It’s all boutiques and trees and tiny cafés, the kind of picture-perfect Manhattan neighborhood that makes you feel a mixture of longing and resentment. She’s also going through her “downtown intellectual slum” phase, or at least that’s what her mother told my mother. (Cornelia’s mother is a Boston society doyenne who married Cornelia’s much older and very rich father, moved to New York, and had Cornelia and her brother. She moved back to Beacon Hill in Boston two years ago, about a minute after he died.) The loft was professionally decorated, naturally, and it’s perfectly disheveled arty chic. Piles of books (that she hasn’t read) everywhere, lots of bijou Paris flea-market finds resting on $15,000 side tables, thick plush carpets and big fat sofas, you know the drill. Slightly overstuffed with things, slightly too impeccable, and all with that immaculate sparkle you only get with a full-time housekeeper. I’m buzzed in and arrive to find the loft in a state of uproar.
