The Girl Next Door (3 page)

‘See you tonight!’ He sounded cheerier than he felt.

‘Are you going to want dinner?’ she asked, not looking at him.

What the hell kind of question was that? Who didn’t want dinner? Why was he made to feel, should he dare answer that daily question in the affirmative, that eating an evening meal was an inconvenience? He ate breakfast at his desk. He was gone all day. His shirts and suits went to the dry cleaners. He just wanted dinner.

‘No. I’ve got a lunch. I’ll have a sandwich.’

‘Good. My schedule is pretty full today.’

Full of what, for Christ’s sake? This question, of course, he did not ask out loud.

‘Say goodbye to Daddy, Avery.’

She didn’t call him Jason any more. She called him Daddy when Avery was awake and around, and when she wasn’t… she didn’t call him anything at all.

The door to the Schulmans’ apartment opened just as Jason closed his own behind him. The hall between the two apartments, the only homes on the sixth floor, was about ten feet wide, and he could smell Rachael’s perfume before he saw her. It wasn’t one of those chemical, strident fragrances – it was flowery and soft and sophisticated. Just like Rachael Schulman.

Even their children were perfect. Jacob, Noah and Mia Schulman, bed‐rumpled and sleepy, stood in the doorway to wave goodbye to their parents, their baby‐sitter behind them. Mia looked like a bushbaby – all huge brown eyes – standing tiny between her two bigger brothers. ‘Love you, Mama. Love you, Daddy.’

‘We love you, too. See you tonight.’ Always the ‘we’. Envy swelled in his throat.

David patted Jason on the top of his arm. ‘Morning.’

‘How are you?’ The elevator doors opened and they got in, Rachael pressing I with the manicured index finger of her left hand, diamond wedding band sparkling.

‘How are Kim and Avery?’ Rachael asked, her wide Julia Roberts smile revealing her small white even teeth.

They’re horrible, he wanted to say. Out loud, ‘Fine.’ A pause, a floor of silence. Rachael brushed lint from David’s shoulder in a quietly proprietary way. Jason coughed. ‘Great weather we’ve been having.’ God, could he be any more pedestrian?

‘Fabulous. Felt like a long winter, this one, hey? We’re going to go out to the country this weekend. So nice to feel the sun on our skin.’

Rachael’s skin. Golden, even through the long winter. Smooth, even, glowing. Like the skin on the girls on the advertisements for body lotion.

‘You must come out for a weekend. Mia and the boys would love to have Avery to play with.’

David nodded in agreement. ‘We’ll make that happen, definitely.’

Jason really, really hoped so. In the country, Rachael would wear a bathing suit. A bikini. More skin than he’d seen before. Last summer, Rachael in her short shorts had fuelled his dreams for weeks. Rachael in a bikini… he felt his heart racing.

The elevator had reached the ground floor. Che, the doorman, was mopping the floor at the end of his night shift. Jason reached into his jacket pocket for his Metro Pass, and waved to Rachael and David as they climbed into the Lincoln town car that picked them up each morning and delivered them to their respective offices downtown.

It was a beautiful morning – classic New York blue.

In their air‐conditioned car, David put one hand on Rachael’s knee. ‘Did you mean that?’

‘Mean what?’

‘Mean that the Kramers should come to the country with us?’

‘Shouldn’t I have done?’

David shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He’s always a bit… furtive… these days. And she’s so uptight.’

‘She’s protective of Avery. That’s all. First baby.’

‘I don’t remember you being like that with Jacob…’

‘You’re biased. I think it could be fun. Besides, I feel bad for him. He always seems a bit sad to me.’

‘I see furtive, you see sad.’

‘You’re just naturally suspicious.’

‘And you’re just naturally a soft touch.’

Rachael laughed. David squeezed her knee. ‘Fine. Invite them. I bet Kim says no. Too much danger in the country, you know. Mosquitoes. Deer ticks.’

‘Bears!’ Rachael laughed.

‘Bears. Quite right. Avery could get attacked by bears. She’ll never come.’

Apartment 5A

Jackson half opened his eyes in irritable protest at the bright light seeping through the blinds of his bedroom, and then turned his head to read the alarm clock. Eight a.m. Jesus. He’d only been in bed for three hours. He focused unsteadily on his left foot, sticking out under the sheets at the end of the bed. Fuchsia‐pink toenails. That had seemed a good idea last night. Or this morning. His mother had left a bottle on the side of the sink when she’d invaded the apartment in a cloud of Hermès last week. He’d been watching reruns of some reality show, drinking beer, and he’d found the nail varnish, and he’d been bored… Not really his colour, he saw now. He wondered vaguely whether she’d left remover, too. Probably not. He couldn’t imagine Martha Northrup Grayling taking her own nail polish off, any more than he could imagine her making her own tea, or blow‐drying her own hair. The varnish would only have been for emergency repairs. God forbid she should appear in public with a chipped nail. This was a woman who wore full make‐up to the gym. He felt too awake to roll over. He groped on the bedside table for his Marlboro, and his engraved Zippo, and lit up without lifting his head from the pillow, taking a deep drag.

From the hallway he heard the sound of the porter, in the service entrance, collecting the glass bottles and black sacks of trash. Too much damn noise. The building might be getting up, but he wasn’t ready.

What was there to get up for, after all? No rat race for Jackson Grayling III. No job to force him into the shower, and on to the subway. No mortgage, no bills. As yet, he had not woken up, either to the morning, or to the realization that the absence of all the above had also equalled no life.

His life was just fine by him. His parents had sprung for this apartment a couple of years ago, anxious to remove his brooding bulk from their own pied à terre. Their main home, for tax purposes, was a detestable behemoth in West Palm Beach, Florida, but they had apartments in at least four other American cities, and they spent time in each, as sanctioned by their accountants, as well as a home in the Bahamas, and one in the Alps in Europe. All through his childhood they’d had a town house on the Upper East Side, with a garage and a roof terrace, but they’d sold it a couple of years ago, and bought one of the new apartments in the Plaza Hotel, half of which had been converted into private homes. His mother called herself ‘Eloise – like in the book’, delightedly, when she told people. He’d liked the town house, and would happily be lolling around there now, had he been permitted, but he loathed the Plaza apartment, and seldom went there unless summoned. His father wasn’t that keen either, on the Plaza or on New York in general. Martha often used it alone or with her clone‐like girlfriends from the South, leaving Jackson’s father golfing or sailing or tax planning somewhere else. It had been years since he’d called either of them on a conventional landline. He never knew where they were, and he got tired of housekeepers telling him. Not that he called them much on their cellphones either. They had all conspired in creating a life where he really didn’t need to.

Most of his money was in trust, of course. They weren’t stupid enough to let him have the bulk of his fortune until he was thirty. They had bought the apartment outright. His mother and her decorator from Palm Beach had descended, reinventing the previously drab apartment into a middle‐aged woman and a gay Cuban’s idea of a young man about town’s place. It looked like a Ralph Lauren show house, but Jackson didn’t really care. Girls seemed to like it. His monthly maintenance charge and utilities went directly through his father’s office. He couldn’t have told you how much they were, actually. He’d had to attend the board interview the co‐op had demanded, of course. His father had demanded a blazer and tie, and his mother had hissed at him, in the elevator on the way up to the fifth floor that he wasn’t to blow it with any of his stupid ‘jokes’ about late‐night parties and drum kits. He wasn’t an idiot – he could play along when playing along was required. The sixth generation of men in his family to attend Duke, the civic responsibility bullshit, the deciding which part of the family business to go into stuff – he could talk a good game, but the only game he actually played was basketball, once a month or so, down on the courts under the West Side Highway by the river. And by and large, he did behave himself – in the apartment. The night doormen might be able to tell a tale or two about him but the Kramers upstairs and Dr Stern downstairs couldn’t complain about him. If the Board President he met on the landing between their apartments from time to time with his boyfriend had regrets about letting him in, they didn’t show.

His father paid him an allowance for his other living expenses, and he always had the black American Express card, for emergencies (he and his father had a very different definition of what constituted an emergency, but he usually got away with it). They paid for a maid who came in, with a basic grocery shop, two or three times a week and cleaned away most of the detritus left over from the last shop she’d done.

Two or three times a year he was questioned, closely and with some exasperation, about his plans for the future. Christmas, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day. He had time between these encounters to plan answers that sounded plausible, even to him. He was looking into this area, talking with people about such and such, considering another college course. Thinking about something philanthropic… that was always a good one.

His mother was a softer sell than his father. He was her only child, and she believed whatever he told her, staring at him, all the while, with adoration and love. Jack 2, as he insisted on calling his father, much to his irritation, was not so easily mollified. He prided himself on a great bullshit antenna and it gave him no pleasure to have it twitch constantly around his only child.

The family money was old by American standards. It was Jackson’s great‐great‐grandfather who had begun to accumulate it in serious amounts in the mid nineteenth century. By the time of the Civil War he was already seriously rich and, despite being from the South, had somehow managed to come out the other side of that conflict even wealthier. There were definitely murky decades, morally, in the Grayling family vault, but the twentieth century had drawn a veil of respectability over them and, by the time Jackson went to college, he was taking classes in buildings bearing his family name. His whole life, all his father had done was manage the family money, which had increased with his marriage to Martha, who came from her own fortune in horse breeding, and, Jackson knew, it was all of their expectations that he would one day grow up enough to be entrusted with the same. The thought bored him as only the truly privileged can be bored. And the money, which he had spent freely his entire life, perversely, did not interest him in the slightest. This, he knew, incensed his father, and that was the most fun part. Last Christmas his father had lost his temper as much as he ever did, and called him a ‘ne’er do well’. Jackson was trying hard to rise to the challenge.

His mother had only managed, despite her family’s success in breeding other animals, to produce one child – him. How he had longed for a brother or even a sister who could toe the line, take over from his father, so that they would all leave him alone.

Apartment 2A

Madison knocked on Charlotte’s door. ‘Hiya, Charl!’

Charlotte pulled her candlewick dressing gown tighter around her, and opened each of the three locks on her door. Madison was wearing hot‐pink and white Lycra – a sleeveless vest and short shorts. She had been to the gym. Of course. She went five times a week. She had that post‐gym glow. Madison had several glows that Charlotte had come to know well. Post‐gym was just one of them. She was more familiar than she might have chosen to be with post‐coital, too – although that was usually at the weekends. And that big hair, with its expensive caramel highlights. And that perfectly applied make‐up, the kind that looked like you didn’t have any make‐up on at all. She wore make‐up to the gym, because you never knew who you might meet there, she’d confided to Charlotte. Not that Madison Cavanagh needed make‐up. Charlotte should know. She’d seen her without it often enough. Madison Cavanagh looked gorgeous in sweats, in rollers, in a towel. In her apartment.

Charlotte wasn’t sure why Madison was in her apartment as often as she was, although she suspected that her neighbour hated being alone. In the absence of a gaggle of girlfriends, or a romantic conquest, she supposed that she was the next best thing. They’d moved in around the same time to the 650 square feet, one‐bedrooms on the second floor. Both apartments were owned by the management company, and rented. When they’d begun, both empty spaces were a symphony of innocuous beige and taupe. Within weeks, Madison’s had been transformed, Charlotte’s merely disguised a little. Madison had a big turquoise sofa and expensive‐looking cushions with graphic prints on them. A wenge wood console with a dozen photo frames. Madison was in each of the photographs, smiling her big white smile. Here against a backdrop of sand dunes with her parents and her brothers, there hoisted on to the shoulders of two big men in football uniforms. Raising a cocktail glass among identikit girlfriends. Centre stage was given to Madison in graduation robes, her hair perfect under the mortar board. The first time Madison had seen Charlotte’s chaste single bed, dressed with a quilt and a small lace pillow, she’d twittered about how sensible it was to leave more room for storage and clothes and stuff, and how, with her queen bed, she’d barely enough room for her shoes.

She’d come, borrowing milk, in her gym kit, one morning in the very early days, and she’d been coming ever since. She’d wanted skim, expressed disappointment at Charlotte’s 2%, but taken it anyway. Charlotte didn’t think she had ever knocked on Madison’s door. The pattern of their friendship – if that was, indeed, what it was – was that Madison came to her. Whenever she needed anything, be it milk for her cereal (and Charlotte bought skim now – how silly), a needle and thread to sew a button on, or a conversation to make her feel better about her place in the universe again. They had never been out together, and Charlotte knew that they never would. That was not what she was for. She didn’t mind. She was ambiguous about Madison in general. She supposed that Madison, if she ever stopped and thought about it, might expect Charlotte to be desperately jealous of her, envious of her looks, and her ease, and her place in the world. But Charlotte was smarter than that. She was curious, and sometimes mildly alarmed or vaguely amused. If Charlotte had had a pen pal back home that she wrote to about the big bad city (although she did not), her letters would have been full of the adventures of Madison Cavanagh.