Perfectly Impossible Read online

  PRAISE FOR PERFECTLY IMPOSSIBLE

  “Reading Perfectly Impossible was like eating imported macarons while getting a massage and having someone else figure out your tax prep—all at the same time. With deft precision and humor, Topp chronicles every delicious detail of what it takes to run the lives of the 1 percent. I loved it.”

  —Nicola Kraus, coauthor of The Nanny Diaries

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 Elizabeth Topp

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Little A, New York

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Little A are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542018678 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542018676 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542018685 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542018684 (paperback)

  Cover design by Rex Bonomelli

  Cover illustration by Micaela Alcaino

  First edition

  This one’s for all the assistants out there.

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  December 27

  Park Avenue cooperatives announced their inverse relationship to reality first with the lobby’s temperature. The colder it was outside, the hotter the climate in the marble entrance hall. In the steamy heat of August, gusts of icy air escaped through the iron doors each time a white glove held them open. When the building’s residents crossed the pavement from their town cars, they unavoidably experienced several seconds of weather, like everyone, but once inside they could rest instantly reassured of exclusive and constant comfort. The doors stayed wide open to the street on only a few ideal days each year, the climate inside and out equivalent.

  This day—a tooth-clacking seventeen degrees—a hot blast hit Anna in the face as Brian held the door for her. “You made it! All this way in this snow,” he remarked.

  “Gotta keep the wheels rollin’, Bri.” She unzipped her coat and fanned her face to avoid perspiring. “What is it, ninety degrees in here?”

  “Eighty-seven today. Hey, what are you even doing here? Aren’t they away?”

  “Indeed they are, Bri!” she said cheerily, stepping onto the elevator. Brian pushed the button for her from the podium, and the Von Bizmark lower floor button, “8,” illuminated itself with a tidy ding.

  Anna felt good. Optimistic even. She loved this dead week in the office after Christmas and before the New Year when she was left to her own devices. She could come in late—a glance at her watch told her it was already 10:37 a.m.—but there was no one upstairs to complain. The gargantuan duplex remained quiet, and Anna would dispatch with the previous year’s business, carefully documenting what money went where for what and then sending it all filed, labeled, and boxed to Marco, the Von Bizmark forever accountant. It was easy and cathartic work that never ran late, and Anna was always out the door and headed for her studio before six.

  Both Von Bizmarks were in Aspen with the kids, their kids’ friends, and a few hangers-on in a house so large no one knew exactly who or how many people were under its roof at the end of all the skiing, après skiing, après après, dinners, clubs, and clandestine rendezvous. Anna had had to book three separate jets to carry the whole entourage back East: one to Boston, one to Exeter, and one to New York. But that was still several glorious and calm days hence, after New Year’s at Aspen’s Caribou Club.

  Without the family in residence and with the employees on vacation, there could be no surprises, which made Anna’s life much, much easier, since her main purpose at the Von Bizmark residence was to make sure nothing unexpected happened to them. Every task flowed from that rule: staffing, researching, cleaning, maintaining, scheduling, confirming, reconfirming, and then maybe just one more confirmation. She could never know what, exactly, was going to be important to her employer on a moment-to-moment basis, which required her to keep tabs on an infinite number of details. Phone calls, emails, letters, cards, flowers with cards, gifts with notes. Requests, events, parties. Where is the car? Where is the Magritte sketch? Where is the scuba gear? Where does so-and-so live? In January? What do you think of this dress? Email? Person? Bracelet? Behind-the-scenes drama at the opera? What is the name of the person I am thinking of? The answers had to be not simply correct but perfect.

  No one understood. After two decades, Anna gave up trying to explain, mostly unbothered by what her friends, family, and the people she met at gallery openings and cocktail parties thought a “private assistant” actually did. Those three days each week supported her creative work. PAing had always been her sustenance, a vocation that lived in its own tidy box in her mind labeled “day job.” Anna knew it was precisely this—that she thought of herself primarily as an artist—that made Anna so good in a role that could easily eclipse a lesser identity.

  Another few dings as the elevator doors opened into the Von Bizmark anteroom, a tiny holding area whose walls crawled with hand-painted vines that extended into the carved double doors, which remained open when the family was in residence but locked otherwise. In the absence of staff, who usually made Anna her coffee and midday meal, she contemplated the delicious lunch she would order on Mrs. Von Bizmark’s credit card—a little treat for working through the holiday. Maybe a rack of ribs, chicken parmesan, one of those custom chopped salads with all the premium toppings and her favorite: double avocado.

  But before Anna could turn her key in the lock, the doors fell open. She stepped inside the vast foyer, where the ivy pattern from the anteroom retreated into cabinet marquetry and the foresty color scheme was muted into creamy monotone. If the foyer door was open, that meant someone was inside the apartment: Anna had locked this door herself the evening before. She said uncertainly, “Hello?” No response.

  The squeaking of her rubber boots on the walnut floors filled the long hallway, quiet kitchen, and then the office, a large airy space, all clean, white, and ordered. This was a room of systems and processes, lots of hard copies and matching staplers in a midcentury modern lime green. Mrs. Von Bizmark’s broad desk of reclaimed wood occupied nearly a quarter of the space on its own platform. Anna’s desk spanned the other side of the room, partially reserved for Julie, the other assistant, on the one day in the week when they overlapped. In between their two workspaces, the enormous, ledger-like leather-bound calendar splayed open in the sun like a cat. All the machines remained dark and quiet—as they should when the Von Bizmarks were away.

  Yet arrayed there, on Anna’s keyboard, a stack of handwritten notes: black Sharpie scrawled over personalized bloodred-on-chambray Kissy V. Bizmark stationery. In the office, this was Mrs. Von Bizmark’s primary method of communicating all her most important thoughts, which inevitably occurred outside of the workday. These notes were piled in reverse order over the previous tw
elve hours, during which time the Von Bizmarks had not been in Aspen but home in New York after all. Was someone injured? Sick? Dead? The doorman would have known, said something. They kept track of the tenants on a little pegboard at their podium, yet Brian had also seemed ignorant of the Von Bizmarks’ early return.

  How had they even gotten home anyway? People like the Von Bizmarks frequently enjoyed a handful of everyman activities—grocery shopping, driving, mowing the lawn—that the rest of us would gladly avoid. For them, menial tasks provided a sense of misplaced nostalgia, not for a period of their lives but for the normalcy that would always elude them. More complicated everyman tasks like altering travel plans or navigating technical difficulties of any kind were essentially out of reach for them. Mr. and Mrs. had called Anna from a Parisian restaurant for the correct spelling of a particular wine, from Santa Fe to get the Financial Times delivered, from Boston to arrange the gift wrapping of a brand-new Jeep. They preferred to make requests of their personal staff, even if someone else with the answers stood directly in front of them. Anna’s eyes narrowed. Florence, Mr. Von Bizmark’s assistant of thirty years, had had a hand in this for sure.

  Anna dialed Florence as she sifted through the notes on her desk. Piled in reverse order, the frantic scrawl quieted into more recognizable script:

  Seriously, where are you

  Buzz me AS SOON AS YOU GET IN.

  Where are you? It’s 10:14 AM.

  EST

  A—it’s 10:05. Buzz me when you get in. KVB

  VERY IMPORTANT—BUZZ ME WHEN YOU ARE HERE.

  WE ARE BEING HONORED AT THE NEW YORK OPERA BALL!!!!!!!

  So much to plan!

  You won’t believe what happened!

  “Mr. Von Bizmark’s office, this is—”

  “Florence! What is going on?” Anna said. “Are they here?”

  “She specifically told me not to call you. ‘There’s no reason to bother her,’ she said,” Florence reported primly.

  “But . . . but . . . ,” Anna sputtered. “Not even a text?”

  “Anna!” Mrs. Von Bizmark stood at the door to the office, her tone 60 percent concerned, 40 percent “you’re fired.” Anna hung up on Florence. The notes fanned out in Anna’s right hand; her beat-up nylon purse hung open from the left. Her goofy woolen hat with the braided earflaps sat slightly crooked on her head. Mrs. Von Bizmark wore head-to-toe chocolate cashmere. Her impeccably highlighted hair curved robustly just under her shoulders. If she could still move her eyebrows, they would have creased in agitation, but her face remained seamless, pliant. Lasered, injected, and tweaked, she looked about two decades younger than reality, which would make her and Anna about the same age.

  Bambi Von Bizmark was known to staff as “Mrs. Von Bizmark.” Only her husband called her “Bambi.” To friends and press, on her social stationery, and at the opera, she was always “Kissy V. Bizmark.” Although few others knew this, the V. for “Von” stood also for her maiden name, Verhuvenvel, a mass of v’s that defied penmanship. Though Anna called her “Mrs. Von Bizmark” to her face, with employees, colleagues, and vendors she was “the Mrs.” and in writing simply “KVB.” The building staff referred to her as “KGB” only behind her back for her exactingness and seemingly random visitations to various storage facilities in the basement. Peter Von Bizmark, her husband, was “Mr. Von Bizmark,” or “PVB,” to all except cable news networks, who tended to use his name in its momentous entirety. Only Mrs. Von Bizmark and Avi, their personal lawyer, thought of him as a “Peter.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Von Bizmark. I must admit I’m rather surprised to see you,” Anna said.

  “In my own home?” Mrs. Von Bizmark replied, instantly indignant.

  Cristina, the severe Polish housekeeper in a gray maid’s uniform, poked her head around the pocket doors of the office. “Morning, Anna!” She hurried by, exhorting the two Salvadorean maids to follow her upstairs to the residential wing. These three were known to everyone in the building as “the ladies,” and how they had come to be here on a day Anna knew they had off was confounding. Florence must have called everyone but her. Anna burned with annoyance—so much for double avocado.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked.

  “Fabulous, why would you ask?” Mrs. Von Bizmark and her circle were always, always fabulous, and to imply otherwise was ever-so-slightly offensive.

  “Well, you’re home five days early.”

  Mrs. Von Bizmark turned to the two-foot-high stack of new glossy magazines on the central island and absentmindedly dropped them one by one into the pewter trash can as she talked, gazing at each one for a few seconds before letting it fall. “Oh, yes, well . . . the snow was mediocre . . .” She held up a New York magazine—a close-up of the extremely liberal mayor of New York with the headline, “The City’s Socialist Revolution.” “Yuckapoo,” she said, letting it fall. “Anyway, the kids and Peter were just so bored. They were all complaining, so I said why don’t we just go home, then? The kids thought that was a great idea, of course.” She paused, forced a chuckle, but her hands stopped. “And so did Peter . . . ,” she added. Her shoulders slumped as she let out a sigh.

  Uh-oh. The Von Bizmarks were not getting along. Which happened every so often—the Mrs. puffing up with dissatisfaction, the Mr. disappearing into work. And while it had always righted itself, the Von Bizmark marriage functioned as the cornerstone of an enormous enterprise that included staff, property, vendors—practically a whole economy unto itself. If the house divided, that economy would radically shrink. In other words, they could all be out of work.

  “But wait . . . ,” Anna said. “Why were the foyer doors closed if you are here?”

  “I need to talk to you about that,” Mrs. Von Bizmark said. “Mr. Von Bizmark has some security . . .” She waved her hand in the air, as if she might find the word there. Although she was perfectly coiffed and styled after a vacation of not just skiing but spa services and shopping, Anna could tell Mrs. Von Bizmark was out of sorts. “Issues,” she finally said.

  Anna’s employers frequently spoke in code. Valued most highly were those employees who could intuit meaning from the fewest, vaguest words, those who knew when to ask questions and those who knew when to let it lie. Furthermore, to have “security issues” in the Von Bizmarks’ hyperexclusive Park Avenue co-op fell somewhere on the spectrum between extremely unlikely and completely impossible.

  “And what about the ball?” Anna always tried to turn things toward the positive for her employers.

  “Exactly!” Mrs. Von Bizmark said, moving to her desk in its elevated nook surrounded by built-in shelves lined with extraordinarily expensive bulbs Anna had had to order weeks in advance from Germany. All the while she nattered on, happy to have a flattering subject. “So we were at the Smythesons’—you know, Guy and Libba—they have this outrageous place out there, looks like somewhere Dracula might live or something. Anyway, they always have this big party where we get to see everyone, and it just so happened that it was Richard’s last night in town. Anyway, when he sees me, he beelines over, snubbing Prince Valdobianno, who you know is a tremendous opera buff, and he finally takes both my hands in his and says, ‘Just who I’ve been looking for, the belle of my ball.’”

  Internally, Anna rolled her eyes. A very public budget shortfall had turned Richard Gross, the opera’s executive director, into a rabidly obsequious fundraising machine. Meanwhile, a scathing New York Times article had pondered whether opera had run its course as an art form. Richard knew the answer to this lay in a blockbuster season, starting with the opening-night gala: he had been saying this in emails, phone calls, and letters to the entire board of trustees for at least three months.

  “Richard got the board to vote”—Mrs. Von Bizmark bubbled over with delight—“on Christmas Eve morning and”—practically panting with eagerness—“they’re going to honor Mr. Von Bizmark and me!” Effectively, this meant the Von Bizmarks were now on the hook to give or raise from their friends millions of
additional dollars for the opera, a huge coup for Richard. In return, he would elevate the Von Bizmarks before their cohort of the richest, most well-connected people in North America; it was like the Von Bizmarks got to be king and queen of the prom, only this was not high school but New York City.

  The Mrs. burst with such girlish glee at the prospect it was hard not to be a little happy for her. If philanthropy were Mrs. Von Bizmark’s “career,” then this would be the highlight of her curriculum vitae. Various institutions honored the Von Bizmarks all the time, but despite its financial woes, the New York City Opera was the most prestigious by a league. For the Mrs., it was the ultimate social credential, the jewel in her crown for which she had fought long and hard in the Park Avenue trenches. “That’s the real reason we came back from Aspen early.”

  As exciting as this all was, Anna could see through this ruse. Since all the logistics for the ball could have been handled by phone, this meant the Von Bizmarks were definitely at odds. Next would be a trip to the couples counselor followed by a renegotiation of their wills. While this had all happened before, Anna had never known them to end a vacation early. Except the time Mrs. Von Bizmark had feigned a stomach illness to disembark prematurely from a friend’s yacht in Portofino (“It was like escaping a prison!” Mrs. Von Bizmark later gushed).

  “Well, congratulations!” Anna said; in her seat, she always had to play along.

  “I know we’ve done plenty of balls and galas and parties . . .” Mrs. Von Bizmark began a pep talk but instantly lost her train of thought, traveling back through the annals of her social calendar. “Dinners . . . concerts . . .”

  “Yes, I was—” Anna started.

  “But this one, Anna,” Mrs. Von Bizmark interrupted. “This one is . . .”

  “A really big deal,” Anna said.

  “First there’s the luncheon. The opera will handle the production and almost all of the gala, other than seating. But the luncheon! It’s up to us.”

  All major happenings in New York society called for at least one significant “preparty” in order to build momentum, raise more money, and capture any potential attendees with conflicts for the main do. It was like you couldn’t throw a successful party without actually having at least two. Typically, the first was less formal and held at someone’s home to limit expenditures, maximize profits, and dangle a rare opportunity to see the inner sanctum of another multimillionaire’s life.