Twelve Rooms with a View

by Theresa Rebeck

  “We won’t stay. We just want to come by and see where you live!”

  “I’ll tell him. Maybe we can work something out for next month.”

  “Is it a dump? Are you living in some sort of crazy dump?”

  “No, not at all. He’s just private.”

  “He’s crazy is what it sounds like.”

  It was pretty uncomfortable for all of us, frankly; Lucy’s questions to Mom made the situation sound as creepy and weird as we worried it might be. Mom just shrugged a little and looked down, and then she sighed, like this was all too much.

  Lucy took offense. “It’s a fair question, Mom,” she pointed out, kind of edgy. “You’ve been married to this guy for almost two years—why can’t we meet him?”

  “He doesn’t want to, is why,” Mom said. And she wasn’t apologetic about it at all.

  “But he’s nice to you, right?” I said.

  “You don’t have to worry about me, sweetheart, I’m fine!” she said, and she smiled and squeezed my hand. Which is maybe why it occurred to me after she was dead that what she meant was, worry about yourself, you dingbat; you’ve just agreed to go to the Delaware Water Gap with another loser.

  It also occurred to me that she didn’t want Bill to meet us because she was ashamed of us. Sitting there on the floor of that ridiculous TV room, eating Chinese food out of cartons, and trying to figure out how to screw over the two guys who grew up there and whose father had died just three weeks before Mom did, it then occurred to me that maybe we weren’t behaving well.

  “Are you crying?” Alison asked me suddenly.

  “It’s this kung pao chicken, I bit into one of the peppers. I wonder if there’s any Kleenex around here.” I stood up and looked around, confused. Lucy held up a wad of those lousy paper napkins that they dump in the carry-out bag and breezed on with her clever plan. “I’ll have the Sotheby’s guy call Long in the morning. Eventually he’s going to have to transfer the files anyway, and they’ll have a better sense of how soon that needs to happen. Surely they know how to work this so we can proceed with the sale even though the property’s still in probate,” she told us, licking her fingers like a cat. “There’s no question they’ll fight it, but we could at least get a jump on those Drinans. Potentially we could leave them in the dust.”

  “They’re already in the dust, their father just died,” I reminded her.

  “Their father, who disinherited them,” she retorted.

  “Precisely,” I said. “Precisely.”

  “You’re not going to get all moralistic about this,” Lucy said, looking up. “Oh, no no. This is not a situation of our making.”

  “You’re sitting here—plotting!” I said.

  “Plotting to make you rich. Oh, a couple million dollars, that would suck. You might have to give up cleaning houses.”

  “I wasn’t cleaning houses,” I told her, suddenly feeling peevish as hell. “I was managing properties.”

  “Well, my way you can own the properties you manage, how’s that for a thought?” she said, starting to close up the food cartons. “And you can go back to college and finish your degree in pottery, and you can start your own little pottery shop and throw clay around for the rest of your life and never worry ever ever ever about whether you make one red cent off any of it. That’s what can happen to your life, Tina, if you just sit still and let me make you rich.”

  “That was mean,” I said.

  “What?” she said, looking at me like I was nuts. “That was mean?”

  “Yeah, mean, you’re being mean to me again, Lucy.”

  “We’re all tired, it’s been a long couple of days,” Daniel chimed in, trying to be soothing. He was being Mr. Good Brother-in-Law now, asking quietly supportive questions and making sure Lucy knew We Are in This Together. “Lucy’s worked hard to protect us all, and I for one appreciate it.” He smiled at her. I wanted to smack them both. Instead I smiled wanly and nodded my sheepish little head.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m still a little shook up about Mom.”

  “We all are,” Alison said, like she also thought maybe I was being a bit too morally superior.

  “I know I know, I mean, I didn’t get much sleep last night,” I said, fully in retreat mode, because what other option did I have? I rubbed my eyes for effect. “I think I’d better go lie down.”

  “Be my guest,” Lucy said, shrugging. Which was her way of letting me know that this wasn’t my apartment, it was her apartment, and I wasn’t calling the shots. As if I ever called the shots with this crew. I went and hid in the bedroom with the little beds on the floor. I stared at the stars on the ceiling and waited for my so-called family to leave. Which they did not do, and after a while I started worrying that maybe they were plotting about how they were going to cut me out of my share of the loot once we got our hands on it. And once that occurred to me, I worked myself into a complete paranoid frenzy. I almost went back out to let them know they weren’t pulling any fast ones on me, that I was a full member of this little tribe of pirates, and there would be no sneaking around and cheating. Then I decided I probably shouldn’t be so confrontational, because it would make them think I was weak. The smartest move, I thought, would be to sneak through the pink room and into the empty room next to the TV room, where I could hide behind the door and eavesdrop on their diabolical maneuverings.

  I was about to put this idiotic plan in motion—I was literally sneaking to the door of the pink room and easing it open as silently as I could—when I heard them coming down the hallway. So I had to sneak back to the other room, and the little bed against the far wall, so that when Lucy looked through the crack in the door she could see me sleeping peacefully and tell herself that I was a mess but not a problem. Her shadow hovered in the doorway for a moment, watching my back, curled against the light in the hallway. Then she left.

  I lay there for a good five minutes after I heard the door thump shut and the three different tumblers turn in their locks. And then I waited another five minutes. I didn’t want one of them coming back and interrupting me, which was completely possible, given my older sister’s devious mind. But after fifteen minutes I was fairly sure that they had gone away, so I turned on the light, pulled out the bag I had hidden under the clothes I had bought, and began to inventory my afternoon’s purchases.

  6

  SO THIS IS WHAT I HAD: ONE PHILLIPS-HEAD SCREWDRIVER WITH INTERCHANGEABLE heads, one zinc-plated steel four-inch spring-bolt lock, and two brass chain door guards. Both the spring bolt and the chain guards came with their own screws, but I had bought an extra half dozen just in case. I spent the next fifty minutes locking myself into that apartment. I knew it would piss off absolutely everybody that I was doing this—Lucy, Alison, Daniel, those Drinans, maybe even Len the moss lover and Frank the doorman, both of whom had been really nice to me. Nobody was going to be happy that I had figured out a way to be the one who said who could come in and who couldn’t. But I didn’t see that I had much choice. In case you hadn’t noticed, in spite of the fact that I had been invaded the night before, not one person had spent one second figuring out how I was supposed to protect myself, given that the Drinan brothers had keys and that they clearly thought they were within their rights to use them. Lucy was spending all her time cooking up plans to pull one over on those guys—well, if you ask me, it wouldn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that they were doing the same thing to us. I needed protection. I needed a spring bolt and two security chains.

  And I was right. I mean, within ten minutes of finishing the installation process. I was in the kitchen pouring myself a tumbler of vodkagrapefruit surprise when the yelling started. You could hear it all the way back in the kitchen.

  “What the fuck? HEY. WHAT THE FUCK!” Then pounding, and yanking, and more pounding on the door. It was enormously satisfying to hear.

  “GO AWAY!” I yelled in return, while I sauntered to the front of the apartment. “I’M CALLING THE COPS!”

  “
I AM THE COPS!” he yelled. “OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR.” By this I knew it was the Drinan with the sexy eyes. Not that I was surprised.

  “I’M SLEEPING IN HERE AND I’M NOT BOTHERING ANYBODY. GO AWAY,” I yelled.

  “OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR,” he yelled back.

  “What, you’ve got like three sentences, is that all you know how to say?” I asked him through the door. “Open the door, I’m a cop, what the fuck—is that all you know how to say?”

  “I’d open the door, Tina Finn,” he warned me.

  “Oh yeah? Why?” I said to the door, kind of bold and cocky. It was weird. All of a sudden I felt like I was flirting with someone in a bar. “What are you going to do to me, Officer?”

  “I’m going to arrest you,” he announced.

  “I’m not the one trying to break in and harass an innocent citizen in her home, dude,” I retorted. “I put a call in to 911, you’re the one who’s in the shithouse.”

  “There’s a stay on the apartment, Tina,” he informed me through the door. “No one’s allowed to fuck with the locks. You’re in violation of the law.”

  “Except I didn’t fuck with the locks, Pierre,” I said. “I put in a spring bolt and some chain guards. The locks are fine. When I’m not here? The locks work just fine. When I am here? YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED IN.”

  There was a pause, and then a bump right at my shoulder. “Shit,” I heard him mumble. He must have been right up against the door. For a second I thought, wow, this door is so thin I can hear everything—and if I can hear everything, he can probably bash it open with one of those little battering-ram things cops carry, whether or not I have the spring bolt in place. And then I thought, is he the kind of cop who carries those things? What kind of a cop is this guy anyway? Does he have a gun on him? He didn’t have a gun or a uniform the last time I saw him, but there was no knowing if he had any of those things right now. I took a step back, because it did occur to me that if he started whacking at the door I didn’t want to be leaning against it. But that did not seem to be on his mind. For the moment, at least, he was quiet.

  And then someone else started talking.

  I couldn’t hear what the other person was saying. The voice was much softer, more distant; I heard a murmur, and a question. Pete answered, only now I couldn’t hear him either; he was practically whispering to whoever was out there. This should have been good news—let’s face it, having an angry cop screaming at me to let him in was not an ideal situation—but the whispering voices actually made me more anxious than the yelling had. I stepped back to the door and put my ear up against it to see if I could hear what the other person was saying or what the angry Pete Drinan was saying. But now I could barely hear Pete. He wasn’t up against the door anymore; he was over by the elevators. The other person asked him a question that I couldn’t hear, and he answered, and again I couldn’t hear. I thought the other person might be his brother, that would make the most sense, but it didn’t really sound like Doug. This person was talking more thoughtfully, and Drinan was talking thoughtfully back. I truly couldn’t tell what was going on.

  Given my options, I decided to go for it. I slid back the spring bolt very quietly and carefully, which was exceptionally difficult; those spring bolts hold pretty tight—what use would they be if they didn’t? Luckily, Drinan was far enough away, and the conversation was apparently riveting enough that he wasn’t super-attuned to the sound of a spring bolt being slowly scraped back. He had already thrown the tumblers in the three door locks, so all I had to do was make sure the chain guards were in place and open the door as silently as possible.

  He was past the elevators, his back to me, and he was talking to whoever lived in the other apartment. It made so much sense when I saw it that I almost laughed out loud about how paranoid I was being. The lady—I could see it was a lady with kind of messy brown hair—was standing in her doorway, like all the yelling had woken her up and she had come out to investigate. But she didn’t seem angry. She had her hand on Drinan’s arm, and every now and then she would pat it, like she was comforting him, and he would nod and look at the floor. He had a bottle of beer in his left hand and was holding it behind him, like a teenager who doesn’t want his mom’s friend to know he’s got a beer. His thumb was hooked into the top to make sure the fizz didn’t go.

  They didn’t know I was listening, so they just kept talking. “God rest her soul I miss her every day,” said the lady. Her voice was sort of odd and low, which was why if you couldn’t see her, she sounded like a man.

  “I miss her too,” he told her, quiet.

  “It would have killed her to see this, just killed her! Oh my god, when they were selling the furniture, all I could think was this would have just killed Sophie, the way Bill is letting everything go.”

  “Actually she hated most of that stuff,” Drinan noted.

  “So many beautiful pieces. Worth a fortune! And then the paintings, I thought I would just cry, when the paintings—”

  “She didn’t like them either.” With every answer, he sounded like he wanted to take a hit off that beer bottle, but she wasn’t giving him an opening.

  “Your inheritance, it was all your inheritance, gone—that’s what she wouldn’t have liked. Your father should be ashamed of himself.”

  “Yeah, well, he never was.”

  “God rest his soul, you got that right. And he never asked me if I wanted them. I thought, at least ask, I would have been happy to step in and keep them in the building. I would have done that for your mother, god rest her soul. I told him! But you couldn’t talk to him. Well, you know that.”

  “Yes.” He shifted on his feet, and for about fifteen seconds I got a better look at the woman, who had an intelligent face underneath that big messy head of hair. I wasn’t liking her much until I saw her face, then I wasn’t so sure, because she seemed sort of sensible, even though she was saying slightly dotty things and clearly was cranky that she didn’t get her hands on those paintings and all that furniture. She had on some kind of silk robe, sage green with a burnt-orange stripe, and the bit I could see hanging off her shoulder suggested it might be spectacularly beautiful if I could get a better look at it. Drinan shifted again, and I lost the sight line.

  “Well, thank you for your thoughts, Mrs. Westmoreland,” he started. The hand holding the beer was getting a little slippery, plus I could see from the way his shoulders were scrunching together that he was getting pretty desperate for that drink. Before he could take a step backward and turn to take a fast hit, she touched him on the sleeve and held him there. Ai yi yi, I thought, this is getting interesting.

  “But these people—who are these people?” she asked, all concerned. “Coming and going, acting like they own the place, Frank says one of them has moved in. I’m horrified.” I went back to not liking her. What on earth was she complaining about, she was “horrified” about me living in an apartment I had every legal right to live in? She was just an Upper West Side snob who had the hots for a dude half her age, I decided, on the basis of hardly any information at all.

  “It’s something to do with Dad’s will,” he told her. “He left everything to Olivia.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Look, it’s fine, it’s going to be fine.” You could hear that he was already kicking himself for telling her that much. And it did seem to be a terrific mistake.

  “He left everything to Olivia? He barely knew her!”

  “They were married two years,” he corrected her.

  “Did you know he was doing that? Did you agree to it?”

  “He didn’t actually ask us to agree,” Pete said. His voice sounded really uptight. “He told us. Doug tried to talk him out of it. He wanted to do something for her.”

  “But why?”

  “He was worried that she wouldn’t have anything if he died. That’s what he said.”

  “She didn’t deserve anything!”

  “Well, that’s what he felt, anyway. He, you know, he knew he was dy
ing, and he wanted her to have some security after he was gone.”

  “Surely you could have put a stop to this.”

  “We had a big fight about it. Doug, you know, he pretty much felt the way you do, and Dad got real mad. It wasn’t … we didn’t really talk much after that.”

  This was so much more information than I’d ever had about Bill and his marriage to my mom that I was momentarily thrilled. I had forgotten how useful snooping at doors could be. I was also happy to have a shred of good feeling for the guy, since he had tried to do the right thing by Mom in the face of opposition. He was instantly transformed in my imagination from a selfish drunk into an eccentric recluse who had lousy kids.

  “But Olivia is dead now. And these other people, what rights do they have?”

  “I don’t know. Honestly, I just don’t know.” Pete trailed off, clearly wanting to get out of this conversation. But she was a sharp one. And she was as fascinated by what he had told her as I was.

  “He didn’t even know them, he refused to meet them!” she told him. “He was afraid of just this scenario, that complete strangers would come after his property—that’s why he told her they were never to set foot in the building!”

  “She told you that?”

  “She did! I asked her one night. She had just come back from having dinner with them apparently. It was so rare that you ever saw either of them leave the apartment, so when I saw her in the lobby, I said, this is a treat! You and Bill don’t go out much, do you, and she said, I was having dinner with my daughters, and we rode up in the elevator together, and I said, are we going to meet your daughters? She said, oh no, Bill prefers to keep me all to himself! And I said, well, that hardly seems fair, you must miss them a lot. And she said she did, very much, and that she had tried to speak to him about it but he was very worried—those were her words—he was worried that other people were after his property, and he had to protect it. Those were her exact words. And then I saw him one day not long after that—I actually saw him putting trash in the bin, which he never did—and I said, why Bill, there you are! He looked terrible, I don’t need to tell you that, he was sick for a long long time and I know he refused to see a doctor—”