He slowly turned his head and stared at her, and the fact that it took him about a minute to complete this movement made her wonder if she was supposed to be afraid of him. She wasn’t—and if he thought he could intimidate Lola Fabrikant with a look, he had another thing coming.
“And what do you do?” he asked, mocking the tone of her question. “Don’t tell me you’re an actress.”
“I’m Philip’s researcher,” she replied with the edge to her voice that usually silenced strangers. But not this man. He looked from her to Philip and back again. He grinned. “A researcher, eh?” He laughed. “And did I tell you I’m Santa Claus?”
The whole table erupted in laughter, including Philip. Sensing this was not a good time to go into high dudgeon, Lola laughed along gamely, but really, she told herself, it was too much. She wasn’t used to being treated this way. She would let it go this once but not again. Of course, she planned to bring it up with Philip, but would be careful a
bout how she did so. In general, it wasn’t a good idea to complain about a man’s friends to his face—it could hurt his feelings, and then he would associate you with negativity.
In the meantime, she thought, she should find a way to be taken a bit more seriously. No man wanted a woman whom other people thought silly—in which case, a visit to the library might not be a bad idea after all.
When Philip returned to the apartment, however, he found Lola had gone back to bed and appeared to be in a deep sleep. He went into his office and quickly knocked off five pages. From the other room, he heard the sound of Lola’s gentle snoring. She was so natural, he thought. Reading through his pages, which were excellent, he decided she was his good-luck charm.
The Rices’ apartment was slowly taking shape. The once empty dining room now held an ornate table with six Queen Anne chairs that Billy had mysteriously conjured from a friend’s storage bin somewhere on the Upper East Side. The table was on loan until a proper (meaning larger) table could be found; in the meantime, it was strewn with decorating books and color swatches, both fabric and paint, and Internet printouts of various pieces of furniture. Annalisa looked at the table and smiled, recalling something Billy Litchfield had said to her weeks ago.
“My dear,” he’d admonished her when she brought up the fact that she might, in the future, go back to work as a lawyer, “how do you expect to do two jobs?”
“Excuse me?”
“You already have a job,” he explained. “From now on, your life with your husband is your job.” He corrected himself. “It’s more than a job. It’s a career. Your husband makes the money, and you create the life. And it’s going to take effort. You’ll rise each morning and exercise, not simply to look attractive but to build endurance. Most ladies prefer yoga. Then you will dress. You’ll arrange your schedule and send e-mails. You’ll attend a meeting for a charity in the morning, or perhaps visit an art dealer or make a studio visit. You’ll have lunch, and then there are meetings with decorators, caterers, and stylists; you’ll have your hair colored twice a month and blow-dried three times a week. You’ll do private tours of museums and read, I hope, three newspapers a day: The New York Times, The New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal. At the end of the day, you’ll prepare for an evening out, which may include two or three cocktail parties and a dinner. Some will be black-tie charity events where you’ll be expected to wear a gown and never the same dress twice. You’ll need to have your hair and makeup done. You’ll also plan vacations and weekend outings. You may purchase a country house, which you will also have to organize, staff, and decorate. You will meet the right people and court them in a manner both subtle and shameless. And then, my dear, there will be children. So,” Billy concluded, “let’s get busy.”
And busy they had been. There were so many tiny details to put together: bathroom tiles handmade in South Carolina to complement the marble floors (the apartment held five bathrooms, and each needed its own theme), rugs, window treatments, even door handles. Most of Annalisa’s days were spent in the furniture district in the East and West Twenties, but there were all the antique shops on Madison that had to be explored, as well as the auction houses. And then there were the renovations themselves. One by one, each room was being torn apart, rewired, replastered, and put back together. For the first month, Annalisa and Paul had moved an air mattress from one room to another to get out of the way of the construction, but now, at least the master bedroom was finished, and she was, as Billy said, “beginning to put together a bit of a closet.”
The intercom buzzed exactly at noon. “A man is here to see you,” Fritz said from below.
“Which man?” Annalisa asked, but Fritz had hung up. The intercom was in the kitchen, on the first floor of the apartment. Annalisa ran through the nearly empty living room and up the stairs to the bedroom, where she quickly tried to finish dressing.
“Maria?” she said, sticking her head out of the bedroom door and calling down the hall to the housekeeper, whom she’d heard rustling around in one of the back bedrooms.
“Yes, Mrs. Rice?” Maria asked, coming out into the hall. Maria was from an agency and cooked and cleaned and ran errands and would even, supposedly, walk your dog if you had one, but so far Annalisa hadn’t felt comfortable asking her to do much of anything, not being used to having a live-in housekeeper.
“Someone’s coming up,” Annalisa said. “I think it’s Billy Litchfield. Do you mind answering the door?”
She went back to the bedroom and into the large walk-in closet. The beginnings of the closet were not the closet itself but its contents. According to Billy, she was to have an array of shoes, bags, belts, jeans, white shirts, suits for luncheons, cocktail dresses, evening gowns, resort clothes for both mountain and island, and any sport in which one might be called upon to participate: golf, tennis, horseback riding, parasailing, rappelling, white-water rafting, and even hockey. To help her get her wardrobe together, Billy had hired a famous stylist named Norine Norton, who would pick out clothing and bring it to her apartment. Norine was famously busy and wasn’t able to schedule their first appointment for two weeks, but Billy was thrilled. “Norine is like the best plastic surgeons. It can take six months to get an appointment with her—and that’s only for a consultation.”
In the meantime, one of Norine’s six assistants had begun the task of dressing Annalisa, and on a low shelf were arranged several shoe boxes with a photograph of the shoe pasted on the front of the box. Annalisa selected a pair of black pumps with a four-inch heel. She hated wearing high heels during the day, but Billy had said it was necessary. “People expect to see Annalisa Rice, so you must give them Annalisa Rice.”
“But who is Annalisa Rice?” she’d asked jokingly.
“That, my dear, is what we’re going to find out. Isn’t this fun?”
Right now the visitor was not Billy Litchfield but the man coming to see about Paul’s aquarium. Annalisa led him upstairs to the ballroom and glanced regretfully at the ceiling, painted in the whimsical Italian view of heaven, with puffy clouds in a halo of pink on which sat fat cherubs. Sometimes, when she had a moment, Annalisa would come up here for a brief rest, lying on the floor in a patch of sunlight, utterly contented, but Paul had declared the ballroom his private space and planned to turn it into “command central,” from where, Annalisa teased him, he could take over the world. The French windows were to be reglazed with a new electrical compound to render them completely opaque with the touch of a button—thus thwarting any attempts to photograph the room or the actions of its occupant by the employment of a long-lens camera from a helicopter—while a three-dimensional screen would be installed above the fireplace. On the roof, a special antenna would scramble cell and satellite transmissions. There would be a state-of-the-art aquarium, twenty feet long and seven feet wide, which would allow Paul to pursue his new hobby of collecting rare and expensive fish. It was a shame to destroy the room, but Paul wouldn’t consider any arguments to the contrary. “You can do what you like with the rest of the apartment,” he’d said. “But this room’s mine.”
The aquarium man began taking measurements, asking Annalisa about voltage and the possible construction of a subfloor to support the weight of the aquarium. Annalisa did her best to answer his questions but then gave up and fled downstairs.
Billy Litchfield had arrived, and five minutes later, they were sitting in the back of a crisp new Town Car heading downtown.
“I have a welcome surprise for you, my dear,” he said. “After all that furniture, I thought you might like a break. Today we’re looking at art. Last night I had a brilliant idea.” He took a breath. “I’m thinking, for you, feminist art.”
“I see.”
“Are you a feminist?”
“Of course,” Annalisa said.
“Either way, it doesn’t matter. For instance, I doubt you’re a cubist, either. But think how much cubist art is worth now. It’s unaffordable.”
“Not for Paul,” Annalisa said.