One Fifth Avenue (3 page)

For those who knew the history of the building and its occupants, Enid Merle was not only its second oldest resident—after Mrs. Houghton—but in the sixties and seventies, one of its most notorious. Enid, who had never married and had a degree in psychology from Columbia University (making her one of the college’s first women to earn one), had taken a job as a secretary at the
New York Star
in 1948, and given her fascination with the antics of humanity, and possessing a sympathetic ear, had worked her way into the gossip department, eventually securing her own column.

Having spent the early part of her life on a cotton farm in Texas, Enid always felt slightly the outsider and approached her work with the good Southern values of kindness and sympathy. Enid was known as the “nice”

gossip columnist, and it had served her well: When actors and politicians were ready to tell their side of a story, they called Enid. In the early eight-O N E F I F T H AV E N U E

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ies, the column had been syndicated, and Enid had become a wealthy woman. She’d been trying to retire for ten years, but her name, argued her employers, was too valuable, and so Enid worked with a staff that gathered information and wrote the column, although under special circumstances, Enid would write the column herself. Louise Houghton’s death was one such circumstance.

Thinking about the column she would have to write about Mrs.

Houghton, Enid felt a sharp pang of loss. Louise had had a full and glamorous life—a life to be envied and admired—and had died without enemies, save perhaps for Flossie Davis, who was Enid’s stepmother. Flossie lived across the street, having abandoned One Fifth in the early sixties for the conveniences of a new high-rise. But Flossie was crazy and always had been, and Enid reminded herself that this pang of loss was a feeling she’d carried all her life—a longing for something that always seemed to be just out of reach. It was, Enid thought, simply the human condition. There were inherent questions in the very nature of being alive that couldn’t be answered but only endured.

Usually, Enid did not find these thoughts depressing but, rather, exhil-arating. In her experience, she’d found that most people did not manage to grow up. Their bodies got older, but this did not necessarily mean the mind matured in the proper way. Enid did not find this truth particularly bothersome, either. Her days of being upset about the unfairness of life and the inherent unreliability of human beings to do the right thing were over.

Having reached old age, she considered herself endlessly lucky. If you had a little bit of money and most of your health, if you lived in a place with lots of other people and interesting things going on all the time, it was very pleasant to be old. No one expected anything of you but to live. Indeed, they applauded you merely for getting out of bed in the morning.

Spotting the paparazzi below, Enid realized she ought to tell Philip about Mrs. Houghton’s passing. Philip was not an early riser, but Enid considered the news important enough to wake him. She knocked on his door and waited for a minute, until she heard Philip’s sleepy, annoyed voice call out, “Who is it?”

“It’s me,” Enid said.

Philip opened the door. He was wearing a pair of light blue boxer shorts. “Can I come in?” Enid asked. “Or do you have a young lady here?”

18

Candace Bushnell

“Good morning to you, too, Nini,” Philip said, holding the door so she could enter. “Nini” was Philip’s pet name for Enid, having come up with it when he was one and was first learning to talk. Philip had been and was still, at forty-five, a precocious child, but this wasn’t perhaps his fault, Enid thought. “And you know they’re not young ladies anymore,”

he added. “There’s nothing ladylike about them.”

“But they’re still young. Too young,” Enid said. She followed Philip into the kitchen. “Louise Houghton died last night. I thought you might want to know.”

“Poor Louise,” Philip said. “The ancient mariner returns to the sea.

Coffee?”

“Please,” Enid said. “I wonder what will happen to her apartment.

Maybe they’ll split it up. You could buy the fourteenth floor. You’ve got plenty of money.”

“Sure,” Philip said.

“If you bought the fourteenth floor, you could get married. And have room for children,” Enid said.

“I love you, Nini,” Philip said. “But not that much.”

Enid smiled. She found Philip’s sense of humor charming. And Philip was so good-looking—endearingly handsome in that boyish way that women find endlessly pleasing—that she could never be angry with him. He wore his dark hair one length, clipped below the ears so it curled over his collar like a spaniel’s, and when Enid looked at him, she still saw the sweet five-year-old boy who used to come to her apartment after kindergarten, dressed in his blue school uniform and cap. He was such a good boy, even then. “Mama’s sleeping, and I don’t want to wake her. She’s tired again. You don’t mind if I sit with you, do you, Nini?”

he would ask. And she didn’t mind. She never minded anything about Philip.

“Roberto told me that one of Louise’s relatives tried to get into the apartment last night,” Enid said, “but he wouldn’t let them in.”

“It’s going to get ugly,” Philip said. “All those antiques.”

“Sotheby’s will sell them,” Enid said, “and that will be the end of it.

The end of an era.”

Philip handed her a mug of coffee.

“There are always deaths in this building,” he said.

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“Mrs. Houghton was old,” Enid said and, quickly changing the subject, asked, “What are you going to do today?”

“I’m still interviewing researchers,” Philip said.

A diversion, Enid thought, but decided not to delve into it. She could tell by Philip’s attitude that his writing wasn’t going well again. He was joyous when it was and miserable when it wasn’t.

Enid went back to her apartment and attempted to work on her column about Mrs. Houghton, but found that Philip had distracted her more than usual. Philip was a complicated character. Technically, he wasn’t her nephew but a sort of second cousin—his grandmother Flossie Davis was Enid’s stepmother. Enid’s own mother had died when she was a girl, and her father had met Flossie backstage at Radio City Music Hall during a business trip to New York. Flossie was a Rockette and, after a quick marriage, had tried to live with Enid and her father in Texas. She’d lasted six months, at which point Enid’s father had moved the family to New York. When Enid was twenty, Flossie had had a daughter, Anna, who was Philip’s mother. Like Flossie, Anna was very beautiful, but plagued by demons. When Philip was nineteen, she’d killed herself. It was a violent, messy death. She’d thrown herself off the top of One Fifth.

It was the kind of thing that people always assume they will never forget, but that wasn’t true, Enid thought. Over time, the healthy mind had a way of erasing the most unpleasant details. So Enid didn’t remember the exact circumstances of what had happened on the day Anna had died; nor did she recall exactly what had happened to Philip after his mother’s death. She recalled the outlines—the drug addiction, the arrest, the fact that Philip had spent two weeks in jail, and the consequent months in rehab—but she was fuzzy on the specifics. Philip had taken his experiences and turned them into the novel
Summer
Morning
, for which he’d won the Pulitzer Prize. But instead of pursuing an artistic career, Philip had become commercial, caught up in Hollywood glamour and money.

In the apartment next door, Philip was also sitting in front of his computer, determined to finish a scene in his new screenplay,
Bridesmaids
Revisited
. He wrote two lines of dialogue and then, in frustration, shut down his computer. He got into the shower, wondering once more if he was losing his touch.

20

Candace Bushnell

Ten years ago, when he was thirty-five, he’d had everything a man could want in his career: a Pulitzer Prize, an Oscar for screenwriting, money, and an unassailable reputation. And then the small fissures began to appear: movies that didn’t make as much as they should have at the box office. Arguments with young executives. Being replaced on two projects. At the time, Philip told himself it was irrelevant: It was the business, after all. But the steady stream of money he’d enjoyed as a young man had lately been reduced to a trickle. He didn’t have the heart to tell Nini, who would be disappointed and alarmed. Shampooing his hair, he again rationalized his situation, telling himself there was no need for worry—with the right project and a little bit of luck, he’d be on top of the world again.

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A few minutes later, Philip stepped into the elevator and tousled his damp hair. Still thinking about his life, he was startled when the elevator doors opened on the ninth floor, and a familiar, musical voice chimed out, “Philip.” A second later, Schiffer Diamond got on. “Schoolboy,” she said, as if no time had passed at all, “I can’t believe you still live in this lousy building.”

Philip laughed. “Enid told me you were coming back.” He smirked, immediately falling into their old familiar banter. “And here you are.”

“Told you?” Schiffer said. “She wrote a whole column about it. The return of Schiffer Diamond. Made me sound like a middle-aged gunslinger.”

“You could never be middle-aged,” Philip said.

“Could be and am,” Schiffer replied. She paused and looked him up and down. “You still married?”

“Not for seven years,” Philip said, almost proudly.

“Isn’t that some kind of record for you?” Schiffer asked. “I thought you never went more than four years without getting hitched.”

“I’ve learned a lot since my two divorces,” Philip said, “i.e.: Do not get married again. What about you? Where’s your second husband?”

“Oh, I divorced him as well. Or he divorced me. I can’t remember.”

She smiled at him in that particular way she had, making him feel like he was the only person in the world. For a moment, Philip was taken in, O N E F I F T H AV E N U E

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and then he reminded himself that he’d seen her use that smile on too many others.

The elevator doors opened, and Philip looked over her shoulder at the pack of paparazzi in front of the building. “Are those for you?” he asked, almost accusingly.

“No, silly. They’re for Mrs. Houghton. I’m not that famous,” she said.

Hurrying across the lobby, she ran through the flashing cameras and jumped into the back of a white van.

Oh, yes, you are, Philip thought. You’re still that famous and more.

Dodging the photographers, he headed across Fifth Avenue and down Tenth Street to the little library on Sixth Avenue where he sometimes worked. He suddenly felt irritated. Why had she come back? She would torture him again and then leave. There was no telling what that woman might do. Twenty years ago, she’d surprised him and bought an apartment in One Fifth and tried to position it as proof that she would always be with him. She was an actress, and she was nuts. They were all nuts, and after that last time, when she’d run off and married that goddamned count, he’d sworn off actresses for good.

He entered the cool of the library, taking a seat in a battered armchair.

He picked up the draft of
Bridesmaids Revisited
, and after reading through a few pages, put it down in disgust. How had he, Philip Oakland, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, ended up writing this crap? He could imagine Schiffer Diamond’s reaction: “Why don’t you do your own work, Oakland? At least find something you care about personally.” And his own defense: “It’s called show ‘business.’ Not show ‘art.’ ”

“Bullshit,” she’d say. “You’re scared.”

Well, she always prided herself on not being afraid of anything. And that was her own bullshit defense: insisting she wasn’t vulnerable. It was dishonest, he thought. But when it came to her feelings for him, she’d always thought he was a little bit better than even he thought he was.

He picked up the pages again but found he wasn’t the least bit interested.
Bridesmaids Revisited
was exactly what it seemed—a story about what had happened in the lives of four women who’d met as bridesmaids at twenty-two. And what the hell did he know about twenty-two-year-old girls? His last girlfriend, Sondra, wasn’t nearly as young as Enid had implied—she was, in fact, thirty-three—and was an 22

Candace Bushnell

up-and-coming executive at an independent movie company. But after nine months, she’d become fed up with him, assessing—correctly—

that he was not ready to get married and have children anytime soon.

A fact that was, at his age, “pathetic,” according to Sondra and her friends. This reminded Philip that he hadn’t had sex since their breakup two months ago. Not that the sex had been so great anyway.

Sondra had performed all the standard moves, but the sex had not been inspiring, and he’d found himself going through the motions with a kind of weariness that had made him wonder if sex would ever be good again. This thought led him to memories of sex with Schiffer Diamond.

Now, that, he thought, staring blankly at the pages of his screenplay, had been good sex.

At the tip of Manhattan, the white van containing Schiffer Diamond was crossing the Williamsburg Bridge to the Steiner Studios in Brooklyn.

Schiffer was also attempting to study a script—the pilot episode for
Lady
Superior
—for which she had a table read that morning. The part was especially good: A forty-five-year-old nun radically changes her life and discovers what it means to be a contemporary woman. The producers were billing the character as middle-aged, although Schiffer still had a hard time accepting the fact that forty-five was middle-aged. This made her smile, thinking of Philip trying not to act surprised to see her in the elevator. No doubt he, too, was having a hard time accepting that forty-five was middle-aged.

And then, like Philip, she also recalled their sex life. But for her, the memory of sex with Philip was laced with frustration. There were rules about sex: If the sex wasn’t good the first time, it would probably get better. If it was great the first time, it would go downhill. But mostly, if the sex was really great, the best sex you’d had in your life, it meant the two people should be together. The rules were juvenile, of course, constructs concocted by young women in order to make sense of men.