Chapter Fourteen
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“You should’ve seen them together. They had such a natural connection.
I am telling you, she is like a baby charmer…
And this apartment. I don’t know if I can even call it an apartment…
” I am talking so fast, trying to tell Roman about how I found Daisy.
Or, more accurately, how she found me, about our afternoon together.
He does his nightly stroll into Holden’s room, noticing Daisy’s sketch, already hanging near his crib. “That from today? It’s lovely.”
“Daisy drew that for him. Can you believe it? Just like that, sketched it in the grass at Washington Square Park. It was like watching Picasso in Montmartre.”
“I gotta give it to you, babe, you don’t give up easy,” he says, sprinkling food in Turtly’s aquarium.
“I’m really happy for you.” I know that he means it, but I also feel like he wants to end the conversation.
He’s hoping this reunion means I can get rid of the stack of smut.
That I’ll come to bed at night and stop talking about porn stars and private investigators.
That we can go back to talking about the things we talked about before, though I don’t entirely remember what those things were except that we sent each other Daily Mail articles and complained about the mayor a lot.
Roman hopes that finding Daisy means I can be myself again.
He walks to replace Turtly’s water. (I draw the line at tank maintenance.) He’s just home after a twelve-hour day.
More layoffs at his firm. It isn’t emotional, how a global accounting firm axes people.
They have data, charts. You know if you suck.
You go to work one day and you’re out the next.
Your security badge no longer works. Your boss wants to see you.
HR is there. They give you fifteen minutes to pack up before the men in the dark suits arrive to escort you out.
The file boxes are already on the floor by your desk, fully assembled.
I can’t decide which was worse. A militarily precise booting or marching into a job every day, as I had before I had Holden, knowing my boss didn’t like me, but he also didn’t have any real reason to fire me.
Maybe being escorted out with a box of personal items is the kick in the ass I need.
That is what Daisy told me earlier that day when we climbed into an idling Mercedes. “It sounds like you need a good kick in the ass, Em,” she said, when I’d admitted how fucking bored I’d been.
The driver stopped on a culturally parched stretch of Park Avenue in the fifties.
Not close enough to Midtown to be part of its ecosystem of office workers and coffee shops and salad lines and shoe repairs.
Not far enough uptown to be dotted in designer flagships and florists and stores selling French baby clothes.
I followed Daisy toward the revolving doors at 527 Park.
My neck cracked as I looked up at the fourteen-hundred-foot-tall pencil of glass and steel.
The Burj Khalifa of the Middle East Side, swaying in the sky.
A bellhop held the double doors open for me to push the Yoyo inside.
We walked past a couple of security guards who nodded at us.
They were watching CCTV footage of everything in the building, on a slight delay, Daisy explained.
“Kinda hot, right?” We waved to a doorman and said hello to a couple of employees polishing every inch of a lobby spacious enough to go roller skating in.
The true mark of wealth in Manhattan, unused space.
We got on an elevator. Daisy plugged in floor 87 on a secure keypad.
She said that the city was fighting the developers over a new ordinance that would force luxury towers to turn the less desirable apartments, on the lower floors, into affordable housing.
But the developers insisted the incoming residents use a separate entrance.
The New York Post dubbed it “the poor door.”
“Gross,” I said.
“Right. The separate door thing is obviously controversial, so the whole thing is tied up in red tape and the building is basically empty,” she explained.
“It must get lonely.” I said this even as I was overcome with envy. An empty luxury apartment beats a California king bed at the Borgata.
“Neighbors are overrated,” Daisy said. I thought about Audrey’s husband, Stuart or Stu, leering at me during night feedings.
I looked down at Holden, worried his ears would pop on the ride up, but he was asleep again.
The elevator doors opened, and we entered a glass-enclosed condo with a wraparound terrace.
We were so high up. You had to squint to make out the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Central Park Reservoir.
It didn’t even look like New York. It just looked expensive.
The apartment was decorated in the sterile fashion of the global elite.
No clutter. No personal effects. No power cords or stack of junk mail or pile of Ryan & Rose Cutie PAT teething rings.
Daisy dropped her bag on a velvet bench.
I parked Holden near a leather sofa. Daisy picked him up and, like a woman weaving on a loom, easily wrapped him in an artfully snug swaddle.
I watched this, staggered. Then she led me to the Roy Lichtenstein, in a study with green peacock feathers for wallpaper.
A dreamy-eyed, tangerine-haired comic girl startled awake, red lipstick and a pixelated breast out.
She’s looking sideways, a hint of a Hitchcock thriller. She’s alone…Or is she?
This was where Daisy lived, in a thirty-seven-million-dollar apartment, in an architectural emblem of inequality, purchased by a Greek billionaire to move offshore funds or avoid taxes, or both.
Daisy touched another keypad. Stevie Nicks came on the Sonos.
I rubbed a finger over the peacock feathers.
They were real, soft and prickly and erotic on my fingertips.
For a long time, Daisy and I stared at the Lichtenstein, at the cartoon woman, pulled into the synthetic oil and polymer of a DC Comics heroine who doesn’t need a man. Then, Daisy asked, “So, did you become a writer?”
“Not exactly…” I explained that I write grants helping to get funding for nonprofits.
“Oh, so you work for a charity? What kind? You were always a good egg, Em.”
No, I am not a good egg. I’d double-locked the door when Daisy had cried for my help.
I don’t work for a charity, I explained.
I work for a for-profit company that takes money from charities.
“I research and draft letters and submit proposals to try to get NGOs, 501(c)(3)s, and other nonprofits financial or in-kind support…” God, I was boring myself.
I should record myself talking about my job and share it with the Juju Bean moms. Maybe they can program it into the Second Generation Hatch Rest Plus Sleepy Baby Noise Maker to lull their babies to sleep.
When I finished bumbling on about what I do in the cubicle in Midtown East, Daisy smiled and said, “Right on.”
She walked to a kitchen: a marble island the size of a Caribbean nation, ranunculus in a Steuben vase.
She opened a wood-paneled refrigerator door.
The fridge was filled with boxes of water in straight lines and fresh-pressed juices in slim glass jars organized by color.
How dumb to ever think this girl was dancing at the Peppermint Elephant.
Daisy took two boxes of water out, handing me one. She smiled. “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”
—
I am pretending to ignore the smell of Turtly’s tank as I listen to Roman talk about the layoffs at work, about how he really needs to just keep his head down.
But I am thinking about what Daisy said.
Thinking that maybe she still knows me better than I know myself.
How I wish I could figure out a way to get fired and have the men in suits escort me out and confiscate my security badge (not that the Elevate Comprehensive Grant Writing Company required security) but also pay me severance and let me keep my flex-spending account, because pelvic-floor therapy…
“Babe? You listening?” Roman asks. I watch him get an IPA out of the fridge, pop a grape.
“You went to the store?” I could burn villages over those grapes.
“Yeah,” he says, mouth full of seedless male privilege.
“Um, did you want to ask if we needed anything?”
“Sorry, did you need something?”
“That is not the point.”
I am angry all the time. Angrier than I’ve ever been, watching my husband eat soggy Concord grapes.
It is relentless, biology’s daily barrage.
But I am also too exhausted to fight. Too exhausted to tell him why this has triggered me beyond comprehension.
It’s so unfair. To have so much rage and so little energy.
Then I spring it on him, because he is tired and stressed and will have less of a will to fight, and I am too angry to keep it in. “I think I found us a nanny.”
“Sweet. Can we afford a nanny?” Roman says.
“We can afford this one.”
He pauses mid-chew. He’s seen this glint in my eye before.
“No.”
“I swear, Rome, she’s better with him than I am. She has a driver! He’s picking us up tomorrow.”
“Maybe I should be a sex worker.”
“His name is Viktor.”
“Do they get a Roth IRA?”