Trading Up (15 page)

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Pictures was going to show a mid-year loss. But on Thursday night he was being honored by the mayor of New York for his humanitarian contributions to the city, and by the weekend, he hoped to be well into a deal that could easily net him $50

million or more. Recently, he’d been thinking about expanding his horizons—yes, he loved movies, but eventually one had to admit that it was a business for kids—

and wouldn’t he make an excellent politician? He wiped his brow with a linen handkerchief, and as Brenda Lish continued her endless prattle, he smiled.

“I don’t have to tell
you
about this lobby,” she said, turning to Mauve. “It was designed by Stanford White and it’s been meticulously maintained—everything is original. If you tried to sell this lobby at Sotheby’s, I think it would be worth something like twenty-five million dollars.”

The walls were of paneled mahogany; a large marble fireplace formed the centerpiece, and on its mantel stood a vase with a three-foot-high spray of flowers.

Uniformed doormen wearing white gloves drifted silently through the lobby like ghosts; the atmosphere was one of timeless discretion and luxury, as if all of the events of the past eighty years had left this little oasis of class untouched.

“Comstock, what do you think?” Brenda Lish asked.

Comstock looked at her—she must be in her mid-forties but somehow managed to be both schoolmarmish and girlish at the same time—and what, he wondered, was with that flowered dress she was wearing?

“What I think is . . . ,” he said slowly, “I’m not buying the lobby.” At this, Mauve rolled her eyes, but Brenda laughed as if he’d said something extremely funny. If he had any awareness of how he appeared in this setting—of how his boorish manner was made only more glaring against the backdrop of these surroundings—he didn’t show it. Nor did Brenda Lish acknowledge it. Brenda was from an old New York family, from the time when that actually meant something, and her grandmother had lived in this building. Fifty years ago, a man like Comstock Dibble wouldn’t have been admitted, but he might have had enough sense and pride not to want to live in a building like this one anyway. But those days were gone, along with the Lish fortune; it had all disappeared by the mid-1980s. At which point Brenda, who had the quiet modesty and sensible practicality of her Puritan ancestors, became a real estate agent, using her insider knowledge of the best buildings in New York to build up a clientele who was willing, and able, to spend millions and millions of dollars on the right apartment. She didn’t personally approve of men like Comstock Dibble, but while he was cruder than most of the arrogant, tasteless men with their trophy wives who had changed the face of society in the eighties, he wasn’t completely out of the mold. He had a name, he had money, he was being honored by the mayor (which would help with the board in considering him an upstanding citizen—indeed, he had already mentioned that he 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:22 PM Page 83

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would get a letter of recommendation from His Honor), and he was marrying Mauve Binchely. That would help with the board, too.

“Should we step outside?” she asked, and the three wandered out into the bright sunshine.

“Now Mauve, I don’t have to tell
you
this,” Brenda said. “But you know apartments in this building don’t come up very often . . . The last one was three years ago, so if you’re interested, I would make an offer right away, of at least the asking price . . .”

Mauve sniffed the air as if detecting a foul odor, and said, “I’m worried about the noise.”

“Noise?” Comstock said. He suddenly seemed to be on the edge of a temper tantrum, and Brenda, who heard a great deal about people through her line of work, wondered if she was about to witness his legendary loss of self-control.

“You should be used to the noise by now. You
already
live on Park Avenue,” he said, turning to Mauve accusingly, as if she’d just stolen something from a store.

“So what?” Mauve said. “I heard a loud noise.”

“That was probably Brenda talking, you twit,” he snapped.

“I
heard
a
car horn,
” Mauve said, not responding to the insult. It was one of the things he liked about her—she had a hide as tough as an old alligator’s.

“Well, the windows are double-glazed, but you could certainly have them triple-glazed, for probably . . . fifty thousand dollars?” Brenda said. She suddenly remembered a story she’d heard about Comstock Dibble, about how he had put nipple clamps on some woman and attached strings to them and then fucked her up the butt, riding her like a horse. And apparently, the woman had liked it.

“You know I can’t tolerate noise,” Mauve said primly. “Brenda, you remember, even when we were girls, I used to scream every time I heard a siren.”

“And I can’t tolerate you right now,” Comstock said. “Where the hell is my car?” He was, of course, standing right in front of it—a black Mercedes with tinted windows and bulletproof glass. “Good-bye Brenda,” he said, glaring at Mauve. “
I
will call you.”

“Anytime,” Brenda said, with a little wave.

“He’s hideous, isn’t he?” Mauve said.

“Hideous” was too kind a word for it, Brenda thought, but she said, “Oh yes.”

“But I can’t help it. I love him,” Mauve said.

Brenda wanted to laugh. Unlike most of her contemporaries, she didn’t feel sorry for “poor Mauve”; rather, she saw her impending alliance with Comstock as a sort of divine retribution. Brenda and Mauve had been at Brearley together as girls, and Comstock was absolutely right—Mauve was, and had always been, a twit. She really had screamed every time a siren went by, and once she had even wet her 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:22 PM Page 84

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pants. They probably would have kicked her out of Brearley, but her parents had too much money and were somehow related—like only about a hundred other people in the city—to the Vanderbilts.

“If you love him, that’s all that counts,” Brenda said.

“Oh, I
know
,” Mauve said. She removed a gold compact from a blue snakeskin Fendi bag and dabbed at her long, pointy nose with powder. “I really
should
be going, dear. Fashion Week starts today.”

“It was great to see you again, dear,” Brenda said, leaning forward for the two requisite air kisses. “You look exactly the same as you did twenty years ago.”

“So do you,” Mauve said. “You know, I’d forgotten how wonderful those old Laura Ashley dresses are. Maybe they’ll make a comeback.”

“Everything does, eventually,” Brenda said. She smiled as she watched Mauve teeter down Park Avenue. She didn’t mind that Mauve had made a dig at her Laura Ashley dress; Brenda herself was the first person to admit that she was hopelessly old-fashioned. But still, she made more than $2 million in commissions a year, and as someone who had seen the mighty fall again and again, the last thing she was going to do was waste her money on designer frocks.

How foolish these rich people were! she thought, as she raised her hand to hail a cab. As if wearing designer clothes could give Mauve Binchely a personality. She settled into the back of the cab and gave the address of her next appointment. She was feeling gleeful—despite Mauve’s protests, she knew Comstock Dibble would buy the apartment, or would attempt to, anyway. The apartment he was interested in, 9B, was a four-thousand-square-foot “classic eight,” with a living room, dining room, study, three bedrooms, and a maid’s room, but she suspected he would have bought an apartment the size of a shoebox if it were the only thing available. It wasn’t just that 795 Park was one of the best buildings in the city, but that Victor Matrick, the crazy CEO of all of Splatch Verner, lived in the building, and, apparently, where Victor lived, Comstock must live as well. The entire time she’d been showing them the apartment Comstock had asked endless questions about Victor Matrick’s apartment—its location in relation to 9B and its size, and even who had done the interior decoration. It was all so typical and pathetic, Brenda thought, the way these rich, powerful men, who should have been above it all, nearly always made decisions based on their petty little egos.

Just a couple of blocks south, on Fifth Avenue and Seventieth Street, Mimi Kilroy entered the tiny elevator that opened into her and George’s apartment, and greeted the elevator man, who pressed the button for the lobby so that she wouldn’t have to exert herself. Two doormen were stationed in the lobby; as she passed, nodding, one 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:22 PM Page 85

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of them hurried to the heavy brass door that led to the street and held it open for her to pass.

“I don’t think the car is here, Mrs. Paxton,” he said, with great concern, as if the idea of her walking caused him physical pain.

“I’m not taking the car today, Jésus. I’m riding in that. Isn’t it marvelous?” She indicated a strange contraption parked at the curb, which consisted of a rickshaw attached to a bicycle. On it sat a wiry young man wearing a baseball cap.

“That looks dangerous, Mrs. Paxton,” Jésus said, and Mimi laughed. “You know nothing ever happens to
me,
” she said.

Stepping outside, her spirits soared at the day. Fifth Avenue was one of the most wonderful places in the world and it was always the same, year after year—it was one of the few things in life you could really count on. And then she thought about how interesting that was, that a street could give you more comfort than family or friends, but she’d found in life that it was important to take little bits of happiness from wherever they sprang, because so often the things that people told you would make you happy didn’t.

She stepped into the fancy rickshaw, decoratively painted yellow to attract the eye of the tourists for whom these conveyances had been invented. She crossed her legs, smoothing down the skirt of her fine tweed shift; her feet were clad in beige suede boots—impossibly impractical and ridiculously expensive, but that was the point. The driver nodded at her and set off into the traffic, and as they gently swayed down Fifth Avenue, she took her emotional temperature.

She was, she decided, happy that day. She was forty-two, and recently her days had either one of two casts: depressed or ridiculously giddy. When she was giddy, she felt like an eighteen-year-old girl again, like it wasn’t too late and she could still do anything, like start an all-girl rock band and learn to play the electric guitar and sing on a stage in front of thousands of people. When she was depressed, she felt old, she felt like she hadn’t done anything in her life, she felt that soon she would be completely undesirable and no one would ever want to have sex with her again. She would go through menopause and her vagina would dry up—as it was, it was sometimes embarrassingly difficult to become lubricated, especially with George. But George hadn’t demanded sex from her much in the past year. She guessed that he might be getting it elsewhere like most of the husbands she knew, but she didn’t mind, as long as he was discreet.

A few years ago, such thoughts would have been anathema to her. Her father had been a cheater (for all she knew, he still was), and she had seen a grimy film of bitterness and misery develop beneath the surface of her mother’s otherwise buoyant personality. When Mimi was a teenager, she hated her mother for never object-18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:22 PM Page 86

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ing to the mysterious nights her father spent away from home, but her mother made it clear that it was a topic not to be discussed, with the comment, “I will never criticize your father, dear.” That comment had haunted her for years; she sometimes wondered if it was what had made her so rebellious in her twenties and early thirties, refusing to settle down, to marry, to “do something.” And yet, as a
concept,
she admired the sacrifice her mother had made. She had often wondered if it was something she could do, and she suddenly realized, with an inward laugh, that it was exactly what she
had
done with George. She had put her personal preferences aside for what she had believed would be the greater good.

But the greater good for whom? she wondered, as they passed the stunning white marble mansion that had once been a millionaire’s private home in the 1920s but was now the Frick Museum. Her actions had been for herself, of course; after all, George was a very rich man, and it had always been expected that she would marry a rich man, if only for the purpose of adding to the Kilroy fortune. But she had also known that she’d be an excellent wife for George, that she would enhance him. The realization and eventual acceptance that this was to be her purpose in life had not come easily, and for years she had chafed at the idea like a young stallion that refuses to take the bit. As a child, she had always thought that she would be something—a star—an Olympic rider or even a jockey, an actress, a journalist, but her attempts at these professions had always been met with tacit disapproval by her family, and although their objections were never articulated, they were felt as strongly as a pair of handcuffs. She mustn’t be too much in the public eye, where she might fail or be ridiculed by critics (well, she had been ridiculed by critics when she’d appeared in an off-Broadway play at twenty-two); she mustn’t embarrass the family and, most of all, her father. The unspoken message was always: Why should she do anything since she didn’t have to? Wasn’t it enough to be gracious and charming, to look beautiful and be beautifully dressed? And so, she wondered, what the hell was she doing having an affair with Zizi?

She was having a midlife crisis. Nobody ever told women what was going to happen to them emotionally when they got into their forties. First, there was a wonderful sense of peace. You understood that you couldn’t control everything, that not everything that happened had something to do with you, and there were so many things that you once thought mattered but suddenly realized they didn’t. And yet you still felt young, you could still read the menu in a restaurant at night. But then came an emotionally sickening thud, when you wondered what was the point of life, what was the point of
your
life, especially. You suddenly wanted meaning, you wanted connection, you wanted love, and you saw that those things had somehow been worn away; you were an automaton, going through the motions, doing the things you’d always done, but you weren’t excited by them anymore, you saw the 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:22 PM Page 87