Closing Costs by Seth Margolis

Author:Seth Margolis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626818620
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2015-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

“You see, solid as a rock.”

Victor Ozeri rapped an enormous knuckle on a portion of the dining-room wall next to the kitchen door.

Rosemary heard the dull, architectural plan-destroying thump of flesh making contact with an unmovable object, in this case a support beam in her new apartment at 218 West End Avenue.

“No way we can move the door four inches. Not unless you want the building to come down on top of us.”

Ozeri grinned—inappropriately, she thought. Falling buildings were no longer a laughing matter, if they ever had been. He seemed to delight in delivering bad news—or was it rather that bad news was the only kind he dealt in? Did contractors ever call clients to tell them a job was progressing ahead of schedule and under budget? Were floor tiles ever easier to remove than anticipated, paint faster to dry than expected, appliances delivered early and with all necessary parts? Or were contractors like those saintly doctors you read about who dealt only with the terminally ill, delivering bad news as dispassionately as a weather forecast.

Ozeri was at least six-five and so barrel-chested and bandy-legged, he looked like he, and not the building, might topple over. His head was a geography of outsized features: huge, deep-set boulders for eyes beneath an unbroken thicket of eyebrow, a long, craggy arête of a nose jutting from a pale, undulating desert of hairless cheeks. Though he towered over most people, he positively dwarfed his workmen, most of them shortish South Americans who regarded him as if he were a large, frisky dog.

“But we were assured the door could be moved,” Rosemary said. The use of the passive voice disguised the fact that she couldn’t recall precisely who had done the assuring. Their architect? Ozeri? Or Guy himself, who had spent a good two hours one morning pounding, with proprietary zeal, on every wall in the apartment to determine which ones could be safely obliterated, until the downstairs neighbors had complained to the doorman?

Ozeri rapped the wall again. “You were mis-assured,” he said, his lips curling into a smug grin.

She retrieved the architect’s plans from the double stroller, which was parked just inside the front door, and in which the twins slept soundly. Back in the dining room, she unfurled the plans on the radiator.

“If we can’t move the door,” she said, “then we can’t put the Sub-Zero over here. And if we can’t put the Sub-Zero over here, it has to go there, which means the breakfast area—”

“Which means there is no breakfast area.”

For want of four inches, a breakfast area is lost—Rosemary leaned against the wall until she realized it was caked with plaster dust.

“Can’t you just…” She brushed off her sweater, but the plaster dust seemed to have bonded with the angora. “I don’t know, shave a few inches off the beam?”

He shook his head and rapped the offending section of the wall.

“Please stop doing that,” she said, rubbing her temples at the first dull throb of a headache. “What are we going to do?”

The opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth trilled from Ozeri’s waist.

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