One Fifth Avenue - Candace Bushnell [32]
“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 onesie in a blue crib in a blue