Alternate Side(47)
“I’m sorry if I upset you,” Nora said. “His wife talked as though I wasn’t the only one who had visited.”
“Yes,” Sherry Fisk said. “George went up there and apparently told Ricky that if he didn’t say the whole thing was an accident he would never work on the block again. That wasn’t helpful, either.”
Nora felt her face grow hot. Being lumped in with George was a terrible feeling. “Apparently Ricky’s wife came in and hit George with a crutch. It’s the only good thing to come out of this whole sorry situation.” Sherry started to laugh a little tentatively, as though she hadn’t laughed in a while and was trying to get the laugh motor running again. “I have to admit, the idea of someone hitting George with a crutch made my day. She didn’t hit you, did she?”
Nora shook her head, although she suspected Nita had wanted to. As Nora was going toward the double doors that led to the elevators, walking fast, although what she really wanted to do was sprint, she had heard footfalls behind her.
“Hey!” Nita called, and Nora turned to see her with the candy box in her hand. “You leave these?”
“The food is pretty terrible here, right?”
“Not bad enough to eat these,” she said, shoving the box hard into Nora’s chest. “And all that stuff you give Rico for the kids? He sells it all on eBay. Ice skates? Who you kidding, lady? Ice skates?”
Nora and Charlie were a little surprised to find themselves going to a dinner party, but it saved them eating alone together, which had become difficult since they were barely speaking, and it was an invitation that could not be denied. Charlie still had hopes of another rung on the ladder at Parsons Ridge, and the dinner was being given by one of the so-called rainmakers, Jim DeGeneris. There had almost been a snafu; Charlie had looked at the date and time, but not the address, and until the afternoon of the dinner had planned to meet Nora at the DeGeneris apartment, a rather bare but enormous place with elaborate moldings and fireplaces off Fifth. But his assistant had reminded him that Jim and his wife were now separated and that Jim had moved to a loft in Tribeca, neither of which Charlie had known, making it even more important that they attend the dinner party. “A Tribeca loft,” said Nora. “Where rich guys go when they ditch the first wife. When he remarries someone younger he’ll move to Madison Park.”
“Maybe table the cynicism for tonight,” Charlie said on the phone. “This could be important for me.” Nora had lost count of how many times her husband had said this. They each found the other’s work inconsequential, for very different reasons. But hers was shinier in public. Charlie was interested in what she did when he could proffer it for possible professional gain, or at least reflected stature. He needed the card to play. He was afraid that he was never going to be one of the big men, the ones whose names popped up in Forbes or the Journal. He was usually the third guy to be introduced to the major client in the conference room.
“Is Jim cooking?” Nora asked.
“I have no idea,” Charlie said. Charlie had never cooked a thing in his life. When she left him something to reheat, on those evenings she was out with a prospect or a friend, he would always text: What temp how long? Several years before, she had written on the chalkboard in the kitchen 350/30 minutes. It was still there. She’d once seen a quote on someone’s inspiration board—“Kill me if I ever have an inspiration board,” she’d said to her sister, who’d responded with a silence so weighty that Nora instantly concluded that Christine had one—that said “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” She actually sometimes thought that was the definition of marriage.
“Everyone attibutes that quote to Einstein,” said Jenny, standing in the wreckage of what had been her old kitchen and would become her new one. “It’s not Einstein. Maybe it was Einstein’s wife.”
“Was Einstein married?”
Jenny had nodded. “Can you imagine? You’re not married to a man who thinks he’s Einstein, you’re married to a man who is Einstein.”
“God, this looks great,” Nora said when Jenny showed her the cabinet door samples. “This finish is beautiful. Jasper really knows what he’s doing, although I assume you get special treatment.”
“That’s what happens when you’re fellating the craftsman,” Jenny said.
“Oh, my God, Jen,” Nora said.
“I love that you’re still shockable. Seriously, he’s really talented. And I don’t just mean in the obvious way. He reads all the time. He cooks, too.”
“Oh, please, save me from the man who allegedly cooks.”
“This is completely different, Nor. He’s not a guy who talks about cooking, or buys a ten-thousand-dollar stove and then tells you you can’t make osso bucco properly on anything else. He’s a guy who goes through the cupboards, stops at the butcher, and makes real food that tastes good without making a big deal about it or expecting you to act like he cured cancer.”
Jim DeGeneres was the other guy, the guy who acted as though making a meal were akin to nuclear fission, who produced food that tasted of nothing, or too much of something you couldn’t identify and didn’t particularly like. Nora knew this new place would have a monumental kitchen, and it did. The Tribeca loft was cavernous and modern but, oddly, done in Swedish antiques, all white and blue. It was the kind of downtown place that, for a few years after September 11, would have gone begging. Everyone who lived below Canal Street had been traumatized; everyone who had considered buying or renting there had gone elsewhere. But though everyone was fond of saying that New York, and New Yorkers, had been changed forever by the terrorist attacks, forever in terms of real estate lasted about thirty months. A shiny new tower stood where the Twin Towers had crumpled to the earth, and the downtown real estate market had bounced back. At some point Nora expected Jim to say, “I don’t want to tell you what I paid for this place,” and then proceed to do just that.