One Fifth Avenue - Candace Bushnell [63]
James looked up. The photographer was hidden behind his camera. He clicked off a shot. “That’s very good, James,” he said. “You look sad. Soulful.”
Do I? James thought. Maybe he wasn’t so bad at this famous-author business after all.
That evening, Schiffer knocked on Philip’s door again, hoping to catch him at home. When he didn’t answer, she tried Enid. “Philip?” Enid called out.
“It’s Schiffer.”
“I was wondering when you’d come to see me,” Enid said, opening the door.
“I have no excuse.”
“Perhaps you thought I was dead,” Enid said.
Schiffer smiled. “I’m sure Philip would have told me.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Only in the elevator.”
“That’s a shame. You haven’t been to dinner?”
“No,” Schiffer said.
“It’s that damn girl,” Enid said. “I knew this was going to happen. He hired some little twit to be his researcher, and now he’s sleeping with her.”
“Ah.” Schiffer nodded. For a moment, she was taken aback. So Billy had been right after all. She shrugged, trying not to show her disappointment. “Philip will never change.”
“You never know,” Enid said. “Something might hit him over the head.”
“I doubt it,” Schiffer said. “I’m sure she finds him fascinating. That’s the difference between girls and women: Girls find men fascinating. Women know better.”
“You thought Philip was fascinating once,” Enid said.
“I still do,” Schiffer said, not wanting to hurt Enid’s feelings. “Just not in the same way.” She quickly changed the subject. “I heard a new couple is moving into Mrs. Houghton’s apartment.”
Enid sighed. “That’s right. And I’m not very happy about it. It’s all Billy Litchfield’s fault.”
“But Billy is so sweet.”
“He’s caused a great deal of trouble in the building. He was the one who found this couple and introduced them to Mindy Gooch. I wanted the bottom floor for Philip. But Mindy wouldn’t hear of it. She called a special meeting of the board to push them through. She’d rather have strangers in the building. I saw her in the lobby, and I said, ‘Mindy, I know what you’re up to, changing the meeting,’ and she said, ‘Enid, you were late three times last year with your maintenance payments.’
“She has something against Philip,” Enid continued. “Because Philip is successful, and her own husband is not.”
“So nothing has changed.”
“Not a bit,” Enid said. “Isn’t it wonderful? But you’ve changed. You’ve come back.”
A few days later, Mindy was in her home office, looking through the Rices’ paperwork. One of the pluses of being the head of the board of a building was access to the financial information of every resident who had moved into the building in the last ten years. The building required applicants to pay 50 percent of the asking price in cash; it also required they have an equivalent amount left over in bank accounts, stocks, retirement funds, and other assets; basically, an applicant had to be worth the full price of the apartment. The rules had been different when Mindy and James had moved in. Applicants had needed only 25 percent of the asking price and merely had to prove that they had liquid assets to cover the cost of the maintenance fee for five years. But Mindy had pushed through a referendum for change. There were, she argued, too many layabout characters in the building, the unseemly residue from the eighties when the building had been filled with rock-and-rollers and actors and models and fashion types and people who had known Andy Warhol, and it was the premier party building in the city. During Mindy’s first year as head of the board, two of these residents went bankrupt, another died of a heroin overdose, and yet another committed suicide while her five-year-old son