One Fifth Avenue

1

Billy Litchfield strolled by One Fifth at least twice a day. He once had a dog, a Wheaten terrier, that had been given to him by Mrs.

Houghton, who had raised Wheaten terriers on her estate on the Hudson. Wheaty had required two outings a day to the dog run in Washington Square Park, and Billy, who lived on Fifth Avenue just north of One Fifth, had developed the habit then of walking past One Fifth as part of his daily constitutional. One Fifth was one of his personal landmarks, a magnificent building constructed of a pale gray stone in the classic lines of the art deco era, and Billy, who had one foot in the new millennium and one foot in the café society of lore, had always admired it. “It shouldn’t matter where you live as long as where you live is decent,” he said to himself, but still, he aspired to live in One Fifth. He had aspired to live there for thirty-five years and had yet to make it.

For a short time, Billy had decided that aspiration was dead, or at least out of favor. This was just after 9/11, when the cynicism and shallowness that had beaten through the lifeblood of the city was interpreted as unnecessary cruelty, and it was all at once tacky to wish for anything other than world peace, and tacky not to appreciate what one had. But six years had passed, and like a racehorse, New York couldn’t be kept out of the gate, nor change its nature. While most of New York was in mourning, a secret society of bankers had brewed and stirred a giant cauldron of money, adding a dash of youth and computer technology, and voilà, a whole new class of the obscenely super-rich was born. This was perhaps bad for America, but it was good for Billy. Although a self-declared anachronism, lacking the appurtenances of what might be called a regular job, Billy acted as a sort of concierge to the very rich and successful, making introductions to decorators, art dealers, club impresarios, and members of the boards of both cultural establishments and apartment buildings. In addition to a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of art and antiquities, Billy was well versed in the finer points of jets and yachts, knew who owned what, where to go on vacation, and which restaurants to frequent.

Billy had very little money of his own, however. Possessing the fine nature of an aristocrat, Billy was a snob, especially when it came to money. He was happy to live among the rich and successful, to be witty at dinner and house parties, to advise what to say and how best to spend money, but he drew the line at soiling his own hands in the pursuit of filthy lucre.

And so, while he longed to live at One Fifth Avenue, he could never raise the desire in himself to make that pact with the devil to sell his soul for money. He was content in his rent-stabilized apartment for which he paid eleven hundred dollars a month. He often reminded himself that one didn’t actually need money when one had very rich friends.

Upon returning from the park, Billy usually felt soothed by the morning air. But on this particular morning in July, Billy was despondent.

While in the park he had sat down on a bench with The New York Times and discovered that his beloved Mrs. Houghton had passed away the night before. During the thunderstorm three days ago, Mrs. Houghton had been left out in the rain for no more than ten minutes, but it was still too late. A vicious pneumonia had set in, bringing her long life to a swift and speedy end and taking much of New York by surprise. Billy’s only consolation was that her obituary had appeared on the front page of the Times, which meant there were still one or two editors who remembered the traditions of a more refined age, when art mattered more than money, when one’s contribution to society was more important than showing off the toys of one’s wealth.

Thinking about Mrs. Houghton, Billy found himself lingering in front of One Fifth, staring up at the imposing facade. For years, One Fifth had been an unofficial club for successful artists of all kinds — the painters and writers and composers and conductors and actors and directors who possessed the creative energy that kept the city alive. Although not an artist herself, Mrs. Houghton, who had lived in the building since 1947, had been the arts’ biggest patron, founding organizations and donating millions to art institutions both large and small.

There were those who’d called her a saint.

In the past hour, the paparazzi apparently had decided a photograph of the building in which Mrs. Houghton had lived might be worth money, and had gathered in front of the entrance. As Billy took in the small group of photographers, badly dressed in misshapen T-shirts and jeans, his sensibilities were offended. All the best people are dead, he thought mournfully.

And then, since he was a New Yorker, his thoughts inevitably turned to real estate. What would happen to Mrs. Houghton’s apartment? he wondered. Her children were in their seventies. Her grandchildren, he supposed, would sell it and take the cash, having denuded most of the Houghton fortune over the years, a fortune, like so many old New York fortunes, that turned out to be not quite as impressive as it had been in the seventies and eighties. In the seventies, a million dollars could buy you just about anything you wanted. Now it barely paid for a birthday party.

How New York had changed, Billy thought.

“Money follows art, Billy,” Mrs. Houghton always said. “Money wants what it can’t buy. Class and talent. And remember that while there’s a talent for making money, it takes real talent to know how to spend it.

And that’s what you do so well, Billy.”

And now who would spend the money to buy the Houghton place?

It hadn’t been redecorated in at least twenty years, trapped in the chintz of the eighties. But the bones of the apartment were magnificent — and it was one of the grandest apartments in Manhattan, a proper triplex built for the original owner of One Fifth, which had once been a hotel. The apartment had twelve-foot ceilings and a ballroom with a marble fireplace, and wraparound terraces on all three floors.

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.

“Yes,” James said, barely looking up from his computer.

“Mrs. Houghton’s dead.”

James stared at her blankly.

“Did you know that?” Mindy asked.

“It was all over the Internet this morning.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought you knew.”

“I’m the head of the board, and you didn’t tell me,” Mindy said. “I just ran into Billy Litchfield. He told me. It was embarrassing.”

“Don’t you have better things to worry about?” James asked.

“Yes, I do. And now I’ve got to worry about that apartment. And who’s going to move into it. And what kind of people they’re going to be. Why don’t we live in that apartment?”

“Because it’s worth about twenty million dollars, and we don’t happen to have twenty million dollars lying around?” James said.

“And whose fault is that?” Mindy said.

“Mindy, please,” James said. He scratched his head. “We’ve discussed this a million times. There is nothing wrong with our apartment.”

On the thirteenth floor, the floor below the three grand floors that had been Mrs. Houghton’s apartment, Enid Merle stood on her terrace, thinking about Louise. The top of the building was tiered like a wedding cake, so the upper terraces were visible to those below. How shocking that only three days ago, she’d been standing in this very spot, convers-ing with Louise, her face shaded in that ubiquitous straw hat. Louise had never allowed the sun to touch her skin, and she’d rarely moved her face, believing that facial expressions caused wrinkles. She’d had at least two face-lifts, but nevertheless, even on the day of the storm, Enid remembered noting that Louise’s skin had been astoundingly smooth. Enid was a different story. Even as a little girl, she’d hated all that female fussi-ness and overbearing attention to one’s appearance. Nevertheless, due to the fact that she was a public persona, Enid had eventually succumbed to a face-lift by the famous Dr. Baker, whose society patients were known as “Baker’s Girls.” At eighty-two, Enid had the face of a sixty-five-year-old, although the rest of her was not only creased but as pleasantly speck-led as a chicken.

For those who knew the history of the building and its occupants, Enid Merle was not only its second oldest resident — after Mrs. Houghton — but in the sixties and seventies, one of its most notorious. Enid, who had never married and had a degree in psychology from Columbia University (making her one of the college’s first women to earn one), had taken a job as a secretary at the New York Star in 1948, and given her fascination with the antics of humanity, and possessing a sympathetic ear, had worked her way into the gossip department, eventually securing her own column.

Having spent the early part of her life on a cotton farm in Texas, Enid always felt slightly the outsider and approached her work with the good Southern values of kindness and sympathy. Enid was known as the “nice” gossip columnist, and it had served her well: When actors and politicians were ready to tell their side of a story, they called Enid. In the early eighties, the column had been syndicated, and Enid had become a wealthy woman. She’d been trying to retire for ten years, but her name, argued her employers, was too valuable, and so Enid worked with a staff that gathered information and wrote the column, although under special circumstances, Enid would write the column herself. Louise Houghton’s death was one such circumstance.

Thinking about the column she would have to write about Mrs. Houghton, Enid felt a sharp pang of loss. Louise had had a full and glamorous life — a life to be envied and admired — and had died without enemies, save perhaps for Flossie Davis, who was Enid’s stepmother. Flossie lived across the street, having abandoned One Fifth in the early sixties for the conveniences of a new high-rise. But Flossie was crazy and always had been, and Enid reminded herself that this pang of loss was a feeling she’d carried all her life — a longing for something that always seemed to be just out of reach. It was, Enid thought, simply the human condition. There were inherent questions in the very nature of being alive that couldn’t be answered but only endured.

Usually, Enid did not find these thoughts depressing but, rather, exhil-arating. In her experience, she’d found that most people did not manage to grow up. Their bodies got older, but this did not necessarily mean the mind matured in the proper way. Enid did not find this truth particularly bothersome, either. Her days of being upset about the unfairness of life and the inherent unreliability of human beings to do the right thing were over.

Having reached old age, she considered herself endlessly lucky. If you had a little bit of money and most of your health, if you lived in a place with lots of other people and interesting things going on all the time, it was very pleasant to be old. No one expected anything of you but to live. Indeed, they applauded you merely for getting out of bed in the morning.

Spotting the paparazzi below, Enid realized she ought to tell Philip about Mrs. Houghton’s passing. Philip was not an early riser, but Enid considered the news important enough to wake him. She knocked on his door and waited for a minute, until she heard Philip’s sleepy, annoyed voice call out, “Who is it?”

“It’s me,” Enid said.

Philip opened the door. He was wearing a pair of light blue boxer shorts. “Can I come in?” Enid asked. “Or do you have a young lady here?”

“Good morning to you, too, Nini,” Philip said, holding the door so she could enter. “Nini” was Philip’s pet name for Enid, having come up with it when he was one and was first learning to talk. Philip had been and was still, at forty-five, a precocious child, but this wasn’t perhaps his fault, Enid thought. “And you know they’re not young ladies anymore,”

he added. “There’s nothing ladylike about them.”

“But they’re still young. Too young,” Enid said. She followed Philip into the kitchen. “Louise Houghton died last night. I thought you might want to know.”

“Poor Louise,” Philip said. “The ancient mariner returns to the sea.

Coffee?”

“Please,” Enid said. “I wonder what will happen to her apartment.

Maybe they’ll split it up. You could buy the fourteenth floor. You’ve got plenty of money.”

“Sure,” Philip said.

“If you bought the fourteenth floor, you could get married. And have room for children,” Enid said.

“I love you, Nini,” Philip said. “But not that much.”

Enid smiled. She found Philip’s sense of humor charming. And Philip was so good-looking — endearingly handsome in that boyish way that women find endlessly pleasing — that she could never be angry with him. He wore his dark hair one length, clipped below the ears so it curled over his collar like a spaniel’s, and when Enid looked at him, she still saw the sweet five-year-old boy who used to come to her apartment after kindergarten, dressed in his blue school uniform and cap. He was such a good boy, even then. “Mama’s sleeping, and I don’t want to wake her. She’s tired again. You don’t mind if I sit with you, do you, Nini?”

he would ask. And she didn’t mind. She never minded anything about Philip.

“Roberto told me that one of Louise’s relatives tried to get into the apartment last night,” Enid said, “but he wouldn’t let them in.”

“It’s going to get ugly,” Philip said. “All those antiques.”

“Sotheby’s will sell them,” Enid said, “and that will be the end of it.

The end of an era.”

Philip handed her a mug of coffee.

“There are always deaths in this building,” he said.

“Mrs. Houghton was old,” Enid said and, quickly changing the subject, asked, “What are you going to do today?”

“I’m still interviewing researchers,” Philip said.

A diversion, Enid thought, but decided not to delve into it. She could tell by Philip’s attitude that his writing wasn’t going well again. He was joyous when it was and miserable when it wasn’t.

Enid went back to her apartment and attempted to work on her column about Mrs. Houghton, but found that Philip had distracted her more than usual. Philip was a complicated character. Technically, he wasn’t her nephew but a sort of second cousin — his grandmother Flossie Davis was Enid’s stepmother. Enid’s own mother had died when she was a girl, and her father had met Flossie backstage at Radio City Music Hall during a business trip to New York. Flossie was a Rockette and, after a quick marriage, had tried to live with Enid and her father in Texas. She’d lasted six months, at which point Enid’s father had moved the family to New York. When Enid was twenty, Flossie had had a daughter, Anna, who was Philip’s mother. Like Flossie, Anna was very beautiful, but plagued by demons. When Philip was nineteen, she’d killed herself. It was a violent, messy death. She’d thrown herself off the top of One Fifth.

It was the kind of thing that people always assume they will never forget, but that wasn’t true, Enid thought. Over time, the healthy mind had a way of erasing the most unpleasant details. So Enid didn’t remember the exact circumstances of what had happened on the day Anna had died; nor did she recall exactly what had happened to Philip after his mother’s death. She recalled the outlines — the drug addiction, the arrest, the fact that Philip had spent two weeks in jail, and the consequent months in rehab — but she was fuzzy on the specifics. Philip had taken his experiences and turned them into the novel Summer Morning, for which he’d won the Pulitzer Prize. But instead of pursuing an artistic career, Philip had become commercial, caught up in Hollywood glamour and money.

In the apartment next door, Philip was also sitting in front of his computer, determined to finish a scene in his new screenplay, Bridesmaids Revisited. He wrote two lines of dialogue and then, in frustration, shut down his computer. He got into the shower, wondering once more if he was losing his touch.

Ten years ago, when he was thirty-five, he’d had everything a man could want in his career: a Pulitzer Prize, an Oscar for screenwriting, money, and an unassailable reputation. And then the small fissures began to appear: movies that didn’t make as much as they should have at the box office. Arguments with young executives. Being replaced on two projects. At the time, Philip told himself it was irrelevant: It was the business, after all. But the steady stream of money he’d enjoyed as a young man had lately been reduced to a trickle. He didn’t have the heart to tell Nini, who would be disappointed and alarmed. Shampooing his hair, he again rationalized his situation, telling himself there was no need for worry — with the right project and a little bit of luck, he’d be on top of the world again.

A few minutes later, Philip stepped into the elevator and tousled his damp hair. Still thinking about his life, he was startled when the elevator doors opened on the ninth floor, and a familiar, musical voice chimed out, “Philip.” A second later, Schiffer Diamond got on. “Schoolboy,” she said, as if no time had passed at all, “I can’t believe you still live in this lousy building.”

Philip laughed. “Enid told me you were coming back.” He smirked, immediately falling into their old familiar banter. “And here you are.”

“Told you?” Schiffer said. “She wrote a whole column about it. The return of Schiffer Diamond. Made me sound like a middle-aged gunslinger.”

“You could never be middle-aged,” Philip said.

“Could be and am,” Schiffer replied. She paused and looked him up and down. “You still married?”

“Not for seven years,” Philip said, almost proudly.

“Isn’t that some kind of record for you?” Schiffer asked. “I thought you never went more than four years without getting hitched.”

“I’ve learned a lot since my two divorces,” Philip said, “i.e.: Do not get married again. What about you? Where’s your second husband?”

“Oh, I divorced him as well. Or he divorced me. I can’t remember.”

She smiled at him in that particular way she had, making him feel like he was the only person in the world. For a moment, Philip was taken in, and then he reminded himself that he’d seen her use that smile on too many others.

The elevator doors opened, and Philip looked over her shoulder at the pack of paparazzi in front of the building. “Are those for you?” he asked, almost accusingly.

“No, silly. They’re for Mrs. Houghton. I’m not that famous,” she said.

Hurrying across the lobby, she ran through the flashing cameras and jumped into the back of a white van.

Oh, yes, you are, Philip thought. You’re still that famous and more.

Dodging the photographers, he headed across Fifth Avenue and down Tenth Street to the little library on Sixth Avenue where he sometimes worked. He suddenly felt irritated. Why had she come back? She would torture him again and then leave. There was no telling what that woman might do. Twenty years ago, she’d surprised him and bought an apartment in One Fifth and tried to position it as proof that she would always be with him. She was an actress, and she was nuts. They were all nuts, and after that last time, when she’d run off and married that goddamned count, he’d sworn off actresses for good.

He entered the cool of the library, taking a seat in a battered armchair.

He picked up the draft of Bridesmaids Revisited, and after reading through a few pages, put it down in disgust. How had he, Philip Oakland, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, ended up writing this crap? He could imagine Schiffer Diamond’s reaction: “Why don’t you do your own work, Oakland? At least find something you care about personally.” And his own defense: “It’s called show ‘business.’ Not show ‘art.’ ”

“Bullshit,” she’d say. “You’re scared.”

Well, she always prided herself on not being afraid of anything. And that was her own bullshit defense: insisting she wasn’t vulnerable. It was dishonest, he thought. But when it came to her feelings for him, she’d always thought he was a little bit better than even he thought he was.

He picked up the pages again but found he wasn’t the least bit interested. Bridesmaids Revisited was exactly what it seemed — a story about what had happened in the lives of four women who’d met as bridesmaids at twenty-two. And what the hell did he know about twenty-two-year-old girls? His last girlfriend, Sondra, wasn’t nearly as young as Enid had implied — she was, in fact, thirty-three — and was an up-and-coming executive at an independent movie company. But after nine months, she’d become fed up with him, assessing — correctly — that he was not ready to get married and have children anytime soon.

A fact that was, at his age, “pathetic,” according to Sondra and her friends. This reminded Philip that he hadn’t had sex since their breakup two months ago. Not that the sex had been so great anyway.

Sondra had performed all the standard moves, but the sex had not been inspiring, and he’d found himself going through the motions with a kind of weariness that had made him wonder if sex would ever be good again. This thought led him to memories of sex with Schiffer Diamond.

Now, that, he thought, staring blankly at the pages of his screenplay, had been good sex.

At the tip of Manhattan, the white van containing Schiffer Diamond was crossing the Williamsburg Bridge to the Steiner Studios in Brooklyn.

Schiffer was also attempting to study a script — the pilot episode for Lady Superior — for which she had a table read that morning. The part was especially good: A forty-five-year-old nun radically changes her life and discovers what it means to be a contemporary woman. The producers were billing the character as middle-aged, although Schiffer still had a hard time accepting the fact that forty-five was middle-aged. This made her smile, thinking of Philip trying not to act surprised to see her in the elevator. No doubt he, too, was having a hard time accepting that forty-five was middle-aged.

And then, like Philip, she also recalled their sex life. But for her, the memory of sex with Philip was laced with frustration. There were rules about sex: If the sex wasn’t good the first time, it would probably get better. If it was great the first time, it would go downhill. But mostly, if the sex was really great, the best sex you’d had in your life, it meant the two people should be together. The rules were juvenile, of course, constructs concocted by young women in order to make sense of men.

But sex with Philip had broken all the rules. It was great the first time and great every time thereafter, and they hadn’t ended up together. This was one of the disappointments one learned about life — yes, men loved sex. But great sex didn’t mean they wanted to marry you. Great sex held no larger implications for them. It was only that: great sex.

She looked out the window at the East River. The water was brown but somehow managed to be sparkling as well, like a grand old lady who won’t give up her jewels. Why did she bother with Philip at all? He was a fool. When great sex wasn’t enough for a man, he was hopeless.

This led her back to her only conclusion: Maybe the sex hadn’t been as special for him as it had been for her. How did one define great sex, anyway? There were all the things one could do to stimulate the genitals — the kissing and licking and firm yet gentle touches, hands wrapped around the shaft of the penis and fingers exploring the inside of the vagina. For the woman, it was about opening up, spreading, accepting the penis not as a foreign object but as a means to pleasure. That was the defining moment of great sex — when the penis met the vagina. She could still remember that first moment of intercourse with Philip: their mutual surprise at how good it felt, then the sensation that their bodies were no longer relevant; then the world fell away and it seemed all of life itself was concentrated in this friction of molecules that led to an explosion. The sensation of completion, the closing of the circle — it had to mean something, right?

2

There were times now when Mindy Gooch wasn’t sure what she was doing in her job, when she couldn’t see the point of her job, or even exactly what her job was. Ten years ago, Mindy, who had been a cultural columnist for the magazine, who at thirty-three had been ambitious, smart, full of beans and fire, and even (she liked to think) ruthless, had managed to ratchet herself up to the head of the Internet division (which no one had really understood back then) to the tuneful salary of half a million dollars a year. At first she had flourished in this position (indeed, how could she not, as no one knew what she was doing or what she was supposed to do), and Mindy was considered one of the company’s brightest stars. With her sleek, highlighted bob and her plain but attractive face, Mindy was trotted out at corporate events, she was honored by women’s media organizations, and she spoke to college students about her “recipe” for getting ahead (“hard work, no job too small, no detail too unimportant,” words no young person really wanted to hear, though they were true). Then there were rumors that Mindy was being groomed for a bigger position, an executive position with domin-ion over many minions — the equivalent, she’d liked to think, of being made a knight in the sixteenth century. At that time, in the beginning of the upswing of her career, Mindy was full of a magical hubris that allowed her to take on any aspect of life and succeed. She found the apartment in One Fifth, moved her family, got herself on the board, got her son, Sam, into a better private kindergarten, made Toll House cookies and decorated pumpkins with nontoxic finger paints, had sex with her husband once a week, and even took a class with her girlfriends on how to give a blow job (using bananas). She’d thought about where she might be in five years, in ten years, in fifteen. She did have fantasies of flying around the world in the corporate jet, of heading up meetings in foreign countries. She would be a noble star while being silently and secretly beleaguered by the pressure.

But the years had passed, and Mindy had not fulfilled her promise. It turned out there were no extra innings in which to make her dreams come true. Sam had had a brief bout with “socialization issues”; the experts at the school thought he’d benefit by spending more time with other children — not unusual in a household consisting of a single child and two adults — requiring subsequent layers of organization and the forcing of Sam into afterschool sports, playdates (the apartment filled with the bells and whistles of video games as “the boys” engaged in side-by-side playing), and the pricey ski weekends in Vermont (during one such jaunt, Mindy sprained her ankle and was on a crutch for a month).

And then James, who had won the National Magazine Award in 1992, had decided to write fiction; after three years of what felt to him like hand-to-hand combat with the written word, he managed to publish a novel that sold seventy-five hundred copies. His depression and resentment permeated their lives, so in the end, Mindy saw that everyday life with its everyday disappointments had simply worn her down.

And yet she often thought, all this she could have overcome if it weren’t for her personality. Anxious and awake in the middle of the night, Mindy often examined the details of her interactions with “corporate” and saw they were lacking. Back then, corporate had consisted of people like Derek Brumminger, the pockmarked perpetual teenager who seemed to be in a never-ending quest to find himself; who, when he discovered that Mindy had no knowledge of seventies rock and roll, tolerated her in meetings with only the barest acknowledgment. It was silently understood that in order to become corporate, in order to be one of them, one had to literally be one of them, since they hung out together, had dinner at each other’s apartments, invited each other to endless nights of black-tie charity events, and all went to the same places on vacation, like lemmings. And Mindy and James most decidedly did not fit in. Mindy wasn’t “fun.” It wasn’t in her nature to be sassy or witty or flirtatious; instead, she was smart and serious and disapproving, a bit of a downer. And while much of corporate was made up of Democrats, to James, they were the wrong kind of Democrats. Wealthy, privileged Democrats with excessive pay packages were unseemly, practically oxy-morons, and after the third dinner party during which James expressed this opinion and Derek Brumminger countered that perhaps James was actually a Communist, they were never asked again. And that was that.

Mindy’s future was established: She was in her place and would go no further. Each subsequent yearly review was the same: She was doing a great job, and they were happy with her performance. They couldn’t give her a raise but would give her more stock options. Mindy understood her position. She was trapped in a very glamorous form of indentured servitude. She could not get the money from those stock options until she retired or was let go. In the meantime, she had a family to support.

On the morning of Mrs. Houghton’s death — on that same morning when Philip Oakland was wondering about his career and Schiffer Diamond was wondering about sex — Mindy Gooch went to her office and, as she did most days, conducted several meetings. She sat behind her long black desk in her cushy black leather swivel chair, one ankle resting on the other knee. Her shoes were black and pointy, with a practical one-and-a-half-inch heel. Her eleven o’clock meeting consisted of four women who sat on the nubby plaid couch and the two small club chairs, done up in the same ugly nubby plaid fabric. They drank coffee or bottled water. They talked about the article in The New York Times about the graying of the Internet. They talked about advertisers. Were the suits who controlled the advertising dollars finally coming around to the fact that the most important consumers were women like themselves, over thirty-five, with their own money to spend? The conversation turned to video games. Were they good or evil? Was it worth developing a video game on their website for women? What would it be? “Shoes,” one of the women said. “Shopping,” said another. “But it already exists. In online catalogs.” “Why not put the best all in one place?” “And have high-end jewelry.” “And baby clothes.”

This was depressing, Mindy thought. “Is that all we’re really interested in? Shopping?”

“We can’t help ourselves,” one woman said. “It’s in our genes. Men are the hunters and women are the gatherers. Shopping is a form of gathering.” All the women laughed.

“I wish we could do something provocative,” Mindy said. “We should be as provocative as those gossip websites. Like Perez Hilton. Or Snarker.”

“How could we do that?” one of the women asked politely.

“I don’t know,” Mindy said. “We should try to get at the truth. Talk about how terrible it is to face middle age. Or how lousy married sex is.”

“Is married sex lousy?” one woman asked. “It’s kind of a cliché, isn’t it?” said another. “It’s up to the woman to stay interested.” “Yes, but who has time?” “It’s the same thing over and over again. It’s like having the same meal every day of your life.” “Every day?” “Okay, maybe once a week. Or once a month.”

“So what are we saying here, that women want variety?” Mindy asked.

“I don’t. I’m too old to have a stranger see me naked.” “We might want it, but we know we can’t have it. We can’t even talk about wanting it.” “It’s too dangerous. For men.” “Women just don’t want it the way men do. I mean, have you ever heard of a woman going to a male prostitute? It’s disgusting.” “But what if the male prostitute were Brad Pitt?” “I’d cheat on my husband in a second for Brad Pitt. Or George Clooney.”

“So if the man is a movie star, it doesn’t count,” Mindy said.

“That’s right.”

“Isn’t that hypocritical?” Mindy said.

“Yeah, but what’s the likelihood of it happening?”

Everyone laughed nervously.

“We’ve got some interesting ideas here,” Mindy said. “We’ll meet again in two weeks and see where we are.”

After the women left her office, Mindy stared blankly at her e-mails.

She received at least 250 a day. Usually, she tried to keep up. But now she felt as if she were drowning in a sea of minutiae.

What was the point? she wondered. It only went on and on, with no end in sight. Tomorrow there would be another 250, and another 250 the day after, and the day after that into infinity. What would happen if one day she just stopped?

I want to be significant, Mindy thought. I want to be loved. Why is that so difficult?

She told her assistant she was going to a meeting and wouldn’t be back until after lunch.

Leaving the suite of offices, she rode the elevator to the ground floor of the massive new office building — where the first three floors were an urban mall of restaurants and high-end shops that sold fifty-thousand-dollar watches to rich tourists — and then she rode an escalator down into the damp bowels of underground corridors and walked through a cement tunnel to the subway. She’d been riding the train ten times a week for twenty years, about a hundred thousand rides. Not what you thought when you were young and determined to make it. She arranged her face into a blank mask and took hold of the metal pole, hoping no male would rub up against her, rub his penis on her leg, the way men sometimes did, like dogs acting on instinct. It was the silent shame endured by every woman who rode the subway. No one did anything about it or talked about it because it was performed mostly by men who were more animal than human, and no one wanted to be reminded of the existence of these men or the disturbing baseness of the natural male human. “Don’t take the train!” exclaimed Mindy’s assistant after Mindy regaled her with yet another tale of one such incident. “You’re entitled to a car.” “I don’t want to sit in traffic in Manhattan,” Mindy replied. “But you could work in the car. And talk on the phone.” “No,” Mindy said. “I like to see the people.”

“You like to suffer, is what,” the assistant said. “You like to be abused. You’re a masochist.” Ten years ago, this comment would have been insubordi-nation. But not now. Not with the new democracy, where every young person was equal to every older person in this new culture where it was difficult to find young people who even cared to work, who could even tolerate discomfort.

Mindy exited the subway at Fourteenth Street, walking three blocks to her gym. By rote, she changed her clothes and got onto a treadmill.

She increased the speed, forcing her legs into a run. A perfect metaphor for her life, she thought. She was running and running and going nowhere.

Back in the locker room, she took a quick shower after carefully tucking her blow-dried bob under a shower cap. She dried off, got dressed again, and thinking about the rest of her day — more meetings and e-mails that would only lead to more meetings and e-mails — felt exhausted. She sat down on the narrow wooden bench in the changing room and called James. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Didn’t we discuss this? I have that lunch,” James said.

“I need you to do something for me.”

“What?” James said.

“Get the keys to Mrs. Houghton’s apartment from the super. I can’t have those keys floating around. And I need to show the real estate agent the apartment. Mrs. Houghton’s relatives want it sold quickly, and I don’t want the place sitting empty for long. Real estate is at a high now. You never know when it might drop, and the price of that apartment needs to set a benchmark. So everyone’s apartment is worth more.”

As usual, James zoned out when Mindy talked real estate. “Can’t you pick them up when you get home?” he asked.

Mindy was suddenly angry. She had excused much over the years with James. She had excused the fact that at times he would barely make conversation other than to respond with a two-syllable word.

She’d excused his lack of hair. She’d excused his sagging muscles. She’d excused the fact that he wasn’t romantic and never said “I love you” unless she said it first, and even then he only, when obligated, said it three or four times a year. She’d excused the reality that he was never going to make a lot of money and was probably never going to be a highly respected writer; she’d even excused the fact that with this second novel of his, he was probably going to become a bit of a joke. She was down to almost nothing now. “I can’t do everything, James. I simply cannot go on like this.”

“Maybe you should go to the doctor,” James said. “Get yourself checked out.”

“This has nothing to do with me,” Mindy said. “It’s about you doing your part. Why can’t you help me, James, when I ask you to?”

James sighed. He’d been feeling up about his lunch, and now Mindy was spoiling it. Feminism, he thought. It had wrecked everything. When he was younger, equality meant sex. Lots of sex, as much as you could grab. But now it meant doing all kinds of things a man wasn’t prepared to do. Plus, it took up a huge amount of time. The one thing feminism had done was to make a man appreciate what a bummer it was to be a woman in the first place. Of course, men knew that anyway, so maybe it wasn’t much of a revelation.

“Mindy,” he said, feeling kinder, “I can’t be late for my lunch.”

Mindy also tried a different approach. “Have they told you what they think of the draft of your book?” she asked.

“No,” James said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Because they’ll tell me at lunch. That’s what the lunch is about,” James said.

“Why can’t they tell you on the phone? Or by e-mail?”

“Maybe they don’t want to. Maybe they want to tell me in person,”

James said.

“So it’s probably bad news,” Mindy said. “They probably don’t like it.

Otherwise, they’d tell you how much they loved it in an e-mail.”

Neither one said anything for a second, and then Mindy said, “I’ll call you after your lunch. Will you be home? And can you please get the keys?”

“Yes,” James said.

At one o’clock, James walked the two blocks to the restaurant Babbo.

Redmon Richardly, his publisher, wasn’t there, but James hadn’t expected him to be. James sat at a table next to the window and watched the passersby. Mindy was probably right, he thought. His book probably did suck, and Redmon was going to tell him they weren’t going to be able to publish it. And if they did publish it, what difference would it make? No one would read it. And after four years of working on the damn thing, he’d feel exactly the same way as he had before he started writing it, the only difference being that he’d feel a little bit more of a loser, a little bit more insignificant. That was what sucked about being middle-aged: It was harder and harder to lie to yourself.

Redmon Richardly showed up at one-twenty. James hadn’t seen him in over a year and was shocked by his appearance. Redmon’s hair was gray and sparse, reminding James of the head of a baby bird. Redmon looked seventy, James thought. And then James wondered if he looked seventy as well. But that was impossible. He was only forty-eight. And Redmon was fifty-five. But there was an aura about Redmon. Something was different about him. Why, he’s happy, James thought in shock.

“Hey, buddy,” Redmon said, patting James on the back. He sat down across from James and unfolded his napkin. “Should we drink? I gave up alcohol, but I can’t resist a drink during the day. Especially when I can get out of the office. What is it about this business now? It’s busy. You actually have to work.”

James laughed sympathetically. “You seem okay.”

“I am,” Redmon said. “I just had a baby. You ever have a baby?”

“I’ve got a son,” James said.

“Isn’t it just amazing?” Redmon said.

“I didn’t even know your wife was pregnant,” James said. “How’d it happen?”

“It just happened. Two months before we got married. We weren’t even trying. It’s all that sperm I stored up over fifty years. It’s powerful stuff,” Redmon said. “Man, having a baby, it’s the greatest thing. How come no one tells you?”

“Don’t know,” James said, suddenly annoyed. Babies. Nowadays, a man couldn’t get away from babies. Not even at a business lunch. Half of James’s friends were new fathers. Who knew middle age was going to be all about babies?

And then Redmon did the unthinkable. He pulled out his wallet. It was the kind of wallet teenaged girls used to have, with an insert of plastic sleeves for photographs. “Sidney at one month,” he said, passing it over to James.

“Sidney,” James repeated.

“Old family name.”

James glanced at the photograph of a toothless, hairless baby with a crooked smile and what appeared to be a peculiarly large head.

“And there,” Redmon said, turning the plastic sleeve. “Sidney at six months. With Catherine.”

James assumed Catherine was Redmon’s wife. She was a pretty little thing, not much bigger than Sidney. “He’s big,” James said, handing back the wallet.

“Doctors say he’s in the ninety-ninth percentile. But all kids are big these days. How big is your son?”

“He’s small,” James said. “Like my wife.”

“I’m sorry,” Redmon said with genuine sympathy, as if smallness were a deformity. “But you never know. Maybe he’ll grow up to be a movie star, like Tom Cruise. Or he’ll run a studio. That would be even better.”

“Doesn’t Tom Cruise run a studio, too?” James smiled feebly and tried to change the subject. “So?”

“Oh yeah. You probably want to know what I think about the book,”

Redmon said. “I thought I’d let Jerry tell you.”

James’s stomach dropped. At least Redmon had the courtesy to look distracted. Or uncomfortable.

“Jerry?” James said. “Jerry the mega-asshole?”

“One and the same. I’m afraid he loves you now, so you may want to amend your assessment.”

“Me?” James said. “Jerry Bockman loves me?”

“I’ll let him explain when he comes by.”

Jerry Bockman, coming to lunch? James didn’t know what to think.

Jerry Bockman was a gross man. He had crude features and bad skin and orange hair, and looked like he should be hiding under a bridge demanding tolls from unsuspecting passersby. Men like that shouldn’t be in publishing, James had thought prudishly the one and only time he’d met Jerry.

But indeed, Jerry Bockman wasn’t in publishing. He was in entertainment. A much vaster and more lucrative enterprise than publishing, which was selling about the same number of books it had sold fifty years ago, the difference being that now there were about fifty times as many books published each year. Publishers had increased the choices but not the demand. And so Redmon Richardly, who’d gone from bad-boy Southern writer to literary publisher with his own company that published Pulitzer Prize–winning authors, like Philip Oakland, and National Book Award winners, and authors who wrote for The Atlantic and Harper’s and Salon, who were members of PEN, who did events at the public library, who lived in Brooklyn, and most of all, who cared — cared about words, words, words! — had had to sell his company to an entertainment conglomorate. Called, unimaginatively, EC.

Jerry Bockman wasn’t the head of EC. That position was held by one of Jerry’s friends. Jerry was the head of a division, maybe second in command, maybe next in line. Inevitably, someone would get fired, and Jerry would take his place. He’d get fired someday, too, but by then none of it would matter because he would have reached every goal he’d ever aspired to in life and would probably have half a billion dollars in the bank, or stock options, or something equivalent. Meanwhile, Redmon hadn’t been able to make his important literary publishing house work and had had no choice but to be absorbed. Like an amoeba. Two years ago, when Redmon had informed James of the impeding “merger” (he’d called it a merger, but it was an absorption, like all mergers), Redmon said that it wouldn’t make any difference. He wouldn’t let Jerry Bockman or EC affect his books or his authors or his quality.

“Then why sell?” James had asked.

“Have to,” Redmon said. “If I want to get married and have children and live in this city, I have to.”

“Since when do you want to get married and have kids?” James asked.

“Since now. Life gets boring when you’re middle-aged. You can’t keep doing the same thing. You look like an asshole. You ever notice that?”

Redmon had asked.

“Yeah,” James had said. And now Jerry was coming to lunch.

“You saw the piece about the ayatollah and his nephew in The Atlantic?” Redmon asked. James nodded, knowing that a piece about Iran or Iraq or anything that had to do with the Middle East was of vast importance here on the little twelve-mile island known as Manhattan, and normally, James would have been able to concentrate on it. He had quite a few informed opinions on the subject, but all he could think about now was Jerry. Jerry coming to lunch? And Jerry loved him?

What was that about? Mindy would be thrilled. But it put an unpleasant pressure on him. Now he was going to have to perform. For Jerry.

You couldn’t just sit there with a Jerry. You had to engage. Make yourself appear worthwhile.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about Updike lately,” James said, to ease his tension.

“Yeah?” Redmon said, unimpressed. “He’s overrated. Hasn’t stood the test of time. Not like Roth.”

“I just picked up A Month of Sundays. I thought the writing was pretty great,” James said. “In any case, it was an event, that book. When it came out in 1975. A book coming out was an event. Now it’s just like ...”

“Britney Spears showing her vagina?” Redmon said.

James cringed as Jerry Bockman came in. Jerry wasn’t wearing a suit, James noted; suits were for bankers only these days. Instead, Jerry wore khakis and a short-sleeved T-shirt. With a vest. And not just any old vest.

A fishing vest. Jesus, James thought.

“Can’t stay long,” Jerry announced, shaking James’s hand. “There’s a thing going on in L.A.”

“Right. That thing,” Redmon said. “What’s going on with that?”

“The usual,” Jerry said. “Corky Pollack is an asshole. But he’s my best friend. So what am I supposed to say?”

“Last man standing. That’s what I always aim to be,” Redmon said.

“The last man standing on his yacht. Except now it’s got to be a mega-yacht. You ever seen one of those things?” Jerry asked James.

“No,” James said primly.

“You tell James what I thought about his book?” Jerry asked Redmon.

“Not yet. I thought I’d let you do the honors. You’re the boss.”

“I’m the boss. Hear that, James? This genius says I’m the boss.”

James nodded. He was terrified.

“Well, to put it mildly, I loved your book,” Jerry said. “It’s great commercial fiction. The kind of thing every businessman is going to want to read on a plane. And I’m not the only one who thinks so. There’s already interest in Hollywood from a couple of my buddies. They’ll definitely pay seven figures. So we’re going to push the production. That’s right, isn’t it?” Jerry said, looking to Redmon for affirmation. “We’re going to push the hell out of this thing and get it out there for spring. We were thinking next fall, but this book is too good. I say let’s get it out there immediately and get you started on another book. I’ve got a great idea for you. Hedge-fund managers. What do you think?”

“Hedge-fund managers,” James said. He could barely get the words out.

“It’s a hot topic. Perfect for you,” Jerry said. “I read your book and said to Redmon, ‘We’ve got a gold mine here. A real commercial male writer.

Like Crichton. Or Dan Brown.’ And once you’ve got a market, you’ve got to keep giving them the product.”

Jerry stood up. “Got to go,” he said. “Got to deal with that thing.”

He turned to James and shook his hand. “Nice to meet you. We’ll talk soon.”

James and Redmon watched Jerry go, watched him walk out of the restaurant and get into a waiting SUV. “I told you you were going to want a drink,” Redmon said.

“Yup,” James said.

“So this is great news. For us,” Redmon said. “We could make some real money here.”

“Sounds like it,” James said. He motioned to the waiter and ordered a Scotch and water, which was the only drink he could think of at the moment. He suddenly felt numb.

“You don’t look so happy, man. Maybe you should try Prozac,” Redmon said. “On the other hand, if this book takes off the way I think it will, you won’t need it.”

“Sure,” James said. He got through the rest of the lunch on automatic pilot. Then he walked home to his apartment in One Fifth, didn’t say hello to the doorman, didn’t collect the mail. Didn’t do anything except go into his little office in his weird apartment and sit in his little chair and stare out the little window in front of his little desk. The same window a hundred butlers and maids had probably stared out of years before, contemplating their fate.

Ugh. The irony, he thought. The last thirty years of his life had been made tolerable by one overriding idea. One secret, powerful idea that was, James had believed, more powerful even than Redmon Richardly’s friggin’ sperm. And that was this: James was an artist. He was, in truth, a great novelist, one of the giants, who had only to be discovered. All these years he had been thinking of himself as Tolstoy. Or Thomas Mann.

Or even Flaubert.

And now, in the next six or eight or ten months, the truth would be revealed. He wasn’t Tolstoy but just plain old James Gooch. Commercial writer. Destined to be of the moment and not to stand the test of time. And the worst thing about it was that he’d never be able to pretend to be Tolstoy again.

Meanwhile, on a lower floor in Mindy’s grand office building, Lola Fabrikant sat on the edge of a love seat done up in the same unattractive nubby brown fabric as the couch in Mindy’s office. She swung one sandaled foot as she flipped through a bridal magazine, studiously ignoring two other young women who were waiting to be interviewed, and to whom Lola judged herself vastly superior. All three young women had long hair worn parted down the middle, with strands that appeared to have been forcibly straightened, although the color of the women’s hair varied. Lola’s was nearly black and shiny, while the other two girls were what Lola called “cheap blondes”; one even sported a half inch of dark roots. This would, Lola decided, briskly turning the pages of the magazine, make the girl ineligible for employment — not that there was an actual job available. In the two months since her graduation from Old Vic University in Virginia, where she’d gotten a degree in fashion market-ing, Lola and her mother, Beetelle Fabrikant, had scoured the Internet, sent e-mails, and even made phone calls to prospective employers with no luck. In truth, Beetelle had done most of the actual scouring, with Lola advising, but even Beetelle’s efforts weren’t easily rewarded. It was a particularly difficult time to find a job in fashion in New York City, with most of the positions taken by interns who spent their summer vacations angling for these jobs. Lola, however, didn’t like to work and had chosen instead to spend her summers sitting by her parents’ pool, or the pools of her parents’ friends, where she and a gaggle of girlfriends would gossip, text, and talk about their fantasy weddings. On inclement days, there was always Facebook or TiVo or the construction of elaborate playlists on her iPod, but mostly there were trips to the mall and endless shopping sprees paid for by a credit card provided by her father, who, when he occasionally complained, was silenced by her mother.

But as her mother pointed out, adolescence couldn’t go on forever, and as Lola wasn’t engaged, finding the boys in her hometown and at the university nowhere near good enough — an assessment with which her mother agreed — it was decided Lola should try her luck in New York. Here, she would not only find interesting employment but meet a much more suitable class of male. Indeed, Beetelle had met her husband, Cem, in New York City and had been happily married for twenty-three years.

Lola had watched every single episode of Sex and the City at least “a hundred times,” and adored the idea of moving to the city and finding her own Mr. Big. If Mr. Big weren’t available, she would happily take fame, ideally becoming the star of her own reality show. Either option was acceptable, the result, she figured, being much the same: a life of pleasurable leisure in which she might indulge in all the usual pamperings and shopping trips and vacations with girlfriends — the only real difference from her current life being the possible addition of a husband and child. But her mother insisted she at least make an effort to work, claiming it would be good for her. So far, her mother had been wrong; the experience was not good at all, merely irritating and annoying. It reminded her of being forced to visit her father’s relatives, who were not as well off as her own family, and who were, as Lola commented to her mother, “frighteningly average.”

Having been blessed with the pleasingly uniform features of a beauty contestant — made more regular and pleasing by the subtle shaving of the cartilage on her nose — Lola considered herself most definitely not average. Unfortunately, despite several interviews with the human resources departments at various fashion magazines, her superiority had failed to impress, and when she was asked “What do you want to do?” for the fifth or sixth time, Lola had finally answered with a curt “I could probably use a seaweed facial.”

Now, putting down the magazine and looking around the small waiting room, Lola imagined her next interview would go very much like the last. An efficient middle-aged woman would explain what the requirements would be if a job were to become available and if she were to get it. She’d have to get to the office by nine and work until six P.M. or later; she’d be responsible for her own transportation and meals; and she might be subjected to the indignity of a drug test, although she had never touched a drug in her life, with the exception of several prescription drugs. And then what would be the point of this job? All her time would be taken up by this work business, and she couldn’t imagine how the standard salary — thirty-five thousand dollars a year, or eighteen thousand after taxes, as her father pointed out, meaning under two thousand dollars a month — could possibly make it worthwhile. She glanced at her watch, which had a plastic band with tiny diamonds around the face, and saw that she’d already been waiting forty-five minutes. It was, she decided, too long. Addressing the girl seated across from her — the one with the inch-long roots — Lola said, “How long have you been waiting?”

“An hour,” the girl replied.

“It isn’t right,” the other girl said, chiming in. “How can they treat us like this? I mean, is my time worth nothing?”

Lola reckoned it probably wasn’t, but she kept this thought to herself. “We should do something,” she said.

“What?” asked the first girl. “We need them more than they need us.”

“Tell me about it,” said the second. “I’ve been on twelve job interviews in the last two weeks, and there’s nothing. I even interviewed to be a researcher for Philip Oakland. And I don’t know anything about research.

I only went because I loved Summer Morning. But even he didn’t want me. The interview lasted like ten minutes, and then he said he’d call and never did.”

At this information, Lola perked up. She, too, had read Summer Morning and listed it among her favorite books of all time. Trying not to appear too keen, she asked slyly, “What did he want you to do?”

“All you basically have to do is look things up on the Internet, which I do all the time anyway, right? And then sometimes you have to go to the library. But it’s the best kind of job, because you don’t have regular hours, and you don’t have to go to an office. You work out of his apartment, which happens to be gorgeous. With a terrace. And it’s on Fifth Avenue. And, by the way, he is still hot, I swear to God, even though I normally don’t like older men. And when I was going in, I ran into an actual movie star.”

“Who?” the second girl squealed.

“Schiffer Diamond. And she was in Summer Morning. So I thought it had to be a sign that I was going to get the job, but I didn’t.”

“How’d you find out about it?” Lola asked casually.

“One of my mother’s friends’ daughters heard about it. She’s from New Jersey, like me, but she works in the city for a literary agent. After I didn’t get the job, she had the nerve to tell her mother, who told my mother, that Philip Oakland only likes to hire pretty girls, so I guess I wasn’t pretty enough. But that’s the way it is in New York. It’s all about your looks. There are some places where the women won’t hire the pretty girls because they don’t want the competition and they don’t want the men to be distracted. And then there are other places where, if you’re not a size zero, forget about it. So, basically, you can’t win.” She looked Lola up and down. “You should try for the Philip Oakland job,” she said. “You’re prettier than I am. Maybe you’ll get it.”

Lola’s mother, Mrs. Beetelle Fabrikant, was a woman to be admired.

She was robust without being heavy and had the kind of attractiveness that, given the right lighting, was close to beauty. She had short dark hair, brown eyes, and the type of lovely cherry-brown skin that never wrinkled. She was known in her community for her excellent taste, firm sensibility, and ability to get things done. Most recently, Beetelle had led a successful charge to have soda and candy vending machines removed from the public schools, an accomplishment made all the more remark-able by the fact that Beetelle’s own daughter was no longer even in high school.

Beetelle was, in general, a wonderful person; if there was anything

“wrong” with her, it was only the tiniest of flaws. She tended toward an upward trajectory in life and could occasionally be accused of being a tad too conscious of who was where on the social ladder. For the past ten years, Beetelle, Cem, and Lola had lived in a million-dollar McMansion in the Atlanta suburb of Windsor Pines; in an uncensored moment, Beetelle had let slip that one had to have at least six thousand square feet and five bathrooms to be anyone these days.

Naturally, Beetelle’s desire for the best in life extended to her daughter; for this parental ambition, Beetelle forgave herself. “Life is the question and children are the answer” was one of her favorite mottoes, a homily she had picked up from a novel. It meant, she’d decided, that doing everything for your child was the most acceptable and unassailable position one could take.

To this end, Beetelle had now established her little family in two large adjoining rooms at the trendy Soho House hotel. Their first three days in New York had been spent in an intense search for an appropriate abode for Lola. Lola and Beetelle wanted a place in the West Village, both for its charms, which couldn’t help but inspire a young person, and for the neighbors, who included, according to the celebrity magazines, several movie and television stars as well as fashion designers and musical artists. Although the ideal abode had yet to be found, Beetelle, always efficient, had already begun furnishing it. She’d ordered a bed and various other items, such as sheets and towels, from the vast warehouse of a store called ABC Carpet. The loot was piled up in the entryway of the hotel room, and in the middle of this, Beetelle lay exhausted on a narrow couch, thinking about her swollen feet and wondering if anything could be done about them.

The Fabrikants, after endless discussion, had decided the most they could pay in rent was three thousand dollars a month, which was, as Cem pointed out, more than most people’s monthly mortgage payment. For this price, the Fabrikants imagined they’d find a spacious apartment with a terrace; instead, they’d been shown dirty little rooms that were reached by several flights of stairs. Beetelle imagined Lola living in such a space and being attacked at knifepoint in the stairwell. It wouldn’t do. Lola had to be safe. Her apartment must be clean and at least a reasonable facsimile of what she had at home.

Across the room, Cem lay facedown on the bed. Beetelle put her hands over her face. “Cem,” she asked, “did you get the reservations for Il Posto?”

There was a muffled groan into the pillow.

“You forgot, didn’t you?” Beetelle said.

“I was just about to call.”

“It’s probably too late. The concierge said it can take a month to get a reservation at a Mario Batali restaurant.”

“We could eat at the restaurant here,” Cem said hopefully, despite the fact that he knew another dinner at the hotel would result in a very chilly evening with his wife and daughter.

“We’ve already eaten here twice,” Beetelle scolded. “Lola so wanted to go to Il Posto. It’s important. If she’s going to succeed here, she needs to be exposed to the best. That’s the whole point of New York. Exposure. I’m sure most of the people she meets will have gone to a Mario Batali restaurant. Or at least a Bobby Flay one.”

Cem Fabrikant couldn’t imagine that this was true — that recent college graduates regularly frequented two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-person restaurants — but knew better than to argue. “I’ll call the concierge,” he said.

And keep my fingers crossed, he added to himself.

Beetelle closed her eyes and folded her lips as if trapping in a sigh of frustration. This was the typical construct of their marriage: Cem would agree to do something and would then take so long to do it that Beetelle would have to take over.

An impatient ringing of the buzzer, which sounded like an angry wasp trying to get into the suite, broke the tension. “Lola’s back,” Beetelle said with relief, getting up and making her way to the door. She pulled it open, and Lola brushed past her, a large yellow shopping bag slung over her shoulder. She let the bag slip to the floor and held out her hands excitedly. “Look, Mom.”

Beetelle examined her daughter’s fingers. “Black?” she asked, comment-ing on Lola’s choice of nail color.

“No one’s forcing you to paint yours black. So it doesn’t matter,” Lola said. She knelt down and extracted a shoe box from the bag. “Aren’t these amazing?” she asked, lifting the cover and tearing away the tissue paper.

She held up a gold platformed boot with a heel at least five inches high.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Beetelle said with dismay.

“What?”

“It’s summer.”

“So what?” Lola said. “I’m going to wear them to dinner tonight. We’re going to Il Posto, right?”

The combination of the boot and the mention of Il Posto roused Cem from the bed. He was a short, round man who resembled a hazelnut and tended to blend into the background. “Why would you buy winter shoes in the summer?” he asked.

Lola ignored him, taking off her current shoes — black leather sandals with a Lucite heel — and slipping on the boots.

“Very nice,” Cem said, trying to get into the spirit of things. After so many years of marriage, however, he knew better than to reveal any vestiges of male sexuality. He aimed to be neutral and enthusiastic, a delicate balance he had learned to attain years ago, shortly after Lola was born. If memory served him correctly, it was precisely at the moment of her birth that his sexuality had effectively been neutered, save for the four or five times a year his wife allowed him intercourse.

“I told you,” Lola said, examining herself in the large round mirror above the couch. She didn’t go on to explain the meaning of her comment, but it didn’t matter. Standing up, Lola towered above her parents, and confronted with the sight of a creature so stunning that she had to remind herself that this girl was indeed the result of her very own genes, Beetelle immediately forgot her dismay over the black fingernails and the gold boots.

Having grown up in an era when young women pampered themselves as vigorously as Roman royalty, Lola was like a piece of granite that had been rubbed and polished until it nearly resembled marble.

She stood five feet eight inches tall, had a surgically enhanced chest, wore Victoria’s Secret lacy bras, and weighed 130 pounds. Her teeth were white and perfect, her eyes hazel with long mascaraed lashes, her skin buffed and moisturized. She’d decided her mouth wasn’t wide enough, but the lips were plump, made more so by regular injections of collagen.

Satisfied with her appearance, Lola plopped down on the couch next to her mother. “Did you get those sheets I wanted?”

“Sheets and towels. But how was the interview? Did you get the job?”

“There was no job. As usual,” Lola said, picking up the clicker for the television and turning it on. “And the woman who interviewed me was kind of hostile. So I was kind of hostile back.”

“You must be nice to everyone,” Beetelle said.

“That would make me a hypocrite,” Lola said.

A muffled chortling came from Cem’s vicinity.

“That’s enough, you two,” Beetelle said firmly. She turned once again to her daughter. “Darling, you have to find a job. Otherwise ...”

Lola looked at her mother. Wishing her mother wouldn’t hover so much, she decided to punish her by delaying the news about the possible job with Philip Oakland. She took her time changing the channels on the TV, and after she got to four hundred and decided there was nothing worth watching, finally said, “I did hear about something today.

Working for Philip Oakland. The writer.”

“Philip Oakland?” Beetelle repeated with fervent interest.

“He’s looking for a researcher. I met a girl at the interview who e-mailed me his information. Then I e-mailed him myself, and he e-mailed me right back. I have an interview next week.”

Beetelle was nearly speechless. “Darling, that’s wonderful.” She pulled her daughter into a smothering embrace. “Philip Oakland is exactly the kind of person you came to New York to meet. He’s an A-list screenwriter. Think of the people he must know — and the people you’ll meet through him.” Gaining momentum, she added, “This is everything I always wanted for you. I just didn’t expect it to happen so soon.”

Lola wriggled out of her mother’s grasp. “It hasn’t happened yet,” she said. “He still has to hire me.”

“Oh, but he will,” Beetelle insisted. She sprang up. “We’ll have to get you a new outfit. Thank goodness Jeffrey is right around the corner.”

Hearing the word “Jeffrey,” Cem shuddered. Jeffrey was one of the most expensive stores in Manhattan. “Weren’t we just there?” he asked cautiously.

“Oh, Cem,” Beetelle scolded. “Don’t be silly. Please, get up. We need to shop. And then we’ve got to meet Brenda Lish. She has two more apartments to show us. I’m so excited, I don’t know what to do.”

Fifteen minutes later, the threesome exited Soho House and came out on Ninth Avenue. Lola had decided to break in her new boots; in the gold platform heels she elicited gaping stares from passersby. After a few feet, they were forced to stop when Cem brought up a map on his iPhone.

“We go straight. And then we veer to the left at the fork.” He looked down at the iPhone again. “At least I think we do,” he added. His few days in the West Village had been a continual exercise in navigational frustration.

“Oh, Daddy, come on,” Lola said, and strode off ahead of them. She had officially outgrown her parents, she thought, teetering along a cobblestoned street. They were just too slow. The evening before, it had taken her father ten minutes to work up the confidence to flag down a cab.

The Fabrikants met the real estate agent, Brenda Lish, in front of a plain white brick building on West Tenth Street, one of many constructed all over the city in the sixties as middle-class housing. Brenda would not normally have dealt with such small potatoes as the Fabrikants, who were only seeking a rental, but Cem was an acquaintance of one of Brenda’s major clients, who had asked if she would help them out. Since the client was spending several million dollars on an apartment, Brenda was happy to be generous to these nice people with the beautiful daughter.

“I think this will be perfect for you,” Brenda said in her happy, flighty voice. “It’s a twenty-four-hour doorman building, and it’s filled with young people. And you can’t beat the West Village location.”

The apartment was a studio with a separate kitchen and dressing area.

The exposure was southern, which meant good light. The cost was thirty-five hundred a month.

“It’s so small,” Lola said.

“We like to call it cozy,” Brenda said.

“My bed will be in the same room as my living room. What if I want to have people over? They’ll see my bed,” Lola protested.

“You could get a foldout couch,” Brenda said cheerfully.

“That’s awful,” Lola said. “I don’t want to sleep on a foldout couch.”

Brenda had recently returned from a spiritual journey to India. There were people in the world who slept on thin mats made of plant materials, there were people who slept on cement slabs, there were people who had no beds at all. She kept a smile on her face.

Beetelle looked at Lola, gauging her mood. “Is there anything else?”

Beetelle asked Brenda. “Anything bigger?”

“Honestly, I’ve shown you everything available in your price range,”

Brenda said. “If you want to look in another area, I’m sure you can find a one-bedroom for the same amount of money.”

“I want to live in the West Village,” Lola said.

“But why, honey?” Cem asked. “It’s all Manhattan. It’s all the same, isn’t it?”

“Some people might look at it that way,” Brenda said. She waited.

Lola crossed her arms and stood with her back to her parents, looking out at the street. “Carrie Bradshaw lived in the West Village,” she said.

“Ah,” Brenda said. “There is another apartment in this building. It’s probably exactly what you’re looking for. But it’s much more expensive.”

“How much more?” Cem asked.

“Six thousand a month.”

Cem Fabrikant did not sleep well that night. He hadn’t slept so badly for years, from around the time when he’d purchased the McMansion in Windsor Pines with an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar mortgage.

Back then, Beetelle had convinced him that it had to be done for the future of the family in this highly competitive world where appearances were as important as reality. Where reality was appearance. The thought of owing so much money made Cem sweat, but he never expressed his fears to his wife or daughter.

Now, lying next to his soundly sleeping wife in the big bed with the starched hotel sheets, he reminded himself that the whole world, or rather, his whole world of decent, upwardly mobile and righteous people, ran on fear. Even his livelihood ran on it — the fear of a terrorist attack or a school shooting or a madman run amok. Cem was a tech man and for the past three years had been working on a system to alert people to these dangers via a text message, so they could at least avoid arriving needlessly into danger. But he sometimes wondered if these larger fears masked the smaller and less worthy fears that drove everyone in his world: the fear of not making it, of being left behind, of not utilizing one’s skills or potential or advantages to the fullest.

What everyone wanted, after all, was a happy, carefree life full of pleasant and wonderful things, a life in which no one was hurt or died needlessly, but most of all, a life in which no one was denied his dream.

And so, he realized, he was going to have to refinance his mortgage again to pay for Lola’s dream of a big life in New York City. Cem did not understand why she wanted this dream or even exactly what this dream was and why it was important, but he did know that if he did not support it, then for the rest of her life Lola might be unhappy, might have to wonder “what if ?” and “if only.” And even worse: Is this all there is?

3

“It is I, the prodigal nephew,” Philip said the next morning, knocking on Enid’s door.

“You’re just in time,” Enid said, jangling a set of keys. “Guess what I’ve got? Keys to Mrs. Houghton’s apartment.”

“How’d you get them?” Philip asked.

“As the board president emeritus, I still enjoy certain perks.”

“The children are definitely selling?” Philip said.

“They want out fast. They think real estate prices can only go down.”

They went upstairs, and opening the door to Mrs. Houghton’s apartment, were immediately assaulted by a riot of flowered chintz. “Society lady circa 1983,” Enid remarked.

“You haven’t been in here since?” Philip asked.

“Only a couple of times. Louise didn’t want visitors toward the end.”

There was a scratching at the door, and Mindy Gooch and the real estate agent Brenda Lish came in. “Well,” Mindy said, staring at Philip and Enid. “It’s like Grand Central Station in here.”

“Hello, Mindy, dear,” Enid said.

“Hello,” Mindy said coldly. “So you do have the keys.”

“Didn’t Roberto tell you?” Enid asked innocently. “I picked them up yesterday afternoon.”

Philip glanced at Mindy but didn’t acknowledge her. He knew vaguely who Mindy was, knew vaguely that her husband was some kind of writer, but as he didn’t know them, he never said hello. And so, as sometimes happened in these buildings, Mindy and James had decided that Philip Oakland, who was successful, was also smug and arrogant, too arrogant to even greet them politely, making him their sworn enemy.

“You’re Philip Oakland,” Mindy said, wanting to put herself in his face but not wanting to sink to his level of disregard.

“Yes,” Philip said.

“I’m Mindy Gooch. You know who I am, Philip. I live here. With my husband, James Gooch. For God’s sake, the two of you have the same publisher. Redmon Richardly?”

“Ah, yes,” Philip said. “I didn’t know that.”

“You do now,” Mindy said. “So the next time we see you, perhaps you’ll say hello.”

“Don’t I say hello?” Philip said.

“No, you don’t,” Mindy said.

“The bones of this apartment are amazing,” Brenda Lish interjected, wanting to defuse a spat between warring residents. With an apartment like this, there would undoubtedly be many skirmishes ahead.

The group trooped up the stairs, eventually reaching the top floor, which contained the ballroom. The ceiling was a dome, sixteen feet high; at one end was an enormous marble fireplace. Mindy’s heart beat faster.

She’d always dreamed of living in an apartment like this, with a room like this, an aerie with three-hundred-and-sixty-degree views of all of Manhattan. The light was astounding. Every New Yorker wanted light, and few had it. If she lived here, in this apartment, instead of in the half-basement warren of rooms her family now occupied, maybe for once in her life, she could be happy.

“I was thinking,” Enid said, “we might want to split up the apartment.

Sell off each floor.”

Yes, Mindy thought. And maybe she and James could buy the top floor. “We’d need to have a special quorum of the board,” she said.

“How long would that take?” Brenda asked.

Mindy looked at Enid. “It depends.”

“Well, it would be a shame,” Brenda said. “Apartments like this never come up in Manhattan. And especially not in this location. It’s one of a kind. It should probably be on the National Register of Historic Places.”

“The exterior of the building is on the register. The apartments are not.

Residents are entitled to do anything they want with them,” Enid said.

“That’s too bad,” Brenda said. “If the apartment were part of the national register, you’d attract the right kind of buyer, someone you’d probably want in the building. Someone who appreciates beauty and history.

They wouldn’t be able to destroy these deco moldings, for instance.”

“We’re not going to turn it into a museum,” Mindy said.

“How much is it worth?” Enid asked.

“My guess? Intact, around twenty million. If you split it up, you’ll hurt the value. Each floor will probably be worth three point five.”

In a fluster, Mindy went down to her apartment. The still air was stifling; in the afternoon on a bright day, when the sun was angled just right, a strip of light illuminated the back of the rooms, which looked out onto a small cement patio. The patio was eight feet wide, and she and James were always thinking about fixing it up, but never got around to it. Any kind of construction had to be approved by the board, which wouldn’t have been a problem, but it also required materials and workers to do the job, and the logistics of organizing such an event were too much on top of everything else she had to do. So, for the ten years she and James had lived there, the patio had remained the same — a cracked cement patch through which stubborn tufts of grass grew. A small Weber barbecue grill and three folding chairs completed the picture.

Mindy went into her office. Finding her latest bank statement, she added up their assets. They had two hundred and fifty-seven thousand in savings, four hundred thousand in a retirement account, thirty thousand dollars in checking, and maybe ten thousand dollars in stocks. A long time ago, James had wanted to invest in the stock market, and Mindy had said, “Do I look like someone who wants to throw away her money? The stock market is nothing more than legalized gambling, and you know how I feel about gambling. And the lotto, for that matter.”

Adding up all their cash, they had barely seven hundred thousand dollars. Mindy knew this sum was more than what most Americans had, but in their world, it wasn’t much. It cost thirty-five thousand a year to send Sam to private school, and it would take at least a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to send him to college. On the plus side, their apartment — which they had bought slowly in pieces and put together during the real estate downturn in the mid-nineties — was worth at least a million dollars. And they’d paid only two hundred and fifty thousand. Altogether, their assets were close-ish to two million dollars. If they wanted to buy just one floor of the penthouse, they were still one and a half million short.

Maybe they should sell everything and move to the Caribbean, Mindy thought.

How much could a house in the Caribbean cost? A hundred, two hundred thousand dollars? She could swim and make salads and read.

James could write pathetic novels about the local goings-on. They’d be giving up, but so what? The only glitch was Sam. He’d love it, but would it be good for him? He was a genius and such a nice boy. Not the least bit arrogant about his intelligence, unlike some of his friends. But if they left New York, it could throw Sam’s whole educational career off track, meaning he might not get into an Ivy League school. No, Mindy thought, shaking her head. We will not give up. We will persevere. We will stay in New York with our fingernails digging into the cement, if only for Sam’s sake.

The buzzer rang, and she jumped up, wondering who it might be.

Probably James, who was out buying overpriced food at Citarella and who’d probably forgotten his keys.

Instead, it was Enid Merle.

“Is Sam home?” Enid asked. “I need to install some new software, and I was wondering if he could help.” Sam was the building’s resident computer expert; whenever anyone had a problem, they called on Sam, who was a computer genius and had built up a cottage industry in the building.

“Sam isn’t here,” Mindy said. “He’s away for a few days.”

“How nice for him. Where?”

Mindy stood in her doorway, blocking Enid’s entry. She didn’t want Enid to see her apartment. She was private about her space, but also embarrassed. Plus, her hostility toward Philip often extended to Enid, as she was his aunt. “He’s gone upstate with friends. I’ll tell him to ring your buzzer when he gets back.”

Enid didn’t move away. “What do you think?” she asked.

“About what?” Mindy said.

“It might not be a bad idea to break up the apartment.”

“I don’t know why you’re interested,” Mindy said.

“I’ve lived in the building for over sixty years. Naturally, I’m interested in everything that goes on here.”

“I appreciate that, Enid. But you’re no longer on the board.”

“Not technically,” Enid said. “But I have a lot of friends.”

“We all do,” Mindy said, although in her case, she wasn’t sure this was entirely true.

“If we split up the apartment, we could probably sell to people who already live in the building. It could save you a lot of headaches,” Enid pointed out.

Ah, Mindy thought. Enid wanted the bottom floor for Philip. It made sense. Philip could break through from his own apartment. And he probably had the money. Not enough for the whole apartment but enough for one floor.

“I’ll think about it,” Mindy said. She closed the door firmly and went back to her accounts. No matter how she added them up, they were still short. That was that, then. There was no way she would allow Philip Oakland to get the bottom floor of that apartment. If she and James couldn’t have a floor, why should he?

“Check out Sanderson vs. English,” Annalisa Rice said into the phone. “It’s all very clear. And of course there’s the moral element, which always sways juries. It’s like an Aesop’s fable.”

“Damn, Rice,” said the male voice at the other end. “Why’d you have to go and move to New York on me?”

“Change, Riley,” Annalisa replied. “It’s good, remember?”

“I know you,” Riley said. “You’re probably already on to the next big thing. Are you running someone’s campaign? Or running for office yourself?”

“Neither.” Annalisa laughed. “I’ve made a U-turn, to put it mildly. You won’t believe what I’m doing right now.”

“Helping the homeless?”

“Consorting with the rich. I’m going to the Hamptons for the weekend.”

Riley laughed, too. “I always said you were too glamorous for Washington.”

“Damn you, Riley,” Annalisa said. “I miss you guys.”

“You can always come back,” Riley said.

“Too late,” Annalisa said. She said goodbye and hung up the phone, twisting her auburn hair into her trademark ponytail. She went to the window and, pushing back the heavy gold drapes, looked out at the street.

It was a long way down. She pushed at the window, longing for some fresh air in the overly air-conditioned suite, and remembered that the windows were bolted shut. She looked at her watch; it was three o’clock. She had two hours to pack and get to the heliport. It should have been plenty of time. But she didn’t know what to pack. What did one wear to a weekend in the Hamptons?

“Paul, what should I bring?” she’d asked that morning.

“Oh, hell. I don’t know,” Paul had said. Paul was her husband. He was engaged in getting out the door by seven A.M. on the dot, sitting on the edge of a hassock, pulling on thin silk socks and Italian loafers. Paul had never worn proper shoes before. He’d never had to, before New York.

Back in Washington, he’d always worn leather Adidas tennis shoes.

“Are those new?” Annalisa asked, referring to the shoes.

“I can’t say. What does new mean, exactly?” Paul asked. “Six months old? A day? These kinds of questions are only answerable if you know the context of the person asking.”

Annalisa laughed. “Paul, you have to help me. They’re your friends.”

“Partners,” Paul corrected. “Anyway, what difference does it make?

You’ll be the best-looking woman there.”

“It’s the Hamptons. They probably have a dress code.”

“Why don’t you call Sandy’s wife, Connie?”

“I don’t know her,” Annalisa said.

“Sure you do. She’s Sandy’s wife.”

“Oh, Paul,” she said. It just doesn’t work that way, she thought, but refrained from explaining. Paul wouldn’t understand.

Paul leaned across the bed to kiss her goodbye. “Are you looking at apartments today?” he asked.

“I’m always looking at apartments. You’d think that with fifteen million dollars to spend, it would be easy.”

“If it’s not enough, spend more,” Paul said.

“I love you,” she called after him.

That morning, Annalisa had considered asking Emme, the real estate agent, what one wore in the Hamptons, but judging from Emme’s appearance, Annalisa didn’t think she’d like the answer. Emme was at least sixty years old but had a face that sported the latest in plastic surgery techniques. All morning, Emme’s overarched eyebrows, plastic lips, and large white teeth kept distracting Annalisa, as did Emme’s hair, which was coarse and dark at the roots and frayed blond on the ends. Emme was considered the best real estate agent on the Upper East Side. “I know you’ve got plenty of money,” Emme said, “but money isn’t the issue. Everyone’s got plenty of money these days. It’s who you know that counts.” Then she’d asked, “Who do you know?”

“How about the president of the United States?” Annalisa said, twisting her ponytail.

“Will he write you a letter?” Emme asked, not catching the sarcasm.

“Probably not,” Annalisa said. “Considering I called his administration an embarrassment.”

“Everybody says that,” Emme said.

“Yes, but I said it on TV. I used to be a regular on Washington Morning.”

“That’s not a good answer,” Emme said.

“How about Sandy Brewer?” Annalisa finally ventured.

“Who’s he?” Emme asked.

“My husband works with him.”

“But who is he?” Emme said.

“He runs a fund,” Annalisa said cautiously, as Paul had told her repeatedly that she wasn’t to talk about what he did or how he made his money. It was a secret community, he said, like Skull and Bones at Yale.

“So he’s a hedge-fund manager,” Emme guessed correctly. “Nobody knows who they are or wants to know them. Nobody wants them as a member of their club.” She looked Annalisa up and down. “And it isn’t just about your husband. It’s about you, too. You have to be approved by the board.”

“I’m a lawyer,” Annalisa said. “I can’t see anyone objecting to that.”

“What kind of lawyer?” Emme asked.

“Class-action lawsuits. Among other things.”

“I could see a lot of people objecting to you,” Emme said. “Isn’t that really a glorified kind of ambulance chasing?” She shook her head. “We’d better concentrate on brownstones. If you buy a brownstone, you won’t have to worry about getting approved by a board.”

The morning of the day Annalisa and Paul were going to the Hamptons, Emme had shown her three town houses. One was a mess, smelling of milk and dirty diapers, with toys strewn everywhere. In the second town house, a woman of about thirty followed them around, holding a slippery two-year-old boy in her arms. “It’s a fantastic house,” the woman had said.

“Why are you moving?” Annalisa had asked.

“We’re moving to the country. We’ve got a house there. We’re putting on a big addition. It’s better for kids in the country, don’t you think?”

The third town house was larger and less expensive. The hitch was that it was broken up into apartments, most of which were occupied.

“You’d have to get the tenants to leave. It usually isn’t a problem. You pay them fifty thousand cash, and they’re happy to have the money,”

Emme had explained.

“But where will they go?” Annalisa asked.

“They’ll find a nice, clean studio apartment somewhere,” Emme said.

“Or they’ll move to Florida.”

“That doesn’t seem right,” Annalisa said. “Kicking people out of their apartments. It’s against my moral code.”

“You can’t stop progress,” Emme replied. “It’s unhealthy.”

And so another day passed during which she and Paul still didn’t have a place to live and were stuck in the suite at the Waldorf.

Annalisa called Paul. “I can’t find anything to buy. Maybe we should rent in the meantime.”

“And move twice? It’s ergonomically wasteful.”

“Paul,” she said, “I’m going to go out of my mind if we have to stay in this suite for one more day. Actually, I’ll go out of my mind if I have to spend more time with Emme. Her face scares me.”

“So let’s change to a bigger suite. The staff can move our things.”

“The cost,” Annalisa said.

“Doesn’t matter. Love you,” he said.

She went downstairs into the bustle of the lobby. She had always stayed at the Waldorf when the law firm sent her to New York on business, and back then she’d thought the hotel lobby glamorous, with its grand staircases and brass and expensive wares displayed behind sparkling glass windows. The Waldorf was perfect for tourists and out-of-town businesspeople, but it was like a showgirl: One must enjoy the feathers and glitz without looking too closely. Otherwise, one saw the faded carpets and the dirty crystal in the chandeliers and the cheap polyester in the uniforms of the employees. One had time to observe these things, Annalisa noted, when one didn’t have enough to do.

She was informed that a bigger suite was indeed available, and the manager was summoned. He had a soft face and jowls that pulled down the skin below his eyes; the available suite, he said, had two bedrooms and a living room and a bar and four bathrooms. It was twenty-five hundred a night, but if they were staying for a month, he’d give it to them for forty thousand. An odd feeling came over Annalisa, a rush of adrenaline, and she said she’d take it without seeing it first. It was the most exciting thing in weeks.

Back in the original suite, Annalisa opened the safe and put on the diamond-encrusted watch Paul had given her for her birthday. She couldn’t imagine what it had cost, probably twenty thousand dollars, but it put some perspective on the cost of the suite, she supposed. The watch was a little flashy for her taste, but Paul would notice if she didn’t wear it for the weekend. Under an attempt at a casual demeanor he had looked so eager and frightened and proud while she untied the ribbon on the blue handmade box with the beige suede lining. When she’d opened the box and removed the watch, Paul did the honors of closing the band round her wrist. “Do you like it?” he’d asked. “I love it,” she’d said, lying. “I truly love it.”

“Apparently, all the other wives have them. So you’ll fit in,” he said.

And noting her expression, added, “If you want to.”

“We don’t fit in,” she said. “That’s why people love us.”

Now she began to pack, placing a bathing suit and khaki shorts and three button-down shirts into a navy blue canvas roller bag. At the last minute, she tossed in a plain black sleeveless shift and a pair of black pumps with a sensible two-inch heel in case there was a fancy dinner. The dress wasn’t summery but would have to do. She put on a white T-shirt, jeans, and yellow Converse sneakers; then she went downstairs again and waited in line for a taxi, arriving at the Twenty-third Street heliport at four-thirty, half an hour early. She was early to nearly everything these days and seemed to spend a lot of her time waiting. The heliport was located under the FDR Drive. The air was dense with the heat of July and the exhaust from the cars stalled on the highway and the stench of the East River. Annalisa walked to the edge of the dock and peered into the murky brown water, watching a plastic bottle lapping at the wood as a condom floated by.

She checked her watch again. Paul would be neither early nor late but exactly on time, arriving at 4:55, as he’d said he would. Indeed, at 4:55, a Town Car pulled in through the chain-link fencing, and Paul got out, leaning into the backseat of the car to take out his briefcase and a small hard-sided Louis Vuitton case covered in black goatskin. Until recently, Annalisa had no idea Paul cared for such things. He bought something pricey nearly every week now. Last week it had been a cigar box from Asprey, although Paul did not smoke.

He loped toward her, talking on his cell phone. Paul was tall and had the slight stoop of those accustomed to minding their heads. He managed to stay on his phone while waving to the pilot of the seaplane and overseeing the stowage of their luggage while a steward helped Annalisa from the dock into the plane. The interior held eight seats done up in plush pale yellow suede, and while Paul and Annalisa were the only passengers, Paul elected to sit in the row in front of her. He finally got off his call, and she said, hesitantly and a little bit hurt, “Paul?”

Paul wore glasses, and his soft, dark curling hair was always a bit unkempt. He was nearly handsome but for his hooded eyes and the slight gaps between his teeth. He was a mathematical genius, one of the youngest Ph.D.s at Georgetown ever, and there was always talk of him winning the Nobel Prize someday. But six months ago, he had taken a job with Sandy Brewer and, in two days, relocated to New York City at a small hotel on East Fifty-sixth Street. When they decided the move was permanent, Annalisa had joined him, but they’d lived long-distance for five months, and the residual effects were still there.

“Wouldn’t you like to sit together?” Annalisa asked. She hated having to beg.

“These cabins are so small,” he said. “Why be crowded? We’re together the whole weekend anyway.”

“You’re right,” she said. It was pointless pushing Paul on the small issues. Annalisa looked out the window. A middle-aged man was hurrying breathlessly toward the seaplane. Annalisa’s first impression was of a man freckled and nearly hairless, like an exotic species of cat. The man was wearing spectator shoes and a white linen suit with a navy silk pocket square; in one hand was a woven hat. He gave his bag to the pilot and came up into the cabin, taking a seat in the row behind Annalisa. “Hello,” he said, extending his hand over the top of the seats. “I’m Billy Litchfield.”

“Annalisa Rice.”

“I assume you’re going to the Brewers’ for the weekend. Are you a friend of Connie’s?”

“My husband works for Sandy Brewer.”

“Ah,” Billy Litchfield said. “So you’re an unknown element.”

Annalisa smiled. “Yes.”

“And that gentleman is your husband?”

Paul was reading something on his iPhone. “Paul,” she said. He looked up briefly. “This is Billy Litchfield.”

Paul gave Billy a curt smile and went back to his iPhone. He was never interested in strangers, and as usual, Annalisa tried to cover it up by being excessively friendly.

“Are you a friend of Connie’s?” she asked.

“I’m a friend of both Brewers now. But yes, in answer to your question, Connie and I go way back.”

There was a pause. Annalisa suddenly didn’t know what to say, but Billy Litchfield smiled at her. “Have you been to the house before?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“You’re in for a treat. It’s magnificent, designed by Peter Cook. Peter can be over the top, but the Brewers’ house is one of the best examples of his work.”

“I see.”

“You know who Peter Cook is, don’t you?” he asked.

“Actually, I don’t. I’m a lawyer, and...”

“Ah,” Billy said, as if this explained everything. “Peter Cook is an architect. Some people say he ruined the East End with his McMansions, but eventually, they’ve all come round to him. Everyone uses him — he won’t do a house for under ten million these days.” The pilot started up the engines. “I love this moment of the week, don’t you?” Billy said, leaning forward conspiratorially. “Taking off for greener pastures. Even if it is just for the weekend.” He looked her over. “Do you live in New York?”

“We just moved.”

“Upper East Side?” Billy asked.

“Nowhere, really.”

“My dear,” Billy said. “You and that magnificent husband of yours who is sporting a two-thousand-dollar Paul Smith shirt cannot be living in a cardboard box on the street.”

“We’re in the Waldorf. Until we find an apartment. Or a town house.”

“Why the Waldorf?” Billy asked.

“I always used to stay there on business.”

“Aha,” Billy said.

Annalisa felt self-conscious, pinned under Billy’s gaze. She was used to attention, having stood out all her life, with her auburn hair and her wide cheekbones and her light gray eyes. Men had a propensity to fall in love with her — foolishly — and she’d learned to ignore the undercurrents of male attraction. But with Billy, it was different. He seemed to be studying her as if she were a piece of fine china. Embarrassed, she turned away, leaving Billy to examine her profile. She’s not a classic beauty, Billy thought, but a unique one. Having once seen her face, you wouldn’t forget her. She wasn’t wearing a stitch of makeup, and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Confident girl, he thought, to be so unadorned, save for the platinum-and-diamond Chopard watch on her wrist. That was a nice touch. He turned his attention to the husband, who was less interesting physically. Billy had already heard from Connie Brewer that Paul Rice was a mathematical genius. If he worked with Sandy Brewer, he was rich, and that was all that was required of a man in New York society — that he have money. It was the wives who mattered. As the seaplane taxied across the choppy waters of the East River, Billy sat back in his seat, satisfied. Annalisa and Paul Rice intrigued him.

It would be an interesting weekend after all.

Picking up speed, the seaplane lifted off the water. They flew over Queens, over endless rows of tiny houses, and then straight up the middle of Long Island Sound, which sparkled as brightly as the diamonds on Annalisa’s watch. They turned south over the rocky white lip of the North Fork, past the green pastures and cornfields. Then they were over water again, and the plane was descending into an inlet.

Billy Litchfield tapped Annalisa on the shoulder. “This is a patch of paradise,” he said. “I’ve been everywhere, and it’s as beautiful here as it is in Saint-Tropez or Capri or any other place you can think of. It’s why the Hamptons will never be over, no matter what anyone says.”

The plane taxied to a pristine white dock. A lawn as perfectly manicured as a golf course sloped up a long hill, at the top of which sat an enormous shingled house with turrets that appeared to be made of pink stone. On the lawn next to the dock sat two golf carts.

Sandy Brewer met them on the dock. His most distinct feature was his name; without his name, he was disturbingly indistinct, with hair of no particular color and nondescript features. “Connie said to have you go straight up to the house,” Sandy said to Billy. “She’s having some problem with the dessert. I thought I’d take Paul and Annalisa on a tour of the property.”

Billy was driven away in one of the golf carts with the luggage.

Annalisa got into the back of the second golf cart. Paul sat in the front with Sandy. Sandy drove casually, turning back to talk to her. “Have you ever been to the Hamptons before?” he asked.

“I haven’t, actually,” Annalisa said.

“We’ve got fifty acres here,” Sandy said. “It’s an enormous amount of land. Connie and I just bought a ranch in Montana with a thousand acres, but Montana’s different. If you don’t have a thousand acres in Montana, you’re a loser. In the Hamptons, you can have five acres and it’s perfectly acceptable — you might even be a member of the Bath and Tennis in Southampton. But Connie and I don’t like those kinds of places. We like to be private. When we’re here, nobody knows it.”

An hour later, after they were shown the two pools (one Olympic, one shaped like a pond with a waterfall), the guesthouse, the private zoo and aviary, the greenhouse where Sandy oversaw the cultivation of rare species of tulips, the miniature horse and goat barn, the three tennis courts complete with bleachers, the baseball diamond and basketball court, the children’s Victorian summerhouse, the indoor squash court, the winery with state-of-the-art concrete casks, the five-acre vineyard, the orchard and vegetable garden and koi pond, Sandy ushered them into the house. Two grand staircases flanked the foyer. Paul went off with Sandy to talk business. A Guatemalan woman motioned for Annalisa to follow her up the stairs. They passed an upstairs sitting room and several closed doors. Annalisa was led into a room with an enormous four-poster bed and two bathrooms. French windows opened onto a balcony overlooking the lawn and the ocean. Her suitcase had been unpacked; her paltry supply of clothing for the weekend looked incongruous in the enormous cedar closet. Annalisa stepped inside, inhaling the odor of the wood. I’ve got to tell Paul about this, she thought, and went downstairs to find him.

Instead, she discovered Connie, Sandy’s wife, and Billy Litchfield in a sunroom done up with pink silk chaises. “I’m sure you feel horrible,”

Connie was saying to Billy.

“Excuse me,” Annalisa said, realizing she’d interrupted a tête-à-tête.

Connie sprang up. She was once a famous ballerina and wore her blond hair long and straight, hanging nearly to her tailbone. She had enormous blue eyes and a tiny nose and was as slim as a fairy. “I was about to check on you,” she said. “Do you have everything you need?”

“Our room is wonderful, thank you. I was just looking for Paul.”

“He’s gone off with Sandy. They might be up to anything, but they’re probably plotting how to take over the world. Come sit with us,” Connie said. “We’ve heard you were a lawyer. Sandy said you had a very important job. Working for the attorney general.”

“I clerked for him when I finished law school.”

“You’ll probably find us very boring then,” Connie responded. “All the men ever talk about is business. And all we women talk about is children.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Billy said to Annalisa. “Connie’s an expert on contemporary art.”

“Only because you taught me everything I know, Billy,” Connie said.

“My real love is jewelry. I love glittery things. I can’t help myself. Do you have any passions you’re ashamed of, Annalisa?”

Annalisa smiled. “My problem is that I’m probably too serious.”

Connie rearranged herself on the chaise and said dramatically, “And mine is that I’m frivolous. I’m rich and silly. But I have a good time.”

Billy stood up. “Shall we dress for dinner?” he asked. Annalisa walked with him to the stairs. “Connie is frivolous,” Billy went on, “but they’ve only had their money for seven years. On the other hand, she doesn’t have a mean bone in her body. If you become friends with her, you’ll find her a useful ally.”

“Am I going to need allies?”

“One always does,” Billy said, and smiled.

He left Annalisa at the top of the landing. “I’ll see you at cocktails.

They start at eight on the veranda.”

What a funny man, Annalisa thought, returning to her room. He was like someone out of the nineteenth century.

Paul came back while she was in a shower stall the size of a small room. She opened the glass door. “It’s a steam shower,” she called out to him. “Do you want to come in?” He got in, and she soaped his chest.

“Did you see the cedar closet? And the towel warmers? And what about that bed?”

“Should we get a place like this?” Paul asked, tilting his head back to get the lather out of his hair.

“You mean our own ten-million-dollar Peter Cook house with pink stone and a little man like Billy Litchfield to teach us manners and art?”

She jumped out of the shower and dried herself. Paul came out and stood dripping on the mat. She handed him a thick towel.

“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

“Paul,” she said. “Is that what we’re doing? Becoming Connie and Sandy Brewer? Are we going to be just like them but with newer money?”

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“How old is our money, anyway? Six months? Maybe when it’s a year old, we can have a birthday party to celebrate.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “It was just something odd that Billy Litchfield said. It’s not important.”

In a nearly identical room down the hall, Billy Litchfield lay on his back, arms folded carefully across his chest in order not to wrinkle his shirt. He closed his eyes, hoping to nap. Lately, he’d been tired all the time and yet found he couldn’t sleep. For months, he’d felt psychically off; perhaps, he thought, he should try seeing an astrologer instead of a psychopharmacol-ogist.After several more minutes of jangly exhaustion, he gave up and took a prescription bottle from his bag. Inside were several small orange pills.

Billy broke one in half, swallowed it, and lay back down on the bed.

Within minutes, he relaxed and fell asleep. He napped longer than he’d planned, waking at ten minutes past eight.

Hurrying downstairs, he found Annalisa in the middle of a small clump of men. She was wearing a simple black shift that showed off her lanky, boyish figure, and her auburn hair swung free around her shoulders. Once again, she was without makeup, her only adornment the diamond-studded watch. As Billy passed by on his way to greet Connie, he overheard a snippet of the conversation. “Please don’t tell me you’re a Republican,” Annalisa was saying to one of Sandy’s associates. “If you have money and youth, it’s your moral imperative to become a Democrat.”

Billy paused and turned back to the group. Effortlessly inserting himself, he took Annalisa’s arm. “Do you mind if I borrow you for a second?”

he asked. “Have you met Connie’s friends?”

Connie was sitting with three other women in a grouping of wide brown wicker couches. One of the women was surreptitiously smoking a cigarette; the others were talking about a shop in East Hampton. Connie looked up on their approach and patted the place next to her. “There’s room here,” she said to Annalisa, and indicated the woman who was smoking. “This is Beth. She went to Harvard as well. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Harvard Law,” Beth said, quickly stubbing out her cigarette. “What about you?” she asked Annalisa.

“Georgetown,” Annalisa said.

“You still working?” Beth asked.

“No. I just quit.”

“Beth quit her job years ago,” Connie jumped in. “And you haven’t looked back.”

“I don’t have time to work,” Beth said. “When you’re married to one of these guys” — she indicated the men — “it’s a full-time job.”

“Oh, but it’s the kids, really,” Connie said. “You don’t want to miss a minute.”

At nine o’clock, they were ushered in to dinner. They were served by a young man and woman dressed in black — college students earning extra money on their summer break. Annalisa was seated between Billy Litchfield and Sandy Brewer, occupying the place of honor next to the host. “Have you ever been to the Andes?” Sandy asked her. Beth, seated across from her, jumped in, prompting a lively discussion with Sandy about how the Andes were the “new” New Zealand. The conversation turned to the Bilbao art fair, a charity event to which Sandy had pledged a million dollars, and the best wine auction in the world. After dinner, there was an endless game of pool in a paneled library. Sandy and the other men smoked cigars. They were tipsy on fine wine and champagne, and during a match between Billy and Paul, Billy’s voice carried across the room. “You’ll make a ton of money,” Billy was saying, “bags and bags, more than you could ever imagine — and it won’t make a bit of difference.

Because you’ll be working as hard as you were before, maybe harder, and you won’t be able to stop, and one day you’ll look up and realize the only thing that’s changed in your life is your location. And you’ll wonder why the hell you spent your whole life doing it ...”

All conversation went dead. Into the silence, like the bell in a lighthouse, came the voice of Connie Brewer: “Well,” she said breathlessly, “you know what they say. It’s all about location. Location, location, location.”

The guests breathed a sigh of relief. The time was noted and exclaimed upon: It was two A.M. Everyone went upstairs to bed.

“What do you think got into that guy?” Paul said, taking off his pants.

“Billy Litchfield?” Annalisa asked. “Probably too much alcohol.” The air conditioner was turned up high, and she snuggled under the down comforter. “Anyway, I like him.”

“That’s good,” Paul said, getting into bed.

“Do you think they liked us?” she asked.

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“I don’t know. The women are so different.”

“They seemed nice enough.”

“Oh, they’re perfectly nice,” Annalisa said.

“What’s wrong?” Paul said, yawning loudly. “You sound insecure.

That’s not like you.”

“I’m not insecure,” she said. “Just curious.” After a moment, she said,

“What if Billy Litchfield is right, Paul? About the money thing?”

But Paul was asleep.

The next morning at breakfast, Annalisa learned that they were expected to play tennis in a small tournament with some of the guests from the night before. Paul, who was not athletic, was eliminated in the first match against Sandy. Annalisa sat in the bleachers, watching. She’d been a high school champion. Her competitive nature rose to the fore. I’m going to win this, she thought.

The tournament went on for five hours. The sun came out and the temperature rose. Annalisa won four matches in a row and was faced with Sandy in the final. As she stood on the baseline, bouncing the ball, she assessed her opponent. His playing style indicated that he’d had a lot of lessons, and his aggression made up for his lack of skill. But he didn’t have a natural ability for tennis. She could win if she kept him off balance.

You might be rich, but I can still beat you, she thought, tossing the ball into the air. She brought her racket up behind her and, just before the moment of contact, flicked her wrist so the ball sliced across the net and bounced right on the sideline.

“Ace!” Billy Litchfield shouted.

Thirty minutes later, it was over. As they clustered around her, congratulating her, Annalisa thought, You can do this. You can really do this. You can succeed here as well.

“Good job,” Paul said. He hugged her distractedly, with one eye on Sandy.

They all headed back to the house.

“Your wife moves well,” Sandy said.

“She’s good,” Paul ventured.

“Yeah,” Sandy said. “She’d be great in a war.”

Billy Litchfield, who was strolling behind them, shuddered a little on hearing their conversation. At that moment, Annalisa stopped and turned, waiting for the group to catch up. She looked unabashedly triumphant.

Billy took her arm. “Well done,” he said. And then, apprising her of the age-old rule at house parties, said, “Of course, it’s always a good idea to let the host win.”

She stopped. “But that would be cheating. I could never do that.”

“No, my dear,” he said, steering her along the path. “I can see that you’re the kind of girl who plays by her own rules. It’s wonderful, and you must never change. But it’s always wise to know what the rules are before you break them.”

4

Billy Litchfield arrived back in the city at six o’clock on Sunday evening. Taking a taxi to his apartment, he was content, having had an unexpectedly fruitful weekend. Connie Brewer had agreed to buy a small Diebenkorn for three hundred thousand dollars, from which he would take a 2 percent commission. Mostly, though, he was thinking about Annalisa Rice. A girl like her rarely came along these days —

she was a true original, from her auburn ponytail and light gray eyes to her keen mind. Feeling a little rush of excitement, Billy guessed that with his guidance, she might even become one of the greats.

Billy’s apartment was located on Fifth Avenue between Eleventh and Twelfth Streets; his narrow brown building, a former residence for single ladies, was dwarfed into invisibility by the fine redbrick buildings on either side. His building had no doorman, although a porter could be summoned with a buzzer. Billy collected his mail and climbed the stairs to his apartment on the fourth floor.

In this building, every floor and every apartment were the same. There were four apartments per floor, and each apartment was a one-bedroom of approximately six hundred square feet. Billy liked to joke that it was an early-retirement home for spinsters such as himself. His apartment was comfortably cluttered, furnished with the castoffs of wealthy ladies.

For the past ten years, he’d been telling himself that he would redecorate and find himself a lover, but he never seemed to be able to get around to either, and time passed and it mattered less and less. Billy had had no visitors for years.

He began opening his mail as a matter of course. There were several invitations and a couple of glossy magazines, a bill for his MasterCard, and a legal-size envelope that was hand-addressed, which Billy put aside.

He picked out the most promising invitation, and instantly recognizing the heavy cream stationery, turned it over. The address on the back was One Fifth Avenue. The stationery came from Mrs. Strong’s, and there was only one person he knew who still used it — Mrs. Louise Houghton. He opened the envelope and extracted a card on which was printed PRIVATE MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR MRS. LOUISE HOUGHTON, ST. AMBROSE CHURCH, with the date, Wednesday, July 12, written in calligraphy below. It was so Louise, Billy thought, to have planned out her memorial service in advance, down to the guest list.

He put the card in a place of honor on the narrow mantelpiece above the small fireplace. Then he sat down to the rest of his mail. Picking up the legal-size envelope, he saw that the return address was that of his building’s management company. With growing dread, Billy opened it.

“We’re happy to inform you ... a deal has been closed ... building will go co-op as of July 1, 2009 ... you may purchase your apartment for market value ... those not purchasing their apartments will be expected to vacate by the closing date ...” A dull throb started up in his jaw. Where would he go? The market value of his apartment was at least eight hundred thousand dollars. He’d need two or three hundred thousand as a down payment, and then he’d have a mortgage payment and a maintenance fee. It would add up to several thousand a month. He paid only eleven hundred dollars a month in rent. The thought of finding another apartment and packing up and moving overwhelmed him. He was fifty-four. Not old, he reminded himself, but old enough to no longer have the energy for such things.

He went into the bathroom and, opening his medicine cabinet, took three antidepressants instead of his usual dose of two. Then he got into the tub, letting the water fill up around him. I can’t move, he thought.

I’m too tired. I’ll have to figure out how to get the money to buy the apartment instead.

Later that evening, clean and in a better frame of mind, Billy called the Waldorf-Astoria, asking for the Rices’ room. Annalisa answered on the third ring. “Hello?” she said curiously.

“Annalisa? It’s Billy Litchfield. From this weekend.”

“Oh, Billy. How are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“Yes?”

“I was wondering,” Billy said. “Have you ever heard the expression ‘A lady should appear in the newspapers only three times in her life — her birth, her marriage, and her death’?”

“Is that true?”

“It was true a hundred years ago.”

“Wow,” Annalisa said.

“Well, I was wondering,” Billy said. “Would you like to go to a funeral with me on Wednesday?”

On Monday afternoon, back in her office after having spent the weekend with her family at Redmon and Catherine Richardly’s house in the Hamptons, Mindy opened a new file on her computer. Like most jobs in the so-called creative glamour business, her work had become increasingly less creative and less glamorous and more organizational; a significant portion of her day was devoted to being kept in the loop or keeping others in the loop. Originality was met with smug politesse. Nevertheless, due perhaps to her perplexing weekend, Mindy had had an idea that she planned to pursue. It had popped into her head during the ride back to Manhattan in the rental car, with James driving and Mindy mostly looking at her BlackBerry or staring straight ahead. She would start a blog about her own life.

And why not? And why hadn’t she thought of this before? Well, she had, but she’d resisted the idea of putting her mincey little thoughts out there on the Internet with her name attached for all to see. It felt so common; after all, anyone could do it and did. On the other hand, very good people were doing it these days. It was one of the new obligations, like having children, for smart people to make an effort to get some sensible opinions out there in the ether.

Now Mindy typed in the title of her new blog: “The Joys of Not Having It All.” Not wholly original, perhaps, but original enough; she was quite sure no one else was nailing this particular female lament with such preciseness.

“Scenes from a weekend,” she wrote. She crossed her legs and leaned forward, staring at the mostly blank computer screen. “Despite global warming, it was a spectacular weekend in the Hamptons,” she typed. It had been nearly perfect — eighty degrees, the leaves a halo of dusky pinks and yellows, the grass still very green on the two-acre expanse of lawn on Redmon Richardly’s property. The air was still and lazy with the peaty scent of decay, a scent, Mindy thought, that made time stand still.

Mindy and James and Sam had left the city late on Friday night to avoid the traffic, arriving at midnight to red wine and hot chocolate.

Redmon and Catherine’s baby, Sidney, was asleep, dressed in a blue one-sie in a blue crib in a blue room with a wallpaper band of yellow ducks encircling the ceiling. Like the baby, the house was new but pleasantly reassuring, reminding Mindy of what she didn’t have — namely, a baby and a pleasant house in the Hamptons to which one could escape every weekend, and to which one could someday make the ultimate escape: retirement. It was, Mindy realized, becoming harder and harder to jus-tify why she and James didn’t have these things that were no longer the appurtenances of the rich but only of the comfortable middle class.

The ease of the Richardlys’ life was made all the more enviable when Catherine revealed, in a private moment between her and Mindy in the eight-hundred-square-foot kitchen, where they were loading the dishwasher, that Sidney had been conceived without the aid of technology. Catherine was forty-two. Mindy went to bed with a pain in her heart, and after James fell asleep (immediately, as was his habit), Mindy was consumed with examining this riddle of what one got in life and why.

Just after her fortieth birthday, in the midst of a vague discontent, Mindy began seeing a shrink, a woman who specialized in a new psychoanalytropic approach called life adjustment. The shrink was a pretty, mature woman in her late thirties with the smooth skin of a beauty devotee; she wore a brown pencil skirt with a leopard-print shirt and open-toed Manolo Blahnik pumps. She had a five-year-old girl and was recently divorced. “What do you want, Mindy?” she’d asked in a flat, down-to-basics, corporate tone of voice. “If you could have anything, what would it be? Don’t think, just answer.”

“A baby,” Mindy said. “I’d like another baby. A little girl.” Before she’d said it, Mindy had had no idea what was ailing her. “Why?” the shrink asked. Mindy had to think about her answer. “I want to share myself.

With someone.” “But you have a husband and a child already. Isn’t that so?” “Yes, but my son is ten.” “You want life insurance,” said the shrink.

“I don’t know what you mean.” “You want insurance that someone is still going to need you in ten years. When your son has graduated from college and doesn’t need you anymore.” “Oh.” Mindy had laughed. “He’ll always need me.” “Will he? What if he doesn’t?” “Are you saying I can’t win?” “You can win. Anyone can win if they know what they want and they focus on it. And if they’re willing to make sacrifices. I always tell my clients there are no free shoes.” “Don’t you mean patients?” Mindy had asked. “They’re clients,” the shrink insisted. “After all, they’re not sick.”

Mindy was prescribed Xanax, one pill every night before bedtime to cut down on her anxiety and poor sleep habits (she awoke every night after four hours of sleep and would lie awake for at least two hours, worrying), and was sent to the best fertility specialist in Manhattan, who pre-ferred high-profile patients but would take those recommended by other doctors of his ilk. At the beginning, he had recommended prenatal vi-tamins and a bit of luck. Mindy knew it wouldn’t work because she wasn’t lucky. Neither she nor James ever had been.

After two years of increasingly complicated procedures, Mindy gave up. She’d tallied their money and realized she couldn’t afford to go on.

“I can count the days I’ve been truly content on one hand,” Mindy wrote now. “Those are bad numbers in a country where pursuing happiness is a right so important, it’s in our Constitution. But maybe that’s the key. It’s the pursuit of happiness, not the actual acquisition of it that matters.”

Mindy thought back to her Sunday in the Hamptons. In the morning, they’d all gone for a walk on the beach, and she’d carried Sidney as they labored in the soft sand above the waterline. The houses, set behind the dunes, were enormous, triumphant testimonials to what some men could achieve and what others could not. In the afternoon, back at the house, Redmon organized a touch-football game.

Catherine and Mindy sat on the porch, watching the men. “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” Catherine said for the tenth time.

“It’s amazing,” Mindy agreed.

Catherine squinted at the men on the lawn. “Sam is so cute,” Catherine said.

“He’s a good-looking boy,” Mindy said proudly. “But James was cute when he was younger.”

“He’s still attractive,” Catherine said kindly.

“You’re very nice, but he isn’t,” Mindy said. Catherine looked startled.

“I’m one of those people who won’t lie to herself,” Mindy explained. “I try to live with the truth.”

“Is that healthy?” Catherine asked.

“Probably not.”

They sat in silence for a moment. The men moved clumsily on the lawn with the heavy breath that marks the beginning of real age, and yet Mindy envied them their freedom and their willingness to pursue joy.

“Are you happy with Redmon?” she said.

“Funny you should ask,” Catherine said. “When we were pregnant, I was afraid. I had no idea what he’d be like as a father. It was one of the scariest times in our relationship.”

“Really?”

“He still went out nearly every night. I thought, Is this what he’s going to do when we have the baby? Have I made another terrible mistake with a man? You don’t really know a man until you have a child with him. Then you see so much. Is he kind? Is he tolerant? Is he lov-ing? Or is he immature and egotistical and selfish? When you have a child, it can go two ways with your husband: You love him even more, or you lose all respect for him. And if you lose respect, there’s no way to get it back. I mean,” Catherine said, “if Redmon ever hit Sidney or yelled at him or complained about him crying, I don’t know what I’d do.”

“But he’d never do those things. Redmon has so much pride in being civilized.”

“Yes, he does, but one can’t help thinking about those things when one has a baby. The protective gene, I suppose. How is James as a father?”

“He was great from the beginning,” Mindy said. “He’s not a perfect man ...”

“What man is?”

“But he was so careful with Sam. When I was pregnant, he read all the parenting books. He’s a bit of a nerd ...”

“Like most journalists ...”

“Well, he likes the details. And Sam has turned out great.”

Mindy sat back in her chair, taking in the hazy warmth of the summer day. What she’d told Catherine about James was only half the truth.

James had been neurotic about Sam, about what he ate and even the kind of diapers he wore, so much so that Mindy would find herself arguing with him about the best brand in the aisle of Duane Reade. Their resentment toward each other was always just under the surface. Catherine was right, Mindy thought: All the trouble in their marriage went back to those first few months after Sam was born. Likely, James was as scared as she was and didn’t want to admit it, but she’d interpreted his behavior as a direct assault on her mothering abilities. She worried he secretly thought she was a bad mother and was trying to prove it by criticizing all her decisions. This, in turn, inflamed her own guilt. She’d taken her six weeks of maternity leave and not a day more, returning to work immediately, and the truth was, she secretly relished getting out of the house and getting away from the baby, who was so demanding that it scared her, and who elicited such love from her that it scared her, too.

They’d adjusted, as most parents do, and having created little Sam together was ultimately big enough to astonish them out of their animosity. But still, the bickering over Sam had never quite gone away.

“I don’t have it all, and I’m coming to the realization that I probably never will,” Mindy wrote now. “I suppose I can live with that. Perhaps my real fear lies elsewhere — in giving up my pursuit of happiness. Who would I be if I just let myself be?”

Mindy posted her new blog entry on the website and, returning to One Fifth for the evening, caught sight of herself in the smoky mirror next to the elevators. Who is that middle-aged woman? she thought. “I have a package for you,” said Roberto the doorman.

The package was big and heavy, and Mindy balanced it precariously on her forearm as she struggled with her keys. It was addressed to James, and going into the bedroom to change, she dropped it on the unmade bed. Seeing it was from Redmon Richardly’s office, and thinking it might be important, she opened it. Inside were three bound galleys of James’s new book.

She opened the book, read two paragraphs, and put it down, feeling guilty. What she’d read was better than expected. Two years ago, she’d read half of James’s book in first draft and had become afraid. Too afraid to go on. She’d thought the book wasn’t so good. But she hadn’t wanted to hurt his feelings, so she’d said it wasn’t her kind of material. This was easy to get away with, as the book was a historical novel about some character named David Bushnell, a real-life person who’d invented the first subma-rine. Mindy suspected that this David Bushnell was gay because he’d never married. The whole story took place in the seventeen hundreds, and if you weren’t married back then, you were definitely homosexual. Mindy had asked James if he was going to explore David Bushnell’s sexuality and what it might mean, and James had given her a dirty look and said no. David Bushnell was a scholar, he said. A farm boy who was a mathematical genius and had managed to go to Yale and then invented not just the sub-marine but underwater bombs. Which didn’t quite work.

“So in other words,” Mindy said, “he was a terrorist.”

“I guess you could say that,” James said. And that was the last conversation they’d had about the book.

But just because you didn’t talk about something didn’t mean it went away. That book, all eight hundred manuscript pages, had lain between them like a brick for months, until James finally delivered the copy to his publisher.

Now she found James on the cement pad in the back of the apartment, drinking a Scotch. She sat down next to him on a chair with metal arms and a woven plastic seat that she’d purchased from an online catalog years ago, when such transactions were new and marveled over (“I bought it online!” “No!” “Yes. And it was so easy!”), and wriggled her feet out of her shoes. “Your galleys have arrived,” she said. She looked at the glass in his hand. “Isn’t it a little early to start drinking?” she asked.

James held up the glass. “I’m celebrating. Apple wants to carry my book. They’re going to put it in their stores in February. They want to experiment with books, and they’ve chosen mine as the first. Redmon says we’re practically guaranteed sales of two hundred thousand copies.

Because people trust the Apple name. Not the name of the author. The author doesn’t matter. It’s the opinion of the computer that counts. I could make half a million dollars.” He paused. “What do you think?” he asked after a moment.

“I’m stunned,” Mindy said.

That evening, Enid crossed Fifth Avenue to visit her stepmother, Flossie Davis. Enid did not relish these visits, but since Flossie was ninety-three, Enid felt it would be cruel to avoid her. Flossie couldn’t last much longer, but on the other hand, she’d been knocking at death’s door (her words) for the past fifteen years, and death had yet to answer.

As usual, Enid found Flossie in bed. Flossie rarely left her two-bedroom apartment but always managed to complete the grotesque makeup routine she’d adopted as a teenaged showgirl. Her white hair was tinted a sickly yellow and piled on top of her head. When she was younger, she’d worn it bleached and teased, like a swirl of cotton candy. Enid had a the-ory that this constant bleaching had affected Flossie’s brain, as she never got anything quite right and was querulously insistent on her rightness even when all evidence pointed to the contrary. The only thing Flossie had managed to get partially right was men. At nineteen, she’d snatched up Enid’s father, Bugsy Merle, an oil prospector from Texas; when he passed away at fifty-five from a heart attack, she’d married the elderly widower, Stanley Davis, who had owned a chain of newspapers. With plenty of money and little to do, Flossie had spent much of her life pursuing the goal of becoming New York’s reigning socialite, but she’d never developed the self-control or discipline needed to succeed. She now suffered from heart trouble and gum infections, wheezed when she spoke, and had only television and visits from Enid and Philip to keep her company. Flossie was a reminder that it was terrible to get old and that there was very little to be done about it.

“And now Louise is dead,” Flossie said triumphantly. “I can’t say I’m sorry. Nobody deserved death more than she. I knew she’d come to a bad end.”

Enid sighed. This was typical Flossie, completely illogical in her analyses. It came, Enid thought, from never having had to really apply herself.

“I would hardly call her death ‘just deserts,’ ” Enid said carefully. “She was ninety-nine. Everyone dies eventually. It’s not a punishment. From the moment we’re born, life only goes in one direction.”

“Why bring that up?” Flossie said.

“It’s important to face the truth,” Enid said.

“I never want to face the truth,” Flossie said. “What’s good about the truth? If everyone faced the truth, they would kill themselves.”

“That might be true,” Enid said.

“But not you, Enid,” Flossie said, pushing herself up on her elbows in preparation for a verbal attack. “You never married, never had children.

Most women would have killed themselves. But not you. You go on and on. I admire that. I could never be a spinster myself.”

“ ‘Single’ is the word they use now.”

“Well,” Flossie said brightly, “I suppose you can’t miss what you never had.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Enid said. “If that were true, there would be no envy in the world. No unhappiness.”

“I was not envious of Louise,” Flossie said. “Everyone says I was, but I wasn’t. Why would I be envious of her? She didn’t even have a good figure. No bosom.”

“Flossie,” Enid said patiently. “If you weren’t envious, then why did you accuse her of robbery?”

“Because I was right,” Flossie said. Her wheezing increased, and she reached for an inhaler on the coffee table. “The woman,” she said between gasps, “was a thief ! And worse.”

Enid got up and fetched Flossie a glass of water. When she returned, she said gently, “Drink your water. And forget about it.”

“Then where is it?” Flossie said. “Where is the Cross of Bloody Mary?”

“There’s no proof the cross ever existed,” Enid said firmly.

“No proof?” Flossie’s eyes bulged. “It’s right there. In the painting by Holbein. It’s hanging around her neck. And there are documents that talk about Pope Julius the Third’s gift to Queen Mary for her efforts to keep England Catholic.”

“There’s one document,” Enid said. “And that document has never been shown to be authentic.”

“What about the photograph?”

“Taken in 1910. About as real as the famous photograph of the Loch Ness Monster.”

“I don’t know why you don’t believe me,” Flossie said, looking at Enid with hurt eyes. “I saw it myself. In the basement of the Met. I shouldn’t have let it out of my sight, but I had the Pauline Trigère fashion show in the afternoon. And Louise did go to the Met that day.”

“Flossie dear,” Enid said firmly. “Don’t you understand? You might just as easily have taken the cross yourself. If it exists at all.”

“But I didn’t take it,” Flossie said stubbornly. “Louise did.”

Enid sighed. Flossie had been beating this rumor drum for fifty years.

It was her stubborn insistence that Louise had stolen this cross that had caused Flossie’s eventual removal from the board of the Metropolitan Museum in a charge led by Louise Houghton, who had subtly suggested that Flossie suffered from a slight mental impairment. As this was generally believed to be true, Louise had prevailed, and Flossie had never forgiven Louise not only her supposed crime but also her betrayal, which had led to Flossie’s permanent fall from grace in New York society.

Flossie could have worked her way back in, but she refused to let go of her crazy idea that Louise Houghton, a woman above reproach, had stolen the Cross of Bloody Mary and kept it hidden somewhere in her apartment. Even now Flossie pointed out the window and, with a wheeze, said, “I’m telling you, that cross is in her apartment right now.

It’s just sitting there, waiting to be discovered.”

“Why would Louise Houghton take it?” Enid asked patiently.

“Because she was a Catholic. And Catholics are like that,” Flossie said.

“You must give this up,” Enid said. “It’s time. Louise is dead. You must face the facts.”

“Why?”

“Think about your legacy,” Enid said. “Do you want to go to your grave with everyone thinking you were the crazy old woman who accused Louise Houghton?”

“I don’t care what people think,” Flossie said proudly. “I never have.

And I’ll never understand how my very own stepdaughter continued to be friends with Louise.”

“Ah, Flossie.” Enid shook her head. “If everyone in New York took sides over these petty, insignificant arguments, no one would have any friends at all.”

“I read something funny today,” the makeup artist said. “ ‘The Joys of Not Having It All.’ ”

“Not having it all?” Schiffer asked. “I’m living it.”

“A friend e-mailed it to me. I can e-mail it to you if you want.”

“Sure,” Schiffer said. “I’d love that.”

The makeup artist stepped back to look at Schiffer in the long mirror.

“What do you think?”

“It’s perfect. We want it natural. I don’t think a mother superior would wear much makeup.”

“And after she has sex for the first time, we can make it more glamorous.”

The red-haired PA, Alan, stuck his head into the makeup room.

“They’re ready for you,” he said to Schiffer.

“I’m ready,” she said, getting out of the chair.

“Schiffer Diamond is on her way,” Alan said into a headset.

They walked down a short corridor, then went through the construction department. Two tall metal doors led to one of the six sets.

Inside, behind a maze of gray plywood walls, was a white backdrop.

Several director’s chairs were set up a few feet away, clustered in front of a monitor. The director, Asa Williams, introduced himself. He was a brooding, gaunt man with a shaved head and a tattoo on his left wrist.

He’d directed lots of TV and, recently, two hit movies. Milling around was the usual crowd of crew and executives, all wondering, no doubt, what Schiffer was going to be like. Difficult or professional? Schiffer was friendly but removed.

“You know the drill, right?” Asa said. She was led onto the set. Told to walk toward the camera. Turn to the right. Turn to the left. The bat-tery in the camera died. There was a four-minute break while someone replaced it. She walked away and stood behind the director’s chairs. The executive producers were in a conversation with the network executives.

“She still looks good.”

“Yes, she looks great.”

“But too pale, maybe.”

She was sent back to the makeup room for an adjustment. Sitting in the chair, she recalled the afternoon when Philip had knocked on the door of her trailer. He was still put out that she’d called his movie lousy.

“If you think my movie sucks, why are you in it?” he’d asked.

“I didn’t say it sucked. I said it was lousy. There’s a big difference. You’re going to need much thicker skin if you’re going to survive in Hollywood,” she’d said.

“Who said I want to survive in Hollywood? And what makes you think I don’t have thick skin?”

“And what do you know, anyway?” he asked later, when they were having drinks at the outdoor tiki bar in the hotel. “It’s only your second movie.”

“I’m a fast learner,” she said. “How about you?”

He ordered two shots of tequila, then two more. There was a pool table in the back of the bar, and they used every excuse to accidentally touch each other. The first kiss happened outside the bathroom, located in a little hut. When she came out, he was waiting for her. “I was thinking about what you said, about how Hollywood corrupts.”

She leaned back against the rough wood of the hut and laughed. “You don’t have to take everything I say at face value. Sometimes I say things just to hear how they sound. Any crime in that?”

“No,” he said, putting his hand on the wall above her shoulder. “But it means I’m never going to know when you’re serious.” Her head was tilted back to look at him, although he wasn’t so much taller than she was — maybe six inches. But then his arm was around her back, and they were kissing, and his mouth was so soft. They were both startled and broke away, then went back to the bar and had another tequila shot, but the line had been crossed, and soon they were kissing at the bar and putting their hands on each other’s faces and backs until the bartender said,

“Get a room.”

She laughed. “Oh, we have one.”

Back in her room, they engaged in the long, delicious process of getting to know each other’s bodies. When they took off their shirts and pressed together, the sensation of skin on skin was a revelation. They lay together for a while, like high school kids who have all the time in the world and don’t need to go too far too fast; then they took off their pants and pantomimed sex — his penis touching her vagina through their undergarments. All through the night, they touched and kissed, dozing off and waking to the joy of finding the other in the bed, and then the kissing started again, and finally, in the early morning when it was right, he entered her. There was nothing like that first push, and it so overwhelmed them that he stopped, just let his penis be inside her, while they absorbed the miracle of two pieces that fit perfectly together.

She had a seven A.M. call, but at ten A.M., during a break in shooting, he was in her trailer and they were doing it on the small bed in the back with the polyester sheets. They did it three more times that day, and during dinner with the crew, she sat with her leg over his, and he kept putting his hand under her shirt to touch her waist. By then the whole crew knew, but set romances were a given in the intimacy and stress of getting a movie made. Though they usually ended when the movie wrapped, Philip came to L.A. and moved into her bungalow. They played house like any other young couple discovering the wonders of companionship, when the mundane was new and even a trip to the supermarket could be an adventure. Their anonymous bliss lasted only a short while, however, because then the movie came out, and it was huge.

Their relationship was suddenly public. They rented a bigger house with a gate in the Hollywood Hills, but they couldn’t keep the outside world from creeping in, and that started the trouble.

Their first fight was over an article in a magazine that featured her on the cover. In the piece, she was quoted as saying, “I can’t take making movies too seriously. In the end, it’s not that different from what little girls do when they’re playing dress-up.” She came home from a meeting one afternoon and found the magazine on the coffee table and Philip in a foul mood over her quote. “Is that what you think about my work?” he said.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

“That’s right,” he said, “because everything is about you. Did you ever consider the fact that it’s my movie you were talking about?”

“Don’t take yourself so seriously. It’s not attractive.” But she had, it seemed, irrevocably bruised his ego. They continued on for a little longer, then he moved back to New York. A miserable month passed before he called her. “I’ve been thinking. It’s not us. It’s Hollywood. Why don’t you come to New York?”

She’d been twenty-four then, willing to take on any adventure. But that was over twenty years ago, she thought now, staring at her reflection in the makeup mirror. In the harsh light of the bare bulbs, there was no denying that she no longer looked like that girl. Her face had matured; it was more angular and hollow, and no one would mistake her for an ingenue. But she knew a lot more about what she wanted from life and what no longer mattered.

But did Philip know? Leaning in to the mirror to check her makeup, she wondered what he’d thought when she’d run into him in the elevator. Did he see her as middle-aged? Did he still find her attractive?

The last time she’d seen him had been ten years ago. She’d been in New York doing publicity for a movie when she ran into Philip in the lobby of One Fifth. They hadn’t talked in over a year, but they immediately fell into their old habits, and when she’d finished her last interview, they’d met for dinner at Da Silvano. At eleven o’clock there was a terrific thunderstorm, trapping everyone inside, and the waiters cleared away the tables and turned up the music, and everyone danced. “I love you,” Philip said. “You’re my best friend.”

“You’re my best friend, too.”

“We understand each other. We’ll always be friends.”

They went back to her apartment. She had an antique four-poster bed she’d had shipped from England; that year she’d spent two months in London doing a play and become enamored with the idea of English country houses. Philip was propped up on his arms above her, his hair falling into her face. They made love hard and seriously, astounded by how good it still was, which once again brought up the issue of being together. He asked about her schedule. She was flying to Europe and was supposed to go directly back to L.A. but said she’d make a detour and spend at least a few days in New York. Then she went to Europe and got stuck there for an extra two weeks and had to go directly back to L.A. Then she started a movie that was shooting in Vancouver and India. Six months passed, and she heard from someone that Philip was getting married. She got on a plane and flew to New York to confront him.

“You can’t get married,” she said.

“Why not?”

“What about us?”

“There is no us.”

“Only because you don’t want there to be.”

“Whether I want it or not is irrelevant. It doesn’t exist.”

“Who is she?” Schiffer demanded. “What does she do?”

Her name was Susan, and she taught at a private school in Manhattan.

When Schiffer insisted, he showed her a photograph. She was twenty-six, pretty, and utterly bland. “After all the women you’ve been with, why her?” she asked.

“I’m in love with her. She’s nice,” Philip said.

Schiffer raged and then begged. “What does she have that I don’t have?”

“She’s stable.”

“I can be stable.”

“She’s in the same place all the time.”

“And that’s what you want? Some little mouse who will do everything you say?”

“You don’t know Susan. She’s very independent.”

“She’s dependent. That’s the real reason why you want to marry her.

At least be truthful about your motives.”

“We’re getting married on September twenty-sixth.”

“Where?”

“I won’t tell you. I don’t want you to crash the wedding.”

“I’m not going to crash it. Why are you so worried? I bet you’re getting married in her parents’ backyard.”

“Their country house, actually. In East Hampton.”

She did crash the wedding by enlisting Billy Litchfield to help her. They hid in the hedges surrounding the property. She watched Philip in a white linen suit say “I do” to another woman. For months afterward, she justified her behavior by claiming Philip’s marriage was like a death: One needed to see the dead body in order to believe the soul was really gone.

A little over a year had passed when she heard from an agent that Philip was getting divorced. His marriage had lasted fourteen months.

But by then it was too late. Schiffer was engaged to the English marquis, an aging glamour boy who turned out to have a vicious drug habit. When he died in a boating accident in Saint-Tropez, she went back to L.A. to restart her career.

There was no work, her agent told her — she’d been away for too long, and she was over thirty-five. He said she ought to do what every other actress did and start having children. Being alone in L.A. without work to distract her from her husband’s death slammed her into a deep depression, and one day she didn’t bother to get out of bed. She stayed there for weeks.

Philip had come to L.A. in that time, but she’d made excuses not to see him. She couldn’t see anyone. She could barely leave the house in Los Feliz. The thought of driving down the hill to the supermarket exhausted her, it took hours to work up the energy to gather her things, get in the car, and back it out of the garage. Steering the car along the hairpin turns, she looked for places where she might drive off the road and into a steep ravine, but she wasn’t sure an accident would result in death, and it might leave her worse off than she already was.

Her agent forced her to lunch one afternoon at the Polo Club. She could barely speak and picked at her food. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked. She shook her head, murmuring, “I don’t know.”

“I can’t send you out like this. Hollywood is a cruel town. They’ll say you’ll never work again, if they’re not saying it already. Why don’t you go to the desert? Or Mexico. Even Malibu, for Christ’s sake. Take a couple of weeks. Or a month. When you come back, I can probably get you a part playing someone’s mother.”

When the interminable lunch was over and she was back in her car driving down Sunset, she began to cry uncontrollably and couldn’t stop for several hours. There was the unaccountable despair, but the shame was the worst of it. People like her weren’t supposed to be depressed, but she felt broken and didn’t know how to fix herself. Out of pity, her agent sent her a script for a TV series. She refused to meet the writer for lunch but allowed him to come to the house. His name was Tom, and he was younger than she and eager and sensitive and wasn’t put off by her weakness. He said he wanted to help her, and she let him, and soon they were lovers, and shortly thereafter, he moved in. She didn’t take the part in the series, but it was a hit, and Tom made money and stuck with her, and then they were married. She started working again, too, and made three independent movies, one of which was nominated for an Oscar, putting her back on the map. Things were good with Tom, too. He made another TV show, and it was a hit as well, but then he had to work all the time, and they became irritated with each other. She took nearly every part she was offered in order to get away from him and their marriage. They continued like that for another three years, and then she found out Tom was having an affair, and it was easy. They’d been married six years, and not once in those six years did she stop thinking about Philip or what her life would have been like if she were with him instead.

5

Lately, sex was weighing heavily on Mindy’s mind. She and James didn’t do it enough. In fact, they didn’t do it at all. Looking at it optimistically, they did it once or twice a year. It was terrible and wrong and made Mindy feel like she was a bad wife, not doing her duty, but at the same time, it was such a relief not to do it.

The problem was, it hurt. She knew this could be an issue for women as they got older. But she thought it didn’t happen until well after menopause. She’d never expected it to happen so soon. At the beginning, when she’d first met James, and even into their fourth or fifth year of marriage, she’d prided herself on being good at sex. For years after Sam was born, she and James would do it once a week and really make a night of it. They had things they liked to do. Mindy liked to be tied up, and sometimes she would tie James up (they had special ties they used for this practice — old Brooks Brothers ties James had worn in college), and when James was tied up, she would ride his penis like a banshee. Over time, the sex started to dwindle, which was normal for married couples, but they still did it once or twice a month, and then, two years ago, the pain came. She went to her female gynecologist and tried to talk about it, but the doctor said her vagina wasn’t dried up and she wasn’t going through menopause and she should use lotions. Mindy knew all about sex lotions, but they didn’t work, either. So she bought a vibrator. Nothing fancy, just a plain slim tube of colored light blue plastic. She didn’t know why she picked light blue. It was better than pink or purple, she supposed. On a Saturday afternoon when James was out with Sam, she tried to put the vibrator in her vagina but could get it no farther than an inch before the pain started. She began avoiding sex altogether. James never asked her about it, but the lack of sex in their marriage lay between them like a sack of potatoes. Mindy felt guilty and ashamed, although she told herself it didn’t matter.

Now it looked like James was going to be successful, and it did matter. She wasn’t stupid. She knew successful men had more choices. If she didn’t give him sex, he might get it somewhere else. Arriving home from work on Tuesday evening, Mindy was determined to do it with James that night no matter how much it hurt. But real life intruded.

“Are you going to the funeral?” Roberto asked her as she came into the lobby of One Fifth.

“What funeral?” Mindy asked.

“Mrs. Houghton. It’s tomorrow at St. Ambrose Church.” Roberto, who was always smiling, laughed. “I hear it’s private.”

“Funerals aren’t private,” Mindy said.

“This one is. I hear you need an invitation.”

“Where did you hear that?” Mindy said.

“I just heard, is all,” Roberto said and laughed.

Mindy was furious. Instead of going to her apartment, she went up to Enid Merle’s. “What’s this about Mrs. Houghton’s funeral?” she said.

“It’s a memorial service, dear. Mrs. Houghton has already been laid to rest.”

“Are you going?” Mindy asked.

“Of course.”

“Why wasn’t I invited? I’m the head of the board.”

“Mrs. Houghton knew so many people. This is New York. Not everyone is invited to everything.”

“Can you get me an invitation?” Mindy asked.

“I can’t imagine why you would want to go,” Enid said, and closed her door. She was still annoyed at Mindy for refusing to embrace her plan to split up Mrs. Houghton’s apartment.

Downstairs, Mindy found James in his office. “I am so insulted,” she said, plopping herself onto the old leather club chair. “It seems everyone in the building has been invited to Mrs. Houghton’s memorial service. Everyone but me.”

“Let it go,” James said warningly.

This was not like James. Mindy asked what was wrong.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were writing a blog?” he said.

“I did.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did and you don’t remember.”

“Well, it’s all over Snarker,” James said.

“Is it good or bad?”

“What do you think?” James said.

Mindy got up and peered over his shoulder at the computer screen.

The headline read: INTERNET MOGULETTE (NOT!) AND CORPORATE MEDIA SLUT MINDY GOOCH ASSAULTS WORLD WITH MUSINGS. Underneath was a hideous color photograph of her, taken as she was leaving her office building. She looked ragged and unkempt in an old black trench coat, with her sensible brown saddlebag slung over her shoulder. Her mouth was open; the angle of the photograph made her nose and chin appear especially pointy. Mindy’s first thought was that the photograph was more devastating than the text. For much of her life, Mindy had made a considerable effort to avoid the sin of vanity, as she despised people who cared excessively about their looks; she considered it the height of shallowness.

But the photograph instantly shattered her interior mirror. There was no way to pretend that you were pretty, that you still looked like a twenty-five-year-old, when the evidence to the contrary was available on any computer screen, accessible twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, for years and years and years. Maybe even forever. Or at least until the oil ran out, the polar ice caps melted, and/or the world was destroyed by war, a meteorite, or a giant tsunami.

“Who wrote this?” she demanded. She peered at the name next to the text. “Thayer Core. Who the hell is he?”

“Let it go,” James said.

“Why should I? How dare they?”

“Who cares?” James asked.

“I do,” Mindy said. “It’s my reputation, my image, at stake here. I’m not like you, James. When someone insults me, I don’t just sit there. I do something.”

“What?” James said, rolling his eyes.

“I’m going to have that kid fired.”

James made a dismissive noise.

“What you don’t understand is that all those websites are owned by corporations,” Mindy said. “Or they will be soon. And I’ve got connections. In the corporate world. They don’t call me ‘corporate media slut’ for nothing. I must put on Mozart.” Lately, she’d found Mozart soothing, which could be yet another sign of middle age, she thought.

To put on the Mozart, she had to get up and go into her office next door. She chose The Magic Flute from a pile of CDs. The overture — the great booming drums and oboes, followed by the delicate string instruments — momentarily distracted her. But then she glanced over at her computer. Her screen saver was up, a photograph of Sam dressed as a dinosaur for Halloween. He’d been three and crazy about dinosaurs. She turned away, but the computer was calling her. Snarker was calling her.

She pulled up the website and read the item again.

“Mindy,” James said accusingly, coming into her office. “What are you doing?”

“Working.”

“No, you’re not. You’re sitting here, reading about yourself.” And then he went off on a tirade. “It’s the neurosis of the new millennium. It’s not self-absorption. It’s self-addiction.And that’s why” — he began sputtering — “that’s why I wrote about David Bushnell.”

“Huh?” Mindy said.

“David Bushnell wasn’t about the self,” James said. He sat down on her couch, leaning back as if preparing to engage in a long discussion about his book. “Unlike the bottom-feeders who now populate the world, the publicists, the stockbrokers, the lawyers, everyone trying to make a buck off someone else ...”

Mindy stared at him, unable to fathom what the hell he was going on about. She changed the topic back to herself. “I can’t get over it,” she said. “How dare they? Why me? Why are they making fun of me?”

Once again, James thought, Mindy was refusing to talk about his book. Usually, he let it go. But this time, he wasn’t in a mood to be solicitous to his wife. He stood up and started messing around with her CDs. “Why shouldn’t they make fun of you?” he said, examining a CD

of the Rolling Stones’ greatest hits. “Mother’s Little Helper” was on it, he noted; perhaps he should have a listen.

“Excuse me?” she said.

“Because you’re special and better than everyone else?” James asked casually.

“I am genuinely hurt,” Mindy countered. “I am humiliated.” She gave James her most withering look.

“All I’m saying,” James said, “is that in your twenty years as a journalist, you’ve never hurt anyone?”

“Are you saying this is some kind of retribution?” Mindy asked.

“It could be. Maybe it’s karma.”

Mindy snorted in derision.“Maybe it’s just that young people these days are nasty and jealous. And disrespectful. What did I ever do to them?”

“You’re somewhat successful. Or seen as successful, anyway,” James said. “Don’t you get it? We’re the establishment now.” He paused and, pointing a finger at her, said, “Us. You and me. We’re the so-called adults now. The ones the young people want to knock down. And we were exactly like them when we were in our twenties.”

“We were not.”

“Remember the stories you used to write? About that billionaire.

You made fun of his fingers! Woo-hooo. ‘Short-fingered vulgarian,’ you called him.”

“That was different.”

“It was exactly the same. You only think it was different because you wrote it. And every time you ripped someone, you said it was okay because they were successful, ergo, they were an asshole. And everyone thought you were so clever, and you got attention. It’s the easiest way to get attention, Mindy. Always has been. Make fun of your betters. Disrespect the successful, and you put yourself on their radar. It’s so fucking cheap.”

Any normal person, James thought, would have been slain by this comment. But not Mindy. “And you’re so much better?” she said.

“I never did that.”

“No, James,” Mindy said. “You didn’t have to. You were a man. You wrote those long, endless pieces about ... golf. That took a year to write.

Ten thousand words about golf, and it takes a year? I was working, James.

Making money. It was my job.”

“Right,” James said. “And now it’s these kids’ job as well.”

“That’s great, James,” Mindy said. “I ask for your support. And you turn on me. Your own wife.”

“I’m trying to put things into perspective,” James said. “Don’t you get it? These kids are just like us. They don’t know it yet, but in twenty years, they’ll wake up and they’ll be us. It will be the last thing they were expecting. Oh, they’ll protest now. Say it will never happen to them. They’ll beat the odds. Won’t change. Won’t end up tired, mediocre, apathetic, and sometimes defeated. But life will take care of them. And then they’ll realize they’ve turned into us. And that will be their punishment.”

Mindy pulled at a strand of hair and examined it. “What are you really saying?” she asked. “Is there something wrong with us?”

The fight had gone out of James. “I don’t know,” he said. He slumped.

“What’s going on?” a voice asked. Mindy and James looked up. Their son, Sam, had come into the apartment and was standing in the door to Mindy’s office.

“We were just talking,” Mindy said.

“What about?” Sam asked.

“Your mother was on Snarker,” James said.

“I know.” Sam shrugged.

“Sit down,” James said. “How do you feel about it?”

“I don’t feel anything at all,” Sam said.

“You’re not feeling ... traumatized?”

“No.”

“Your mother’s feelings are hurt.”

“That’s your generation. Kids my age don’t get hurt feelings. It’s just drama. Everyone’s on their own reality show. The more drama you have, the more people pay attention to you. That’s all.”

James and Mindy Gooch looked at each other, thinking the same thing: Their son was a genius! What other thirteen-year-old boy had such insights into the human condition?

“Enid Merle wants me to help her with her computer,” Sam said.

“No,” Mindy said.

“Why?”

“I’m angry at her.”

“Leave Sam out of it,” James said.

“Can I go?” Sam asked.

“Yes,” James said. When Sam left the room, he continued on his dia-tribe. “Reality TV, blogging, commentators, it’s the culture of the para-site.” Immediately, he wondered why he said these things. Why couldn’t he embrace the new? This new human being who was self-centered and rabidly consumerist?

Sam Gooch bore the harsh marks of budding adolescence and the scars of being a New York City kid. He wasn’t innocent. He’d stopped being innocent between the ages of two and four, when he was applauded for making adult remarks. Mindy would often repeat his remarks to her coworkers, followed by the tagline (always delivered with appropriate awe): “How could he know such things! He’s only [fill in the blank].”

Now, at thirteen, Sam also worried that he knew too much. Sometimes he felt world-weary and often wondered what would happen to him; certainly, things would happen to him, things happened to kids in New York City. But he also knew he didn’t have the same advantages as the other children with whom he consorted. He lived in one of the best buildings in the Village but in the worst apartment in that building; he wasn’t taken out of school to go to Kenya for three weeks; he’d never had a birthday party at the Chelsea Piers; he had never gone to see his father play lead guitar in a rock concert at Madison Square Garden.

When Sam went out of town, it was always to stay at the country houses of kids with wealthier and more accomplished parents than his own. His dad urged him to go for the “experience,” clinging to the quaint notion that part of being a writer was about having all kinds of experiences in life, although his dad didn’t seem to have many experiences of his own.

Now Sam had had some experiences he wished he hadn’t had, mostly concerning girls. They wanted something he didn’t know how to give.

What they wanted, Sam suspected, was constant attention. When he went out of town to the country houses, the parents left the kids to their own devices. The boys posed and the girls acted crazy. At some point, there was crying. When he got home, he was exhausted, as if he’d lived two years in two days.

His mother would be waiting for him. After an hour or two would come the inevitable question: “Sam, did you write a thank-you note?”

“No, Mom, it’s embarrassing.” “No one was ever embarrassed to get a thank-you note.” “I’m embarrassed to write one.” “Why?” “Because no one else has to write thank-you notes.” “They’re not as well brought up as you are, Sam. Someday you’ll see. Someone will remember that you wrote them a thank-you note and give you a job.” “I’m not going to work for anyone.” And then his mother would hug him. “You’re so smart, Sammy. You’re going to run the world someday.”

And so Sammy became a computer whiz, which impressed his parents and all other adults born before 1985. “Sam was on the Internet before he could talk!” his mother boasted.

At six, having been admitted to one of New York City’s most exclusive schools — a bonus secured by the often obnoxious, unwavering determination of his mother to set him on the right track (Mindy was one of those people of whom others eventually said, “It’s easier to give in to her just to get her to go away”) — Sam realized he would have to make his own pocket money in order to survive his artificially heightened status. At ten, he began his own computer business in the building.

Sam was tough but fair. He charged the residents, the Philip Oaklands, the quiet doctors and lawyers, the woman who managed the rock band, a hundred dollars an hour for his services, but he helped the doormen and porters for free. This was to make up for his mother. The doormen considered the most egregious residents the bad Christmas tippers, and Sam knew his mother was one such Scrooge. When she doled out the twenty- and fifty-dollar bills for Christmas tips, her mouth would turn down in an unhappy line. She would check and recheck her envelopes next to the list of the twenty-five doormen and porters, and if she found she’d made a mistake — and she usually had, in taking an extra fifty or twenty from the cash machine — she would snatch up the bill and carefully lay it in her wallet. But Sam’s efforts paid off. Sam was loved in the building, and Mindy was tolerated, the word being that Mindy wasn’t as bad as she seemed. “She has a nice son, after all, and that says a lot about a woman,” the doormen said.

But now there was trouble between Mindy and Enid, which Sam would have to fix as well.

In the lobby, Sam ran into a strange girl standing before the elevators, looking down at her iPhone. He knew everyone in the building and wondered who she was, why she was there, and whom she was going to see.

She was wearing a green halter top, dark jeans, and high-heeled sandals, and was a certain type of beautiful. There were girls in his school who were beautiful, and there were models and actresses and sometimes just pretty college girls on the street. But this girl, he thought, with her poochy lips turned up at the corners in a manner that was almost obscene, was a little different. Her clothes were expensive, but she was a little too perfect. She glanced down at Sam and looked away, back at her phone, as if she were embarrassed.

The girl was Lola Fabrikant, and she was on her way to her interview with Philip Oakland. Sam had caught Lola in a rare moment of vulnera-bility. The walk down Fifth Avenue to One Fifth had left her disconcerted.

Having developed a keen sense of status, she was attuned to both blatant and subtle differences between all kinds of residences, products, and service providers, the result being that in strolling down Fifth Avenue, the glaring differences between this avenue and Eleventh Street, where she now resided, assaulted her sense of entitlement. Fifth Avenue was so much nicer than Eleventh Street — why didn’t she live here? she wondered. And then coming upon the towering gray mightiness of One Fifth, with not one but two entrances and a wood-paneled lobby (like a men’s club), and three doormen all over her in uniforms and white gloves (like footmen in a fairy tale), she thought again, Why don’t I live in this building?

Waiting for the elevator, she decided that she would live here somehow. She deserved it.

She looked down and saw a teenaged boy staring at her. Did kids live in the building as well? Somehow she’d imagined New York City as a place for adults only.

The boy got into the elevator after her. He pressed the button for thirteen. “What floor?” he asked.

“Thirteen,” she said.

Sam nodded. The girl was going to see Philip Oakland. It figured. His mother always said Philip Oakland had it easy, and life was unfair.

Shortly before Lola arrived for her appointment, Philip got a call from his agent. “Oh, these people,” the agent said.

“What’s the problem?” Philip asked. Despite his trouble with the material, he’d managed to turn in a draft of Bridesmaids Revisited the day before.

“Nobody knows what the hell they’re doing,” the agent said. “I’m giving you a heads-up. The studio wants an emergency conference call this afternoon.”

“Fuck them,” Philip said. “Sounds like a power play.”

“It’s all a power play. If anyone knew how to make a good movie these days, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

His agent hung up, and an assistant from the studio called. Then he was on hold for ten minutes, waiting for the head of the studio to get on.

She had graduate degrees in both business and law, degrees that should have been irrelevant when it came to understanding the creative process, but now seemed to be the equivalent of having won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. “Philip,” she said, not apologizing for keeping him waiting,

“something happened between the last draft and the current one.”

“It’s called a rewrite,” Philip said.

“We’ve lost something with the main character. She isn’t likable anymore.”

“Really?” Philip replied.

“She has no personality,” said the studio head.

“That’s because you’ve insisted I take out anything that would give her personality,” Philip replied.

“We have to think about the audience. Women are very, very judgmental. As you know. They’re harsh critics of other women.”

“That’s too bad,” Philip said. “Maybe if they weren’t, women would rule the world.”

“I’ll need another draft in two weeks. Just fix it, Philip,” she said, and hung up.

Philip called his agent. “Can I quit this project?” he asked.

“Forget your ego and just give them what they want. Then it’s their problem.”

Philip put the phone down, wondering, as he often did these days, what had happened to his courage.

His intercom buzzed. “Miss Lola Fabrikant is downstairs,” the doorman Fritz said. “Shall I send her up?”

Damn, Philip thought. In the confrontation with the studio, he’d forgotten about his appointment with the girl who’d e-mailed him requesting an interview. He’d seen ten candidates for the job, and every one had been a disappointment. This girl would likely prove another waste of time, but she was already downstairs. He’d give her ten minutes just to be polite. “Send her up,” he said.

A few minutes later, Lola Fabrikant was perched on Philip’s couch, attempting to be on her very best behavior. Philip Oakland was no longer as young as his author photo on the back cover of her tattered copy of Summer Morning, but he wasn’t old, either, and he was certainly younger than her father, who would never wear a faded black T-shirt and Adidas tennis shoes and sport hair past his earlobes. Folded up in his chair, feet on his desk, Philip alternated between tapping a pen on a pile of papers and tucking his hair behind his ears. The girl who had given Lola his e-mail had been right — Philip Oakland was hot.

“Tell me about you,” Philip said. “I want to know everything.” He was no longer in a rush to get rid of Miss Lola Fabrikant, who was not what he’d been expecting and who, after his lousy day, was more than a welcome relief, almost like the answer to his prayers.

“Have you seen my Facebook page?” she asked.

“I haven’t.”

“I tried to look you up,” she said. “But you don’t have a page.”

“Should I?”

She frowned at him as if concerned for his welfare. “Everyone has a Facebook page. How else can your friends keep up with you?”

How else indeed, he thought, finding her charming. “Do you want to show me your Facebook page?”

She tapped quickly on her iPhone and held it out to him. “That’s me in Miami.” Philip stared at a photograph of a bikini-clad Lola standing on a small boat. Was he being seduced deliberately or inadvertently, he wondered. Did it matter?

“And then there’s my bio,” she said, coming up behind him to tap once again on the small machine. “See? My favorite color: yellow. My favorite quote: ‘My way or the Henry Hudson Highway.’ My dream honeymoon: sailing on a yacht around the Greek Islands.” She swung her long hair, and a strand touched his face. She giggled. “Sorry.”

“It’s very interesting,” he said, handing the iPhone back to her.

“I know,” she said. “My friends are always saying big things are going to happen to me.”

“What kinds of big things?” Philip asked, noting her smooth, unblem-ished skin. Her presence was turning him into an idiot, he thought.

“I don’t know,” she said, thinking how different Philip Oakland was from anyone she’d ever met. He was like a real person, but better, because he was a celebrity. She sat back down on the couch. “I know I should know, because I’m twenty-two, but I don’t.”

“You’re a baby,” Philip said. “You have your whole life ahead of you.”

She dismissed this by blowing a small puff of air through her lips.

“Everyone always says that, but it isn’t true. These days you have to make it right away. Or you get left behind.”

“Really?” Philip asked.

“Oh yes,” she said, nodding her lovely head. “Things have changed. If you want something, a million other people want it as well.” She paused, holding out her sandaled foot and cocking her head to admire her black toenail polish. “But it doesn’t bother me. I’m very competitive. I like to win. And I usually do.”

Aha, Philip thought, suddenly inspired. This was what his character was missing in Bridesmaids Revisited. This unbridled confidence of youth.

“So what is this job?” she asked. “What do I have to do? I won’t have to pick up your dry cleaning or anything like that, will I?”

“Worse, I’m afraid,” Philip said. “I’ll expect you to do some research for me — but I’ll also want you to be an assistant. When I’m on a conference call, you’ll be on the other line and will take notes. If I make hand-written notes on a manuscript, you’ll retype it. I’ll expect you to read every draft before it goes out, checking for typos and continuity. And occasionally, I’ll use you as a sounding board.”

“Meaning?” Lola asked, tilting her head.

“For instance,” Philip said, “I’m working on a screenplay now called Bridesmaids Revisited. I’m wondering how obsessed a twenty-two-year-old woman would be with her wedding.”

“Haven’t you ever seen Bridezillas?” Lola asked, flabbergasted.

“What’s that?” Philip said.

“Ohmigod,” Lola said, warming up to this discussion about reality shows, which was one of her favorite topics. “It’s about these women who are totally obsessed with their weddings, to the point where they literally go crazy.”

Philip tapped his pen. “But why?” he asked. “What’s the big deal about getting married?”

“Every girl wants to get married now. And they want to do it while they’re young.”

“I thought they wanted to have careers and take over the world by thirty.”

“That was older Gen Y,” Lola said. “All the girls I know want to get married and have kids right away. They don’t want to end up like their mothers.”

“What’s wrong with their mothers?”

“They’re unhappy,” Lola said. “Girls my age won’t put up with unhappiness.”

Philip felt an urgency to get back to work. He unfolded his legs from the desk and stood up.

“Is that it?” she said.

“That’s it,” he said.

She picked up her bag, a gray snakeskin pouch that was so large Philip guessed it must have been made from the entire skin of a boa constric-tor. “Do I have the job?” she asked.

“Why don’t we both think about it and talk tomorrow,” Philip said.

She looked crushed. “Don’t you like me?” she asked.

He opened the door. “I do like you,” he said. “I like you very much.

That’s the problem.”

When she was gone, he stepped out onto his terrace. His vista was south. A chunky, modern medieval landscape of gray-blues and terra cottas lay before him. Just below was Washington Square Park, a patch of green populated with tiny people going about their business.

You must not do this, he scolded himself. You must not hire that girl.

If you do, you’ll sleep with her, and it will be a disaster.

But he finally had a grip on his screenplay. And gathering up his things, he headed out to the small library on Sixth Avenue, which was open late and where he could work uninterrupted.

Schiffer Diamond was finished on the stages at seven P.M., and during the ride back to the city, she found the attachment from Mindy’s blog, sent by the makeup artist on her BlackBerry: “I don’t have it all, and I’m coming to the realization that I probably never will. Perhaps my real fear lies elsewhere — in giving up my pursuit of happiness.”

No, one must never do that, Schiffer thought, and arriving at One Fifth, she went right up to the thirteenth floor and rang Philip’s bell. He wasn’t home. Back in her apartment, her phone rang, and picking it up, she thought it might be Philip after all — he was one of the few people who had the number. Instead, it was Billy Litchfield. “A little bird told me you were in town,” he scolded. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“I’ve been meaning to. But I’ve been working nonstop.”

“If you’re not working right this minute, let’s have a drink at Da Silvano. It’s a gorgeous evening.”

It was a gorgeous night, she realized. Why should she sit alone in her apartment? She would meet Billy and check back with Philip later.

Maybe he’d be home.

She arrived first at Da Silvano, ordered a glass of wine, and thought about Billy. She loved Billy — everyone did. She felt proprietary in her friendship with him. Although years could go by during which she barely saw him, this was never a reflection of her feelings, especially as Billy was one of the first people she’d met in New York.

Indeed, if it weren’t for Billy, she wouldn’t be where she was today.

She’d been a student at Columbia, studying French literature with a minor in photography, when she’d wrangled an internship with a famous fashion photographer during the summer of her sophomore year.

It was on one of these debauched photo shoots in a loft in SoHo that she’d met Billy, who was then an editor at large at Vogue. Champagne and cocaine were staples in those days, the model was three hours late, and, in the middle of the afternoon, engaged in sex with the photographer in his bedroom while an endless tape of Talk Talk played over and over.

“You know you’re more beautiful than the model,” Billy said to Schiffer while they waited for the photographer to finish his business.

“I know.” Schiffer shrugged.

“Are you always this confident?”

“Why should I have to lie about my looks? I didn’t choose them. They just are.”

“You should be in front of the camera,” Billy said.

“I’m too shy.”

Nevertheless, when Billy insisted she meet his friend who was a casting director, she went along with it. And when the casting director set her up with an audition for a movie, she went along with it, and when she got the part, she didn’t turn it down. She played a spoiled rich sub-urban girl, and on-screen, her beauty was riveting. Then she was on the cover of Vogue, and had a cosmetics campaign, and broke up with her boyfriend, a nice, good-looking boy from Chicago who was going to Columbia med school. She was signed by the biggest talent agent at ICM and told to move to Los Angeles, which she did, renting a small house off Sunset Boulevard. Right away she got the iconic part of the tragic ingenue in Summer Morning.

And met Philip, she reminded herself.

Now Billy, her dear old Billy, came hurrying down the sidewalk in a seersucker suit. She stood up to embrace him.

“I can’t believe you’re here. And I don’t believe you’ll stay in New York,” Billy said, sitting down and motioning to the waiter. “Hollywood people always say they’re going to stay, and they never do.”

“But I never considered myself a Hollywood person,” Schiffer said. “I always thought of myself as a New Yorker. It was the only way I managed to live in L.A. for so long.”

“New York has changed,” Billy said, a mournful tone creeping into his voice.

“I’m sorry about Mrs. Houghton,” Schiffer said. “I know you were close.”

“She was very old. And I think I may have found a couple for her apartment.”

“That’s nice,” Schiffer said, but she didn’t want to talk real estate.

“Billy,” she said, leaning forward. “Have you seen Philip Oakland?”

“That’s exactly what I mean about New York changing,” Billy said. “I almost never see him anymore. I see Enid, of course, at events. But not Philip. I’ve heard he’s a bit of a mess.”

“He was always a bit of a mess,” Schiffer said.

“But at a certain point, the mess needs to go away. Even Redmon Richardly got married.” Billy brushed a speck of dirt off his seersucker trousers. “That was one thing I’ve never understood. Why didn’t you two end up together?”

“I have no idea.”

“You didn’t need him,” Billy said. “A man like Philip wants to be needed. And you were a great actress ...”

She shook her head. “I was never a great actress. I watch Summer Morning now, and I cringe.”

“You were wonderful,” Billy said.

“I sucked,” Schiffer said with a self-deprecating laugh. “Do you know what Philip Oakland said to me once?” she asked. “He said I’d never be a great actress because I wasn’t vulnerable.”

“There’s your answer,” Billy said. “Philip was jealous.”

“Can a man who’s won a Pulitzer Prize and an Oscar be jealous?”

“Of course,” Billy said. “Jealousy, envy, ego — those are the things success is made of. I see it all the time in these new people who come to New York. I suppose in that way, New York hasn’t changed.” Billy took a sip of his wine. “It’s too bad about Philip Oakland, though, because he really was talented.”

“That makes me sad,” Schiffer said.

“My dear,” Billy said, “don’t waste your time worrying about Philip. In five years, he’ll be fifty, and he’ll be one of those old men who are always with young women, and the young women get worse and worse and more and more silly. While you, on the other hand, will probably have three Emmys. You won’t be giving Philip Oakland a second thought.”

“But I love Philip.”

Billy shrugged. “We all love Philip. But what can you do? You can’t change human nature.”

Later, on her way home from Da Silvano, Schiffer thought about ringing Philip’s bell again. But remembering what Billy had said about Philip, she decided it probably was pointless. Who was she kidding? Billy was right. Philip would never change. Coming into her apartment, she congratulated herself on for once doing the sensible thing.

6

“Why are you going to a funeral for a woman you don’t even know?” Paul Rice asked.

That same evening, he and Annalisa were dining at La Grenouille. Paul adored the famous French restaurant, not for the food but simply because it was ridiculously expensive (sixty-six dollars for Dover sole) and close to the hotel, prompting him to refer to it as “the canteen.”

“She’s not just any woman,” Annalisa said. “Mrs. Houghton was the city’s most important socialite. Billy Litchfield asked me, and apparently, it’s a very exclusive invitation.”

Paul studied the wine menu. “Who’s Billy Litchfield again?”

“Connie’s friend,” Annalisa said. She felt weary. “Remember? We spent the weekend with him.”

“Right,” Paul said. “The bald fruit.”

Annalisa smiled. The comment was Paul’s attempt at a joke. “I wish you wouldn’t say things like that.”

“What’s wrong with it? He is gay, isn’t he?”

“Someone might hear you. And get the wrong impression.”

Paul looked around the restaurant. “Who?” he asked. “There’s no one here.”

“Billy says he can probably get us Mrs. Houghton’s apartment. It’s supposed to be spectacular — three floors with wraparound terraces — and the building is one of the best in the city.”

The sommelier came to the table. “We’ll have the Bordeaux,” Paul said. He handed over the wine menu and continued to Annalisa, “I still don’t get it. Why do you have to go to a funeral to get this apartment? Isn’t cold hard cash enough?”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Annalisa said, tearing off a small piece of bread. “Apparently, it’s all about who you know. That’s why I’m going.

To meet some of the other residents. Eventually, you’ll have to meet them, too. And when you do, please don’t call anyone a fruit.”

“How much does he charge?” Paul asked.

“Who?”

“This Billy Litchfield character.”

“I don’t know.”

“You hired him and didn’t ask how much he cost?”

“He’s not an object, Paul. He’s a person. I didn’t want to be rude.”

“He’s the help,” Paul said.

“You’re the one with the money. You talk to him,” Annalisa said.

“The help is your area,” Paul said.

“Do we have areas now?”

“We will. When we have children.”

“Don’t tease, Paul.”

“I’m not,” he said. The sommelier returned to the table and made a great show of opening the wine and pouring it into Paul’s glass. Paul tasted it and approved. “By the way, I’ve been thinking about it. Now would be a good time to get started.”

Annalisa took a sip of her wine. “Wow,” she said. “I’m not sure I’m ready.”

“I thought you wanted to have children.”

“I do. I just wasn’t thinking about having one so soon.”

“Why not?” Paul said. “We’ve got plenty of money. And you’re not working.”

“I might go back to work.”

“None of the other wives work,” Paul said. “It’s inconvenient.”

“Says who?” Annalisa asked.

“Sandy Brewer.”

“Sandy Brewer is an ass.” Annalisa took another sip of wine. “It’s not that I don’t want to have a child. But we don’t even have an apartment yet.”

“That won’t be a problem,” Paul said. “You know you’ll get this Mrs.

Houghton’s apartment if you put your mind to it.” He picked up the menu and studied it, absentmindedly patting her hand.

“You’re not going to work today?” James Gooch asked his wife the next morning.

“I told you. I’m going to Mrs. Houghton’s memorial service.”

“I thought you weren’t invited,” James said.

“I wasn’t,” Mindy said. “But when did that ever stop me?”

Upstairs, Philip Oakland knocked on his aunt’s door. Enid greeted him dressed in black slacks and beaded black top. “I saw Sam Gooch yesterday,” she said as they were riding down in the elevator. “He said you had a young lady in your apartment.”

Philip laughed. “What if I did?”

“Who was she?” Enid asked.

“A young lady,” Philip said teasingly. “I was interviewing her.”

“Oh, Philip,” Enid said. “I wish you wouldn’t. You’re getting to an age when you need to be sensible about women.”

The elevator doors opened, and finding Mindy Gooch in the lobby, Enid put aside her concerns about Philip’s love life. Mindy was also dressed in black, causing Enid to suspect that Mindy was going to try to crash Mrs. Houghton’s memorial service. Enid decided to let this pass unnoticed as well. “Hello, Mindy dear,” she said. “Sad day, isn’t it?”

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

“Any outside interest in the apartment?” Enid asked casually.

“Not yet. But I’m sure there will be soon,” Mindy replied.

“Don’t forget about our interest,” Enid said pleasantly.

“How can I?” Mindy said. She strode out of the building ahead of Enid and Philip, fuming.

The memorial service was at St. Ambrose Church on Broadway and Eleventh Street. There was a snarl of traffic in front of the entrance; a cacophony of honking horns was followed by the wail of a siren as a police car tried to disperse the traffic.

Mindy put her hands over her ears. “Shut up!” she screamed. After this outburst, she felt a little better. She joined the crowd in front of the church, slowly shuffling their way in. She passed a line of police barricades, behind which stood the usual pack of paparazzi. When she reached the steps, she was stopped by a massive security guard. “Invitation?” he asked.

“I left it at home,” Mindy said.

“Step to the side, please,” the guard said.

“Mrs. Houghton was a very good friend. We lived in the same building,” Mindy said.

The security guard waved more people through, and Mindy took the opportunity to try to sneak in with the group ahead of her. The guard spotted her and stepped in front of her. “Move to the side, ma’am.”

Chastised, Mindy moved a little to her right, where she had the pleasure of seeing Enid and Philip Oakland about to pass her by. At the last second, Enid spotted Mindy and, wiggling through the crowd, touched Mindy on the arm. “By the way, dear, I meant to tell you. Sam was such a help yesterday with my computer. Thank God for young people. We old people couldn’t survive in this technological world without them.”

Before Mindy could respond, Enid moved on, and Mindy’s irritation nearly reached the boiling point. Not only had Enid insulted her by implying that she and Mindy were in the same age category (“old,” Enid had said), but she had cruelly and deliberately left Mindy outside. Enid could have easily brought Mindy into the church, as no one said no to Enid Merle. Enid was what little girls called a fair-weather friend, Mindy thought, and planned to return the favor someday.

Strolling up Eleventh Street, Billy Litchfield spotted Mindy Gooch loitering on the edge of the crowd. Providence, he thought happily. This could be nothing less than a sign from Mrs. Houghton herself that Annalisa Rice was meant to get the apartment. Billy had been hoping to introduce Annalisa to Enid Merle and, through Enid, to make her introduction into One Fifth. But Mindy Gooch, the head of the board, was a much bigger — though less glamorous — fish. Approaching her, Billy couldn’t help thinking, Poor Mindy. She’d been relatively pretty once, but over the years, her features had sharpened and her cheeks had sunk, as if literally eaten away by bitterness. Arranging his face into an appropriately mournful demeanor, he took her hands and kissed her on both cheeks. “Hello, Mindy dear,” he said.

“Billy.”

“Are you going in?” Billy asked.

Mindy looked away. “I thought I might pay my respects.”

“Ah.” Billy nodded, immediately guessing at the truth. There was, he knew, no possibility that Mrs. Houghton would have invited Mindy to her memorial service; although Mindy was the head of the board, Mrs.

Houghton had never mentioned her and most likely had not known, or cared to know, of Mindy’s existence. But Mindy, who was always full of misplaced and determined pride, would have found it necessary to attend in order to cement her status. “I’m waiting for a friend,” he said. “Perhaps you’d like to go in with us.”

“Sure,” Mindy said. Say what you would about Billy Litchfield, she thought, at least he was always a gentleman.

Billy took Mindy’s arm. “Were you very close to Mrs. Houghton?”

Mindy stared at him unflinchingly. “Not really,” she said. “I mostly saw her in the lobby. But you were close, weren’t you?”

“Very,” Billy said. “I visited her at least twice a month.”

“You must miss her,” Mindy said.

“I do.” Billy sighed. “She was an amazing woman, but we all know that.”

He paused, gauging Mindy’s mood, and went in for the kill. “And that apartment,” he said. “I wonder what will happen to it.”

His gamble paid off. Mindy was much more interested in talking about Mrs. Houghton’s apartment than about Mrs. Houghton herself.

“Now, that’s a good question,” she said. Leaning forward intently, she whispered loudly, “There are some people in the building who want to split it up.”

Billy took a step back in shock. “That would be a travesty,” he said. “You can’t split up an apartment like that. It’s a landmark, really.”

“That’s what I think,” Mindy said emphatically, pleased to discover that she and Billy were of one mind in the matter.

Billy lowered his voice. “I may be able to help you. I know someone who would be perfect for the apartment.”

“Really?” Mindy said.

Billy nodded. “A lovely young woman from Washington, D.C. I would only say this to you, my dear, because you’ll understand exactly what I mean. But she’s definitely one of us.”

Mindy was flattered but did her best not to show it. “Can she afford a twenty-million-dollar apartment?”

“Naturally, she comes with a husband. He’s in finance. My dear,” Billy said quickly, “we both know One Fifth has a great tradition of being home to creative types. But we also know what’s happened to the real estate market. No one in the arts can afford an apartment like that anymore.

Unless, as you said, you agree to split it up.”

“I’ll never let that happen,” Mindy said, folding her arms.

“Good girl,” Billy said approvingly. “In any case, you can meet my friend.” Looking over Mindy’s shoulder, he saw Annalisa getting out of a cab. “Here she comes now.”

Mindy turned around. A tall young woman with auburn hair pulled back into a messy ponytail was approaching. She had a serious yet interesting face, the kind of face that other women appreciate as beautiful, possibly because it was the kind of beauty that appeared to be attached to a personality.

“This is Mindy Gooch,” Billy said to Annalisa. “Mindy lives in One Fifth. She was also a friend of Mrs. Houghton’s.”

“Nice to meet you,” Annalisa said. Her handshake was firm, and Mindy appreciated the fact that Annalisa didn’t try to kiss her on the cheek in the faux European manner, and that Billy had referred to her as a friend of Mrs. Houghton’s. Billy, Mindy thought, was a perfect example of how civilized Fifth Avenue residents ought to behave toward each other.

Inside the church, they took seats in a middle pew. Two rows ahead, Mindy recognized the back of Enid’s coiffed and bleached blond hair (she had once been a brunette, but gray hair had eventually gotten the better of her) next to Philip’s shiny brown bob. What kind of middle-aged man insisted on wearing his hair so long? They were a ridiculous pair, Mindy decided — the aging spinster and her silly nephew — with their attitudes and arrogance. It was too much. Enid Merle needed to be taught a lesson.

The church bell chimed mournfully ten times. Then the organ music began, and two priests in white robes, swinging balls of incense, came down the aisle, followed by the bishop in a blue gown and mitered hat.

The congregation stood. Mindy bowed her head. Billy leaned toward her.

“Who wants to break up the apartment?” he whispered.

“Enid Merle. And her nephew Philip.”

Billy nodded. The bishop reached the altar, and the congregation sat down. The traditional Catholic ceremony, which was what Mrs.

Houghton had wanted, continued in Latin and English. Billy let the words flow over him. On the surface, he found it hard to believe that Enid Merle would want to break up Mrs. Houghton’s apartment. But there was a good reason Enid had survived as a gossip columnist for nearly fifty years. She wasn’t as kindly as she appeared, and while it was generally understood that Enid and Louise Houghton had been bosom buddies, Billy suspected that wasn’t the whole story. He recalled some trouble between them concerning Enid’s stepmother, which might have been resolved when the stepmother moved out of One Fifth. It was possible Enid Merle didn’t give a damn about preserving Louise Houghton’s legacy.

Still, the situation presented a moral dilemma. Billy didn’t want to thwart Enid, which might be dangerous, as Enid still controlled a segment of popular opinion through her syndicated column. And yet the apartment had been Mrs. Houghton’s pride and joy. She had ruled over all of Manhattan society from her perch in the sky, and even in the seventies and eighties, when downtown lost its luster and the Upper East Side ruled, Mrs. Houghton wouldn’t consider moving. When she relayed this information to Billy, she would tap on the floor with her marble-topped cane.

“This is the center of New York Society,” she would insist in her grand low voice. “Not up there in the provinces,” she’d say, referring to the Upper East and West Sides of Manhattan. “Did you know it used to take an entire day to reach the Dakota? And then one was forced to spend the night in that Gothic monstrosity.” She would tap her cane again. “Society began here, and it will end here. Never forget your origins, Billy.”

A significant portion of society would end if Enid Merle had her way with the apartment, Billy thought. His mission was clear: As much as he admired Enid Merle, his loyalty must be to Mrs. Houghton’s wishes.

There was more praying, and the congregation knelt. Mindy folded her hands in front of her face. “I was thinking,” Billy whispered behind his closed palms. “What are you doing after this? Perhaps we could nip over to One Fifth and take a peek at the apartment.”

Mindy looked at Billy in surprise. She’d suspected a motive behind his sudden kindness, but she hadn’t expected him to go so far as to wheel and deal in the house of the Lord. But this was New York, where nothing was sacred. She peeked through her fingers at the back of her neighbors’ heads, and her resentment flared. The bishop led the mourners in the sign of the cross. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” Mindy said. She sat back in the pew and, staring straight ahead, whispered to Billy, “I think it can be arranged.”

Following the memorial service, Enid had organized a luncheon for twenty at the Village restaurant on Ninth Street, to which Philip Oakland accompanied his aunt. Although not technically open for lunch, the restaurant, where Enid had been a patron for years — along with almost everyone else who lived in the neighborhood — made an exception for Enid and the sad occasion. Philip was well acquainted with Enid’s crowd, once New York’s best and brightest. These people and their particular rituals — which included speaking to the woman on your right during the appetizer and the woman on your left during the main course; exchanging inside information on politics, business, the media, and the arts; and, lastly, standing and speechifying during coffee — was so much a part of Philip’s life that he barely noticed how ancient these movers and shak-ers had become.

The conversation was, as usual, impassioned. Although the tragedy of Mrs. Houghton’s unfortunate accident and her untimely death — “she had another five good years in her,” most agreed — was part of the discussion, it eventually turned to the upcoming elections and the impending recession. Seated next to his aunt was an aged man who held himself stiffly upright in his chair. A former senator and speechwriter for Jack Kennedy, he held forth on the differences between the Democratic candidates’ oracular styles. The second course came — veal in a lemon butter sauce — and without missing a beat in the conversation, Enid picked up her knife and fork and began to cut up the senator’s meat. Her act of kindness terrified Philip. As he looked around the table, the scene was all at once gar-ish to him, a picaresque grotesquery of old age.

He put down his fork. This was where his own life was headed; indeed, he was only a short hop away. His perceived reality panicked him, and everything that had recently gone wrong with his life came to the fore.

There was trouble with his current screenplay; there would be trouble with the next one, if there was a next one, and if there was another book, he’d have trouble with that as well. Someday he’d be here, an impotent and insignificant windbag, needing someone to cut up his meat. And he didn’t even have a woman to soothe him.

He stood up and made his excuses. He had a conference call from Los Angeles that couldn’t be avoided — he’d only just gotten the message on his BlackBerry. “You can’t stay for dessert?” Enid asked. Then she exclaimed, “Oh, damn. There go the numbers.” His absence meant there would be an uneven number of men and women.

“Can’t be avoided, Nini,” he said, kissing her on her upturned cheek.

“You’ll manage.”

He made it only halfway down the block before he called Lola. Her casual hello made his heart race, and he covered it up by becoming more serious than he’d intended. “This is Philip Oakland.”

“What’s up?” she said, although she sounded pleased to hear from him.

“I want to offer you the job. As my researcher. Can you start this afternoon?”

“No,” she said. “I’m busy.”

“How about tomorrow morning?”

“Can’t,” she said. “My mother’s leaving, and I have to say goodbye.”

“What time is she leaving?” he said, wondering how he’d gotten into this desperate-sounding exchange.

“I don’t know. Maybe ten? Or eleven?”

“Why don’t you come by in the afternoon?”

“I guess I could,” Lola said, sounding uncertain. Sitting on the edge of the pool at Soho House, she dipped her toe into the warm, murky water.

She wanted the job but didn’t want to appear too eager. After all, even though Philip would technically be her employer, he was still a man. And in dealing with men, it was always important to keep the upper hand.

“How’s two o’clock?”

“Perfect,” Philip said, relieved, and hung up the phone.

Back at Soho House, the waiter approached Lola and warned her that cell phones were not allowed in the club, even on the roof. Lola gave him an icy stare before texting her mother to tell her the good news. Then she slathered herself with more sunscreen and lay down on a chaise. She closed her eyes, fantasizing about Philip Oakland and One Fifth. Maybe Philip would fall in love with her and marry her, and then she’d live there, too.

“It’s beautiful,” Annalisa said, stepping into the foyer of Mrs. Houghton’s apartment.

Billy clutched his heart. “It’s a mess. You should have seen it when Mrs. Houghton lived here.”

“I did see it,” Mindy said. “It was very old-lady.”

The apartment had been stripped of its antiques, paintings, rugs, and silk draperies; what was left were dust bunnies and faded wallpaper. At mid-afternoon, the apartment was flooded with light, revealing the chipped paint and scuffed parquet floors. The small foyer led to a bigger foyer with a sunburst inlaid in the marble floor; from there, a grand staircase ascended. Three sets of tall wooden doors opened to a living room, dining room, and library. Billy, lost in memories, stepped into the enormous living room. It ran the length of the front of the apartment, overlooking Fifth Avenue. Two pairs of French doors led to a ten-foot-wide terrace. “Oh, the parties she had here,” he said, gesturing around the room.

“She had it set up like a European salon, with couches and settees and conversational clusters. You could fit a hundred people in this room and not even know it.” He led the way to the dining room. “She had everyone to dinner. I remember one dinner in particular. Princess Grace. She was so beautiful. No one had any idea that a month later, she’d be dead.”

“People rarely do,” Mindy said dryly.

Billy ignored this. “There was one long table for forty. I do think a long table is so much more elegant than those round tables for ten that everyone does these days. But I suppose there’s no choice. No one has a large dining room anymore, although Mrs. Houghton always said one never wanted more than forty people at a sit-down dinner. It was all about making the guests feel they were part of a select group.”

“Where’s the kitchen?” Mindy asked. Although she’d been in the apartment once before, it had been only a cursory tour, and now she felt envious and intimidated. She had no idea Mrs. Houghton had lived so grandly, but the grand living appeared to have taken place before Mindy and James moved into the building. Leading the way through swinging doors, Billy pointed out the butler’s pantry and, farther on, the kitchen itself, which was surprisingly crude, with a linoleum floor and Formica countertops. “She never came in here, of course,” Billy explained. “No one did except the staff. It was considered a form of respect.”

“What if she wanted a glass of water?” Annalisa asked.

“She would call on the phone. There were phones in every room, and each room had its own line. It was considered very modern in the early eighties.”

Annalisa looked at Mindy, caught her eye, and smiled. Until then Mindy hadn’t known what to make of Annalisa, who managed to appear self-contained and confident, without revealing a peep of information about herself. Perhaps Annalisa Rice had a sense of humor after all.

They went up to the second floor, examined Mrs. Houghton’s master bedroom, large bathroom, and sitting room, where, Billy noted, he and Louise had spent many pleasant hours. They peeked into the three bedrooms down the hall and then went up to the third floor. “And here,”

Billy said, throwing open two paneled doors, “is the pièce de résistance.

The ballroom.”

Annalisa walked across the black-and-white-checkerboard marble floor and stood in the middle of the room, taking in the domed ceiling and the fireplace and the French windows. The room was overwhelmingly beautiful — she had never imagined that such a room, in such an apartment, could exist in a building in New York City. Manhattan was full of wonderful secrets and surprises. Gazing around, Annalisa thought that she had never desired anything in her life as much as this apartment.

Billy came up behind her. “I always say if one can’t be happy in this apartment, one can’t be happy anywhere.” Even Mindy was unable to come up with a retort. The atmosphere was full of longing, Billy thought, what he called “the ache.” It was part of the pain of living in Manhattan, this overwhelming ache for prime real estate. It could cause people to do all kinds of things — lie, stay in marriages that were over, prostitute themselves, even commit murder. “What do you think?” he asked Annalisa.

Annalisa’s heart was racing. What she thought was that she and Paul must buy the apartment now, this afternoon, before anyone else saw it and wanted it as well. But her trained lawyerly mind prevailed, and she kept her cool. “It’s wonderful. Certainly something for us to consider.”

She looked at Mindy. The key to getting the apartment lay in the hands of this jumpy neurotic woman whose eyes bulged slightly out of her head. “My husband, Paul, is so particular,” Annalisa said. “He’ll want to see the building’s financials.”

“It’s a top-notch building,” Mindy said. “We have the highest mortgage credentials.” She opened the French doors and went onto the terrace. Looking over the side, she had a clear view of the corner of Enid Merle’s terrace. “Have you seen this view?” she called to Annalisa.

Annalisa came outside. Standing on the terrace was like being on the prow of a ship sailing over a sea of Manhattan rooftops. “Gorgeous,”

she said.

“So you’re from ... ?” Mindy asked.

“Washington,” Annalisa said. “We moved here for Paul’s work. He’s in finance.” Billy Litchfield had whispered to her in the church to avoid

“hedge-fund manager” and use “finance” instead, which was vague and classier. “When you talk to Mindy, emphasize how normal you are,” Billy had advised.

“How long have you lived here?” Annalisa asked politely, turning the topic away from herself.

“Ten years,” Mindy said. “We love the building. And the area. My son goes to school in the Village, so it makes things easier.”

“Ah.” Annalisa nodded wisely.

“Do you have children?” Mindy asked.

“Not yet.”

“It’s a very child-friendly building,” Mindy said. “Everyone loves Sam.”

Billy Litchfield joined them, and Annalisa decided now was the time to strike. “Is your husband James Gooch?” she asked Mindy casually.

“He is. How do you know him?” Mindy asked, looking at her in surprise.

“I read his last book, The Lonesome Soldier,” Annalisa said.

“Only two thousand people read that book,” Mindy countered.

“I loved it. American history is one of my obsessions. Your husband is a wonderful writer.”

Mindy took a step back. She wasn’t sure whether to believe Annalisa, but she liked the fact that Annalisa was making an effort. And considering James’s coup with Apple, maybe Mindy had been wrong about his fiction abilities. It was true that James had once been a wonderful writer; it was one of the reasons she’d married him. Perhaps he was about to become a wonderful writer again. “My husband has a new book coming out,” she said. “People in the business are saying it’s going to be bigger than Dan Brown. If you can believe that.”

Having said the words aloud, and having liked how they sounded, Mindy now began to believe James’s success was a distinct possibility.

That would really show Philip Oakland, she thought. And if the Rices took the apartment, it would be a blow to both Enid and Philip.

“I’ve got to get back to my office,” Mindy said, holding out her hand to Annalisa. “But I hope we’ll be seeing each other soon.”

“I’m impressed,” Billy said to Annalisa, when they were on the sidewalk in front of One Fifth. “Mindy Gooch liked you, and she doesn’t like anyone.”

Annalisa smiled and flagged down a taxi.

“Have you really read The Lonesome Soldier?” Billy asked. “It was eight hundred pages and dry as toast.”

“I have,” Annalisa said.

“So you knew James Gooch was her husband?”

“No. I Googled her on our way out of the church. There was an item that mentioned James Gooch was her husband.”

“Clever,” Billy said. A taxi pulled up, and he held open the door.

Annalisa slid onto the backseat. “I always do my homework,” she said.

As predicted, the job as Philip’s researcher was easy. Three afternoons a week — on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays — Lola met Philip at his apartment at noon. Sitting at a tiny desk in his large, sun-filled living room, Lola made a great pretense of working; for the first few days, anyway. Philip worked in his office with the door open. Every now and then, he would poke his head out and ask her to find something for him, like the exact address of some restaurant that had been on First Avenue in the eighties. Lola couldn’t understand why he needed this information; after all, he was writing a screenplay, so why couldn’t he just make it up the way he had the characters?

When she questioned him about it, he took a seat near her on the arm of the leather club chair in front of the fireplace and gave her a lecture about the importance of authenticity in fiction. At first Lola was mysti-fied, then bored, and finally fascinated. Not by what Philip was saying but by the fact that he was speaking to her as if she, too, possessed the same interests and knowledge. This happened a few times, and when he went back to his office abruptly, as if he’d just thought of something, and she’d hear the tap of his fingers on his keyboard, Lola would tuck her hair behind her ears and, frowning in concentration, attempt to Google the information he’d requested. But she had a short attention span, and within minutes, she’d be off on the wrong tangent, reading Perez Hilton, or checking her Facebook page, or watching episodes of The Hills, or scrolling through videos on YouTube. If she’d had a regular job in an office, Lola knew, these activities would have been frowned upon — indeed, one of her college friends had recently been fired from her job as a para-legal for this particular infraction — but Philip didn’t seem to mind. Indeed, it was the opposite: He appeared to consider it part of her job.

On her second afternoon, while looking at videos on YouTube, Lola came across a clip of a bride in a strapless wedding gown attacking a man with an umbrella on the side of a highway. In the background was a white limousine — apparently, the car had broken down, and the bride was taking it out on the driver. “Philip?” Lola said, peeking into his office.

Philip was hunched over his computer, his dark hair falling over his forehead. “Huh?” he said, looking up and brushing back the hair.

“I think I’ve found something that might help you.”

“The address of Peartree’s?”

“Something better.” She showed him the video.

“Wow,” Philip said. “Is that real?”

“Of course.” They listened to the bride screaming epithets at the driver.

“Now, that,” Lola said, sitting back in her little chair, “is authenticity.”

“Are there more of these?” Philip asked.

“There are probably hundreds,” Lola replied.

“Good work,” Philip said, impressed.

Philip, Lola decided, was book-smart, but despite his desire for authenticity, he didn’t seem to know a lot about real life. On the other hand, her own real life in New York wasn’t exactly shaping up to be what she’d hoped.

On Saturday night, she’d gone clubbing with the two girls she’d met in the human resources department. Although Lola considered them “average,” they were the only girls she knew in New York. Clubbing in the Meatpacking District had been both an exciting and depressing adventure. At the beginning of the evening, they were turned away from two clubs but found a third where they could wait in line to get in. For forty-five minutes, they’d stood behind a police barricade while people in Town Cars and SUVs pulled up to the entrance and were admitted immediately — and how it stung not to be a member of that exclusive club — but during the wait, they saw six genuine celebrities enter. The line would begin buzzing like a rattlesnake’s tail, and then all of a sudden, everyone was using their phones, trying to get a photo of the celebrity. Inside the club, there was more separation of the Somebodies and the Wannabes. The Somebodies had bottles of vodka and champagne at tables in roped-off tiers protected by enormous security guards, while the Nobodies were forced to cluster in front of the bar like part of a mosh pit. It took another half hour to get a drink, which you clutched protectively like a baby, not knowing when you’d be able to get another.

This was no way to live. Lola needed to find a way to break into New York’s glamorous inner circle.

The second Wednesday of Lola’s employment found her stretched out on the couch in Philip’s living room, reading tabloid magazines. Philip had gone to the library to write, leaving her alone in his apartment, where she was supposed to be reading the draft of his script, looking for typos. “Don’t you have spell-check?” she’d asked when he handed her the script. “I don’t trust it,” he’d said. Lola started reading the script but then remembered it was the day all the new tabloid magazines came out. Putting aside the script, she went out to the newsstand on University. She loved going in and out of One Fifth, and when she passed the doormen now, she would give them a little nod, as if she lived there.

But the tabloids were dull that week — no major celebrities had gone to rehab or gained (or lost) several pounds or stolen someone’s husband —

and Lola tossed the magazines aside, bored. Looking around Philip’s apartment, she realized that with Philip gone, there was something much more interesting to do: snoop.

She headed for the wall of bookcases. Three entire shelves were taken up with Philip’s first book, Summer Morning, in various editions and lan-guages. Another shelf consisted of hardcover first editions of the classics; Philip had told her that he collected them and had paid as much as five thousand dollars for a first edition of The Great Gatsby, which Lola thought was crazy. On the bottom shelf was a collection of old newspapers and magazines. Lola picked up a copy of The New York Review of Books dated February 1992. She flipped through the pages until she came upon a review of Philip’s book Dark Star. Boring, she thought, and put it back. On the bottom of the pile, she spied an old copy of Vogue magazine. She pulled it out and looked at the cover. September 1989. One of the headlines read: THE NEW POWER COUPLES. What was Philip doing with an old copy of Vogue? she wondered, and opened it up to find out.

Turning to the middle of the magazine, she found the answer. There was a ten-page spread of a much younger Philip and an even younger-looking Schiffer Diamond, standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, feeding each other croissants at a sidewalk café, strolling down a Paris street in a ballgown and a tux. The headline read: LOVE IN THE SPRINGTIME: OSCAR-WINNING ACTRESS SCHIFFER DIAMOND AND PULITZER PRIZE–WINNING AUTHOR PHILIP OAKLAND SHOW OFF THE NEW PARIS COLLECTIONS.

Lola took the magazine to the couch and studied the pictures more carefully. She’d had no idea Philip Oakland and Schiffer Diamond had once been together, and she was filled with jealousy. In the past week, she’d felt moments of attraction to Philip but had always hesitated because of his age. He was twenty years older. And while he looked younger and was in good shape — he went to the gym every morning — and there were tons of young women who married older celebrities — look at Billy Joel’s wife — Lola still worried that if she “went there” with Philip, she might get a nasty surprise. What if he had age spots? Or couldn’t get it up?

But as she flipped through the photo spread in Vogue, her estimation of him rose, and she began calculating how to seduce him.

At five P.M., Philip left the library and walked back to One Fifth. Lola should be gone, he figured, and another day would have passed during which he had managed not to attempt to sleep with the girl. He was attracted to her, which he couldn’t help, being a man. And she seemed to be attracted to him, judging by the way she looked at him through a strand of hair she was always twisting in front of her face, as if she were shy. But she was a little young even for him and, despite her knowledge of everything celebrity and Internet, not very worldly. So far, nothing much had happened to her in life, and she was a bit immature.

Riding the elevator to his floor, he had an inspiration and hit the button for nine. There were six apartments on this floor, and Schiffer’s was at the end. He walked down the hallway, reminded of the many times he’d been here at all hours of the day and night. He rang her bell and then rattled the door handle. Nothing. She wasn’t home, of course. She was never home.

He went upstairs to his own apartment and, turning the key in the lock, was startled to hear Lola call out, “Philip?”

Inside the door was a small pink patent-leather overnight case. Lola was in the living room on the couch. She peeked over the back.

“You’re still here,” Philip said. He was surprised but not, he realized, unhappy to see her.

“Something really, really terrible has happened,” she said. “I hope you won’t be angry.”

“What?” he asked in alarm, thinking it must have something to do with his screenplay. Had he gotten another call from the head of the studio?

“There’s no hot water in my building.”

“Oh,” he said. Guessing at the meaning of the overnight case, he said,

“Do you need to take a shower here?”

“It’s not just that. Someone told me they’re going to be working on the pipes all night. When I went home, there was all this banging.”

“But surely they’ll stop. After six, I would think.”

She shook her head. “My building isn’t like your building. It’s a rental, so they can do whatever they want. Whenever they want,” she added for emphasis.

“What do you want to do?” he asked. Was she angling to spend the night at his apartment? Which could be a very bad — or a very good — idea.

“I was thinking maybe I could sleep on your couch. It’s only one night.

They’ll have to have the pipes fixed by tomorrow.”

He hesitated, wondering if the pipes were an excuse. If so, he’d be a fool to resist. “Sure,” he said.

“Oh, goody,” she exclaimed, jumping up from the couch and grabbing her bag. “You won’t even know I’m here, I promise. I’ll sit on the couch and watch TV. And you can work, if you want to. Or whatever.”

“You don’t have to act like a little orphan girl,” he said. “I’ll take you to dinner.”

While she was in the shower, he went into his office and scrolled through his e-mails. There were several he knew he ought to return, but hearing the shower running and imagining Lola’s naked body, he couldn’t concentrate and tried to read Variety instead. Then she appeared in the doorway, damp but clothed in a short tank-top dress, rubbing her hair in a towel. “Where do you want to go for dinner?” she asked.

He closed his computer. “I thought I’d take you to Knickerbocker. It’s right around the corner, and it’s one of my favorite restaurants. It’s not fancy, but the food’s good.”

A little later, seated in a booth, Lola studied the extensive menu while Philip ordered a bottle of wine. “I always get the oysters and steak,” he said. “Do you like oysters?”

“I love them,” she said, putting down the menu and smiling at him eagerly. “Have you ever had an oyster shot? They take an oyster and put it in a shot glass with vodka and cocktail sauce. We had them all the time when I was in Miami.”

Philip wasn’t sure how to respond, having never had an oyster shot, which sounded disgusting but probably made sense to a twenty-two-year-old. “And then what happened?” he asked. It was a random question, but it prompted a response.

“Well,” she said, putting her elbows on the table and resting her chin in her hands, “you get really wasted. And one girl — she wasn’t one of my friends, but she was in our posse — got so drunk, she took off her shirt for Girls Gone Wild. And her father saw it. And he flipped out. Isn’t that disgusting, knowing your father watches Girls Gone Wild?”

“Maybe he’d heard she’d done it. And he wanted to know for sure.”

She frowned. “No one tells their father they did Girls Gone Wild. But some girls definitely do it to get guys interested. They think it makes them look hot.”

“What do you think?” he asked.

“It’s stupid. Yeah, a guy will sleep with you, but then what?”

Then what, indeed, Philip thought, wondering how many men she’d slept with. “Have you ever done it?” he asked.

“Girls Gone Wild? No way. I would maybe take my clothes off for Playboy. Or Vanity Fair, because those are classy. And you have photo approval.”

Philip took a gulp of wine and smiled. She definitely wanted to sleep with him. Why else would she be talking about sex and taking her clothes off? She was going to drive him insane if she didn’t stop.

A little angel on his shoulder, however, reminded him that he shouldn’t have sex with her, while the devil on his other said, “Why not?

She’s obviously done it before, and probably quite often.” As a compro-mise, he made the dinner last as long as possible, ordering another bottle of wine, dessert, and after-dinner drinks. When the inevitable moment arrived and it was time to go home, Lola stood up and fumbled for her snakeskin bag, obviously tipsy. Leaving the restaurant, he put his arm around her to steady her, and when they got outside, she slipped her arm around his waist and leaned in to his body, giggling. In response, his cock swelled against his thigh.

“That was so much fun,” she said. And then becoming serious, added,

“I had no idea the movie business was so hard.”

“But it’s worth it,” he said. After the sex talk, and feeling loose from the wine, he’d told her all about his troubles with the studio, while she’d listened, rapt. He moved his hand up from her shoulder to the back of her neck. “It’s time to get you to bed,” he said. “I don’t want you to be hungover tomorrow.”

“I already will be.” She giggled.

Back in his apartment, she made a great show of going into the bathroom to get changed, while he put a pillow and blanket on the couch. They both knew she wasn’t going to sleep there, but it was probably a good idea to pretend, Philip thought. She came out of the bathroom barefoot in a short baby-doll nightgown with silk ribbon stitched around the neckline, unbuttoned just enough to expose her cleavage. Philip sighed. And, summoning all his resistance, he stopped in front of her, kissed her on the forehead, and went into his room. “Good night,” he said. And somehow forced himself to close the door.

He took off his clothes save for his boxer shorts and got into bed, leaving the light on and picking up a copy of Buddenbrooks. Once again, he couldn’t concentrate, not with Lola on the other side of the door in that tiny baby-doll nightgown. Frowning at the page, he reminded himself that she was only twenty-two. He could sleep with her — and then what? She couldn’t work for him if they were having sex. Or could she? He could always fire her and find another researcher. After all, it was probably easier to find another researcher than it was to find a gorgeous twenty-two-year-old who wanted to have sex.

But what now? Should he get up and go to her? For a moment, he had a disquieting thought: What if he was wrong? What if she didn’t want to sleep with him at all, and the excuse about the broken pipes in her apartment building was real? What if he went out there and she rejected him? It would be doubly awkward to have her around, and then he really would have to fire her. Another minute or two passed. And there it was — his answer — a knock on the door.

“Philip?” she said.

“Come in,” he called.

She opened the door as he took off his reading glasses. Acting as if she didn’t want to disturb him, she leaned against the door frame with her hands crossed in front of her like a child. “Can I have a glass of water?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Can you get it for me? I don’t know where the glasses are.”

“Follow me.” He got out of bed, realizing he was wearing only his boxer shorts, and realizing he didn’t care.

She stared at his chest, at the patch of dark curling hairs that made a neat pattern above his pectoral muscles. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“You’re not disturbing me,” he said, going to the kitchen. She followed him, and he took out a glass and filled it with tap water. When he turned, she was standing right next to him. He was about to hand her the glass but suddenly put it down and put his arm around her shoulder. “Oh, Lola,” he said. “Let’s stop pretending.”

“What do you mean?” she asked coyly, putting her hand in the hair on his chest.

“Do you want to sleep with me?” he whispered.“Because I want to sleep with you.”

“Of course.” She pressed her body against his as they kissed. He could feel her firm, full breasts through the thin fabric of her nightgown; he could even, he thought, feel the poke of her erect nipples. He put his hands under the nightgown, sliding them along the sides of her panties and up her stomach to her breasts, where his fingers played with her nipples. She groaned and leaned back, and he pulled the nightgown over her head. God, she was beautiful, he thought. He lifted her onto the counter and, parting her legs, stood between them, kissing her. He moved his hand down to her crotch and pulled aside her panties, which were also silk and lacy, and then, surprised by what he felt, stopped and took a step back.

“No hair?” he said.

“Of course not,” she said proudly. Like all the girls she knew, she had a Brazilian wax once a month.

“But why?” he said, touching the exposed skin.

“Because men like it,” she said. “It’s supposed to be hot.” She took a breath. “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen one before?” She laughed.

“I like it,” he said, examining her hairless vagina. It was like one of those soft, hairless cats, he thought. He lifted her again and carried her to the couch. “You’re spectacular,” he said.

Placing her on the edge of the couch, he pushed her legs open and began licking the purplish skin. “Stop,” she said suddenly.

“Why?” he asked.

“I don’t like it.”

“That’s only because no one’s ever done it properly,” he said. The kissing “down there” seemed to go on for hours, and finally, she gave in, with her legs shaking and her vagina pulsating. Then she was overcome and burst into tears.

He kissed her on the mouth, and she could taste herself on his lips and tongue. Reason told her she ought to be repulsed, but it wasn’t so bad; more, she thought, like clean, slightly damp clothes just out of the dryer. She put her hands in his hair, which was softer and finer than her own. She stared into his eyes. Would he tell her he loved her?

“Did you like it?” he whispered.

“Yes,” she said.

Then he went into the kitchen.

“Is that it?” she asked, wiping her cheeks and laughing. “Aren’t you going to ... ?”

He came back with two shots of vodka. “Sustenance,” he said, handing her the tiny glass. “It doesn’t have an oyster in it, but it’ll do.” He took her hand and led her into the bedroom and removed his boxer shorts. His penis was fat, with a thick vein on the underside, and his balls swung slightly in the sack of prickly pink skin. She lay on her back, and he crunched her knees up to her chest, kneeling between her legs. When he pushed his penis in, she braced herself for some pain, but surprisingly, there was none, only a pulse of pleasure. “Lola, Lola, Lola,” he said, repeating her name. Then his body stiffened, his back arched, and he collapsed on top of her. Lola put her arms around him, kissing his neck.

In the middle of the night, he woke her up, and they made love again.

She fell asleep, and the next morning, she awakened to find him staring at her. “Ah, Lola,” he said. “What’s going to happen with you?”

“With me?”

“With me and you.”

Lola wasn’t sure she liked the sound of that. “Philip?” she said shyly, teasing his penis with the tip of her nail. In the next second, he was on top of her again. Lola opened her legs, and after he’d come and was lying on top of her, exhausted, she whispered, “I think I love you.”

His head jerked up and he looked at her with surprise. Smiling and kissing the tip of her nose, he said, “ ‘Love’ is a big word, Lola.” He stretched and got out of bed. “I’m going to get us some breakfast. How about bagels?

What kind of bagel do you like?”

“What’s the best kind?” Lola asked.

He laughed, shaking his head at her remark. “There is no best. It’s whatever kind you like.”

“What do you like?” she asked.

“Sesame.”

“I’ll have sesame, too.”

He pulled on his jeans and, looking at Lola lying naked on his bed, smiled. This was what was so great about New York, he thought. You never knew what was going to happen. One’s life could literally improve overnight.

While he was gone, Enid Merle, having heard suspicious noises coming from Philip’s apartment the night before, decided to check in on him.

She went through the small gate that separated their terraces and knocked on the French door. Her worst fears were confirmed when a young lady, wearing only what appeared to be one of Philip’s T-shirts —

with probably nothing underneath — came to the door. She looked at Enid curiously. “Yes?” she said.

Enid pushed past her. “Is Philip here?”

“I don’t know,” the girl said. “Who are you?”

“Who are you?” Enid said, not unpleasantly.

“I’m Philip’s girlfriend,” the girl said proudly.

“Really?” Enid said, thinking that was quick. “I’m Philip’s aunt.”

“Oh,” the girl said. “I didn’t know Philip had an aunt.”

“And I didn’t know he had a girlfriend,” Enid said. “Is he here?”

The girl folded her arms as if realizing she was practically naked. “He went to get bagels.”

“Tell him his aunt stopped by, will you?”

“Sure,” Lola said. She followed Enid to the French door and watched her go through the gate to her own terrace.

Lola went inside and sat down on the couch. So Philip had a relative who lived right next door. She hadn’t expected that — somehow she’d assumed that people like Philip Oakland didn’t have relatives. Idly opening a magazine, she recalled the cold look on Enid’s face but told herself it didn’t matter. The aunt was ancient. How much trouble could an old lady be?

7

James, what is wrong with you?” Mindy asked the next morning.

“I don’t think I’m suited for fame,” James said. “I can’t even figure out what to wear.”

Mindy rolled over in the bed and looked at the clock. It was just after six A.M. I am depressed, she thought. “Could you be a little quieter?” she said. “I’m tired.”

“It’s not my fault.”

“Do you have to rattle the hangers so loudly? Can’t you try on clothes silently?”

“Why don’t you get up and help me?”

“You’re a grown man, James. You ought to be able to figure out what to wear.”

“Fine. I’ll wear what I always wear. Jeans and a T-shirt.”

“You could try a suit,” Mindy said.

“Haven’t seen that suit in three months. The dry cleaners probably lost it,” James said in a slightly accusatory tone, as if this might be her fault.

“Please, James. Stop. It’s only a stupid picture.”

“It’s my publicity photograph.”

“Why are they doing it so early?”

“I told you. Some famous fashion photographer is taking the picture.

He’s only available from nine to eleven.”

“Jesus. I could have taken your picture.With my cell phone. Oh, please,”

Mindy said. “Can’t you be quiet? If I don’t sleep, I’m going to go insane.”

If you haven’t already, James thought, gathering up a pile of clothes and leaving the room in a huff. It was his big day. Why did Mindy have to make everything about her?

He took the pile into his office and dropped the clothes on a chair.

Viewed from this angle, his clothing looked like something you’d find in the cart of a homeless person. The publicist in Redmon’s office, who possessed the improbable moniker of Cherry, had instructed him to bring three choices. Three shirts, three pairs of pants, a jacket or two, and a couple pairs of shoes. “But I mostly wear sneakers. Converse,” James had said. “Do your best,” Cherry had replied. “The photograph should be a reflection of you.”

Great, James thought. It’ll be a photograph of a balding, middle-aged man. He went into the bathroom and studied his appearance. Perhaps he should have shaved his head. But then he’d look like every other middle-aged guy who was balding and trying to cover it up. Besides, he didn’t believe he had the face for the no-hair look. His features were irregu-lar; his nose appeared as if it might have been broken once and healed badly, but it was only the Gooch nose, passed down through generations of ordinary hardship. He wished he looked like someone specific, though; he would have been happy with the brooding, hooded look of an artist. He narrowed his eyes and turned down his mouth, but this only made him appear to be making a face. Resigned to his visage, James shoved as many clothes as he could into one of Mindy’s carefully folded shopping bags from Barneys and went out into the lobby.

It was raining. Hard. From the little windows in the back of his apartment, it was difficult to gauge the weather, so that one might arrive outside and find it was much better, although usually much worse, than one expected. It was not yet seven A.M., and already James felt defeated by the day. He went back into his apartment to get an umbrella, but all he could find in the jumbled hall closet was a flimsy fold-up affair, which, when opened, revealed four sharp spokes. Back in the lobby, James peered out anxiously at the pouring rain. A black SUV was idling at the curb. Behind him, the doorman Fritz was rolling out a plastic runner.

Fritz stopped for a moment and joined James. “It’s really pouring out there,” he said, looking concerned. “You need a cab?”

“I’m okay,” James said. He did need a taxi, but he never allowed the doormen to get him one. He knew how the doormen felt about Mindy’s tipping, and he felt guilty asking them to perform the normal duties they did for other, better-tipping residents. If he made money from his book, he thought, he’d be sure to give them extra this year.

The elevator door opened, and Schiffer Diamond came out. James suddenly felt excited and diminished. She had her hair in a ponytail and was wearing a shiny green trench coat and jeans and low-heeled black boots. She didn’t necessarily look like a movie star, James thought, but she somehow looked better than a regular person, so that no matter where she went, people would think, This woman is someone, and they would look at her curiously. James didn’t know how a person could stand that, always being looked at. But they must get used to it. Wasn’t that the reason, after all, that people became actors in the first place — to be gaped at?

“Bad weather, eh, Fritz?” Schiffer said.

“It’s only going to get worse.”

James stepped outside and stood under the awning. He looked up the street. Nothing. No taxis at all.

Schiffer Diamond came out behind him. “Where are you going?” she asked.

James jumped. “Chelsea?” he asked.

“Me, too. Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”

“No, I...”

“Don’t be silly. The car’s free. And it’s pouring.” Fritz came out and opened the door. Schiffer Diamond slid across the backseat.

James looked at Fritz. What the hell, he thought, and got in.

“Two stops,” she said to the driver. “Where are you going?” She turned to James.

“I, uh, don’t know exactly.” He fumbled in his jeans pocket for the slip of paper on which he’d written the address. “Industria Super Studios?”

“I’m going to the same place,” she said. “One stop, then,” she informed the driver. She reached into her bag and pulled out an iPhone. James sat stiffly beside her; luckily, there was a console between them so it wasn’t as uncomfortable as it might have been. Outside, the rain was coming down in buckets, and there was a rumble of thunder. This is nice, James thought. Imagine never having to worry about getting a taxi. Or taking the subway.

“Horrible weather, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s so wet for August. I don’t remember it being this rainy in the summer. I remember ninety-degree heat. And snow at Christmas.”

“Really?” James said. “It doesn’t usually snow until January now.”

“I guess I have a romantic memory of New York.”

“We haven’t had snow in years,” James said. “Global warming.” I sound like a putz, he thought.

She smiled at him, and James wondered if she was one of those actresses who seduced every man. He remembered a story about a journalist friend, a real regular guy, who had been seduced by a famous movie star during an interview.

“You’re Mindy Gooch’s husband, right?” she asked.

“James,” he said. She clearly wasn’t going to introduce herself, knowing, obviously, there was no need.

She nodded. “Your wife is ...”

“The head of the board. For the building.”

“She writes that blog,” Schiffer said.

“Do you read it?”

“It’s very touching,” Schiffer said.

“Really?” James rubbed his chin in annoyance. Even here, in an SUV with a movie star going to a photo shoot, it was still about his wife. “I try not to read it,” he said primly.

“Ah.” Schiffer nodded. James had no idea what the nod meant, and for a few blocks, they rode in stiff silence. Then Schiffer brought the topic back to his wife. “She wasn’t the head of the board when I moved in. It was Enid Merle then. The building was different. It wasn’t so ... quiet.”

James winced at Enid’s name. “Enid,” he said.

“She’s a wonderful character, isn’t she? I adore her.”

“I don’t really know her,” James said carefully, caught in the middle of betraying his wife and alienating a movie star.

“But you must know her nephew Philip Oakland,” Schiffer insisted.

There she went again, she thought, bringing up Philip’s name, digging for information. “Aren’t you a novelist as well?” she asked.

“We’re different. He’s much more ... commercial. He writes screenplays. And I’m more ... literary,” James said.

“Meaning you sell five thousand copies,” Schiffer said. James was crushed but tried not to show it. “Please,” she said, touching his arm. “I was kidding. It’s my bad sense of humor. I’m sure you’re a wonderful writer.”

James didn’t know whether to agree or disagree.

“Don’t take anything I say seriously. I never do,” she said.

The car stopped at a red light. It was his turn to come up with a conversational gambit, but James couldn’t think of one.

“What’s happening with Mrs. Houghton’s apartment?” she asked.

“Oh,” he said, relieved. “It’s been sold.”

“Really? That was quick, wasn’t it?”

“The board meeting is this week. My wife says they’re as good as approved. She likes them. They’re supposedly a regular couple. With millions of dollars, of course,” he added.

“How boring,” Schiffer said.

The car arrived at the destination. There was another awkward moment as they stood waiting for the elevator. “Are you working on a movie?”

James asked.

“TV show,” she said. “I never thought I’d do TV. But you look around at your peers and think, Is that how I want to end up? With the plastic surgery and the adoptions and the crazy tell-all books that no one really wants to read? Or else with the dull husband who cheats.”

“I’m sure it’s difficult,” James said.

“I like to work. I stopped for a while, and I missed it.”

They got into the elevator. “Do you shoot the TV show here?” he inquired politely.

“I’m here for a photo shoot. For the cover of one of those over-forty magazines.”

“Don’t you get nervous?” James said.

“I just pretend I’m someone else. That’s the secret to all this.” The elevator door opened, and she got out.

An hour later, James, having submitted his face to the basting and flouring of makeup, sat on a stool in front of a blue roll of paper, his face stiffened in a death mask of a smile.

“You are famous author, no?” asked the photographer, who was French and, although a good ten years older than James, in possession of a full head of hair, as well as a wife thirty years his junior, according to the makeup artist.

“No,” James said between gritted teeth.

“You will be soon, eh?” said the photographer. “Otherwise your publisher wouldn’t pay for me.” He put down his camera and called to the makeup artist, who was hovering on the side. “He is so stiff. Like a corpse.

I cannot take a picture of a corpse,” he said to James, who smiled uncomfortably. “We must do something. Anita will make you relax.” The makeup artist came up behind James and put her hands on his shoulders. “I’m fine,” James said as the young woman dug her fingers into his back. “I’m married. Really. My wife wouldn’t like it.”

“I don’t see your wife here, do you?” Anita asked.

“No, but she...”

“Shhhhh.”

“I can see you are not used to the attention of beautiful ladies,” said the photographer. “You will learn. When you are famous, you will have the women all over you.”

“I don’t think so,” James said.

The photographer and the makeup artist began laughing. Then it seemed that everyone in the studio was laughing. James reddened. He suddenly felt eight years old. He was playing on the Little League team at the neighborhood baseball diamond and had let the ball roll through his legs for the third time in a row. “C’mon, buddy,” the coach said to James as he was laughed off the field. “It’s all about picturization. You got to picture yourself a winner. Then you can be one.” James sat on the bench for the rest of the game with his rheumy eyes and his runny nose (he had hay fever) and tried to “picturize” himself hitting a home run.

But all he saw was that ball rolling between his legs again and again, and his father asking, “How’d it go, son?” and James replying, “Not so good.”

“Again?” “That’s right, Dad, not so good.” Even when he was eight, it was obvious to him that he was never going to be more than Jimmy Gooch, the kid who didn’t quite fit in.

James looked up. The photographer was hidden behind his camera.

He clicked off a shot. “That’s very good, James,” he said. “You look sad. Soulful.”

Do I? James thought. Maybe he wasn’t so bad at this famous-author business after all.

That evening, Schiffer knocked on Philip’s door again, hoping to catch him at home. When he didn’t answer, she tried Enid. “Philip?” Enid called out.

“It’s Schiffer.”

“I was wondering when you’d come to see me,” Enid said, opening the door.

“I have no excuse.”

“Perhaps you thought I was dead,” Enid said.

Schiffer smiled. “I’m sure Philip would have told me.”

“Have you seen him?”

“Only in the elevator.”

“That’s a shame. You haven’t been to dinner?”

“No,” Schiffer said.

“It’s that damn girl,” Enid said. “I knew this was going to happen. He hired some little twit to be his researcher, and now he’s sleeping with her.”

“Ah.” Schiffer nodded. For a moment, she was taken aback. So Billy had been right after all. She shrugged, trying not to show her disappointment.

“Philip will never change.”

“You never know,” Enid said. “Something might hit him over the head.”

“I doubt it,” Schiffer said. “I’m sure she finds him fascinating. That’s the difference between girls and women: Girls find men fascinating. Women know better.”

“You thought Philip was fascinating once,” Enid said.

“I still do,” Schiffer said, not wanting to hurt Enid’s feelings. “Just not in the same way.” She quickly changed the subject. “I heard a new couple is moving into Mrs. Houghton’s apartment.”

Enid sighed. “That’s right. And I’m not very happy about it. It’s all Billy Litchfield’s fault.”

“But Billy is so sweet.”

“He’s caused a great deal of trouble in the building. He was the one who found this couple and introduced them to Mindy Gooch. I wanted the bottom floor for Philip. But Mindy wouldn’t hear of it. She called a special meeting of the board to push them through. She’d rather have strangers in the building. I saw her in the lobby, and I said, ‘Mindy, I know what you’re up to, changing the meeting,’ and she said, ‘Enid, you were late three times last year with your maintenance payments.’

“She has something against Philip,” Enid continued. “Because Philip is successful, and her own husband is not.”

“So nothing has changed.”

“Not a bit,” Enid said. “Isn’t it wonderful? But you’ve changed.

You’ve come back.”

A few days later, Mindy was in her home office, looking through the Rices’ paperwork. One of the pluses of being the head of the board of a building was access to the financial information of every resident who had moved into the building in the last ten years. The building required applicants to pay 50 percent of the asking price in cash; it also required they have an equivalent amount left over in bank accounts, stocks, retirement funds, and other assets; basically, an applicant had to be worth the full price of the apartment.The rules had been different when Mindy and James had moved in. Applicants had needed only 25 percent of the asking price and merely had to prove that they had liquid assets to cover the cost of the maintenance fee for five years. But Mindy had pushed through a referen-dum for change. There were, she argued, too many layabout characters in the building, the unseemly residue from the eighties when the building had been filled with rock-and-rollers and actors and models and fashion types and people who had known Andy Warhol, and it was the premier party building in the city. During Mindy’s first year as head of the board, two of these residents went bankrupt, another died of a heroin overdose, and yet another committed suicide while her five-year-old son was asleep.

She’d been a sometime model and girlfriend to a famous drummer who had married someone else and moved to Connecticut, abandoning the girlfriend and child in a two-bedroom apartment where she couldn’t afford the maintenance. She’d taken sleeping pills and put a dry-cleaning bag over her head, Roberto reported.

“A building is only as good as its residents,” Mindy had said in what she considered her famous address to the board. “If our building has a bad reputation, we all suffer. The value of our apartments suffers. No one wants to live in a building with police and ambulances rushing in and out.”

“Our residents are creative types with interesting lives,” Enid had countered.

“There are children living in this building. Overdoses and suicides are not ‘interesting,’ ” Mindy said, glaring at her.

“Perhaps you’d be happier in a building on the Upper East Side. It’s all doctors, lawyers, and bankers up there. I hear they never die,” Enid said.

In the end, Enid was defeated by a vote of five to one.

“We clearly have very different values,” Mindy said.

“Clearly.” Enid nodded.

Enid was nearly forty years older than Mindy. So how was it that Enid always made Mindy feel like she was the old lady?

Shortly thereafter, Enid had retired from the board. In her place, Mindy installed Mark Vaily, a sweet gay man from the Midwest who was a set designer and had a life partner of fifteen years and a beautiful little His-panic girl adopted from Texas. Everyone in the building agreed that Mark was lovely, and most important, he always agreed with Mindy.

The meeting with the Rices would include Mindy, Mark, and a woman named Grace Waggins, who had been on the board for twenty years, worked at the New York Public Library, and lived a quiet life in a one-bedroom apartment with two toy poodles. Grace was one of those types who never changed but only aged and had no apparent expectations or ambitions other than the wish that her life should remain the same.

At seven o’clock, Mark and Grace came to Mindy’s apartment for a pre-meeting. “The bottom line is, they’re going to pay cash,” Mindy said.

“They’re financially sound. They’re worth about forty million dollars ...”

“And they’re how old?” Grace asked.

“Young. Early thirties.”

“I always hoped Julia Roberts would buy the apartment. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have Julia Roberts here?”

“Even Julia Roberts probably doesn’t have twenty million dollars cash to buy an apartment,” Mark said.

“It’s a shame, isn’t it?”

“Actresses are not good tenants,” Mindy said. “Look at Schiffer Diamond. She left her apartment empty for years. It caused a huge mouse problem. No,” she went on, shaking her head. “We need a nice, stable couple who will live in the building for twenty years. We don’t want any more actors or socialites or someone who will attract attention. It was bad enough when Mrs. Houghton died. The last thing we need are paparazzi camped outside the building.”

The Rices arrived at seven-thirty. Mindy brought them into the living room, where Mark and Grace were sitting stiffly on the couch. Mindy had brought out two wooden chairs and motioned for the Rices to sit.

Paul was more attractive than Mindy had imagined he’d be. He was sexy, with the kind of dark curly hair that reminded Mindy of a young Cat Stevens. Mindy distributed small bottles of water and perched between Mark and Grace. “Shall we begin?” she said formally.

Annalisa took Paul’s hand. She and Paul had made several visits to the apartment with the real estate agent, Brenda Lish, and Paul was as enamored of the apartment as she was. Their future lay in the hands of these three odd people staring at them with blank, slightly hostile faces, but Annalisa was not afraid. She’d survived rigorous job interviews, had appeared in debates on TV, and had even met the president.

“What’s your typical day like?” Mindy asked.

Annalisa glanced at Paul and smiled. “Paul gets up early and goes to work. We’re trying to start a family. So I’m hoping to be busy with a baby soon.”

“What if the baby cries all night?” Grace asked. She was childless herself, and while she adored children, the reality of them made her nervous.

“I hope he — or she — won’t,” Annalisa said, trying to make a joke. “But we’d have a nanny. And a baby nurse at first.”

“There’s certainly enough room in that apartment for a baby nurse,”

Grace said, nodding agreeably.

“Yes,” Annalisa said. “And Paul needs his sleep as well.”

“What do you do in the evenings?” Mindy said.

“We’re very quiet. Paul gets home at about nine, and we either go out to dinner or we eat something at home and go to bed. Paul has to be up at six in the morning.”

“Do you have a lot of friends?” Mark asked.

“No,” Paul said. He was about to say “We don’t like a lot of people,” but Annalisa squeezed his hand. “We don’t do a lot of socializing. Except on the weekends. Sometimes we go away.”

“One has to get out of the city,” Mark agreed.

“Do you have any hobbies we should know about?” Grace asked. “Play any musical instruments? You should know that there’s a rule in the building — no playing of musical instruments after eleven P.M.”

Annalisa smiled. “That rule must be left over from the jazz era. And One Fifth was built a little before that fun was over — Was it in 1927? The architect was ...” She paused as if thinking, although she knew the answer by rote. “Harvey Wiley Corbett,” she continued. “His firm also designed much of Rockefeller Center. He was considered a visionary, although his plans for elevated sidewalks in midtown didn’t work out.”

“I’m impressed,” Grace said. “I thought I was the only one who knew the building’s history.”

“Paul and I love this building,” Annalisa said. “We want to do everything we can to maintain the historical integrity of the apartment.”

“Well,” Mindy said, looking from Grace to Mark, “I think we’re all in agreement.” Mark and Grace nodded. Mindy stood up and held out her hand. “Welcome to One Fifth,” she said.

“That was easy. It was so easy, wasn’t it?” Annalisa said to Paul in the Town Car, riding back to the hotel.

“How could they reject us?” Paul said. “Did you see them? They’re freaks.”

“They seemed perfectly nice to me.”

“What about that Mindy Gooch?” Paul asked. “She’s one of those bitter career women.”

“How do you know?”

“I see them all the time. In my office.”

Annalisa laughed. “There aren’t any women in your office. There are hardly any women in your industry.”

“There are,” Paul said. “And they’re all like Mindy Gooch. Dried-up husks who spend their whole lives trying to be like men. And not succeed-ing,” he added.

“Don’t be so hard on people, Paul. And what difference does it make?

We’ll probably never see her.”

Back at the hotel, Annalisa sat on the bed, reading through the bylaws of the building, which Mindy had put together into a neat, printed pamphlet for new occupants. “Listen to this,” Annalisa said as Paul brushed and flossed his teeth. “We have a storage room in the basement.

And there’s parking. In the Mews.”

“Really?” Paul said, removing his clothes.

“Maybe not,” Annalisa said, reading on. “It’s a lottery. Every year, they pick one name out of a hat. And that person gets a parking spot for a year.”

“We’ll have to get one,” Paul said.

“We don’t have a car,” Annalisa said.

“We’ll get one. With a driver.”

Annalisa put the pamphlet aside and playfully wrapped her legs around his waist. “Isn’t it exciting?” she said. “We’re starting a new life.”

Knowing she wanted to have sex, Paul kissed her briefly, then moved down to her vagina. Their lovemaking was slightly clinical and always consisted of the same routine. Several minutes of cunnilingus, during which Annalisa climaxed, followed by about three minutes of intercourse. Then Paul would arch his back and come. She would hold him, stroking his back. After another minute, he would roll off her, go to the bathroom, put on his boxer shorts, and get into bed. It wasn’t exactly exciting, but it was satisfying as far as orgasms went. This evening, however, Paul was distracted and lost his hard-on.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, raising herself up on her elbow.

“Nothing,” he said, pulling on his shorts. He began pacing the room.

“Do you want me to give you a blow job?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Just thinking about the apartment,” he said.

“Me, too.”

“And that parking spot. Why does it have to be a lottery? And why do you only get it for a year?”

“I don’t know. Those are the rules, I guess.”

“We have the biggest apartment in the building. And we pay the most maintenance. We should get precedence,” he said.

Three weeks later, when Annalisa and Paul Rice had closed on the apartment, Mrs. Houghton’s lawyer called Billy Litchfield and asked to see him in his office.

Mrs. Houghton might have chosen an attorney from an old New York family to manage her legal affairs, but instead had retained Johnnie Toochin, a tall, pugnacious fellow who had grown up in the Bronx. Louise had “discovered” Johnnie at a dinner party where he was holding court as the city’s brightest up-and-coming young lawyer in a case of the city ver-sus the government over school funding. Johnnie had won, and his future was doubly assured when Mrs. Houghton hired him on retainer. “There are as many criminals in the ‘establishment’ as there are in the ghettos,”

Mrs. Houghton was fond of saying. “Never forget that it’s easy for a man to hide his bad intentions beneath good clothes.”

Happily for Mrs. Houghton, Johnnie Toochin had never been well dressed, but after exposure to money and superior company, he had definitely become establishment. His office was nearly a museum of modern furniture and art, containing two Eames chairs, a sharkskin coffee table, and on the walls, a Klee, a DeKooning, and a David Salle.

“We should see each other more often,” Johnnie said to Billy from behind a massive desk. “Not like this, though. The way we used to at parties.

My wife keeps telling me we ought to go out more. But somehow there’s no time. You’re still out and about, though.”

“Not as much as I used to be,” Billy said, quietly resenting the conversation. It was the same conversation he seemed to have often now, every time he ran into someone he hadn’t seen in ages and likely wouldn’t in the future.

“Ah, we’re all getting old,” Johnnie said. “I’ll be sixty this year.”

“Best not to talk about it,” Billy said.

“You still live in the same place?” Johnnie asked.

“Lower Fifth,” Billy said, wishing Johnnie would get on with whatever it was that had caused him to call this meeting.

Johnnie nodded. “You lived close to Mrs. Houghton. Well, she adored you, you know. She left you something.” He stood up. “She insisted I give it to you in person. Hence the visit to my office.”

“It’s no trouble,” Billy said pleasantly. “It’s nice to see you.”

“Well,” Johnnie said. He stuck his head out the door and called to his assistant. “Could you get the box Mrs. Houghton left for Billy Litchfield?”

He turned back to Billy. “I’m afraid it’s not much. Considering all the money she had.”

Best not to talk about that, either, Billy thought. It wasn’t polite. “I wasn’t expecting anything from her,” he said firmly. “Her friendship was enough.”

The assistant came in carrying a crude wooden box that Billy recognized immediately. The piece had sat incongruously among priceless bibelots on the top of Mrs. Houghton’s bureau. “Is it worth anything, do you think?”

Johnnie asked.

“No,” Billy said. “It’s a sentimental piece. She kept her old costume jewelry in it.”

“Perhaps the jewelry’s worth something.”

“I doubt it,” Billy said. “Besides, I wouldn’t sell it.”

He took the box and left, balancing it carefully on his knees in the taxi going home. Louise Houghton had always been proud of the fact that she came from nothing. “Dirt-poor farmers we were in Oklahoma,” she said. The box had been a gift from her first beau, who had made it for her back in school. Louise had taken the box with her when she’d left at seventeen, carting it all the way to China, where she worked as a missionary for three years. She had come to New York in 1928, looking for money to support the cause, and had met her first husband, Richard Stuyvesant, whom she had married, much to the consternation of his family and New York society. “They considered me a little farm girl who didn’t know my place,” she’d tell Billy on the long afternoons they used to spend together. “And they were right. I didn’t know my place. As long as one refuses to know one’s place, there’s no telling what one can do in the world.”

Back in his apartment, Billy set the box down on his coffee table.

He opened the lid and extracted a long string of plastic pearls. Even as a penniless young girl, Louise had had style, sewing her own clothes from scraps of material and adorning herself with glass beads, cheap metals, and feathers. She was one of those rare women who could take the tackiest item and, by wearing it with confidence, make it look expensive. Of course, after she took New York by storm, she didn’t need to wear costume jewelry and acquired a legendary collection of jewelry that she kept in a safe in her apartment. But she never forgot her roots, and the box of costume jewelry was always on display. On afternoons when they sat in her bedroom, where Louise felt it was safe to gossip, she and Billy would sometimes engage in a silly game of dress-up, decorating themselves in various pieces of costume jewelry and pretending they were other people. Now Billy stood up, and staring into the mirror over the mantelpiece, he wrapped the pearls around his neck and made a face. “No, no,” Louise would have said, laughing.

“You look like that awful Flossie Davis. Pearls aren’t for you, darling.

How about a feather?”

Billy went back to the couch and began carefully laying out each piece on the coffee table. Some of the pieces were ninety years old and falling apart; Billy decided he would wrap each piece in tissue paper and bubble wrap to keep them from suffering further injury. Then he picked up the box, meaning to put it on his own bureau, where it would be the last thing he saw before he went to sleep and the first thing he saw in the morning; in that way, he might keep Louise and her memory close to him. As he lifted the box, the top slammed shut on his finger. Billy opened the lid and glanced inside. He had never examined the box empty, and now he saw a small latch tucked into the back. No wonder Louise had always kept the box, he thought. She would have found it romantic — a box with a hidden compartment. It would have been a magical piece for a bright fourteen-year-old girl who had only fairy tales to nourish her dreams.

It was a small, simple latch made of bronze, a tongue held in place by a tiny knob. Billy unhooked the latch and, using a nail file for leverage, lifted out the wooden shelf. There was indeed something in the hidden compartment, something wrapped in a soft, gray pouch fastened with a black cord. Billy warned himself not to get too excited: Knowing Louise, it was probably a rabbit’s foot.

He untied the cord and peeked inside.

What he saw made him immediately want to tie the cord again and pretend he’d never seen it. But a perverse curiosity prevailed, and slowly, he inched off the pouch. There was old gold, rough-cut emeralds and rubies, and in the center, an enormous crudely faceted diamond. The piece was as big as his hand. Billy began to shake with excitement, to which was quickly added fear and confusion. He picked up the piece and carried it over to the window, where he could examine it more closely in the light. But he was quite sure of what he held in his hand. It was the Cross of Bloody Mary.