The Fixer Upper (7 page)

He was singing this song for her! Just the way she’d dreamed, just the way she’d fantasized. He was singing to her…and she could scarcely even listen to the song because she had to concentrate all her energies on remaining upright when she was
this
close to fainting dead away.

The girls stormed the apartment in a tumble of chatter, laughter and stomping feet. They shouted a chorus of “Hi’s” at Libby on their way to the kitchen, where they armed themselves with a two-liter bottle of Diet Pepsi and a bag of cheddar-cheese popcorn, and then they vanished into Reva’s bedroom. Hearing Reva’s door slam shut, Libby shook her head and grinned.

She would rather die than have to relive her thirteenth year. Her memories of that year were ghastly. She’d been gangly and mismatched, her nose suddenly too big for her face, her chin too small, her figure devoid of curves and her knees and elbows as rough as sandpaper. And as much as she would have liked to ignore her appearance altogether, her mother had constantly harped on it: “Don’t eat that, it’ll
give you pimples!” “Don’t wear that skirt, it makes you look chubby.” “I wish you’d let me do something with your hair, Libby.” Her mother had undoubtedly meant well, but every comment had informed Libby that she was a disaster.

Her mother had been beautiful, and still was. Her father appreciated his wife’s beauty more than any of her other traits, which was probably a good thing, given that Libby’s mother had been a dreadful cook, an even worse housekeeper, a dilettante who always swore she’d get a job but never did, and a sometime volunteer who complained about the hard work she was doing without compensation. “I’m answering phones for this outfit all day. The least they could do is pay me,” she’d grouse, even if the outfit was a soup kitchen or an organization raising money for research on dyslexia.

“Better yet, they should make you their spokeswoman,” her father would say. “A beautiful woman like you, all you’d have to do is smile and the donations would pour in.”

Libby had promised herself then that she’d never harp on her own daughter’s appearance—assuming she ever had a daughter. Once Reva had been born, Libby held on to that promise. In truth, she believed Reva was the most beautiful girl in the world, but she never said so. If she did, she would undoubtedly embarrass Reva. To be thirteen was to be overly conscious of every minor flaw, every misplaced freckle and torn cuticle. If Reva asked, “Does this shirt match these pants?” or “Is my hair straight in back?” Libby would answer honestly, but other than that she kept her mouth shut about her daughter’s appearance.

Through the closed bedroom door Libby heard muffled giggling and shrieks. She turned her attention back to the application open in front of her. Phoebe Evans was apparently quite the four-year-old, already capable of writing the entire alphabet backward, a talent Libby supposed would
come in handy if she ever became a subversive inventor like Leonardo da Vinci and wanted to write her notebooks in code. Her parents pointed out on the application that they’d managed to secure a place for her in her extremely prestigious preschool two months before she was born. “We believe in planning ahead, and so does Phoebe,” her parents wrote.

Libby set aside Phoebe’s application and opened the next folder. Madison Harkinian was a spectacular gymnast, according to her father, with hopes of competing in the 2016 Summer Olympics. This sounded familiar to Libby…and then she saw the Post-it fastened to the inside of the folder, with her preliminary notes on Madison’s application jotted onto it. She’d already reviewed this application. Her piles must have gotten mixed up.

She leaned back in the dining room chair and groaned. Not even two weeks into the process, and all the applications were sounding alike to her. She’d read at least four essays about youngsters who hoped to compete in the 2016 Summer Olympics, and a few more who expected to compete in the 2018 Winter Olympics. Shoving Madison’s folder away, she reached for the next one in the pile and prayed that the child had no Olympics aspirations.

She opened the folder and immediately noticed a Post-it with her handwriting on it: “Fin Aid App.” This was Eric Donovan’s application. She’d jotted the reminder to make sure his father filed the form. Flipping through the folder, she found a copy of Eric’s financial-aid application, several faxed sheets. Tara must have filed them.

Libby pulled out the financial-aid application and studied it. Ned Donovan was neither rich nor poor. He lived in New York and worked for a firm called Greater Manhattan Design Associates, where he got paid what would be considered a comfortably middle-class income in any other
community but what in Manhattan was a just-getting-by income. He’d bought his apartment for a typically obscene amount of money. He had a savings account but no investments. He and his son were clearly not caviar class.

But he owned his apartment outright. Libby would be thrilled just to have a mortgage. To qualify for one, however, she needed a down payment.

She’d already visited the Human Resources Department at Hudson to discuss the possibility of borrowing against her pension; they’d advised her not to do it. She’d also visited her bank, where a loan officer told her he’d be happy to discuss mortgages with her once she had a sufficient down payment. Vivienne didn’t seem to be coming through with any rich single guys from her synagogue.

Libby wondered if Ned knew how lucky he was. He might not be able to afford the Hudson School’s annual tuition—hell, she couldn’t afford it, either, and if Reva hadn’t been eligible for a free ride at the school, she’d be stuck, like Eric, in an overcrowded public school. Or else Libby would have left the city, moved to a more affordable suburb and enrolled her daughter in the local school district. Nowadays, though, the suburbs were almost as expensive as the city. Imagine having to bankrupt herself to buy a tract house somewhere, miles from everything, with sky-high property taxes. And she’d have to buy a car, and Reva wouldn’t have Central Park to hang out in with her friends, or a student subscription to Mostly Mozart.

Life was too damn expensive.

Sighing, Libby shut Eric Donovan’s folder and tossed it onto the dining-room table. Then she pushed herself out of her chair and trudged to the kitchen. Her ex-husband’s phone number was programmed into the cordless phone’s memory to make Reva’s life easier—she phoned Harry far more often than Libby did—but Libby had assigned him
number nine on the memory list. No way did he deserve one of the first few numbers.

She pressed the memory button and nine and listened to the phone ring on the other end. Maybe she’d get lucky and no one would be home. That would give her a few more days to prepare herself mentally for the difficult task of begging him for assistance. Not that she had a lot of time to spare. She needed to come up with the money or move by January.

“Hello?” Bonnie spoke into the phone. She had an odd accent, nasal Brooklyn burnished with polished notes of Westchester, kind of like Dijon mustard on a greasy hot dog.

“Bonnie? It’s Libby,” she said. “Is Harry there?”

“If you’d called ten minutes later, he wouldn’t be,” Bonnie told her. “He has a squash date with Gerald Wexler.” Bonnie liked to engage in friendly small talk with Libby. She probably considered it terribly civilized that a former wife and a current wife could shoot the breeze rather than each other.

Libby tried to recall who Gerald Wexler was, then decided she didn’t care. “Can I talk to him?” she asked, a part of her wishing she’d waited ten minutes before phoning, and another part of her lecturing herself to be mature and sensible and get this god-awful conversation over with.

“Let me see if I can grab him before he bolts,” Bonnie said. “You know how he can be.”

Actually, Libby didn’t know how he could be. The only time he’d ever bolted during their marriage was when he’d bolted from the marriage itself.

She heard a click as Bonnie put her on hold—why the woman couldn’t just put down the phone and holler for Harry was a mystery—and then, after a few seconds, another click. “What’s up?” Harry said. Unlike Bonnie, he didn’t seem to feel any compulsion to be civilized.

Libby steeled herself for her mission. To call him and complain about his failure to pick Reva up on time or his letting her watch R-rated movies when she visited him was one thing; to ask him for financial help was quite another. “I need to talk to you,” she began, then realized she couldn’t possibly talk to him about her apartment if he was on the verge of bolting.

“About what?”

If he were any more brusque, Libby would get windburn from his words, right through the phone. “It’s important, and I can’t go into it when you’re on your way out.”

“Is it about Reva? Is she okay?”

She’d give him half a point for remembering that they had a child together. “Reva is fine,” she assured him. “But what I have to discuss with you affects her. When can we talk?”

“You’re the one who’s asking for this talk,” he said. “When do you want to talk?”

“I want to talk now,” she told him, striving mightily to keep her tone calm and even. “We can’t talk now because you’ve got a squash game.”

“How long a talk are you anticipating? Can we do it when I get Reva tomorrow?” Reva usually saw her father Sundays, a routine they’d developed a few years ago, when he’d taken charge of her Hebrew-school classes in preparation for her bat mitzvah, and the classes had met on Sundays. Now they just spent the day together. Reva had dinner with him and Bonnie and then she returned home to sleep, since she had school the next morning.

“All right—but I’d rather not discuss this in front of her. Or Bonnie, for that matter.”

“It’s a big secret?” His voice held a touch of mockery. “Oh, boy. I love secrets. Fine. We’ll talk tomorrow. I’ve got to go.”

“Go. We’ll talk tomorrow.” Libby hung up before she
could say anything else, like
Fuck you, shithead.
No one could bring out the bad language in her like Harry.

She dreaded having to ask him for money face-to-face, but maybe it would be harder for him to say no when he understood that Reva’s home and her stability were at stake. He did care about her, and although fatherhood clearly didn’t come naturally to him, he put some effort into it.

Libby carried the phone back to its base in the kitchen and felt her shoulders slump. What had she accomplished with that call? She’d laid some groundwork. She’d bought herself twenty-four hours to figure out how to persuade Harry to help her out. She’d made herself nauseous.

She returned to the dining-room table and saw Eric Donovan’s folder lying open in front of her chair. If only there were a scholarship fund for people like her, who were desperate to hang on to their overpriced apartments. She’d fill out an application just as Ned Donovan had, and fax it to someone, and hope that a bouncy assistant stuck it into the correct file, and then—because she was a good person and a hard worker and she deserved to keep her apartment—she’d receive a letter saying she’d been approved for aid. And she and Reva would live happily ever after, right here in this place that had been their home for thirteen years.

She heard a surge of trilling laughter from behind Reva’s closed door. For her, Libby thought. Harry had damn well better come through for his daughter.

“Y
ou want me to what?” Harry bellowed.

“Shh!” Libby batted the air with her hand, signaling him to lower his voice. Reva had vanished into her bedroom as soon as she and Harry had arrived at the apartment, but even through her closed door she would hear every word of this difficult discussion if he insisted on shouting. For that matter, the Shapiros downstairs and the Gordons upstairs would probably hear every word. When Harry got worked up, his voice had the resonance of a foghorn.

It wasn’t as if Reva needed to be protected from the idea that her mother would ask her father for money, given that she herself had suggested it. But Libby would prefer not to have her daughter witness an argument. She and Harry had done a decent job of divorcing without rancor, and when they disagreed, they did so as calmly as possible for Reva’s sake.

Libby really hoped this talk would be calm. Harry’s reaction didn’t bode well.

“Sit,” she said, gesturing toward the faded sofa in the living room—a sofa that had entered the apartment when Harry still called the place home. “I’ll make some coffee.”

“I don’t want coffee,” he retorted in a tone maybe one or two decibels lower than before. “I just ate a very nice dinner with Reva and Bonnie.”

As if someone who’d eaten a very nice dinner couldn’t possibly follow it with a cup of coffee. Libby wondered where the very nice dinner had been—somewhere near his downtown apartment, she assumed, since he’d told her he had dropped Bonnie off at home before driving Reva to the Upper West Side to engage in this conversation Libby had requested.

“Well, sit anyway,” she said, steering him to the sofa. The coffee table—a scuffed but solid oak piece that also dated back to Harry’s marriage to Libby—was strewn with sections of the Sunday
Times
, and Libby made a halfhearted attempt to straighten them into a pile before settling into one of the wingback chairs.

Even glowering at her from the other side of the coffee table, Harry was a handsome man, lean and buffed, his dark hair brushed straight back from his polished face. When she’d started dating him at Columbia, her friends had nicknamed him “Ken” because he looked a little like a Ken doll. Unlike Ken dolls, however, he was anatomically correct, which was how she’d wound up pregnant just weeks before graduation.

He’d done the right thing. He’d offered to accompany her to a clinic if she wanted an abortion, and when she’d told him she didn’t—a decision that had surprised her as much as him, although as soon as she’d reached it she’d been certain she’d made the right choice—he had agreed to marry
her. He’d been finishing his first year at Columbia Law School, and a dean he’d gotten chummy with had somehow finagled them into this apartment. The wedding had been simple, Libby in a loose-fitting white dress, Harry in a beautifully tailored suit that had cost more than her dress, a ceremony at his parents’ synagogue followed by an elegant dinner hosted by her parents at the Faculty House on campus. Everyone had told her the food was terrific, but she’d been suffering from morning sickness, which in her case had been morning, noon and night sickness until well into her fifth month. Her only memory of the wedding dinner was that it had returned on her as soon as they’d arrived home.

The rooms of this apartment had been empty when they were newlyweds, the windows uncurtained, the fireplace dusty, the naked hardwood floors echoing Libby’s and Harry’s footsteps. Gilda and Irwin had scrounged some cast-off furniture for them, and after a few months, once Libby had landed a job as an administrative assistant in the admissions department of the lower school at Hudson, she had replaced the inflatable mattress she and Harry had been sleeping on with a real bed and purchased the living-room sofa at a discount outlet in the Bronx. She’d set up the crib Gilda had located for her—Gilda’s neighbor’s niece’s colleague at work had been willing to sell the thing for fifty bucks when her youngest child graduated to a junior bed—just days before Reva arrived.

Libby had nursed her daughter through countless sleepless nights in this apartment. She’d scraped strained peas off the walls, mopped fingerpaints off the moldings and rescued LEGO blocks from the hearth of the never-used fireplace. She’d splurged on a few multicolored rugs to warm the hardwood floors and muffle her footsteps. She’d observed pigeons roosting on the sill outside the kitchen window. She’d read
Green Eggs and Ham
a thousand times to Reva,
seated side by side with her on the couch where Harry now sat, and then she’d watched Reva prance around the room shouting, “That Sam-I-Am! That Sam-I-Am!”

She was
not
going to give up this apartment. Not without a fight—or a grovel, if that was what it took.

“Harry,” she said, “I hate asking you for money, but I’m in a bind. Either I buy this apartment or we move. Moving would mean a long schlep for Reva to get to school. It would mean longer trips for you to visit her. A quarter of a million dollars—” she raced through the figure, hoping he wouldn’t think too hard about it “—isn’t that much when you consider how essential it is for her to stay in the only home she’s ever known.”

Libby held her breath, fearing he might propose something ridiculous, like taking primary custody of Reva and having her move into his SoHo loft so she wouldn’t have such a long schlep. But from SoHo to the Upper West Side wasn’t exactly a short schlep, and anyway, Bonnie would never want to be a full-time mother. Besides, Harry didn’t want to be a full-time father. That was one reason he and his second wife were such a good match. The only other reason, as far as Libby could tell, was that they both liked money a lot.

Not that Libby was in any position to criticize. Right now, money was one of her favorite things, too—or it would be if she had any.

Harry sighed and rubbed his Adam’s apple, as if swallowing had become a challenge for him. Swallowing Libby’s plea for assistance obviously had. “I know you don’t want to leave this apartment, Libby.
I
didn’t want to leave, but I had to.”

Under other, less desperate circumstances, Libby would have pointed out that he’d had to leave the apartment only because he’d chosen to leave their marriage. He’d had his
law degree and his megabucks job as an associate at a fat-cat Wall Street firm, and he’d yearned for a glamorous life, not one that included a decidedly down-to-earth wife and a three-year-old daughter with dried ketchup on her shirt and pink Play-Doh in her hair.

“But the amount of money you’re asking for—I mean, Libby! It’s outrageous!” he declared, barely managing to keep from shouting. Libby could see his exertion. Some people had difficulty projecting their voices. Harry had difficulty not projecting his.

“What’s outrageous about it?” Libby asked. “The only outrageous thing about this is the cost of real estate in Manhattan.”

“Why the hell can’t you cover the down payment?”

“I can cover part of it,” she said defensively.

“All you need is a quarter-million dollars. Christ.” He closed his eyes, as if the situation presented a gruesome spectacle he couldn’t bear to view. “What did you do with all your money?”

“All what money? My salary at the Hudson School doesn’t compare with what you corporate lawyers earn. I pay the rent, I pay for food, I pay for supplemental life insurance, I pay for Reva’s subscription to Mostly Mozart, and every now and then I buy new stockings. My old ones get runs in them.” She felt herself scowling and tried hard to relax her face. If she came across as too angry, he’d have an excuse to say no. “It’s a miracle I’ve saved as much money as I have,” she argued, thinking wistfully of how she’d earmarked that money for a special vacation trip with Reva someday, and Reva’s college, and even a wedding at the Faculty House at Columbia if that was what Reva wished. Now all her savings would have to go toward the down payment on the apartment. Libby could only hope Harry would pay for Reva’s college and her wedding. She highly doubted that he’d offer to pay for a special vacation trip.

“Is the apartment actually worth that much? Have you had it appraised?”

“It’s worth more than they’re asking,” she told him. “They’re offering me an insider’s price. Other apartments in this row—” she gestured up and down to indicate the identical apartments above and below hers “—have gone for much more in the past few years.”

“In other words, buying this place would be an investment.”

“Yes!” She felt triumphant, delighted that Harry could regard the purchase as a positive thing. Her triumph faded fast, though. If he provided the down payment, would the apartment become
his
investment? Would he think he owned it? Even if she paid the mortgage?

Oh, shit. Would they have to draw up a formal agreement, with the title in both their names? Would she have to hire a lawyer to negotiate terms with Harry? Lawyers cost too much money. Some—like the one currently sitting on her sofa—got paid several hundred dollars an hour.

She slumped against the chair’s slack upholstery. Like the sofa, the two armchairs in the living room dated back to her newly wed days. Harry had taken a few items with him when he’d left: a brass coat tree that used to stand in the entry, the Wedgwood-china serving for four that had been a gift from his dour aunt Ethel—it was the same pattern as her own china, and Libby had always suspected Aunt Ethel had simply given them some extra settings that she didn’t need—and a fussy pair of lamps with overly ornate pseudo-Ming Dynasty bases that Gilda had donated to Libby and Harry after buying herself new bedroom lamps. But most of the furniture had been too shabby to match Harry’s upwardly mobile self-image, so he’d left it behind. The apartment’s furnishings were ten years shabbier now, but familiar and comfortable. Libby couldn’t imagine redecorating, even if
she could afford to. The chairs were indented to cup her tush; the sofa cushions cradled her shoulders perfectly. The upholstery colors—at one time teal and dun, but now a sort of murky bluish-green and brownish-green that reminded her of the ocean—worked with the rugs and the curtains.

Sitting in her beloved old chair, she eyed Harry cautiously. For a casual Sunday dinner with his daughter, he’d dressed awfully formally, in a crisp shirt, a blazer, tailored trousers and loafers so thoroughly polished they gleamed like chrome on a hot rod. Even when he’d been a struggling law school student, he’d dressed with precision. Libby suspected that when he played squash with Gerald Wexler, he wore starched white shorts and a polo shirt with a pocket-embroidered logo so exclusive no one knew who the designer was.

“If I supplied the down payment,” he said slowly, his dark eyes narrowing on her, “and mind you, I said
if
, I’d expect to be paid back.”

“Of course,” she assured him, proving she could be eminently reasonable as long as he wasn’t going to claim ownership of the apartment.

“And how would you pay me back?”

“We could work out a payment schedule once I paid off the mortgage.”

“In other words, I’d have to wait thirty years for you to reimburse me.”

“I was figuring on a fifteen-year mortgage,” she said, even though she hadn’t given it much thought. She’d be thrilled to qualify for any mortgage at all.

“We could all be dead in fifteen years,” he pointed out.

That was a cheery notion. Maybe as a lawyer, he found it useful to consider worst-case scenarios. In fifteen years, a high-tech war might vaporize the planet, and then this building would be gone, and Harry’s precious investment
would be worthless. In fifteen years, Martians might take over Manhattan and choose this West End Avenue address as their headquarters. In fifteen years, Reva might be married and Libby might be insane, muttering gibberish in a cozy padded cell somewhere. In which case, Harry could sell the damn apartment and get his down payment back.

“Why don’t we operate on the assumption that that won’t happen,” she said sweetly.

“Well.” He surveyed the living room, his gaze lingering for a moment on the painting hanging on the wall next to the fireplace, a trite but inspiring rendering of the Brooklyn Bridge in the fog. Libby had bought it a few years ago from a sidewalk artist who was clearly not destined to have his own show at the Museum of Modern Art anytime soon, but she loved it. Harry registered his disapproval of the painting with a grimace. “A quarter of a million dollars, Libby. It ain’t chopped liver.”

“It certainly ain’t.” She’d agree with anything he said, including bad grammar, if he would come through for her.

“I have to think about this.”

Think fast
, she wanted to demand. She didn’t have much time. In less than three months, the new owners would expect her to buy or move. “Of course,” she said, determined to be nice. “Of course you have to think about it.”

“Given the investment value of the place,” he added, his gaze sweeping the room once more and his upper lip twitching slightly as he glimpsed the Brooklyn Bridge painting, “you really ought to do more to maintain it.”

“If I owned the place, I’d do more,” she said, although it had never occurred to her to do anything with the apartment, other than vacuum it whenever the dust bunnies threatened to crawl out from under the sofa and raid the refrigerator. What would she do to it? Paint the walls? Install a marble vanity in the bathroom? Hell, if she bought the place, she
would hardly be able to afford toilet paper, let alone new vanities.

“I’ll get back to you.” He pushed himself to stand, as lean and slim as he’d been when she’d first met him. As arrogant, too. As snooty and superficial and Ken-doll plastic.

But he hadn’t said no. He’d said he would think about it. He could be as arrogant and snooty as he wanted to be; if he said yes, she would consider him the most wonderful Ken doll in the world.

She walked him to the door, ever the gracious hostess, and gave him her most winning smile. He didn’t return it. Smiling had never been one of his talents. She tried to recall moments in their lives when she’d seen him smile with genuine pleasure. At their wedding? No, but then, she herself hadn’t smiled that day, given her profound nausea. When Reva was born? He might have cracked a glimmer of a smile that day, but mostly she remembered him sitting beside her in her hospital room in the maternity ward and outlining the financial pressures this new baby placed upon them. “All right, we can name her Reva,” he’d said, as if this was a huge concession for him when he’d been the one to suggest the name, which had belonged to his late paternal grandmother. “Now, how soon will you be able to return to work?”