Goodbye To All That (39 page)

No, there was nothing
surely
about that. If she lived in Inwood, she’d want to move downtown, too, even if Murray Hill wasn’t the hottest neighborhood in the city. Maybe O’Leary was curious enough to want to check out the apartment for himself. Or maybe he just wanted to give her
tsorris
. She’d taught him a new word; now he wanted to make the concept come to life.

What was he up to? Why was he still trying to game her?

She approached the two, who were chattering away like old friends. No doubt O’Leary was treating Kathy to a double-barreled barrage of charm. Melissa suppressed the urge to kick him.

“Hi,” she greeted him curtly, then turned to Kathy. “I told him to meet me here at six-twenty,” she explained. “I guess he can wait in the lobby.”

“Oh, I thought
 . . .
” Kathy’s quizzical gaze shuttled between O’Leary and Melissa.

“It’s all right,” O’Leary said smoothly. “I’d like to see the apartment, too. Considering.”

Considering what? He was definitely gaming Melissa, pulling something on her, and she didn’t like it. She didn’t like it even more when he touched his hand to the small of her back and escorted her into the building, as if he were her boyfriend or something.

Kathy conferred with the doorman for a minute. The lobby was nothing special, and the doorman, who wore an ill-fitting brown suit, looked peevish, as if Kathy had awakened him from a nap. But given that the cost of the apartment upstairs was more than Melissa could afford, she wasn’t about to waste time looking at apartments in swankier buildings. She was already paying an exorbitant rent for her studio apartment uptown, and a significant chunk of that rent was probably subsidizing the building’s three doormen, who dressed in spiffy livery with gold-braid trim and stood in a lobby graced with black marble flooring and smoky veined mirrors, which actually seemed kind of dated to Melissa but were still more elegant than the plain cream-hued walls of this building’s lobby.

“Why are you here?” Melissa whispered to O’Leary.

He was spared from having to answer when Kathy returned and gestured toward the elevator. “Nice place,” he said, as much to Kathy as to Melissa as they stepped inside the elevator. “It doesn’t smell like onions.”

“Is it supposed to smell like onions?” Melissa asked, her voice icy enough to freeze whisky.

“My building’s elevator usually does. I’m not sure what the source is. I’ve complained to the super, but he says he doesn’t notice it. I guess it’s the sort of thing you get used to after a while.”

“There’s such a thing as an air freshener,” Kathy pointed out. “Perhaps your super could plug one in.”

“I don’t think there’s an electrical socket in the elevator,” he mused. “What would he plug it into?”

“There’s got to be an electrical source,” Kathy said. “It’s an elevator. It runs on electricity.”

Melissa gritted her teeth as they yakked amiably about elevators, electricity and onions. After a sluggish ascent—this particular elevator didn’t run, it trudged—they reached the fourth floor and exited into a hall that smelled blessedly like nothing at all.

“Have you crunched the numbers?” Kathy asked Melissa as they strolled down the hall to the unit. “Is this going to be doable for you?”

“I’m still crunching,” Melissa assured her, although the numbers had so far proven themselves crunch-resistant. She smiled placidly, ignoring the light pressure of O’Leary’s hand at the small of her back again as they waited for Kathy to unlock the door.

“The unit is empty,” Kathy explained to O’Leary as the door swung in. “The owner is an elderly woman who’s having some health issues, so her son moved her down to the Atlanta area, where he lives. From what I hear, she hates it there. She says the place is full of southerners.”

“New Yorkers can be so provincial,” O’Leary joked.

Kathy took him seriously. “Indeed we can be. But the move is a done deal, and her son wants this place sold ASAP. There’s some kind of arrangement where the money she makes on the sale will go to the senior community where she’s living down there. She told her broker her new residence is like a cruise ship, only on land. They’ve got activities all day long. Movies, lectures, crafts. Shuffleboard, she said. She hates shuffleboard.”

Kathy switched on the ceiling light in the entry, then hurried ahead of them to turn on the few lamps that had been left behind in the otherwise barren apartment. The rooms looked small to Melissa, as if the naked walls were leaning inward, but that didn’t concern her. Rooms always looked smaller when they were empty.

O’Leary abandoned her side and ducked into the kitchen. She wondered if he was an amateur chef; he surveyed the tiny work space with more intensity than she ever had.

She scrutinized the kitchen, trying to figure out what he saw that she might have missed. The cabinets were some enameled compound material, but the cooking range was gas, which she considered an asset. The fridge stood open, its bulb unscrewed and its dark, vacant shelves forlorn. O’Leary rapped a fist gently against the laminate countertop, then exited into the dining nook off the living room. “You could fit a full-size table here,” he said.

“I doubt I’ll be hosting any banquets.”

“Still, it’s a nice size. The kitchen, though
 . . .
” He glanced behind him, then ventured into the living room. “Southern exposure. How’s the air conditioning in this unit?”

“Nobody’s turned it on in a couple of months,” Kathy informed him. “If there’s a problem, management will cover the repair costs. We can write that into the contract.”

“I’m just saying, with all these windows facing south, you want to make sure the room isn’t going to be hard to cool in the summer. These are double-panes, right?” Before Kathy could answer, he was striding down the hall to the bedrooms.

Kathy and Melissa shared a look. Kathy was smiling one of those aww-he’s-adorable smiles. Melissa didn’t smile back. She was thinking not that he was adorable but that he was asking questions she’d never thought to ask. She was a lawyer, for God’s sake. She should have been thinking like a lawyer. But she’d been thinking like a woman desperate to find a halfway decent apartment that wouldn’t ultimately land her in debtor’s prison.

“The master bath could use some updating,” O’Leary called from deep within the master bedroom.

What did he care? If he didn’t have to pee right this minute, he’d never have an opportunity to use that bathroom.

What she’d noticed when she’d inspected the master bedroom was the closet. It was a walk-in—small enough that “step-in” would be a more accurate description, but bigger than what she currently had. The bathroom could be updated after she’d paid down the mortgage a bit. Like maybe fifteen years from now. As long as the toilet flushed and the shower didn’t spray too hot or too cold, she was satisfied.

He emerged from the bathroom as she emerged from the closet. “Hardwood floor in a bedroom?” he said. “You’d need to put down a rug. Who wants to get out of bed and have your bare feet touch a cold, hard floor?”

“Who wants to get out of bed, period?” she retorted, then realized, from his mischievous grin, that he’d misinterpreted her words. “I’m usually so tired when the alarm goes off,” she clarified. “The cold hard floor wakes me up. Wood isn’t that cold, anyway. And the bathroom is clean. I don’t need fancy.”

“If you say so.” He winked again, and she wondered if she was going to be hearing about how she didn’t want to get out of bed for the rest of her life, or at least for as long as it took to eat dinner with him.

She told herself she didn’t care. His criticisms of the apartment implied that he wasn’t going to enter into a bidding war with her over it. Maybe his place up in Inwood had a marble sunken tub and granite counters in the master bath. Maybe his kitchen featured a six-burner Viking range. Maybe such things mattered to him.

In any case, she didn’t have to worry about his vying with her for this unit. Which was a good thing, because walking through it, wrapping herself in the atmosphere of its dowdy kitchen and its potentially steamy living room and its antiquated master bath, only reinforced her love of the place. She couldn’t pinpoint
why
this apartment felt so right to her. All she knew was that it
did
feel right.

He peered into the walk-in closet, then headed for the door, where Kathy stood on the threshold watching them, her “aww” smile still plastered across her face. She stepped aside so he and Melissa could exit. Melissa braced herself for the second bedroom.

Yes, it was compact. Yes, its window overlooked an air shaft, not the street. But the instant she entered the room, which was lit only by a cheap tabletop lamp standing on the floor in one corner, throwing knee-high parabolas of light onto the walls, she felt that same maternal stirring she’d felt the first time she’d seen this room.

“This would make a nice nursery,” O’Leary said.

Melissa flinched. Why would he say that? Did he feel the same vibe she felt? If the room had ever been a nursery, it hadn’t been one recently, given the advanced age of the current owner. Most childless people considering the purchase of this apartment would turn this room into a den or an office.

But O’Leary saw it as a nursery. Just like her.

“All right,” she said briskly, brushing past him as she bolted toward the doorway. She couldn’t stand in this room, this would-be nursery, with a man who saw it the way she did. She had no idea what O’Leary’s agenda was, but she was unnerved. If he hadn’t already riled her suspicions, his ability to identify the room as a nursery spooked her.

She had to get back into the living room—someplace where the yearning to have a baby could fade away. No one wanted a baby in a living room.

O’Leary and Kathy sauntered down the hall to the living room at a more leisurely pace. “The place has possibilities,” O’Leary was saying. “It also has flaws.”

Kathy shrugged. “What apartment doesn’t? I’ve been in luxury towers, penthouses, townhouses—they all have flaws. Still, I’d say that for the asking price, this is a real little gem.”

“A flawed gem,” O’Leary said, strolling across the living room to the south-facing wall of windows and then meeting Melissa’s gaze. Another wink.

Would he stop with the winks already? Did he have a freaking tic in his eyelid? “I heard you,” she muttered. “It’s flawed.”

“I’m just thinking, given the flaws, there’s got to be some flexibility in the price.” His voice was muted, but he’d managed to project it enough for Kathy to overhear

Then she got it. God, was she stupid. She might be able to negotiate on behalf of her clients. But on behalf of herself, she was helpless. It had never occurred to her to pretend to be less than thrilled by this apartment as a way of bargaining down the price.

“A two-bedroom apartment for under seven figures?” Kathy said. “You’re not going to find a better deal, not if you want to stay in Manhattan.”

Melissa almost retorted that $995,000 was barely under seven figures, but Kathy wasn’t the person she had to convince. The seller was. “Tell them I’ll buy it for eight-fif—” O’Leary squinted slightly and pointed his thumb downward. “Eight hundred thousand,” she said, her voice wavering. Even eight hundred thousand would be a stretch for her. She’d have to give up twelve-dollar margaritas and four-hundred dollar shoes. She might even have to buy her purses from some counterfeiter running his business from a card table on a street corner in Queens.

“Eight hundred thousand?” Kathy sounded shrill. “They’ll be insulted.”

O’Leary watched Melissa. He was measuring her, testing her, and that pissed her off. But damn if she wouldn’t pass his stupid test. “No they won’t,” she told Kathy, turning from him. “If they’re serious about selling, they’ll counter-offer.”

“Well, I don’t know.” Kathy sighed heavily and shook her head. “Eight hundred thousand?”