ONE
December 27
Park Avenue cooperatives announced their inverse relationship to reality first with the lobby’s temperature. The colder it was outside, the hotter the climate in the marble entrance hall. In the steamy heat of August, gusts of icy air escaped through the iron doors each time a white glove held them open. When the building’s residents crossed the pavement from their town cars, they unavoidably experienced several seconds of weather, like everyone, but once inside they could rest instantly reassured of exclusive and constant comfort. The doors stayed wide open to the street on only a few ideal days each year, the climate inside and out equivalent.
This day—a tooth-clacking seventeen degrees—a hot blast hit Anna in the face as Brian held the door for her. “You made it! All this way in this snow,” he remarked.
“Gotta keep the wheels rollin’, Bri.” She unzipped her coat and fanned her face to avoid perspiring. “What is it, ninety degrees in here?”
“Eighty-seven today. Hey, what are you even doing here? Aren’t they away?”
“Indeed they are, Bri!” she said cheerily, stepping onto the elevator. Brian pushed the button for her from the podium, and the Von Bizmark lower floor button, “8,” illuminated itself with a tidy ding.
Anna felt good. Optimistic even. She loved this dead week in the office after Christmas and before the New Year when she was left to her own devices. She could come in late—a glance at her watch told her it was already 10:37 a.m.—but there was no one upstairs to complain. The gargantuan duplex remained quiet, and Anna would dispatch with the previous year’s business, carefully documenting what money went where for what and then sending it all filed, labeled, and boxed to Marco, the Von Bizmark forever accountant. It was easy and cathartic work that never ran late, and Anna was always out the door and headed for her studio before six.
Both Von Bizmarks were in Aspen with the kids, their kids’ friends, and a few hangers-on in a house so large no one knew exactly who or how many people were under its roof at the end of all the skiing, après skiing, après après, dinners, clubs, and clandestine rendezvous. Anna had had to book three separate jets to carry the whole entourage back East: one to Boston, one to Exeter, and one to New York. But that was still several glorious and calm days hence, after New Year’s at Aspen’s Caribou Club.
Without the family in residence and with the employees on vacation, there could be no surprises, which made Anna’s life much, much easier, since her main purpose at the Von Bizmark residence was to make sure nothing unexpected happened to them. Every task flowed from that rule: staffing, researching, cleaning, maintaining, scheduling, confirming, reconfirming, and then maybe just one more confirmation. She could never know what, exactly, was going to be important to her employer on a moment-to-moment basis, which required her to keep tabs on an infinite number of details. Phone calls, emails, letters, cards, flowers with cards, gifts with notes. Requests, events, parties. Where is the car? Where is the Magritte sketch? Where is the scuba gear? Where does so-and-so live? In January? What do you think of this dress? Email? Person? Bracelet? Behind-the-scenes drama at the opera? What is the name of the person I am thinking of? The answers had to be not simply correct but perfect.
No one understood. After two decades, Anna gave up trying to explain, mostly unbothered by what her friends, family, and the people she met at gallery openings and cocktail parties thought a “private assistant” actually did. Those three days each week supported her creative work. PAing had always been her sustenance, a vocation that lived in its own tidy box in her mind labeled “day job.” Anna knew it was precisely this—that she thought of herself primarily as an artist—that made Anna so good in a role that could easily eclipse a lesser identity.
Another few dings as the elevator doors opened into the Von Bizmark anteroom, a tiny holding area whose walls crawled with hand-painted vines that extended into the carved double doors, which remained open when the family was in residence but locked otherwise. In the absence of staff, who usually made Anna her coffee and midday meal, she contemplated the delicious lunch she would order on Mrs. Von Bizmark’s credit card—a little treat for working through the holiday. Maybe a rack of ribs, chicken parmesan, one of those custom chopped salads with all the premium toppings and her favorite: double avocado.
But before Anna could turn her key in the lock, the doors fell open. She stepped inside the vast foyer, where the ivy pattern from the anteroom retreated into cabinet marquetry and the foresty color scheme was muted into creamy monotone. If the foyer door was open, that meant someone was inside the apartment: Anna had locked this door herself the evening before. She said uncertainly, “Hello?” No response.
The squeaking of her rubber boots on the walnut floors filled the long hallway, quiet kitchen, and then the office, a large airy space, all clean, white, and ordered. This was a room of systems and processes, lots of hard copies and matching staplers in a midcentury modern lime green. Mrs. Von Bizmark’s broad desk of reclaimed wood occupied nearly a quarter of the space on its own platform. Anna’s desk spanned the other side of the room, partially reserved for Julie, the other assistant, on the one day in the week when they overlapped. In between their two workspaces, the enormous, ledger-like leather-bound calendar splayed open in the sun like a cat. All the machines remained dark and quiet—as they should when the Von Bizmarks were away.
Yet arrayed there, on Anna’s keyboard, a stack of handwritten notes: black Sharpie scrawled over personalized bloodred-on-chambray Kissy V. Bizmark stationery. In the office, this was Mrs. Von Bizmark’s primary method of communicating all her most important thoughts, which inevitably occurred outside of the workday. These notes were piled in reverse order over the previous twelve hours, during which time the Von Bizmarks had not been in Aspen but home in New York after all. Was someone injured? Sick? Dead? The doorman would have known, said something. They kept track of the tenants on a little pegboard at their podium, yet Brian had also seemed ignorant of the Von Bizmarks’ early return.
How had they even gotten home anyway? People like the Von Bizmarks frequently enjoyed a handful of everyman activities—grocery shopping, driving, mowing the lawn—that the rest of us would gladly avoid. For them, menial tasks provided a sense of misplaced nostalgia, not for a period of their lives but for the normalcy that would always elude them. More complicated everyman tasks like altering travel plans or navigating technical difficulties of any kind were essentially out of reach for them. Mr. and Mrs. had called Anna from a Parisian restaurant for the correct spelling of a particular wine, from Santa Fe to get the Financial Times delivered, from Boston to arrange the gift wrapping of a brand-new Jeep. They preferred to make requests of their personal staff, even if someone else with the answers stood directly in front of them. Anna’s eyes narrowed. Florence, Mr. Von Bizmark’s assistant of thirty years, had had a hand in this for sure.
Anna dialed Florence as she sifted through the notes on her desk. Piled in reverse order, the frantic scrawl quieted into more recognizable script:
Seriously, where are you
Buzz me AS SOON AS YOU GET IN.
Where are you? It’s 10:14 AM.
EST
A—it’s 10:05. Buzz me when you get in. KVB