“Welp,” he said, “they built this couch in this room, right?” Anna recalled the six summer weeks when a team of Italian furniture makers had set up shop there, somehow producing bowls of pasta and a few bottles of chianti each day from their bags for a leisurely two-hour lunch. “We can take it apart with a chainsaw, basically, but it’ll never be quite right again.”
“‘Not quite right’ is definitely wrong. Let me think about it.”
Miguel showed up to do the toilet and traveled upstairs with an impossibly small tool bag and a nervous Josefina, charged with safeguarding the fixtures, while Anna ran to answer the ringing phone; Julie was on two other lines.
“Don’t talk, Anna, just listen,” Phil stage-whispered. “I don’t know what this even means, but the Mrs. told me to call you and say, ‘Bloom is coming at noon to see the space.’” Anna’s eyes flew to the office clock: 11:53 a.m. “Does that make any sense to you? Oh God, here she comes.”
“Bloom’s coming in five minutes,” Anna said to Julie, off the phone.
“What now?” Julie asked.
“I forgot,” Anna admitted. The Mrs. had said something about Bloom coming, and it had uncharacteristically slipped her mind.
“How are you going to keep Bloom under budget?” Julie asked. “She just stopped telling us about new expenses last time, remember?”
Yes, Anna remembered Bloom arguing with the fire of a thousand suns, as if she were talking about her very own child and not a soufflé station: “Which element would you have me cut? You tell me! You take out one piece, and the whole thing becomes tacky. Half-done. That’s not me! That’s not what I do! We agreed if we were going to do an Ali Baba theme, it had to be Dubai, not Vegas. Am I right or am I right, here?”
Not everyone loved a Sydney Bloom event, most particularly Mr. Von Bizmark after the last budget blowout.
“I’m open to suggestions!” Anna said brightly, waving her hand in a circular “come on” motion. “It’s 11:56, so we have a whole four minutes to think of a new idea.”
“I’m trying! It’s hard to come up with something that we didn’t do last time.” Julie’s sneakered foot started shaking, her velour pant leg rippling.
“Any thoughts whatsoever?”
“Have her itemize everything and sign a copy?”
“Did that already.”
“She always has a loophole!”
“Right! Anything I can actually use here?” Anna asked. The front doorbell rang, and Anna sighed. Too late. She threw back her shoulders as she swung open the door. “Bloom! Good to see you,” Anna said to the small woman, midsixties in a classic Chanel suit topped with a surprising pouf of red curly hair. She smiled widely and took both of Anna’s hands into her chilly grasp.
“What fun to work together again!” she said, practically licking her mauve lips.
“Yes, but this is surely a much less complicated event than the others. Shall we?” Anna said, inviting Bloom into the living room.
“So this is the party space,” Anna said. They had done a few parties in the apartment, but never a sit-down luncheon before. Bloom scanned the room, calculations running through her mind. She ground her cheek, bright with coral blush, into her molars.
“I think we can seat eighty in here.”
“If we want to go larger than that . . .” Anna took her through the room to the double doors into the formal dining room, where two round tables constantly waited for a dinner party of twenty.
“So one hundred then,” Bloom said, turning back to the larger space. “Of course, all of this . . . every little thing”—she punctuated this with her index talon, pointing out a soft bright-white carpet under a side table, a few delicately draped furs, a particularly valuable French topiary that looked like it might topple over just because they were talking about it—“must go. Particularly these large pieces,” she said, pointing at each couch. “We’ll bring in wall fabrics to absorb the noise, planters for explosions of flowers, I’m thinking a strolling violinist . . . don’t worry!” Bloom said, following Anna’s gaze to the pillowy sectional. “You just have to get the room empty, and we’ll take care of the rest!”
For a moment, it was as if dollar signs had actually replaced Bloom’s eyes, her makeup momentarily macabre, clownish. Surely she had already far exceeded the relatively modest $250,000 with all these requests. Moving and replacing the couches alone would be at least ten thousand.
Instead of heading straight back to the office, Anna guided Bloom through another door into a library, where all the most serious business of the Von Bizmark family was conducted. They sat at a small table in leather chairs, a single light between them.
“Before we look at the invitations, I thought we could talk broad strokes,” Anna said. Bloom raised an eyebrow. Anna wanted her to know from the start that this time was different. “Let’s talk about the budget.”
“Seems ample.” Bloom grinned and gave Anna an infuriating half wink that said both, “Hey, it’s not your money,” and, more infuriatingly, “What are you going to do about it?”
“Our lawyer is drafting an addendum that guarantees you will not exceed two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.” Whether Avi would actually do this at Anna’s request was a bridge down the river. What mattered was the way the grin slackened right off Bloom’s face. “Anything over that is at your expense. I’ll forward that document to you for signature as soon as I have it, but in the meantime, can we agree on that point?”
“I’ve never signed anything like that in my entire career.”
“Well, I have to tell you, Bloom, I think Mr. Von Bizmark in particular would be disappointed to hear that you balked at this request.” Anna sighed heavily to underline their impasse. “Do we have a deal?”
“You’ll handle preparing the space, printing and mailing the invitations, and the wine?”
“Deal.”
Bloom pursed her lips but extended her hand for a shake. “I’ll prepare my presentation for one week from today.” The date of Anna’s opening.
Anna’s heart sank. “Could we do it Tuesday instead?”
“I leave for three days in Dubai tonight, and I’m in Paris after. I’m squeezing Kissy in, you know?” Bloom winked wickedly. The day her painfully brief exhibition opened was not a great day to have a huge meeting at work, but what could Anna do?
Back in the office, Julie had arranged a few proofs of the invitation. They examined various rectangles of thick cream paper and hundreds of fonts, deciding ultimately on a combination of a spring green and tangerine, which the Mrs. had been partial to lately, in a font they agreed was “kicky” to offset the most staid verbiage: Please Join Kissy Von Bizmark and the Host Committee as They Kick Off This Year’s Opera Ball at a Luncheon Honoring Felix Mercurion. Anna’s stomach lurched when she remembered this key information had yet to be communicated to Mrs. Von Bizmark, who still believed it might be possible to feature Opal at the luncheon . . . Opal, who had yet to return any of her calls.
The three grim dry cleaners arrived with their machines. These workers had been there before and had learned to fear the Von Bizmarks’ taste for delicate, expensive fabrics in various shades of white, cream, off white, and light gray. As they lumbered after Cristina, quietly wheeling their large devices, bleak expressions on each face, Anna tallied up the number of workers in the apartment, which had exceeded the count technically allowed at any one time without approval from the co-op board. But what could she do? Ordinarily, she would have had all her paperwork in order weeks in advance, but this time she’d had only a few weeks total. Things were unraveling.