Chasing Harry Winston. Lauren Weisberger

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СКАЧАТЬ there would be no stilettos clacking against the hardwood floors, no late-night parties, no parade of visitors stomping around.

      The very next day Leigh wrote a check for the down payment, and two months later she excitedly moved into her mint-condition one-bedroom dream apartment. It had a renovated kitchen, an oversized bathtub, and a more than decent northern view of the Empire State Building. It might have been one of the smallest units in the building – okay, the smallest – but it was still a dream, a beautiful, lucky dream in a building Leigh never thought she could afford, each and every obscenely priced square foot paid for with her own hard work and savings.

      How could she possibly have predicted that the seemingly innocuous upstairs neighbor was a dedicated wearer of massive wooden orthopedic clogs? Still, Leigh berated herself regularly for thinking high heels were the only potential noise risk: it had been an amateur’s mistake. Before she’d spotted her neighbor wearing the offending shoes, Leigh had created an elaborate explanation for the relentless upstairs racket. She decided that the woman had to be Dutch (since everyone knew Dutch people wore clogs), and the matriarch of a huge, proudly Dutch family who received constant visits from countless children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, siblings, cousins, and general advice-seekers … all, most likely, Dutch clog-wearers. After spotting her neighbor wearing an air cast and feigning interest in the woman’s disgusting-sounding foot ailments including (but not limited to) plantar fasciitis, ingrown toenails, neuromas, and bunions, Leigh had clucked as sympathetically as she could manage and then raced upstairs to check her copy of the co-op rules. Sure enough, they dictated that owners were required to cover eighty percent of their hardwood floors with carpet – which she realized was an entirely moot point when the very next page revealed that her upstairs neighbor was president of the board.

      Leigh had already endured nearly four months of round-the-clock clogging, something that might have been funny if it was happening to someone else. Her nerves were directly tied to the volume and frequency of the steady thump-thump-thump that segued into a thumpety-thump-thumpety-thump-thump pattern when Leigh’s heart began to pound right along with it. She tried to breathe slowly, but her exhales were short and raspy, punctuated by little guppy gasps. As she examined her pale complexion (which on good days she thought of as ‘ethereal’ and all other times accepted as ‘sickly’) in the mirrored hallway closet door, a thin sheen of perspiration dampened her forehead.

      It seemed to be happening more frequently, this sweating/breathing issue – and not just when she heard the wood-on-wood banging. Sometimes Leigh would awaken from a sleep so deep it almost hurt, only to find her heart racing and her sheets drenched. Last week in the middle of an otherwise completely relaxing shavasna – albeit one where the instructor felt compelled to play an a capella version of ‘Amazing Grace’ over the speakers – a sharp pain shot through Leigh’s chest on each measured inhale. And just this morning as she watched the human tidal wave of commuters cram onto the N train – she forced herself to take the subway, but hated every second of it – Leigh’s throat constricted and her pulse inexplicably quickened. There seemed to be only two plausible explanations, and although she could be a bit of a hypochondriac, even Leigh didn’t think she was a likely candidate for a coronary: it was a panic attack, plain and simple.

      In an ineffective attempt to dispel the panic, Leigh pressed her fingertips into her temples and stretched her neck from side to side, neither of which did a damn thing. It felt like her lungs could reach only ten percent capacity, and just as she considered who would find her body – and when – she heard a choked sobbing and yet another ring of her doorbell.

      She tiptoed over to the door and looked through the peep-hole but saw only empty hallway. This was exactly how people ended up robbed and raped in New York City – getting duped by some criminal mastermind into opening their doors. I’m not falling for this, she thought as she stealthily dialed her doorman. Never mind that her building’s security rivaled the UN’s, or that in eight years of city living she didn’t personally know anyone who’d been so much as pickpocketed, or that the chances of a psychopathic murderer choosing her apartment from more than two hundred other units in her building was unlikely … This was how it all started.

      The doorman answered after four eternally long rings.

      ‘Gerard, it’s Leigh Eisner in 16D. There’s someone outside my door. I think they’re trying to break in. Can you come up here right away? Should I call 911?’ The words came out in a frantic jumble as Leigh paced the small foyer and popped Nicorette squares into her mouth directly from the foil wrapper.

      ‘Miss Eisner, of course I’ll send someone up immediately, but perhaps you’re mistaking Miss Solomon for someone else? She arrived a few minutes ago and proceeded directly to your apartment … which is permissible for someone on your permanent clearance list.’

      ‘Emmy’s here?’ Leigh asked. She forgot all about her imminent death by disease or homicide and pulled open her door to find Emmy rocking back and forth on the hallway floor, knees pulled tight against her chest, cheeks slick with tears.

      ‘Miss, may I be of further assistance? Shall I still—’

      ‘Thanks for your help, Gerard. We’re fine now,’ Leigh said, snapping shut her cell phone and shoving it into the kangaroo pocket of her sweatshirt. She dropped to her knees without thinking and wrapped her arms around Emmy.

      ‘Honey, what’s wrong?’ she crooned, gathering Emmy’s tear-dampened hair from her face into a ponytail. ‘What happened?’

      The show of concern brought with it a fresh stream of tears; Emmy was sobbing so hard her tiny body trembled. Leigh ran through the possibilities of what could cause such pain, and came up with only three: a death in the family, a pending death in the family, or a man.

      ‘Sweetie, is it your parents? Did something happen to them? To Izzie?’

      Emmy shook her head.

      ‘Talk to me, Emmy. Is everything okay with Duncan?’

      This elicited a wail so plaintive it hurt Leigh to hear it. Bingo.

      ‘Over,’ Emmy cried, her voice catching in her throat. ‘It’s over for good.’

      Emmy had made this pronouncement no fewer than eight times in the five years she and Duncan had been dating, but something about tonight seemed different.

      ‘Honey, I’m sure it’s all just—’

      ‘He met someone.’

      ‘He what?’ Leigh dropped her arms and sat back on her ankles.

      ‘I’m sorry, let me rephrase: I bought him someone.’

      ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

      ‘Remember when I got him a membership at Clay for his thirty-first birthday because he was desperate to get back in shape? And then he never went – not one fucking time in two whole years – because, according to him, it wasn’t “an efficient use of his time” to just go and stand on the treadmill? So rather than just cancel the whole damn thing and forget about it, I, genius extraordinaire, decide to buy him a series of sessions with a personal trainer so he wouldn’t have to waste one precious second exercising like everyone else.’

      ‘I think I can see where this is going.’

      ‘What? You think he fucked her?’ Emmy laughed mirthlessly. It sometimes surprised people to hear Emmy trash-talk with such ferocity – she was, after all, only five-one and looked no older than a teenager – but Leigh barely even noticed anymore. СКАЧАТЬ