New York - The Novel

Perhaps it will make me a pile of money.”
    “I think this conversation should end.”
    “There we can agree.”

    Tuesday began as a clear, bright September day. Dr. Caruso left his apartment on West End Avenue early.
    He’d heard that there might be trouble with the board at Park Avenue, and was a little hurt. “Is it because I have an Italian name?” he’d asked the realtor. The memories of his childhood were still quite keen.
    “Absolutely not,” she assured him. “They might have liked more social references, but there’s a money issue, too. The new board chairman wants richer people.”
    Well, if that was all, Caruso wasn’t too dismayed. At least, not for himself. He wasn’t sure he wanted to have his wife humiliated and embarrassed, though. He’d thought of speaking to the Masters about it, but he didn’t want to put them in an awkward position.
    “I think we should go to the interview,” he said to his wife. “I’ll ask them what it is they want, and if they don’t like us then fine, I shall tell them straight out that we don’t want to be in the building. Politely of course. But I’m not going to take any crap from them.”
    He felt better after he said that.
    Anyway, this morning he had a meeting scheduled with his insurance agent. There was an old term policy that the agent had been bugging him for years to convert. Finally he’d agreed to do it. Term policies were cheaper when you started, but the guy was right, they got expensive as time went on. He had an early meeting arranged so that he could still get back uptown to his surgery at the usual time.
    It was a fine day. The insurance offices were quite a way up the World Trade Center’s South Tower. The view from up there would be spectacular.

    Katie Keller was quietly confident. You had to admit, her presentation book was fantastic. Maybe some of Theodore Keller’s artistic genes had found their way down to her. Pictures of dinner parties and banquets, corporate lunches and buffets, beautifully displayed with menus and letters of thanks. She even had a shot showing a well-known financier givinga presentation with a table of her refreshments discreetly visible to one side.
    She had photographs of the various teams, including one corporate lunch where she’d had to provide a dozen waiters and waitresses—actually the cast of an Off-Broadway musical. That had been a blast. And there were shots of her kitchen, looking almost unbelievably metallic. Okay, some of that was faked.
    Oh, and the flower arrangements were also fantastic.
    She had price lists, and bar charts, and a graph showing how her costs were rising just under those of the prevailing competition. The corporate accounts loved that kind of thing.
    So she was happy. She was wearing a dress that looked both pretty and businesslike. Get them both ways.
    Her fiancé Rick was driving. As they came over the George Washington Bridge, she could look both upriver past the Palisades, and down to the distant, glimmering waters of New York harbor. It was so beautiful.
    As they came down the Henry Hudson Parkway alongside the river, she gazed at the water. They passed the yacht basin at Seventy-ninth Street, and in the low Fifties, they reached the big piers where the Cunard liners still came in.
    On the left, big warehouse-like buildings prevailed. Katie knew enough of Theodore Keller’s work to realize that down here somewhere he must have taken the famous shot of the men walking up the railroad tracks.
    The traffic wasn’t too bad, and soon the towers of the World Trade Center were looming impressively ahead.
    Katie Keller loved those towers. She knew that when they first went up, thirty years ago, some people had said they were architecturally dull. But she didn’t find them dull. Some of the gleaming glass rectangles that had started up since might be a little glitzy and lacking in character, but the towers were different. The broad horizontal bands softly divided their sheer verticality into sections that, strangely, gave them a tall intimacy. And the thin, silver-gray, vertical lines that ran down each face caught the altering light of the sky so that the towers’ faces were as constantly changing as the wide waters of the harbor and the great northerly Hudson below. Sometimes they were gleaming softly silver, sometimes they were granular gray. Once in a while, even, for haunting moments, a corner would flash like a sword, as its long blade caught the bright arc of the