New York - The Novel

left my watch in the pocket of the scrubs. It’s gone down into the laundry.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Caruso. “Was it a Rolex?”
    “Oh no. Nothing expensive. All the same …”
    “You can tell the nurse, and she’ll let the laundry know. They might find it.”
    “Do you think this happens quite often?”
    “Probably.”
    “Do they ever find the watches?”
    “I couldn’t say. I believe the jobs down there are quite popular.”
    “Right.”
    “Look at it this way,” said Caruso cheerfully. “You may have lost a watch, but you’ve gained a son.”

    When he got home, Gorham called Maggie’s parents and his mother. Then he opened a bottle of champagne, and made Bella have a drink with him to toast the birth, and told her she should come with him when hewent back to the hospital, so that she could see the baby. He wanted Bella to bond with the baby too.
    But first there was some time to kill. He was too excited just to sit down and look at television. He certainly couldn’t do any work. He started to pace about the apartment.
    Maybe he’d call Juan. That would be good.
    But he put it off for a moment, and continued to pace. He hardly wanted to think about the subject, but he couldn’t help himself.
    What the devil was he going to do about that offer from the investment bank?

Millennium
    T HE CRISIS IN the life of Gorham Master developed so gradually that, as the years passed, he himself could not have said when the process first began. Probably it was when he’d refused the offer to join the investment house at the time of young Gorham Junior’s birth. At the time it had seemed for the best, and Maggie had agreed with his decision, too.
    Since then, the flow of his life had been even. The stock market crash of ’87 had quite soon become a memory, albeit a painful one, as it subsided into its proper place as one more of the cycles of market boom and bust that had been repeating regularly now between London and New York for about three hundred years.
    It had been succeeded, however, by another recession, this time in the New York real estate market, which had been rather beneficial to the Master family. For soon after his second son, Richard, was born, an eight-room apartment in the building became available. “And the asking price is only seventy percent of what I reckon it would have been two or three years ago,” he told Maggie. The financial logic was impeccable: trade up in a down market. It was an estate sale, too, and the trustees of the estate were glad to sell to a qualified buyer who was already in the building, so that there were no problems with getting the co-op board approval, and no need even to pay commission to a realtor. Gorham and Maggie were able to negotiate a highly advantageous price. They sold their six-room apartment, took out a joint mortgage for the difference, and bought theeight. The following year, Gorham had stood for election to the co-op board, and served on it for several years.
    Even the eight-room, however, was soon full. For after the two boys, they both still wanted a daughter, and in 1992, Emma arrived. The two boys had to share the second bedroom, therefore, while Emma had the third. With an eight, there were two maids’ rooms off the kitchen, and by the time Emma arrived, Bella the housekeeper had been joined there by Megan the nanny, a jolly girl from Wisconsin who lived with them for several years until she was succeeded by her cousin Millie. With this pleasant Upper East Side household, any reasonable person should have been well content.
    Yet it was then, for the first time in his life, that Gorham had started to dream of living outside New York.
    Not that there was so much wrong with the city. Indeed, for many people, New York was becoming a better place to live than it had been for years. Mayor Koch had been succeeded by Mayor Dinkins who, as an African American, had been perceived as more sympathetic to the troubles of Harlem and the other deprived areas. But the city had retained its reputation for crime, especially muggings, until nearly halfway through the nineties, when hard-line Mayor Giuliani had taken over. Like Giuliani or not, his “zero tolerance” policy on crime seemed to have worked. One could walk the streets nowadays with little fear of trouble.
    The city felt cleaner, too. Behind the New York Public Library, where once the Crystal Palace had stood, the little green of Bryant Park had become a dismal enclave where