One Fifth Avenue - Candace Bushnell [18]
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 remarkable 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