One Fifth Avenue - Candace Bushnell [31]
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.