Amidst the applause of the dozen guests and her fathers, Ai Ling curtseyed and went off with her Nana. Lilia, not for the first time, considered Larry’s upward mobility. This dinner party was for some of Boyd’s clients, a few people whom Larry sought to impress and one or two like her whom he liked to taunt with his success.
A woman asked Boyd what preschool his daughter attended. One of his clients dropped the names of two senators and the president in a single sentence.
A young man who had been brought by an old and famous children’s book illustrator talked about the novel he was writing, “It’s YA and horror-light on what at the moment is a very timely theme,” he said.
Larry smiled and said to Lilia, “I walked past Reliquary yesterday and you were closed.”
“Major redecoration,” she replied. Their connection had once been so close that at times each could still read the other. So they both knew that wasn’t so.
He tilted his handsome head with only a subtle touch of grey and raised his left eyebrow a fraction of an inch.
Lilia knew he was going to ask her something about her shop and how long it could survive. She didn’t want to discuss that just then.
Larry’s question went unasked. At that moment the young author said, “It’s a theme that sometimes gets overworked but never gets stale. The book I’m doing right now is titled, Never Blood Today. You know a variation on, ‘Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never jam today’ from Alice in Wonderland. In fact the book is Alice with Vampires! Set in a well-to-do private high school!”
The writer looked at Larry with fascination as he spoke. Boyd frowned. The illustrator who had a show of his art up in Larry’s gallery rolled his eyes.
Larry smiled again, but just for a moment. For Lilia, the writer’s conversation was an unplanned bonus.
A woman in an enviable silk dress with just a hint of sheath about it changed the subject to a reliably safe one: how nicely real estate prices had bottomed out.
Then Boyd suggested they all sit down to dinner. Boyd Lazlo was a corporate lawyer: solid, polite, nice looking, completely opaque. Lilia Gaines knew he didn’t much trust her.
Lilia and Larry went back to the time when Warhol walked the earth, Manhattan was seamy and corroded and an unending stream of young people came there to loose their identities and find newer, more exotic ones. Back then, they two were roommates and Boyd was still a college kid preparing to go to Yale Law.
That summer Manhattan was gripped by nostalgia for the old sordid days and Lilia had something to show Larry that would evoke them. But it was personal, private, and she hadn’t found a moment alone with him.
At the end of the evening he stood at the door saying good-by to the illustrator. The young writer looked wide-eyed at Larry and even at Lilia. The mystique of old evil: she understood it well.
As Larry wished him farewell, Lilia caught the half wink her old companion gave the kid and was certain Larry was bored.
She remembered him in the Ichordone group therapy standing in tears and swearing that when he walked out of there—cured of his habit—he would establish a stable relationship and raise children.
Boyd was down the hall at the elevator kissing and shaking hands. Lilia and Larry were alone. Only then did he put his hands on her shoulders say, “You have a secret; give it up.”
“Something I just found,” she said, reached into her bag and handed him a folded linen napkin. You’d have had to know him as well as she did to catch the eyes widening by a millimeter. Stitched into the cloth was what, when Lilia first saw it years before, had looked like a small gold crown, a coronet. Curving below that in script were the words “Myrna’s Place.” The same words were above it upside down.
Before anything more could be said, Boyd came back, looking a bit concerned and as if he needed to speak to Larry alone. So Lilia thanked both of them for dinner and took her leave. She noticed Larry had made the napkin disappear.
Years ago—when New York was the wilder, darker place—Larry and Lilia had shared an apartment on a marginal street on the Lower East Side, pursued careers, and watched for their chance. He acted in underground films with Madonna before that meant anything, and took photos; she sold dresses she’d designed and made to East Village boutiques.
Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe was the model for all the young couples like them: the poker-faced, serious girl with hair framing her face and the flashy bisexual guy. They were in the crowd at the Pyramid Club, Studio 54, and the Factory. Drugs and alcohol were their playthings. Love did enter into it, of course, and even sex when their stars crossed paths.
Since they needed money, they also had an informal business selling antiques and weird collectibles at the flea market on Sixth Avenue in the Twenties.
In those days that stretch of Manhattan was a place of rundown five-story buildings and wide parking lots—fallow land waiting for a developer. On weekends first one parking lot, then a second, then a third, then more blossomed with tables set up in the open air, tents pitched before dawn.
It became a destination where New Yorkers spent their weekend afternoons sifting through the trash and the gems. Warhol, the pale prince, bought much of his fabled cookie jar collection there.
During the week Larry and Lilia haunted the auction rooms on Fourth Avenue and Broadway south of Union Square, swooped down on forlorn vases and candy dishes, old toys, unwanted lots of parasols and packets of photos of doughboys and chorus girls, turn of the century nude swimming scenes, elephants wearing bonnets and top hats.
Since it kind of was their livelihood they both tried to be reasonably straight and sober at the moment that Sunday morning stopped being Saturday night. While it was still dark they’d go up to Sixth Avenue with their treasures in shopping carts, rent a few square feet of space and a couple of tables and set up their booth.
In the predawn, out-of-town antique dealers, edgy interior decorators, and compulsive collectors—all bearing flashlights—would circulate among the vans unloading furniture and the tables being carried to their places by the flea market porters.
Beams of light would scan the dark and suddenly, four, five, a dozen of them would circle around a booth where strange, interesting, perhaps even valuable stuff was being set up.
Lilia and Larry wanted that attention. Then came the very drowsy weekday auction when they found a lot consisting of several cartons of distressed goods: everything from matchbooks and champagne flutes to mirrors and tablecloths all with the words “Myrna’s Place” in an oval and the gold design that looked like a small crown, a coronet.
The name meant nothing to them. They guessed that Myrna’s was some kind of uptown operation—a speakeasy, a bordello, a bohemian salon—they didn’t quite know.
Larry said, “Fleas—” old hard-bitten market dealers called themselves “fleas”—“call the trash they sell ‘Stuff.’ ”
“And this looks like Stuff,” Lilia replied.