One Fifth Avenue (39 page)

“That’s why there’s true love,” Lola said.

James’s mood turned and his emotions began to chug upward like the little train that could. What a darling, he thought, looking at Lola. She didn’t know a thing about life, but still, she believed in herself so purely, it
was
almost inspirational. “It’s all about the numbers,” he said, nodding at this realization. “Numbers upon numbers upon numbers. Maybe it always was,” he went on musingly.

“Was what?” Lola asked. She was bored. The conversation had taken an unexpected turn not only away from her but into an area she equated with taxes. Meaning something she hoped never to think about.

“Ratings. Bottom lines,” James said, thinking he wouldn’t mind seeing Lola’s bottom line. But he couldn’t exactly say that, could he?

Or could he?

“I have to go,” she said. “Hug your teddy. Kiss him for luck. And text me later. I can’t wait to read the review.”

After she left, James got back on the Internet. He checked and rechecked his e-mails, his Amazon ranking, his Google ranking, and looked up his name on any possible media-related website, including The Huffington Post, Snarker, and Defamer. The next five hours passed in this most unpleasant manner.

Finally, at three-fifteen, his phone rang. “We did it,” Redmon said, his voice filled with triumph. “You got the cover of
The New York Times Book
Review
. And they called you a modern-day Melville.”

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Candace Bushnell

At first James was too shocked to speak. But after a moment, he found his voice and, as if he had books on the cover of
The New York Times Book
Review
all the time, said, “I’ll take that.”

“Damn right we’ll take it,” Redmon said. “It couldn’t be better if we’d written it ourselves. I’ll have my assistant e-mail you the review.”

James hung up. For the first time in his life, he was a success. “I am a man of triumph,” he said aloud. Then he began to feel dizzy—with joy, he told himself—and then oddly nauseated. He hadn’t thrown up in years, not since he was a boy, but the nausea increased, and he was finally forced to go into the bathroom to perform that most unmasculine of all rituals—spitting up into the toilet bowl.

Still unsteady on his feet, he went back to his office, opened the attachment on his computer, and printed it out, eagerly reading each page as it shot from the machine. His talent was at last recognized, and no matter how many books he sold, it was this acknowledgment of his place in the literary pantheon that mattered. He had won! But what was he supposed to do now? Ah—sharing the news. That’s what one did next.

He began to dial Mindy’s number but hesitated. Plenty of time to tell her, he thought, and there was one person who would appreciate the news more: Lola. She was the one who ought to hear first, who had sweated out this most fateful of days with him. Grabbing the three pages of the review, he went into the lobby, impatiently waiting for the elevator, planning exactly what he might say to her (“I did it”? “You’re going to be proud of me”? “You were right”?) and what might happen afterward. (She would hug him, naturally, and that hug might turn into a kiss, and the kiss might turn into . . . ? God only knew.) At last the elevator arrived from the top of the building, and he got on and sent it right back up, looking back and forth from the slow ticking off of the floors to the words printed in the review and now imprinted on his brain: “Modern-day Melville.”

Full of brio, he pounded on the door of Apartment 13B. He heard scuffling inside and, expecting Lola, was shocked when Philip Oakland opened the door. Seeing James, Philip’s face became cold and annoyed.

“Gooch,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

It was, James thought, a scene straight out of the schoolyard. He tried O N E F I F T H AV E N U E

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to peer unobtrusively around Philip, hoping to catch sight of Lola. “Can I help you with something?” Philip asked.

James did his best to recover. “I just got a great review in
The New York
Times Book Review
.” The pages flapped uselessly in his hand.

“Congratulations,” Philip said, making as if to close the door.

“Is Lola home?” James asked in desperation. Philip looked at him and gave a half-sardonic, half-pitying laugh as if he at last understood James’s true mission. “Lola?” he said, calling out behind him.

Lola came to the door, wrapped in a silk robe, her hair wet, as if she’d just come out of the shower. “What?” she said. She casually slipped her hand into the back of Philip’s jeans.

James awkwardly held out the pages. “Here’s the review in the
Times
,”

he said. “I thought you might want to see it.”

“Oh, I do,” she said, as nonchalantly as if she hadn’t been in his apartment hours before, had never been in his apartment ever, and hardly knew him at all.

“It’s a good one,” James said, knowing he was beaten but not wanting to acknowledge defeat. “It’s great, as a matter of fact.”

“That’s so cute of you, James,” she said. “Isn’t that cute?” she asked, addressing Philip.

“Very nice,” Philip said, and this time, he did close the door.

James wondered if he’d ever felt quite so foolish.

Back in his apartment, it took him several minutes to recover from this disquieting scene, and it was only because his phone rang. Mindy was on the line. “I just heard,” she said accusingly.

“About what?” he said, falling into their old married habits like a grown-up visiting his parents.

“The cover of
The New York Times Book Review
?” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me? I have to read about it on a blog?”

James sighed. “I only just found out myself.”

“Aren’t you excited?” Mindy demanded.

“Sure,” he said. He hung up the phone and sat down in his chair. He hadn’t expected the pleasure of his triumph to last forever, but he’d never imagined it would be so short-lived.

ı

272

Candace Bushnell

Billy Litchfield returned to Manhattan a few days later. His mother was better, but they both understood she’d begun to make the inevitable descent into death. Nevertheless, his month in the remote suburbs on the edge of the Berkshire Mountains had taught him a great deal—namely, how lucky he’d been in life. The reality was that he wasn’t to the manor born, but to the suburb, and the fact that he’d managed to escape the suburbs for over thirty years was extraordinary. His relief at being back in Manhattan, however, was brief. When he walked into his apartment building, he found an eviction notice on his door.

Restitution involved a trip to housing court on State Street, where he mingled among the hoi polloi of Manhattan. This was the real Manhattan, where everyone had a ragged sense of his own importance and his rights as a person. Billy sat among a hundred such people in a molded plastic chair in a windowless room until his case was called.

“What’s your excuse?” the judge asked.

“My mother was sick. I had to leave town to take care of her.”

“That’s negligence.”

“Not from my mother’s point of view.”

The judge frowned but appeared to take pity on him. “Pay the rent due and the fine. And don’t let me see you in here again.”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Billy said. He waited in another long line to pay cash, then took the subway uptown. The warm, putrid air in the subway car clamped down on his mood like a vise. Scanning the faces around him, he was struck by the pointlessness of so many lives. But perhaps it was his own expectations that were too high. Maybe God hadn’t intended for life to have a point beyond reproduction.

In this mood, he met Annalisa in front of One Fifth and got into her newly purchased green Bentley, complete with a chauffeur, which Billy had helped to arrange through a service. Not having seen her in a while, he was struck by her appearance, thinking how much she’d changed from the tomboyish woman he’d met nine months ago. But she still had that knack for appearing natural, as if she were wearing no makeup and hadn’t had her hair styled and wasn’t wearing five-thousand-dollar trousers, all the while, he knew, putting a great deal of time and effort into her appearance. It was no wonder everyone wanted her at their events and the magazines always featured her photographs. But he found O N E F I F T H AV E N U E

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himself feeling surprisingly hesitant about her budding success. This cau-tion was new for him, and he wondered if it was due to recent events or to the realization that his own years of striving had added up to nearly nothing. “A photograph is only an image. Here today, gone tomorrow,”

he wanted to say. “It won’t satisfy your soul in the long run.” But he didn’t. Why shouldn’t she have her fun now, while she could? There would be plenty of time for regrets later.

The car took them to the Hammer Galleries on Fifth Avenue, where Billy sat on a bench and took in the recent paintings. In the clean white rarefied air of the gallery, he began to feel better. This was why he did what he did, he thought. Although he couldn’t afford art himself, he could surround himself with it through those who could. Annalisa sat next to him, staring at Andrew Wyeth’s famous painting of a woman in a blue room at the beach. “I’ll never understand how a painting can cost forty million dollars,” she said.

“Oh my dear,” he said. “A painting like this is priceless. It’s absolutely unique. The work and vision of one man, and yet in it, one sees the universal creative hand of God.”

“But the money could be spent to really help people,” Annalisa said.

Her argument made Billy feel weary. He’d heard it so many times before. “That’s true, on the surface of things,” he said. “But without art, man is an animal, and a not very attractive animal at that. Greedy, striving, selfish, and murderous. Here is joy and awe and regard.” He indicated the painting. “It’s nourishment for the soul.”

“How are you, Billy?” Annalisa asked. “Really?”

“Just peachy,” Billy replied.

“If there’s anything I can do to help your mother—” She hesitated, knowing how Billy hated talking about his financial situation. But charity got the better of her. “If you need money . . . and Paul is making so much . . . He says he’s on the verge of making billions”—she smiled as if it were an uncomfortable joke—“and I would never spend ten million dollars on a painting. But if a person needs help . . .”

Billy kept his eyes on the Wyeth. “You don’t have to worry about me, my dear. I’ve survived in New York this long, and I reckon I’ll survive a little longer.”

When he got back to his apartment, the phone was ringing. It was his 274

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mother. “I asked the girl to bring me cod from the supermarket, and it had turned. You’d think a person would know if fish were bad or not.”

“Oh, Ma,” he said, feeling defeated and frustrated.

“What am I supposed to do?” she asked.

“Can’t you call Laura?” he said, referring to his sister.

“We’re not speaking again. We were only speaking because you were here.”

“I wish you would sell the house and move to a condo in Palm Beach.

Your life would be so much easier.”

“I can’t afford it, Billy,” she said. “And I won’t live with strangers.”

“But you’d have your own apartment.”

“I can’t live in an apartment. I’d go crazy.”

Billy hung up the phone and sighed. His mother had become impossible, as, he supposed, all elderly people were when they refused to accept that their lives had to change. He had hired a private nurse to visit his mother twice a week, as well as a girl who would clean her house and run errands. But it was only a temporary solution. And his mother was right—she couldn’t afford to sell her house and buy a condo in Florida. During his month in the Berkshires, he’d consulted a real estate agent who’d informed him that the housing market had plummeted and his mother’s house was worth maybe three hundred thousand dollars.

If she’d wanted to sell two years ago, it would have been a different story—the house might have sold for four-fifty.

But he hadn’t been concerned about his mother’s situation two years ago. She was okay for the moment, but eventually, she’d have to go into some kind of assisted living facility, the cost of which, he’d been informed by his sister, was upward of five thousand dollars a month. If she sold the house, the money from the sale would last about four years. And then what?

He looked around his little apartment. Was he about to lose his own home as well? Would he, too, become a charity case? The fact that Annalisa Rice had asked him if he needed money was a bad sign. Was it apparent to all how desperate he was? Once people sensed his weakness, he’d be cut off. “Did you hear what happened to Billy Litchfield?” they’d ask. “He lost his apartment and had to leave New York.” They’d talk O N E F I F T H AV E N U E

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about it for a little while, but then they’d forget about him. No one cared to think about the people who didn’t make it.

He went into his bedroom and opened the wooden box Mrs.

Houghton had left him. The Cross of Bloody Mary was still in its suede pouch in the hidden compartment. He’d considered renting a safe deposit box in which to store the cross, but he worried that this action alone might arouse suspicion. So he had kept it, as Mrs. Houghton had, on top of his bureau. Unwrapping the cross, he recalled something Mrs.

Houghton had once said: “The problem with art is that it doesn’t solve people’s problems, Billy. Money, on the other hand, does.”

Billy put on his reading glasses and examined the cross. The diamonds were crudely cut by today’s standards and were far from perfect in color or clarity, with cloudy occlusions. But the stones were old and enormous.

The diamond in the middle was at least twenty carats. On the open market, the cross might be worth ten to twenty million dollars.

This particular circumstance dictated that he mustn’t be greedy, however—the more money he demanded, the more likely the sale would attract attention. He would ask for only three million dollars—just enough, he reasoned, to take care of his mother and ensure his relatively modest lifestyle in New York.