Page 1 of Come Back to Bed
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Bernadette
FROM: DOLLY KEMP
TO: BERNADETTE FARMER
Bernadette my dear—greetings from Prague! I think you would love it and be so inspired here. There is art everywhere, and I want to buy all of it. Everything is gorgeous and delicious (especially the beer and sausages). Marty and I are having a ball.
Speaking of sausages and balls—I’m sure you have enjoyednothearing us fooling around next door for the past three months. LOL. Numerous guests at five-star hotels all over Europe have not been so lucky.
I hope you are well, and I have a favor to ask of you.
My lawyer nephew needs a place to stay for a while and will be living in my apartment until he finds one of his own.
His name is Matt McGovern, Esq.
He is my younger sister’s son.
Matt spends most of his life at work or out on the town, so you probably won’t even know he’s there.
Can I trouble you to give him your spare key for my flat tonight? I know you are a private person, so I didn’t give him your phone number. I told him to buzz you at 4A around 7:30 pm. If that is inconvenient for you, you can email him at: [email protected] to plan a better time.
You have similar personal email addresses—isn’t that cute?!
Thank you for taking care of my plants.
I still don’t know when we will be returning, but you may continue to pay rent at the discounted rate until then.
xx DK
Well, crap.
It was fun having the floor to myself while it lasted.
And by “fun,” I mean blissfully uneventful and quiet.
Dolly Kemp is my landlady and neighbor. She owns both condos on the fourth floor of the Upper West Side townhouse we live in, sublets the smaller one to me, and charges me less when she’s out of town because I water her plants while she’s gone. She is a retired investment banker and an enthusiastic art collector, a senior citizen who has a far racier wardrobe and love life than I do. Since I don’t know exactly how old she or her younger sister is, her nephew could be anywhere from mid-twenties to early fifties.
Here’s hoping he’s a shy fifty-something intellectual property lawyer who listens to classical music and does crossword puzzles to relax when he’s at home. I don’t know if that person actually exists anywhere on earth in the twenty-first century, but that’s my idea of a good neighbor. Polite, quiet, and almost never at home.
I myself am a twenty-seven-year-old homebody who deeply values what little time I get to spend in my apartment. Being the well-paid executive personal assistant to a very successful (and moderately sexy—okay super sexy) recently-divorced artist means that I spend most of my days doing whatever he needs me to do for him, whenever and wherever he wants me to do it. And no, none of those things ever involve sex. Unfortunately. Unless you count the time he asked me to pose partially nude for a painting, but I may as well have been a naked bowl of fruit as far as he was concerned. A really demure, secretly horny bowl of fruit.
Being a homebody in Manhattan is like being a vegetarian in a meat market, but when your life revolves around another person in the way that mine does, in a city of eight and a half million other people, you really need that room of your own. Even when you spend most of your time in that room thinking about your boss. Even when you spend most of your time in any room thinking about your boss.
Today, world-renowned artist Sebastian Smith has tasked me with stretching canvases, ordering paints from Japan, brushes from China, responding to interview requests, and updating his website, all of which I have been able to do in his four-bedroom converted loft in Tribeca. He himself has spent the day driving around the Hudson Valley for inspiration, and while I’d always prefer to see his face and hear his voice, it does make for an easier work day. I should easily make it home before seven-thirty, so I shoot Dolly an email saying just that.
I get off at the 79thStreet station instead of 86th, because the sun hasn’t gone down yet and it’s a gorgeous mid-March early evening after a full week of rain. I always enjoy people-watching as I walk up Broadway, but it’s especially fun now that New Yorkers are starting to show some skin again.
I really love my Upper West Side neighborhood. I am the only single under thirty-year-old in the art world that I know of who chooses to live up here. It’s old-school—a little mellower than downtown—and with its relatively unpretentious residents and neighborhood feel, it’s the closest I can get to my home state of Vermont without leaving Manhattan. And okay, yes, I also moved here because ofYou’ve Got Mail, and I hear “Dreams” by The Cranberries in my head whenever I walk around here. Don’t judge me. Call me crazy, but at this point in my life I’d rather be safe and living in Nora Ephron’s charming but not-at-all-cool late-Nineties fantasy world than do ecstasy at an after-party where the DJ is some model with a famous parent and a bottle of Heineken costs more than the Uber ride it took to get there.
I cut across to 85thto check out the floral offerings at my local green grocer, but my attention is diverted by the cutest damn Boston Terrier I’ve ever seen. She has a pink collar, is staring right at me, and I swear it’s love at first sight for both of us.
I don’t want to brag or anything, but dogs love me. Like, every dog I’ve ever met. To dogs, I’m basically a five-foot seven jerky treat with a voice and hands. I march straight over to that black and white beauty and drop to my knees. She keeps licking her chops as she stands up on her hind legs, resting her paws on my thighs and hopping up and down.
“Ooooh you’re so cute! Look at that face! Look at that sweet sweet little face! Ohhhh, what’s your name, happy girl? You’re a pretty girl, aren’t you? What’s your name?...What’s her name?”
I stand up as my eyes follow the leash up to the big strong hand that’s holding it, and the man in the suit and coat who is attached to the hand. He is so ludicrously gorgeous, I just burst out laughing. This must happen often when people look at him, because his facial expression betrays absolutely no sense of surprise. In fact, he is completely stone-faced. Like a handsome statue. A handsome statue in a modern-cut suit and slim tie and trench coat that is probably worth more than everything I own, who is talking on the phone through his earbuds, who has no intention of answering my very important question about his dog’s name. He just stares at me while continuing to engage in his phone conversation about contracts and clauses or something.
