“You know me,” Remy said, and set the empty glass on the bar.
April came in two drinks later, wearing black pants and a short green jacket that stopped at her ribcage, like something a bullfighter might wear. It made her look long and exotic, and Remy felt that exhilarating embarrassment that he imagined was experienced by middle-aged guys with beautiful, younger girlfriends. “You look great,” he said. He stood and kissed her.
She smiled nervously. “Thanks for doing this.”
“Oh.” He reached for his fourth whiskey sour. “Sure.” Remy took her hand and followed her into the restaurant, listing a bit from the booze, and taking in the open stares from the tables, shadowed faces peering up in the harsh light of tabletop candles. They all seemed to be trying too hard to have a good time, to be casual, and it crossed Remy’s mind that they might be spirits of some kind, the ghosts of people who used to go out to dinner, before it became a form of patriotism. The candles agitated the flashers and floaters behind Remy’s eyes, but he couldn’t look away, the bits swarming like summer insects around flickering candlelight. Finally he closed his eyes and let April pull him through the maze of tables.
When he opened his eyes, Remy saw why April had thanked him for coming. The sharp, older real estate broker who’d been at April’s apartment, Nicole, was sitting at a corner booth, waiting for them. Nicole wore a smart pink suit that made her seem like a design on a sketchpad. The first time she blinked, her long lashes snapped like castanets.
“Troy couldn’t make it?” April asked.
“Uh… no,” said Nicole, and she sized up Remy as if considering a purchase. “I didn’t ask him. I thought it was just going to be the two of us, April.”
“Oh, really?” she said. “I must’ve misunderstood.”
Remy had already taken his jacket off and draped it over the chair back. “Oh,” he said. “Should I-” April grabbed his hand.
“No.” Nicole sighed. “That’s okay. You may as well join us… as long as you don’t mind a little shop talk.”
“I don’t mind,” he said.
He sat and they all sipped at their waters, Remy momentarily startled by the taste of liquid that wasn’t distilled. “I trust you saw this?” Nicole asked April, and slid across a real estate listing from another company showing a photo of the balcony of a high-rise apartment. Remy read the words concierge and glass conversion before April took the slick sheet of paper and read it. “Six to eight rooms,” Nicole was saying. “Both fulls and halves. This would have been perfect for Morgan. But the assholes at Klinerman Davis used the long weekend to hide the listing; they were at forty-eight hours before anyone had any idea the building was open. And then on Monday they didn’t answer their phones until four. Look, we can’t whiff on a building like this, April. This is exactly the kind of thing we need our associates to bird-dog for us.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“We can’t sit around waiting for these sharks to share their listings, because their goddamn clients will be unpacking boxes before we’ve even heard about it. We have to have a heads-up when something like this is about to come on line, whether it means paying secretaries or blowing someone at the real estate board. But whatever we need to do, we need to do it now. Do you understand? There is no more honor out there,” Nicole said. “It’s a war, now, honey. This is about defending our values. Because they will beat you to death for a dime on the sidewalk. And the only way to deal with that kind of aggression is to beat them to death for a nickel.”
There was more of this talk, and Remy found himself drifting as Nicole ranted. April held her menu to her chest like a shield, but she couldn’t look away from Nicole, whose menu remained folded in front of her while she criticized April’s work, while pretending at the same time to be concerned (“The partners all agree: it’s just not like you to let things get away from you like this”). Drinks came and Nicole turned to the inspirational part of her speech, rambling on about the great opportunities and the new listings that April should be getting. More drinks came and Nicole’s voice rose to cover the restaurant din – higher and faster, speaking with a frenzy that seemed to make April even edgier: competing brokers were snakes, clients idiots, developers thieves, “and April, honey, we need to know that you can handle every one of them,” April nodding slightly and reaching for her empty water glass as Nicole warned about partners who would cheat her out of commissions, a broker at the firm who was known for hoarding the ’burbs and a seemingly cooperative agent uptown who wouldn’t think twice about spreading rumors to potential clients that April had AIDS.
April coughed in her hand and looked around the room, as if trying to find an escape route.
“Listen, dear,” Nicole said, “the bottom line is that we’re going to look back at this period as the dawn of a new age, an unprecedented period of growth in real estate wealth, and I don’t want you to miss it. I won’t allow any of my brokers to miss it. I won’t allow my group to miss it. And I won’t allow the firm to miss it.”
April said she understood, thanked Nicole, and changed the subject, twice, but even when Nicole talked about other things – she told a long story about her son Milo getting into a prestigious preschool – Remy realized that she talked about her son the way she talked about real estate, as if there were a thriving market somewhere in which Milo’s development could be tracked and profited from, and getting him into the right school was just another function of waiting for market forces and gentrification and favorable interest rates. At one point April tried to speak, but she made the mistake of referring to the market as a bubble and Nicole came out of her seat, arguing that this was “the triumph of the concentrated work of generations.”
They ordered wine and appetizers and Nicole talked about real estate, about her secret hope to partner with a developer looking to “furb and flip fifteen boxes in the Heights.” They ordered entrées (Remy ordered the wasabi marinated duck) and a wine bottle came and went and its brother came and went, and this seemed to mellow Nicole a bit, because she shifted to an easier subject – real estate fables, stories about people who got the last great deal, who chanced upon the next Williamsburg or got a foothold on an undiscovered street, or the last unrehabbed building in the Bowery, or the only quiet block in the meatpacking district. And maybe it was the booze, or maybe it was the stories coming out of Nicole’s pinched little mouth, but it seemed to Remy that she was describing a world in which everyone was in the process of moving, and he had the image of a colony of disturbed ants scurrying back to their hills. Everyone was in the market to buy apartments and condos and houses, whether they knew it or not. Everyone was the agent of his own destiny, shifting from one place to another, and he imagined an historic migration, Okies closing up dusty family farms and cashing out 401ks, climbing in their Benzes and driving sixty blocks uptown to five-room walk-ups with river views. Remy took a long pull of wine and looked up at April and smiled – didn’t it all sound… sort of… nice? Food came and went, and still Nicole talked, her voice rising in a kind of poetic incantation as she recited wondrous new listings from memory, or produced them out of the air, and Remy thought she must know every apartment in the city by heart, or perhaps all she had to do was imagine them and they became reaclass="underline" a three-bedroom with a wrap terrace in the West Nineties, a northern exposure with a doorman in the East Twenties, the Village building about to go co-op with the little Montessori school across the street. And Remy understood that every conversation now was really about real estate, and that a conversation about real estate was really a conversation about progress – the blossoming of civilization, the spread of democracy. This neighborhood had turned or was turning or was on the verge of turning. No neighborhood ever went down in Nicole’s estimation. In police work, there had only been decline; in real estate, there was only ascension. He found himself drifting happily as Nicole described a world in which the wealthy selflessly tried to save the city, maybe the whole country, maybe the whole world, one neighborhood at a time, cleansing blocks and doubling property values. If the city before had seemed to him always on the verge of decay, strips of lawless, decrepit neighborhoods in danger of being overrun by criminals, now it was being transformed through a million tiny regime changes – nice professional couples cleansing blocks with shutters and window flower boxes, with curbside Saabs and Lexuses.