Dusk
Carriage ride
Pianist + earplugs
Renaissance art?
Tangerine—the color
Fireworks
(in a heart bubble with sparkles shooting out)
Nothing too challenging, really, except for that final item. Fireworks at dusk over Park Avenue in the shape of a heart. If anyone could pull it off, it was the famed Gafrucci fireworks family, whose sons had been sacrificing fingers on the job for a half dozen generations. But Anna’s calls to their office had been answered by a deeply disinterested family member with a heavy Queens accent who insisted both the timing and location of her request was “totally impossible, goodbye.”
Stymied, Anna focused on nailing everything else. She knew it annoyed the staff when she tried to tell them how to do their jobs, but she had to be sure Chef understood the task in front of her. “Like, dinner of a lifetime!” Anna said on the phone. “Dazzle her!”
“I have this idea, but it’s a little expensive . . . ?” Chef said with a rising inflection. That she would even mention cost signaled to Anna that perhaps Chef had in fact come up with something extraordinary enough to impress the unimpressible. “See, my friend, Paolo in Puglia, he has this biodynamic heirloom farm. And I got him to send me a dozen tomatoes by plane, and, Anna, you cannot even believe how she loves these tomatoes.”
“Uh-huh,” Anna said, calculating the cost of a jet to Bari, Italy. What if she was on that jet? Anna imagined herself there, cushioned in the cool beige leather of the G-7, a large basket lined with one of those napkins from Provence on the seat next to her. She would gather the vegetables from Paolo, spare time for a glass and a half of verdicchio, hop back on the jet with the rest of the bottle, and zoom back to reality. Chef had been talking, but no words penetrated Anna’s brief respite in the south of Italy.
“Chamomile sorbet for dessert.”
“I’m sorry?” Anna said.
“Look, just get me the jet, and Paolo can take care of all our sourcing. Just there and back . . . Quick, yes?”
“Um.” This was right? Right? This made sense? All Mrs. Von Bizmark ate was fresh fruit and vegetables. What did Anna expect Chef to do? Rely on Whole Foods produce? “OK?” Anna said, mimicking Chef’s speech pattern. “Do you think Paolo could throw some seafood in a cooler?” Anna asked, recalling that raw fish was also on the approved list for Mrs. Von Bizmark’s waistline.
“What, you don’t listen?” Chef asked, and Anna decided the job was in the best hands. Chef did not need Anna’s guidance any more than the reverse. She hung up and hoped for the best. The food, after all, would never be the main event for Mrs. Von Bizmark, who was focused squarely on the Vogue shoot. She doubled up on training sessions and water consumption. She cut the lemon peel from her espresso. She iced her face on the daily.
Which gave Anna some time to devote to each aspect of the anniversary. She created a tangerine tabletop, from the flowers in the cloth underneath to the enameled Tiffany silverware to the vintage Hermès plates. Julie wrangled her way into a wholesale channel of cherry blossoms and intercepted every branch due in New York City the week of the dinner. Anna found a Renaissance art show coming to the Cloisters and purchased a table at the preview evening as one of Mr. Von Bizmark’s gifts. Julie booked a piano player happy to wear earplugs, which the entire staff knew was the Mrs.’s strange preference whenever there was only a single player performing in their home.
The one nut Anna could not crack was the Gafrucci family. She kept getting transferred to the same aloof guy, who now seemed dead set on turning her down as a matter of principle. She studied their website for clues on how to appeal to them. She had tried every number and email on their contact page and was just aimlessly clicking around their bare-bones website when she stumbled on a familiar name under MEDIA CONTACTS.
“Well, hello, Max, how are you today?”
“Oh boy, Anna, what is it? What’s wrong?”
“We need a favor.”
“You mean it’s not enough that I got her the goddamn spread in Vogue!” It seemed these days like Max was always an inch from hysteria.
“Well, this one is a bit different. It involves arranging a small fireworks display over Park Avenue in a few weeks.”
“Ah, you want the Gafruccis.”
“Not just any Gafrucci. I can’t get the boss on the phone, and the guy I keep talking to says it’s not possible. Can you get whoever Gafrucci Senior is to come here and meet with me?”
“And you know what you are going to do for me?” Uh-oh. Anna had not anticipated a tit for tat. “Convince Kissy to pose for Vogue with Sellers and Josefina.”
“Huh,” Anna said, wondering how this would fly. Would Josefina feel used as a prop? Would Sellers find the whole thing silly and wasteful? Between this and the luncheon pictures, Lanuit was shaping up to have a real doozy of a piece.
“I think they’ve picked up on the Marriage of Figaro thing,” Max said as if reading Anna’s mind. “Vivienne mentioned it. You know, Upstairs, Downstairs.”
“Inevitable, I guess,” Anna said, though even she was unclear to what extent Mrs. Von Bizmark was eager to participate or even understood that the opera could be interpreted as a statement about class in America in the twenty-first century: that despite the enormous advantages of money and social rank, cleverness would always triumph. Anna was not even sure if Mrs. Von Bizmark would agree or disagree with that statement. In any case, the only thing that really mattered was whether her overall personal social stock would rise or fall in value.
Ernesto Gafrucci arrived promptly when the Mrs. was at back-to-back SoulCycle classes. He understood that the gift was entirely to be a surprise and assured Anna that “you don’t stay in this business without discretion.”
On the phone, the guy she’d spoken with had been coarse, bordering on unprofessional. Ernesto Gafrucci in the flesh was anything but. In an Armani suit and an Hermès tie, hair slicked back, and with a deep tan, Gafrucci reached for Anna’s hand with a pinky ring so enormous it almost completely distracted from his missing right thumb and index finger. He smelled like gardenias.
“Anna, I presume.”
“Excuse the mess,” she said as they stepped into the living room, still damaged: an enormous hole in the ceiling, a fractured wall, and the destroyed hardwood floor waiting for Forstbacher’s unlikely consent to start work. Gafrucci graciously averted his eyes from the mess. “They’ll be here.” She stood at the broadest window in the center of the living room wall over Park Avenue. Gafrucci took up a post next to Anna, hands clasped behind his back. He seemed to be chewing something with his front teeth behind closed lips, mulling it over with his jaw.
“What time?”
“Just after dusk.”
He raised his chin, as if doing some last calculation. “Possible,” he finally said, just above a whisper.
“Really?”
“But you’re going to need a 1047 form and a 21C lenience. We can start the process, but we’re a little late.”
“Anything we can do to expedite?”
“Do you know someone in the mayor’s office?”
In her mind, she could hear Mrs. Von Bizmark’s response: We certainly do not know that socialist! The mayor, famously liberal, existed at the opposite end of the city’s social spectrum, far from the aerie perch of the Von Bizmarks. Nonetheless, someone at VBO must be in touch with the mayor, inasmuch as the web of VBO influence traveled to the farthest corners of the earth. Who that person was and how to find them was the trick.