Twelve Rooms with a View

by Theresa Rebeck

  You couldn’t tell how big the place was right away. The blinds were drawn, and we didn’t know where the switches were, so we all stepped tentatively into the gloom. It smelled too, a sort of funny old-people smell, not as if someone had died in there, but more like camphor and dried paper and mothballs. And far off, in with the mothballs, was a hint of old flowers and jewelry and France.

  “Hey, Mom’s perfume,” I said.

  “What?” said Lucy, who had wandered into the next room looking for a light switch.

  “Don’t you smell Mom’s perfume?” I asked. It seemed unmistakable to me, even though she hardly ever wore that stuff because it was so ridiculously expensive. Our dad had given her a bottle of it on their wedding night, and they could never afford it again, so she wore it only once every three years or so when he had an actual job and they got to go to a cocktail party. We would watch her put on her one black dress and the earrings with the sparkles and the smallest little dab of the most expensive perfume in the world. Who knows if it really was the most expensive in the world, I rather doubt it, but that’s what she told us. Anyway there it was in that huge apartment, in with a bunch of mothballs, the smell of my mother when she was happy.

  “What was the name of that stuff?” I asked, taking another step in. I loved the apartment already, so dark and big and strange, with my mother’s perfume hiding in it like a secret. “Mom’s perfume. Don’t you smell it?”

  “No,” said Alison, running her hand up the wall, like a blind person looking for a doorway. “I don’t.”

  Maybe I was making it up. There were a lot of smells in there in the dark. Mostly I think it smelled as if time had just stopped. And then Daniel found the light switch, and there was the smallest golden glow from high up near the ceiling. You could barely see anything because the room was so big, but what you could see was that time actually had stopped there. Between 1857, say, and 1960, things had happened, and then just like that, they had stopped happening.

  The ceiling was high and far away, with shadowy coves around the corners, and right in the middle of this enormous lake of a ceiling was the strangest old chandelier, glued together out of what looked like iron filings, with things dripping and looping out of it. It must have been poorly wired, because it had only three fake-candle fifteen-watt bulbs, which is why it gave off so little light. And then there was this mustard-colored shag carpeting, which I believe I have mentioned, and one lone chair in a corner. It was a pretty big chair, but seriously, it was one chair.

  “What a dump!” Daniel whistled, low.

  “Could we not piss on this before we’ve even seen it, Daniel?” called Lucy from the kitchen. But she sounded friendly, not edgy. She was having a pretty good time, I think.

  Alison was not. She kept pawing at the wall. “Is this the only light? There has to be another light switch somewhere,” she said, all worried.

  “Here, I’ve got one,” said Lucy, throwing a switch in the kitchen. It didn’t really do much, because the kitchen was a whole separate room with a big fat wall in front of it, so there was just a little doorway-sized bit of light that didn’t make it very far into the living room, or parlor, or whatever you wanted to call this giant space.

  “Oh that’s a big help,” said Alison.

  “Wow, this kitchen is a mess, you should see this!” yelled Lucy. “Oh, god, there’s something growing in here.”

  “That’s not funny,” Alison snapped.

  “No kidding,” Lucy called back, banging things around in a sudden, alarming frenzy. “No kidding, there’s stuff growing everywhere—ick, it’s moving! It’s moving! No, wait—never mind, never mind.”

  “I am in no mood, Lucy! This is ridiculous. Daniel! Where are you? Tina, where did you go? Where is everybody! Could we all stay in one place, please? DANIEL.” Alison suddenly sounded like a total nut. It’s something that happens to her—she gets more and more worked up, and she truly doesn’t know how to stop it once she starts. No one is quite sure why Daniel married her, as he’s pretty good-looking and certainly could have done a lot better. Not that Alison is mean or stupid; she’s just sort of high-strung in a way that is definitely trying. Anyway, that apartment was literally starting to drive her crazy. She kept slapping the wall, looking for another light switch, and Daniel was ignoring how scared she was; he was heading across the gigantic room into the gloom on the other side, where that one chair sat, next to a big hole in the wall. Well, it wasn’t a hole, it was a hallway. But from where we were standing, it looked like a hole, and the sloping black shadow that used to be Daniel was about to disappear into it.

  “Daniel, just wait, could you wait, please?” Alison yelled, completely panicked. “I cannot see where you are going!”

  “It’s fine, Alison,” he said, sounding like a bastard, then disappeared.

  “Daniel, WAIT,” she yelled, almost crying now.

  “Here, Alison,” I said, and I pulled open the blind at one of the incredibly large windows. A beautiful gold and red light shot through and hit every wall in that room, making everything glow and move. The sun was going down, and the light was cutting through the branches of the trees, shifting in the wind. That big old room went from being all weird and dreary to being something else altogether, skipping everything in between.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Yes, thank you, that’s much better,” Alison nodded, looking around, still anxious as shit. “Although that isn’t going to be much help when the sun is gone.”

  “Is it going somewhere?” I asked.

  “It’s going down, and then what will you do? Because that chandelier gives off no light whatsoever, it’s worse than useless. You’d think they’d have some area lamps in a room this size.”

  “You’d think they’d have some furniture in a room this size,” I observed.

  “Okay, I don’t know what that stuff is that’s growing in the kitchen,” Lucy announced, barging into the big light-filled room, “but it’s kind of disgusting in there. We’re going to have to have this whole place professionally cleaned before we put it on the market, and even that might not be enough. Oh god, who knows what that stuff is? And it’s everywhere. On the counters, in the closets. Who knows what’s in the refrigerator? I was afraid to look.”

  “There’s really something growing?” I asked. The more dire her pronouncements, the more I wanted to see the stuff. I slid over to the doorway to take a peek.

  “Is it mold?” Alison asked, her panic starting to rev up again. “Because that could ruin everything. This place will be useless, worse than useless, if there’s mold. It costs millions to get rid of that stuff.”

  “It doesn’t cost millions,” Lucy countered.

  “A serious mold problem in an exclusive building? That’s millions.”

  “You’ve never had a serious mold problem in any building, Alison. You don’t know anything about it,” Lucy said bluntly.

  “I know that if the other owners find out, they could sue us,” Alison shot back. “We would be the responsible parties if mold in this apartment made anybody in the building sick. It could be making us sick right now.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Lucy said, looking at me and rolling her eyes. Everybody rolls their eyes at Alison behind her back, even if she might be right. She’s just so irredeemably uptight.

  “Holy shit,” I said when I finally got a good look at the kitchen.

  “What, is it bad? It’s bad, isn’t it.”

  “No, no, it’s not that bad,” I lied. The whole kitchen was green. Or at least most of it. “And I don’t think it’s mold. I think it’s moss.”

  “Moss doesn’t grow inside apartments,” Alison hissed. “We have to get out of here. We have to leave immediately, it will make us all sick. It’s probably what killed Mom.”

  “Mom died of a heart attack,” I reminded her.

  “We have to leave now, before we all get sick. DANIEL! WE HAVE TO GO.”

  “There’s another apartment back her
e!” Daniel yelled.

  “What?” said Lucy, following him into the black hallway.

  “There’s a whole second apartment, another kitchen and another living room or parlor—there’s like six bedrooms and two dining rooms!” he yelled.

  “How can there be two dining rooms?” Lucy muttered. And then she disappeared. I looked at Alison, standing very still, arms at her sides. I completely did not want to contribute any fuel to the coming conflagration. But I did want to see the rest of that apartment.

  “It’ll be okay, Alison,” I said. “It’s not mold. It’s moss! And Mom died of a heart attack. Let’s go see the rest of this place, it sounds awesome.” Realizing that I didn’t sound particularly convincing, I bolted down the hallway.

  The place was awesome. The hall was dark and twisty, and there were rooms everywhere that hooked into other rooms and then hooked back to that twisty hallway farther down. Seriously, you never quite knew where you were, and then you were in a place you had gone through six rooms ago, but you didn’t know how you had gotten back there. And while some of those rooms were as empty and lonely as that giant front room, some of the others were cozy and interesting. One was painted a weird shade of pink that I had never seen before, with no furniture but with framed pictures of flowers on three walls and a gigantic mirror on the fourth wall. No kidding, the room looked six times as big as it was because of that mirror, and you’d jump when you walked in because you thought someone else was there with you, but it was just you. Another room had little beds that were only six inches off the ground and old solar-system stickers stuck on the ceiling, and someone had painted a giant sun setting over the ocean, right on one of the walls. Another room was painted dark purple, with stars on the ceiling and a little bitty chandelier that had glass moons and suns hanging from it. There was no furniture in that room either.

  Twelve rooms is a lot of rooms. That apartment felt as if it went on forever, even before I got to the second kitchen and the two dining rooms. That’s where Lucy and Daniel had ended up and were figuring things out.

  “This is where they lived,” Lucy observed, looking around.

  She was right. There was furniture in these rooms, a couple of chairs and a comfortable couch across from a television set, and a coffee table with a clicker and some dirty plates on it. On one side was the so-called second kitchen, but it was really more of a half-kitchen dinette. It had the smallest sink imaginable, a very skinny refrigerator, and an old electric stovetop with a tiny oven. It was kind of doll-sized, frankly, but nothing was growing on it. And on the other side of this TV room–kitchen area was an archway, and beyond an old bed, with two bedside tables and a chair with some dirty clothes on it. The bed wasn’t made.

  “Jesus,” I said, and sat down. Compared to the rest of that great apartment, this little TV-bedroom-kitchen space seemed stupidly ordinary. They lived in the most amazing apartment ever, but they just holed up in the back of it and pretended they were living in a boring normal place like the rest of us. It was overwhelming. Alison, arriving behind me, took a step forward.

  “Look,” she said, pointing to the coffee table. “Fish sticks. She was eating fish sticks when she died.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” said Lucy, and she reached over, grabbed the plate, and turned back to the tiny kitchenette, where she proceeded to bang the cabinet doors.

  “What are you looking for now?” I sighed, lying down on the couch. I could hardly keep my head up.

  “It’s disgusting,” she snapped. “That’s just been sitting there for days, I can’t believe no one cleaned it up.”

  “Who would clean it up?” I asked.

  “Someone, I don’t know who. Who found her—wasn’t it a neighbor? What did they do, just let the EMS people pick up the body and then leave the place like this? It’s disgusting. It could attract bugs, or mice.” Lucy started looking under the little sink for a garbage can. “Oh god, if there are mice, I’m just going to kill myself,” she muttered. “It’s going to cost a fortune to take care of that mold issue; I do NOT want to have to deal with exterminators.”

  “Relax,” Daniel told her, turning slowly and taking it all in with a kind of speculative grimace. “We won’t have to do a thing. What’d he say, eleven million? This place is worth more than that as is. With mold and mice and fish sticks on dirty plates and a shitty economy. This place is worth a fortune. We won’t have to do a thing.”

  “Oh, well,” said Alison, apparently having something like a philosophical moment. “She had a good life.”

  “She had a shitty life,” I said.

  “Look, there’re actually some things in the freezer,” Lucy announced, swinging open the little door. “Some hamburgers and frozen vegetables, and the ice-cube maker seems to work … plenty of food. You’ll be all right at least for the next couple of days, Tina, then we’ll have to spring for some groceries, I’m guessing, because as usual you are completely broke, is that the story?”

  “That’s the story.” I shrugged. “Look, seriously, Lucy, maybe we should wait a day. For me to move in? So we have time to like tell the building super and stuff, so they know I’m here?”

  “There’s no reason you shouldn’t move in right now,” Lucy said. “You need a place to stay, my place is too small, and so is Daniel and Alison’s. Where else are you going to go? By your own account you can hardly afford a hotel room.”

  “This is—it’s just—”

  “It’s our apartment. Why not stay here?”

  There was a why not, obviously. There was a good reason to slow things down, but not one of us wanted to mention it. Even me. You split eleven million dollars three ways, even after taxes? Every single one of us suddenly has a whole new life. I’m fairly certain that was the sum total of all the thinking going on in that apartment when they handed me the keys and told me to sit tight.

  2

  I CAN’T SAY I WAS SORRY TO SEE THEM GO.

  The first thing I did was take my boots off. Alison would have thrown a fit if she had seen me. She had already moaned about how dirty the place was, and “who knows what might be lurking in that crummy shag carpet,” like bedbugs or worms or slime from distant centuries might just be waiting for some idiot’s bare foot to come along so it could spread fungal disaster into the idiot’s system. Alison has that kind of imagination; sometimes talking to her is like talking to someone who writes horror films for a living. But I didn’t care; my toes were so hot and tired and I just felt like being flat on my feet before checking the place out more carefully. As it turned out, the carpet was dry and seemed clean enough, just a little scratchy. It really was a pretty hideous color, but I think that’s the worst that could be said about it.

  By then the sun had gone away, as predicted, and I didn’t have a lot of light to explore by, so I went back to the boring area where Mom and Bill had camped out. I slipped out of the dark blue skirt I had brought for the funeral, pulled on the jeans I had stashed in my backpack, and took a look around their rooms. Lucy had already cased the refrigerator, so I knew there was frozen food. A little casual probing in the cabinets yielded something like sixteen packets of ramen noodles, and then I noticed, on the teeny tiny counter, half a bottle of wine, open and useless, next to three empties. The search continued, and sure enough, when I poked around the laundry room behind the kitchenette I spotted a big pile of clothes on the floor, which looked like nothing until I nudged it with my foot and found two mostly full cases of red wine. I was feeling pretty good about that, so I kept looking, and up in the freezer of that skinny refrigerator, back behind the ice-cube machine, I hit the mother lode: a big bottle of really good vodka with hardly a dent in it.

  Knowing my mother, I was sure that would not be the only bottle around. She liked to have a few in reach, so I was pretty sure I’d find some squirreled away in other thinly disguised hiding places. The two cases of pricy red wine told me that Bill was a drinker himself, and for a second I thought, well, at least she finally hooked up with som
eone who could pay for the good stuff as opposed to the truly undrinkable crap she had survived on the rest of her life.

  Anyway, in the door of the refrigerator I found half a bottle of ruby red grapefruit juice, which meant I could have an actual cocktail instead of trying to down the vodka straight or over melted ice. So I made myself a drink, put the water on to boil for the noodles, and turned the television on for company. They had only basic cable, so I found one of those stations that run endless documentaries all the time and started to look around.

  The bedroom was not really a bedroom, even though it had a bed. The enormous pocket doors were clearly meant to shut the room off, but they had been left open for so long they were stuck on their rails. Another set of pocket doors made up the entire wall on the other side of the room, but they were stuck closed, with the bed shoved up against them. There was a small alcove built into one wall, with fancy plasterwork up the sides and a crown at the top. That had a dresser in it. There were no closets—just clothes everywhere on the floor—which along with the pocket doors made me think this room was not ever meant to be a bedroom. Daniel had said there were two dining rooms, but I decided this bedroom was really the dining room, and the room behind it with the television was originally the kitchen, where the servants would cook, and then bring the food in through the pocket doors, which probably opened and closed at some previous point in history. Well, honestly, I had no idea what was supposed to be what in this crazy apartment in the other century when it was built. But that’s what I thought.

  I also thought, I wonder where Mom’s perfume is? Because back in that freaky bedroom area I smelled it everywhere; it was in all the clothes and the blankets and the sheets, along with the red wine and the cigarettes and dirty laundry and mothballs. I kind of had it in my head that I might find that little black bottle and snag it before Lucy turned it into a big issue for no reason whatsoever. Seriously, you just never knew when she was going to get all twitchy and start making lists and arguing about everything, and Alison sometimes went along with that shit just because it wasn’t worth arguing with Lucy. The next thing you knew, Lucy would be telling everybody that we’d have to put everything smaller than a paperback into a box and sell it all together because that would be the only way to be fair, and then she’d hand it over to some thrift store for ten dollars, not even enough to buy a pizza. It made no sense to let Lucy try that, so I started looking for that little bottle. I thought that if I found it I could stick it in my backpack and no one would ever know.