The Secret Life of Manhattanites

Miss Eliza Dupree, yes that Eliza Dupree, the New York Times bestselling crime novelist, did not, in fact, smoke cigarettes, she would like everyone to know. She would prefer it stated on the official record that she was not in the alley behind her apartment building at 5:33 in the morning in her pajamas to smoke a yellow American Spirit, no she was not. It was definitely for some other reason. Digression aside, Miss Eliza Dupree was shocked to her core when she opened the fire exit door of the Upper East Side luxury apartment building, stepped into the bitterness of the morning, and saw, next to the greasy piles of trash bags overflowing from the dumpster, her beloved maintenance man, George Projektorinski. His body stiff and stoic. Graying with every passing second. Before her brain could form a thought, her body reacted. Her knees buckled and an anguished scream flew out of her as if she was releasing caged doves at a wedding. Eliza did not feel the doorman, Vince, rush to her side after her scream. She did not feel her neighbor, Mrs. Raymond, kindly rubbing her back to calm her. She did not hear the police’s questions when they arrived. All she could see was the man she had considered a father, cold and lifeless, soaking in a puddle of his own blood, the knife still in his chest.

Eliza was unsure if it had been hours or minutes or perhaps even mere seconds since she had gone through the fire exit and her life as she knew it collapsed. Miss Eliza Dupree, now thirty-three, had lived in the Green Gardens her whole life. Born to the great granddaughter of the inventor of the ballpoint pen, and the grandson of the first president of United Bank of America, she had a charmed life. Unlike that of the major modern dynasties, the Duprees kept their life out of the newspapers and settled into an upscale apartment building back in the 1960s. The Green Gardens has only ever housed the heirs and heiresses to quiet, but powerful fortunes. No Kardashians. No Kennedys. But a dozen of the richest and most terrifyingly influential families all in one building surely could not maintain a pleasant atmosphere, correct? Surely the investments and stacked interests of moguls and mobsters, politicians and philanthropists, would cause baffling levels of drama, wouldn’t they? The answer is yes. For over four decades, the twelve families, day in and day out, fought in the corridors and the grand halls, exacerbated by the audience. Rich people are incapable of minding their own business, Vince thought. Vince began working at the Green Gardens back in 1987 while he was studying part-time at NYU, and quickly became very entertained by all of the chaos these characters exuded on a daily basis. They seemed to have no concept that the way they behaved was not necessarily normal for neighbors. Vince became so entertained and intrigued by these people, with whom he could not have less in common with, that even after graduating from NYU, he never stopped serving as the doorman at the Green Gardens. And, for the most part, none of the tenants cared enough about Vince to be curious as to why someone with a degree from an elite university would still be working as a doorman. To be fair, they were also the kind of people who thought Vince made $100,000 a year when in reality he made about $10,000. While every single tenant knew Vince’s name and made sure to greet him, there were few who took the time to know him. That’s what made Eliza Dupree so special. Vince had already worked at the Green Gardens for two years when Lyle and Agatha Dupree came home with their sparkling infant. Vince can still remember holding her the day she came home. He loved her so endlessly so instantaneously. A love her parents never seemed to possess for anything, but especially not her. Not that they were harsh or cruel, no. They just were never there. Always on trips, leaving Eliza with a series of increasingly uglier and older nannies. Vince always suspected it was Lyle’s handsiness that repeatedly drove off the help. One day when Eliza was about four, Miss Hazel, her eighty-eight-year-old nanny, fell asleep for six hours. Hungry and bored, Eliza snuck out of the apartment and wandered into the service elevator. She rode the elevator for a while before someone found her.

            George Projektorinski was born and raised in Brooklyn, to a large and loud Polish family. He married his high school sweetheart, Sylvia, when he was eighteen and began working at the Green Gardens shortly after it opened in 1967, just two short months after he and Sylvia had wed. After four miscarriages, and far too many tears, Sylvia finally made it to her ninth month. Her water broke and the labor pains came and George drove to the hospital, beaming through his wife’s endless screaming. Fourteen hours later and out pops a beautiful baby girl that they named Elizabeth. Only there’s a small problem, the umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck, the doctors tell George. She’s losing a lot of oxygen. George cannot understand, he cannot connect. Doctors and nurses rush around him, he’s pulled from the hospital room. He is unsure if hours or minutes or maybe even merely seconds have passed when the doctor comes to tell him that their baby girl, their Elizabeth, did not make it. The next six months made George feel like a ghost haunting the halls of the Green Gardens, of his own home. Nothing was joyous anymore. Nothing was beautiful. He brought Sylvia flowers every night and watched as she’d blot her tears with the petals. Then her tears stopped. And so did the wailing. And the rare smiles he used to be able to crack out of her, never came at all anymore. One December evening, about ten days before Christmas, George came home with the usual bouquet in his fist, the house filled with the aroma of kielbasa and onions, he walked into the kitchen but could not find Sylvia. On the dining room table was one plate. Just one. He called out to her, denial pushing at his fear. No response. He began to become frantic and pushed open the bathroom door to find his dear, sweet Sylvia lifeless. The pain of living without her Elizabeth was just too much.

            George moved in solemn silence for years, keeping his loneliness tucked closely to his chest. For sixteen years, he continued to show up daily to the Green Gardens, unclogging shower drains and patching holes in walls and tightening toilet seats and replacing flickering lightbulbs. George was the savior to every millionaire and billionaire in the building. They all knew and loved him. And he was always kind back. Polite and never overly familiar. Until one morning in 1992, when he went to ride the service elevator and instead of an empty lift, found a tiny little girl with glasses that magnified her eyes to about thirteen times what they should have been. Before George could even begin to form a question, the precocious child of millionaires, looked up at the big, hairy man and said “I am Eliza Dupree. I am four and a half years old. And my nanny is dead.”

After struggling for a minute to figure out which floor Miss Eliza should be on, George was very relieved upon entering the apartment to see an old woman loudly snoring in an armchair in front of the television. He laughed. After confirming with Eliza that this was, in fact, her nanny and she was, in fact, just sleeping and not dead, he tried to leave her behind to go work. But Eliza wouldn’t let him leave without her. It didn’t take long for this to become routine. Eliza began to wait by the fire exit every day for George to arrive and then she’d join him on his jobs. It was George who taught her to ride a bike. George who cleaned her cuts and put on Band-Aids when she bled. George who presented her at her debutante ball. And it was supposed to be George who walked Eliza down the aisle next December at her own wedding. When Eliza’s parents passed in a tragic plane crash when she was 15, it was George who acted as her confidant, who helped her make the funeral arrangements, who held her hand as they were buried, who made sure she ate in the weeks following and didn’t fall behind in school. For all intents and purposes, George was the only real parent Eliza ever knew. And now he, too, was dead.

            Sometimes Eliza felt like everyone she ever loved died. Not in the sense that of course, everyone dies, but that somehow, she was cursed. That death followed her. That those she loved ended tragically, always. That was, mostly, what had led her to becoming a crime novelist. In 2007, when Eliza was trying to pick a major for university, Green Gardens had thousands upon thousands of security cameras installed in the building, which gave Eliza the idea for a murder mystery short story in which the murder is solved by the security cameras. While it doesn’t sound at all exciting or intriguing, it won a prize in a local short story competition and the judges strongly encouraged Eliza to pursue a career in writing. She never wavered from that path, seeing a way to tie her own tragically beautiful backstory into her pieces. She found success quickly and that, of course, led her to meeting her future husband, Henry, who worked as her publicist. But Eliza was never too sure about Henry. He was just a flaccid, spoiled person. Not at all the kind of people Eliza actually loved, but the kind her breeding said were correct. But Eliza was only 25 when she and Henry got engaged and it was at her engagement party that things started to become a bit, well, messy for her. She could feel herself bordering on a panic attack and excused herself from the Grand Hall, shuffling in her gown out the fire exit once more. Due to her hyperventilation, she didn’t notice Vince, 20 years her senior, smoking a yellow American Spirit. He could see she was not okay, so he didn’t say anything. He just handed her a cigarette and a lighter. Eliza hadn’t smoked a cigarette since that one night when she was 17 and it made her throw up. But this time, she sucked the smoke down like Audrey Hepburn and felt comforted. The next thing she knew, she was lunging at Vince. Pressing her lips and body against him. Sucking in the smell of cigarettes mixed with her own home on his skin. Eight years had passed since that night, and not much had changed. Eliza still was selling out her novels. Eliza was still engaged to be married to Henry. And Eliza was still fucking her doorman in the alleyway behind her home. The only thing that had changed, now, was that her father, for all intents and purposes, was dead. No. Not dead. Murdered.

            Eliza stayed in a grief trance for about a week, but that did not stop she and Vince from continuing their pattern. One night, as Vince had her bent over in the security office, Eliza snapped back into her body. She asked if the cops had looked at the footage from the alley the night George was murdered and Vince informs her that the police said the video was too grainy and unclear to use. He tells her not to worry about it, to focus on her grief like George would want. But Eliza knew, and she knew that Vince knew, that no that wasn’t what he would have wanted. So later that night, Eliza snuck back down into the security room to do some snooping herself. George taught her to pick locks when she was only nine. She’d written enough crimes novels to know that sometimes, you have to be the detective yourself. She begins shuffling through the screens and the thousands of cameras. The 50 in the lobby, the 90 in the Grand Hall, the 74 in each pool room, the three in Mr. and Mrs. Raymond’s sex dungeon, the fourteen in…wait what. Eliza begins rapidly going through the screens only to discover there aren’t just thousands of security cameras in the public areas of the apartment building, but rather each individual apartment is filled with them, picking up high-definition video and audio in every single room of every single apartment in the building. Breathless, shocked, and confused, Eliza realizes that it’s being live streamed globally as a The Truman Show style entertainment program on Tube4Us.com. Terrified, Eliza shifts the alleyway camera back to the night of George’s murder to find her worst fear. Vince, as usual, was outside smoking a cigarette when George violently throws the door open, screaming and pointing a finger at Vince.

Eliza listens closely as George lays out that he had been suspicious something was going on for a while, but couldn’t put his finger on it. How he picked the lock on the security room door. How he too how found all the cameras, the livestream, the interviews Vince would go on talk shows disguised as Executive Producer, Walter Nelly. How millions of people across the globe were watching The Secret Life of Manhattanites. How the rest of the world was somehow unaware of the fact that every piece of this show was non-consensual and illegal. How Vince or Walter Nelly or whatever his real name was, had forged all of their signatures to make it possible. How Vince had been planning this since he was a film student at NYU. How he had made millions and millions of dollars by publicly broadcasting the grittiest, dirtiest, most rancid and private parts of these heirs and heiresses’ lives. George told Vince that he was going to go public. That between the twelve families combined, he could ensure his life would be ruined. That Vince was a fool for believing that whatever power he had gained from this could ever overshadow the power of hundreds of years of generational wealth. And George made sure that Vince knew that Eliza would never belong to him. She would never be his wife. She would never love him back the way he loved her…

And that’s when Vince took the knife out of his jacket pocket.