“I got a couple days’ worth here,” Frank mentioned. “Hang on a second.” His head disappeared below the podium. Vince continued to smile down at me, but didn’t say anything. The effect was insanely flirtatious.
“Hi, I’m Tina. Tina Finn.” I suddenly got it together and held up my hand for him to shake. “I just moved in. Do you live here? I’m in 8A.”
“Oh, the Livingston place, I heard about this. You’re squatting there.”
“I’m not squatting there, no, I, no,” I said, both flustered and defensive. “My mother was, she left the apartment to me and my sisters. It’s our apartment.”
“That’s not what I heard.” Vince shrugged as he accepted a slender pile of mail. “Thanks, Frank.” He stood there, ignoring me now, while he glanced through it.
“Most of it’s for your dad,” Frank offered. Vince looked up with a fast flash of annoyance, and I had an utterly ridiculous moment of feeling glad that he didn’t get any mail, that it was all for his dad.
“Yeah, thanks, Frank, I’ll get it to him,” he said, tossing the junk mail onto the podium, right on top of what Frank was doing, sorting everyone else’s mail. It was so condescending you could tell that he really thought he was better than Frank and didn’t care if Frank knew it. I mean, people do that to me all the time, and I don’t love it, but it doesn’t piss me off as much as watching people be mean to some nice doorman like Frank.
“Here, I’ll take care of that for you, Frank,” I said, and I grabbed the junk mail before he could reach for it. “He’s the doorman, not the garbageman,” I informed Vince as I carried it across the foyer.
“It’s okay, Tina,” said Frank, a little confused and nervous. And why not, I was being unspeakably rude on his behalf.
“Are you up or down, what’s your name—Tina?” Vince said, looking me over again, sort of like he was skinning me alive.
“What?” I said, shocked.
“Up or down?” It sounded like he was talking about sexual positions. He smirked, like he knew I was thinking that. “Are you on your way up, or have you just come down?”
What a creep, I thought and was about to say something completely inappropriate and aggressive when I glanced down at the junk mail I was about to dump into the trash can and caught the name Roger Masterson. One of the names on the list, one of the kings of the co-op board.
I took a breath and dumped the junk mail in the trash. “I’m on my way up,” I said. “Want to share an elevator?”
9
VINCE MASTERSON HATES HIS FATHER. HE LIVES IN HIS FATHER’S apartment, which is quite nice but small compared to, say, my apartment. Vince has a trust fund, which his father set up, so Vince gets a check in the mail for many thousands of dollars—more than fifteen, as it turns out—from his father every month, while he lives in his father’s apartment and hates his father. Vince talks easily and exhaustively about how much he hates his father. It is his favorite subject.
“It’s not even his money, that’s the thing you have to remember.” We were in the big room, downing red wine while Vince took off his gorgeous but slightly uptight jacket, and I gave him a tour of the place. “He inherited it, and it’s not like he inherited a small fortune and then was such a blinding genius at investing that it grew into a significant fortune, that’s not what happened,” he explained, as he launched into his favorite subject. “He just got it handed to him from my grandfather, who had it handed to him, and god, let me tell you, it’s not like either one of them added to it—it just sits in the markets. Someone else, some completely anonymous but clever underling at Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley or Chase Manhattan, moves it around or leaves it where it is, and it grows, even in a shitty market it just keeps growing in these underground vaults, and every so often Dad or Grandpa will go and lop off a wad of this stuff and blow it on something ludicrous, a house in Palm Beach or an estate in East Hampton. So that’s the family business, spending money, even though there is no way to use it up. No one does anything and it just spreads. It’s that kind of money. Because if you did something meaningful with it, you would have to be someone, you know, actually be someone whom people dealt with on a cultural or political or even global level. You’d be a player, even though I hate that word. You’d have to risk everything to have real power, you know what I mean? Honestly, I think that would be the better option—you’d have to risk losing it and then risk being the person who lost the fucking family money, but at least you’d be yourself.”
Vince took a huge gulp of wine and looked out the window over the park, posing like a model in a fashion shoot. It was quite a performance. He sounded like a complete idiot and at the same time a brokenhearted old soul. “And that’s what scares him!” he exclaimed, turning back to me with complete anguish in his eyes. “The man is so terrified of his own existence he can barely speak. You say ‘hello, Dad’ and he looks at you with complete and utter contempt, but it’s not really contempt because it’s terror that’s driving him. Trust me, the contempt is just the cover, and not a very good one at that.”
The heartbreak careened into superiority. “All the sneering and spending and womanizing, it’s positively mundane,” Vince explained, as if I could follow this. “I have not two but three stepmothers, all of them so exactly identical I can’t keep their names straight, and he’s cheated on them all with women who look just like them. A couple of them tried to take him to the cleaners, but the money’s tied up, as you can imagine; the lawyers aren’t letting anyone, much less a trophy wife, walk away with anything meaningful, no matter how big a shit my father is. But what I don’t understand is the endless repetition. Honestly, why trade in one for the other if they’re exactly the same model? And what on earth do they talk about? You can’t fuck all the time—I actually don’t think he fucks them at all, if you want to know the truth. These women are not getting laid, every last one of them has this look of pinched terror hovering around the corners of her bottom lips, although that could be the plastic surgery or the fact that they’re all starving to death. Has anyone ever thought about the irony of all these ridiculously wealthy white women starving themselves to death on the Upper West Side of the richest city in the richest country in the world, because the instant they look healthier than a fucking Holocaust survivor their husbands will divorce them? Although, trust me, I waste no sympathy on any of the brainless twigs who married my father. Christ, the whole thing is so stupid, it’s so fucking stupid I can’t even bear to talk about it. What a fucking waste of time. Is there more wine? You know, this stuff is actually quite good. And just cases of it lying around, that had to be a nice surprise.”
He carried his half-empty glass of wine loosely in his right hand and poured with his left, not even glancing down to make sure he didn’t spill anything. While I found the guy annoying, I couldn’t help noticing that he had a great chest, because at some point the top three buttons on his shirt had sort of magically come undone.
“So what’s under here?” he suddenly asked, kicking at a tuft of the mustard-covered shag.
“I haven’t looked,” I said, staring at his chest. He smirked like a thirteen-year-old, and I turned red. “I mean, we haven’t had a chance to do an inventory or anything like that.”
“I heard you already had the place appraised.”
“Who’d you hear that from?”
“I’m asking the questions, Ms. Finn. Did they give you an estimate?”
“Yes they did, we got three separate estimates. One from Sotheby’s.” I held my glass out, opting suddenly for a stance of deliberate and overt sexuality. It always works. He came to my side and refilled it with sloppy generosity, finishing off the bottle.
“So how much did they tell you you’d get, without even bothering to glance under the rugs?” he asked, coolly appraising the place himself.
“I don’t know you well enough to discuss my personal finances, Vince.”
“We just drank an entire bottle of red wine together in under twenty minutes, Tina.
I think you know me pretty well, or at least you will within the hour.” I couldn’t help it, it was so cocky I had to laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“You’re just a really good flirt,” I tossed at him.
“Thank you,” he said, following me around the room like a dog on a leash. “I appreciate the compliment. Must be this place. Down in the lobby, I could have sworn you didn’t like me.”
“I don’t like you,” I said, smiling up at him. “That doesn’t change the fact that you’re a really good flirt.”
“You’re not so bad yourself,” he said, with a dazzling smile full of smug self-assurance. And why not, he really was beautiful, especially standing in front of a view of Manhattan with his shirt half open. Vince glanced over my head and out to the spectacular expanse of Central Park, visible from all six windows along the big room’s front wall. “Christ, this place really is amazing. It’s got to be seven thousand square feet, and this view! What did Sotheby’s tell you? Come on, I want a number. Everybody in the building is guessing you’ll get at least ten for it—if they let you sell it, that is.”
“Are they going to try and stop us?”
“I’m still the one asking the questions today. Come on, what did they say you’d get?” Wandering across the room, Vince stuck his head into the kitchen and jumped. “Holy shit, what’s this? There’s mold everywhere in here, have you called the super?”
I laughed. He glanced back at me, flushing with annoyance, and you could see that mean streak flare up. Mean, handsome, hypersensitive, rich, arrogant, sexy, and drunk; there was no question where this was going. I followed him across the room, passing him in the doorway of the kitchen, where he hovered like a scared rabbit.
“That guy who lives in the penthouse—Len? The botanist? He had a deal with Bill; he rented the kitchen to him. It’s a mossery.” I leaned on the word to make it sound like I thought he was a bit stupid.
“A what?” He followed me in but stayed behind me, still completely creeped out by all that moss. I flipped the wall switch, and the place started to glow. Len had tucked itty-bitty light fixtures into odd corners amid the moss, so it looked like you were lost in some gnomish netherworld. There were three fountains that propelled tiny streams of water through the various trays of bryophytes. The pump that kept the water running hummed, so the dark, mossy room seemed to vibrate a little and shift in the light. I took a step in and fingered one of the mosses Len had shown me; the tiniest of purple knobs skimmed the surface of that particular tray.
“It’s a mossery,” I repeated. “They used to have them all over the place in the nineteenth century, now people don’t do them much, except for places like botanical gardens. But Len wanted to build one, and he gets too much light up in the penthouse, so he rented one of Bill’s kitchens. Look at the cedar-plank boxes, he built them himself. And some of the moss—like this one—grows on concrete. But mostly he has to create an environment that approximates the floor of a deciduous forest.” Len had told me some of this stuff, but mostly I was making it up. “Here,” I said. I put my hand on Vince’s, lifted it, and moved it onto a particularly dense thicket, pushing his fingers into the softest part of the growth. “Feels weird, doesn’t it?”
Vince looked down at me. “Fantastic,” he said.
No surprise, Vince knew exactly what to do in this situation. He just leaned down and kissed me carefully, right on the mouth. His right arm went around me, he tossed his wineglass onto one of the moss beds without even looking where it landed, and then he had my back up against the wall while his other hand moved easily up under my shirt, pushing it out of the way so that two seconds later, when his half-buttoned shirt was somehow completely undone, my skin was right up against his. I mean, both of us still had our clothes on, but who could tell? His tongue was so far down my throat I was seeing stars. I thought about coming up for air and decided I’d rather faint, if it came to it. Seriously, I knew it was bad news, this guy was so good at making a pass at someone he barely knew, but he was so good I really didn’t care. He kept me pinned against the wall, with both hands on my waist, and then he slid his fingers down into my jeans, and I almost leapt out of my skin. I could feel his erection pressing against me, and he made a little sound in the back of his throat, like he knew he was an animal and he wasn’t going to give me a chance to pretend I wasn’t. I mean, it was one hell of a kiss. Vince made out the way he talked, with so much reckless confidence it didn’t really matter that everything he said was bullshit.
By the time we stopped kissing we were both gasping for air. He set me down, took a step back, and leaned against the opposite wall, knocking over a pile of wooden trays that Len had stacked next to a bag of plant food. The trays went flying. When he reached out to stop them from collapsing into the room, he bumped into something else that bumped into something else that knocked his wineglass off the counter and onto the floor, where it shattered with a loud crack.
“Holy shit, the moss is attacking me,” Vince muttered, shoving the trays back against the wall with his foot. “They seem to be very protective of your honor.”
“Too late for that.” I laughed, sounding way too shaky. Vince looked up from the broken glass and considered me from the darkness on the other side of the room.
“Thanks for showing me the mossery,” he said. “But maybe we should take another look at the bedrooms.”
“You know, now is not such a good time,” I said. “But thanks for stopping by.” I went out of the kitchen and turned toward the front door, which surprised him. After all, there was no hiding the fact that I was dying to leap on him again and let it take me wherever it would. But I thought it would be a bad idea to give him the satisfaction. He had too many character flaws, most of which I already knew. “So maybe I’ll see you around the building,” I said, turning the locks on the door with casual determination.
“I’d like that,” he said at my shoulder.
I turned to smile a good-bye to him, my hand on the spring bolt. But before I could open the door, he grabbed my shoulder, flipped me around, and got his tongue down my throat a second time. I considered resisting for about half a second, but honestly, it is not always easy to consider consequences at moments like that. So much for walking away, I thought, my hands going after the top button of his jeans. He already had mine unzipped when we heard a voice in the hall.
“Tina? Are you in there? Tina?” There was a little rapping on the door, the sound of keys. I stopped.
“Yeah—Lucy—just give me a minute.” This made not the slightest impression on old Vince, who was wrapping his arms around my waist. I very weakly tried to extract myself. “Put your clothes back on, come on,” I whispered, dragging him away from the doorway.
“Tell her to go away,” he murmured in my ear as his fingers continued in their determination to undress me.
“I would, but she doesn’t do what I tell her,” I said, shoving him. The locks were flipping. I was not going to have Lucy find me in a clinch with Vince Masterson with my clothes half off.
“She can’t be your mother, your mother’s dead.” Vince laughed, as I desperately buttoned my jeans.
“She’s worse, she’s my sister,” I told him. He laughed again and leaned against the wall, completely amused by my predicament. Lucy stepped through the doorway. Her eyes swiped over us, then raked the room, finding the empty red wine bottle in the middle of the floor, where Vince had simply dropped it. She looked back at us and didn’t say anything. She didn’t even set her briefcase down. Vince stifled another laugh. I elbowed him.
“Ow, what’d you do that for?” he said, acting like a frat boy. “Hi, I’m Vince Masterson. I live on the fifth floor, Tina was just showing me the apartment. It’s fabulous, congratulations. What did you say your name was?” All his sexual and class confidence merged into one dazzling bit of arrogance as he ignored the utterly disheveled state of his clothes and held out his hand for Lucy to shake. She looked him in the eye before glancing down at his
hand, trying to decide if it was clean enough to touch, because it was not at all clear where his fingers had recently been. I wanted to hit her.
Vince just laughed and brought his hand up, touching her carelessly on the elbow as if that had been what he intended all along. “Terrific meeting you,” he said, smiling. “Tina, you were just showing me out, weren’t you?”
He looked back at me and held out his hand. I obediently reached for it and let him drag me to the front door, which was still standing open. He leaned down and kissed me on the cheek. “I feel like I got caught in the back of the schoolhouse with the parson’s daughter,” he murmured in my ear.
“It was so great to meet you, Vince,” I said loudly.
“Likewise,” he agreed. “Give me a call.”
I shut the door and turned to find Lucy picking up the empty wine bottle. She held it out to me.
“Do you think you could put this in with the recycling? I don’t want this place turning into a dump,” she said.
“It’s one empty wine bottle,” I told her with deliberate indifference.
“It’s trashy,” she informed me. “And we’re not going down that road this time, is that understood? It’s not happening!” And then she shoved me. I think she just meant to poke me in the shoulder for emphasis, but her anger got the better of her and she shoved me. It really hurt.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s your problem?”
“You are my problem. Jesus—I would just, I would just like to fucking kill you!” she hissed. I didn’t particularly enjoy the fact that she had walked in on me making out with a cute guy, but this was a bit out of control.
“Chill out, will you?” I said. “That guy—”
“I don’t want to hear about that guy.”
“He lives in the building.”
“He lives in the building! Terrific! Is that enough of a reason to bring him up here and have sex with him?”
Twelve Rooms with a View Page 12
