A short story

The Country House

Debra Wollensky hadn’t closed a deal in over six months. Today she was determined. Absolutely fucking determined. She would stay on the phone all day if she had to. In her cubicle, about halfway down a line of five cubicles on a narrow hallway on the far side of the office floor, she had built a shrine to possibility.

This shrine consisted of multiple heaps of papers, books, maps, phone numbers, notes, scribblings, magazines, floor plans, schematics, stacking plans. Real estate definitions. Peanut M&Ms. Sticky notes, tic tacs, zoning codes, a subway map. Her purse. A box of cigarettes - Marlboro lights.

It was Sunday, and she was smoking at her desk. There was nobody else in the office. She was playing music. Moses Blue and the Pinkertons. She had seen them at the Village Vanguard the previous night with an old friend who was visiting from Dallas. Maggie. Maggie had gone to City College with Debra and the two shared an apartment on the upper west side in the mid 80s. Maggie recently came out as a lesbian and divorced her husband of 14 years, leaving two kids and a fair amount of debt on Long Island to live with her partner, Cindy, in East Dallas. Cindy was an oil heiress who owned a bakery.

Debra and Maggie had eaten Asian fusion and then seen Moses Blue and then gotten shitfaced.

Her head hurt. She was hung over and worried that if she didn’t close a deal in the next week, her job would be on the line.

In Manhattan, Sunday is when deals get made. Especially in commercial real estate. Especially in a down market. Especially with Persians. The phone rang.

“This is Debra Wollensky. Abe. How are you. Thanks for calling. Listen, I’ve spoken with the owner of West 172^nd Street. Yes. That’s the one. Number 58. Next to the church. Listen he’s open to selling. I know. This could be – yes, it could be – what’s that? What’s that? On 172^nd street in Washington Heights. Yes. Near the bus terminal. At Broadway. This could be good. This could be - We’re finally getting somewhere with him. Thirty. Thirty Million. Yes. With the basement. Yes. The back entrance. Here’s the thing. He also owns the property next door. He’d be willing – what? Yea the one – it’s empty now. It was a drugstore. It’s empty. It’s vacant. What? Abe? You gotta call me back? You gotta call me back. Ok. Call me back. 212-765-9077. Ok. Abe? Ok. Bye.”

She lit another cigarette, leaned back in her chair, and spun around slowly. She played with her hair. She smelled like the night before.

Debra works with Ari Levenstein. The two form the “Uptown and Outer Borough” team – specializing in Harlem, Washington Heights, the South Bronx, Long Island City, and Downtown Brooklyn. Mostly they do deals with non-profits – schools, churches, community groups, Latino advocacy, AIDS outreach, the City itself, the transportation authority. Recently, they had dealings with some more prestigious clients – an avant-garde art museum in Chelsea was looking for an uptown home. Washington Heights was gaining popularity – a musical about the Dominican barrio had just won a Tony award and a handful of Zagat – rated bistros had opened their doors north of 145^th Street. It was rumored that Laurence Fishburne kept an apartment in the 190s, overlooking the Hudson River and the Palisades.

Across a narrow hallway from the row of cubicles were the offices of the CFO, her partner, Ari, and some of the ‘midtown’ brokers. The research team was further back, squeezed in the corner. Through the empty office of John Markowitz, CFO, Debra stared at the small corner of dark shrouded sky that was visible through the folds and corners of the towers across E 55^th Street. In the lower-right section of the window, she could make out a line of yellow cabs cruising their way up Park Avenue. It was autumn.

Abe Sadani, the potential buyer from Great Neck, would not call back that afternoon. At 4 o’clock, Debra headed home, stopping at Saks Fifth Avenue on the way. There was a sale on winter things.

She lived in a newish, two-bedroom co-op on the Lower East Side, seventh floor. Doorman. Her eldest daughter, Becca, lived there, too. Becca was recovering from addiction to methamphetamines and crack cocaine. She had failed out of the New School after three semesters. Her other daughter, Clarissa, was a freshman at Bard College upstate. Debra’s ex-husband lived in London and sent money for the girls. He was in publishing. He wasn’t remarried, but had brought a six-foot six - inch tall Belarusian woman to a Columbia Business School alumni event. She was escort he found using google. He told that to someone at the party.

As Debra walked back toward her apartment from the 2^nd Avenue subway station, she paused for a moment on a park bench to eat some M&Ms. It was humid, and dark clouds were gathering over the top of the Williamsburg Bridge, visible down Delancey Street to the left. A salty breeze brought a scent of trash and freshly-cut construction wood.

‘Damn I used to be cool’, she thought. She was a native New Yorker. She lived on the Lower East Side because that’s where the pulse was nowadays. She lived there because it was close to the music clubs and to where CBGB used to be. Trust-fund kids from Los Angeles walked around in shabby clothes that draped off their gaunt frames. Models and actors disguised themselves as hipsters and drank apple beer from the Australian who served them. An old bum with lampshades for feet danced and sang the blues, and a Chinese man splashed a bucket of fish water on the sidewalk. Debra inhaled. She smiled.

The next day, Monday, she was late coming into the office. She was in by 10. She checked her messages. Abe Sadani hadn’t called. It was her partner, Ari. He was calling to remind Debra that he wouldn’t be in until Thursday. He was morbidly obese, and was down in North Carolina at what he called a “fat farm” called “The Forest House.” He went every year. He paid fifteen-odd thousand dollars for a week’s stay, where obesity specialists checked his heartbeat and prescribed a diet of fish, greens, and brown rice. He had a room that overlooked piney woods and a pond, and he could watch the Mets on TV. It was a pleasant escape for him.

Debra had been moved around the office three times in the past two years. Initially, she was in the cubicle in front of Peter Buckley, a broker that specialized in Fairfield and Westchester Counties. He had complained to Randall Leslie, the president. He had said that Debra was too loud. That he could hear her phone conversations, and that her desk was messy.

So, she was moved four desks over, in front of Catherine Papinelli, one of the assistants. Catherine was a diminutive, stout firebrand who grew up in the West Village and still lived there in a rent-stabilized walk up. She had a boyfriend who was a flight-attendant on a discount carrier, and was in New York twice a month.

“You know, I got a better offer at C and B Partners,” Catherine was saying a few months back, shortly after having joined the firm from a rival company. “But to get to their office, you had to go down an escalator. I can’t go down escalators. So, I came here.”

Catherine had also complained about Debra. She was, for a short time, Debra’s administrative assistant. She filed a formal complaint after just five weeks, claiming that Debra was “impossible to work for.” That she was “bossy, impatient, and short-tempered.”

So, Debra was moved a second time, this time to the far end of the floor. Ari was also sequestered there from a more formidable perch amongst the offices of the ‘midtown’ brokers on the sunny, Park Avenue - facing side of the floor. His office is diagonal to her cubicle. It’s a mess. On the wall is a caricature that was drawn at a Bar-Mitzvah showing a (flatteringly slim) Ari holding a baseball bat in a Mets uniform. He grew up in Queens. His parents are Greek holocaust survivors. He’s on his second marriage and lives on the upper west side. A lawyer by training, he found his calling in real estate.

Debra knew she would have been fired if she weren’t so damn good. And capable. And sharp. She was a New Yorker. She had a god-damn Columbia MBA. She knew New York better than anyone else in the office and they knew it. She comes in late on the weekdays and has therapy appointments Tuesdays and Thursdays. She talks about her prescription mood-tranquilizers out loud. She is erratic and dresses like a beat poet and has bad hair. But she’s good. And on a Sunday afternoon, she’s on the phone with Abe Sadani, the buyer from Great Neck, trying to close a lucrative deal in Washington Heights.

Every few weeks, Debra heads to her country house in the Hudson Valley. It was one of the few victories of her divorce. A few miles outside of Beacon, in Dutchess County. Small, but with a back porch that faces a long, sloping meadow. The Catskills are visible over the tree line in the distance.

She often invites friends. Maggie came with her partner Cindy a couple months ago. The three had smoked pot and listened to jazz and cooked a lamb curry and polenta. Other times, she goes up alone.

She was heading up there this Friday. An escape. She hadn’t closed a deal in over six months, and her daughter, Becca, had stolen some jewelry and a wad of 20 dollar bills off the kitchen counter and then disappeared. Debra figured that she had either gone to visit her ex - boyfriend, an ex-marine in Cleveland, or was trying to score drugs somewhere.

A weekend in Dutchess County, alone, was what she needed.

Thursday, Ari called to say that his flight from Raleigh had been cancelled because of severe weather. He was staying through the weekend – he decided to play a round of golf at Pinehurst and visit his uncle in Richmond. Friday morning, Abe the Persian finally called.

“Debra Wollensky. Hi Abe, how are you. Thanks for calling. Ye – yes. Yes. Yes. I spoke to the owner again. Thirty million, basement and back entrance. Now, Abe, listen. He’s also looking to sell the space next door. You could sublet that out. I don’t know. I don’t know. I believe so. Yes, the back entrance. There are 14 parking spaces. Do you speak Spanish? Yes, he’s willing to – Abe? Abe? Are you in a tunnel? Ok. He’s willing to – hello? Abe?”

“Fuck.” She said, exasperated.

She said it a little too loudly. She could hear sniggering from the junior brokers a few cubicles down. Little schmucks. WASPY little schmucks, she thought. Or maybe she said that aloud.

She left the office shortly after lunch. The market was bad. Spaces weren’t leasing. Nobody was buying. Vacancy was rising. She would go unwind at the country house. Smoke some pot. Listen to some jazz.

She took the elevator down to the lobby and put on her new pea coat from Saks and her scarf from Coach. The wind had changed and the air had grown sharply crisp. There would be frost in the country. She went out the revolving door onto east 55^th Street and walked briskly toward the Lexington Avenue subway. She had a Subaru parked at a garage in Harlem. With good traffic, she could be on her back porch in the mountains in two hours.

Forty-five minutes later, she was passing over the George Washington Bridge on her way up the Hudson. Traffic was light this early in the day. She was wearing her sunglasses and had rolled the window halfway down to take in the fall air. Her crazy curly mop of hair was billowing this way and that and she had managed to hook her I-pod into the car’s sound system. Her daughters had shown her how. She was playing some Steve Winwood.

Across the wide, gray river rose the Palisades, bathed in reds, yellows, and purples. Debra had managed to roll a joint before she left for work that morning, and held it in her left hand has she steered with her right. She was completely relaxed.

Suddenly she slammed on the brakes as the traffic slowed. “Fuck. God Dammit. God Dammit,” she said as she dropped the joint to her feet. “Shit. Shit. Shit.” She fumbled around with her left hand to try to pick it up, her sunglasses falling down her face, exposing one eye. She picked up the joint and tried to regain her composure as the traffic ground to a halt. “Dammit,” she said. She switched her music to the am radio station that had news, traffic, and weather every ten minutes.

The news was bad. There was construction ahead, and there had been an accident. A school bus full of at-risk youth from Newark had overturned, blocking a lane. Expect delays. The stock market was down. An investment bank had failed. A woman had plunged to her death from a rooftop pool in Brooklyn - she had been pushed by her daughter. In Texas, a hurricane had flooded a church, with the parishioners inside. American decline was accelerating, according to a recent study. A family of polar bears had been found starving on an iceberg off of Greenland. The Mets’ season was over.

Twenty minutes later she was still crawling across the bridge. She had finished her joint and three cigarettes. She tapped the steering wheel in a mock drum beat, anxiously. Her phone range.

“This is Debra Wollensky. Hi. Hello? Abe? Hi Abe. Look this – this isn’t the best – thirty-million. And the back entrance. Abe this isn’t the best time. I’m stuck in traffic – I’m going to my country house – can we – Abe? Shit. Abe?”