Hot Property Read online

  When her cell phone rings, she almost decides she’s feeling too wrung-out and despondent over Scott to answer, but then sees that it’s Lorelei Lyne, one of the brokers from Chase Residential.

  “Hi there,” she says, and is surprised to hear that Lorelei—a twice-divorced, middle-aged broker who’s been in the business more than twenty years and is quite a tough cookie—is actually weeping. “What is it?” Kate urges. She slips off her high heels and tucks her legs underneath her.

  But Lorelei is sobbing so hard, she can’t even speak. Hearing those sobs, Kate feels like crying herself. I don’t want to keep hurting you—a simple half dozen words that have punctured her heart.

  “Lorelei,” she says, changing the channel on the TV, “what happened?”

  “Let me pull myself together,” Lorelei says; Kate can hear the click of her cigarette lighter and the long, drawn-out exhaling of smoke that follows.

  “Are you smoking? Lorelei, I thought you were quitting,” Kate says instinctively, as if there’s a forty-eight-year-old in the world you can talk to like that, even if it’s for her own good. She can picture Lorelei with the cigarette protruding from her mouth, lounging on her bed dressed in nothing but a leopard-skin push-up bra and a matching slip, her long black hair arranged around her cleavage like armor; in truth, Lorelei’s become kind of slutty, and perhaps a little desperate as well. Since her second divorce—this time from a husband she made sure was arrested on two counts of criminal nonsupport for failing to pay alimony and child support—she’s been scrambling harder than ever to get those commissions and also to find a “reliable” man for herself.

  “Oh, I’m smoking, all right,” Lorelei says. “Chain-smoking’s more like it. The more Xanax I take, the more divine the ciggy,” she says, and inhales deeply, looking, Kate imagines, like Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate.

  “Now you’re making me nervous,” Kate says. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s Rodney Greenstein.”

  “Oh, no, now what?” Greenstein is one of the city’s wealthiest men, and a beast through and through. Kate’s mother sold him and his string of ex-wives several multimillion-dollar apartments over the years, but the man’s behavior had grown increasingly intolerable. Whenever Elizabeth took him to the handful of triple-mint Fifth Avenue co-ops that had recently struck his fancy, she’d found herself down on yet another vast marble floor, picking up the trail of sugar-dusted crumbs left in Greenstein’s wake—all from those damn E.A.T. crumb cakes he brought as his mid-morning snack, nibbling on them with his hairy fingers that were either too chubby or too careless to contain the crumbs, so they followed behind him like the trail in “Hansel and Gretel.” Once, Kate knows, when her mother suggested that Greenstein might actually try and catch his crumbs in a napkin or leave the crumb cake in the entrance gallery for after the showing, he glared at her and took a big crumbly bite. According to Kate’s mother, it hit her then that Greenstein delighted in seeing her on her knees in her pencil Ralph Lauren skirt or charcoal gray pants, scrambling after his crumbs. If only he weren’t one of the biggest sharks in finance, a billionaire whose appetites—for money, real estate, and sex—are legendary. But, as she has told Kate and Isabel more than once, Elizabeth was absolutely unwilling to sell her soul for a commission no matter what the price, because Greenstein was just too vile. So she passed him off to Lorelei Lyne, who would work with anyone.

  “He’s going to make an offer on 740 Park,” Lorelei tells Kate now. “You know, the twelve-room duplex, with the double-height living room and the—”

  “Twenty million?” Kate interrupts. “With four bedrooms?”

  “Oh, yes, and it’s a serious offer,” Lorelei says.

  “Well, that sounds fabulous, so why are you crying, and why’d you call me, not Mom?”

  “Your mother’s not picking up her cell.”

  “Oh, she’s charging her phone,” Kate says. She and Isabel have a ritual of talking with their mother at the end of every night, just to check in one last time before bed. And then first thing the next morning, as well—always a quick call to discuss the weather, and what outfits and jewelry they’ll wear to work.

  “And the problem is what Greenstein wants from me,” Lorelei is saying, lighting another cigarette.

  “What do you mean?” Kate is up now, walking toward the refrigerator (she’s always been a late-night nibbler), though she knows perfectly well there’s nothing in it but some expired mayonnaise, some shiny plastic take-out packets of mustard and ketchup, a couple of bottles of pinot grigio, and a few bottles of Poland Spring and Vintage seltzer, which she and Isabel have delivered by the case from FreshDirect. That’s it. And in the freezer nothing except a half-filled ice tray. She is craving some delicious raspberry or lemon or coconut gelato from Sant Ambroeus on Madison, but why bother to have any food at home when she and Isabel have almost all their meals with their parents, in the apartment they grew up in just around the corner on Park?

  “What I mean,” Lorelei continues, her voice wobbly again, “is that Rodney Greenstein wants something I’m not sure I can give him. I mean, I could, but I don’t want to . . .”

  “Lorelei, what are you saying?” Kate says, walking back into the living room, settling back onto the sofa, and plucking a sour apple Charms pop from the apothecary jar on the end table. It’s not gelato from Sant Ambroeus, but it’s something. And these particular lollipops—which she buys by the dozen at Dylan’s Candy Bar—are her favorite.

  “Oh, my God!” Lorelei moans.

  “Lorelei, please tell me what happened,” Kate says. She picks up a copy of Vanity Fair. On the cover is a photograph of Michael Douglas looking really gorgeous; beneath him are the words

  It’s Still About Greed and . . .

  MONEY

  “He wants me to give him a b.j.,” Lorelei says in a whisper. “If I don’t, he won’t buy the apartment.”

  “WHAT?”

  “He won’t buy the apartment unless I give him a blow job, it’s as simple as that, okay?”

  “Are you kidding?” Kate says, thinking how ironic it is that she’s sucking a lollipop. “Please, please, please tell me this is a joke.”

  “If it were a joke, do you think I’d be in hysterics?”

  At least Kate’s half forgotten about Scott and her broken heart; at least there’s that. But what a night, Kate thinks, and contemplates calling her mother’s landline and waking her up to tell her everything. And to get her advice. But maybe her mother would appreciate it if she handled this turn of events regarding Greenstein on her own. She’s twenty-nine years old, after all; she can do this. “Okay, look, Lorelei,” she says, biting down on her lollipop.

  Lorelei continues. “Because if I lose this sale, this $600,000 commission for us, I’ll kill myself!”

  “Lorelei,” Kate assures her, “you’re a smart grown woman, and you know what you should do—you don’t need me to tell you.” Running her fingertip along the bottom of one of her upper molars, Kate discovers a tiny chip.

  “You have to tell me what to do!” Lorelei says. “I’m unraveling!”

  “Listen, Lorelei, when you first started at Chase Residential and Mom told you that good brokers get down on their hands and knees to close a sale, you do understand that she was not being literal, right? So get it together and let’s never, ever mention that we had this conversation.”

  “All right, fine,” Lorelei says, sniffling. “Thanks.” For a moment they sit on their ends of the line in companionable silence. “Hey, Kate? Don’t you think I should at least be a little flattered that one of the most powerful guys in the whole city wants a blow job from me?”

  Oh, dear! What is WRONG with this woman?

  Kate forces herself to be patient. “Lorelei, what he asked you to do is disgusting! I don’t care what he’s worth, he’s completely and totally vile, and it’s not one bit flattering that he de
manded a blow job from you, okay? And my mother would tell you the same thing if you asked her.”

  “Okay,” Lorelei says, but she doesn’t sound convinced.

  “Lorelei, please tell me I don’t need to worry about you,” Kate says. “Can you promise me you aren’t going there?” Gazing at the framed movie poster of High Society on the wall above her dining room table, Kate takes in the sight of the strikingly beautiful Grace Kelly in an elegant floor-length ballroom gown, flanked on either side by Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, and, in the background, Louis Armstrong poised with his trumpet at his lips. Kate and her family adore those old romantic comedies where, in the end, and with a wonderful inevitability, everything works out just as you know it was meant to. Even the names of the characters give Kate a small thrill—Tracy Samantha Lord, C. K. Dexter-Haven, George Kittredge. One of the reasons Kate and Isabel’s apartment is filled with framed old movie posters is because Tom, in his past life as the president of the major advertising agency he founded with two partners, did the campaigns for Showtime, which he named, and dozens of films, including E.T. and Back to the Future—Jonathan even has the license plate from the movie up on his wall at school. The girls loved when their father was in advertising; he had two floors of offices at 777 Third Avenue (Elizabeth always said, “What a lucky number!”), and they would go and draw in the art department, and sit on their father’s lap and help him edit copy. And the holiday parties they had (usually catered by Shun Lee Palace)! One of Tom’s biggest clients had a pet monkey who played cards, and who for many years was the surprise guest at the parties. But their favorite thing was that Tom did the campaigns for Loews Hotels and Princess Hotels, so that in addition to the family always being sent to fabulous places, like the Southampton Princess Hotel in Bermuda, Kate and Isabel, ages seven and four, modeled in their brochures, the two little girls standing at the far end of the beach in matching purple bathing suits with stripes of rainbow down the sides, snorkel masks on their heads, flippers on their feet, and braids in their hair. Kate was toothless, with wet brown bangs across her forehead, and Isabel had a mop of curly blond hair.

  “Okay, I promise,” Lorelei is saying now in a tiny voice, and hangs up.

  Kate’s purple cell phone, which she keeps with her along with her BlackBerry at all times, rings again an instant later; it’s her client Alexa Walden, whose brother had been in high school with Kate at Horace Mann—where Kate and Isabel have served on the alumni council since they graduated and attend monthly meetings for benefits and fund-raising, often at the divine head of school Tom Kelly’s house in Riverdale. Alexa’s husband is an investment banker who’s done exceptionally well at Goldman Sachs. So well, in fact, that they’d been looking for nearly six months now to upgrade their postwar apartment at 1025 Fifth and move to a prewar on Park or Fifth.

  “We heard back from the co-op board,” Alexa says; she sounds miserable, as if she’s just suffered an unbearable loss. Or in her case, more likely, as though she just received a rejection letter stating that her five-year-old, Chloe, has been denied acceptance to the $36,000-a-year kindergarten of her choice.

  “What do you mean?” Kate says, sitting up. “They called you?” Clients almost never heard from co-op boards before their brokers did.

  “I told them I was desperate to hear and asked them how soon I would find out. And then I just went ahead and gave them my cell phone number and begged them to call me directly. And you know what: they turned us down!” Alexa wails. “I loved every bit of that apartment—the wrap-around terraces, that three-room master suite, that enormous entrance gallery, in my head I’d already arranged all my artwork. . . . It was fucking perfect!”

  Kate sighs. “Oh, no, Alexa, what did you do?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Alexa says vaguely. “You have to fix this, Kate.”

  “Alexa, didn’t we go over in great detail what you should look and act like at the board meeting? You said you took notes! Understated! That meant no Chanel bag, or huge diamonds; no labels, no spiked heels, no short dresses or low-cut shirts. I told you what Mom always says, ‘When your own initials are enough’—like Bottega Veneta. . . . Remember, I even said look like Miranda on Sex and the City—remember I told you all that?”

  “Well, I had to take the special-order Birkin with me, you know, the one with the saltwater crocodile skin and the diamonds in the buckle,” Alexa reports. “But just because I was on my way to a cocktail party at 834 Fifth afterward, and I told the board that, I figured they’d understand—”

  “Alexa, was there something else? I can’t imagine they turned you down simply because of the way you were dressed,” Kate says, though she knows that of course they could have. Knowing Alexa, who likes to dress low-cut and sexy, and in her strappy six-inch Louboutins and no stockings, her beautifully tanned face fresh from the Viceroy in Anguilla where she vacationed most recently, well, Kate can easily imagine the distaste with which the brittle, sixtysomething ladies on the co-op board viewed her, despite her impeccable financials. What they feared, Kate speculates, was the very thought of their distinguished husbands riding in the elevator for even two minutes with the likes of the sexy young wife of one of Goldman Sachs’ most valuable players, Alexa licking her lips or rubbing her long red nail over one of her quilted Chanels. Alexa, as Kate saw tonight, is unable to control her urges.

  “I remember you told me to keep my mouth shut during the co-op interview, and not to speak unless spoken to, but I just can’t stand those awkward silences,” Alexa confesses. “They’re dreadful. So I made small talk here and there, but nothing serious.”

  Kate sighs, thinking, What’s the point, really, when the deal has come undone and it’s too late for a miracle. Though she does in fact know of a client who, having been rejected because of the scandals of her much-married, drug-rehabbed celebrity father, wrote a sweetly poignant letter begging for a second chance from a co-op board—a letter that ultimately warmed the board’s icy hearts and got her client the $6 million apartment of her dreams. But that, of course, was a rarity. A co-op board is like the Harvard admissions office: once they turn you down, it’s over.

  What a hideous night it’s been. (Speaking of which, where is her sister? She’s due back any minute now from Millbrook, a cute little town upstate in Dutchess County, where Isabel had gone for the weekend with Michael. It’s almost midnight, and tomorrow’s Monday.) Even when a client gets hoist by her own petard, Kate knows she must act sympathetically and behave like a lady.

  “Oh, those terraces,” Alexa says tearfully. “Will we ever find any like them? Kate, what have I done? I don’t know why boards won’t let you bring brokers to board meetings—I just know you would have controlled me!”

  “I promise you, Alexa, we’ll find you another apartment that you’ll fall in love with. Now tell me you believe me. Okay? I want you to have a glass of wine and get a good night’s sleep, and we’ll start again tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” Alexa says morosely. “Whatever.”

  “Speak to you tomorrow,” Kate says.

  She’s about to call her brother, who’s always up late hanging with his friends or girlfriend, and is always the perfect tonic when she needs cheering up. But there’s another call on her cell phone now.

  “Hi there,” she says at the sound of Samantha Siegal’s excited voice.

  “Wait till you hear about my weekend!” Samantha is her oldest and, other than Isabel, closest girlfriend; she and Kate started at Horace Mann nursery school together more than a quarter of a century ago, and ended up as roommates at Penn fifteen years later.

  Despite her slightly chipped molar, Kate selects another lollipop from the apothecary jar and begins to unwrap it as Sam shrieks happily into the phone: Randy, her boyfriend since right after college, only a few minutes ago presented her with a sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring. Kate is, of course, one of the very first people Sam is calling, the very first person, in fac
t, after her mother, to hear the news.

  So her oldest friend is engaged. And what comes immediately to Kate—before she even has a chance to congratulate Sam—is a line from High Society: “My dear boy, this is the sort of day history tells us is better spent in bed.”

  “I’m so excited for you,” Kate hears herself say, her voice rising with each word, trying not to cry. “I couldn’t be happier.” And it’s the truth, even though she feels so terribly lonely at this moment, lonelier, she’s sure, than she’s ever felt in this enviably lucky, privileged life of hers.

  Chapter Two

  Isabel

  Legendary Bldg off Madison

  4 large bedrooms, 3 baths and EIK in the famed Carlyle House; private elevator landing, old-world details throughout—ESTATE SALE $5.9m.

  Isabel is having an awful, everything-that-can-possibly-go-wrong-does sort of morning. It started when she slept right through her alarm and woke, disoriented, to find that Dixie, the delicious shih tzu puppy she and Kate had recently bought from a breeder in Pennsylvania, had somehow tumbled off her bed, chewed through the toe of one of the new Christian Louboutin pumps Isabel had kicked off the night before, and left a couple of puddles (surprisingly large, considering she’s such a small dog) on the floor, one of which Isabel stepped in on her way to the bathroom.

  This inauspicious beginning on the morning after her return from Millbrook was followed by the discovery that a carelessly uncapped Sharpie had left an indelible black scrawl inside her favorite champagne leather Bottega Veneta bag. Kate had woken up in a foul mood, responding to Isabel’s inquiries with monosyllables. And then came a jerky, stop-and-start cab ride to her first appointment, which made the latté she’d gotten at Juliano’s—the small neighborhood espresso bar her family loved for its coffee—and gulped in an effort to wake herself up churn miserably in her stomach. At this moment, Isabel laments that her family never hired a driver. (They did once, actually; his name was Leo, and two weeks after he started, the market crashed and Tom and Elizabeth had nowhere to be driven to, so Leo sat in front of their building or office waiting for them all day. A few weeks after that, they sadly had to let him go, and there was never talk of a driver again. Elizabeth thought she’d single-handedly caused the crash of 1987.) Isabel actually had to get off the phone with her mother—their usual first-thing-in-the morning phone call, delayed by Isabel having overslept—because she needed to close her eyes and put her head back on her seat to rest for a few minutes.