One Fifth Avenue - Candace Bushnell [44]
Sam was tough but fair. He charged the residents, the Philip Oaklands, the quiet doctors and lawyers, the woman who managed the rock band, a hundred dollars an hour for his services, but he helped the doormen and porters for free. This was to make up for his mother. The doormen considered the most egregious residents the bad Christmas tippers, and Sam knew his mother was one such Scrooge. When she doled out the twenty-and fifty-dollar bills for Christmas tips, her mouth would turn down in an unhappy line. She would check and recheck her envelopes next to the list of the twenty-five doormen and porters, and if she found she’d made a mistake—and she usually had, in taking an extra fifty or twenty from the cash machine—she would snatch up the bill and carefully lay it in her wallet. But Sam’s efforts paid off. Sam was loved in the building, and Mindy was tolerated, the word being that Mindy wasn’t as bad as she seemed. “She has a nice son, after all, and that says a lot about a woman,” the doormen said.
But now there was trouble between Mindy and Enid, which Sam would have to fix as well.
In the lobby, Sam ran into a strange girl standing before the elevators, looking down at her iPhone. He knew everyone in the building and wondered who she was, why she was there, and whom she was going to see. She was wearing a green halter top, dark jeans, and high-heeled sandals, and was a certain type of beautiful. There were girls in his school who were beautiful, and there were models and actresses and sometimes just pretty college girls on the street. But this girl, he thought, with her poochy lips turned up at the corners in a manner that was almost obscene, was a little different. Her clothes were expensive, but she was a little too perfect. She glanced down at Sam and looked away, back at her phone, as if she were embarrassed.
The girl was Lola Fabrikant, and she was on her way to her interview with Philip Oakland. Sam had caught Lola in a rare moment of vulnerability. The walk down Fifth Avenue to One Fifth had left her disconcerted. Having developed a keen sense of status, she was attuned to both blatant and subtle differences between all kinds of residences, products, and service providers, the result being that in strolling down Fifth Avenue, the glaring differences between this avenue and Eleventh Street, where she now resided, assaulted her sense of entitlement. Fifth Avenue was so much nicer than Eleventh Street—why didn’t she live here? she wondered. And then coming upon the towering gray mightiness of One Fifth, with not one but two entrances and a wood-paneled lobby (like a men’s club), and three doormen all over her in uniforms and white gloves (like footmen in a fairy tale), she thought again, Why don’t I live in this building?
Waiting for the elevator, she decided that she would live here somehow. She deserved it.
She looked down and saw a teenaged boy staring at her. Did kids live in the building as well? Somehow she’d imagined New York City as a place for adults only.
The boy got into the elevator after her. He pressed the button for thirteen. “What floor?” he asked.
“Thirteen,” she said.
Sam nodded. The girl was going to see Philip Oakland. It figured. His mother always said Philip Oakland had it easy, and life was unfair.
Shortly before Lola arrived for her appointment, Philip got a call from his agent. “Oh, these people,” the agent said.
“What’s the problem?” Philip asked. Despite his trouble with the material, he’d managed to turn in a draft of Bridesmaids Revisited the day before.
“Nobody knows what the hell they’re doing,” the agent said. “I’m giving you a heads-up. The