Twelve Rooms with a View

by Theresa Rebeck

  “Yes, until the will is settled. I’m staying here.”

  “And what do the boys have to say about that?” Len the elf asked, sort of half to himself.

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?” I asked edgily. He smiled, clearly amused by my tone.

  “The boys,” he repeated. “I ran into them last night in the lobby. They didn’t mention to me that you would be living here. So I’m surprised to hear it. As I assume they were.” He folded his hands in front of his chest with an odd little gesture of delight and smiled at me again, as if I would find his clever piece of deduction charming.

  “Look, you’re going to have to go,” I said. “I don’t know anything about this, and you know, you want me to be discreet and everything, but this is clearly some sort of illegal thing you have going here.”

  “Moss is not a controlled substance,” he informed me, laughing.

  “Oh sorry, I maybe misunderstood you before,” I said. “Because you said how people in the building got all mad when you were trying to grow it up there on the roof, so I was thinking maybe they wouldn’t like to find out that instead you decided to grow it on the eighth floor in the middle of the building, where it might actually spread.”

  “Ah,” said Len. “I understand why perhaps you thought I said that.”

  “Yeah, it sounded a little like that, like people maybe wouldn’t be so thrilled to hear what you were doing here.”

  “That’s not what I was saying,” he said.

  “So I don’t actually need to keep my mouth shut about this?” Elfman laughed again, to himself this time.

  “What’s so funny, Len?”

  “Nothing, no, nothing.” He looked back at the kitchen, this time with real longing. “Do you like moss?” he asked me.

  “Honestly, I’ve never thought about it that much.”

  “It is a rare spirit that appreciates moss,” he said, as if this were news. “I have seventeen different species in this particular mossery. Some of them are exceedingly beautiful. The curators at the two public botanical gardens in the city would give their eyeteeth, frankly. It’s actually a bit of an achievement that I could do what I’ve done, and under these conditions? Please. Let me show you.”

  “That’s not necessary, Len.”

  “Please,” he said, holding out his elegant dirty hand, like a prince at some ball, waiting to sweep me into a dance.

  “What the hell,” I said.

  So for the next hour, this strange guy walked me through the intricacies of moss, gametophores and microphylls and archegonia—that’s the female sex organ of moss, who knew—and how much water moss needs for fertilization and how long it takes for sporophytes to mature. He talked about liverworts and hornworts; he had mosses in there that were native to the Yorkshire Dales and mosses that grew only in cracks in city streets and mosses that grew only in water. In Europe during World War II, he told me, sphagnum mosses were used to dress the wounds of soldiers, because they’re so absorbent and have mild antibacterial properties. Also some mosses have been used to put out fires. Don’t ask me how they would do that, but apparently it’s historically accurate. Old Len knew a ton about moss, and he made sure that I knew how great his mossery was and how no one builds them anymore and what a tragedy it would be if anything were to happen to his mossery.

  “That would be awful,” I agreed. I looked around the transformed kitchen. Len had even hung an old woodcut of a medieval tree on one wall, I suppose to keep the moss company. “So how much did Bill charge you to rent his kitchen like this?”

  “Oh,” he said, looking at me sideways for a second. “It was a very friendly arrangement.”

  “He didn’t charge you rent for this? But they were broke, weren’t they?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I spent the night here. There’s nothing here. They were living on vodka and fish sticks and red wine,” I said. “Which he paid for in cash.”

  “You have been busy, and you say you just arrived yesterday?”

  “So he really gave you this room to grow moss in, for free?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Len smiled. “I said we had a friendly arrangement.”

  “Like under the table, friendly like that?” I asked.

  “Bill liked to fly under the radar,” he admitted with a small shrug. “He did prefer cash.”

  “How much did he charge you?” I asked directly. Len looked at me sideways and then went back to examining one of his moss beds, poking at it carefully with his middle finger.

  “Seven hundred dollars a month,” he said, raising an eyebrow.

  “You know what, Len?” I said. “I think this mossery is fantastic, and I see no reason why you can’t keep it here for as long as you want. I’m gonna go make a phone call.”

  “Lovely.” Len smiled. “I’ll just continue my work, then.”

  I figured I might need to keep the cash coming, and it did seem reasonable to let this guy keep his mossery. So I went back to TV land and picked up the phone and started dialing, meaning I made it halfway through Lucy’s number before realizing that the phone was dead. There was nothing on the line—no clicks, no beeps, no dial tone, nothing. I hung up and tried again, and I did that about eight more times, and then I plugged and unplugged the phone about eight times and then I tried it eight more times. Then I tried it in three other jacks, in three of the little bedrooms, before returning to the great room.

  “Something wrong?” Len asked me, leaning out of the kitchen. I mean, obviously there was something wrong; I was holding the phone out and staring at it like it was about to explode.

  “The phone doesn’t work,” I told him. “I mean, it worked just an hour ago, and now it doesn’t.”

  He held out his neat but dirty hand and I gave him the phone, which he plugged into yet another wall jack. He listened for less than one second, then nodded. “Well,” he said. “I need to introduce you to Frank.”

  Frank was the doorman. Len took me downstairs to the front lobby, and there was Frank, a good-looking Hispanic guy in a beige uniform with little gold things on the shoulders.

  “Hey, Len, what’s up?” Frank asked.

  “This is Tina Finn, Olivia’s daughter.” Len made a little wave with his hand, like I might be some fancy dish that was being served up. I felt like bowing.

  “Nice to meet you, Miss Finn,” said Frank, reaching out and shaking my hand politely. “I’m real sorry about your mom.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Tina is going to be staying in the apartment for now, while they settle things up with the estate,” Len informed Frank. It was genius, seriously; coming from Len, “she’s staying in the apartment” sounded pretty good. At least Frank the doorman had no problem with it.

  “Well, welcome to the Edge,” he said. “If you need anything, you let me know.”

  “There is something.” Len nodded. “It looks like her phone’s been cut off. Could you put a call in about it?”

  “Sure, who’s your carrier?” asked Frank, reaching for the phone receiver on his desk.

  “You know, I’m not sure who they had,” I said.

  “Well, let’s see then, maybe I’ll put in a call to Doug—that’s Bill’s son,” he told me. “There’s probably been some mistake, maybe he cut the phone off. Did he know you were going to be staying up there?”

  “Yeah, we talked, you know, we just talked yesterday about it,” I said. “Look, you don’t need to bother him, I’ll call him myself.”

  “I got it right here,” Frank said, dialing. “It’s no bother.” He was dialing away when Len tapped him on the shoulder.

  “It’s probably better just to give her the number,” Len said under his breath, like he was trying to keep me from hearing what he said. Frank looked at him, confused, and Len did that thing with his hands, opening them up, apologizing to the universe for the stupidity of the human race. “I think there’s a lot going on, Frank, you probably don’t want to put yourself in the middle of
it.” It sounded so much like he was taking care of Frank that for a minute I forgot he was actually taking care of me.

  However, it was starting to occur to old Frank that this story didn’t quite add up. “But you did see Doug last night?” he asked, a little worried, while he rooted around for a pen.

  “We hadn’t figured out what we were doing last night when we talked, and everything was such a mess, with Mom’s funeral, I was kind of a wreck and we hadn’t actually thought about the practicalities. I mean, I was just like crying and crying, so I really didn’t get the details straight,” I fibbed.

  “I know what that’s like.” Frank nodded. “I lost my mom fifteen years ago, I still miss her.” He looked at me, and I swear to god, in that split second you could see the sadness rise up in his face, just enough to make his cheeks flush a little and his eyes well up. He got embarrassed right away and looked down, like he was still searching for that pen even though it was in his hand, and because that uniform looked so hideous on him, it made me feel kind of bad to be lying to him. I mean, he was significantly nicer than Len, who probably was just taking care of me so I wouldn’t mess with his moss. But this guy Frank was just a nice person who missed his mom. He had a kind of bad haircut, which was so sweet and stupid I thought my head was going to split.

  “Well … thanks, Frank,” I finally said. “I’ll go call Doug right now and make sure he knows about me staying here and all that and, you know, make sure that he knows not to turn anything else off.” I turned away so Frank could have a moment of privacy to collect himself. And then old Len was at my elbow, showing me to the door, like a friendly undercover agent. “There’s a Verizon store two blocks up and one over, on Columbus,” he informed me cheerfully under his breath. “They sell those throwaway phones. You don’t need a credit card, you can just pay cash, isn’t that convenient?”

  “Very,” I agreed. “Thanks for the tip, Len.”

  A throwaway phone was exactly the thing, of course, because I had no cell phone and no credit card and now no landline. So Len was right to suggest it, and while I was out putting his sensible suggestion into action, I also poked around a couple of clothing stores so I’d have more than one skirt, one pair of jeans, and one sweater in my wardrobe. I could have called that bonehead Darren and asked him to put all my clothes in a box and send them, but I had no reason to believe he would actually do that, even if he said he would. So I ducked into a couple of really cute shops, where I learned that my seven hundred dollars, minus one throwaway phone, might buy me one pair of excruciatingly expensive blue jeans and half a tank top, which seriously annoyed me until I found a Gap, which had a whole lot of stuff on sale that fit fine and looked cool enough and cost quite a bit less. Then I was hungry, so I had a burger in a seedy deli, and then I needed underwear, and honestly I couldn’t find anyplace to buy it except one of those really cute little shops, and that cost a complete fortune but I had no choice. So the seven hundred dollars was more or less whittled down to two hundred by the time I decided to go back home.

  That was the first time my head said “Let’s go home,” and I know it sounds kind of ridiculous that I thought of it that way? But no kidding, I was already in love with that place. All that stuff about my mother drinking herself to death there, and my sisters being so uptight and bossy, and the crazy drunk guys showing up in the middle of the night—none of it seemed that serious when I picked up my eighteen packages and thought about going home. I half wondered, what are you going to do when you get home? And then I thought, well, maybe I’ll just make myself a cup of tea and read a book or something, there are at least a thousand used mysteries still shoved under the bed in Bill and Mom’s bedroom. So on the way home I stopped at a little shop and bought some fancy tea, and I was well on my way to becoming a totally different person, the kind who lives on the Upper West Side, and drinks tea in the afternoon while reading mystery novels. Then I got back to the lobby of my fabulous new apartment where I found out I was still the same old Tina I had been just a couple hours before.

  The lobby was packed. People were milling about, a bunch of kids in school uniforms were clustered around the elevator, arguing with one another and hitting the buttons on the elevator bank, and a woman in a bright red jacket with a fur collar kept trying to get Frank’s attention at his little brass podium. Frank was talking to two men, and they were all yelling at once, and it sounded loud because the ceilings in that small space were so high and curved that the sounds bounced around in it. The lady in the red jacket was clearly related to the kids, because occasionally she would yell, “Stop it, Gail! All of you, would you just wait until I see if your father’s package has arrived? Frank …” But Frank was dealing with whatever the two guys were saying, which I couldn’t hear because of all the other noise. Two ladies standing behind the one in the red jacket were waiting a little more patiently, but not much. Both of them were spectacularly thin and wearing the kind of clothes you only see in ads in the New York Times, everything tight and fitted and slightly strange. I couldn’t see their faces right away because their backs were to me. All I could see were those strange fashionable outfits, and one of the women had the most astonishing black curls tumbling down her back while the other one had short white hair flipped around her head. Then the one with black hair turned for a second, like she had heard something just behind her, and she was one of those people who are so idiotically beautiful you think you’re on drugs when you see them up close. Her eyes flicked in my direction, but then the woman she was with yanked at her arm.

  “This is ludicrous,” the older woman said. “I’ll hail my own cab.”

  “That’s what I said ten minutes ago,” said the spectacular-looking woman. She turned around and headed right for the door. But the older lady didn’t follow.

  “We will get our OWN CAB, FRANK!” the old lady announced in quite a loud voice. “And I’m going to call the management company, do you understand? This chaos is NOT ACCEPTABLE.”

  “I want to talk to management as well, you get them on the phone,” said one of the guys who was arguing with Frank.

  “Maybe you could just take a second to look through the deliveries, then we’ll just get out of your hair, Frank,” said the lady in the red jacket, poking through the stuff piled on the console, trying to be nice but trying to get her own way too. The kids continued to scream as the furious white-haired lady turned away, muttering to herself about how nuts it all was.

  Poor Frank was apologizing to everyone at the same time. “I can do that, sure let me—sorry, Mrs. Gideon, I am so sorry, so sorry, Julianna,” Frank called after the ladies heading for the door. “If you give me just a second here—oh, she’s here!” he said suddenly, looking both harried and relieved. And then the lady in the red jacket knocked all the packages off the top of the podium.

  The whole scene was so complicated that it took me a second to realize that Frank was looking at me. He said to one of the guys he’d been talking to, “She says she’s living there now, and that you met last night and you spoke about it—I’m not sure, but that’s the young lady, she said that you know each other.” Then he turned to me. “Tina, there’s some kind of confusion here with Doug about the locks, he says he needs to change the locks, but you didn’t say anything about that, so can you come talk to him while I deal with this? Hang on there, Mrs. Gideon, let me get you a cab. You can go ahead and look through all this, Mrs. White, but I didn’t see anything.” Frank rushed by me, opening the door for the infuriated Mrs. Gideon and her fabulous daughter Julianna. Mrs. White continued to yell at her children while she poked through the packages on the floor. Doug Drinan turned and gave me a dirty look.

  Obviously this moment was a bit of a drag. The fabulous Upper West Side fashion plates were pushing by me while I tried to grab up my Gap bags, apologizing like a loser, “So sorry, sorry, sorry …” Frank practically shoved me aside while he raced after the women, trying to do his job. The loud, insane kids finally managed to get the elevator to ar
rive, but their mother was not yet ready to pile in with them; she was too busy giving me the once-over, like I was someone who was trying to break into their building. Which in fact I was.

  “The doorman seems to be under the impression that you’re living in my father’s apartment,” Doug announced. “And he thinks that I somehow agreed to this.”

  “Well, we did have a conversation about this last night, Doug, and I don’t think you could have been really surprised that Frank told you that,” I announced back. We were both pretending to be polite, but our voices were too forceful to count as polite.

  “Last night we were decent enough not to kick you out onto the street,” he told me. “The understanding was you’d be gone in the morning. You have no right to be here—your mother actually had no right to be here either, after my father died—”

  “That’s not what my lawyer tells me.”

  For some reason this caused old Doug to really lose it. He was suddenly furious, his face going all red, and he actually grabbed me, right up at the front of my shirt, and yanked me toward him, to do what I wasn’t sure. I was not expecting it; even last night when he showed up with his brother totally wasted, and they were both really mad and reactive, they didn’t put their hands on me. For one terrible minute I thought, oh no, this is one of those guys who’s worse when he’s not drunk; all that disappointment and sadness and thinning hair are just too much for him.

  “Let go of me, let go let go,” I said, real nice, real fast. I truly didn’t want to find out if he had it in him to hit me.

  “Look, I got a bunch of other jobs. Is this going to happen?” the guy with Doug asked. He had on a bad leather jacket and jeans and was carrying a tool kit, and he looked really bored. Somehow you knew right away that he saw this stuff all the time, people arguing about who had the right to change the locks to some house or apartment, and it wasn’t all that earth-shattering. I realized I was probably not going to get hit. Anyway, the lock guy didn’t seem to think so. He looked away like he didn’t give a shit who won this battle, but also like he was pretty sure it was not going to be me, so there was no use even acknowledging that I existed.