Rough Trade

of the day fighting over commas with the Brandts, who seemed determined to interject themselves into a process they didn’t understand with the same instinct that drives a dog to mark its territory. While deep down I knew that Stuart was right—they were the client and therefore paying for the privilege of being as irritating as they pleased—it didn’t make it any easier to be lectured on the finer points of syntax by flesh-peddling high school dropouts for whom English was a second language.
    By the time I slipped the final pages into the fax machine, it was well past midnight. Naturally, Stuart Eisenstadt was long gone. Exhausted, I put Cheryl into a cab with instructions to sleep in the next morning. Then I began to make my weary way back home.
    As a rule I like the small hours of the morning. The darkness softens the edges of the city, and the deserted streets seem to offer up the illusion of freedom. But tonight I felt restless and dissatisfied, unable to savor even the minor satisfaction of having gotten the Avco letter out on time.
    No doubt a good part of my disenchantment was personal. There seemed to be a great deal in my life right now that was either unsettled or outside of my control. After Russell died I had drifted, almost without thinking, back into what could best be described as an arid relationship of convenience with Stephen Azorini. No longer the black sheep of North Shore Country Day, Stephen was now the eminently presentable CEO of a successful, high-tech pharmaceutical company that was also my most important client. We accompanied each other to business dinners and charity balls, with most of these evenings ending in Stephen’s bed. This had now been going on long enough and publicly enough that almost everyone assumed there was a level of commitment and affection between us that; frankly did not exist.
    Stephen loved his business first and himself second, while I was still in love with my dead husband and in no hurry to offer up my heart again. While hardly the stuff of Hallmark cards, it worked, or at least, it had until recently.
    In a moment of weakness Stephen and I had bought an apartment together, a once-palatial Lake Shore residence in one of the city’s premier buildings that had fallen into disrepair. Perhaps I’d mistaken my love for the apartment (which, even in shambles, was almost heartbreakingly beautiful) for affection for the man, or maybe I’d secretly hoped that it would bring us closer together. Instead, the strain of undertaking the massive and expensive renovation had only seemed to etch the empty spaces in our relationship into sharper relief.
    Of course, the lawsuits didn’t help. The new apartment occupied the top two floors of a landmark David Adler building on East Lake Shore Drive. Unfortunately, we did not discover until after we’d begun replastering that there was a structural problem with the roof—specifically the thousands of tons of dirt, grass, and trees that our downstairs neighbor had put on top of it to construct a rooftop play area for his children. He’d erected an impressive urban oasis, a sylvan aerie in the very heart of the city. Unfortunately, it was also about to come crashing down through our ceiling.
    The downstairs neighbor in question was Paul Riskoff, the abrasive and notoriously combative real estate tycoon. When negotiations broke down, we’d been forced to file a lawsuit against him and obtain a court order allowing us to remove the hazard on the roof. We’d also taken separate actions against the city building inspector who’d initially granted the permit allowing Riskoff to construct the garden (no doubt after his palm had been generously greased), the inspector we’d hired who had failed to detect the problem before closing, and the entire condo board who’d thus far sided with Riskoff. Naturally, none of this had endeared us to our future neighbors.
    Since then we’d made steady progress renovating the apartment, and while I still had faith that it would be stunning when all the work was finally completed, I had recently found myself wondering, without any great sense of tragedy, which of us was going to end up moving into it once the last of the paint had dried.
    I pulled into the alley behind the Hyde Park apartment I still shared with my roommate and reflected that it had been more than a long day. I was glad to be home. The apartment had originally been Claudia’s, rented the day she arrived from New York to