The View From Penthouse B

The View From Penthouse B - By Elinor Lipman


Who better to dedicate this particular book to than my wonderful sister, Deborah Slobodnik





Acknowledgments


As ever, I thank my remarkable and steadfast friends, Mameve Medwed and Stacy Schiff, for improving every chapter and for their unflagging attention to matters great and small in real life, too.

I am grateful for the kind brilliance of my editor, Andrea Schulz, and my entire Houghton Mifflin Harcourt team, especially Megan Wilson and Lori Glazer.

I am immensely grateful to the Bogliasco Foundation and its Liguria Study Center for the kind of month abroad where this author and her chapters felt as if they didn’t have a care in the world.

And like a certain fictional sister with both a giant heart and a head for business, my agent extraordinaire, Suzanne Gluck, wins daily, ongoing gratitude.

And for everything a son could be, I thank Benjamin Austin.





Fort Necessity


SINCE EDWIN DIED, I have lived with my sister Margot in the Batavia, an Art Deco apartment building on beautiful West Tenth Street in Greenwich Village. This arrangement has made a great deal of sense for us both: I lost my husband without warning, and Margot lost her entire life’s savings to the Ponzi schemer whose name we dare not speak.

Though we call ourselves roommates, we are definitely more than that, something on the order of wartime trenchmates. She refers to me fondly as her boarder—ironic, of course, because no one confuses a boarding house with an apartment reached via an elevator button marked PH. In a sense, we live in both luxury and poverty, looking out over the Hudson while stretching the contents of tureens of stews and soups that Margot cooks expertly and cheerfully.

She takes cookbooks out of the library and finds recipes that add a little glamour to our lives without expensive ingredients, so a pea soup that employs a ham bone might start with sautéed cumin seeds or a grilled cheese sandwich is elevated to an entrée with the addition of an exotic slaw on the plate. We mostly get along fine, and our division of labor is fair: cook and dishwasher, optimist and pessimist.

Margot has turned herself into a professional blogger—or so she likes to announce. Her main topic is the incarcerated lifer who stole all her money, and her readers were primarily her fellow victims. I use “were” instead of “are” because visitors to www.thepoorhouse.com dwindled to zero at one point. The blog produces no money and has no advertisers, but she says it is just as good for confession and self-reflection as the expensive sounding board who once was her psychoanalyst.

When asked by strangers what I do, I tell them I have something on the drawing board, hoping my mysterious tone implies Can’t say more than that. So far, it’s only a concept, one that grew out of my own social perspective. It occurred to me that there might be a niche for arranging evenings between a man and a woman who desired nothing more than companionship. The working title for my organization is “Chaste Dates.” So far, no one finds it either catchy or appealing.

Best-case scenario: I’d network with licensed matchmakers and establish reciprocity. They’d send me their timid, and I’d send them my marriage-minded. Might there be singletons with a healthy fear of intimacy versus the sin-seekers of Match.com? I hope to find them.

Everyone I’ve confided in—my younger sister, Betsy, for example, who has a job in banking in the sticky, bundling side of mortgages—hates the idea and/or tells me I’m thinking small. She’s the sister who is always alert to rank and ambition. Her husband is a lawyer who didn’t make partner, left the law, and teaches algebra in a public high school in an outer borough of New York. You’d think she’d brag about that, but she doesn’t. Occasionally I catch her telling someone that Andrew went to law school with this president or that first lady and neglecting to mention his subsequent career. I usually tell her later, “You should be proud of what he does.”

“Algebra?” she snarls, despite the fact that, unlike the progeny of a lot of New Yorkers who spend a fortune on tutors, both of her children excel in math. Edwin was a public school teacher, so I expect a little more sensitivity. These conversations push Chaste Dates further into oblivion. Still in mourning, I am easily overwhelmed.





Margot is divorced from Charles, a too-handsome, board-certified physician with an ugly story, who calls our apartment collect from his country club of a prison. He was/is a gynecologist, now under suspension, with a reckless subspecialty that drew the lonely and libidinous. Patients came with an infertility story and left a little ruddier and more relaxed than when they arrived. Who were these women, Margot and I always marvel, who knew how to signal, feet in stirrups, that a doctor’s advances would be deemed not only consensual but medical? Yes, Charles partnered with a sperm bank, whose donors were advertised as brilliant, healthy, handsome men with high IQs, graduate degrees, and above-average height. And, yes, the vast majority of his practice was artificial rather than personal insemination. But for a few, the main draw was Charles himself, a silver-haired, blue-eyed, occasionally sensitive man, the kind of physician women put their faith in and develop a crush on. Overall, it was lucky that Charles suffered from borderline oligospermia—in layman’s terms, a low-to-useless sperm count. Did he know? Of course. We’re not sure how he framed these trespasses, but some patients must have told themselves that a doctor’s fleshly ministrations, midcycle, were donorlike and ethical in some footnoted way, imagining the top-notch child and possible romantic entanglement that his DNA could yield. His bedside talents were such, apparently, that satisfied customers came back for subsequent treatments. Luckily, only one procedure took, only one child was conceived, one son eventually revealed through due diligence. Charles might still be practicing amorous medicine, except that his unknowing bookkeeper charged the paramours a fee commensurate with an outside donor—five thousand dollars, the going rate at the time—and thus committed fraud of a punishable, actionable kind. “Fraud” on the books; “malpractice,” “adultery,” “grounds for divorce,” and “sin” everywhere else. Margot left the day he was rather publicly arrested. Her settlement was enormous. She bought her penthouse, invested the rest catastrophically, and resumed the use of her maiden name.

Edwin died one month before turning fifty, without getting sick first, due to a malformation of his heart valves that proved fatal. One morning I woke up and found that he hadn’t, a sight and a shock that I wonder if I’ve yet recovered from.

Even twenty-three months after his death, his absence is always present. People assume I am grateful for the memories, but where they’re wrong is that the memories cause more wistfulness than comfort. It’s hard to find a subject that doesn’t summon Edwin, no matter how mundane. All topics—music, food, movies, wall colors, a stranger’s questions about my marital status or the location of the rings on my fingers—bring him back. I haven’t seen much progress in two years. Keeping someone’s memory alive has its voluntary and involuntary properties. You want to and you don’t. You’re not going to hide the photos, but neither will you relocate the images of his formerly happy, healthy, smiling face to your bedside night table.

Amateur shrinks are everywhere. “Ed wouldn’t want you to be staying home, would he?”—to me, who never called him Ed. And, “If it was you who had died, wouldn’t you want him to find someone else?” They mean well, I’m told. I think Edwin actually would be glad I haven’t remarried, dated, or looked. He wasn’t a jealous husband, but he was a sentimental one.

It’s good to be around Margot, an amusingly bitter ex-wife. She loathes Charles, so I join in. We enjoy discussing his felonious acts, a subject we never tire of. Hating Charles is good for her and oddly good for me. We often start the day over coffee with a new insight into his egregiousness. Margot might begin a rant by saying, “Maybe he chose to be an ob-gyn just for this very purpose. Naked women, legs open, one every twenty minutes.”

The summing up of his character flaws often leads one of us to say, usually with a sigh, that it’s just as well Charles didn’t father a child inside their marriage. Imagine trying to explain his behavior to a son or daughter of any age? Imagine having a jailbird for a father. That, of course, reminds me that Edwin and I tried, but without success and without great commitment. For years, Margot urged me to consult Charles, but who would want to be seen by a brother-in-law in such an intimate arena? Knowing now about his modus operandi, that I might have given birth to my own niece or nephew, I am forever thankful that I resisted. Lately Margot is juicing up her blog by admitting that her ex is the once-esteemed physician-felon who was a tabloid headline for a whole season. As the subject tilts from the recession to his unique brand of adultery, she’s won new readers. Though she’s not much of a stylist, her writing is lively and her pen poisonous in a most engaging way.

Living here is interesting and soothing. It’s a beautiful apartment with what Margot calls “dimensions.” Hallways veer this way and that, so you can’t see from one end of the apartment what’s going on in the other. The building has doormen, porters, and a menagerie of fancy purebred dogs. Edwin and I lived more modestly in a ground-floor, rent-controlled one-bedroom on West End Avenue. The Batavia shares its name with a Dutch ship that struck a reef off the coast of Australia in 1629. Amazingly enough, most of its shipwrecked passengers survived.





I Next Considered


MY ONCE-RELIABLE FREELANCE job was writing copy for bill inserts issued by utility companies, the slips of paper that offered tips on insulating and reducing customers’ carbon footprints. Occasionally I’d get to write 250 to 300 words about a heroic, lifesaving deed, usually CPR or a Heimlich maneuver performed in the field by a hard-hatted employee. When customers switched to e-bills, my assignments dwindled to nothing. Every day I read front-page stories about professionals combing every inch of second-fiddle job listings, and there I am.

I don’t like to blame what pop psychologists call “birth order” for my situation and motivation. If I did, I’d have to accept that being the middle child has a major influence on how I approach the world and those gray areas that fall loosely under the heading “relations.” Still, I wonder if some of my professional dead ends had to do with my growing up between perfect Margot and formidable Betsy.

I majored in education in college, a safe and appealing concentration—until I got into the classroom. Even as a student teacher, I dreaded every minute, every smart-aleck eighth grader, the smoke-filled teachers’ room and its burned coffee, the married gym teacher who liked me and his guidance-counselor wife who did not.

I lived at home, in Hartford, which might have contributed to my less-than-amorous twenties. Like today, I helped around the house and read the classifieds. After my retirement from education at twenty-two, I took the summer off, sleeping late in my childhood bedroom, the empty parakeet cage and The Partridge Family poster reminding me that time had passed. I lunched with unemployed high school girlfriends who hadn’t moved away, either. My father, one of dozens of vice presidents at one of the city’s insurance company’s world headquarters, gave my anemic résumé to what in those days was called Personnel, despite my objection that I didn’t want a job because of nepotism or mercy.

Soon enough, when asked in a social setting what I did, I could answer “administrative assistant.” My boss wrote the magazine-size glossy annual report and I typed it all up, correcting his grammar and punctuation. Within six months, he told someone in Personnel, whether out of admiration or annoyance, about my eye for typos, and soon I had my own cubicle, dictionary, thesaurus, and pencil sharpener, proofreading insurance jargon all day long in what felt like solitary confinement.

I lunched with my father almost daily until there wasn’t a single cafeteria worker who hadn’t heard him say a half-dozen times, “This is my daughter, Gwen-Laura. She works here now.” I’d nudge him and add “His favorite daughter” in such a way that always elicited a chuckle and at the same time signaled to our audience that Jim Considine loved all his daughters equally. It was at one of our lunches that he asked if I had any desire to get my own place. Margot, for example, struggling to make ends meet, had nonetheless found that garret in the Bowery. And Betsy, too, was happy living with people her own age.

I reminded him that Betsy was still in college, living in a dorm, so I didn’t think she should be held up as a paragon of residential courage. I said that I did want to be on my own, a white lie I hoped would soon be the truth. Again, looking back, I wonder: birth order. Middle child. Brown-haired daughter between two hazel-eyed blonds. Maybe I needed extra parental attention to make up for . . . well, for nothing. Every one of the three Considine girls, we would discover after first my father’s death, then my mother’s, thought herself to be the favorite child.





As Margot contemplates various angles for a possible memoir, I’m thinking of writing something, too. My premise is good: A woman widowed relatively young moves from her small apartment into a choice piece of Manhattan real estate. It would be a retelling of Little Orphan Annie, updated and without the orphans. She would find companionship and eventually love, and along the way, travel the world through the good graces of her husband’s generous life insurance policies. I know I’d enjoy casting myself in a Cinderella story, fully recovered from my sorrows—which I guess makes it fiction. Margot and I often discuss our books; sometimes we pause midconversation and wonder aloud if the conjuring is half the fun, at which point we vow to start our respective works that very week.

We have updated résumés at the ready. Margot’s is livelier than mine. She even makes her first job (second-tier secretary in Obstetrics at Saint Vincent’s) sound consequential. What was actually socializing and flirting has become “mentored and liaised with interns and residents.” It was where Charles first spotted her, and possibly what reinforced his career choice. To test the relationship, to make her overscheduled and exhausted boyfriend miss her, she jumped ship to an AM radio station, putting up with the on-air banter of the two male drive-time deejays who soon worked her into their act. Her receptionist’s role on The Mitch and Mike Show expanded the morning they buzzed her on the intercom while on air and asked, “Margot? We were wondering what you had for supper last night?”

She answered casually, even lazily, “Spaghetti and tap water.” Hilarity ensued. After that, “Let’s Ask Margot” became an hourly sure bet. “Margot’s wearing a fetching—what is that called, doll?—a nearly see-through blouse today.” She would yell back, “It’s voile. And the bodice is lined so you cannot see through it one iota.” The guys would deliver a mock apology. So sorry to offend her highness! Her bodice is lined! She’s rolling her eyes at us now. Wish you could see her! Two words, guys: Bomb. Shell.

Off air, Mike and Mitch were kind and harmless, she maintained. They explained that it was called “shtick,” that their wives understood; and it came with a raise. She received fan letters and the occasional marriage proposal. Mike and Mitch read the cleanest ones on air, prompting even more letters—listeners trying to outdo, to empurple, to rhyme.

Even now her name occasionally rings a bell with a middle-aged commuter who asks, “You’re that Margot? From The Mitch and Mike Show?” I think it marked her—in a good way. Not that her self- esteem was ever low, but more than anything else, it was Mike and Mitch who gave her a feel for a pedestal beneath her feet. I am sure that one of the reasons she is relatively cheerful today is that this new Depression reminds her of her happy twenties, sleeping alone on a Murphy bed in what is now NoLiTa (but previously had neither nickname nor appeal) and making soup out of chicken backs and necks on a hot plate. “I used to walk my skinny little paycheck to my bank, deposit all of it, and keep forty dollars for spending money! For everything! For lunches and subway fare and maybe one movie a week. I never felt deprived because all my friends lived that way, too. Those were the days!”

Those were also the days when daughters married right out of college, especially when young doctors were doing the asking. Margot explained her ambivalence at Thanksgiving, with just the immediate family present, planned that way so she could explain why she’d turned down Charles’s proposal.

He didn’t understand who she was, Margot insisted. Or who she’d become. Margot Considine was something of a household name; well, at least she felt that way when Mitch or Mike teased and complimented her, and the station’s phone lines lit up. Our father paused in his carving mathematically precise slices of breast away from the bone and turned to our mother. “Did a daughter of ours just say that she didn’t want to marry a perfectly nice man from a good family, a physician no less, because he didn’t listen to her being teased by two buffoons?”

“I’m afraid so,” said our mother, still in her apron, a gift from me that was festooned with horns of plenty in honor of her November birthday. And then, borrowing his wry tone: “Let’s use psychology. Let’s agree that she is too important and famous to marry anyone, let alone a mere doctor in training. We’ll pretend we don’t want her to give Charles the time of day. That should help.”

Margot said, “What about the fact that he’s going to be a gynecologist?”

Dad said, “I owe most of what is great in my life to that honorable profession.”

“But would you want your favorite eldest daughter to be married to one?” Margot asked. “Aren’t you wondering if a man whose patient population will be 100 percent female is the best candidate for marriage? Or monogamy?”

We waited. Our mom said, “Jim?”

Margot continued. “Because it seems to me that one of two things would follow: either temptation or burnout.”

“Ask him,” our dad said. “He must already know if temptation goes along with the job.”

Charles insisted that the answer was no. He’d learned in his first week of residency, performing dozens of pelvic exams a day, to disassociate. How could she confuse the emotional with the clinical? He had eyes only for her.

Margot said she needed a week to think things over, then said yes. As befitting the beautiful eldest daughter, the wedding was large and formal, black tie and prime rib. I’d been fitted for contact lenses and wore an orchid behind one ear. Charles’s eight groomsmen danced with Betsy and me so obligingly that I now suspect it was a condition set down by the bride or her parents. But that night, it felt like popularity.





Although Margot appears strong and cynical, and is quick to joke about her divorce, I think she needs me here. I have assumed the task of accepting Charles’s collect calls, two a month, a frequency we negotiated despite her reluctance to accept even one. I argued for that small act of charity. “At least he didn’t die,” I remind her.

At first, his calls were heartbreaking. He told me how much he missed Edwin, his favorite brother-in-law, which I really shouldn’t have believed, but I’d so rather have heard that than the frequent questions about poor me, my state of mind, health, welfare, and rotten luck.

Whether it’s the group therapy in prison or just the hours and hours of boredom that have made him reflect on his life and marriage, he speaks in a new pop psychology idiom and in a new revelatory fashion. “I wasn’t emotionally available to Margot,” he announced, his greeting. “Which is so typical of a surgeon.”

I said, “But you’re not a surgeon,” which he corrects. What did I call hysterectomies and Caesarians if not surgery? He’d spent thousands of hours in the OR during his training. And his point was not his board certification but his surgical personality. He may have been a little robotic and selfish . . .

This sounded new. Apparently, at his particular prison, where alpha-male white-collar criminals of the CEO variety served time, many group therapy sessions turned to wives, girlfriends, mistresses, conjugal visits—what went wrong and how did felons woo when reintegrated into society?

“So you’re saying that your being robotic and surgical was the cause of your patient hanky-panky?” I asked him.

“You two are close,” he continued. “So I’m assuming you know that during the time that the unfortunate conception took place, Margot and I were separated.”

I said, “I would’ve known if you two were separated!”

“No one knew. I was sleeping on my office couch. It wasn’t that we were unhappy. I think it was just that Margot had bouts of romantic ambition, with those two deejays forwarding her fan letters for years; love letters from her commuter-suitors, real or imagined. I think any little argument we had, any little dry spell, made her wonder what if . . . ?”

I said, “We discuss you a lot. I’d have known about a separation, especially if it exiled you to a couch in your office—”

“You discuss me a lot?” he repeated, sounding pleased.

“That can’t surprise you! You get married and you feel secure and you think it’s forever, then suddenly your husband’s in prison! Gone. You’re alone. Of course we talk about you.”

Someone, presumably a guard, was telling Charles that his time was up. “Thirty seconds,” he negotiated. “This is important.” And then to me: “I don’t have time to be anything but blunt, so here goes: Aren’t you talking about yourself? About you and Edwin? Because if you substitute ‘in the ground’ for ‘in prison,’ you’re describing your own situation. He’s gone and you’re alone—”

I hung up without answering. I didn’t want bluntness or insight or analysis. And the news of a long-ago separation was confusing. Charles was one of our top two villains. If there had been mitigating emotional circumstances, I’d have to realign everything.





I had moved into the Batavia three months after Edwin died, as I was pondering whether to renew my lease. The teaming up was our sister Betsy’s idea, who asked calmly while she was treating us to our semimonthly dinner in her Upper East Side neighborhood, “Have either of you discussed the possibility of joining forces?”

I asked what she meant.

“Gwen moving into the Batavia.”

Margot asked, “Do you mean buy?”

I knew, embedded in that question, was her hope that Betsy the banker knew something she did not—that Edwin had left me previously undetected funds.

I said, “Oh, sure. I’d be just the one to spend a million or two on a one-bedroom.”

“I meant,” Betsy said, “obviously, beyond obviously, that Gwen could move into your outsized apartment.”

I said, “I think Margot would have asked me by now if that idea appealed.”

Margot was writing on the edge of her paper place mat featuring the Chinese Zodiac. “What are you scribbling over there?” Betsy asked.

“Math,” said Margot.

I said, “I know the second bedroom is your study . . .”

Betsy said, “What does she need a whole study for? One blog entry a week? She can move her laptop to the dining-room table.”

Margot looked up finally. She asked, “Can you afford . . . ?” and named a figure that was thirty dollars below my current rent.

I said yes, I could.

Betsy asked what percentage of the common charges and utilities did that figure represent. Half?

Margot said firmly, “It represents what I’m comfortable asking my widowed sister to put into the coffer.” She asked again if I could manage the figure she’d named.

“I can.”

“And do you want to?”

My first, unspoken answer was no. How could I abandon the apartment that still had Edwin’s voice on the answering machine and his DNA on the piano keys? But then I pictured the inlaid marble floors of the Batavia’s lobby, its frescoed walls, its bank of filigreed brass mailboxes, and its companionship. “Yes,” I said. “I want to.”

Margot said, “Then I can, too.”

Though I could talk about Edwin and even his death without getting choked up, I still lose my voice and composure in the face of unexpected acts of kindness.

Margot saw this. She added, “We’ll be good for each other. I’ve always secretly envied you and Betsy sharing a room.”

Betsy laughed. Even when Margot went to college, she fought to keep her bedroom sanctified and empty for her visits home.

I said, “It’ll be temporary. A few months?”

“Why go and set some arbitrary deadline?” asked Betsy. “This could work out beautifully for all sides and all pocketbooks.”

Margot said, “Maybe she’ll get sick of me. Maybe after your last child goes off to college, Gwen will be ready to move in with you and Andrew.”

“That sounds about right: I’ll go from sister to sister till I die, young and unexpectedly.”

Margot explained to Betsy: “What happened to Edwin—it makes her feel doomed herself.”

Betsy reached across the table and took my hand. I knew what was coming: the speech about life’s possibilities. She began, “I know you don’t like to hear this, and I know you think it’s too soon to imagine that one day . . . someone—”

Eyes closed, I shook my head to stop her. I had no appetite for what I knew she was about to say, that my life wasn’t over. And by “life” she would mean one lived in the company of a man or men.

“Later, Betsy,” said Margot. “She needs time. I’ll remind her occasionally that she’s still alive.”

I slept at the beautiful Batavia that night, not in the second bedroom but on the other half of the king-size bed that Margot had brought from the marital home in New Jersey, hoping that one day she’d need something expansive. Because of her large wardrobe of nightwear and spare toothbrushes, I didn’t stop at home first. We stayed up talking past midnight, Margot confessing what she thought were the bad habits and rituals that I might find annoying in a roommate. Not one was unfamiliar or discouraging. I offered a few feeble warnings of my own, that I’d leave dishes in the sink and lights on; that I had insomnia, a dry cough; still wore my retainer at night and was apt to leave it—

“Not one a deal breaker,” she said, and reached across the broad expanse of mattress to pat my pink satin–clothed forearm. It was kind of her not to make me admit my most obvious shortcoming: I would be a sad roommate who couldn’t be counted on for any fun at all.