The night doorman, Jesus, was coming off his shift.
Before Raoul, his replacement, arrived, he mopped the
marble foyer, and diligently polished the brass tread
on the door threshold. The day-shift doorman changed
into his smart grey uniform in the staff bathroom. The
porter travelled to each floor in the service elevator,
collecting the black sacks of trash and sorted recycling
that people left out there. In the basement, the super
checked his list to see who was on, who was away, who
was having things delivered or taken away. He¡¯d done
this fifty weeks of each year for more than fifteen years.
He and his wife lived in a small apartment at the back
downstairs. They¡¯d raised their boys there, though they
were grown up and gone now.
In apartment 7B, Maria Piscatella kissed her husband
Earnest goodbye, chastely on the cheek, smoothing
his hair down habitually as he left for work, and contemplated
the breakfast dishes and another day. Her
two children smiled down at her in their high-school
graduation outfits, from the 8¡ä¡ä ¡Á 10¡ä¡ä photographs that
hung on the kitchen wall. She knew they¡¯d both still be
asleep, in their college beds in their college dorms far
away. Up late, no doubt, last night studying or partying.
Bradley had been gone from here two years, and Ariel
since last September, and she still missed them every
day. The apartment was still too quiet. There
wasn¡¯t enough mess. She had two plates, two glasses
and two mugs to load into the dishwasher. One bed to
make. And no laundry today. If you¡¯d told her ten years
ago how much she would miss all of that, she¡¯d have
laughed and told you you were crazy.
Upstairs, in 8A/B Blair Stewart¡¯s housekeeper Mary
would also have laughed. She¡¯d been up since six,
waking alone in the windowless maid¡¯s room off the
laundry, as she had done for the past six months, and
now she was serving waffles ¨C each plate configured
slightly differently ¨C to the Stewarts¡¯ three kids, while
Blair issued the day¡¯s instructions, and Bobbie moaned
that the dry cleaners hadn¡¯t returned his grey pinstripe.
Mary didn¡¯t mind being told what to do (wrong career
path, if she did), but she hated the way Mrs Stewart did
it. When she said ¡®clean the laundry room¡¯, she always
added ¡®really well, please, Mary¡¯ as though there were
any other way to do it, or as if she ever did anything
else. You¡¯d think a woman who was so damn particular
about how things were done would do some of them
herself. But, of course, Mrs Stewart was perpetually
busy. Today was a luncheon. Mary had still to figure
out what elevated a regular lunch by those three letters
into a luncheon, but she figured it had something to do
with money. Mrs Stewart would go to that gym, on the
corner of Madison and 85th, the one she went to every
day during the week, and then get her hair blown out
and get dressed up to go out and ¡®do good¡¯. Forget
about doing any good in her own home. Mary didn¡¯t
like Blair Stewart at all. God knows she needed a job,
and the money wasn¡¯t bad here, but if it weren¡¯t for the
kids, she¡¯d be thinking about finding something else
already. The kids were okay. A little lazy, a little spoilt
maybe ¨C but whose kids weren¡¯t, these days?
Dr Hunter Stern, in 4A, slept on. He never had a
patient until 11 a.m., and since he saw patients in the
apartment, he never needed to get up before 10.30. An
insomniac since his twenties, he was never asleep before
three or four in the morning, and he wore earplugs
so that the cacophony of a Manhattan morning didn¡¯t
disturb him once he had dropped off. He couldn¡¯t
take sleeping pills. He had an addictive personality, like
so many of the patients he counselled. That ruled out
red wine, too, which would also have worked. He read
biographies avidly, and usually dozed off, eventually,
on the sofa, heavy tomes rising and falling on his chest.
Across the hall, Violet Wallace fried an egg and two
rashers of bacon, as she did every morning of the week.
She carried the plate through to the dining room, where
she had laid the table the night before, with a linen
napkin and silver cutlery, and switched on the BBC
World Service on the radio. Cat, the smoky Abyssinian
cat she had resisted getting for so long, refusing to conform
to the stereotype of the single old lady, and whom
she still tokenly resisted loving by calling her Cat, curled
her tail around Violet¡¯s chair, rubbing her back against
Violet¡¯s legs, oblivious to her mistress¡¯s ambivalence.
Above her, in 5B, Gregory Cole fed Ulysses, his
chocolate-brown Labrador, who licked his hand appreciatively,
while his partner Todd took a shower. Todd
ate breakfast with his assistant, Gabrielle, at the office
every day, so Greg made a bowl of granola with yoghurt
for himself, and flipped open the Times, leaning against
the granite breakfast bar in their kitchen.
¡®Sit down to eat,¡¯ Todd called from the bedroom.
¡®You can¡¯t even see me!¡¯
¡®Doesn¡¯t mean I don¡¯t know what you¡¯re doing . . .¡¯
Charlotte Murphy peered into the mirror, as she did
every morning in 2A, and was, as she was every morning,
disappointed to see herself peering back. Through
the thin partition wall in 2B, built before building codes
came into effect, Madison Cavanagh had the opposite
reaction as she tossed her mane of Bergdorf Blonde
hair, and carefully applied another coat of lengthening
mascara to lashes that already almost hit her eyebrows.
Upstairs in 3A, newcomer Emily Mikanowski
stretched her body into the Cat on her yoga mat, trying
to ignore the pile of boxes in the living room that still
needed to be unpacked, while next door Arthur
Alexander dreamed his troubled dreams and snored,
spittle settling into the corners of his mouth, and on the
other side Hung Hamazaki, just back from a fast threemile
run, turned on the shower and hoped the hot
water would come through fast. He liked to be at his
desk at work by 8.45.
The furnace burned, and the pipes ran. Kettles boiled
on stovetops, and radiators creaked.