The Girl in Times Square (26 page)

Whoever said that money did not bring happiness obviously had none. Lily was feeling a little better, a little stronger, eating a little. For the two weeks that she went out every day and came back with stacks of stuff, it brought her great happiness.

She would go out in her new cashmere tracksuit, in her new black wool coat, her new boots, a new bag, a new spiffy red hat to cover the fuzz on her head. Lily bought earrings and books, and more DVDs, addicted to comedies. She bought Joy a cashmere coat. She bought Amanda an SUV—to drive the girls around in. She bought Anne another month in her apartment. She paid the property taxes on Grandma’s Brooklyn brownstone for five years up front. After two weeks of Gucci and Guess? and Prada three-quarter length red rainslickers (the coolest raincoat
ever
), Lily was done. She bought a digital camera, a digital video recorder, she bought a stereo and a kitchen faucet because hers was leaking. She bought an iMac. She bought a plush down quilt for the bed, comfy pillows, a throw rug, a vase. Two weeks of shopping and she was done.

And now what?

She called him. “Spencer, can I buy you something?”

“I told you no. Not a thing.”

“Come on. Don’t be such a stickler for propriety. This isn’t about a detective and his witness.”

“What is it about then?”

Good question. “When is your birthday?”

“Don’t have one.”

“How about an Armani suit for your birthday?”

“If you want me to lose my job, go right ahead.”

He was so stubborn. “I think I want to move,” said Lily with a sigh.

“Very good idea. Move where?”

“I don’t know. Central Park West? Central Park East? SoHo? Chelsea? Where do you think?”

“Anywhere but that apartment would be good.”

Just for fun Lily decided to go look at some available apartments. She asked Spencer to come with her because she didn’t want to appear to be the gullible sap she actually was. But though Spencer had agreed to come, she didn’t hear from him that Saturday, and even when she beeped him, he didn’t call her back. She didn’t see him Sunday, which was odd. On Tuesday after her blood work when he did call, he said he would go with her the following weekend, but the following weekend came and she couldn’t get hold of him again.

“Spencer, where were you?” Lily asked, almost plaintively on Monday. She didn’t want to sound upset, he certainly wasn’t obligated to come with her, but if he said he would, why didn’t he? Was he not as good as his word? Lily hadn’t expected that from Spencer.

He didn’t answer, and when she pressed him teasingly, he got a funny cold look in his eyes that told her that she was overstepping her bounds, even kidding around. So she quickly let it go and didn’t ask him to come with her again—and he didn’t offer.

Lily went with Paul and Rachel instead even though Paul said, “Lil, I don’t want you to leave your apartment. What happens when Amy comes back and finds you all moved out and gone?”

“This is just for fun, Paulie,” she said, squeezing him.

The real estate woman, Marilyn Alterbrando, asked, “Will you be selling your apartment?” and Lily replied that no, she was only renting at the moment. The realtor’s face soured. “Will you be needing a mortgage?”

“No,” said Lily, “I’m paying cash.”

“The apartments we’re seeing today, they’re a bit pricey.”

“I know.”

“Oh.”

Okay, that felt
good.

They saw a loft in Greenwich Village, a studio on the West Side, a one-bedroom in Hell’s Kitchen, a tiny two-room on the Upper East Side, all for a million dollars. “If you have two million, I can show you some really nice places. Maybe you can get a mortgage for the other million?”

“Won’t need to.” Okay, that also felt
very
good.

After two weekends of going around Manhattan, Lily found her dream life: a 5000-square-foot, brand-new floor-through on 64th Street overlooking Central Park, which was going for $9,000,000 without all the options or $11,000,000 with extra crown molding.

“That’s a lot of fucking crown molding,” said Spencer when he heard.

Lily liked the apartment so much she arranged for a Sunday morning second viewing and dragged a reluctant but curious Spencer to see it, afterward taking him to the long-promised, long-undelivered brunch at the Plaza—without Mary. They sat at a little table in Palm Court. Lily was monochromally red—beret, rainslicker, galoshes. Spencer was monochromally gray—chinos, shirt, tie. His brown hair was growing out. Her bald head was under crimson cover.

“So what did you think?”

“Lily, why do you want to live on the Upper East Side? You’re not an Upper East Side kind of gal.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Know-It-All. I
want
to be
that kind of gal.” The waiter came and asked if they wanted mimosas—champagne and orange juice. Lily said yes.

Just orange juice and black coffee for Spencer. “You need a bedroom and an art studio. What are you going to do with five bedrooms, formals and a library?”

“My art needs to go somewhere.”

“Your art can fit into your closet. You’re not going to be storing this future art, are you? You plan to be selling it, right? Because you can store your non-existent art for a lot less than eleven million bucks.”

“I want an elevator that goes right up to my apartment. I want park views. I want crown molding.”

“Why do you want five bathrooms? You’ll have to clean them all.”

“Well, I don’t plan to use them all. I’ll use just one.”

“So what do you need five for?”

“Oh, Spencer! Didn’t you like it?”

“You don’t need a 5000-square-foot apartment,” he said firmly. Lily and Spencer were having this conversation with waffles on their plates while waiting for their custom-made omelettes, while the violinist and the pan-flutist played a
pas de deux
of Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 1.

“I didn’t say I needed it. I said I wanted it.”

“You don’t have eleven million dollars.”

That was true. Lily’s money just was not going far enough in New York City. Yet New York was all she knew. That was the conundrum. She remained where she was, but one thing was becoming abundantly clear. She couldn’t remain where she was. Amy’s ghost was living with her in the apartment. It started to feel crowded. Now that Lily was healthier, the ghost got healthier, too.

Lily started to get the ill feeling she was being watched. She started closing all her windows and drawing her shades like the couple across the yard. Turned out they weren’t drawing the shades, they were no longer together. Two women lived in the apartment now.

Was it crazy, the slight paranoia? Or was it just a rationalization for wanting to move to eleven-million-dollar digs on Fifth? She asked Spencer if he ever found anything about Milo. When he said he had not, Lily became tightfisted. She sold her second Prada bag on eBay, and her second pair of Stuart Weitzman shoes, and her only Tiffany bracelet. She started renting her DVDs, and buying clips for all the snack bags so they wouldn’t go stale. Suddenly life loomed large in front of Lily again, and it was no point throwing away her money—after all, there might come a day when she would need it.

But though she had sold all her baubles and her beads, she still felt she was being watched, almost as if the two had nothing to do with one another.

“Everybody has their own karma. Can I help it that I think mine is to die young?”
Amy said to Lily once. Forgotten words that would have stayed forgotten, if only, if
only
Amy had not been missing for nine months. For nine months, every single night as Lily turned out the lights in the apartment and walked past Amy’s closed door to her own bedroom, the words sounded out with her every step—but only in the darkest hours, when she felt ghostly eyes on her. Because during sunlight and during morning, during lunches with Spencer and sketching and shopping, Lily, along with Amy’s childhood friend Paul, continued to cry over homemade margaritas that they hoped Amy was safe somewhere.

Alive somewhere.

In early February, after a fifth clean blood test and a celebratory removal of her Hickman catheter, and after realizing she could not afford an eleven-million-dollar change of life, Lily decided to seek the services of a financial consultant.

She was still giving cash to Anne. And Amanda’s husband had called, hemming and hawing, to ask for a “small loan” to jump-start his own body shop in Bedford. There was a nice space becoming available in a good location, but the banks were proving difficult, and could Lily make him a small loan of two-hundred-and-fifty thousand dollars, to change her sister and nieces’ lives for the better? Lily gave him the money so that her sister Amanda would love her again, and call her again. The SUV for the girls just didn’t seem to do it.

It worked. Lily got some sisterly phone calls. It was worth it, but now she had to think about her future. After all, she had a family to support.

She picked a name out of the phone book at random. Lily figured the lottery came to her at random, she might as well pick at random the man who was going to take care of that money.

The man turned out to be a forty-year-old woman named Katherine, a vice president at Smith Barney. She was intimidating and tall, and had perfect bone structure that didn’t come
from her bodyfat being eaten away by chemo drugs. She said, looking Lily over carefully, “Please—call me Katie,” but did not become less intimidating. She looked at Lily full on and said the sort of correct things that a compassionate stranger might say. Not an awkward moment in Katie’s office, the walls of which were covered in bookshelves but no art.

Katie and Lily established that if she continued to live in her rat-hole of an apartment on 9th Street, with her current food, utility, entertainment and art supply needs, her yearly expenses would come to $50,000, and that included Christmas and birthday shopping, and an occasional backpack or boots but not both. A safe six-percent return on her remaining six million dollars would yield Lily $360,000 a year. “You can get a mortgage on a great apartment,” Katie said, drumming on her desk with a pencil, “buy boots and bags, go on vacation, give money to charitable causes to offset the capital gains tax, family gifts are not considered charitable contributions by the way, and still have a hundred thousand a year left over for knick-knacks.”

Lily chewed her lip. Clearing her throat, she timidly asked, “A mortgage, huh? How much would a mortgage be on, say…just for the sake of argument…an eleven-million-dollar apartment?”

That made Katie stop drumming on her desk with a pencil.

“About a hundred thousand dollars,” she said. “A
month.
Over a million a year.” She raised her eyebrows. “I didn’t think we were investing for that.”

“Perhaps we should invest a little bit more aggressively,” said Lily with an ahem. “Perhaps slightly less safe—but more rewarding?”

After another hour of looking over various mutual fund plans, and Lily wishing only for her charcoal so she could draw this room and this computer and this woman sitting across from her in a suit and talking about money, they had agreed on a fund that would—provided nothing catastrophic happened in the world—yield Lily between fifteen and twenty-six percent a year
in income. That was some serious cash, some meaningful return on investment. Since Lily would need only fifty grand to live on, she could reinvest her dividends annually, and her capital would double every three to four years. In other words, at the five-year cancer survival benchmark, Lily, if she lived frugally—and lived—could buy the eleven-million-dollar apartment for cash and still have money left over for Oodles of Noodles.

Now that was a plan she liked. Lily signed the papers, filled out the forms, got new check cards, new checkbooks. By the time she got out of there, having left all of her money behind with Katie, Lily thought she would have paid double not to have been in one stuffy office for the whole afternoon. Is this what working is like, she thought? Is this what I’m going to have to do after I take my college course and finally get a degree and look through
The New York Times
employment section, finally finding a job just like this one?

That thought was enough to send Lily into a tizzy for the next three days, spending practically her entire annual allowance on art supplies. She asked Spencer to help her clear Amy’s room of all of Amy’s things, putting them into a small storage facility for a few bucks a month. Spencer was glad to help. Lily bought three rolls of canvas, wood planks, a staple gun, turpentine, gesso canvas primer, four easels, paintbrushes, and paints! She bought oil paints, and oil pastel crayons, watercolors and acrylics, and color pencils and color markers, and charcoal and black pencils that were so beautiful, she immediately sat down on her bed and from memory on a 12-by-16 sheet drew Katie the stockbroker in black pencil sitting behind her desk with books all around her, and her window open, and spring trees far down below and the Hudson river far down below, too, and Katie in her sharp suit behind her desk, looking out at her next client while at her fingertips lay
The World According to Garp
and the
67-Pound Marriage
and
Hotel New Hampshire.
Two days later, when Lily went back to see Katie, she brought the picture, in full color. Katie looked at it for a long time, and then asked how much Lily wanted for it.

Lily was surprised. “Nothing. Why would I want your money? I give
you
money, not vice versa. How much have I made, by the way, in two days?”

“Twenty-one cents,” said Katie, but before Lily left, she added, looking at the portrait of herself, “I wouldn’t worry about that floor-through on Fifth, Lilianne. I have a feeling it will come sooner than you think.”

Lily wasn’t quite sure what Katie had meant by that, but the next day Katie called, asking her if she would, “for money only”, paint The Children. Lily agreed, and painted in acrylic the two small Katies, one male, one female, sitting together, close and wistful, in a park in Brooklyn, with an orange ball between them that looked like a pumpkin.

Katie gave her a $500 check that Lily took and had framed on her wall, as the first ever money she made from her art.

She spent the week sketching new things in her book—refrigerators, lamps, trees outside, cats across the way on windowsills, sleeping women on beds through windows. Then she rendered them in her new art studio—Amy’s bedroom—with the great southern exposure and plank wood floors on which paint splattered. Lily watercolored some, she colored-penciled others. She used acrylic paints, which dried in hours, and she even did two small oils on canvas that took all of Thursday and Friday, one of a cat sitting watching the trees while his mistress napped on a bed behind him, and one of Spencer draped over a couch watching TV with a sulky look on his face.

“I don’t look like that,” Spencer said sulkily.

Lily laughed. “No?”

“What is that
smell
?”

“Turpentine!” she said. “I need it for the oils. Is it terrible?”

“It’s not an alluring smell, no.”

“Well, I’m not in the alluring business,” she declared to him happily. “I’m in the painting business.” Besides, her sense of smell had not fully returned. She painted with the windows open. “I’m selling it on 8th Street on Saturday morning.”

Spencer walked around the studio, inspecting her work. “Well, what do you think?” she asked expectantly.

“I don’t think you’ll be able to give
me
away for free,” he replied.

On Saturday morning, Lily took a cab with her twenty pieces of artwork, a folding table and a folding chair, to 8th Street, the art thoroughfare in Greenwich Village, and with three tiered standing easels and the table, set up her twenty pieces of artwork by nine.

By noon Lily had come back home. At one on Saturday Spencer came to her door. She was
very
surprised to see him. “What happened?” he said. “I went to 8th to find you and you’d disappeared. That’s not much staying power.”

“Hmm.”

“Why did you leave? You have to have patience. It’s like fishing. They’ll bite eventually. The weather has to be right.”

“Hmm. The weather must have been real good, because I sold everything.”

“You what?”

Lily jumped up. “Yup! I sold everything. Every last painting. Including you, Mr. Grumpy. For the last two, there was nearly a dust-up. I had four customers in an auction type situation. It was pretty heated. Eventually the two paintings went for a hundred bucks each.”

“A hundred bucks? Whew!”

Lily looked at him askance. “Are you being ironic?”

“
Frames
cost more than that! Why don’t you just give your art away? How much did you make altogether?”

“Enough to buy you lunch. Let’s go.”

“I can buy my own sandwich. How much?”

“A thousand bucks.”

Spencer whistled. “Well, that’s nearly a living.”

“Yes. I’m trying to save up eleven million dollars.”

And Spencer laughed with all his white teeth and blue eyes, and Lily laughed, and on a cold February Saturday, they sat for
three hours in Odessa. And then he said, “
Scream
3 is playing at Union Square. My treat.”

Lily spent half the movie buried in her knees. She hated horror movies, and she didn’t know what Spencer found more enjoyable, the movie, which was so-so, or her being scrunched up, eyes closed, too scared to look at the screen. They got separate popcorns and separate drinks.

But when Lily painted next week, she painted one medium bag of yellow popcorn and one of his hands and one of hers in it together.

She painted popcorn hands, and smiles, and tufts of hair; she painted black-rimmed eyes, and tears, and cats. She painted empty beds, and wet showers, and Tompkins Square Park, all its bare trees and benches, its stone fountains and iron fences. She painted Spencer’s hands in the shape of a teepee. Lily couldn’t wait for spring when she could spend more time outside. She spent all day every day in Amy’s room where she was not just outside, but everywhere at once—in stores and parks and galleries and on the water. All in one room. And on Saturday mornings she set up her table and easels on 8th Street, and no matter how much or what she drew, Lily went home with nothing but a wad of cash.

Her appetite came back—slowly. Eighty pounds, then eighty-two, then a big jump—eighty-six. Must have been all those Double Chocolate Milanos. When she told Grandma this, the next day a case of Milanos came from the supermarket. In two weeks the case was gone and Lily was ninety pounds. Jelly donuts from Dunkin’ Donuts. Vanilla shakes. Protein shakes, morning, noon and night. Then solid food other than cookies and heavenly eclairs from Veniero’s—the best bakery on the planet. She spent breakfast and dinner at the Odessa and at Veselka, the Ukrainian restaurant on Second Avenue near Spencer’s precinct. Omelettes, corned-beef hash, bacon, sausage, home fries, stuffed cabbage, pierogi. On Thursdays when she visited her grandmother, Lily baked brownies in Grandma’s kitchen.

“That
man
is not coming around anymore, is he, Lily? Because you’re all better now, and your brother is moving on.”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Grandma.”

“Lily.”

“Grandma.”

If my brother is moving on, Lily wanted to say, then how come he hasn’t called me? And how come I can’t call him? And where is Amy?

A hundred and two pounds. Lily looked almost just frightfully underweight, not Dachau-outbound. The blood work was still clean. The hair, little by little, was growing back. Painfully slow and blotchy. It grew in ugly clumpy tufts, making her so self-conscious that she kept asking Spencer to cut it, to even it out. She continued to ask him, and didn’t let Paul do it, because Spencer held her head with his left hand to steady her, as he sheared her with his right. It was the only time he ever touched her.

Rachel told Lily that as soon as Lily grew out her hair Rachel had a guy for her that would knock her panties off. That’s what Rachel said. “Would knock your panties off.”

“And this is something I want?” Lily felt that the chemo didn’t just remove the cancer from her, it removed the sex organs from her also.

“Just grow out your hair, will you?”