One Fifth Avenue

Having been blessed with the pleasingly uniform features of a beauty contestant—made more regular and pleasing by the subtle shaving of the cartilage on her nose—Lola considered herself most definitely not average. Unfortunately, despite several interviews with the human resources departments at various fashion magazines, her superiority had failed to impress, and when she was asked “What do you want to do?” for the fifth or sixth time, Lola had finally answered with a curt “I could probably use a seaweed facial.”

Now, putting down the magazine and looking around the small waiting room, Lola imagined her next interview would go very much like the last. An efficient middle-aged woman would explain what the requirements would be if a job were to become available and if she were to get it. She’d have to get to the office by nine and work until six P.M. or later; she’d be responsible for her own transportation and meals; and she might be subjected to the indignity of a drug test, although she had never touched a drug in her life, with the exception of several prescription drugs. And then what would be the point of this job? All her time would be taken up by this work business, and she couldn’t imagine how the standard salary—thirty-five thousand dollars a year, or eighteen thousand after taxes, as her father pointed out, meaning under two thousand dollars a month—could possibly make it worthwhile. She glanced at her watch, which had a plastic band with tiny diamonds around the face, and saw that she’d already been waiting forty-five minutes. It was, she decided, too long. Addressing the girl seated across from her—the one with the inch-long roots—Lola said, “How long have you been waiting?”

“An hour,” the girl replied.

“It isn’t right,” the other girl said, chiming in. “How can they treat us like this? I mean, is my time worth nothing?”

Lola reckoned it probably wasn’t, but she kept this thought to herself. “We should do something,” she said.

“What?” asked the first girl. “We need them more than they need us.”

“Tell me about it,” said the second. “I’ve been on twelve job interviews in the last two weeks, and there’s nothing. I even interviewed to be a researcher for Philip Oakland. And I don’t know anything about research. I only went because I loved Summer Morning. But even he didn’t want me. The interview lasted like ten minutes, and then he said he’d call and never did.”

At this information, Lola perked up. She, too, had read Summer Morning and listed it among her favorite books of all time. Trying not to appear too keen, she asked slyly, “What did he want you to do?”

“All you basically have to do is look things up on the Internet, which I do all the time anyway, right? And then sometimes you have to go to the library. But it’s the best kind of job, because you don’t have regular hours, and you don’t have to go to an office. You work out of his apartment, which happens to be gorgeous. With a terrace. And it’s on Fifth Avenue. And, by the way, he is still hot, I swear to God, even though I normally don’t like older men. And when I was going in, I ran into an actual movie star.”

“Who?” the second girl squealed.

“Schiffer Diamond. And she was in Summer Morning. So I thought it had to be a sign that I was going to get the job, but I didn’t.”

“How’d you find out about it?” Lola asked casually.

“One of my mother’s friends’ daughters heard about it. She’s from New Jersey, like me, but she works in the city for a literary agent. After I didn’t get the job, she had the nerve to tell her mother, who told my mother, that Philip Oakland only likes to hire pretty girls, so I guess I wasn’t pretty enough. But that’s the way it is in New York. It’s all about your looks. There are some places where the women won’t hire the pretty girls because they don’t want the competition and they don’t want the men to be distracted. And then there are other places where, if you’re not a size zero, forget about it. So, basically, you can’t win.” She looked Lola up and down. “You should try for the Philip Oakland job,” she said. “You’re prettier than I am. Maybe you’ll get it.”

Lola’s mother, Mrs. Beetelle Fabrikant, was a woman to be admired.

She was robust without being heavy and had the kind of attractiveness that, given the right lighting, was close to beauty. She had short dark hair, brown eyes, and the type of lovely cherry-brown skin that never wrinkled. She was known in her community for her excellent taste, firm sensibility, and ability to get things done. Most recently, Beetelle had led a successful charge to have soda and candy vending machines removed from the public schools, an accomplishment made all the more remarkable by the fact that Beetelle’s own daughter was no longer even in high school.

Beetelle was, in general, a wonderful person; if there was anything “wrong” with her, it was only the tiniest of flaws. She tended toward an upward trajectory in life and could occasionally be accused of being a tad too conscious of who was where on the social ladder. For the past ten years, Beetelle, Cem, and Lola had lived in a million-dollar McMansion in the Atlanta suburb of Windsor Pines; in an uncensored moment, Beetelle had let slip that one had to have at least six thousand square feet and five bathrooms to be anyone these days.

Naturally, Beetelle’s desire for the best in life extended to her daughter; for this parental ambition, Beetelle forgave herself. “Life is the question and children are the answer” was one of her favorite mottoes, a homily she had picked up from a novel. It meant, she’d decided, that doing everything for your child was the most acceptable and unassailable position one could take.

To this end, Beetelle had now established her little family in two large adjoining rooms at the trendy Soho House hotel. Their first three days in New York had been spent in an intense search for an appropriate abode for Lola. Lola and Beetelle wanted a place in the West Village, both for its charms, which couldn’t help but inspire a young person, and for the neighbors, who included, according to the celebrity magazines, several movie and television stars as well as fashion designers and musical artists. Although the ideal abode had yet to be found, Beetelle, always efficient, had already begun furnishing it. She’d ordered a bed and various other items, such as sheets and towels, from the vast warehouse of a store called ABC Carpet. The loot was piled up in the entryway of the hotel room, and in the middle of this, Beetelle lay exhausted on a narrow couch, thinking about her swollen feet and wondering if anything could be done about them.

The Fabrikants, after endless discussion, had decided the most they could pay in rent was three thousand dollars a month, which was, as Cem pointed out, more than most people’s monthly mortgage payment. For this price, the Fabrikants imagined they’d find a spacious apartment with a terrace; instead, they’d been shown dirty little rooms that were reached by several flights of stairs. Beetelle imagined Lola living in such a space and being attacked at knifepoint in the stairwell. It wouldn’t do. Lola had to be safe. Her apartment must be clean and at least a reasonable facsimile of what she had at home.

Across the room, Cem lay facedown on the bed. Beetelle put her hands over her face. “Cem,” she asked, “did you get the reservations for Il Posto?”

There was a muffled groan into the pillow.

“You forgot, didn’t you?” Beetelle said.

“I was just about to call.”

“It’s probably too late. The concierge said it can take a month to get a reservation at a Mario Batali restaurant.”

“We could eat at the restaurant here,” Cem said hopefully, despite the fact that he knew another dinner at the hotel would result in a very chilly evening with his wife and daughter.

“We’ve already eaten here twice,” Beetelle scolded. “Lola so wanted to go to Il Posto. It’s important. If she’s going to succeed here, she needs to be exposed to the best. That’s the whole point of New York. Exposure. I’m sure most of the people she meets will have gone to a Mario Batali restaurant. Or at least a Bobby Flay one.”

Cem Fabrikant couldn’t imagine that this was true—that recent college graduates regularly frequented two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-person restaurants—but knew better than to argue. “I’ll call the concierge,” he said. And keep my fingers crossed, he added to himself.

Beetelle closed her eyes and folded her lips as if trapping in a sigh of frustration. This was the typical construct of their marriage: Cem would agree to do something and would then take so long to do it that Beetelle would have to take over.

An impatient ringing of the buzzer, which sounded like an angry wasp trying to get into the suite, broke

the tension. “Lola’s back,” Beetelle said with relief, getting up and making her way to the door. She pulled it open, and Lola brushed past her, a large yellow shopping bag slung over her shoulder. She let the bag slip to the floor and held out her hands excitedly. “Look, Mom.”