Better Homes and Husbands

The Building On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the budding is lime-stone and red brick, a heavy front door of black iron tracery, a gray canvas canopy with its white-lettered address, Nine-eighty Park Avenue. Here, wealthy New Yorkers occupy grand apartments with their children, cooks and maids. A super lives in the basement, managing doormen, handymen. Throughout the year, drivers in long shiny cars wait by the curb. Nannies push strollers to Central Park, and delivery boys bring gro-ceries around to the service entrance. There are dinner parties, guests, cocktails. Greetings exchanged in the lobby, gossip whispered in the back elevator. Over time, the building changes. Children grow up, go off to prep school, college. Or they flee, disappointing their par-ents. Residents die or sometimes move away. An apartment is vacant, and new families up the ante on multimillion-dollar bids and apply to the co-op board. Many are turned down. Families in the building interact-or they don't. Over time, they watch one another, perceive and misperceive, play out feuds of class and caste with ferocious etiquette. There are quiet revolutions, and the inhabitants of the building adjust-, some gladly, some with dismay. In 980 Park Avenue, during the last three decades of the twentieth century, stories have layered the walls of high--ceilinged apartments like coats of plaster, wallpaper, paint; voices linger like the scent of spices in the kitchen cabinets. A suicide, a strike, a seventeen-year-old girl pregnant. A scan-dalous arrest in the late 1980s. A lawsuit barely averted by the co-op board. No one knows the whole history, and the truth is understood in pieces by one resident or another, by a daugh-ter, a friend of the family, by a doorman. The truth is told in stories, in voices tinged with opinion, envy, regret. The truth is kept in the building, never completely revealed. The building is brick, mortar, limestone, lath and plaster. Plumbing and wires run through it. The building is also stories and lives, concurrent and overlapping. On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the building, 980 Park Avenue, holds these stories within its walls, silent, like a book... i0 Claudia Bloom: Trader Vic's -1970- There used to be a hallway in the Plaza that led to Trader Vic's. You walked past creamy white doors with gilded moldings, crystal wall sconces, and turned right, down a flight of red--and-gold-carpeted stairs. Then, suddenly, you found yourself in Polynesia. The carpet became green, a giant canoe hung from the ceiling and the walls were draped with fishing nets. Green, blue and rose-colored lights illuminated starfish and oars. Two tiki statues-blocky, life-size, carved wooden men, dark brown and gleaming-stood guard on either side of the stairway landing. The sound of soft waves and South Seas melodies filled the air. On a dare, in full view of the coat-check lady, my best friend, Madeline Sapphire, bit the left-hand tiki statue on his chunky rectangular penis. I screeched, "Penicopter!" We held hands and ran, giggling all the way to the maitre d's podium. Madeline's parents, Dick and Lauren Sapphire, were waiting for us, together with her little brother, Ritchie. I patted Ritchie on the head and said hello. We didn't mind Ritchie as much as two eight-year-old girls might disdain a younger boy. After all, he had invented the word "penicopter" the summer before at Westhampton Beach. We even gave him Batman's part when-ever we played Catwoman, though he usually tired pretty quickly of being tied up. My mother had followed us into Trader Vic's, and when she caught up with us, she reprimanded us as severely as she could while keeping a straight face. "Claudia! Madeline!" She pulled us aside and, leaning one hand on a large tribal drum, whis-pered that she could not imagine where this obsession with penises had come from. We solemnly told her thaLeff, Valerie Ann is the author of 'Better Homes and Husbands' with ISBN 9780312330637 and ISBN 0312330634.