The car was waved forward by two security men, one of whom opened the door. Karen got out first and, after consulting briefly with two women dressed in black and wearing headsets, motioned for Schiffer to come out of the car. A ripple of excitement went through the crowd, and the blazing flashes began.
Schiffer found Billy Litchfield waiting just inside the door. “Another night in Manhattan, eh, Billy?” she said, taking his arm. Immediately, she was accosted by a young woman from Women’s Wear Daily who asked if she could interview her, and then a young man from New York magazine, and it was another half hour before she and Billy were able to escape to their table. Making their way through the crowd, Schiffer said, “Philip is still seeing that Lola Fabrikant.”
“Do you care?” Billy said.
“I shouldn’t.”
“Don’t. Brumminger is at our table.”
“He keeps turning up like a bad penny, doesn’t he?”
“More like a million-dollar bill,” Billy said. “You can have any man you want. You know that.”
“Actually, I can’t. There’s only a certain kind of man who will deal with this,” Schiffer said, indicating the event. “And he’s not necessarily the kind of man one wants.” At the table, she greeted Brumminger, who was seated opposite her on the other side of the centerpiece. “We missed you in Saint Barths,” he said, taking her hands.
“I should have come,” she said.
“We had a great group on the yacht. I’m determined to get you on it. I don’t give up easily.”
“Please don’t,” she said, and went to her seat. A plate of salad with a couple of pieces of lobster was already set at her place. She opened her napkin and picked up her fork, realizing she hadn’t eaten all day, but the head of the ICSD came over, insisting on introducing her to a man whose name she didn’t catch, and then a woman came over who claimed to have known her from twenty years ago, and then two young women rushed over and said they were fans and asked her to sign their programs. Then Karen arrived and informed her it was time to go backstage to get ready for her speech, and she got up and went behind the platform to wait with the other celebrities, who were being lined up by handlers and mostly ignoring each other. “Do you need anything?” Karen asked, fussing. “Water? I could bring you your wine from the table.”
“I’m fine,” Schiffer said. The program began, and she stood by herself, waiting to go on. She could see the crowd through a crack in the plasterboard, their eager and politely bored faces lifted in the semi-darkness. She felt a creeping loneliness.
Years and years ago, she and Philip would go to these kinds of events and have fun. But perhaps it was only because they were young and so wrapped up in each other that every moment had the vibrancy of a scene in a movie. She could see Philip in his tux, with the white silk scarf he always wore slung over his shoulders, and she remembered the feel of his hand around hers, muscular and firm, leading her out of the crowd and across the sidewalk to the waiting car. Somehow they would have gathered an entourage of half a dozen people, and they’d pile into the car, laughing and screaming, and go on to the next place, and the next place after that, finally heading home in the gray light of dawn with the birds singing. She would lie halfway across the seat with her head on Philip’s shoulder, sleepily closing her eyes. “I’d like to shoot those birds,” he’d say.
“Shut up, Oakland. I think they’re sweet.”
Peeking once more through the crack, she spotted Billy Litchfield at the front table. Billy looked weary, as if he’d tilted his head too many times at too many of these events over the years. He had recently pointed out that what was once fun had become institutionalized, and he was right, she realized. And then, hearing the MC announce her name, she stepped out into the lights, remembering that there was not even a warm hand to lead her away at the end of the evening.
When she was able to return to the table, the main course had been served and taken away, but Karen made sure the waiters had saved a plate for her. The filet mignon was cold. Schiffer ate two bites and tried to talk to Billy before she was interrupted again by the woman from the ICSD, who had more people Schiffer had to meet. This went on for another thirty minutes, and then Brumminger was by her side. “You look like you’ve had enough,” he said. “Why don’t I take you away?”
“Yes, please,” she said gratefully. “Can we go someplace fun?”
“You have a seven A. M. call tomorrow,” Karen reminded her.
Brumminger had a chauffeur-driven Escalade with two video screens and a small refrigerator. “Anyone for champagne?” he asked, extracting a half-bottle.
They went to the Box and sat upstairs in a curtained booth. Schiffer
let Brumminger put his arm around her shoulder and lace his fingers through hers, and the next day, Page Six reported that they’d been spotted canoodling and were rumored to be seeing each other.
Returning to Philip’s apartment on Tuesday, Lola dug out the old Vogue magazine with the photo spread of Philip and Schiffer (he hadn’t, at least, tried to hide it, which was a good sign), and looking at the young, handsome Philip with the gorgeous young Schiffer made her want to march down to Schiffer’s apartment and confront her. But she didn’t quite have the guts—what if Schiffer didn’t back down?—and then she thought she should simply throw out the magazine, the way Philip had thrown out hers. But if she did that, she wouldn’t have the pleasure of staring at Schiffer’s photographs and hating her. Then she decided to watch Summer Morning.
Viewing the DVD was a kind of divine torture. In Summer Morning, the ingenue saves the boy from himself, and when the boy finally realizes he’s in love with her, he accidentally kills her in a car crash. The story was somehow supposed to be autobiographical, and while Philip wasn’t actually in the movie, every line of dialogue delivered by the actor playing Philip reminded her of something Philip would say. Watching the love story unfold between Schiffer Diamond and the Philip character made Lola feel like the third wheel in a relationship where she didn’t belong. It also made her more in love with Philip, and more determined to keep him.
The next day, she got to work and enlisted Thayer Core and his awful roommate, Josh, to help her officially move into Philip’s apartment. The task required Thayer and Josh to pack up her things in boxes and plastic bags and, like Sherpas, carry it all to One Fifth.
Josh grumbled throughout the morning, complaining about his fingers, his back (he had a bad back, he claimed, just like his mother), and his feet, which were encased in thick white sports shoes that resembled two casts. Thayer, on the other hand, was surprisingly efficient. Naturally, there was an ulterior motive behind Thayer’s efforts: He wanted to see the inside of One Fifth and, in particular, Philip Oakland’s apartment. Therefore, he didn’t object when Lola required him to make three trips, back and forth, dragging a garbage bag filled with Lola’s shoes down Greenwich Avenue. In the past two days, Lola had sold off everything in her apartment, posting the details of the sale on Craigslist and Facebook, and presiding over the sale like a dealer of fine antiques. She took nothing less than top dollar for the furnishings her parents had purchased under a year ago, and consequently, she had eight thousand dollars in cash. But she refused to pay for a taxi to transport her belongings. If the last month of penury had taught her anything, it was this: It was one thing to lavishly spend someone else’s money but quite another to shell out your own.
On the fourth trip, the trio ran into James Gooch in the lobby of One Fifth. James was pushing two boxes of hardcover copies of his book across the lobby with his foot. When he spotted Lola, he reddened. Her visits and text messages had stopped abruptly after his encounter with Philip, leaving James confused and hurt. Seeing Lola in the lobby with what appeared to be a young asshole and a young loser, James wondered if he should speak to her at all.
But in the next minute, she’d not only engaged him but convinced him to help her carry her things. So he found himself squeezed next to her in the elevator with the young asshole, who glared at him, and the young loser, who kept talking about his feet. It could have been his imagination, but holding a box of old shampoo bottles in his arms, James swore he felt waves of electricity coming from Lola and commingling with the electricity from his own body, and he imagined their electrons doing a little sex dance right there in the elevator in front of everyone.
Putting down the box in the foyer of Philip’s apartment, Lola introduced James as “a writer who lives in the building,” to the young asshole, who immediately began challenging James about the relevance of every successful living novelist. With Lola as his audience, James found himself easily rising to the occasion, putting the boy in his place by citing DeLillo and McEwan, whom the young asshole hadn’t bothered to read. James’s knowledge infuriated Thayer, but he reminded himself that this James person was insignificant, nothing more than a member of the hated boomer tribe who happened to live in this exclusive building. But then Lola began gushing about James’s new book and his review in The New York Times, and Thayer figured out exactly who James was, sighting him in the crosshairs of his ire.
Later that evening, after Thayer had consumed two bottles of Philip Oakland’s best red wine and was back in his dank hole of an apartment, he looked up James Gooch on Google, found he was married to Mindy Gooch, looked him up on Amazon, found that his yet unpublished novel was already ranked number eighty-two, and began constructing an elaborate and vicious blog entry about him in which he called James “a probable pedophile and word molester.”
Lola, meanwhile, still awake and bored, sent James a text message warning him not to tell Philip he had been in the apartment because Philip was jealous. The message caused James’s phone to bleat at one in the morning, and the uncharacteristic noise woke Mindy. For a moment, she wondered if James was having an affair, but dismissed it as impossible.