Кэндес Бушнелл - One Fifth Avenue

Billy hoped it wouldn’t be someone like the Brewers, although it probably would be. Despite the chintz, the apartment was worth at least twenty million dollars, and who could afford it except for one of the new hedge-funders? And considering some of those types, the Brewers weren’t bad. At least the wife, Connie, was a former ballet dancer and friend. The Brewers lived uptown and owned a hideous new house in the Hamptons where Billy was going for the weekend. He would tell Connie about the apartment and how he could smooth their entry with the head of the board, the extremely unpleasant Mindy Gooch. Billy had known Mindy “forever” — meaning from the mid-eighties, when he’d met her at a party.

She was Mindy Welch back then, fresh off the boat from Smith College.

Full of brio, she was convinced she was about to become the next big thing in publishing. In the early nineties, she got herself engaged to James Gooch, who had just won a journalism award. Once again Mindy had had all kinds of grand schemes, picturing she and James as the city’s next power couple. But none of it had worked out as planned, and now Mindy and James were a middle-aged, middle-class couple with creative preten-sions who couldn’t afford to buy their own apartment today. Billy often wondered how they’d been able to buy in One Fifth in the first place. The unexpected and tragic early death of a parent, he guessed.

He stood a moment longer, wondering what the photographers were waiting for. Mrs. Houghton was dead and had passed away in the hospital.

No one related to her was likely to come walking out; there wouldn’t even be the thrill of the body being taken away, zipped up in a body bag, as one sometimes saw in these buildings filled with old people. At that instant, however, none other than Mindy Gooch strolled out of the building. She was wearing jeans and those fuzzy slippers that people pretended were shoes and were in three years ago. She was shielding the face of a young teenaged boy as if afraid for his safety. The photographers ignored them.

“What is all this?” she asked, spotting Billy and approaching him for a chat.

“I imagine it’s for Mrs. Houghton.”

“Is she finally dead?” Mindy said.

“If you want to look at it that way,” Billy said.

“How else can one look at it?” Mindy said.

“It’s that word ‘finally,’ ” Billy said. “It’s not nice.”

“Mom,” the boy said.

“This is my son, Sam,” Mindy said.

“Hello, Sam,” Billy said, shaking the boy’s hand. He was surprisingly attractive, with a mop of blond hair and dark eyes. “I didn’t know you had a child,” Billy remarked.

“He’s thirteen,” Mindy said. “We’ve had him quite a long time.”

Sam pulled away from her.

“Will you kiss me goodbye, please?” Mindy said to her son.

“I’m going to see you in, like, forty-eight hours,” Sam protested.

“Something could happen. I could get hit by a bus. And then your last memory will be of how you wouldn’t kiss your mother goodbye before you went away for the weekend.”

“Mom, please,” Sam said. But he relented. He kissed her on the cheek.

Mindy gazed at him as he ran across the street. “He’s that age,” she said to Billy. “He doesn’t want his mommy anymore. It’s terrible.”

Billy nodded cautiously. Mindy was one of those aggressive New York types, as tightly wound as two twisted pieces of rope. You never knew when the rope might unwind and hit you. That rope, Billy often thought, might even turn into a tornado. “I know exactly what you mean.” He sighed.

“Do you?” she said, her eyes beaming in on him. There was a glassy look to les yeux , thought Billy. Perhaps she was on drugs. But in the next second, she calmed down and repeated, “So Mrs. Houghton’s finally dead.”

“Yes,” Billy said, slightly relieved. “Don’t you read the papers?”

“Something came up this morning.” Mindy’s eyes narrowed. “Should be interesting to see who tries to buy the apartment.”

“A rich hedge-funder, I would imagine.”

“I hate them, don’t you?” Mindy said. And without saying goodbye, she turned on her heel and walked abruptly away.

Billy shook his head and went home.

Mindy went to the deli around the corner. When she returned, the photographers were still on the sidewalk in front of One Fifth. Mindy was suddenly enraged by their presence.

“Roberto,” Mindy said, getting in the doorman’s face. “I want you to call the police. We need to get rid of those photographers.”

“Okay, Missus Mindy,” Roberto said.

“I mean it, Roberto. Have you noticed that there are more and more of these paparazzi types on the street lately?”

“It’s because of all the celebrities,” Roberto said. “I can’t do anything about them.”

“Someone should do something,” Mindy said. “I’m going to talk to the mayor about it. Next time I see him. If he can drum out smokers and trans fat, he can certainly do something about these hoodlum photographers.”

“He’ll be sure to listen to you,” Roberto said.

“You know, James and I do know him,” Mindy said. “The mayor. We’ve known him for years. From before he was the mayor.”

“I’ll try to shoo them away,” Roberto said. “But it’s a free country.”

“Not anymore,” Mindy said. She walked past the elevator and opened the door to her ground-floor apartment.

The Gooches’ apartment was one of the oddest in the building, consisting of a string of rooms that had once been servants’ quarters and storage rooms. The apartment was an unwieldy shape of boxlike spaces, dead-end rooms, and dark patches, reflecting the inner psychosis of James and Mindy Gooch and shaping the psychology of their little family. Which could be summed up in one word: dysfunctional.

In the summer, the low-ceilinged rooms were hot; in the winter, cold.

The biggest room in the warren, the one they used as their living room, had a shallow fireplace. Mindy imagined it as a room once occupied by a majordomo, the head of all servants. Perhaps he had lured young female maids into his room and had sex with them. Perhaps he had been gay. And now, eighty years later, here she and James lived in those same quarters. It felt historically wrong. After years and years of pursuing the American dream, of aspirations and university educations and hard, hard work, all you got for your efforts these days were servants’ quarters in Manhattan. And being told you were lucky to have them. While upstairs, one of the grandest apartments in Manhattan was empty, waiting to be filled by some wealthy banker type, probably a young man who cared only about money and nothing about the good of the country or its people, who would live like a little king. In an apartment that morally should have been hers and James’s.

In a tiny room at the edge of the apartment, her husband, James, with his sweet balding head and messy blond comb-over, was pecking away mercilessly at his computer, working on his book, distracted and believing, as always, that he was on the edge of failure. Of all his feelings, this edge-of-failure feeling was the most prominent. It dwarfed all other feelings, crowding them out and pushing them to the edge of his consciousness, where they squatted like old packages in the corner of a room. Perhaps there were good things in those packages, useful things, but James hadn’t the time to unwrap them.

James heard the soft thud of the door in the other part of the apartment as Mindy came in. Or perhaps he only sensed her presence. He’d been around Mindy for so long, he could feel the vibrations she set off in the air. They weren’t particularly soothing vibrations, but they were familiar.

Mindy appeared before him, paused, then sat down in his old leather club chair, purchased at the fire sale in the Plaza when the venerable hotel was sold for condos for even more rich people. “James,” she said.