The Nest(29)

“Well, her clothes are of another place and time, too,” Celia said. “God. What is she wearing? Who still shops at thrift stores? Hasn’t she heard about bedbugs?”

“Stop,” Lena said, sounding guilty but still laughing.

“And those braids. Honestly,” Celia said. “How old are we?”

“I feel bad for her, though,” Lena said. “Stuck at Paper Fibres. People in that world know who she is, still recognize her name. It must be hard, being Beatrice Plumb.”

Bea was grateful that she was still leaning against a wall, had flattened both hands on the cool plaster and felt sturdy, supported, and able to withstand the wave of rage and humiliation roaring over her. She closed her eyes. The room smelled like cat even though there wasn’t a cat in sight and no other signs of an animal in the house. She wondered if Celia made a housekeeper or a neighbor hide the cat when she had guests so her pristine apartment wouldn’t be sullied by a bowl of pet food or a scratching post; she seemed like that kind of traitor.

Bea stepped away from the wall and hurried to button her coat and pull on her hat. Celia and Lena were gossiping about someone else and moving into the living room. Bea entered the now-empty kitchen, heading for the front door; she stopped in front of an impressive array of expensive cookies destined for the dessert table. She opened her canvas tote and carefully slid all the cookies inside. Celia walked back into the room just as Bea was covering the stash with paper napkins. “Bea!” she said, stopping short, looking slightly abashed but also annoyed. “Where did you come from?”

“Nowhere,” Bea said. Celia eyed the empty plate and Bea’s bulging tote. “I can’t stay for dessert,” Bea said, “but thank you for a lovely evening.” They stared at each other for a few laden seconds, each daring the other to speak, and then Bea turned and walked straight out the front door.





CHAPTER TEN


Jack was winded when he ascended the stairs after arriving at the Bergen Street stop in Brooklyn. How could he be so out of shape? He’d been to Stephanie’s once before, years ago, right after she moved in and she and Leo were doing whatever it was she and Leo did on and off for all those years: f*cking, teasing, staging their hetero melodramas. He and Walker had casually considered buying a brownstone once, but Jack didn’t want to live so far from his shop, and reopening in Brooklyn was unthinkable; he believed he’d lose too many customers, which was probably no longer the case now that Brooklyn was unaffordable and unrecognizable. Jack remembered Stephanie’s street as being fairly derelict. Today it seemed as if every third house had a construction Dumpster out front. He stopped in front of one brownstone under renovation. The doors were open and the curving mahogany staircase with freshly painted white risers was visible. He could see straight through into the rear open kitchen where two workers were laboring to fit a massive stainless-steel refrigerator into a cutout in the back wall.

Another lost opportunity, Jack thought. Well, that was the story these days if you were a longtime New Yorker and hadn’t jumped on the real estate carousel at the right time. No matter where he looked lately, the city was mocking him and his financial woes. He picked up his pace and soon he was standing in front of Stephanie’s building. A light in the upstairs hallway went off. Good. Someone was home. He hoped it was Leo, but if it wasn’t, he’d sit there until Leo returned. He had all day. It was a Monday and his store was closed.

“Three months,” Leo had said that afternoon in the Oyster Bar. “Give me three months to present you with some kind of plan.”

And so he had. Three months and seventy-two hours to be exact and Leo wasn’t answering phone calls or e-mails and he’d better have a f*cking plan. Jack was in a near panic. He’d barely slept since the meeting with his old friend Arthur, the one who had helped him obtain the homeowner’s line of credit.

Jack was concealing an enormous debt from Walker, a tangled thicket of money and deception. Walker knew that most years Jack’s revenue barely covered his expenses, but he never objected because Jack loved what he did. But Walker was completely unaware of how Jack’s rent had risen (dramatically, precipitously) during the last five years and that Jack was keeping the store above water with a home equity line of credit taken against the small weekend property they owned on the North Fork of Long Island. At the time, it had seemed a logical solution to what he hoped were temporary financial woes, a welcome bit of magic, when his old friend Arthur had proposed the opportunity over drinks one night when Jack complained about his balance sheet. He and Arthur had gone to Vassar together and shared an apartment the first year they lived in Manhattan.

“As easy as opening a credit card!” Arthur worked for an Internet mortgage lender and claimed he helped friends “put their equity to use” all the time. “Won’t cost you a cent!”

Jack knew he wasn’t alone in the mid-2000s, falling prey to this gilded logic, but he realized with a sickening heart that he’d been among the last before the financial system nearly buckled under the weight of its own greed and folly. Worse, he knew better. He’d listened to Walker rail against the loans for years, had heard him discourage their friends and acquaintances and neighbors and his clients from participating in the feverish, implausible extending of credit. “It’s not just foolish,” Walker had said over and over about the swollen mortgage industry, “it’s bordering on illegal. It’s fraud and it’s completely unethical.”