a rush, they’d pick up a phone, dial the number, and then realize they were using an earpiece that didn’t match the keypad.”
Laurene’s friend Shell, a large brunette woman who wore red lipstick and spoke loudly, with a New York accent, came to visit us at the suite at the Carlyle Hotel. She stood beside the piano, playing a few notes. They talked about people I didn’t know, calling them “total losers.”
That afternoon, my father said, “There’s something I want to show you two.” We took a taxi to a tall building and then a freight elevator with blankets for walls up to the very top. My ears popped. The elevator opened onto a dusty, windy space, full of watery light.
It was an apartment at the top of a building called the San Remo. It was still under renovation, and it took me a few minutes to grasp that it was his apartment. The ceilings were at least twice the height of ordinary ceilings. Pieces of cardboard covered the floor; he lifted one up to show us the marble below, a glossy deep black that also lined the walls. He told us that I. M. Pei designed the apartment in 1982, and when one of the quarries ran out, they’d had to find another one and replace the old marble with the new marble. Otherwise the blacks wouldn’t match. Construction had lasted six years and it was still unfinished.
“It’s incredible,” Laurene said, looking around.
Other than a bank of windows along two sides, all the surfaces in the apartment were black marble. I swept up a line of dust with my finger; the marble gleamed beneath. We stood in the main room, with its triple-height ceilings and windows, gaping fireplace, black walls and floor. The staircase looked wet, dripping down from the second floor, each level of stair opening wider than the last, like molasses poured from a jar. He said it was based on the design of a staircase by Michelangelo.
It was hard to tell how a person could possibly be comfortable in such a place. It was hard-edged like rich people’s apartments in movies. It was opulent, the opposite of the counterculture ideals he talked about, a showcase made to impress. Yes, he had the Porsche and the nice suits, but I’d believed he thought the best things were simple things, so that looking at this apartment felt like a shock. Maybe his ideals were only for me, an excuse not to be generous with me. Maybe he was bifurcated, and couldn’t help trying to impress other people in the obvious ways rich people do, even as I’d thought, with his holey jeans, his strange diet, his emphasis on simplicity, his crumbling house, he didn’t care.
“It was supposed to be the ultimate bachelor pad,” he said sadly. “Oh well.”
We went out onto the balcony, a line of stone balustrades like candlesticks wrapped around the corner. From up this high, New York smelled like nothing. The wind made a sound like a sheet flapping. Below us, Central Park looked like it was cut out of the concrete.
“It’s a great view, isn’t it?” he asked.
“It is,” I said.
“This is amazing, Steve,” Laurene said, with a lightness to her voice I wished I felt too. He grabbed her and I looked away. I felt stuck, unable to talk, my feet heavy on the ground.
Soon after I returned, my mother and I bought a couch, a chair, and an ottoman at the mall.
Wings made of white feathers hung in a children’s store window display. “When I was a kid, my mother told me all children are born with wings, but the doctors cut them off at birth. The scapulae are what remain. Isn’t that strange?”
We walked past Woolworth’s, with its tubes of watermelon-flavored lip gloss and packets of press-on nails, past the restaurant Bravo Fono, where we still went sometimes with my father, and into Ralph Lauren. The store was half outside. Cement planters came up to my waist and held impatiens with swollen green seed pods that popped open when I squeezed them, spraying tiny yellow seeds and springing back to a horizontal curl.
“Hey, what do you think of this couch? Do you like it?” she asked. It was two cushions wide. I sat; the cushions did not spring back, but sank slowly under my weight.
“I like it,” I said. “Is it expensive?”
She looked at a price tag pinned to the side and took a sharp breath.
I knew she hated the couch