One Fifth Avenue

“Only two thousand people read that book,” Mindy countered.

“I loved it. American history is one of my obsessions. Your husband is a wonderful writer.”

Mindy took a step back. She wasn’t sure whether to believe Annalisa, but she liked the fact that Annalisa was making an effort. And considering James’s coup with Apple, maybe Mindy had been wrong about his fiction abilities. It was true that James had once been a wonderful writer; it was one of the reasons she’d married him. Perhaps he was about to become a wonderful writer again. “My husband has a new book coming out,” she said. “People in the business are saying it’s going to be bigger than Dan Brown. If you can believe that.”

Having said the words aloud, and having liked how they sounded, Mindy now began to believe James’s success was a distinct possibility. That would really show Philip Oakland, she thought. And if the Rices took the apartment, it would be a blow to both Enid and Philip.

“I’ve got to get back to my office,” Mindy said, holding out her hand to Annalisa. “But I hope we’ll be seeing each other soon.”

“I’m impressed,” Billy said to Annalisa, when they were on the sidewalk in front of One Fifth. “Mindy Gooch liked you, and she doesn’t like anyone.”

Annalisa smiled and flagged down a taxi.

“Have you really read The Lonesome Soldier?” Billy asked. “It was eight hundred pages and dry as toast.”

“I have,” Annalisa said.

“So you knew James Gooch was her husband?”

“No. I Googled her on our way out of the church. There was an item that mentioned James Gooch was her husband.”

“Clever,” Billy said. A taxi pulled up, and he held open the door.

Annalisa slid onto the backseat. “I always do my homework,” she said.

As predicted, the job as Philip’s researcher was easy. Three afternoons a week—on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—Lola met Philip at his apartment at noon. Sitting at a tiny desk in his large, sun-filled living room, Lola made a great pretense of working; for the first few days, anyway. Philip worked in his office with the door open. Every now and then, he would poke his head out and ask her to find something for him, like the exact address of some restaurant that had been on First Avenue in the eighties. Lola couldn’t understand why he needed this information; after all, he was writing a screenplay, so why couldn’t he just make it up the way he had the characters?

When she questioned him about it, he took a seat near her on the arm of the leather club chair in front of the fireplace and gave her a lecture about the importance of authenticity in fiction. At first Lola was mystified, then bored, and finally fascinated. Not by what Philip was saying but by the fact that he was speaking to her as if she, too, possessed the same interests and knowledge. This happened a few times, and when he went back to his office abruptly, as if he’d just thought of something, and she’d hear the tap of his fingers on his keyboard, Lola would tuck her hair behind her ears and, frowning in concentration, attempt to Google the information he’d requested. But she had a short attention span, and within minutes, she’d be off on the wrong tangent, reading Perez Hilton, or checking her Facebook page, or watching episodes of The Hills, or scrolling through videos on YouTube. If she’d had a regular job in an office, Lola knew, these activities would have been frowned upon—indeed, one of her college friends had recently been fired from her job as a paralegal for this particular infraction—but Philip didn’t seem to mind. Indeed, it was the opposite: He appeared to consider it part of her job.

On her second afternoon, while looking at videos on YouTube, Lola came across a clip of a bride in a strapless wedding gown attacking a man with an umbrella on the side of a highway. In the background was a white limousine—apparently, the car had broken down, and the bride was taking it out on the driver. “Philip?” Lola said, peeking into his office.

Philip was hunched over his computer, his dark hair falling over his forehead. “Huh?” he said, looking up and brushing back the hair.

“I think I’ve found something that might help you.”

“The address of Peartree’s?”

“Something better.” She showed him the video.

“Wow,” Philip said. “Is that real?”

“Of course.” They listened to the bride screaming epithets at the driver. “Now, that,” Lola said, sitting back in her little chair, “is authenticity.”

“Are there more of these?” Philip asked.

“There are probably hundreds,” Lola replied.

“Good work,” Philip said, impressed.

Philip, Lola decided, was book-smart, but despite his desire for authenticity, he didn’t seem to know a lot about real life. On the other hand, her own real life in New York wasn’t exactly shaping up to be what she’d hoped.

On Saturday night, she’d gone clubbing with the two girls she’d met in the human resources department. Although Lola considered them “average,” they were the only girls she knew in New York. Clubbing in the Meatpacking District had been both an exciting and depressing adventure. At the beginning of the evening, they were turned away from two clubs but found a third where they could wait in line to get in. For forty-five minutes, they’d stood behind a police barricade while people in Town Cars and SUVs pulled up to the entrance and were admitted immediately—and how it stung not to be a member of that exclusive club—but during the wait, they saw six genuine celebrities enter. The line would begin buzzing like a rattlesnake’s tail, and then all of a sudden, everyone was using their phones, trying to get a photo of the celebrity. Inside the club, there was more separation of the Somebodies and the Wannabes. The Somebodies had bottles of vodka and champagne at tables in roped-off tiers protected by enormous security guards, while the Nobodies were forced to cluster in front of the bar like part of a mosh pit. It took another half hour to get a drink, which you clutched protectively like a baby, not knowing when you’d be able to get another.

This was no way to live. Lola needed to find a way to break into New York’s glamorous inner circle.

The second Wednesday of Lola’s employment found her stretched out on the couch in Philip’s living room, reading tabloid magazines. Philip had gone to the library to write, leaving her alone in his apartment, where she was supposed to be reading the draft of his script, looking for typos. “Don’t you have spell-check?” she’d asked when he handed her the script. “I don’t trust it,” he’d said. Lola started reading the script but then remembered it was the day all the new tabloid magazines came out. Putting aside the script, she went out to the newsstand on University. She loved going in and out of One Fifth, and when she passed the doormen now, she would give them a little nod, as if she lived there.

But the tabloids were dull that week—no major celebrities had gone to rehab or gained (or lost) several pounds or stolen someone’s husband—and Lola tossed the magazines aside, bored. Looking around Philip’s apartment, she realized that with Philip gone, there was something much more interesting to do: snoop.