One Fifth Avenue - Candace Bushnell [66]
“Do you want me to give you a blow job?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Just thinking about the apartment,” he said.
“Me, too.”
“And that parking spot. Why does it have to be a lottery? And why do you only get it for a year?”
“I don’t know. Those are the rules, I guess.”
“We have the biggest apartment in the building. And we pay the most maintenance. We should get precedence,” he said.
Three weeks later, when Annalisa and Paul Rice had closed on the apartment, Mrs. Houghton’s lawyer called Billy Litchfield and asked to see him in his office.
Mrs. Houghton might have chosen an attorney from an old New York family to manage her legal affairs, but instead had retained Johnnie Toochin, a tall, pugnacious fellow who had grown up in the Bronx. Louise had “discovered” Johnnie at a dinner party where he was holding court as the city’s brightest up-and-coming young lawyer in a case of the city versus the government over school funding. Johnnie had won, and his future was doubly assured when Mrs. Houghton hired him on retainer. “There are as many criminals in the ‘establishment’ as there are in the ghettos,” Mrs. Houghton was fond of saying. “Never forget that it’s easy for a man to hide his bad intentions beneath good clothes.”
Happily for Mrs. Houghton, Johnnie Toochin had never been well dressed, but after exposure to money and superior company, he had definitely become establishment. His office was nearly a museum of modern furniture and art, containing two Eames chairs, a sharkskin coffee table, and on the walls, a Klee, a DeKooning, and a David Salle.
“We should see each other more often,” Johnnie said to Billy from behind a massive desk. “Not like this, though. The way we used to at parties. My wife keeps telling me we ought to go out more. But somehow there’s no time. You’re still out and about, though.”
“Not as much as I used to be,” Billy said, quietly resenting the conversation. It was the same conversation he seemed to have often now, every time he ran into someone he hadn’t seen in ages and likely wouldn’t in the future.
“Ah, we’re all getting old,” Johnnie said. “I’ll be sixty this year.”
“Best not to talk about it,” Billy said.
“You still live in the same place?” Johnnie asked.
“Lower Fifth,” Billy said, wishing Johnnie would get on with whatever it was that had caused him to call this meeting.
Johnnie nodded. “You lived close to Mrs. Houghton. Well, she adored you, you know. She left you something.” He stood up. “She insisted I give it to you in person. Hence the visit to my office.”
“It’s no trouble,” Billy said pleasantly. “It’s nice to see you.”
“Well,” Johnnie said. He stuck his head out the door and called to his assistant. “Could you get the box Mrs. Houghton left for Billy Litchfield?” He turned back to Billy. “I’m afraid it’s not much. Considering all the money she had.”
Best not to talk about that, either, Billy thought. It wasn’t polite. “I wasn’t expecting anything from her,” he said firmly. “Her friendship was enough.”
The assistant came in carrying a crude wooden box that Billy recognized immediately. The piece had sat incongruously among priceless bibelots on the top of Mrs. Houghton’s bureau. “Is it worth anything, do you think?” Johnnie asked.
“No,” Billy said. “It’s a sentimental piece. She kept her old costume jewelry in it.”
“Perhaps the jewelry’s worth something.”
“I doubt it,” Billy said. “Besides, I wouldn’t sell it.”
He took the box and left, balancing it carefully on his knees in the taxi going home. Louise Houghton had always been proud of the fact that she came from nothing. “Dirt-poor farmers we were in Oklahoma,” she said. The box had been a gift from her first beau, who had made it for her back in school. Louise had taken the box with her when she’d left at seventeen, carting it all the way to China, where she worked as a missionary for three years. She had come to New York in 1928, looking for money to support the cause, and had met her first husband, Richard Stuyvesant, whom she had married, much to the consternation of his family and New York