not,” Guy said, disappointing himself.
“’Cause if you were to sell, I think I could put together a consortium…”
Guy could only imagine what a Ventnor-assembled consortium would look like, a bunch of greasy middle-aged lechers in gold jewelry and hairpieces taking time out from art-directing beaver shots to pay sales calls on systems analysts in central Tennessee. Or maybe there was something in it, a truly rational merger, for a change. A two-hundred-thousand-dollar license fee includes four years of free upgrades, seventy-five hours of on-site customer support, and five on-site blow jobs from Krystal. They’d never lose a bid.
“Guy, look at this,” Rosemary called from the twins’ room after he’d hung up. “They put the air-conditioning vent right in the middle of the wall.” Rosemary pointed at the offending orifice. They’d had central air installed at a huge cost, putting a big generator in what had been a closet off the kitchen and running ducts into every room. You could buy a starter home in some of the outer suburbs of New York City for what they’d paid to have central air.
“It looks centered to me,” Guy said.
“Exactly. How can we put a picture on that wall? Anything we put there would cover the vent. It was supposed to go under the crown molding and to the right.”
“Wasn’t that specified in the plans?” Their HVAC consultant, engaged for the price of a triple bypass at NewYork-Presbyterian, had meticulously detailed every inch of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning. And still they’d end up paying.
She nodded as she furiously added to the punch list, which was beginning to resemble a supermarket receipt. When had they become such perfectionists? Only a year ago the air conditioner in their bedroom had begun to make noises that resembled food being uncomfortably digested by a three-ton rhinoceros and they’d decided to live with it rather than buy a new one at the then-staggering cost of four hundred dollars. After a few days they’d added the dyspeptic air conditioner to the repertoire of urban noises they didn’t register anymore: the angry growl of garbage trucks compacting, the beeping of trucks backing up, the exasperated sigh of a bus kneeling to ingest an old person. Now the misplacement of a single vent in the boys’ room was cause for torment.
Lily reboarded the express train at 181st Street, and as it hurtled downtown, she contemplated Nanny and her tryst. Why was it so shocking to discover that the woman had a lover, not to mention a sexy, heart-shaped ass, almost as appalling as the firming conviction that she’d stolen several million dollars from her employer? After all, she herself was en route to her own lover’s apartment, and hers, unlike Nanny’s, would be an adulterous liaison, at least technically (surely marital desertion had its privileges). Wasn’t Nanny entitled to a life of her own, apart from taking care of two children well past the age of needing taking care of?
After changing trains, she emerged from the subway at Eighty-sixth Street and headed along Broadway to Larry’s place. She’d left him under a cloud of tension last time and was looking forward to clearing things up with some quick, restorative sex.
At Eighty-fourth Street she passed a florist shop and decided to buy a peace offering. As she turned into the shop, she saw a man hesitate, then continue on his way. What caught her attention was his attire—dark, formless suit, white shirt, narrow tie; his grooming, everything about him, including his clipped black hair, identified him as an alien in the land of denim and running shoes—and the fact that he’d been staring at her, of this she was quite sure.
She bought a bunch of tall white lilies with a fresh twenty. Then, as she resumed her walk to Larry’s place, she saw the man again, this time heading south, in the opposite direction. He avoided her glance—studiously, she thought. She gave him a few seconds, then turned and followed him.
He turned into the florist shop.