One Fifth Avenue

It was, James thought, a scene straight out of the schoolyard. He tried to peer unobtrusively around Philip, hoping to catch sight of Lola. “Can I help you with something?” Philip asked.

James did his best to recover. “I just got a great review in The New York Times Book Review.” The pages flapped uselessly in his hand.

“Congratulations,” Philip said, making as if to close the door.

“Is Lola home?” James asked in desperation. Philip looked at him and gave a half-sardonic, half-pitying laugh as if he at last understood James’s true mission. “Lola?” he said, calling out behind him.

Lola came to the door, wrapped in a silk robe, her hair wet, as if she’d just come out of the shower. “What?” she said. She casually slipped her hand into the back of Philip’s jeans.

James awkwardly held out the pages. “Here’s the review in the Times,” he said. “I thought you might want to see it.”

“Oh, I do,” she said, as nonchalantly as if she hadn’t been in his apartment hours before, had never been in his apartment ever, and hardly knew him at all.

“It’s a good one,” James said, knowing he was beaten but not wanting to acknowledge defeat. “It’s great, as a matter of fact.”

“That’s so cute of you, James,” she said. “Isn’t that cute?” she asked, addressing Philip.

“Very nice,” Philip said, and this time, he did close the door.

James wondered if he’d ever felt quite so foolish.

Back in his apartment, it took him several minutes to recover from this disquieting scene, and it was only because his phone rang. Mindy was on the line. “I just heard,” she said accusingly.

“About what?” he said, falling into their old married habits like a grown-up visiting his parents.

“The cover of The New York Times Book Review?” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me? I have to read about it on a blog?”

James sighed. “I only just found out myself.”

“Aren’t you excited?” Mindy demanded.

“Sure,” he said. He hung up the phone and sat down in his chair. He hadn’t expected the pleasure of his triumph to last forever, but he’d never imagined it would be so short-lived.

Billy Litchfield returned to Manhattan a few days later. His mother was better, but they both understood she’d begun to make the inevitable descent into death. Nevertheless, his month in the remote suburbs on the edge of the Berkshire Mountains had taught him a great deal—namely, how lucky he’d been in life. The reality was that he wasn’t to the manor born, but to the suburb, and the fact that he’d managed to escape the suburbs for over thirty years was extraordinary. His relief at being back in Manhattan, however, was brief. When he walked into his apartment building, he found an eviction notice on his door.

Restitution involved a trip to housing court on State Street, where he mingled among the hoi polloi of Manhattan. This was the real Manhattan, where everyone had a ragged sense of his own importance and his rights as a person. Billy sat among a hundred such people in a molded plastic chair in a windowless room until his case was called.

“What’s your excuse?” the judge asked.

“My mother was sick. I had to leave town to take care of her.”

“That’s negligence.”

“Not from my mother’s point of view.”

The judge frowned but appeared to take pity on him. “Pay the rent due and the fine. And don’t let me see you in here again.

”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Billy said. He waited in another long line to pay cash, then took the subway uptown. The warm, putrid air in the subway car clamped down on his mood like a vise. Scanning the faces around him, he was struck by the pointlessness of so many lives. But perhaps it was his own expectations that were too high. Maybe God hadn’t intended for life to have a point beyond reproduction.

In this mood, he met Annalisa in front of One Fifth and got into her newly purchased green Bentley, complete with a chauffeur, which Billy had helped to arrange through a service. Not having seen her in a while, he was struck by her appearance, thinking how much she’d changed from the tomboyish woman he’d met nine months ago. But she still had that knack for appearing natural, as if she were wearing no makeup and hadn’t had her hair styled and wasn’t wearing five-thousand-dollar trousers, all the while, he knew, putting a great deal of time and effort into her appearance. It was no wonder everyone wanted her at their events and the magazines always featured her photographs. But he found himself feeling surprisingly hesitant about her budding success. This caution was new for him, and he wondered if it was due to recent events or to the realization that his own years of striving had added up to nearly nothing. “A photograph is only an image. Here today, gone tomorrow,” he wanted to say. “It won’t satisfy your soul in the long run.” But he didn’t. Why shouldn’t she have her fun now, while she could? There would be plenty of time for regrets later.

The car took them to the Hammer Galleries on Fifth Avenue, where Billy sat on a bench and took in the recent paintings. In the clean white rarefied air of the gallery, he began to feel better. This was why he did what he did, he thought. Although he couldn’t afford art himself, he could surround himself with it through those who could. Annalisa sat next to him, staring at Andrew Wyeth’s famous painting of a woman in a blue room at the beach. “I’ll never understand how a painting can cost forty million dollars,” she said.

“Oh my dear,” he said. “A painting like this is priceless. It’s absolutely unique. The work and vision of one man, and yet in it, one sees the universal creative hand of God.”

“But the money could be spent to really help people,” Annalisa said.