The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

place. Who but we would actually enjoy the fact that the stove and the refrigerator appear, like the building, to be prewar? Who but we would keep the sixties-style wallpaper in the maid's room? (The ghost of Christie Thorn shakes her head in annoyance at the broker: “Total gut job in the kitchen!” “No closet space!” “No wet bar!”) And then there is our daughter and the doorman, who is pretending to play hide-and-seek with her, while we stand wordless in the marble lobby, looking out at the green of the Park, doing sums in our head, reconsidering decisions of the past, decisions that might have netted us this apartment, pure and simple.

Because now nothing else will do.

The apartment is at the breaking point of our price range, and though on paper we can swing it, our broker calls that night with bad news: he's shopped us to the board, and they are reluctant to consider anyone whose liquid assets are as low as ours. That fast, it's over. We have been slotted into position. We know-and can laugh bitterly at the notion that this knowledge, in other circumstances, is supposed to be comforting-exactly where we are.

A week after the bad news, I walk by the building, daughterless this time. A man emerges, then two schoolgirls in uniform. I put my sunglasses on to hide the fact that I am staring in an ugly, covetous way. How tortured and unpleasant I must look compared with the woman my age who comes out next, well dressed, well coiffed, followed by two children, a girl and a boy, who are followed in turn by two nannies. For an incredible moment, I mistake the woman for an older, more sophisticated Christie Thorn. Out of habit I am pretending not to see even this twin of hers (the way you ignore a man in a bar who resembles your ex-boyfriend), when the doorman's greeting rings out-yes, as if in a dream-“Mrs. Brue-wald.” “Hi, Lester.” He asks how long she will be, and the woman says, “Oh, an hour or two. We’re just going to go to the Park and do some shopping before Daddy gets home.”

In a vile moment of Darwinian survival, I paste a smile on my face, and I call out, “Christie?”

We went to an Italian restaurant on Madison. Kids and nannies were dispatched to the Park. It was an off hour, three or four o’clock, and I remember I almost hated to dirty one of the white linen tablecloths, which were already set for dinner. We started with cappuccinos, then moved on to glasses of the house white. Later, when we got hungry, the waiter brought antipasto and some bread, and to wash it down I had another glass of white wine and Christie switched to red. I was longing for a cigarette, and eventually I asked her, “Do you still smoke?” “My God, I’m dying for one,” she said, and took a pack out of her purse. We each smoked two.

I should explain that it was one of those surreally springlike days at the tail end of winter, the kind of afternoon when you flirt with the mailman, the coffee-cart man, and the busboy when you long for a new pair of open-toed sandals and a good excuse to sit in a cafe all afternoon, ignoring your responsibilities and getting drunk. Well, we had one. There was catching up to be done-husbands, children, careers, in a nutshell.

From the beginning, I was drinking rather fast. All the information sharing, I realized, was making me uneasy. I, who used to rattle off insou-ciantly all the good things that had happened to me, was guarded now. I had something to protect, it seemed. I held back, forming half-truths for every potential question Christie might pose- asking myself, “Will I tell her about that or not? Will I act as if everything's fine or will I level with her?”-while she grew expansive with me, as she now could. The family crest was not a joke; it was not a sham. In some little town in the former East Germany, the Bruewalds were evidently a big deal. “All the money was tied up in this castle in Saxony-this huge, horrible, dark, awful house-and, the minute Onkel Guenther died, Thomas and I looked at each other and we were like, ‘We’re selling!’ It was like, before he died we couldn’t mention it, and the minute we got the news we never looked back. It was a done deal.” They had sold the Schloss, auctioned the furniture, and inherited the lot, except, of course, for what was in trust for Hildie and Axel. (It had occurred to me that although Hildie still resembled her father, her appearance would be seen, later in life, as distinguishing; people would seek ownership of those peculiar looks, the way they would those of a rock star's eccentric-looking daughter. Only outsiders would make the obvious comments; insiders would know better.) In addition to the apartment on Fifth Avenue, the Bruewalds now owned a ski lodge in the Arlberg, a country house in New Jersey, and a mansion in Solln, which Christie described as “the Greenwich of Munich.”

The sheer weight of the information had made me dizzy, but when she mentioned Greenwich I sat up and did her the one courtesy I could. I fed her the line. “That must be nice,” I said. “It must feel like home.” She drained her glass of wine, though she had already drained it once, and then she put it down and unexpectedly met my eye. She said, “You know, when we got the money I went out and got myself a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-an-hour shrink. I used to think I was a horrible person.” She wasn’t a horrible person, the shrink had told her; in fact, there was nothing wrong with her at all.

We split a third glass of wine and then a fourth, making the waiter laugh. During the fourth, I told her why I had been loitering outside her building-not hoping to get something out of it, just wanting to ante up with something real of my own. Christie laughed, the way you laugh at something you don’t quite believe, and at first I interpreted her incredulity as an attack-that's how defensive I felt. “Oh, for Christ's sake!” she said. “You’ve got to be kidding!” I stared stonily at the table, the way I do when I’m both drunk and mortally offended. “No, no-listen. Thomas is on the board, and they owe him a big favor. This is no problem, no problem at all. Don’t believe what they say about the liquid assets. It's just a way of keeping people out. Anyway,” she said, “I’ll tell them about your Mayflower ancestor.”

“I told you about our Mayflower ancestor?” I said.

“Of course you did!” She smiled. “The first time we met.”

There was nothing I could do but turn red and finish the wine. Christie went to the bathroom, and I sat there flipping a matchbook over and over in my hand. I had an anticipatory feeling, as if I were waiting for a date to return, as if we might be planning to go back to her deluxe pad and make out on her and Thomas's king-size bed. People had always said that Christie had a great body, and that's the kind of body it was-firm, relentlessly fit, and offered up as a commodity for others to comment on. In the early nineties, she had been an aerobics queen, logging two, three hours a day at the gym; now, of course, she was into yoga and Pilates, but, “to tell you the truth,” she’d confessed earlier in the afternoon, “I kind of miss the screaming and the jumping up and down.”

We had moved to the city at the same time-ten years ago now-and sitting there, playing with the matchbook, I tried to get a handle on what those ten years had amounted to. We had been single. Now we were married women with children. But, despite the italics in my head, I couldn’t seem to take it any further than that. My thoughts drifted to the apartment, trying again, I suppose, to notch the progress we had each made. If my husband and I got the place, we’d be cash-poor for a few years. With both of us working, we could bring in x amount per year, put y aside, and contribute z to our 401(k)s. But, even considering promotions and raises, there was a limit to x. X was fixed, and there was only t-time-to increase it. But time ate up your life. You could say, “In ten years,” “In twenty years.” But the problem was that then whatever it was would be in ten years, or in twenty years. A decade, two decades of your life would have gone by before you attained it. The fixity of x was the most bittersweet thing I had thought of in ages. Of course, it was comparing myself with Christie that had brought on all these thoughts. When she came out of the ladies’ room, looking as happy and drunk as I had felt a minute before, her innocence struck me like a storm. And I realized that what separated us, and perhaps had always separated us, was the understanding that I had only just reached: in life you can only get so far.

I walked home with the good news for my husband and daughter. It seemed that Christie and I were going to be friends again, or friends after all, I should say. My husband would be dubious, to say the least. “The same Christie Thorn you told me you would never have coffee with again?” Nor would he like the idea of her getting us past the board; it would take a week to make him understand what had changed in the course of an afternoon and why it wasn’t the case that we were simply using her. Then again, I deserved a dose of his skepticism. I had carried on about her-had laughed in my best moments, but from time to time had been derisive, too, and even indignant. I asked myself, now, how I truly felt about all her pretensions. I went through them one by one-the wedding, the Christmas card, then little things, little remarks from her single days, her obsession with the “it” handbag every year, for instance. I came to the conclusion that none of it was worth getting worked up about. None of it was profound. As the shrink had evidently made clear, none of it had anything to do with Christie herself. On the contrary, I told myself, it was your problem.