The Gooches’ apartment was one of the oddest in the building, consisting of a string of rooms that had once been servants’ quarters and storage rooms. The apartment was an unwieldy shape of boxlike spaces, dead-end rooms, and dark patches, reflecting the inner psychosis of James and Mindy Gooch and shaping the psychology of their little family. Which could be summed up in one word: dysfunctional.
In the summer, the low-ceilinged rooms were hot; in the winter, cold. The biggest room in the warren, the one they used as their living room, had a shallow fireplace. Mindy imagined it as a room once occupied by a majordomo, the head of all servants. Perhaps he had lured young female maids into his room and had sex with them. Perhaps he had been gay. And now, eighty years later, here she and James lived in those same quarters. It felt historically wrong. After years and years of pursuing the American dream, of aspirations and university educations and hard, hard work, all you got for your efforts these days were servants’ quarters in Manhattan. And being told you were lucky to have them. While upstairs, one of the grandest apartments in Manhattan was empty, waiting to be filled by some wealthy banker type, probably a young man who cared only about money and nothing about the good of the country or its people, who would live like a little king. In an apartment that morally should have been hers and James’s.
In a tiny room at the edge of the apartment, her husband, James, with his sweet balding head and messy blond comb-over, was pecking away mercilessly at his computer, working on his book, distracted and believing, as always, that he was on the edge of failure. Of all his feelings, this edge-of-failure feeling was the most prominent. It dwarfed all other feelings, crowding them out and pushing them to the edge of his consciousness, where they squatted like old packages in the corner of a room. Perhaps there were good things in those packages, useful things, but James hadn’t the time to unwrap them.
James heard the soft thud of the door in the other part of the apartment as Mindy came in. Or perhaps he only sensed her presence. He’d been around Mindy for so long, he could feel the vibrations she set off in the air. They weren’t particularly soothing vibrations, but they were familiar.
Mindy appeared before him, paused, then sat down in his old leather club chair, purchased at the fire sale in the Plaza when the venerable hotel was sold for condos for even more rich people. “James,” she said.
“Yes,” James said, barely looking up from his computer.
“Mrs. Houghton’s dead.”
James stared at her blankly.
“Did you know that?” Mindy asked.
“It was all over the Internet this morning.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought you knew.”
“I’m the head of the board, and you didn’t tell me,” Mindy said. “I just ran into Billy Litchfield. He told me. It was embarrassing.”
“Don’t you have better things to worry about?” James asked.
“Yes, I do. And now I’ve got to worry about that apartment. And who’s going to move into it. And what kind of people they’re going to be. Why don’t we live in that apartment?”
“Because it’s worth about twenty million dollars, and we don’t happen to have twenty million dollars lying around?” James said.
“And whose fault is that?” Mindy said.
“Mindy, please,” James said. He scratched his head. “We’ve discussed this a million times. There is nothing wrong with our apartment.”
On the thirteenth floor, the floor below the three grand floors that had been Mrs. Houghton’s apartment, Enid Merle stood on her terrace, thinking about Louise. The top of the building was tiered like a wedding cake, so the upper terraces were visible to those below. How shocking that only three days ago, she’d been standing in this very spot, conversing with Louise, her face shaded in that ubiquitous straw hat. Louise had never allowed the sun to touch her skin, and she’d rarely moved her face, believing that facial expressions caused wrinkles. She’d had at least two face-lifts, but nevertheless, even on the day of the storm, Enid remembered noting that Louise’s skin had been astoundingly smooth. Enid was a different story. Even as a little girl, she’d hated all that female fussiness and overbearing attention to one’s appearance. Nevertheless, due to the fact that she was a public persona, Enid had eventually succumbed to a face-lift by the famous Dr. Baker, whose society patients were known as “Baker’s Girls.” At eighty-two, Enid had the face of a sixty-five-year-old, although the rest of her was not only creased but as pleasantly speckled as a chicken.
For those who knew the history of the building and its occupants, Enid Merle was not only its second oldest resident—after Mrs. Houghton—but in the sixties and seventies, one of its most notorious. Enid, who had never married and had a degree in psychology from Columbia University (making her one of the college’s first women to earn one), had taken a job as a secretary at the New York Star in 1948, and given her fascination with the antics of humanity, and possessing a sympathetic ear, had worked her way into the gossip department, eventually securing her own column. Having spent the early part of her life on a cotton farm in Texas, Enid always felt slightly the outsider and approached her work with the good Southern values of kindness and sympathy. Enid was known as the “nice” gossip columnist, and it had served her well: When actors and politicians were ready to tell their side of a story, they called Enid. In the early eighties, the column had been syndicated, and Enid had become a wealthy woman. She’d been trying to retire for ten years, but her name, argued her employers, was too valuable, and so Enid worked with a staff that gathered information and wrote the column, although under special circumstances, Enid would write the column herself. Louise Houghton’s death was one such circumstance.
Thinking about the column she would have to write about Mrs. Houghton, Enid felt a sharp pang of loss. Louise had had a full and glamorous life—a life to be envied and admired—and had died without enemies, save perhaps for Flossie Davis, who was Enid’s stepmother. Flossie lived across the street, having abandoned One Fifth in the early sixties for the conveniences of a new high-rise. But Flossie was crazy and always had been, and Enid reminded herself that this pang of loss was a feeling she’d carried all her life—a longing for something that always seemed to be just out of reach. It was, Enid thought, simply the human condition. There were inherent questions in the very nature of being alive that couldn’t be answered but only endured.
Usually, Enid did not find these thoughts depressing but, rather, exhilarating. In her experience, she’d found that most people did not manage to grow up. Their bodies got older, but this did not necessarily mean the mind matured in the proper way. Enid did not find this truth particularly bothersome, either. Her days of being upset about the unfairness of life and the inherent unreliability of human beings to do the right thing were over. Having reached old age, she considered herself endlessly lucky. If you had a little bit of money and most of your health, if you lived in a place with lots of other people and interesting things going on all the time, it was very pleasant to be old. No one expected anything of you but to live. Indeed, they applauded you merely for getting out of bed in the morning.
Spotting the paparazzi below, Enid realized she ought to tell Philip about Mrs. Houghton’s passing. Philip was not an early riser, but Enid considered the news important enough to wake him. She knocked on his door and waited for a minute, until she heard Philip’s sleepy, annoyed voice call out, “Who is it?”
“It’s me,” Enid said.
Philip opened the door. He was wearing a pair of light blue boxer shorts. “Can I come in?” Enid asked. “Or do you have a young lady here?”
“Good morning to you, too, Nini,” Philip said, holding the door so she could enter. “Nini” was Philip’s pet name for Enid, having come up with it when he was one and was first learning to talk. Philip had been and was still, at forty-five, a precocious child, but this wasn’t perhaps his fault, Enid thought. “And you know they’re not young ladies anymore,” he added. “There’s nothing ladylike about them.”
“But they’re still young. Too young,” Enid said. She followed Philip into the kitchen. “Louise Houghton died last night. I thought you might want to know.”
“Poor Louise,” Philip said. “The ancient mariner returns to the sea. Coffee?”
“Please,” Enid said. “I wonder what will happen to her apartment. Maybe they’ll split it up. You could buy the fourteenth floor. You’ve got plenty of money.”
“Sure,” Philip said.