“All the principal rooms face Park Avenue,” Lucinda Wells said as she crossed the grand sitting room of Apartment 9A at 913 Park Avenue. She tapped a fingernail on the double-insulated windows. “Major sunlight,” she said, for Park Avenue.
The paunchy investment banker and his pretty wife joined her at the window. Clients always followed her like young children on a class trip to the zoo, huddling close lest they get left behind.
“Wasn’t this the Grantham apartment?” the wife asked.
“A million years ago.” Ten months. Barnett Grantham had regained control of the place from the Feds and decided not to move back in. Since she already had the listing, he agreed to let her sell it for him. During his exile in Switzerland, the apartment had increased by a fourth, or something like one-point-nine million, which came to about six thousand dollars for every day he was out of the city. Try making that kind of money on Wall Street!
The wife turned and studied the empty sitting room with newfound reverence. For a certain species of aspiring socialite, Lily Grantham had once sat atop the evolutionary chain.
“The sitting room is twenty by twenty. Square is very rare, you know, and quite desirable. This apartment nailed ten pages in Architectural Digest, and three were devoted to this room.”
“Do they ever cover the same apartment twice?” the wife asked anxiously. “I mean, after it’s been done over, of course.”
Damn, she shouldn’t have brought up the Ark Digest feature. She never made mistakes like that, but the karma on the Grantham apartment was for shit.
“If you do it right,” she said lightly, and ushered them back into the gallery. “The coat closet is nicely tucked away, don’t you think?” She opened it to reveal a mirror on the back of the door. The three of them froze in contemplation of their reflections, startled by the sudden evidence of life amid so much arid real estate. She was several inches taller than the wife, who was herself a good head taller than her husband, who stood between them like a fat child squeezed into a new suit for an outing with two stylish aunts. Still, he had pulled in twenty-six million dollars last year running a hedge fund, the new cliché. She always checked these things, since there was no point in showing an apartment to people who couldn’t afford it. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who liked to tour apartments just to see how the other half lived.
The hedge hog was the first to step away from the mirror. Well, who could blame him?
“Where to?” he huffed.
“Whatever happened to Lily Grantham?” the wife asked. “Didn’t I hear that the husband came back?”
“He was exonerated,” the husband said. “Turns out it was the baby-sitter or something who stole the money. She’s locked away for twenty years.”
“You can comfortably entertain twenty-six in here,” Lucinda said in the dining room, pulling the number from a mental hat.
The wife ran a finger along the glazed walls.
“The color’s called Caravaggio Red,” Lucinda said. “It was all the rage a million years ago. It took like twelve coats to achieve this luster.” She saw the banker’s jowls start to quiver and quickly added, “But it comes off like that. Not a big job, trust me.”
“Where are they living now?” the wife asked.
“Separately,” Lucinda replied. “Notice the light. Very bright.” For Park Avenue.
“They’re not together?”
Lucinda sighed. She hadn’t brought up the Granthams, but she hadn’t nipped the story in the bud, either. Now she’d have to rehash the whole sordid tale, which would do zero for the apartment.
“He came back to New York all set to pick up where he’d left off. Lily Grantham said no dice.”
“Didn’t he have a girlfriend?”
“Didn’t want to marry her, apparently.”
“Lily Grantham was a major rainmaker for Grantham, Wiley & Zelma,” said the husband. “She brought the firm more business than the three principals combined. Why ditch her?”
“The kitchen,” Lucinda said, unfurling one arm like a car-show model. “Custom millwork, honed granite countertops, Sub-Zero, Viking, Miele.” The husband made a beeline for the Sub-Zero.
“Where is she living?” the wife asked.
“That’s a long story,” Lucinda said. It was always a long story—where you lived told the story of your life. “She took up with an old flame. High-school sweetheart. Neighborhood boy.”
“What neighborhood?”
“Upper West Side. She moved into his rent-controlled classic six.” The real-estate broker’s nightmare.
“Who is it?” Meaning, Do we know him? Does anyone?
“Nobody. Owns a candy store on Broadway. I was showing an apartment in the neighborhood and happened to walk by. Lily was behind the counter, dishing out nuts.”
The husband was methodically opening and closing drawers in the vast Sub-Zero. A twelve-million-dollar apartment, and fatso was inspecting the fridge for freebies. Visibly frustrated, the wife turned back to Lucinda.
“Lily Grantham is working in a candy store?”
“She looked radiant. And her boyfriend…”
“What about him?”
“A major improvement in the looks department.” Lucinda couldn’t help glancing at the porcine husband, now rooting through the empty cabinets. “To die for, really. He was just returning from a run when I walked by. Tight shorts, T-shirt all clingy with sweat. You should have seen the kiss he gave her.”
“A lot of women are going for physical attraction these days,” the wife said somewhat wistfully. “I read somewhere it’s a trend.”
The husband opened the microwave. Perhaps the Granthams had left a bag of popcorn behind on their flight from the East Side.
“Two maids’ rooms, generously sized.”
They crowded into one of the narrow maids’. It wasn’t completely sunless, but the light felt sullen and gray, as if the journey around the back of the building and down the narrow courtyard had exhausted it. The husband looked even shorter and heavier in the small space and seemed to know it.
“Seen one, seen ’em all,” he pronounced as he squeezed by them.
“Where was she before she moved in with the…candy man?”
“Where was she living? With her parents in a postwar across from Lincoln Center. I sold it to them. I also sold their old place. Twice, actually.”
“How do you sell the same apartment twice?” asked the husband. Finally something he could get excited about.
“They had a big classic seven on West End. Total wreck, but good bones. First I sold it to an Internet executive and his wife. Gut renovation with Victor Ozeri, who would be perfect for this place, BTW, if you could get him. I don’t have to tell you what happened to software companies. Practically the day the renovation was done, they put the place back on the market.”
“Which software company?” the husband wanted to know.
“Positano.”
He grunted and once again Lucinda wished she hadn’t stumbled onto this path. The market was on the way back, but no one wanted to hear about dead dot-coms when they were considering forking over twelve million for an apartment with shitty light and walls lacquered in fuchsia nail polish that would require several weeks and half the population of Guatemala to sand off.
“They managed to scratch together enough cash to buy their old place back, at a twenty percent premium, of course. My exclusive. Way too small for them—they have twin girls. Or boys. Two of the same, at any rate. But at least it’s a roof over their heads. I sold the renovated West End Avenue place to a Guyanese man and his family.”
“Chinese?”
“Guyanese. From Guyana.” People were so ignorant, not to mention insensitive. “He was referred to me by Lily Grantham, of all people. He was a taxi driver, if you can believe it. Notice the sweep from the sitting room right to the dining room as you pass through the gallery. Seventy-two feet. You could play football if you wanted.” Silence. She’d remember to say lacrosse next time. All the East Side kids played lacrosse at their private schools—it didn’t even help them get into The Ivy League anymore, that’s how ordinary it was. Lacrosse! Thank God she’d never had children. “Let’s have a look at the library.”
“How did a taxi driver get past a co-op board?”
“Ex–taxi driver. And he’s paying all cash. Plus, he’s…well, he’s not exactly black, but dark enough to bring a discrimination suit if he’s rejected. His name is Mohammed, which can’t hurt, either. People are soooo worried about offending Arabs. He sailed through the approval process.”
“But how did he make all that money? Even on West End a classic seven—”
“Two-point-seven, triple mint. Notice the bookshelves, burled walnut. I wouldn’t change a thing in here. He invested every cent he had in the market.”
“And made money?” the husband asked. He’d become comparatively animated in the library, visions of surround-sound stereo, flat-panel HDTV, and gilt-framed equestrian prints no doubt dancing in his mind.
“Sold short. Every cent he had. Put options, covered calls, the whole nine yards. Then, when the market turned around, he invested all the proceeds long. Still, I think he must have had a side income—a lot of these cabdrivers do, you know.”
“That’s rich,” the husband said. “We’re standing in the apartment of the grandson of Ben ‘Sell ’Em’ Grantham, the most famous short-seller of all time. And you just sold an apartment to…what exactly was the connection?”
“The apartment on West End used to belong to the parents of Lily Grantham.”
“Exactly. You sold it to a taxi driver who made millions short-selling.”
“I’ll tell you what’s perfect,” Lucinda said as she led them down the hallway to the bedrooms. “This taxi driver, Mohammed? Has four kids, just brought them over from Guyana. He wouldn’t dream of making them share a room, though you can only imagine how they must have lived back in Africa. So he’s hired Victor Ozeri to redo the entire apartment. They’re putting back the wall between the living room and one of the bedrooms that the previous owners, Guy and Rosemary Pierce, had taken down. I mean, in my next life I want to come back as a contractor!”
As if. She’d netted more selling and then reselling Apartment 6D than Ozeri would clear gutting it twice. And without all that plaster dust and plumbing talk and having to supervise an army of little men from Central America who worked hard, God knows, but always seemed to be sharing a secret joke at your expense. And if Mohammed’s luck in the market turned—and luck always turned, in Lucianda’s experience—she’d be perfectly positioned to sell it a third time.
“This was a girl’s room, obviously.” She led the couple into a large bedroom with pink wall-to-wall carpeting and white curtains with pastel appliqués of bonnets and ribbons. It was the only room with any personality left, and it was extremely depressing. For some crazy reason, Lucinda thought of Anne Frank, though the Grantham girl had hardly been shipped off to a concentration camp. Still, leaving behind a nicely decorated room, curtains and carpet and fresh paint, for an unrenovated rental was a kind of, well, maybe not a death sentence, but a…what did that phony psychic with the TV show call it? A passing. She made a mental note to have the curtains taken down before showing the apartment again.
“What an amazing story,” the wife said. “From Lily Grantham to a short-selling taxi driver.”
Lucinda worried that she wasn’t focusing the couple’s attention on the charms of the apartment, but she couldn’t help trumping her own story.
“There’s more,” she said coyly.
“More?”
“Let’s look at the second bedroom.”
This one, thankfully, had no remnants of its former occupant, other than a variety of scuff marks on the hunter-green walls.
“Four bedrooms in all, with three bathrooms. A lot of people divide this bathroom.” She pointed to the bathroom that connected the room they were in to Anne Frank’s.
“You said there was more.”
“Rosemary Pierce, the wife of the Positano Software founder? She works at Atherton’s.”
The husband and wife shuffled toward her, the better to catch her next utterance. Atherton’s would be seeing a lot of them if they ended up buying the apartment, which would need a palace’s worth of French antiques and acres of old Oriental rugs to render it comfy.
“Her boss, I forget his name, a flamer who specializes in glass, he was investigated for buying Positano shares with inside information.”
“I think I read about that,” the husband said. “Half of Atherton’s was implicated.”
“Never indicted, though, since in the end they lost money, and who goes to jail for losing money—your own money, at least. Anyway, this Rosemary, who worked for him, one of her clients is an ancient woman named Esme Hollender. Her father was Frederick Packard, who was very big in something.”
“The Importance of Unimportance,” the husband said reverently. “Frederick Packard was a genius.”
“Yeah, well, he wasn’t genius enough to teach his daughter how to pick a husband. She married a flamer, a different one, who bilked her out of most of her money. All she had left was the apartment. Thank God it was at 700 Fifth. Views to die for. I got her eleven-point-five, cash.”
“Amazing.”
“That’s not the amazing part. Notice that the third bedroom has its own bathroom, as you can see. A lot of people”—a lot of people—there were exactly eleven apartments in the entire building!—“use this as a guest room, though some turn it into a dressing room with en suite bath.”
“What was the amazing part?” the wife asked.
“I sold Esme Hollender’s apartment”—she stepped closer to the already looming couple—“to a pornographer.”
The wife, gratifyingly, gasped.
“Richer than God, apparently. Who knew online porno was so lucrative? Truckloads of money coming in every month, and all he has to do is point a Webcam at a drug-addicted slut willing to…to open wide, as my dentist says, LOL. In my next life I want to come back as a pornographer!”
“At least someone’s making money off the Internet,” the husband grumbled. Lucinda worried that he might have lost a bit too much in the bubble and never fully recovered since then. The board at 913 Park Avenue liked to see liquid assets totaling ten times the purchase price, which in this case would mean cash and securities worth at least ninety million bucks, assuming they negotiated down the asking price by a few mil. That was an ocean of liquid, even in the recent, relatively strong market.
“Of course, I had no idea he was into porno,” Lucinda said as she led the charge into the master bedroom. “Rosemary Pierce referred him to me. Seems he and her husband had some sort of business connection—trust me, I had no interest in going there!” She Vanna Whited an arm toward the master bedroom’s windows. “You won’t find a larger master on Park.”
“How did this pornographer ever get through the co-op board?” the wife asked.
“Amazonian mahogany or something, very rare,” she said upon opening the closet. “They needed a special dispensation from the World Wildlife Foundation to import it. How did he get by the co-op board? All cash, natch. And he didn’t exactly announce that he was into porn. His company’s called Ventnor Place, which sounds legitimate enough.”
“Ventnor…” The husband flushed and turned away. No wonder Ventnor could afford an apartment at 700 Fifth, if the likes of Porky the Hedge Hog was jerking off to his pay-for-pussy sites. Lucinda had, of course, undertaken her usual due diligence on Ventnor, which entailed visiting a few of his more successful URLs. She’d never seen such tits in her life—how did those women brush their hair? She looked at the wife, fashionably flat-chested, and wondered if she knew or even cared that her husband downloaded videos of women with jugs the size of her Dolce and Gabbana satchel.
“Esme Hollender hadn’t paid her maintenance in over a year, so the board was desperate to get her out of there. But the apartment was in such bad shape, a lot of buyers were put off. Not this Ventnor fellow. In fact, he came to the second showing with Victor Ozeri. Very shrewd to get Ozeri on board pre-sale. You’re gonna love the master bath, right over there. The tiles were brought over from a monastery outside Assisi. Trust me, those nuns will never have to worry where their next bowl of porridge is coming from.”
The wife hadn’t made it past the small dressing area, which she was studying as if she were a pilgrim at a saint’s shrine. “I read somewhere that Lily Grantham used to get her dresses sewed onto her before big parties. I mean, the designer himself would come here to work on her. And she’d also have someone sent up from Alexendre’s to blow out her hair at the same time.”
Imagine aspiring to such a life, being trussed like a Thanksgiving turkey before dinner.
“Yeah, well, I doubt anyone’s sewing on her clothes at the Broadway Nut Shoppe. She did look radiant, though, in a Banana Republicly way. And she hasn’t given up all remnants of her old life.” Lucinda led them on the long trek back to the gallery. “She got basically nothing from her husband. A few million, if that. I mean, he wanted her back—she was the one who wanted out of the marriage, so what did she expect? There are rumors that she’d somehow managed to stash away some cash, but who knows. Anyway, the kids insisted on staying in this public school she had them in, even though their father, of course, offered to put them back in private. Kids.”
“You said she still kept part of her old life.”
“Right. Not her old life exactly, but she’s having some work done in the candy man’s rent-controlled six. Nothing major, just the bathrooms and the kitchen and the floors and the walls. New wiring. Windows. It’s a crime to invest in a rental, but when you’re paying that little for a classic six, you know you’re never going to move. And here’s the kicker. Guess who she’s hired as a contractor?”
“Not Victor Ozeri?”
“Like he’d take on a rental! Guy Pierce! The founder of Positano I told you about? He’s in the contracting business! He’s still got a few million shares of stock, Aquinas stock, the company that bought him out and fired him the same day, but they’re selling for, like, twenty cents, even today, with the market semi back up, so he’s changing careers. I put him in touch with Lily and her candy man, and from what I hear, both sides are delirious. He loves this stuff, apparently.”
“You wouldn’t recommend him for…”
“For this place? Noooooo. There are only two or three names the board will even consider. Are you thinking of making an offer?”
“We’ll want to think it over,” the wife said. “It certainly has good bones.”
Lucinda nodded—someone had been reading the shelter magazines. But the wife was right, if unoriginal. The apartment’s bones were impeccable: good light (for Park Avenue), large, well-proportioned rooms—and plenty of them—a logical, no-nonsense floor plan. But a pall of defeat hung over the place; everyone sensed it even before they realized that this was where Lily Grantham had made her last stand, even after they remembered that Barnett Grantham had been exonerated (though of embezzlement, not desertion or adultery) and was back to making money down on Wall Street. Walls always talked, in Lucianda’s experience.
“Something about the Granthams living here…” the husband said. “I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel right.”
“But there’s a happy ending.”
“Happy ending? I don’t see them moving back in here,” the husband said, causing Lucinda to marvel, not for the first time, at the remarkably low minimum intelligence required to make a fortune on Wall Street.
“You should see her,” she said, prepared to launch into a sales pitch about the rare opportunity to own a world-class apartment in a top building, and how the board was eager to get someone into the apartment, which had been empty for almost a year. But her mind drifted irresistibly to Central Park, where she jogged twice a week with Marque, her trainer, a toffee-skinned Apollo with big biceps that glistened like fresh challah loaves when he flexed them at her frequent request, and pecs as swollen and sturdy as the tits on the girls of Ventnor Place. Usually they circled the reservoir twice, for a total of three miles, before he handed her the small weights he jogged with and they power-walked back to her building, where he obligingly fucked her if she had the energy for it. But every so often he led her into other areas of the park, particularly the Rambles, where the hills added a deeper, more humbling level of torture to the workout. It was during one such excursion, earlier that week, on a glorious spring day, that she’d seen Lily Grantham.
She had on a navy polo shirt tucked into jeans and had pulled her hair back into a simple ponytail. Lucinda hadn’t recognized her at first because her face was obscured by a pair of binoculars, through which she was looking up at a tree. But when she lowered them, she was instantly familiar, though quite changed. She looked heavier and plainer but also younger—her face benefited from the extra flesh, that much was evident even on a quick jog-by. On the return trip she saw her on a bench, binoculars on her lap, her head on the shoulder of the man from the candy store. She was pointing up at the sky, and like the candy man, Lucinda followed her outstretched arm to a lone hawk, the celebrity one who lived for free at 927 Fifth Avenue, its outstretched wings unmoving as it lazily circled the Rambles on a current of air. She envied the hawk at that moment, and she envied Lily Grantham and the candy man, too. They seemed to belong to a secret society, a guild of blessed creatures without worries and responsibilities and board rejections, who floated above non-members on warm, invisible currents. She was sorely tempted to stop and stare, if only for the chance to understand how one entered such a society, but Marque must have sensed her momentary lack of resolve and exhorted her to sprint the last half-mile to Fifth Avenue, and what choice did she have? Just before turning a corner, she looked back and saw them kissing, not a chummy, comfortable kiss but the connecting of two people who felt they had to snatch every available moment from a hostile world.
“I have a few other places to show you,” she told the couple as she led them to the elevator landing. “None of them quite as perfect as this place, I might as well tell you right now.” She locked the front door with the key she’d been sent a million years ago from some bureaucrat in the federal building downtown. “If you’re interested, I’d make an offer soon. Trust me, you won’t see another place like this one.”