The Best Laid Plans (8 page)

T
EN DAYS LATER I
step out into the street in front of our building and pull out my cellphone to call Sienna to say I’m running late. As I distractedly jaywalk through traffic, a monster eighteen-wheeler truck comes to a screeching halt within inches of my body and a conga line of cars going up Park Avenue narrowly avoid crashing into one another. I’m so badly shaken that the only parts of my body capable of moving are my hands, which fly up in front of my face. Terrance sprints from the lobby to safely shepherd me back to the curb, and the driver jumps down from the cab of the truck.

“Lady, you gotta look where you’re going, this rig weighs forty tons. Do you think it’s a piece of cake to try to stop it on a dime like that?” the driver barks.

“Sorry, you’re right, I should have been paying attention,” I say, as I reach into my purse to finger one of the half dozen St. Christopher medals that I carry in each of my pocketbooks. Even if you’re not Catholic, it can’t hurt to have the patron saint of travel keeping an eye out for you. Especially if you’re
an attention-deficit New Yorker who’s never doing fewer than three things at the same time.

Terrance pats my hand. “Mrs. N, you’re still trembling. Want to do a meditation?”

“Or medication?” a female voice sings out. “I have a whole bottle of Ativan, it’s a lovely anti-anxiety drug.” I look up and spot the driver extending a helping hand to a blond bombshell as she daintily steps out of the truck’s cab. Even from twenty feet away I can see that her legs are longer than Heidi Klum’s and her eyelashes are thicker than Bambi’s. She’s dressed in five-inch heels and a sexy bandage dress wrapped so tightly that I momentarily wonder whether she’s wearing Herve Leger, or if she’s been in an accident herself and left the hospital in traction.

“That’s okay,” I say, as my breathing gets back to normal. I send a quick text message to Sienna to let her know that I’m all right and I’ll be there as soon as I can. “I guess if my thumbs are working well enough to use my cellphone there’s no permanent damage.”

Terrance and the driver laugh, but the vixenish blonde just stares at me blankly.

“You must be Ms. Glass,” Terrance says, stepping in to introduce us. “Welcome to the building. Most people don’t make such a dramatic entrance.”

“I’m known for my entrances.” She giggles flirtatiously.

“Mrs. Newman, meet our newest tenant, Ms. Glass. Ms. Glass bought the three MBA, EIK, CVAC, FISBO with BLT BC on the third floor,” Terrance says. Which, to those who don’t speak the one language common to all New Yorkers—real estate—is a three-bedroom, master suite with bath, eat-in kitchen, central-vacuum equipped, for-sale-by-owner apartment with built-in bookcases.

“Yes, yes I did. But call me Tiffany,” she says, still locking eyes on my muscular doorman.

“Tiffany, Tiffany Glass?” I chuckle congenially. “I bet a lot of people ask you about your name. I know a little bit about that myself. I’m Truman Newman.”

“Well, how about that?” Tiffany blinks.

Terrance tells the driver to take the truck around to the side entrance. “And Mrs. N, I want you to pay attention to where you’re going,” he scolds me affectionately.

“Will do.” I glance at my watch and hurry off in the direction of the train. “Welcome to the building,” I shout over my shoulder toward Tiffany. “If there’s anything you need, just let me know.”

“Okay, um, thanks,” she says, winding up our clever conversation and turning her attention (which, let’s face it, never really left) back to Terrance and the truck driver. “Now which of you boys is going to help me find my ThighMaster?”

I
’M STILL RATTLED
as I sit down next to Sienna—and it’s not just about my near accident. Sienna’s and my legs are dangling side by side over the edge of a medical examining table in our beloved Dr. B.’s office. When Sienna pooh-poohs my opposition, I give her a little kick.

“You’re out of work and I’m broke,” I say guiltily. “This is wrong.”

“Nonsense,” says Sienna as a nurse wipes our faces clean with astringent-soaked cotton balls and then frosts them with a thin coat of numbing cream.

“No really,” I try to insist. “I’m supposed to be putting food on my family’s table, not poison in my forehead. Getting Botox is shallow and frivolous.”

“In times like these it’s shallow and
practical,
” Sienna argues. “Just today a job counselor told me that older people can’t find work. Besides, I’m paying for it out of my severance
package. That fucking Jerry Gerard is responsible for at least half of these wrinkles; it’s only fair that he should foot the bill for smoothing them out.”

I dab at the numbing cream to make sure that it’s working and squirm around in my chair. Maybe it’s too much to expect a mountain climber to scale Everest on her first try. Or to ask me to give up trying to look my best after having spent a lifetime in Naomi’s shadow. Besides, now that Tiffany Glass is living in our building, it’s going to take a lot more than a Sub-Zero refrigerator to keep up with the neighbors.

“Thank you,” I say emotionally. “This is very generous.”

“Don’t mention it. I mean really, don’t,” Sienna says, patting my hand. “But if you happen to know a cute guy you’d like to introduce me to …”

“Cute guys, was somebody talking about cute guys?” Dr. B. asks cheerily, bouncing into the room on the balls of his gray ombre alligator loafers.

“Never mind that, love the outfit,” Sienna says, running her hand admiringly down the skinny lapel of Dr. B.’s black Prada suit with a nipped-in waist.

“I know, and look!” Dr. B. says pulling the flaps on his shirt pocket opened and closed. “Velcro!”

I hate going for a physical, you have to drag me to my yearly mammogram, but despite the fact that he sticks dozens of syringes in my face, I look forward to seeing Dr. Brandt—his needles are like magic wands, not to mention that he’s endlessly entertaining. I’d never trust my worry lines to anyone else, and neither would half the world’s most fabulous faces. Gwyneth flies him to London, Madonna has him on speed dial and
New York
magazine anointed him the architect of the New New Face—which looks like what your old face used to look like, only better.

Sienna and I settle back in our seats. Dr. B. pulls on a pair of
gloves and traces what used to be the hollows under my eyes. “Looking good. This Perlane’s really holding up,” he says. The nurse lines up a row of clear bottles and hands Dr. B. a set of hypodermic needles on a silver tray. He stabs a syringe into the top of one of his magic potions and plunges it into my cheek. Again. And, ooh, here it comes, again. “Just another little squirt, to pump up the volume,” Dr. B. says, pursing his lips as the needle goes in, yes, again.

I pick up the mirror and see, despite a few pricks, that I’m already looking so much more fresher and relaxed. My mood, along with my face, immediately lifts. “Can you imagine what Picasso would have done with Perlane?” I giggle.

“You mean crossing women’s eyes, flattening their heads, and reassembling their body parts?” Dr. B. laughs. “That old goat did enough damage with a paintbrush. But imagine what Michelangelo could have done with collagen!”

Over the next several minutes Dr. B. changes needles, choosing from an arsenal of modern beauty ammunition that includes Botox to freeze forehead muscles and hyaluronic and fillers like Juvederm to fill in lines around our mouths. As he loads another syringe to zap the folds between my nose and my mouth—unfunnily referred to as “laugh lines”—the good doctor lets out a whoop.

“This is the Evolence, it’s made out of pig and a rabbi blessed it. Not exactly kosher.” Dr. B. laughs. “But it works.”

Sienna always says that Botox is like face cocaine. You get a little, and you just want more and more. Today, I’d swear it’s a muscle relaxant. Dishing with Sienna and Dr. B., I can feel the tension absolutely drain from my whole body. The radio is tuned to the lite FM station, programmed for contemporary soft rock to appeal to the over-forty crowd who can’t stand rap, but who don’t want to spend the next decade listening to the
greatest hits of the eighties, either. I’d always thought of music as a great equalizer, bringing people together—but I defy any parent to spend five earsplitting minutes with their teenager listening to Kanye West before they run screaming from the room. Sienna and Dr. B. are bantering about the latest
Dancing with the Stars
contestants when all of a sudden, a newscaster breaks in with an announcement.

“Bankruptcy … emergency loan … housing market … shit!”

I don’t catch every word, but I hear enough. Peter had warned me that his company was just the tip of the iceberg, but in my wildest dreams—or nightmares—I’d never imagined that the whole economy was going down.

Three more nurses come rushing into Dr. B.’s office, followed by a line of patients in various stages of treatment—and distress.

“The market’s crashing,” a woman whose hair is tied back in a high ponytail cries. She clutches the latex glove filled with frozen peas that you usually hold against a bruise, to her heart.

“How much to do my eyes today and not the lips?” asks another woman, already in economy mode.

Sienna’s reaction is pure newscaster. “Did the announcer really say ‘shit’?”

“Everyone, ladies, take a deep breath,” says Dr. B. “Get your head out of your hands, Millie,” he says, going over to the frozen-pea-holding woman, who’s burst into tears. “You don’t want the CosmoDerm getting all lumpy, now do you?”

Ready to jump on the story, Sienna grabs for her BlackBerry and punches in the news desk’s number. On the seventh unanswered ring, she punches the phone. “Goddamn it, they see my caller ID and won’t pick up. The biggest story of the
decade and I’ve nobody to report it for!” She pauses as the reality of the situation hits closer to home. “This probably wasn’t the best time to quit my job.”

There are wails and frantic phone calls to husbands, brokers, therapists, and who-knows-who-else. With people’s anxiety levels rising in direct proportion to the falling Dow, Dr. B. emerges as a King-of-Collagen-post 9/11-Rudy-Guliani, offering strong leadership and taking control of the situation.

“Okay, everyone. Heads high, put away your phones. Gloria,” he commands, turning to a receptionist, “get everyone a bottle of antioxidant pomegranate water. And, ladies, stop fretting, it causes wrinkles. Today’s injections are on the house.”

The house? I’d love to stay for more Evolence but I have to get back to the apartment to see Peter and the girls. I give Dr. B. a quick kiss, grab Sienna, and head toward the waiting room. It’s not until we’re out of the subway and the anesthetic wears off that I realize we never finished filling in my laugh lines. At the moment that doesn’t seem so terrible—they’re a reminder of happier times.

P
ETER’S STANDING SLACK-SHOULDERED
in the entranceway of the apartment, bouncing a red rubber ball against our Venetian-plastered sky blue walls. Our twenty-nine-year-old boy-wonder lawyer, Bill Murphy, is trying to get him to turn on the lights, but as soon as Bill flicks them on, Peter stops bouncing the ball long enough to turn them off.

“I got here an hour ago, as soon as I heard the news, but I can’t get Peter to focus on anything but that damned ball,” Bill says, patting his hair, which isn’t so much slicked back as plastered, Alfalfa-style, to his baby-faced head. His suit, as always,
is slightly rumpled, and although he’s over six feet tall, Bill’s the kind of guy who doesn’t stand out in a crowd. Still, while Bill’s style isn’t sharp, his mind is—he got his degree less than five years ago and already he’s considered one of New York’s best tax attorneys. And he’s awfully sweet.

“It was nice of you to come over. Why don’t we go inside and I’ll fix you both a drink,” I say, guiding Bill and Sienna past my shell-shocked husband and dropping my bag on the now-flowerless Georgian table. “I think Peter just needs some alone time.” And as I step into the living room, I can see why.

The peripatetic financial analyst Jim Cramer is waving his arms manically, shouting out blow-by-blows of the economic meltdown from the sixty-five-inch plasma TV screen. Naomi, dressed head-to-toe in black, is rocking back and forth with her hands on either side of her head like a Sicilian widow at a funeral. “It’s a perfect storm, a perfect storm,” wails my mother, the Al Roker of tragedy. Sitting next to Naomi, patting her arm protectively, is Dr. Barasch, P-H-D, her dancing partner from the benefit.