“So help me help you,” Anna said. “Help me help you.” She looked around the room, face to face, for any hint of an idea.
“She hates ice cream?” Alfie said uncertainly. Julie wrote Likes and Dislikes at the top of her pad and put ice cream in the Dislike column.
“No, she loves ice cream,” said Alicia. Julie drew an arrow into the Like column.
“But once, someone sent her all these fancy ice creams packed in dry ice, and she looked like she was gonna cry. She gave ’em right back to me.”
“It’s because she loves ice cream too much,” Cristina said sagely. Julie crossed out ice cream entirely.
“She likes sorbet? Ices? Like that,” Chef said, off camera. Julie wrote in sorbet. “But only in, like, crazy flavors. Wild honey and lavender. Basil. She hates, like, chocolate?” Julie wrote in parentheses: herbal?
“She hates orchids,” Barclay said, jumping in. Almost all the hundreds of white orchids that had been delivered to the residence had been sent to live elsewhere. Everyone suddenly had something to contribute.
“She hates the smell of salmon.”
“And citrus.”
“Traffic noise.”
“Slow drivers.”
“Wilted flowers.”
“Video games.”
“White chocolate.”
“White dogs.”
“Annoying ringtones.”
“Styrofoam.”
“Loud kids.”
“Ethnic food.”
“Except Italian.”
“That’s not ethnic.”
“OK, OK, what about times we’ve seen Mrs. Von Bizmark happy,” Anna prodded. A few beats. It was a much harder question. She held her breath.
“She loves cherry blossoms,” Barclay said. “I remember once I brought a huge bouquet of them upstairs—as big as a small child—and she actually hugged them.”
“She’s gettin’ real esoteric about the sort of vegetables we plant in the garden. All heritage-breed this and imported-from-Italy stuff,” the head groundskeeper offered.
“She studied Renaissance art,” Julie added.
“She loves juice,” Josefina offered, wrinkling her nose. “Like, vegetable juice.”
“She likes dusk,” Joe said. “Years ago she would go for walks at dusk. Said it was her favorite time of day.”
“That’s true,” Phil confirmed.
“I heard her say once how romantic the carriages in the park are,” Alfie offered.
“She loves live piano,” the middle-aged housekeeper from Coolwater shouted unnecessarily. “She had a guy who would come play years ago. But always with earplugs!”
Julie wrote, pianist + earplugs.
“She likes tangerine,” Evangeline, the newest maid, offered.
“Tangerines?” Julie asked to clarify.
“No, like the color tangerine.”
“Yeah, all the roses had to be tangerine this year. Like, not orange. Tangerine,” the groundskeeper confirmed.
“And you know what? I once saw her get really excited about fireworks. The polo club had this one that exploded into a big pink heart, and then it dissolved into, like, a sea of sparkles . . . ,” said Phil, suddenly engaged. “If you could get some fireworks like that . . . like up and over Park Avenue . . . that would be so great, Anna. I think that would really do it.”
Anna saw Julie write down fireworks and circle it with a big heart. She drew sparkles exploding out of the heart, and underneath she wrote, PARK AVENUE. Yep, that would be no problem whatsoever.
Sumptuous evenings at the Peninsula had their luxuriating effects on Anna, who felt better rested and more physically relaxed than she had in years, thanks mostly to the absence of cats but also to daily (or even twice-daily) visits to the cushy, creamy spa. There, the floor and walls glistened with pastel mosaics; rolled-up fresh Turkish towels in pyramids proffered themselves at the feet of cushiony chaise lounges. Sometimes she did twenty minutes on an elliptical in the gym before making a leisurely circuit of the whirlpool, seawater plunge, steam room, and sauna, resting in between, reclining while sipping icy lemon water.
When the weekend came around, Anna didn’t want to be piggy on the Von Bizmark dime, but not ordering anything extra—food? A massage?—seemed monkish. Martyr-y. As Mrs. Von Bizmark had said: this had been a tough week. Everyone needed to be at their best. Of course, she said that every week. Anna ordered a porterhouse steak, mashed potatoes, and creamed spinach with chocolate cake for dessert. Plus a bottle of burgundy and a massage.
Saturday morning Anna went straight to the studio. The handful of other artists there didn’t mind her leaning her three large canvases against the wall. She put on The Marriage of Figaro and stared at the paintings. The first two were done: the joyful one of the picnic with Adrian and the foreboding one about her feelings of inadequacy compared to her successful sister. These two were definitely finished.
The new piece was supposed to represent the joining of two worlds most thematically reflective of the opera itself. The Marriage of Figaro told the story of a count who plotted to exercise his lordly right to bed his manservant’s new bride the evening of their wedding. But his servants outwitted him in the end. Not only was the valet married and his wife unmolested, but the count himself happily returned to the loving embrace of his wife.
Anna studied her piece. It still felt like an open-ended sentence. The intricate oil roses in the background stirred feelings of nostalgia. Overlaid, a crisp re-creation in plastic of Julie’s black-and-white lips hovered as if from another world. The lips were superenlarged and hyperdetailed—Anna had painstakingly executed the skin’s contours with teensy dots. The cashmere fibers made up the pistils of one fully open flower as well as tiny wrinkles on the skin. But what, exactly, was Anna trying to conjure about these two worlds? She felt like the piece loitered in the “interesting idea” space without having yet arrived at its stirring conclusion.
“It needs a third element,” the watercolorist a few spaces away said just loudly enough to be heard. She barely raised her braided mullet. Nearby, a pale twentysomething who could have passed for fourteen looked up from her colored pencil drawing to look at Anna’s unfinished piece. She nodded, agreeing with Mullet Woman’s assessment. Anna had never seen either before, but the stranger was exactly right. “Not too much,” Mullet Woman said. “Just a touch of something.”
“Thanks,” Anna said.
What exactly that third component might consist of was a detail best left for the next day, Anna decided. Now that she knew something was missing, no need to rush the full epiphany—it would come when she was ready. She spent the rest of the weekend on a circuit between the Peninsula spa, the roof-deck, and the free movies on her hotel room television.
On Monday, Anna felt downright enthusiastic about devoting herself to the Von Bizmark anniversary fantasia. The all-hands brainstorming meeting had generated a list so rarefied she knew that if she could pull it off, Anna would not only preserve her job and the relationship but quite possibly set Julie and herself up for that raise. She studied the list, each day ticking off one more item.
Sorbet (herbal?)
Cherry blossoms!
“Esoteric” heritage vegetables (?)