The Girl Next Door (4 page)

Madison was the first promiscuous person Charlotte had ever known. (And the first adult person besides herself that Charlotte had ever seen entirely naked, Madison having once stripped off completely while seeking Charlotte’s opinion on which short and sparkling outfit she should wear to some party or other.) Sex was, for Madison, something completely separate from love. On one, she considered herself a talented expert. As for the other, she claimed to have had several misadventures and been left wounded and vulnerable, although Charlotte wasn’t convinced. Her own virginity was a subject they never touched upon. Charlotte didn’t volunteer, and Madison didn’t probe. If it wasn’t about Madison, it wasn’t really worth discussing, and virginity hadn’t been about Madison for many years.

It had been shocking to Charlotte, at first, to hear details. ‘Play by plays’, Madison called them, laughing. But she was used to it now. Madison had a new theme recently. Jackson Grayling III. Trip, as he was known. She’d been out with some college friends from Wall Street, who’d been joined by some guys who worked nearby. They’d been connecting the dots of their lovely lives, as young people like that did. And she’d found out that Trip, the scruffy but undeniably good‐looking, nocturnal guy who lived on the fifth floor, was this filthy‐rich trust‐fund guy whose parents owned half of Texas, or something.

Madison didn’t link sex with love. But she sure as hell linked love with money. Charlotte didn’t care much about money, so long as she could pay the rent and bills and buy books. She sent about twenty per cent of what she earned home, where it helped cancel out the debt she owed her parents for college. And she saved, more than might be expected, from her salary at the library. She didn’t crave things the way Madison seemed to.

Madison earned more than twice what she did, working at a fashion magazine. And Charlotte knew that her mother sent her cheques almost every month, and paid the air fare when she was going home for the holidays. But she was always claiming penury, usually because she’d have spent her food money on shoes in Barneys in her lunch hour. She had what she called a ‘wish board’ in her apartment, propped up against the kitchen cabinet next to the sink. She said she got the idea off
Oprah
once, when she’d been home with a cold and watching daytime television. Oprah had told her she should put pictures of all the things she dreamed of on a board, and that this would help her visualize them, and thus come closer to attaining them. Charlotte suspected that Oprah – even if you didn’t consider the idea to be hokum, as she did – had loftier ideals for such a board, and hadn’t particularly meant it for an YSL Muse bag and a three‐carat, princess‐cut Tiffany diamond necklace. But those were the things that Madison dreamed of.

Madison talked about marriage a lot. It was inevitable, clearly, in her mind. This part of her life – the time when she dated lots of men and slept with almost all of them without ever knowing things about them – this was just now. When the time came (and Madison thought that twenty‐seven was about the right time) she would get serious in her search. And the guy she found (a guy who wouldn’t mind at all that she’d spent the previous five years working her way through the male population of Manhattan, apparently) would be wealthy or, at the very least, have spectacular prospects, from a good family, tall, athletic, handsome and generous. Fate would take care of it all. There was a little girl’s heart beating far beneath the Agent Provocateur‐clad bosom of Madison Cavanagh, and it dreamed of Prince Charming.

Who may or may not currently be sporting a slightly lazy goatee and living on the fifth floor of this very building…

Since the story had first been told, around February time, Madison had been on what Charlotte called (only in her own head) ‘Trip watch’, which was a somewhat frustrating game, since Trip rarely appeared. She’d cornered him in the elevator once or twice, and talked to him about the friend of a friend they had in common, but he hadn’t taken the bait. She’d commandeered a package she’d seen Raoul signing for once, and taken it to Trip’s door, but he’d been on the phone when she rang the doorbell, and though he’d winked and mouthed thanks at her when he’d taken the envelope, nothing more had come of it.

Charlotte wished she was so certain there was a happy ending in her future. She sat, every day, on the subway, and looked at the men in the carriage, none of whom, it seemed, were ever looking back. Most of them, she wouldn’t want. But one… just one, one day…

Eve

This apartment was beautiful, and easily the best part of their new life so far. She felt like she was living inside the pages of a magazine she used to read in the hairdressers. Eve had found it when she’d been over in January. The bank used a relocation company, assigning her a consultant, Francine, who was a veritable font of knowledge. She, in turn, had set up a day of appointments with real estate brokers across the city. Eve had felt impossibly glamorous, being picked up outside the hotel by a limo, and driven from location to location all day. In between appointments, Francine would talk to her in the back of the car about neighbourhoods and budgets, and sip Vitamin Water without smudging her lip gloss. She had patiently explained the difference between a co‐op and a condo and a cond op. About supers, and doormen. She appeared to know the location of every Whole Foods and Dean & Deluca and CVS Pharmacy in the city, as well as every park and most Zagat rated restaurants worth eating at. Francine lived in Brooklyn with her boyfriend Anthony (pronounced with a soft ‘th’) and Anthony’s two sons ‘from a previous relationship with a complete bi‐atch’. She’d left her beloved Manhattan for Anthony, a firefighter. Eve reasoned Anthony could have had no greater declaration of love from Francine.

They’d been lucky and struck gold late morning, after seeing five depressing places Eve wouldn’t have lived in at any price. The last had been above a nail salon, and the smell of acetone was still in her nostrils, making her feel faintly queasy. It was probably almost time for lunch. Eve wondered if Francine ate lunch, and whether, if she did, she could do that, too, without smudging her lip gloss. Francine had a call on her cell, about a place that had literally just come on the market. Eve never believed it when they said that on property shows on the telly, but this time it was true. Francine hailed a cab with frantic arm movements made far too far out into the path of oncoming traffic. On the way, she waxed lyrical about the location. Upper East Side. Mid 70s. Close to the Met and the Frick, and not too far from Bloomies. Between Park and Lexington, close to the subway at 77th and the park at Cedar Hill. Handy for the hospital, if you should be unlucky enough to need it, and close to a great gym. Ed could be at work in fifteen minutes, which seemed extraordinary. He would love that.

By the time the car stopped outside the building, Eve had allowed herself to get a little excited. No nail salon in sight, for a start. Francine explained that the building was a co‐op. As a tenant, renting from a management company, she could vote on board matters, but never join the board. ‘And who in their right mind would want to, you may well ask,’ she raised her eyebrows cynically. Francine used shorthand, not all of which made complete sense to Eve. She didn’t entirely know what a co‐op board was, although Ed had explained that co‐ops were like businesses, and if you owned an apartment you owned shares in the building. She understood 24‐hour doorman (how cool was that?) but not why they would be called ‘white glove’ when they weren’t wearing any. She understood AC, but not HVAC. Should have something to do with hoovering. Didn’t. It must be good, though, since Francine was listing it gleefully in her flat accent. This was a ‘reno’ – a renovation, Eve realized – which received Francine’s most animated response, with all stainless‐steel appliances and a vast Viking range (at this point Francine’s cup runneth over, almost literally, since her ample chest heaved with pleasure and threatened to break free from its buttoned sweater). The Viking range looking exactly like you might use it to cook for real Vikings. Eve couldn’t imagine switching it on just to bake two potatoes for supper.

The building had an awning. That was the first thing Eve noticed, apart from the absence of a nail bar. Awnings were so very New York. It was like being in an episode of
Friends
. This one was burgundy red, and quite new, and attached to shiny brass poles. You could easily imagine Charlotte York coming out in a Jackie O shift dress carrying a Hermès Birkin. There was a long, thin lobby, with a marble floor, and a large circular table, on which sat an elaborate arrangement of silk flowers. There were two elevators at one end, and a small room at the other where the ‘white glove’ gloveless doorman sat. It was full of dry cleaning, hung in plastic on racks, and parcels. He announced them and they took the elevator to the seventh floor. The lift had a seat in the corner, and Eve sat on it, trying to suppress a giggle at the grandeur of it all. House hunting was never like this in the Surrey Hills. She tried to remember everything for when she phoned Cath, later on. A woman who looked, sounded, and even smelt like Francine, just a brunette version, greeted them, and invited Eve to take a look around, explaining that the furniture was not part of the rental, but that the apartment had been ‘staged for viewings’.

But it wasn’t the furniture that interested Eve. It was the light, flooding in from the windows on three sides. She realized, standing there, that light was what had been missing from all the apartments she’d seen that morning. Even the biggest had been dark. In the light, she suddenly felt lighter herself, and for the first time all day, she began to imagine herself, sitting by that window, standing at that counter. Pouring a drink for Ed and herself.

It wasn’t huge. Most of the square footage appeared to be in this one room, which had the kitchen floating in the middle. You’d sit on sofas and armchairs, she guessed, at one end, and have a table and chairs at the other. The Viking range stood proudly in the middle of the run of units, looking industrial and intimidating, and there was plenty of the stainless steel that had got Francine so excited on the phone on the way over. Beyond, there were two bedrooms, one of which was pretty tiny, but you could probably fit a 5ft bed in it, for visitors, Eve figured, so long as they didn’t mind vaulting over it to get to the hallway. The master had a bathroom, with a separate shower (showerhead the size of a dinner plate, she noticed gleefully), and the only wall which would take a king size bed faced two huge windows with a great cityscape view, of water towers, strangely archaic alongside the modern, tall buildings. There was a helicopter hovering in the middle of one.

Everything was painted magnolia and the floor was a herringbone pattern of wood, polished shiny new and smooth.

This was unbelievably cool.

‘Come see this,’ Francine urged animatedly, pulling Eve back away from the bedrooms. Triumphant, she opened a door, revealing a cupboard into which had been stacked a small washing machine and a tumble dryer. ‘Laundry.’ She said it like she was saying ‘George Clooney’ or ‘Holy Grail’. The only thing Francine apparently found more exciting than a unit with a laundry was a unit with a walk‐in closet. Sadly, there wasn’t one of those here, but the wardrobes in both bedrooms seemed pretty big, empty, at least. Eve wasn’t entirely sure, anyway, that any of her clothes were going to work in this new life. Might take a while to fill those closets with the appropriate gear.

It felt right. Not just exactly right, like the cottage had. More right than anything else she’d seen. Different, but right. And so cool she wished she could call Cath immediately, just to giggle down the phone. This was someone else’s life. ‘Can we afford it?’ she whispered to Francine, although the other real estate broker (why did you have to have two anyway?) was down by the window, talking into her cellphone and fiddling with her hair.

‘Yes. No third bedroom cum office, which was on your list originally. So you’ll do your paperwork in the living room and tell anyone visiting who wants to bring their kids that the Waldorf’s ten blocks that way. Yes, it’s in budget. D’ya want it?’

‘I want it. We do.’

‘Does your husband need to come see it?’

‘No, he trusts me. Tell them we’ll take it.’

Just like that. She’d found them a home. A light‐filled, two bed, eighth‐floor apartment, not a flat, with city views, in a co‐op off Park Avenue –
Park Avenue!
– in New York City. It was getting more real by the day…

They’d left most of their furniture in the cottage. Renters paid more for furnished properties, the agent said, and since she thought the house would appeal more to young families than to single sharers, she told them they needn’t worry too much about things getting wrecked. Obviously, Eve thought, the agent didn’t know much about young families. There weren’t many pieces of furniture in Cath’s house that didn’t have scratches, or dents, or at the very least mysteriously sticky patches on them – except those in the front room that locked from the outside, and where Cath and Geoff went to listen to classical music and read the newspapers. She didn’t want to take the stuff, actually. The cottage was pine and oak and as much retro chintz as Ed could tolerate, in a palette of duck‐egg blue and cream and soft pink. This apartment, their new home, called for something entirely less… country and shabby chic. She’d gone shopping, armed with a Visa card which tapped into a relocation package bonus and a new urban vision, buying a structural sectional sofa in brown suede, with sheepskin cushions, and a glass and chrome coffee table that looked like a wave.

They’d put lots of their personal things into store in England. Ed was all for getting rid of most of it, but Eve was more sentimental, and more inclined, she thought, to tie herself to the UK, not only with family and friends but with a storage bin on an industrial estate that cost £100 a month. What they brought with them – had shipped – amounted to little more than half a container. Books (the clever, book club kind, not the really good ones with the dog‐eared corners that fell open at the saucy bits), clothes (all wrong, already – New York women wore dresses and heels all day, and appeared to be strangers to fleeces and Barbours. Was she destined to be uncomfortable every day of her life here, she wondered?), wedding pictures in silver frames (how young they looked, already), some kitchen stuff …