One Fifth Avenue (17 page)

“Not yet.”

“It’s a very child-friendly building,” Mindy said. “Everyone loves Sam.”

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Billy Litchfield joined them, and Annalisa decided now was the time to strike. “Is your husband James Gooch?” she asked Mindy casually.

“He is. How do you know him?” Mindy asked, looking at her in surprise.

“I read his last book,
The Lonesome Soldier
,” Annalisa said.

“Only two thousand people read that book,” Mindy countered.

“I loved it. American history is one of my obsessions. Your husband is a wonderful writer.”

Mindy took a step back. She wasn’t sure whether to believe Annalisa, but she liked the fact that Annalisa was making an effort. And considering James’s coup with Apple, maybe Mindy had been wrong about his fiction abilities. It was true that James had once been a wonderful writer; it was one of the reasons she’d married him. Perhaps he was about to become a wonderful writer again. “My husband has a new book coming out,”

she said. “People in the business are saying it’s going to be bigger than Dan Brown. If you can believe that.”

Having said the words aloud, and having liked how they sounded, Mindy now began to believe James’s success was a distinct possibility.

That would really show Philip Oakland, she thought. And if the Rices took the apartment, it would be a blow to both Enid and Philip.

“I’ve got to get back to my office,” Mindy said, holding out her hand to Annalisa. “But I hope we’ll be seeing each other soon.”

“I’m impressed,” Billy said to Annalisa, when they were on the sidewalk in front of One Fifth. “Mindy Gooch liked you, and she doesn’t like anyone.”

Annalisa smiled and flagged down a taxi.

“Have you really read
The Lonesome Soldier
?” Billy asked. “It was eight hundred pages and dry as toast.”

“I have,” Annalisa said.

“So you knew James Gooch was her husband?”

“No. I Googled her on our way out of the church. There was an item that mentioned James Gooch was her husband.”

“Clever,” Billy said. A taxi pulled up, and he held open the door.

Annalisa slid onto the backseat. “I always do my homework,” she said.

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114

Candace Bushnell

As predicted, the job as Philip’s researcher was easy. Three afternoons a week—on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—Lola met Philip at his apartment at noon. Sitting at a tiny desk in his large, sun-filled living room, Lola made a great pretense of working; for the first few days, anyway. Philip worked in his office with the door open. Every now and then, he would poke his head out and ask her to find something for him, like the exact address of some restaurant that had been on First Avenue in the eighties. Lola couldn’t understand why he needed this information; after all, he was writing a screenplay, so why couldn’t he just make it up the way he had the characters?

When she questioned him about it, he took a seat near her on the arm of the leather club chair in front of the fireplace and gave her a lecture about the importance of authenticity in fiction. At first Lola was mysti-fied, then bored, and finally fascinated. Not by what Philip was saying but by the fact that he was speaking to her as if she, too, possessed the same interests and knowledge. This happened a few times, and when he went back to his office abruptly, as if he’d just thought of something, and she’d hear the tap of his fingers on his keyboard, Lola would tuck her hair behind her ears and, frowning in concentration, attempt to Google the information he’d requested. But she had a short attention span, and within minutes, she’d be off on the wrong tangent, reading Perez Hilton, or checking her Facebook page, or watching episodes of
The Hills
, or scrolling through videos on YouTube. If she’d had a regular job in an office, Lola knew, these activities would have been frowned upon—indeed, one of her college friends had recently been fired from her job as a para-legal for this particular infraction—but Philip didn’t seem to mind. Indeed, it was the opposite: He appeared to consider it part of her job.

On her second afternoon, while looking at videos on YouTube, Lola came across a clip of a bride in a strapless wedding gown attacking a man with an umbrella on the side of a highway. In the background was a white limousine—apparently, the car had broken down, and the bride was taking it out on the driver. “Philip?” Lola said, peeking into his office.

Philip was hunched over his computer, his dark hair falling over his forehead. “Huh?” he said, looking up and brushing back the hair.

“I think I’ve found something that might help you.”

“The address of Peartree’s?”

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“Something better.” She showed him the video.

“Wow,” Philip said. “Is that real?”

“Of course.” They listened to the bride screaming epithets at the driver.

“Now, that,” Lola said, sitting back in her little chair, “is authenticity.”

“Are there more of these?” Philip asked.

“There are probably hundreds,” Lola replied.

“Good work,” Philip said, impressed.

Philip, Lola decided, was book-smart, but despite his desire for authenticity, he didn’t seem to know a lot about real life. On the other hand, her own real life in New York wasn’t exactly shaping up to be what she’d hoped.

On Saturday night, she’d gone clubbing with the two girls she’d met in the human resources department. Although Lola considered them “average,” they were the only girls she knew in New York. Clubbing in the Meatpacking District had been both an exciting and depressing adventure. At the beginning of the evening, they were turned away from two clubs but found a third where they could wait in line to get in. For forty-five minutes, they’d stood behind a police barricade while people in Town Cars and SUVs pulled up to the entrance and were admitted immediately—and how it stung not to be a member of that exclusive club—but during the wait, they saw six genuine celebrities enter. The line would begin buzzing like a rattlesnake’s tail, and then all of a sudden, everyone was using their phones, trying to get a photo of the celebrity. Inside the club, there was more separation of the Somebodies and the Wannabes. The Somebodies had bottles of vodka and champagne at tables in roped-off tiers protected by enormous security guards, while the Nobodies were forced to cluster in front of the bar like part of a mosh pit. It took another half hour to get a drink, which you clutched protectively like a baby, not knowing when you’d be able to get another.

This was no way to live. Lola needed to find a way to break into New York’s glamorous inner circle.

The second Wednesday of Lola’s employment found her stretched out on the couch in Philip’s living room, reading tabloid magazines. Philip had gone to the library to write, leaving her alone in his apartment, where she was supposed to be reading the draft of his script, looking for typos. “Don’t you have spell-check?” she’d asked when he handed her the script. “I don’t 116

Candace Bushnell

trust it,” he’d said. Lola started reading the script but then remembered it was the day all the new tabloid magazines came out. Putting aside the script, she went out to the newsstand on University. She loved going in and out of One Fifth, and when she passed the doormen now, she would give them a little nod, as if she lived there.

But the tabloids were dull that week—no major celebrities had gone to rehab or gained (or lost) several pounds or stolen someone’s husband—

and Lola tossed the magazines aside, bored. Looking around Philip’s apartment, she realized that with Philip gone, there was something much more interesting to do: snoop.

She headed for the wall of bookcases. Three entire shelves were taken up with Philip’s first book,
Summer Morning
, in various editions and lan-guages. Another shelf consisted of hardcover first editions of the classics; Philip had told her that he collected them and had paid as much as five thousand dollars for a first edition of
The Great Gatsby,
which Lola thought was crazy. On the bottom shelf was a collection of old newspapers and magazines. Lola picked up a copy of
The New York Review of
Books
dated February 1992. She flipped through the pages until she came upon a review of Philip’s book
Dark Star
. Boring, she thought, and put it back. On the bottom of the pile, she spied an old copy of
Vogue
magazine. She pulled it out and looked at the cover. September 1989. One of the headlines read: THE NEW POWER COUPLES. What was Philip doing with an old copy of
Vogue
? she wondered, and opened it up to find out.

Turning to the middle of the magazine, she found the answer. There was a ten-page spread of a much younger Philip and an even younger-looking Schiffer Diamond, standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, feeding each other croissants at a sidewalk café, strolling down a Paris street in a ballgown and a tux. The headline read: LOVE IN THE SPRINGTIME: OSCAR-WINNING ACTRESS SCHIFFER DIAMOND AND PULITZER PRIZE–WINNING AUTHOR

PHILIP OAKLAND SHOW OFF THE NEW PARIS COLLECTIONS.

Lola took the magazine to the couch and studied the pictures more carefully. She’d had no idea Philip Oakland and Schiffer Diamond had once been together, and she was filled with jealousy. In the past week, she’d felt moments of attraction to Philip but had always hesitated because of his age. He
was
twenty years older. And while he looked younger and was in good shape—he went to the gym every morning—

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and there were tons of young women who married older celebrities—

look at Billy Joel’s wife—Lola still worried that if she “went there” with Philip, she might get a nasty surprise. What if he had age spots? Or couldn’t get it up?

But as she flipped through the photo spread in
Vogue,
her estimation of him rose, and she began calculating how to seduce him.

At five P.M., Philip left the library and walked back to One Fifth. Lola should be gone, he figured, and another day would have passed during which he had managed not to attempt to sleep with the girl. He was attracted to her, which he couldn’t help, being a man. And she seemed to be attracted to him, judging by the way she looked at him through a strand of hair she was always twisting in front of her face, as if she were shy. But she was a little young even for him and, despite her knowledge of everything celebrity and Internet, not very worldly. So far, nothing much had happened to her in life, and she was a bit immature.

Riding the elevator to his floor, he had an inspiration and hit the button for nine. There were six apartments on this floor, and Schiffer’s was at the end. He walked down the hallway, reminded of the many times he’d been here at all hours of the day and night. He rang her bell and then rattled the door handle. Nothing. She wasn’t home, of course. She was never home.

He went upstairs to his own apartment and, turning the key in the lock, was startled to hear Lola call out, “Philip?”

Inside the door was a small pink patent-leather overnight case. Lola was in the living room on the couch. She peeked over the back.

“You’re still here,” Philip said. He was surprised but not, he realized, unhappy to see her.

“Something really, really terrible has happened,” she said. “I hope you won’t be angry.”

“What?” he asked in alarm, thinking it must have something to do with his screenplay. Had he gotten another call from the head of the studio?

“There’s no hot water in my building.”

“Oh,” he said. Guessing at the meaning of the overnight case, he said,

“Do you need to take a shower here?”

“It’s not just that. Someone told me they’re going to be working on the pipes all night. When I went home, there was all this banging.”

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Candace Bushnell

“But surely they’ll stop. After six, I would think.”

She shook her head. “My building isn’t like your building. It’s a rental, so they can do whatever they want.
Whenever
they want,” she added for emphasis.

“What do you want to do?” he asked. Was she angling to spend the night at his apartment? Which could be a very bad—or a very good—idea.

“I was thinking maybe I could sleep on your couch. It’s only one night.

They’ll have to have the pipes fixed by tomorrow.”

He hesitated, wondering if the pipes were an excuse. If so, he’d be a fool to resist. “Sure,” he said.

“Oh, goody,” she exclaimed, jumping up from the couch and grabbing her bag. “You won’t even know I’m here, I promise. I’ll sit on the couch and watch TV. And you can work, if you want to. Or whatever.”

“You don’t have to act like a little orphan girl,” he said. “I’ll take you to dinner.”

While she was in the shower, he went into his office and scrolled through his e-mails. There were several he knew he ought to return, but hearing the shower running and imagining Lola’s naked body, he couldn’t concentrate and tried to read
Variety
instead. Then she appeared in the doorway, damp but clothed in a short tank-top dress, rubbing her hair in a towel. “Where do you want to go for dinner?” she asked.

He closed his computer. “I thought I’d take you to Knickerbocker. It’s right around the corner, and it’s one of my favorite restaurants. It’s not fancy, but the food’s good.”

A little later, seated in a booth, Lola studied the extensive menu while Philip ordered a bottle of wine. “I always get the oysters and steak,” he said. “Do you like oysters?”

“I love them,” she said, putting down the menu and smiling at him eagerly. “Have you ever had an oyster shot? They take an oyster and put it in a shot glass with vodka and cocktail sauce. We had them all the time when I was in Miami.”

Philip wasn’t sure how to respond, having never had an oyster shot, which sounded disgusting but probably made sense to a twenty-two-year-old. “And then what happened?” he asked. It was a random question, but it prompted a response.

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“Well,” she said, putting her elbows on the table and resting her chin in her hands, “you get really wasted. And one girl—she wasn’t one of my friends, but she was in our posse—got so drunk, she took off her shirt for
Girls Gone Wild
. And her father saw it. And he flipped out. Isn’t that disgusting, knowing your father watches
Girls Gone
Wild
?”