I called the shop and got them to send me the costs for two varieties of miniature piano plus shipping. Once I’d finished blinking, I printed out the relevant quotes and showed them to Agnes in her dressing room.
‘That’s quite a present,’ I said.
She waved a hand.
I swallowed. ‘And the shipping is another two and a half thousand dollars on top.’
I blinked. Agnes didn’t. She walked over to her dresser and unlocked it with a key she kept in her jeans. As I watched, she pulled out an untidy wedge of fifty-dollar bills as fat as her arm. ‘Here. This is eight thousand five hundred. I need you to go every morning and get the rest from the ATM. Five hundred a time. Okay?’
I didn’t feel entirely comfortable with the idea of extracting so much money without Mr Gopnik’s knowledge. But I knew that Agnes’s links to her Polish family were intense, and I also knew better than most how you could long to feel close to those who were far away. Who was I to question how she was spending her money? I was pretty sure she owned dresses that cost more than that little piano, after all.
For the next ten days, at some point during daylight hours, I dutifully walked to the ATM on Lexington Avenue and collected the money, stuffing the notes deep into my bra before walking back, braced to fight off muggers who never materialized. I would give the money to Agnes when we were alone, and she would add it to the stash in the dresser, then lock it again. Eventually I took the whole lot to the piano store, signed the requisite form and counted it out in front of a bemused shop assistant. The piano would arrive in Poland in time for Christmas.
It was the only thing that seemed to give Agnes any joy. Every week we drove over to Steven Lipkott’s studio for her art lesson, and Garry and I would silently overdose on caffeine and sugar in the Best Doughnut Place, or I would murmur agreement with his views on ungrateful adult children, and caramel sprinkle doughnuts. We would pick up Agnes a couple of hours later and try to ignore the fact that she had no drawings with her.
Her resentment at the relentless charity circuit had grown ever greater. She had stopped trying to be nice to the other women, Michael told me, in whispers over snatched coffees in the kitchen. She just sat, beautiful and sullen, waiting for each event to be over. ‘I guess you can’t blame her, given how bitchy they’ve been to her. But it’s driving him a little nuts. It’s important for him to have, well, if not a trophy wife, someone who’s at least prepared to smile occasionally.’
Mr Gopnik looked exhausted by work and by life in general. Michael told me things at the office were difficult. A huge deal to prop up a bank in some emerging economy had gone wrong and they were all working around the clock to try to save it. At the same time – or perhaps because of it – Nathan said Mr Gopnik’s arthritis had flared up and they were doing extra sessions to keep him moving normally. He took a lot of pills. A private doctor saw him twice a week.
‘I hate this life,’ Agnes said to me, as we walked across the park. ‘All this money he gives away and for what? So we can sit four times a week and eat dried-up canapés with dried-up people. And so these dried-up women can bitch about me.’ She stopped for a minute and looked back at the building and I saw that her eyes had filled with tears. Her voice dropped. ‘Sometimes, Louisa, I think I cannot do this any more.’
‘He loves you,’ I said. I didn’t know what else to say.
She wiped her eyes with the palm of her hand and shook her head, as if she were trying to rid herself of the emotion. ‘I know.’ She smiled at me, and it was the least convincing smile I’d ever seen. ‘But it is a long time since I believed love solved everything.’
On impulse, I stepped forward and hugged her. Afterwards I realized I couldn’t say whether I’d done it for her or myself.
It was shortly before the Thanksgiving dinner that the idea first occurred to me. Agnes had refused to get out of bed all day, faced with a mental-health charity do that evening. She said she was too depressed to attend, apparently refusing to see the irony.
I thought about it for as long as it took me to drink a mug of tea, and then I decided I had little to lose.
‘Mr Gopnik?’ I knocked on his study door and waited for him to invite me in.
He looked up, his pale blue shirt immaculate, his eyes dragged downwards with weariness. Most days I felt a little sorry for him, in the way that you can feel sorry for a caged bear while maintaining a healthy and slightly fearful respect for it.
‘What is it?’
‘I – I’m sorry to bother you. But I had an idea. It’s something I think might help Agnes.’
He leaned back in his leather chair and signalled to me to close the door. I noticed there was a lead glass tumbler of brandy on his desk. That was earlier than usual.
‘May I speak frankly?’ I said. I felt a little sick with nerves.
‘Please do.’
‘Okay. Well, I couldn’t help but notice Agnes is not as, um, happy as she might be.’
‘That’s an understatement,’ he said quietly.
‘It seems to me that a lot of her issues relate to being plucked from her old life and not really integrating with her new one. She told me she can’t spend time with her old friends because they don’t really understand her new life, and from what I’ve seen, well, a lot of the new ones don’t seem that keen to be friends with her either. I think they feel it would be … disloyal.’
‘To my ex-wife.’
‘Yes. So she has no job, and no community. And this building has no real community. You have your work, and people around you you’ve known for years, who like you and respect you. But Agnes doesn’t. I know she finds the charity circuit particularly hard. But the philanthropic side of things is really important to you. So I had an idea.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, there’s this library up in Washington Heights which is threatened with closure. I’ve got all the information here.’ I pushed my file across his desk. ‘It’s a real community library, used by all different nationalities and ages and types of people, and it’s absolutely vital for the locals that it stays open. They’re fighting so hard to save it.’
‘That’s an issue for the city council.’
‘Well, maybe. But I spoke to one of the librarians and she said that in the past they’ve received individual donations that have helped keep them going.’ I leant forward. ‘If you just went there, Mr Gopnik, you’d see – there are mentoring programmes and mothers keeping their children warm and safe and people really trying to make things better. In a practical way. And I know it’s not as glamorous as the events you attend – I mean, there’s not going to be a ball there, but it’s still charity, right? And I thought maybe … well, maybe you could get involved. And even better, if Agnes got involved she could be part of a community. She could make it her own project. You and she could do something amazing.’
‘Washington Heights?’
‘You should go there. It’s a very mixed area. Quite different from … here. I mean some bits of it are gentrified but this bit –’
‘I know Washington Heights, Louisa.’ He tapped his fingers on the desk. ‘Have you spoken to Agnes about this?’
‘I thought I should probably mention it to you first.’
He pulled the file towards him and flicked it open. He frowned at the first sheet – a newspaper cutting of one of the early protests. The second was a budget statement I had pulled from the city council’s website, showing its latest financial year.