So this is the kind of man Josh is: yesterday he took me to the best bookshop in Brooklyn and bought me a bunch of paperbacks he thought I might like, then at lunchtime he took me to a posh Mexican restaurant on East 46th and made me try fish tacos – don’t pull a face, they were absolutely delicious. Then he told me he wanted to show me something (no, not that). We walked to the Grand Central Terminal and it was packed, as usual, and I was thinking, Okay, bit weird – are we going on a trip? then he told me to stand with my head in the corner of this archway, just by this Oyster Bar. I laughed at him. I thought he was joking. But he insisted, told me to trust him.
So there I am, standing with my head in the corner of this huge masonry archway, with all the commuters coming and going around me, trying not to feel like a complete eejit, and when I look round he’s walking away from me. But then he stops diagonally across from me, maybe fifty feet away, and he puts his own face in the corner and suddenly, above all the noise and chaos and rumbling trains, I hear – murmured into my ear, like he was right beside me – ‘Louisa Clark, you are the cutest girl in the whole of New York City.’
Treen, it was like witchcraft. I looked up and he turned around and smiled, and I have no idea how it worked, but he walked across and just took me in his arms and kissed me in front of everyone and someone whistled at us and it was honestly the most romantic thing that has ever happened to me.
So, yes, I’m moving on. And Josh is amazing. It would be nice if you could be pleased for me.
Give Thom a big kiss.
Lx
Weeks passed and New York, as it did with most things, careered into spring at a million miles an hour, with little subtlety and a lot of noise. The traffic grew heavier, the streets were thicker with people, and each day the grid around our block became a cacophony of noise and activity that barely dimmed until the small hours. I stopped wearing a hat and gloves to the library protests. Dean Martin’s padded coat was laundered and went into the cupboard. The park grew green. Nobody suggested I move out.
Margot, in lieu of any kind of helper’s wage, pressed so many items of clothing on me that I had to stop admiring things in front of her because I became afraid she would feel obliged to give me more. Over the weeks, I observed that she might share an address with the Gopniks but that was where the similarity between them ended. She survived, as my mother would have said, on shirt buttons.
‘Between the healthcare bills and the maintenance fees I don’t know where they think I’m meant to find the money to feed myself,’ she remarked, as I handed her another letter hand-delivered by the management company. The envelope said ‘OPEN – LEGAL ACTION PENDING’. She wrinkled her nose and put it neatly in a pile on the sideboard, where it would stay for the next couple of weeks unless I opened it.
She grumbled often about the maintenance fees, which totalled thousands of dollars a month, and seemed to have reached a point at which she had decided to ignore them because there was nothing else she could do.
She told me she had inherited the apartment from her grandfather, an adventurous sort, the only person in her family who didn’t believe that a woman should restrict her sights to husband and children. ‘My father was furious that he had been bypassed. He didn’t talk to me for years. My mother tried to broker an agreement but by then there were the … other issues.’ She sighed.
She bought her groceries from a local convenience store, a tiny supermarket that operated on tourist prices, because it was one of the few places she could walk to. I put a stop to that and twice a week headed over to a Fairway on East 86th Street where I loaded up on basics to the tune of about a third of what she had been spending.
If I didn’t cook, she ate almost nothing sensible herself, but bought good cuts of meat for Dean Martin or poached him white fish in milk ‘because it’s good for his digestion’.
I think she had become accustomed to my company. Plus she was so wobbly that I think we both knew she couldn’t manage alone any more. I wondered how long it took someone of her age to get over the shock of surgery. I also wondered what she would have done if I hadn’t been there.
‘What will you do?’ I said, motioning towards the pile of bills.
‘Oh, I’ll ignore those.’ She waved a hand. ‘I’m leaving this apartment in a box. I have nowhere to go and no one to leave it to, and that crook Ovitz knows it. I think he’s just sitting tight until I die and then he’ll claim the apartment under the non-payment of maintenance fees clause and make a fortune selling it to some dotcom person or awful CEO, like that fool across the corridor.’
‘Maybe I could help? I have some savings from my time with the Gopniks. I mean, just to get you through a couple of months. You’ve been so kind to me.’
She hooted. ‘Dear girl. You couldn’t meet the maintenance fees on my guest bathroom.’
For some reason this made her laugh so heartily that she coughed until she had to sit down. But I sneaked a look at the letter after she went to bed. Its ‘late payment charges’, its ‘direct contravention of the terms of your lease’ and ‘threat of compulsory eviction’ made me think that Mr Ovitz might not be as beneficent – or patient – as she seemed to think.
I was still walking Dean Martin four times a day, and during those trips to the park I tried to think what could be done for Margot. The thought of her being evicted was appalling. Surely the managing agent wouldn’t do that to a convalescent elderly woman. Surely the other residents would object. Then I remembered how swiftly Mr Gopnik had evicted me, and how insulated the inhabitants of each apartment were from each other’s lives. I wasn’t entirely sure they’d even notice.
I was standing on Sixth Avenue peering at a wholesale underwear store when it hit me. The girls at the Emporium might not sell Chanel and Yves St Laurent but they would if they could get it – or would know some dress agency that could. Margot had innumerable designer labels in her collection, things I was sure that collectors would pay serious money for. There were handbags alone that must be worth thousands of dollars.
I took Margot to meet them under the guise of an outing. I told her it was a beautiful day and that we should go further than usual and build up her strength with fresh air. She told me not to be so ridiculous and nobody had breathed fresh air in Manhattan since 1937, but she climbed into the taxi without too much complaint and, Dean Martin on her lap, we made our way to the East Village, where she frowned up at the concrete storefront as if somebody had asked her to enter a slaughterhouse for fun.
‘What have you done to your arms?’ Margot paused at the checkout and gazed at Lydia’s skin. Lydia was wearing an emerald green puffed-sleeve shirt, and her arms displayed three neatly traced Japanese koi carp in orange, jade and blue.
‘Oh, my tatts. You like ’em?’ Lydia put her cigarette in her other hand and raised her arm towards the light.
‘If I wanted to look like a navvy.’
I began to shepherd Margot to a different part of the shop. ‘Here, Margot. See they have all their vintage clothes in different areas – if you have clothes from the 1960s they go here, and over there the 1950s. It’s a little like your apartment.’
‘It’s nothing like my apartment.’
‘I just mean they trade in outfits like yours. It’s quite a successful line of business, these days.’
Margot pulled at the sleeve of a nylon blouse, then peered at the label over the top of her spectacles. ‘Amy Armistead is an awful line. Never could stand the woman. Or Les Grandes Folies. Their buttons always fell off. Cheap on thread.’
‘There are some really special dresses back here, under plastic.’ I walked over to the cocktail-gown section where the best of the women’s pieces were displayed. I pulled out a Saks Fifth Avenue dress in turquoise, trimmed with sequins and beads at the hem and cuffs, and held it up against myself, smiling.
Margot peered at it, then turned the price tag in her hand. She pulled a face at the figure. ‘Who on earth would pay this?’
‘People who love good clothes,’ said Lydia, who had appeared behind us. She was chewing noisily on a piece of gum and I could see Margot’s eyes flicker slightly every time her jaws met.
‘There’s an actual market for them?’