One Fifth Avenue (44 page)

“Shut up, Oakland. I think they’re sweet.”

Peeking once more through the crack, she spotted Billy Litchfield at the front table. Billy looked weary, as if he’d tilted his head too many times at too many of these events over the years. He had recently pointed out that what was once fun had become institutionalized, and he was right, she realized. And then, hearing the MC announce her name, she stepped out into the lights, remembering that there was not even a warm hand to lead her away at the end of the evening.

When she was able to return to the table, the main course had been served and taken away, but Karen made sure the waiters had saved a plate for her. The filet mignon was cold. Schiffer ate two bites and tried to talk to Billy before she was interrupted again by the woman from the ICSD, who had more people Schiffer had to meet. This went on for another thirty minutes, and then Brumminger was by her side. “You look like you’ve had enough,” he said. “Why don’t I take you away?”

“Yes, please,” she said gratefully. “Can we go someplace fun?”

“You have a seven A.M. call tomorrow,” Karen reminded her.

Brumminger had a chauffeur-driven Escalade with two video screens and a small refrigerator. “Anyone for champagne?” he asked, extracting a half-bottle.

O N E F I F T H AV E N U E

303

They went to the Box and sat upstairs in a curtained booth. Schiffer let Brumminger put his arm around her shoulder and lace his fingers through hers, and the next day, Page Six reported that they’d been spotted canoodling and were rumored to be seeing each other.

ı

Returning to Philip’s apartment on Tuesday, Lola dug out the old
Vogue
magazine with the photo spread of Philip and Schiffer (he hadn’t, at least, tried to hide it, which was a good sign), and looking at the young, handsome Philip with the gorgeous young Schiffer made her want to march down to Schiffer’s apartment and confront her. But she didn’t quite have the guts—what if Schiffer didn’t back down?—and then she thought she should simply throw out the magazine, the way Philip had thrown out hers. But if she did that, she wouldn’t have the pleasure of staring at Schiffer’s photographs and hating her. Then she decided to watch
Summer Morning
.

Viewing the DVD was a kind of divine torture. In
Summer Morning
, the ingenue saves the boy from himself, and when the boy finally realizes he’s in love with her, he accidentally kills her in a car crash. The story was somehow supposed to be autobiographical, and while Philip wasn’t actually in the movie, every line of dialogue delivered by the actor playing Philip reminded her of something Philip would say. Watching the love story unfold between Schiffer Diamond and the Philip character made Lola feel like the third wheel in a relationship where she didn’t belong. It also made her more in love with Philip, and more determined to keep him.

The next day, she got to work and enlisted Thayer Core and his awful roommate, Josh, to help her officially move into Philip’s apartment. The task required Thayer and Josh to pack up her things in boxes and plastic bags and, like Sherpas, carry it all to One Fifth.

Josh grumbled throughout the morning, complaining about his fingers, his back (he had a bad back, he claimed, just like his mother), and his feet, which were encased in thick white sports shoes that resembled two casts. Thayer, on the other hand, was surprisingly efficient. Naturally, there was an ulterior motive behind Thayer’s efforts: He wanted to see the inside of One Fifth and, in particular, Philip Oakland’s apartment.

304

Candace Bushnell

Therefore, he didn’t object when Lola required him to make three trips, back and forth, dragging a garbage bag filled with Lola’s shoes down Greenwich Avenue. In the past two days, Lola had sold off everything in her apartment, posting the details of the sale on Craigslist and Facebook, and presiding over the sale like a dealer of fine antiques. She took nothing less than top dollar for the furnishings her parents had purchased under a year ago, and consequently, she had eight thousand dollars in cash. But she refused to pay for a taxi to transport her belongings.

If the last month of penury had taught her anything, it was this: It was one thing to lavishly spend someone else’s money but quite another to shell out your own.

On the fourth trip, the trio ran into James Gooch in the lobby of One Fifth. James was pushing two boxes of hardcover copies of his book across the lobby with his foot. When he spotted Lola, he reddened. Her visits and text messages had stopped abruptly after his encounter with Philip, leaving James confused and hurt. Seeing Lola in the lobby with what appeared to be a young asshole and a young loser, James wondered if he should speak to her at all.

But in the next minute, she’d not only engaged him but convinced him to help her carry her things. So he found himself squeezed next to her in the elevator with the young asshole, who glared at him, and the young loser, who kept talking about his feet. It could have been his imagination, but holding a box of old shampoo bottles in his arms, James swore he felt waves of electricity coming from Lola and commingling with the electricity from his own body, and he imagined their electrons doing a little sex dance right there in the elevator in front of everyone.

Putting down the box in the foyer of Philip’s apartment, Lola introduced James as “a writer who lives in the building,” to the young asshole, who immediately began challenging James about the relevance of every successful living novelist. With Lola as his audience, James found himself easily rising to the occasion, putting the boy in his place by citing DeLillo and McEwan, whom the young asshole hadn’t bothered to read.

James’s knowledge infuriated Thayer, but he reminded himself that this James person was insignificant, nothing more than a member of the hated boomer tribe who happened to live in this exclusive building. But O N E F I F T H AV E N U E

305

then Lola began gushing about James’s new book and his review in
The
New York Times
, and Thayer figured out exactly who James was, sight-ing him in the crosshairs of his ire.

Later that evening, after Thayer had consumed two bottles of Philip Oakland’s best red wine and was back in his dank hole of an apartment, he looked up James Gooch on Google, found he was married to Mindy Gooch, looked him up on Amazon, found that his yet unpublished novel was already ranked number eighty-two, and began constructing an elaborate and vicious blog entry about him in which he called James “a probable pedophile and word molester.”

Lola, meanwhile, still awake and bored, sent James a text message warning him not to tell Philip he had been in the apartment because Philip was jealous. The message caused James’s phone to bleat at one in the morning, and the uncharacteristic noise woke Mindy. For a moment, she wondered if James was having an affair, but dismissed it as impossible.

ı

On most weekday mornings in One Fifth, Paul Rice was the earliest riser, waking at four A.M. to check the European markets, and to wheel and deal fish. His tank was completed and installed, running nearly the length of Mrs. Houghton’s ballroom, and the interior was a model maker’s dream, a replica of Atlantis half buried under the sea, complete with old Roman roads leading out of sandy caves. The acquisition of his coveted fish was a cutthroat business and required viewing videos of hatchlings and then engaging in bidding wars in which the best fish went for a hundred thousand dollars or more. But every successful man needed a hobby, especially when most of his day entailed either making money or losing it.

On an unusually warm morning on a Tuesday at the end of February, however, James Gooch was also up early. At four-thirty A.M., James got out of bed with a stomach full of nerves. After a night of tossing and turning in anticipation, he had finally fallen asleep only to awaken an hour later, exhausted and hating himself for being exhausted on the most important day of his life.

306

Candace Bushnell

The pub date for his book had finally arrived. That morning, he had an appearance on the
Today
show, followed by several radio interviews, and then a book signing in the evening at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square. Meanwhile, two hundred thousand copies would be released in bookstores all over the country, and two hundred thousand copies would be placed in iStores, and on Sunday, his book would be featured on the cover of
The New York Times Book Review
. The publication was going exactly according to plan, and since nothing in his life had ever gone according to plan, James was seized with an irrational sense of doom.

He showered and made coffee, and then, although he’d promised himself he wouldn’t, he checked his Amazon rating. The number shocked him—twenty-two—and there were still five hours left until it was technically released. How did the world know about his book? he wondered, and decided it was a kind of mysterious miracle, proof that what happened in one’s life was absolutely out of one’s control.

Then, just for the hell of it, he Googled himself. On the bottom of the first page, he came across the following headline: GOOFY BOOMER HOPES

TO PROVE LITERATURE IS ALIVE AND WELL. Clicking on it, he was taken to Snarker. Curious, he began reading Thayer Core’s item about him. As he read on, his jaw dropped, and the blood began pounding in his head.

Thayer had written about James’s book and his marriage to Mindy, referring to her as “the navel-gazing schoolmarm,” followed by a cruel physical description of James as resembling an extinct species of bird.

Gaping at the item, James was filled with rage. Was this what people really thought of him? “James Gooch is a probable pedophile and word molester,” he read again. Wasn’t this kind of statement illegal? Could he sue?

“Mindy!” he shouted. There was no response, and he went into the bedroom to find Mindy awake but pretending to sleep with a pillow over her head.

“What time is it?” she asked wearily.

“Five.”

“Give me another hour.”

“I need you,” James said. “Now.”

Mindy got out of bed and, following James, stared sleepily at the blog entry on his computer. “Typical,” she said. “Just typical.”

O N E F I F T H AV E N U E

307

“We have to do something about it,” James said.

“What?” she asked. “That’s life these days. You can’t do anything about anything. You just have to live with it.” She read through the item again.

“How’d they find out this stuff about you, anyway?” she asked. “How do they know we live in One Fifth?”

“I have no idea,” James said nervously, realizing that the item could be traced back to him. If he hadn’t run into Lola that day when she was moving, he would have never met Thayer Core.

“Forget about it,” Mindy said. “Only ten thousand people read this stuff, anyway.”

“Only ten thousand?” James said. Then his phone bleeped.

“What is that?” Mindy demanded in annoyance. She stared up at him with her pale, mostly unlined face, the result of years of avoiding the sun.

“Why are you getting text messages in the middle of the night?”

“What do you mean?” James asked defensively. “It’s probably the car service from the
Today
show.” When Mindy left the room, James grabbed his phone and checked the message. As he’d hoped, it was from Lola. “Good luck today,” she’d written. “I’ll be watching!” followed by a smiley-face emoticon.

James left the apartment at six-fifteen. Mindy, unable to help herself, reread the blog item on her and James, and her mood became increasingly foul. Nowadays, anyone who committed the crime of trying to do something with her life became a victim of Internet bullying, and there was no retribution, no control, nothing one could do. In this frame of mind, she sat down at her computer and began a new blog entry, listing all the things in her life over which she had no control and had made her bitterly disappointed: her inability to get pregnant, her inability to live in a proper apartment, her inability to lead a life that didn’t feel like she was always racing to catch up to an invisible finish line that moved farther away the closer she came. And now there was James’s impending success—which, instead of relieving these feelings, was only bringing them into sharper focus.

When she heard the elevator ding at seven A.M., signaling Paul Rice’s arrival in the lobby, she deliberately opened her door and let Skippy loose.

Skippy, as usual, growled at Paul. Mindy, still in a lousy mood, didn’t snatch Skippy away as quickly as she normally did, and Skippy attacked 308

Candace Bushnell

Paul’s pant leg with a rabid viciousness that Mindy wished she herself could express. During the tussle, Skippy managed to rip a tiny hole in the fabric of Paul’s pants before he was able to shake Skippy off. He bent down and examined the tear. Then he stood up, making an odd thrusting motion of pushing his tongue into his cheek. “I will sue you for this,”

he said coldly.

“Go ahead,” Mindy said. “Make my day. It can’t really get any worse.”

“Oh, but it can,” Paul said threateningly. “You’ll see.”

Paul went out, and upstairs, Lola Fabrikant got out of bed and turned on the TV. Eventually, James appeared on the screen. Perhaps it was the makeup, but James didn’t look so bad. True, he appeared unnecessarily formal, but James was a little stiff in general. It would be interesting to loosen him up, Lola thought. And he was on TV! Anyone could be on YouTube. But real TV, and network TV at that, was a whole different level. “I watched you!” she texted. “You were great! xLola.” Underneath, she included her new tagline, with which she signed off on all her e-mails and blog posts: “
The body dies, but the spirit lives forever.
”

Up at Thirty Rock, the publicist, a lanky young woman with long blond hair and a bland prettiness, smiled at James. “That was good,” she said.

“Was it?” James said. “I wasn’t sure. I’ve never done TV before.”

“No. You were good. Really,” the publicist said unconvincingly. “We’ve got to hurry if we’re going to make it to your interview at CBS radio.”

James got into the Town Car. He briefly wondered if he would be famous now, recognized by strangers after appearing on the
Today
show. He didn’t feel any different, and the driver took as little notice of him as he had before. Then he checked his e-mails and found the text from Lola. At least someone appreciated him. He opened his window, letting in a rush of damp air.