Chapter Forty-Two
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They shared thorny As if looks.
“Hello? Go home. Please.”
Blank stares. Nobody moved. Somebody yelled, “You ever tried to be at home with a baby?” And a couple of moms smirk-laughed.
Emily tried again. “I hear there’s a new open play center in Flatiron.
Go there. I need all of you out of here.
Now.” Her eyes pleaded with Bianca and Viktor, who stood in a corner, arms crossed.
“Well? Evict them?” They didn’t move. How could they evict women who didn’t have any less ownership of the condo than Emily had?
“I invited you over! Got you on the guest list! None of you would be here if it weren’t for me, and now I need you to pick up your babies and clear the space.”
Shrugs. The moms started to disperse, getting back to their original programming. Finally, one of the hedge-fund manager moms looked over a print copy of the salmon-colored Financial Times and yelled from the kitchen, “You told us you’d say that.”
Emily just stood there, mousy, powerless. God, I’m glad I’m not her.
We’d moved the deejay inside because of the wintry mix, and before Emily knew what to do next, the music was gearing up again and all those bitches she thought she could control started to thrust their bodies into burpees and squat thrusts and yell at the top of their lungs.
Outplayed and overpowered, Emily staggered backward into a guest bedroom, hit with a wave of fatigue and doubt and culpability. She fell back onto the sheets, blocking out the music, the utter mess she’d made. She needed to sleep. She needed to step aside and let me handle this shit show.
—
I see Tina first. Tina is Penelope’s real estate agent.
She turns the keys and walks into Apartment 8789.
She’s wearing a teal sheath dress and has legs that look dusted in gold and a Hermès bag that is trying too hard.
At first I think that maybe we got lucky.
Maybe it is just Tina. Maybe Penelope is too busy organizing a charity lunch or overseeing the installation of some bullshit piece of art to come to the bowels of Midtown East to list the thirty-seven-million-dollar apartment that she forgot she owned.
The apartment she bought amid a litigious battle with her mother over the family trust. But no. Penelope walks in right behind Tina.
Both women expect a vacant apartment, as sanitized as an AD spread.
Instead, they find at least fifty ladies in nylon-Lycra blend, dancing in a sort of sanctuary-meets-nightclub setting.
Tina peeks into the hallway to check the apartment number.
Three moms in leg warmers and leotards speed past on Rollerblades.
“I think I know my apartment, Tina,” Penelope snaps.
“Of course. I’m sorry.” Tina quivers. She takes an iPad out of the Hermès and begins to swipe the screen. “I just…I thought you said this unit was empty.”
“It is…it was. The whole fucking building is empty. What is all this?”
Penelope hasn’t seen Emily, not yet. But she already blames her.
She’d asked her to check on the apartment.
Not let a bacchanal of basic moms take over.
Of course, Penelope didn’t think Emily started the whole thing.
She didn’t have enough friends, ingenuity or, frankly, the balls, for that.
But, at the very least, she’d let it happen.
The Juju Bean moms are in a zone, throwing their heads back, chanting. They don’t notice Penelope and Tina. Skylar, a crowd favorite, leads the class. She has flaming red hair and wears a TED Talk mic and paces around the room with her eyes closed.
“In the words of our vanguard, our mother, our Daisy, it might feel a little wild, a little uninformed, a little terrifying, but this work is essential.” The women all tilt their heads back and moan.
“Don’t be held back by criticism, by judgment.
Express the wounds of your childhood. Of your lineage.
Your past wounds—and place the present over truth. ”
This is the part when they all scream at the top of their lungs…Penelope holds her hands over her ears. “CAN YOU PLEASE DO SOMETHING?” she yells at Tina.
“Absolutely. I’ll check with building security,” Tina says. “Don’t worry. We had something like this happen when I was at Corcoran and we still got over ask.”
I have to intervene. I have to stop Emily.
Obsequious little Emily whose first instinct is to rush downstairs, to apologize.
I can explain. I can explain everything.
But could she, really? Could she explain that her split personality convinced her to open up Penelope’s condo to the masses?
Not only to open it up but to use the Black AmEx that Penelope had entrusted her with years ago—to buy, for instance, lobster salad on the Vineyard, prosciutto and melon on Mott Street.
The one that Emily knows is paid directly by the family’s financial adviser each month.
Do you honestly think people that rich look at their credit card statements?
Would anyone really notice if she bought a playroom full of Montessori toys, stocked a pseudo women’s club with overpriced collagen-infused products and bottomless acai bowls?
Used the condo building’s handful of on-demand educated nannies?
Only Audrey’s hospital bills, the upgrade to the private room, had triggered Penelope’s private wealth manager at JP Morgan.
He bypassed Penelope’s incompetent “chief of staff” and went straight to her most trusted staffer—Emily. “There’s been some unusual activity.” Unusual. That’s one way of putting it.
Emily asked him to send the statements right over. She even gave them to Penelope, knowing that Penelope would never get around to reading them. Not with ski week and the renovation and Mimi’s ninetieth at the villa in Tuscany. Besides, reading boring-ass bank statements is what Emily is for.
The way Emily saw it, she had two options.
Option one: Apologize profusely. It was all a misunderstanding—“You told me to use the facilities.” She’d offer to work for Penelope for the rest of her natural life, until all the debts were repaid.
Option two: Lie. She had no idea who these women were or how they got here.
Maybe Brown Harris Stevens thought it would help make the place more marketable if it looked lived-in?
Like furniture staging but with girlfriends?
Nobody wants to move into a secluded ghost town.
Management recently staged the penthouse, one hundred and ten million dollars, languishing on the market, fully furnished. None of it had ever been mine, alas.
Emily was a gifted lackey and, unlike me, an awful liar, so it would probably be option one, and I couldn’t accept that, so I found a third option.
Penelope cuts the percussion band. “I can’t hear myself think.”
Once it is quiet, she starts to look around.
I watch from the security cameras upstairs, on a slight delay.
She opens a bedroom door to find a woman about to climax using the rechargeable cordless Magic Wand.
Are those bloodstains on the Pratesi sheets?
“What the—” She keeps exploring. The screening room.
The Bling Ring playing. Bowls of edibles, a spread of magic mushroom chocolate bars.
The pumping room, where a busty mom with cracked nipples the size of tea saucers demonstrates how to apply soothing spray.
Another mom with tiny boobs applies cooling hydrogel nipple pads.
In an adjacent bedroom, Penelope finds a well-known influencer leading several women in a demonstration with a postnatal perineum massager and dry-heaves a bit.
She explores a walk-in closet stocked with piles of plush beauty products and hypoallergenic, vegan sex toys, all presumably purchased with her family’s credit card.
She picks up a butt plug with a diamond rhinestone, looking at it like it’s a turd in a teacup.
After that, Penelope, who hardly remembers the layout of her own condo, heads to the main bedroom, the one we use for cryotherapy and aerial yoga. “This could actually be a sales point,” Tina says, peeking back in with her iPad. Penelope shoots her dagger eyes.
They reach the last room, a cleared-out guest bedroom, where a visiting instructor from Santa Fe teaches the women how to orgasm with breath work alone.
“We’re going to use the breath like a siphon so you start to feel stimulation in each of your seven chakras, and you start to feel alive in every single cell… ”
Finally, when Penelope has seen enough, she walks back to the airy sunken living room. That is when she sees me. Standing at the top of the stairs, like a warlord anticipating battle. She squints. Is that…? “Emily Joan?”
I smile, lifting an arm to wave in my fifteen-hundred-dollar Pippa Holt caftan. Or is it her caftan? “Welcome.”
Penelope is disoriented at first, repeating my name as a question. “Emily Joan?” And then she is shaking with rage. “What the fuck is going on? What did you do?”
She climbs the stairs toward the woman she thinks is Emily.
She’s defiant, then terrified, processing that there is something different about Emily.
Something sexy, something hungry and desperate and scrappy and full of guile.
She sees the girl on the stage with the rabbit stuffie.
The girl who clawed her way out of a cloud of Aqua Net and lube all the way to the skies above Park Avenue.
The girl with the knife in the furniture. She sees Daisy.
I don’t move. I just keep smiling—that smile—as if I’d been waiting for her all this time. “Penelope, dear. Do you like what we’ve done with the place?”
She grips her fists, ready to punch me, a furious little girl. “Um. I know my family has been generous, but maybe you forgot that I own this apartment?”
“Hmm. You sure about that? Because last time I checked, it’s registered to an LLC called Saturn Bluescape. I know you bought it to hide your money, avoid paying taxes. The rich really are free while the rest of us are in cages.”
“It was you? You’re the one who used my family’s credit card—”
“Your turn to pick up the check.”
“You’re a fucking leech and I am shutting whatever this is down.” She takes out her cell and calls 911. “…Break-in. The Rafael Vinoly building. 527 Park—”
I walk down a couple of stairs so that I hover over her, close enough to push her down, and with a look that says I just might.
In that moment, I feel such a rush of hate for Penelope.
I hate that she bosses Emily around. I hate that she always gets her way.
I hate that she never has any real money worries.
I hate that she’d never be desperate enough to have to do what I had to do.
I take the phone out of her hand and hang it up.
“I am going to end you, Emily Joan. My dad ends people for sport. You think I can’t destroy you?”
“Play nice, Peepers.”
The condo is suddenly quiet. The women downstairs, white noise.
It is only the two of us. “That’s right.
I know you’re fucking your lawyer. August. I even know his pet name for you.
Your fuckboi in Armani. Does he give it to you in the ass?
I bet he creams all over that Protestant face of yours.
Does things your half-gay husband would never. ”
“After all I did for you.”
“I bet you don’t just suck his dick. I bet he shoves it in until you can’t breathe, until you puke all over the satin sheets in his cheesy bachelor pad.”
“My mom warned me that you were beneath me, that you were trash.”
“Oh shit. Did you let him invite his friends over?”
“But I didn’t listen. I took you in. It’s my weakness. I’m always adopting strays.”
“I bet they gave it to you in every hole.”
“You’re a psycho bitch.”
“Thank you.”
Penelope’s bright blue eyes stare into mine. She realizes then that something has switched inside Emily. She can’t treat her like she used to. She needs to proceed with caution. “You and your friends need to vacate the premises immediately.”
“Let me think about it…No.”
“I’ll get a restraining order. I’ll sue your whole family. I’ll sue your kid and his kids and everyone you care about. Generations of your spawn will be scrubbing my fucking toilets in indentured servitude.”
I am an inch from her perfect face. “I’ll tell Beau.”
“Emily Joan, people like you don’t get to blackmail people like me. You don’t even know the hell I can rain down.”
“I know a lot. For instance, I know that your prenup has an infidelity clause. I know that a divorce would cost you a lot more than letting me and some friends use one of your investment properties.”
Then, before I know it, her hands are around my neck.