Carnegie Hill by Jonathan Vatner

Author:Jonathan Vatner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

11

TIPPING SEASON

Two weeks before Thanksgiving, a Christmas tree appeared in the lobby of the Chelmsford Arms, trimmed with the usual plastic rubbish. The sconces and chandelier candles were topped with plaid lampshades, potted poinsettias replaced the autumn flower arrangements, and orchestral versions of Christmas songs tinkled on repeat from hidden speakers. In a perfunctory nod to the Jews in the building, a plastic light-up menorah had been placed on a console table by the front elevators, cottony fake snow concealing its electrical cord.

It was that time of year again, Francis realized with a shudder. Tipping season.

Lots of things were tipping these days, apparently. Dr. Rothschild had said the bubble in his chest was approaching a tipping point. (Francis abhorred the term “aneurysm”; it sounded like a parasitic species feeding on his heart.) Five centimeters, or was it six or eight? When would it pop? When would Francis’s life be tipping into the grave? It was too frightening to consider, so he put it out of his mind.

That night, a full-color photographic staff listing, comprising five pages and twenty-two names, was slipped under the Levys’ front door. Francis read the first one to Carol while she lay on the couch, either emerging from or treading into a nap.

“Sergei Avilov has served as a doorman with the Chelmsford Arms for nine years. When he’s not ensuring the safety of our shareholders, he enjoys weightlifting and soccer. Every Christmas, he takes his wife on a horse-and-carriage ride through Central Park.”

“Sounds like he’s having more fun than we are,” Carol said.

“I suppose the tip will defray the cost of the horse-and-carriage ride?” Francis mused. “Or is it for the gym membership?”

Francis was closer to the staff than most of the upper-crust tenants in the building, which was why he knew that Sergei was not married, and that he lied about it to increase his tips. And because he had spent hours talking with Sergei over the years, helping him open up about his childhood in the crumbling USSR, tipping gave their genuine relationship a mercenary tang. Francis still saw himself as a fatherless Jewish boy from the Bronx, scanning the sidewalk for pennies, not a retiree in the godless Upper East Side, doling out thousands in bonuses to the staff. He and Carol couldn’t even have afforded to live there had her grandmother not bequeathed them the apartment.

Then there was the problem of how much to tip. He never kept track from year to year and was sure the amounts fluctuated wildly. Was it twenty for the porters, forty for the doormen, and sixty for the managers? Or double that? The staff never seemed offended, but that didn’t mean he was free of their judgment.

Carol put on a CD of jazz Christmas standards—which, in light of Francis’s hatred of the stuff, seemed aggressive—while he flipped through the spurious employee listing. Caleb would indeed use the tips for tuition at Hunter, but Francis doubted that Ty Joseph, the most distractible of the doormen, was really going to take his mother on a trip to build houses in Mexico.

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