“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 was asleep. She’d been a sometime model and girlfriend to a famous drummer who had married someone else and moved to Connecticut, abandoning the girlfriend and child in a two-bedroom apartment where she couldn’t afford the maintenance. She’d taken sleeping pills and put a dry-cleaning bag over her head, Roberto reported.
“A building is only as good as its residents,” Mindy had said in what she considered her famous address to the board. “If our building has a bad reputation, we all suffer. The value of our apartments suffers. No one wants to live in a building with police and ambulances rushing in and out.”
“Our residents are creative types with interesting lives,” Enid had countered.
“There are children living in this building. Overdoses and suicides are not ‘interesting,’” Mindy said, glaring at her.
“Perhaps you’d be happier in a building on the Upper East Side. It’s all doctors, lawyers, and bankers up there. I hear they never die,” Enid said.
In the end, Enid was defeated by a vote of five to one.
“We clearly have very different values,” Mindy said.
“Clearly.” Enid nodded.
Enid was nearly forty years older than Mindy. So how was it that Enid always made Mindy feel like she was the old lady?
Shortly thereafter, Enid had retired from the board. In her place, Mindy installed Mark Vaily, a sweet gay man from the Midwest who was a set designer and had a life partner of fifteen years and a beautiful little Hispanic girl adopted from Texas. Everyone in the building agreed that Mark was lovely, and most important, he always agreed with Mindy.
The meeting with the Rices would include Mindy, Mark, and a woman named Grace Waggins, who had been on the board for twenty years, worked at the New York Public Library, and lived a quiet life in a one-bedroom apartment with two toy poodles. Grace was one of those types who never changed but only aged and had no apparent expectations or ambitions other than the wish that her life should remain the same.
At seven o’clock, Mark and Grace came to Mindy’s apartment for a pre-meeting. “The bottom line is, they’re going to pay cash,” Mindy said. “They’re financially sound. They’re worth about forty million dollars…”