Townhouse Confidential

Chapter One

Elizabeth Perry looked at her iPhone and smiled hopefully.

The small red number next to the green Text icon on her screen could mean only one thing. Her real estate broker, Sophie Minetta, had finally found a new tenant for the garden apartment of her family’s West Village townhouse. Tapping the icon, she saw that it was a message from her younger sister, Lydia, a 23-year-old party girl who was texting her from the Equinox health club where she worked. Though Lydia made good money selling gym memberships to middle-aged hedgefunders who were hot for her booty, most of her earnings seemed to disappear into the trendy boutiques of Bleecker Street on her way home from work. Lydia’s shoes alone took up almost her entire closet.

Found a tenant yet? It's almost the 1st. We need mortgage $$$ now!!!, Lydia texted.

Good thing she's at the gym, Liz grumbled to herself. Otherwise, I’d smack her. Liz was tired of always being the responsible one, waking up at 6 a.m. to ice cupcakes at the Magnolia Bakery while Lydia went shopping and clubbing like some pampered starlet. If I had a dollar for every one of Lydia’s random hookups, Liz groused, I could quit my job and retire. Her middle sister, Mary, was no help, either. A self-styled intellectual who dropped out of NYU to be a writer, Mary sat in her room all day tweeting about the celebrity townhouse market and posting status updates on Facebook. As if anyone cared what some 27-year-old loser had to say about where Courtney Love or Daniel Day Lewis wanted to live.

I'm sure there's a hedge fund manager somewhere who will take the place, Liz texted back.

TUA J, Lydia responded, oblivious to her sister’s sarcasm.

TUA was the sisters' shorthand for "truth universally acknowledged," the three most famous words from the opening line of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, the 19th Century novel that put chick lit on the map. As in "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single hedge fund manager in possession of a six-figure income must rent a garden apartment in the West Village while looking for a wife." After being forced by their mother to listen to nightly readings from Pride and Prejudice and to watch the six-part BBC series starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, the girls knew practically every line of the novel by heart. And hated it.

Five days before her 30th birthday, Liz was feeling old. It was bad enough that her dearly departed parents had chosen to name Elizabeth and her two sisters after three of the husband-hunting Bennet girls in Austen's famous novel. Their mother, an aspiring romance novelist, and their father, an English literature professor at NYU, had also saddled them with a 19th Century townhouse that the sisters could barely afford to maintain. Hence, the never-ending search for a wealthy tenant who would foot the bill for the mortgage, property taxes, insurance, utilities and repairs and the never-ending job of keeping that tenant happy. It was one more thankless, unpaid chore that had fallen into Liz’s lap after her parents were killed by a Big Apple tour bus while crossing Seventh Avenue a year after she graduated from NYU with a bachelor’s in Architectural History. Putting her career on hold, Liz had dropped out of grad school at Yale and moved back to New York to take care of the house and her two younger sisters. Apart from a drunken hookup with a contractor on New Year’s Eve, she hadn’t had sex in over a year. Vacation in Maui was a distant dream.  

For Elizabeth, the romance of townhouse living had fizzled a long time ago, replaced by a steely contempt for the mice, the leaks and the hissing radiators that kept her company. If it weren’t for the fact that she and her sisters couldn’t afford to live in the city on what they managed to scrape together from their paltry paychecks, the Perry girls would have sold the place a long time ago and moved someplace cheaper and sunnier. Sometimes, Liz sighed, staring at the stack of bills on her desk, the prospect of leaving the West Village for Brooklyn, Queens or – God forbid – New Jersey seemed downright appealing.