The View From Penthouse B

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WE DO GO OUT—Margot to dinner parties hosted by friends who understand she can’t afford to reciprocate, and I to free museum nights and occasionally, still, to my widows’ support group at the Y. Otherwise, Manhattan is beyond our budgets, with its double-digit appetizers and skimpy wines by the glass that cost three times as much as whole bottles from Trader Joe’s. For a woman who can be counted among the bereaved (marriage over, brother-in-law deceased, money gone), Margot excels at keeping both our chins up. She announces almost gleefully every novel down-market activity she engages in. Last January, for example, her New Year’s resolution was to read supermarket circulars, scissors in hand. It opened up a world she hadn’t ever entered—double and triple coupons. I told her about the bruised-fruit-and-vegetable shelf that some stores offered, where a barely shriveled Holland red pepper or wilting head of radicchio, ordinarily beyond us, could be had for ninety-nine cents. She was amazed to learn that if you get on a bus after you’ve paid for a subway ride, it’s considered a transfer and deducts nothing from a MetroCard.

We have a terrace and roof garden at the Batavia, open to all, frequented more often under dark of night by me, who doesn’t want to chat with strangers about why I’m here. There are miniature victory gardens up there, necessitating an honor system among residents when the tomatoes are ripe and the basil luxurious. There are picnic tables, lounge chairs, fire extinguishers, hoses for watering the plants, and signs everywhere posting admonitions per the FDNY about a ten-foot clearance between building and briquettes.

Margot feels proprietary toward the space because it is practically outside the penthouse windows. Just for a change of venue, even when it’s chilly, we cook there. If there’s an unseasonably warm evening, we take our hot dogs or ground chuck to the roof at an hour when most have already eaten and left. Hovering in the lighter-fluid-scented air is always the question: How long before someone notices and complains about my unofficial occupancy? I worry about Margot’s across-the-hall French-speaking neighbors in penthouse A with whom we share an umbrella stand, and the strange man below us in 12 D who has mentioned on more than one occasion that he hears an extra set of footsteps in the night. “Someone not sleeping well?” he likes to ask just as he steps off the elevator.

Margot thinks I’m worrying too much. After one particularly unfriendly bonjour from Madame LaPlante across the hall, I asked, “What if someone writes a letter to the board saying that money is changing hands in penthouse B, against co-op rules?”

Margot was at her laptop. She paused, took a deep, long-suffering breath, and said, “We’ve been through this. I was on that board. I’ve participated in discussions about illegal boarders and lingering guests. And you know what always makes it okay? Our collective social conscience. Someone always grouses, ‘What is this, Park Avenue? We’re the Village. Emma Lazarus lived on this street!’”

“In that case,” I said, “why not just come clean and make me official?”

She rose and headed for the kitchen with her empty mug. “Too late,” she called over her shoulder. I followed her and asked why.

“If I said you were paying me rent, I’d have to renege on what I already told them.”

“Which was what?”

From the open fridge, her back to me, she murmured, “You won’t like it.” She opened the spout of the milk carton, sniffed it, and handed it to me for a second opinion.

“‘What did you tell them?” I asked again.

“I told them that money does not change hands. That you don’t have any; that I was taking you in, not charging rent, doing all of this out of the goodness of my heart because otherwise you’d be homeless. Of course they knew I didn’t mean homeless homeless . . .”

I said, “That is a very depressing label to stick on someone, especially when it’s not true. Wasn’t it enough to just say, ‘She’s my sister’?”

“I’m sorry,” said Margot. “But all they have to do is take one look at you to know you’re not penniless or pathetic.” She paused. I sensed a turnabout coming. “Like your big sister, the divorcée and pauper,” she added.

Then it was my turn to say something soothing. We often ended a conversation this way. One of us would sound a morose note, and the other would try to staunch the leak of self-esteem. A joke, a compliment, a summary of attractive traits. As kids, we never got along this well.





Here was the beginning and end of my entrepreneurship. I finally took a little leap with my alleged agency, announcing Chaste Dates on Craigslist. My first and—as it turned out—last client made what he called “an appointment” the same day the ad appeared. His caller ID said “private,” and his voice was clipped. In person, at a well- regarded Midtown steak house of his choosing, he seemed in a hurry and wasn’t answering my questions about where he lived and worked. Noting that his hands were tanned except for the white skin circling the fourth finger of his left hand, I asked if he was married. His answer was “No . . . Well, I was. I’m recently divorced but had”—he looked down at the telltale pale flesh—“a hard time with the, um, final, um, separation. I wore my ring on a fishing trip recently. It was sunny the whole time.”

I looked down at my own wedding ring, switched just this one night to my right hand.

“Is dinner really necessary?” he asked.

“Aren’t you feeling well?”

“I just was hoping to get onto the main course.”

I pointed to the list of entrées under “secondi” on his open menu.

“What about your menu?” he asked. “What are we talking about, pricewise?” Then he added, in the least flirtatious voice that ever employed the phrase, “I find you very attractive.”

Having been warned a dozen times by my sisters that I’d better be ready for exactly this kind of misunderstanding, I lowered my voice to the level of the hoarsely insulted. “Are you talking about prices for things done in a bedroom? Because if you are, there’s been a misunderstanding.”

He said, unperturbed, “Your ad’s under escort services, isn’t it?”

I said—Margot and I had role-played this exact situation—“First of all, the ad was only meant to be a soft opening. I wanted to test the waters, to see if there was any market out there for an evening of innocent company that is in no way sexual. I would’ve put that in the ad, except even that’s in bad taste. Furthermore, what did I ask you about your potential date?”

He said he didn’t remember.

“Then let me remind you: I asked your age, occupation, and hobbies, and whether it matters to you whether a dinner companion shares your interests or roots for your teams. I also asked whether you were a vegetarian or an omnivore. If we were that other kind of business, I think I’d be asking you—I don’t know this from experience—about your physical preferences in a partner, wouldn’t I? Hair color, breast size, skin pigmentation?”

My dinner companion looked at his watch, then gave the knot of his tie a twist, loosening it an inch, which I took to mean This is merely dinner. I’m off duty now.

“Are you really a golf instructor at Chelsea Piers?” I asked.

“Off the record?”

“Of course.”

“I am not a golf instructor at Chelsea Piers.”

“Are you in a line of work where you wear handcuffs?”

“Wear? I’d say no.”

“I meant are they on your person?”

He said, after staring for a good long time, “Yes.”

“Are you a policeman?”

That made him laugh. I reminded him that we were off the record. What was the harm in telling the truth?

After another longish stare, he said, “Vice.”

I said, “Wouldn’t the world be a better place if you put your energy into saving children from abuse and making sure they got breakfast and a hot lunch?”

“No question.”

As stipulated, he picked up the tab. I try to avoid red meat, but this night I felt obliged to order the porterhouse and two glasses of a pinot noir that were seventeen dollars apiece. Sergeant Mulvaney said, raising his glass of Coke, revealing a shamrock tattoo on the inside of his right wrist, “I have a thought. My father is a widower, and a sweet guy, but he can’t afford these prices. Do you ever—just for fun—match up a single gent with someone nice, say Catholic, a good housekeeper—someone whose kids aren’t messed up?”

“He’s how old?”

“Late sixties. Good shape. Great guy.”

I said, “No, I’m retiring.”

He said, grinning—and I’m quite sure joking—“But it’s always good to do a favor for a cop.”

“Most people would say, ‘Sure. This is how one succeeds in legitimate matchmaking. Maybe you’ll send me a rich uncle.’”

“And what do you say?”

“In over my head,” I told him.





Margot was fascinated. I had to repeat the evening’s conversation practically word for word. “You should have told him our outlaw story,” she said. “They love when the bad guy gets caught and is paying his debt to society.”

She meant Charles. I didn’t correct her, didn’t say “that would be your outlaw story” because by this time we held joint custody of each other’s tribulations. I said, “Not in this situation, not with someone on the alert for crime. The law enforcement part of it would have been okay, but the rest? It would’ve brought us back to the topic of sex.”

Margot said, “I’ve never known anyone who thinks so much before she speaks. I’m the opposite. I say, ‘Hello, nice to meet you, my ex-husband is in prison and I lost all my money in a Ponzi scheme!’ I can’t help it. It just comes tripping off my tongue. And no offense, but what comes tripping off your tongue is ‘Edwin this and Edwin that. He was born missing a part of his heart.’ Men don’t find a late husband such an interesting topic.”

We then role-played. Margot said, “Pretend there’s a lapse in the conversation. You say, ‘I have an interesting situation in my own family: My sister’s husband was an obstetrician specializing in getting women pregnant, but it was more like a one-man sex ring.’ Say that. And say ‘gynecologist.’ Guys love that. You can’t lose. It’s riveting, and while it appears that you’re talking about Charles, the guys will pick up on the subtext.”

“Which is what?”

“F*cking,” said Margot. “No matter how you spin the inseminating, they’ll find it a little stirring.” She was staring at me now in an appraising fashion. She asked if I realized that I visibly shuddered when she uttered the word “sex” in the context of conversation with a potential date.

“Do not,” I said.

“Do, too. And I’m going to work on the other words that also render you silent.”

“Such as?”

“Death. Dying. The month in which it happened. The year in which it happened. And one more time: sex.”

“Why bother?” I asked.

She said that she and Betsy had talked after our last dinner. Not that they were worried . . . not that I was a drag to be around. But they had talked about something that she, the live-in sister, could work on to desensitize me to several words and concepts.

“To what end?” I asked.

“Normalcy,” she said. “Progress. Moving forward.”

“It was situational,” I told her. “Having dinner with an undercover cop set me back a few months. What was I thinking? That I could be a G-rated madam?”

Margot shook her head. “We have to move forward, both of us. What if I was stuck in the past, crying every day about my stolen money? I’d be figuring out a way to break into prison and commit murder.”

Crying every day? All she did was exaggerate. She wasn’t going to murder Bernard L. Madoff. There, I’d said it. I’d pronounced the name aloud. How’s that for a start on desensitizing? Let’s stop the psychoanalysis and the drama. I didn’t need it. I didn’t cry that often anymore.





Edwin


THOUGH I USED TO leave my retail employment off my résumé, I look back on it now with pride and nostalgia. To escape the long solitary confinement of my proofreading cubicle, I became a buyer-in-training, despite being not terribly well suited or well dressed enough to catch the eye of managers who might promote me. The job was the result of more parental networking, a propitious conversation between my mother and a stranger at a bridge tournament. And though a wrong turn professionally, it turned out to be the high point of my romantic history because Edwin and I met on the mezzanine level of Nordstrom in Farmington, Connecticut, in what now seems another life.

It was luck or kismet or just being on the right shift at the right time. The store’s famously unreliable piano player, Viktor, had come to work drunk.

“No, sorry, I do not take requests,” we sales-associates-in-training heard him say. He ranted about the stupid clichéd songs Americans always requested, which then led to a sarcastic rendition of “Chim Chim Cher-ee.” He punctuated his tirade with swigs from a Styrofoam cup, its contents clearly alcohol. When he stopped playing altogether and started muttering, presumably obscenities in Russian—acoustics were wonderful in his area—two security guards rushed over.

“Sir,” said the lead guard, reaching for his walkie-talkie, a hand on Viktor’s shoulder.

“Don’t touch me!” Viktor yelled.

“I think it’s time for your break,” said the guard.

Have I mentioned that we all knew Viktor, and all knew he was an émigré from Irkutsk who liked to assert his new American right to swear in two languages at anyone who policed the state, even if the state consisted of Nordstrom, Lord & Taylor, and Emporium Armani?

Those of us in adjacent departments were edging as close as we dared, tucking our IDs into our pockets so we could mingle with the curious shoppers.

“Don’t let him drive!” someone called to the guards.

“Name a musician who owns car,” Viktor yelled back. “And where in hell would I park in U S of A even if I owned little Japanese shitbox?”

A guard sniffed the contents of the Styrofoam cup and pronounced with too much glee and stereotyping, “Vodka!”

“Beeg detective,” Viktor sneered.

Now the head of HR was at the top of the escalator and racewalking toward the piano. We displaced salespeople moved several yards into the crowd, back toward our departments.

The reason a random Russian’s separation from the store is relevant to my social history is that while all of this was unfolding, a customer named Edwin Schmidt was buying athletic socks in the shoe department. He first heard the music stop, midpassage, then a discordant bass clunk of keys as if a big, angry fist had attacked the keyboard. Then he heard raised voices. He abandoned the package of socks under consideration, hopped on the up escalator, and came toward the noise. Arriving as both guards were raising Viktor from the piano bench, he stayed after the crowd had dispersed and gestured toward the piano’s keyboard and to the HR woman May I?

“Play?”

“A few pieces I know by heart.”

He admitted later that he was showing off, starting with a gorgeous Liszt impromptu that drew sighs from the assembled shoppers and rubberneckers. The HR woman smiled the smile of someone who thinks it’s her lucky day and her own bit of genius recruiting. “Do you play other stuff?” she asked. With barely a pause between pieces, Edwin switched into a beautifully mournful rendition of “All You Need Is Love.”

“Are you a professional?”

“Yes and no. I’m a music teacher.”

The HR woman asked where, what time school got out, and whether his weekends were free. He said West Hartford, three p.m., and yes. Did she need references?

“My office is downstairs, a right turn after the restrooms. Come by on your break?”

“So I should keep playing?”

“Let’s get you into a jacket and tie first—follow me—and then we’ll call the next hour an audition.”

Before he left, with a gift certificate toward the purchase price of his new sports jacket and a voucher for our café, he’d played Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, more Beatles, and more impromptus. He returned that night with sheet music, and without being told, played songs that conjured snow, snowmen, winter. It was our huge February coat sale.

No wedding ring on those talented fingers, my coworkers and I all noticed. “Gay,” a few ignoramuses concluded because of his artistic gifts. I wondered aloud to Meredith and Taisha in Hosiery if our maestro was available. Both young and adventurous, they claimed the next move was up to me. When I did nothing, Taisha—safely married and on my behalf—strode to the piano and asked if he was married or seeing anyone. He looked up. She must have mentioned my name because there was a direct gaze into Hosiery, then a switch to a song I didn’t recognize.

I might have turned away, but Meredith was there, backup to Taisha’s bold overtures, prompting me to answer. I smiled and shrugged—Sorry, can’t name that tune.

His right hand crossed over his left to punctuate his answer with one last chord. He called across the mezzanine, “It’s ‘Always,’ by Irving Berlin. He wrote it for his wife.”

I’m sure our three faces fell. Taisha must have said something like “So you are married?” Even from a distance, I could see him trying to take back the impression the lyrics had falsely suggested. He said something to Taisha, who then yelled to me, “Get over here, missy! Time for your break.”

“Lipstick,” Meredith commanded.

Was there ever a less subtle exercise in matchmaking? I made a slow walk over to the piano, trying to look unruffled and innocent, as if I didn’t know what their conversation had been about. With a sly smile Edwin announced to the passersby, “I’m now going to play ‘A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,’ also by the late, great Irving Berlin.”

I was thirty. No one had ever played a song for me without my first having requested it. Over coffee, I asked him to dinner at my new, barely unpacked studio apartment, and he accepted. Sometimes you see gestures that tell you everything about a person’s character and temperament, and that night I saw many such signs. First among them was his good humor after my scallops turned out to be ammoniated and nearly inedible. Edwin turned down my offer of substitute tuna sandwiches and celery sticks for a spontaneous outing to an Italian bistro in my neighborhood. We discovered that we shared two movies in common (Casablanca and Dirty Dancing) on our list of top five. From that first night, I could so easily see myself across the table from him, who’d be relaxed and lenient about whatever I served. I could also see us taking trips together, nothing strenuous or exotic, Edwin sliding onto unoccupied piano benches aboard ships and in restaurants, his staying calm when flights were canceled and luggage lost. I’d get a piano. He didn’t make an overture in the direction of a kiss, so I did that myself, knowing that Meredith and Taisha would scold me for a lost opportunity. He took it well.

He proposed on the one-year anniversary of Viktor’s termination with a ring that needed to be sized, so we waited until it was back from the jeweler’s to announce our plans. It had been his grandmother’s, willed to Edwin upon her death. It was white gold and not exactly my taste, but I grew to love it. The diamond was flawless, and noticed by every single customer of the chatty sort whose purchase I wrapped in tissue or whose credit card I ran.

He always claimed he spotted me first, across a crowded mezzanine, but I think everyone knew that was Edwin evoking Ezio Pinza in South Pacific. He stopped his freelance playing, and I returned to fixing other people’s sentences when we moved to Manhattan and its Washington Irving High School; with our combined incomes and rent-controlled one-bedroom, we didn’t need second jobs. His students loved him.

It was only nineteen years later when the school’s award-winning a cappella group brought the mourners to tears with “Amazing Grace.” It surprised me and broke my heart all over again when they closed with a slow, sweet “Always.” Everyone grasped its meaning: The way we’d met, at a Steinway grand, had been Edwin’s favorite illustration of how music could change a life.