“How long will it take?”
“An hour. Tops.”
“Let me ask Mrs. Von Bizmark if it’s really necessary,” she said, stopping Miguel from removing his jacket to get right to work. “I’ll call you.”
“Up to you,” he said, reshouldering his blazer. “I wouldn’t wait on that, though. It could clean break in the middle of the party, start a flood. Disaster,” he said, heading down the hallway with his head down, like a general leaving the battlefield. Cristina rolled her eyes.
“Please!” she whispered to Anna. Cristina held up her hand, rubbing her fingers together to indicate that Miguel was only interested in money.
“And,” he said, standing with his hand on the back doorknob, “you don’t really have to worry about upsetting seven.”
An ancient woman, Mrs. Forstbacher, inhabited the seventh floor like a painted hermit, interacting mostly with building staff, who claimed that she held a stethoscope to the walls of the apartment when she sensed the slightest disturbance in order to call downstairs and complain. This was, after all, her way of socializing. In any case, the dysfunctional Von Bizmark toilet seemed a safe distance away, a whole floor between them.
“I’ll let you know,” Anna said curtly. “Thank you.” She closed the door.
Back in the office, Julie scribbled on an antiquated carbon copy pad that ensured no phone message was ever completely lost. The teensy-tiny slips forced you to whittle each voluminous, nuanced message down to about eleven words. Julie, sweating underneath her wig, ripped off another draft and crumpled it.
“Everything OK?” Anna asked.
“Vera tried to get the jet for the weekend. To Jamaica, of all places!” Vera was the Von Bizmarks’ second child and a senior at Phillips Exeter. “When I told her no, she asked to speak to my manager.”
“I’ll call her back,” Anna said, winking. “As your manager.”
“And Avi called three times!” Julie said. “First he said he was returning his phone call, then hers, and this last time he wouldn’t even tell me who he wanted to speak to; he just asked exactly who was in the apartment. Do we have to write that one down even?”
Avi the lawyer’s hallmark was the cluster call. He would try the home office, then Mrs. Von Bizmark’s cell phone, then email, then text her, then Mr. Von Bizmark’s cell phone, then office, then back to the beginning until he got a Von Bizmark on the phone. Unlike Marco, he never, ever wanted to speak to anyone but a Von Bizmark about anything. Rumor had it he was former Israeli intelligence.
“He’ll just keep calling until he reaches one of them. No need for a message,” Anna said.
“He’s a weird one,” Julie said. “How’d it go with Miguel?”
Although by nearly anyone else’s lights, the apartment and all its contents were pristine—practically unlived in!—by Von Bizmark entertaining standards, the place needed a lot of work.
“Eh,” Anna said vaguely.
Julie opened the snack drawer between them. They munched anxiously on truffle popcorn, Indonesian raw cashews, grain-free coconut granola.
“Miranda Chung passed,” Anna blurted.
“Oh, shit,” Julie said. She squeezed Anna’s hand over the snack drawer. “Shit, shit, shit!”
Tears unexpectedly filled Anna’s eyes. She blinked, and there they were on her cheeks.
“Oh, no!” Julie exclaimed, handing her a tissue.
“I just don’t know what to do now.”
“Well, I mean, just keep painting. Obviously.”
Anna suppressed a small sob.
“I mean, it’s not like Miranda Chung is the only game in town, Anna,” Julie said.
“And Adrian is leaving Food Blast to go work for Louis Vuitton! Louis fucking Vuitton!” Anna added, quaking a little. Again, it seemed somehow that he was moving up in the world, and that meant she was going down.
Julie looked confused. “Well, that sounds like good news?”
Anna quickly swiped her face and blew her nose when they heard the elevator door ding and then four hard heels on the marble. Both Von Bizmarks? Mr. Von Bizmark went straight upstairs while the Mrs. paused in the kitchen to gather herself before charging into the office. She wore her hair back with sunglasses and a trim down vest: no need for a full coat in a car.
“Good morning,” Mrs. Von Bizmark said, rushing to the relatively dim lighting around her desk, keeping her owlish sunglasses on. Her skin looked puffy and pink. If she had come home alone, there would be some office speculation about where she had been: The dermatologist for a quick peel or laser? The shrink for a new Xanax prescription? Out for an unusual jog on this brisk day? But the two of them together like this on a workday, even if it was the quiet before New Year’s Eve, plus Avi’s frantic calls, could only mean one thing: they had, in fact, redone their wills.
Lately it seemed they treated will revision as if it were bad couples therapy; neither of them could now force the other to sign a postnuptial agreement, so instead they focused on bludgeoning one another with postmortem scenarios. Other husbands and wives fought bitterly and threatened to leave their spouses in their most inner sanctums. The Von Bizmarks did battle in the cool corporate setting of a lawyer’s office, where they would demonstrate through subtext and math laid out by their legal representatives how far the other had fallen in their esteem.
“Anyway,” Mrs. Von Bizmark said as if they were in the middle of a conversation, “I had an idea!” She took a seat at her desk and announced to Anna and Julie, both at attention, sitting straight up in their Aeron chairs: “Let’s send the opera a foundation check.”
This made sense in that if the marriage was in trouble, Mrs. Von Bizmark would wish to avoid dipping into her own personal trust. Anna presumed Mrs. Von Bizmark had just cooked up this idea in the car because there was no way Marco would have given her disinformation. Either way, it suddenly felt very much up to Anna to prevent this from happening. Personal assistants often found themselves in positions of maximum responsibility with minimal power. Florence always said, Never do more or less than you are asked. Somehow, it had never been easy for Anna to keep herself within those limits.
“Well . . . ,” Anna said.
“We absolutely can,” Mrs. Von Bizmark said sternly. Anna would have to prevent her from committing tax fraud either at a later date or surreptitiously. “And furthermore, we decided to go out East for New Year’s Eve,” Mrs. Von Bizmark said without ceremony.
“You’re going to Coolwater?” Anna said, taken aback. The Von Bizmark country home had been most memorably described by Architectural Digest as “the most relevant take on a sixteenth-century chateau ever seen in the Hamptons.” Mrs. Von Bizmark rarely referred to it by name, preferring the more subtle phrasing of out East or the beach. Behind their backs, the staff called it the Castle. The Von Bizmarks spent weekends there Memorial to Labor Day plus two weeks in August, then Thanksgiving with the family, and that was it.
Phil, the house manager, was probably at that moment snuggled up by the fire with a new off-season friend, someone like a buff contractor, several decades his junior. Or he could be gallivanting in the Caribbean with the same. The winter was his downtime, and in the ten years Anna had worked for the Von Bizmarks, it had never been interrupted.