Twelve Rooms with a View

by Theresa Rebeck

  “Yeah, but you said you talked to him?”

  “I did. I took the opportunity. I said, Bill—Olivia tells me you’ve never even met her daughters, aren’t you curious to meet them? She’s your wife! I was reluctant to say anything to him at all, I couldn’t believe he brought another woman into your mother’s apartment. It’s the Livingston Mansion Apartment, it is a historic property! He should have let it go, is my opinion, when your mother died. He should have sold it to someone who would take care of it, someone in the building who would appreciate it. He never appreciated it. She was the one.”

  “But he said something? About these daughters?”

  “Yes, he said they were trash. He said, those daughters are trash and I’m not meeting them. That’s what he called them. Trash. And he said all they wanted was his money.” At which point old Bill went back to being an alcoholic asshole in my mind.

  Pete Drinan thought about this. It was not an uninteresting bit of information to him. “Was he drunk?” he finally asked.

  “Well, I only saw him for a moment, so I couldn’t really say,” Mrs. Westmoreland admitted. “I know he did like to drink.”

  “Yes, he did,” Pete sighed, his hand still curled around the beer bottle behind his back. “Listen, Mrs. Westmoreland—would you be willing to talk about this? To our lawyer?”

  “Oh, a lawyer …” she sighed, all worried but excited too, like she was secretly happy to be asked. “You mean, officially?”

  “Well, yeah,” said Pete. “It might make a difference—that you spoke to him directly and he told you he didn’t want the property going out of the family. That that was his intent?”

  “That was my understanding. But if this is an official situation—I don’t know. I want you and your brother to have your inheritance. But obviously I don’t want to get into some complicated legal mess. I did love your mother. Maybe you’d like to come in and have a cup of tea?”

  “Oh,” said Pete, his fingers twirling around the neck of that beer bottle. I thought about how the beer was getting all warm and flat, and I guessed he was thinking that too. And sure enough, he leaned back on his left leg, ready to edge away again. But she was not letting go. She actually had her fingers twisted in his jacket sleeve now. Her door had swung completely open, and what little I could see of her place was gorgeous.

  “Your mother was my neighbor for thirty years, this whole story breaks my heart,” she explained, leaning up against the doorway.

  “Mine too, Mrs. Westmoreland.” He nodded, leaning back.

  “Good heavens, Peter,” she sighed. “After all this time I think you could consider calling me Delia.”

  “Yeah, well …”

  “Come in, let me get you that tea. Or a drink! Maybe a whiskey—that sounds like a policeman’s drink!” she said with a smile.

  He turned, finally, planning to get a hit off that beer bottle, and saw me looking out through the crack in the door. He looked tired. And then he remembered what was going on and took a fast step in my direction. I remembered too, and I slammed the door and slid the bolt back in place. I thought he was going to start pounding again, but he just waited. I could hear the woman in 8B start to gripe about how awful it all was; I couldn’t really hear the words, but the tone of her voice was not complimentary. He didn’t say anything back to her. I stood at the door and listened, but he didn’t say anything at all. I wasn’t sure what was going on. Finally Mrs. Westmoreland stopped talking, and it got really quiet. I thought maybe he was gone. And then a little white card was slid under the door. At the last second, it kind of wafted, like he had pushed it. I picked it up. It was a really plain business card, with the NYPD shield, and his name, Detective Peter Drinan, right in the middle, and a cell number. On the back, in little block letters in ink, it said, CALL ME WHEN YOU’RE READY. I thought about that for a second, as I kept listening at the door. He was still out there; in fact, from the shadows it looked like he was sort of hovering down near the floor to see if I had picked the card up. So I took the paper bag from the hardware store, and I looked through my backpack, which was still right where I had dumped it, for a pen, and I ripped a piece off the paper bag and wrote: OKAY. I shoved that through the door, And then I watched through the bottom of the door while he picked it up. And then I heard him laugh. The lady in the other apartment asked some more questions, and he said something to her, but then I heard the elevator ding, and the door close.

  And when I went in the hallway in the morning, he was gone.

  7

  LEN’S GREENHOUSE WAS SO BIG IT HAD ROOMS: THE DECIDUOUS room, the desert room, the rain forest room, the heirloom plants from other centuries room, the plants that only grow on other plants room. Some of these were subsets or extensions of rooms, and some of the rooms overlapped before growing into new rooms—the plants growing on other plants room turned into the orchid room, which evolved into the spectacularly gorgeous and weird plants room, which turned a corner and became the poisonous plants room. So the whole greenhouse seemed to be growing. In some places it covered the roof and threatened to crawl down the side of the building. It was the only greenhouse I had ever seen that was big enough to get lost in.

  I told Len that I was surprised he could get enough water up there for a greenhouse that big, especially one with a rain forest, and yet he couldn’t get enough water for a little bit of moss.

  He said, “I know, it is surprising, isn’t it?” By which I knew he really was full of shit, and there was no reason he had to stash the moss in my apartment, except that he had run out of room in his. That, and there really was quite a lot of sunlight up there. He got light on six sides. It was like living on Mount Olympus with a whole bunch of plants.

  As much fun as it had been to talk to Len about his moss, it was nothing compared to hearing him go on about plants. He started by delivering information like a university lecturer, which he had been at some point. Everything was all about the genus and the species and the Latin name and the common name and the historical sources of the names. But he couldn’t hold on to the formality. In no time he was talking to the plants, checking out the texture of the leaves, telling the pretty ones how lovely they were, telling the ones that were all spiky and weird-looking that looks don’t matter, the pink coleus is just a slut for showing off like that, beauty comes and goes so quickly, and she’s only an annual anyway. He thought the cactuses were sly and devious, the “tricksters of the desert,” which I didn’t quite follow, because all those spikes didn’t look sly to me; they seemed pretty direct. When I pointed that out, Len just laughed, like there was so much about cactuses that I didn’t know. And how could you argue with that? I don’t know anything about cactuses; I was just making an observation. Then he took me into the orchid room, and I got an earful about the orchids. He had more than a hundred different kinds, each one stranger than the last. Some had spots all over them, which I had never seen on any flower. They were pink and purple and yellow and white and dark red with black centers, and one was black all over, which was strangely frightening. Some looked like stars and some looked like butterflies, some looked like tarantulas, and some like hornets or some other kind of stinging animal, and then of course there were dozens that looked like sex organs. Seriously, all of those flowers looked like they wanted to have sex with humans. It was a bit creepy, honestly. I was somewhat afraid to touch them.

  This turned out to be a good impulse on my part, as Len casually informed me once we were done with the orchid room.

  “Some of them are poisonous,” he admitted. “The pollen, the ovules, the nectar, this little darling here—don’t touch—not that it would hurt you permanently, but you very well might lose all feeling in your arm, at least for a day.”

  “Come on, Len,” I said.

  “Do you want to try it?” he asked, raising those eyebrows at me.

  I didn’t. “But if orchids are poisonous, how come everybody has them in their houses?”

  “Only certain species, Tina. Use you
r head,” he said, pulling out a very small pair of clippers and snipping some extraneous vines away from a line of bright yellow star-shaped flowers that wound down the side of a tree. “Please don’t touch that.”

  “You can’t touch any of them?” I asked.

  “Until you know which ones are poisonous and which aren’t, no, in fact, you can’t touch any of them.”

  “How did you find out which ones are poisonous?”

  “The hard way,” he said. “I studied.”

  The place smelled like growing things and sounded like water. He had little fountains in corners, and strange pools behind tree trunks or alongside a hillside of ferns. That greenhouse was so big it had hills—small hills, but definite undulations. And everything was green, a thousand different greens, each one more subtle than the last. In spite of the pink coleus and the startling sexuality of the many-colored and poisonous orchids, green was what you saw everywhere.

  And then all of a sudden you turned a corner and were back in his apartment. The apartment was quite small in comparison to the greenhouse; it was one little room right at the center of the roof. There was a kitchenette with a linoleum counter, completely cluttered with pots and pans and a blender, and lots of mismatched dishes on open shelves. And across from the counter was a wall with a lot of books about plants, and a chair and a little table. To one side was a big, overstuffed blue couch with magazines and books piled all over it, and behind that, in a corner, an unmade bed. Next to the bed was what seemed to be a closet, and then a very small bathroom with a skylight and lots of plants in the tub. On the other side of the bathtub was one of those clear acrylic doors they sell in fancy bath stores, and just beyond was the room with all the ferns. Seriously, you could step out of that bathtub and into the greenhouse. I mean, the apartment did have some walls, just not as many as most people have. The greenhouse seemed to have grown out of that tiny apartment and then just kept on growing.

  “Would you like a cappuccino?” Len asked me. He gestured toward a large silver contraption that took up all of the counter space between the very small stovetop and the equally small refrigerator. The only thing that wasn’t utterly minuscule in the kitchen was the enormous cappuccino machine. Len considered it with an air of bemused resignation, like it was an old but hapless and worrisome friend. “I have this wonderful machine someone gave me, but I can never get it to work,” he admitted.

  “If you can’t get it to work, why are you offering me cappuccino?”

  “Well, I was thinking that if you wanted a cappuccino, you could try to make it yourself, and then, if you were successful, you could show me how to do it,” he said, offering up that dazzling smile.

  “Fair enough,” I said. “Where’s the coffee?”

  “Oh, coffee … oh,” he mused, looking around the tiny kitchen.

  “Never mind, I’ll find it,” I said, and started poking around. There weren’t that many places to look. I landed on the stuff my first try: in the freezer.

  “You know you’re not really supposed to freeze your beans, it dries them out,” I informed Len, looking for an expiration date. “How long has this been in here?”

  “Oh, not long. A week? My daughter brought it by, she brought me one of those baskets of food they give to invalids in hospitals. I think there are chocolate biscuits somewhere.” He started poking around the bookshelves, as if he might have hidden the biscuits in with the books.

  “You have a daughter?” This was real news. I mean, it was hard to imagine this strange person having any human relations. I thought he was half plant himself by this point.

  “Oh yes, she’s, well, you know, she’s my daughter, you know what that’s like,” he replied, as if all girls with parents somehow must share the same frontal lobe. “I can’t find the biscuits.”

  “Here they are,” I said, pulling them out from behind the cappuccino machine. Len looked at them with a sort of stern surprise, like the biscuits had done something offensive, locating themselves in such an unusual spot.

  “What are they doing there?” he asked.

  “Maybe your daughter put them there,” I suggested. “Maybe she was trying to clean up your kitchen and she thought it was a good spot to stash the cookies. You know, by the cappuccino machine. What’s her name?”

  “Oh, who remembers,” he sighed, suddenly bored to the point of apathy. “Her mother always called her Charlie. I dislike it when girls have boys’ names, it’s confusing enough as it is without things like that.”

  “Is that the name on her birth certificate?”

  “What? No. Do you think I’m crazy?”

  “Well, yes, a bit,” I said, looking around.

  “Her given name is Charlotte. We named her Charlotte,” he stated, with some heat.

  “Well, why don’t you just call her that?” I asked, pouring a bunch of coffee beans into what seemed to be the grinding part of the machine; at least, the clever little chute that opened up off one side implied that beans might go there.

  “I rarely see her, so I don’t call her anything.” Len sounded increasingly annoyed with my questioning.

  “Why don’t you see her?” I said, looking for the switch.

  “Well, let’s see, Tina, why would a parent and child become estranged? Let’s speculate on that, shall we?” He ducked his head into the refrigerator. “You’ll need milk, I think.”

  “This is a very nice machine, Len,” I told him, flipping the switch. Nothing happened. He set a red-and-white carton of whole milk on the cluttered counter between us and watched as I flipped the switch again.

  “Stop it—it makes no sense to keep flipping that switch. One try is plenty. It doesn’t work, I told you; I’ve had that machine for years, and it doesn’t ever work.”

  “So why don’t you get another one?”

  “Oh, I don’t really like cappuccino anyway,” he sighed, opening the tin of cookies.

  “Then why am I making it?”

  “Well, you’re not, as far as I can see, you haven’t gotten that thing to work any more than I did. And now you have to figure out how to get the beans out of there; you’re going to have to turn the whole thing upside down, and doubtless the beans will simply go everywhere. It’s a complete waste of time.”

  “Wait,” I said, plugging the machine in. “Hang on.” I flipped the switch. The machine started to hum and rumble as the beans swirled in the chute.

  “Oh,” said Len, arrested for a second. Then ground coffee began to spit all over the counter. “Well, that is—interesting.”

  It took twenty minutes to figure out how to get the ground coffee into the other part of the machine, make the espresso, and then steam the milk, but the whole project was pretty entertaining and relaxing, compared to the other stuff that had been happening to me for the past few days. Len had a lot to say about everything except his own personal history. As long as we stayed off the subject of his daughter Charlie and her mother, he was a complete motormouth. He left out a lot of things, but if I didn’t push too hard and just let him keep yakking he produced plenty of information, which I was happy to have.

  “So what’s the story on the lady who lives on the same floor as me?” I said, serving up a perfect cappuccino—which, as it turned out, Len liked a lot.

  “You’ve met Delia Westmoreland!” he noted, admiring the foam on his coffee cup. “How was that for you?”

  “How was it?”

  “Yes, did you find her charming? She can be, if she likes.”

  “But not if she doesn’t like?”

  “I didn’t say that. Where are those cookies?”

  “We finished them, but there are some cheese-twist things here,” I said, finding another little foil bag from a fancy food store. “Is this all you eat, gourmet snack food?”

  “I have a hard time in grocery stores, they confuse me,” he admitted. “Delia Westmoreland. She’s a strong personality, I would say. And she had strong ties to the previous tenants of your apartment.”

  “Y
eah, I noticed.”

  “You noticed? How so?”

  “One of them came by a couple days ago, the Drinan who’s a police detective or something?”

  “Yes, I know who he is,” Len responded drily.

  “Anyway, when he couldn’t get in, he stood out in the hall and yelled, and she came out and talked to him. She’s pretty ooh la la for a lady her age,” I observed.

  “She’s fifty, darling, it’s the new seventeen,” Len informed me. “Although ‘ooh la la’ does cover it. Why did young Mr. Drinan find himself stuck out in the hall yelling in the first place? It was my understanding that neither you nor the Drinans were allowed to change the locks.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Everyone in the building is talking about it, Tina. You’ll have to get used to it, the walls have ears in a co-op. One of you is going to need a court order at this point to change those locks. You didn’t do something foolish, did you?”

  “I didn’t change the locks, if that’s what you mean, I just put in a couple of chains and a spring bolt, so people can’t barge in whenever they want.”

  “Oh,” said Len, startled at this idea. “Oh! That’s clever. Good for you.”

  “He didn’t think I was so clever—he was pretty pissed off.”

  “Well, he’s an open wound. You know that legally you’re not allowed to forbid them access to the apartment until claim to the title is established.”

  “I didn’t say he couldn’t come in, I just don’t want him barging in while I’m sleeping there.”

  “Well, you put yourself in that situation, darling.”

  “My sister put me in it.”

  “Oh yes, I see,” he said, raising his eyebrows.

  “What?”

  “A girl who knows how to put in a spring bolt and two chain guards is hardly a victim, Tina.”

  “I didn’t say I was a victim.”