Primates of Park Avenue (4 page)

I wasn’t fussy about these distinctions—we just needed a good enough place in the right school district. But to my surprise and eventual frustration, being flexible didn’t make finding a place or the process of looking any easier. There just wasn’t a lot of “inventory,” brokers told us over and over. And it was overwhelmingly, unexpectedly strange to enter people’s lives and spaces in such an intimate way—to see their things and their habits, or, for that matter, to see the absence of any traces of people in a perfectly pristine place. I noticed the particular style of decoration on the Upper East Side. There was lots of toile. And yellow. And blue. Again and again. It was hard to imagine what I would do differently, how our furniture would fit here, how we would live in every one of these apartments, my husband and son and I. Which corner would be best for the toddler bed? If we decided to have another child, where would he or she go? Could I work from home in this apartment? And so on.

If the apartment passed muster initially—in the right school district, with the right number of bathrooms and some nice light and views—then the next day my husband, like all husbands, would come have a look, and the women (my broker and I, the seller’s broker, perhaps the seller, too) would be infused with another kind of energy, an anxious attention, an eagerness to please. I felt like Vanna White, ridiculous, as the other women and I “demonstrated” the apartment, opening doors and showing linen closets. It was not like me to simper and serve, but here I was doing it, as if we were all in a play and knew our roles. In further adherence to this apartment-hunting script, my husband would sniff around, the brokers hanging on his every word and gesture, looking for the subtlest clues of his dis/pleasure. He tended to be polite but by no means overly friendly in these situations. He gave nothing away in front of the brokers, and after a quick circle of the premises, would soon head back to the Important World of Men’s Work. Then he would call me and tell me what he thought.

It all would have made me feel like Marion Cunningham on
Happy Days
, but for the fact that I knew I was ultimately the one deciding where we would live. It was a woman thing, the home sphere. That’s why all the brokers and potential buyers were women. The men were there to provide gravitas and a bit of frisson, and then disappear, and then sign off. Or not. After which we would do whatever we wanted. Welcome to the Upper East Side.

As I pondered these gendered divisions of work and meaning in what would be my new habitat, I couldn’t help but focus on more practical matters as well. Namely, in spite of a budget that in Atlanta or Grand Rapids would get us a mansion with a pool, many of the apartments were disappointments. There was a pattern: a gorgeous, gilded, attended lobby at a “prestigious” address on Park or Madison or Fifth. We went up, entered the apartment . . . and I thought I might faint.
Is
this where all the well-turned-out women of the Upper
East Side were living
? I frequently wondered in disbelief. Some of the places were immaculate, even “triple mint,” but many if not most were in a state of gentle or not-so-gentle neglect. Frayed rugs and old carpeting. Worn kitchens. Yellowed paint. And, almost always, a maid dusting or polishing the silver or folding laundry.

And then, every time, without fail, the framed photos and mementos in the living room told the same story. I was transfixed by them, in apartment after apartment: a picture of a young women next to a diploma from Brearley or Spence. A young man in his graduation photo . . . near a framed diploma, all gold-leafed letters and Latin script, from Horace Mann or Buckley or St. Bernard’s. The perfect hair. The unlined young faces. The airbrushed smiles and teeth adjusted to perfection by orthodontia. It hit me like a sledgehammer at a place on Madison Avenue in the low Eighties one day—these people were downsizing or selling because they had to. Their kids, in whom they had invested so much, so intensively, had finally graduated and fledged. The parents had pushed themselves to their outer financial limit for . . . housekeepers and private schools. They’d rather move than give up either. So now they would sell and move into a smaller place. And bring the diplomas and housekeepers along.

“Can you believe it?” I said to my husband on the night of my big realization as I flopped into bed, exhausted and depressed from seeing four consecutive apartments with gilded lobbies, frayed carpets, and fancy diplomas.

“I can,” he said with a sigh. A Brooklynite who had moved to the Upper East Side as a teen, he was a New York but not a Manhattan native, fluent in the desires and beliefs and strivings and anxieties and priorities of the people whose apartments I was in every day, yet also able to see the strangeness of it all. “All that stuff, the housekeepers and private school diplomas—isn’t just window dressing,” he told me now. “It’s who they are.”

He yawned, but I was suddenly wide awake. I remembered an anthropology professor trying to help us understand the concept of honor among the tribe he studied in Yemen. “It’s not an abstract idea,” he explained to the roomful of us in the undergraduate seminar that day so many years before. “When someone sullies your honor, you can’t ignore it and go on, just feeling embarrassed.” No, he told us, it’s like someone has hacked away a piece of your flesh. Something is missing, and you are damaged and injured. Private school diplomas and housekeepers, I realized now, were clearly not just fetishized markers of status, not merely something to wear or have or display with pride. They were utterly intrinsic to one’s identity on the Upper East Side. So crucial, so fundamental, that you would forgo fresh sisal and a kitchen redo and an apartment in “triple mint” condition to hold onto them.

So that explained it, then. The way, all around me, women—brokers with kids, women whose apartments I was looking at, friends of friends on the Upper East Side—talked about where their kids went to school, and used their children’s ages and school affiliations during introductions. Yes, it was a way to describe themselves and do a little coalition-building in the process. But it was also who they were. Period. “Hi, I’m Alicia. My kids Andrew and Adam go to Allen-Stevenson—I think yours do too?”

“No, my kids go to Collegiate”—[Bam! Here she establishes superior rank owing to her child’s enrollment in a TT—top tier—school] “but my friend Marjorie’s four boys are all at AS [subtext: “My friend Marjorie is really rich—you have to be to have four kids—and by association, so am I.”]. Maybe you know her, how old are your kids?”

“Oh wait, really? My nephews are both at Collegiate.” [Here she reveals that she is a mere degree from TT school status herself, since her
sister’s
kids go to a TT school, and thus she is something like an equal] “They’re twins, in second grade, Devon and Dayton?” And so on.

Private school affiliation was so important that, without exception, these women seemed dumbfounded that I planned to send my son to the neighborhood’s excellent public school, PS6, when the time came. They might raise their eyebrows and say politely, after a pause, “Yes, you’ll see at the time where he ends up.” Others were more blunt. “C
ome on
,” one broker said with a forced smile, sounding a little exasperated, as she opened kitchen cabinets to show me they were lighted inside. “You’re going to send your kid to private school like everybody else. You’ll drop him off with your driver. Like everybody else. So you can buy
anywhere
.”

But my husband and I were adamant. We had gone to public schools, and so could our son. It seemed normal and sensible and we continued to push for a place near the excellent public school on East Eighty-First Street between Madison and Park. This is an area brokers refer to as “Upper East Side Prime.” Which just made our quest that much harder.

Now that we had come this far, I needed some tutoring from my husband and Inga. I had bridged the first, fundamental divide in Manhattan real estate social identity, the one that separates “renters” from “owners,” I knew, when I got married. My husband had put me on the deed to his house, and it became ours, and that was that, but apparently it meant a lot in our town. Many people who rent in Manhattan keep it a secret, or at least don’t talk about it, owing to some sense of inferiority, a feeling that renting is second-class and contingent. “You own, correct?” was one of the first questions brokers asked me (or, more often, asked Inga
about
us before agreeing to show us an apartment), wanting to make sure we weren’t presenting them with an additional hurdle, pleased to have it confirmed that we were already members of the tribe of owners.

An additional distinction was prewar versus postwar buildings. Sure, I thought, it would be nice to live in a beautiful old building with beautiful original details, built by an architect of note, storied and historic. But I wasn’t going to make a federal case out of it. Now came another essential distinction, one that largely broke down along the prewar/postwar distinction: co-op versus condo. Living in a house downtown, I was untutored regarding this particular binary opposition, one of the fundamental distinctions that organizes Manhattan buildings and Upper East Side identity.

In a co-op, Inga and my husband explained, board members decide who gets to live there and who doesn’t, and what the rules are. Some of the rules are straightforward and logical. For example, “summer rules” ensure that apartment renovations take place only in summer, when it’s easier to escape the noise by going outside or even to your country place for the whole summer. We live right on top of each other and under each other in Manhattan, so construction can wreck your quality of life. Summer rules are “very Upper East Side,” Inga informed me; almost no West Side co-ops have them. And they make sense.

Other co-op rules are more arbitrary, more cultural than functional. For example, in a co-op you can’t just sublease your apartment or let your twenty-something move in. The board has to approve such things. And a particular building’s co-op may require that an applicant document astronomical liquid assets. Or not. They “require” this (when they choose not to overlook the requirement) as a kind of “insurance,” in spite of the fact that they essentially have a lien against every apartment in the building. That’s because nobody owns an actual apartment in a co-op. They own “shares”—a bigger apartment generally means mores shares. Shares are power. People who want to buy a co-op apartment almost always have to be interviewed by the board. And at a board interview, my husband and Inga warned me, the board members could ask you anything at all. Or decide not to let you move in for any reason at all. So
that’s
why the rare apartments in co-op buildings on Park and Fifth we looked at that advertised “No board approval” were mobbed, I realized, wondering whether owning shares in a co-op felt like having a housekeeper and a child in private school.

Condos are a little more expensive, I learned, generally allow more financing, and you really own them. They are also a little more free-and-easy. You can sublet your place, or use it as a pied à terre, if you choose. And in a condo, a management company scrutinizes your application, which feels less personal and invasive, somehow, than a bunch of your possibly future neighbors poring over every detail of your financial and personal life.

Whether it was a co-op or a condo, prewar or postwar, I considered as I made my way from the West Village to the Upper East Side daily, it was time to settle on a place. The cab fare was killing me. We had to move uptown so I could stop getting there every day.

And then one day, I found a place I thought would do. It was a modern building on Park Avenue, not a “prestigious” prewar building by a famous architect. I didn’t care—after all, it was less than two blocks from Central Park. The apartment itself initially seemed a little dark. But that was just the paint and I could “see through it.” The kitchen was “top of the line,” as brokers say, if on the small side. There were “open city views,” meaning there was no view of the park, but there were no buildings right in front of your window, either; they were all a good distance off, giving you plenty of light and a pleasant feeling of space and company at the same time. It had the right number of bedrooms, one of them with a cute little table and chairs and an arts-and-crafts project in progress—buttons and pieces of dried macaroni and glitter on pink construction paper. This little girl’s room could easily be my little boy’s room, I realized, taking it in. The warm feeling of the kid-friendly mise-en-scène overrode my dislike of the lowish ceilings, busy street-corner location, and less-than-ideal layout.

I walked through the place a second time and a third, my excitement growing. “The broker couldn’t be here,” Inga explained—I knew it was a diss of some sort in the world of brokers and buyers and sellers, a communication that Inga and I didn’t merit her time, she was busy elsewhere or something—but I didn’t care. A second visit was arranged with all haste, so the broker—harried, indifferent, unfriendly—could meet and approve of me. Once she had, we scheduled yet another viewing, this time with my husband in tow.