Thank God Anna had Julie, but the problem with Julie was her cats, to which Anna was allergic. After that first night when she’d passed out at the studio, Anna had been staying on Julie’s couch with her two felines, which meant she hadn’t slept or breathed much in about twelve days. She felt less and less clearheaded outside of the studio.
At work, Anna finished up and submitted the DOE paperwork. Instead of feeling relieved to have at least accomplished this first step, she obsessed about the inevitable shortfall of cash at the opera art auction. It had been reported that Mercurion’s plan had been to gift the opera his most valuable pieces, including a Cezanne and Rothko. The idea that Anna’s work would somehow stand in for these treasures squeezed the air out of her lungs. The school needed $1.3 million. Any one of Mercurion’s canvases would have made at least ten times that. Anna would be lucky to make ten thousand.
When Ilana stopped by after school one day, Anna tried to explain it to her. “Look, I’m doing my best, but I don’t know if we can really expect—”
“Let me see,” Ilana interrupted her.
“See what?”
“What you have.”
Anna handed over her phone with a picture of the work in progress. The floral background was almost done, a traditional rendering of roses in musty peach and celadon that managed to read as both vintage and surreal. She had placed a few ovals made out of thin plastic sheeting over the canvas to get a feel for it.
“I’m not worried,” Ilana said and winked. “We’ll be out of those tents in no time.”
This vote of confidence from a preteen made it possible for Anna to quiet her auction performance anxiety and endure the crescendo of various activities leading up to the luncheon.
After the Mercurion scandal, word of the Opera Ball spread far beyond the island of Manhattan. A broader swath turned their eyes toward the occasion and the Von Bizmarks, a buzz reflected in many interview requests and even an occasional paparazzo parked outside the more high-profile restaurants Mrs. Von Bizmark frequented. She had made the society pages of the New York Times twice in one week.
All this attention was like sunlight to Mrs. Von Bizmark, who preened at every ladies’ luncheon, trunk show, and charity gala, taking calls from journalists at increasingly prestigious publications on her cell phone while en route in the car. She worked out every day and visited Dr. Westley constantly, keeping Anna in a flurry of scheduling snafus and emails.
Mr. Von Bizmark, on the other hand, felt all this attention was rather gauche and shrank from view at his VBO apartment at the Peninsula. His reticence only underlined the fact of their separate residences, a detail that was becoming harder to conceal. Peppered amid everything else, Alicia reported hearing Mrs. Von Bizmark in the upstairs office bickering endlessly with Mr. Von Bizmark whenever she had three minutes’ time. He had at least agreed to dress for the evenings at home so he could, ostensibly, see Peony but, more imperatively, walk out onto Park Avenue (where a photographer could be lurking behind any number of impeccably manicured shrubs) arm in arm with his wife, smiling for all the world to see.
Anna traveled through her days like a sleepwalker, conducting business by muscle memory. Each hour blended into the next, interrupted only by creative output and the briefest islands of unconsciousness, nights punctuated by violent sneezes and eruptions of hives. Anna found herself standing on a patch of tarmac over the East River shuffling unemployed rich ladies from a heliport out to a waiting chopper. Two more zoomed East to the beach, and another trio held over the river, waiting their turn.
Dazed and depressed, Anna wondered who the architect of her life was. Instead of making choices and taking action, it was like she was watching a movie about herself; here in her hands, a short stack of waivers embossed on card stock to make them look less like the legal documents they actually were. Julie, running past her, dark hair streaming from a tense face damp with sweat, in a long tiered pink chiffon dress with two embroidered parrots on the back. Anna, standing for the moment, in her only pair of high heels and a Von Bizmark hand-me-down Etro silk cocktail dress she had never worn before, the wind blowing little artful wisps of material all around her. Both had been lent fur shrugs. Hair and nails done this morning by the “last-minute” salon team as a “treat” from Mrs. Von Bizmark, who had sensed, even from their brief phone call at dawn from the Castle, that things were still “not quite right” with Anna.
“Are you OK, dear?” Mrs. Von Bizmark had asked. And by OK she meant: Was Anna emotionally and physically well enough to carry out the tasks of the day to perfection? Was she feeling only positive things and thinking only beneficent thoughts about Mrs. Von Bizmark? And was she appropriately dressed?
“Absolutely!” Anna had said. “It’s just, you know, a lot. And it’s only five a.m. I’ll be fine in an hour.” You are a robot. You are a machine, she’d told herself.
Anna’s most crucial remaining responsibility was to ensure Mrs. Von Bizmark would not be financially responsible for the watery deaths of any of her dear friends. Anna had handed each guest a numbered waiver to sign in the heliport while they sipped champagne. Avi, ever vigilant, had also installed a tiny hidden camera at the reception desk to record each woman as she read and signed the document. “Let’s make it airtight,” he’d said like a mercenary. “No deniability.”
After obtaining her signature, Anna or Julie would then ferry each woman out to one of two waiting helicopters, refresh her champagne, and toss a cashmere throw over her lap, and then it was wheels up. Each helicopter took less than two minutes to fill. They would hop on the last ride out with Principal Sellers and a few cast members from the opera. Anna couldn’t believe their turn was almost up; everything was moving so quickly.
Sellers, in a belted brown dress and pumps, soberly stood to the side in a knee-length down parka. She held a small bottle of water as Anna ushered out the last flute-clutching socialites making the usual high-pitched chirps. They all wore clothes and accessories in the $50,000-per-look category: the leather of the shoes, the metal of the hardware, the perfect fall of a custom-tailored couture skirt, not to mention the hides of hundreds of mink, chinchilla, and foxes.
These things did not likely impress Sellers, who silently assumed her window seat next to Anna. They lifted up, over the East River. Anna had had this pleasure several times with Mrs. Von Bizmark, but it wasn’t the sort of thing she wished to grow blasé about.
“Cool, right?” Anna said, pointing with her chin at the tall buildings of Manhattan’s East Side, reduced to shimmering blades of grass behind them in minutes. They were lucky to have an unseasonably warm and bright day; the sun glinted off the buildings behind them.
“This is my first helicopter ride,” Sellers said. “It’s not something I expected as part of being an educator.” Anna knew from the programs she had prepared that Principal Sellers had come up through the public school system in the Bronx herself, attended City College, and worked her way from a grade school classroom to principal, and while she hadn’t written this explicitly in the brochure, she imagined that Sellers had managed this all without having to ask a bunch of wealthy white women for money. But they both knew she needed to find $1.3 million, and Mrs. Von Bizmark’s friends were a good place to start.