One Fifth Avenue - Candace Bushnell [74]
The Rices’ apartment was slowly taking shape. The once empty dining room now held an ornate table with six Queen Anne chairs that Billy had mysteriously conjured from a friend’s storage bin somewhere on the Upper East Side. The table was on loan until a proper (meaning larger) table could be found; in the meantime, it was strewn with decorating books and color swatches, both fabric and paint, and Internet printouts of various pieces of furniture. Annalisa looked at the table and smiled, recalling something Billy Litchfield had said to her weeks ago.
“My dear,” he’d admonished her when she brought up the fact that she might, in the future, go back to work as a lawyer, “how do you expect to do two jobs?”
“Excuse me?”
“You already have a job,” he explained. “From now on, your life with your husband is your job.” He corrected himself. “It’s more than a job. It’s a career. Your husband makes the money, and you create the life. And it’s going to take effort. You’ll rise each morning and exercise, not simply to look attractive but to build endurance. Most ladies prefer yoga. Then you will dress. You’ll arrange your schedule and send e-mails. You’ll attend a meeting for a charity in the morning, or perhaps visit an art dealer or make a studio visit. You’ll have lunch, and then there are meetings with decorators, caterers, and stylists; you’ll have your hair colored twice a month and blow-dried three times a week. You’ll do private tours of museums and read, I hope, three newspapers a day: The New York Times, The New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal. At the end of the day, you’ll prepare for an evening out, which may include two or three cocktail parties and a dinner. Some will be black-tie charity events where you’ll be expected to wear a gown and never the same dress twice. You’ll need to have your hair and makeup done. You’ll also plan vacations and weekend outings. You may purchase a country house, which you will also have to organize, staff, and decorate. You will meet the right people and court them in a manner both subtle and shameless. And then, my dear, there will be children. So,” Billy concluded, “let’s get busy.”
And busy they had been. There were so many tiny details to put together: bathroom tiles handmade in South Carolina to complement the marble floors (the apartment held five bathrooms, and each needed its own theme), rugs, window treatments, even door handles. Most of Annalisa’s days were spent in the furniture district in the East and West Twenties, but there were all the antique shops on Madison that had to be explored, as well as the auction houses. And then there were the renovations themselves. One by one, each room was being torn apart, rewired, replastered, and put back together. For the first month, Annalisa and Paul had moved an air mattress from one room to another to get out of the way of the construction, but now, at least the master bedroom was finished, and she was, as Billy said, “beginning to put together a bit of a closet.”
The intercom buzzed exactly at noon. “A man is here to see you,” Fritz said from below.
“Which man?” Annalisa asked, but Fritz had hung up. The intercom was in the kitchen, on the first floor of the apartment. Annalisa ran through the nearly empty living room and up the stairs to the bedroom, where she quickly tried to finish dressing.
“Maria?” she said, sticking her head out of the bedroom door and calling down the hall to the housekeeper, whom she’d heard rustling around in one of the back bedrooms.
“Yes, Mrs. Rice?” Maria asked, coming out into the hall. Maria was from an agency and cooked and cleaned and ran errands and would even, supposedly, walk your dog if you had one, but so far Annalisa hadn’t felt comfortable asking her to do much of anything, not being used to having a live-in housekeeper.