“She was cleaning house for him?”
“You didn’t know that?”
Why was the news that my mother had been cleaning houses the worst news I could get, when in fact it was exactly what I had been doing? I had let her go so far away for so long that I thought the guilt of such distance had burned itself out. But she had still lived in the world, and she found herself cleaning houses. And this sad-eyed detective had seen her with buckets and rags, on her hands and knees, and I had not.
He wasn’t volunteering any more information. I hated the way I had to pry facts out of this bonehead. “Did you see her often?” I asked.
“Just a couple times.”
“How did she look?”
“I didn’t pay much attention until he married her.”
“Were you at the wedding?”
“No, I was not invited. My brother and I were not consulted about the marriage, we were told about it after the fact.”
“So what happened then?”
“You know as much as I do about that part.”
“I don’t know as much as you; I don’t know anything, I think that’s pretty obvious. Which is why I’m asking. I only saw her the one time, which you already know about from Mrs. What’s-Her-Name who I wasn’t spying on, she was spying on them, and we weren’t allowed, your dad—we didn’t—oh fuck it.” I moved almost instantaneously through losing my cool to picking up a phony version of it as it occurred to me that I had to keep my mouth closed about how Bill was shutting us out of their life. Lucy had warned me not to let the Drinans know that Bill didn’t want us around, that it would hurt our chances of getting the apartment. I remembered the rules and managed to stop myself from giving up any more information. But I still wanted to know what he knew. “Did they, did they have a wedding dinner?” I asked.
“No,” he said, laughing a little at the very idea.
“Well, when did he tell you? That they got married?”
“A couple days later.”
“Did you see them?”
“Yeah, we did. We were over at the apartment, and we saw them and they told us.”
“And they were happy?”
“You know, it’s hard to tell about people and happiness, Tina. That’s one thing you learn in police school.” He looked down, and I could see that he had pulled a small wad of neatly folded bills out of his pocket and was rifling through them swiftly, counting to himself like a little kid.
“What does that mean?” I asked, trying not to get mad. He wasn’t objecting to my asking questions, so I didn’t want to piss him off with my famously bad attitude, but my nerves were running on fumes by this point. “I mean, did you see them, what did they—wow. Okay, okay,” I stumbled. “When was the last time you saw them?”
He looked up from his counting, caught by the question, like he couldn’t immediately remember the answer. “A long time,” he admitted with some shade of sorrow or reluctance. “I don’t know. A couple years maybe.”
“A couple years, like two years?” I asked.
“Yeah, like two years.”
“Like when they got married, that’s when you stopped seeing him?”
“Yes, that’s when I stopped seeing him.”
“So he married my mom, and he told you, and you guys had a fight and that was the end of it for you, like how could he have married my mom, and so then you just—stopped even talking to him. Was it that horrible for you and your brother? You just cut yourself off from him because he married her? Is that what happened?”
“Something like that.”
He looked down, still trying to count those bills, a task that was mysteriously beyond his ability all of a sudden. “Look, she was cleaning his house,” he said, and he sounded truly pained that he was the one who had to tell me this. “And then he married her? What were we supposed to think?”
“Just whatever you thought, I guess. How do I know?”
“Exactly.”
“Look,” I said. “She was a really nice person.” Somehow I thought this would make a difference. It didn’t. Detective Bonehead raised an eyebrow as if he was pondering my loyal burst of sentimentality. Then he went back to asking questions.
“So how come you abandoned her?” he said.
“I didn’t,” I said. “I didn’t. I didn’t.”
My assertion that my mother was a nice person did not get through to this guy, but the idiotic desperation behind those three denials apparently did. He shrugged. There was a mournful pause as we both considered how pathetic I sounded. “Well,” he said, with a truly hopeless edge to his voice, “I didn’t abandon them either.”
“No, I get it,” I said. “I do. Here, let me count out the money, you’re like retarded all of a sudden.” Before he could argue, I reached over and took the ones out of his hand and started counting. “How much is it?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted, looking around helplessly. We had been abandoned by the waitress.
“We just had a burger and a Coke and pie and some coffee, it can’t be that hard to figure out,” I noted, counting out about twelve bucks. Somehow everything had shifted, and now we were just two people talking about our fucked-up families. And it was late.
Drinan sucked in his breath and then blew it out slowly, as if someone had taught him that in the one yoga class some hippie girlfriend had gotten him to take before he became a cop. But he still remembered the breathing, so he did it as he sat in that booth, like that one good yoga breath was going to put him back in control of his whole messy life. His face looked like four in the morning. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“Oh, wait, hang on,” I said, remembering my situation. My heart started pounding way too hard. “Jesus, wait, hang on.” Reality was setting in; I wasn’t going to be spending the next three days sitting in a booth in a shitty diner; I was going to jail. I suddenly felt as old and tired as he looked.
“Relax, Tina,” said Detective Bonehead. He stood and dusted the crumbs of salt off his jacket. “I’ll take you home.”
So we went back to the precinct and picked up my stuff, and then he drove me back to the Edge in his old blue Buick. I sat in his car for a long minute, trying to figure out what to say.
“Are you going to get out of the car?” he said finally.
“Yeah, I’m getting out. Sorry. Yes, sorry, I’m just trying to figure out what this all means. Does this mean I can stay in the apartment?”
“It means you can stay tonight.”
“What about after tonight?”
“After tonight is tomorrow.”
“And after that?”
“You know what, Tina?” He tilted his head quickly left and right, like he was working a bad kink out of his neck. “I’m not going to try and tell you what happens the day after tomorrow. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. If you think you do, you’re wrong.”
I was looking down the street past a couple of drunks staggering up the sidewalk toward us. The sky was starting to turn that strange dark purple that meant the night was on its last legs. “Well,” I said. “The sun’s coming up, I know that much.”
“That’s just an educated guess,” Drinan said. “Listen. If anyone tries to arrest you again? You might want to mention that you got roughed up the first time. That sergeant at the desk, his name is Bohrman. Randy Bohrman. You think you can remember that?”
“I think so,” I said.
“They’re not going to bother you. That’s just in case.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I’ll see you in court.” He was gripping the steering wheel, but he didn’t seem angry; it was more like he was trying to stay awake.
“Look,” I said. “You want to come up?”
He tilted his head away, like that kink in his neck was not going to let him alone. Then he glanced back at me with a weary, coplike regret. “That won’t be necessary,” he said. I turned red yet again.
“I didn’t mean that,” I said. “I just meant, since you haven’t
seen it. In so long. Just that one time. And you were drunk that night, and I thought … Do you want to come see it? Just see it. Oh, whatever. Whatever!” I think I yelled it as I started to get out of his stupid loser car. “That is just classic, and you know what? I’m too tired to even be embarrassed by you thinking I’m trying to come on to you right now. Like I’m so tired I’m not even awake enough to think, ‘What did he say? This moron thinks I want to sleep with him even though he tried to have me arrested? He thinks I want to have sex twenty minutes after eating a pound of hamburger and six dozen French fries?’ Men are such geniuses. I’m so tired I can’t even articulate any sarcastic bullshit for you, Detective. So when you want to see the apartment you grew up in—when you want to see your old room and what’s left of your mom’s crazy paint job—you’ll let me know.”
I was almost up to the door of the building when he yelled after me. “What did you say?”
“Oh, man,” I said. “I’m not kidding. I’m done. I’m going to bed.”
“About my mom’s paint job.”
“What about it?”
“How’d you know it’s my mom’s?”
I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t even remember what I said about his mom, and I had said it like seconds ago. “Come on, man. It’s four in the morning.”
“Yeah yeah yeah, okay.” He looked down at his hands on the steering wheel, and he sat there for a second like he wanted to ask me about something else. Before he could ask, I went inside. I went into the apartment and lay down and didn’t get up until Lucy appeared and told me to get out of bed.
13
IT TOOK ME A SECOND TO CATCH UP. SHE WAS WATCHING ME FROM the doorway, impatient, while I groggily fumbled around with the covers. My little adopted bedroom had two windows overlooking an exhaust shaft, so there was not much light even when the old pull-down shades were up, which they were not at this time. So it truly was dark.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“It’s three-thirty in the afternoon. What is the matter with you?” Lucy asserted, stalking in on her low sensible heels and yanking the shades up. “Are you hungover?”
“No, I’m not hungover.”
“Right,” she replied, all pissy as usual.
“I don’t have a hangover, Lucy,” I said. “I was arrested yesterday afternoon, and I spent the night in lockup, thank you very much, because someone forgot to inform me that there is a fucking injunction on this place.”
That did get her attention, although she was completely unapologetic. “You were arrested?” she asked, with more than a shred of disbelief.
“Don’t give me that,” I said, disgusted. “You knew all about it. And don’t even bother lying to me about it—”
“I am not—”
“You forgot to inform me. You and that lawyer, although my bet is he told you and you told him that you would tell me, but then you didn’t even bother to tell me.”
“I am not sure what you’re accusing me of here, Tina. But if you were arrested—”
“What do you mean, ‘if’? Do you think I’d make up something like that?”
“I don’t know what you’d do.”
“Why would I make that up?”
“Well, why would I want you to be arrested? Isn’t that what you’re accusing me of, trying to have you arrested for some unknown reason?”
“Oh forget it,” I said.
“You know, Tina, you’re increasingly unstable,” she noted, starting to dial her CrackBerry.
“I’m, excuse me, I’m what? What am I?”
“All these crazy accusations. If you had been arrested, I would know about it, wouldn’t I? If you were arrested, you would have had to call me—hi, it’s Lucy Finn, could I speak to Ira? Thanks,” she cooed into the phone.
“I’m not making this up!”
“Or Alison. Or anybody, you would have had to call somebody, and they would have had to call me. Which to my knowledge did not happen.”
“I’m going to go take a shower.”
“Hi!” she chirped. “I’m over here at the apartment, and Tina has just told me an interesting story.”
Right across the hall was a bathroom—the one with the silver-spotted wallpaper—but it needed a good cleaning, and several tiles had come up around one of the corners, so it was frankly too depressing to take a shower in. There was also a pretty capable blue bathroom right behind the kitchen off the great room, but Len had all sorts of apparatus set up in there. And just to the right of the TV room and the bedroom, there was a quite tidy peach-colored bathroom, but it had one of those shower chairs in it for people who are too old and decrepit to stand up, which was simply too depressing to contemplate. But if you walked down the hall off the TV room, past the laundry room, and around a corner, there was a fourth bathroom, which was painted periwinkle, and had a lot of sixties-looking groovy flower stickers stuck to the ceiling and all over the cheap plastic door of the shower stall. So although it was a little inconvenient to walk a quarter mile to take a shower, it was a nice bathroom and worth the effort. I left my nightmare of a sister to her devilish shenanigans and hiked off to take a shower to clear my head.
By the time I got back, Lucy was done with her phone calls and having a cup of tea. She glanced up at me, set the cup down, and stood. Then she smiled, like we were good friends who had had some sort of minor misunderstanding. “I talked to Ira,” she informed me.
“Good for you.”
“He told me that they do in fact have a record of you being taken down to the Forty-ninth Precinct.”
“Did you think I was lying?”
“Well, Tina—it didn’t make sense. And by the way, you weren’t actually arrested. They just had you in for questioning, at least that’s what they have on record.”
“They have anything on record about an injunction?”
“Well, that’s the interesting part,” she said, still smiling. “There was in fact an injunction. Ira accepted service, and he did tell me about it, but he assured me that he didn’t think it would stick.”
“And then you just forgot to tell me.”
“I didn’t forget, for heaven’s sake, no one thought they would arrest you.”
“So you deliberately didn’t tell me?”
“This is not my fault, Tina. I am not the one who had you arrested,” Lucy claimed, staying right on point. “And if you would just calm down long enough to listen, it might interest you to know that the injunction is gone. Obviously it would never have held up to a court challenge, which Ira was going to file this week.”
“They just dropped it? When?”
“Just this afternoon apparently. So no worries about that, okay, Tina? Although honestly, if the police come by, you will call me, right? Even though they just took you in for questioning, that is completely unacceptable, and you should never ever talk to the police without a lawyer present. Ira got really upset when he heard that you let them take you down there and no one called him.”
“I don’t even know him,” I said.
“But you should have called me, and I would have called him. Listen, tell me you understand this. If you’re being harassed, it’s important that you let us know.”
“Why, because you’re so worried about my safety? Is that why you didn’t even warn me?”
“I’m not going to get into some long argument about this, Tina, especially when everything came out all right. I already said I’m glad it was nothing worse. I don’t know what more you want out of me, but then I never do.” She sighed, looked at her CrackBerry, and started doing that little thing with her thumbs.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
“What?”
“You never just show up. You always have a reason,” I said. “So what’s your reason today?”
“A friend of mine is coming over.”
“What friend?”
“His name is Dave, he works on the city page of the Times, he’s going to come take a look at the apartment. He might be inte
rested in writing about it.”
“No. Come on,” I said, suddenly overwhelmed. “No.”
“What do you mean, no?” she said, looking up at me sharply.
“I mean no. No reporters in here. No.” I thought about Len talking about privacy, and Pete Drinan not even setting foot in his home for years and years, and that tenderhearted paint job in the kid’s bedroom, and I just couldn’t bear the thought of some fucking reporter wandering around my apartment. “No,” I repeated.
“You know, I don’t actually need your permission, Tina,” Lucy observed, with that nasty edge she could not keep out of her voice. “You can stop acting like you own the place, when you’re just staying here for all of us.”
“I can’t believe you,” I said, trying seriously not to lose it. “I spent the night in jail because you—you—”
“I’m only taking care of my interests and yours. And as to spending a night in jail, it’s not the first time, so I don’t know what you’re making such a big deal about.” She stood up, turned away, and went to the little kitchenette, where she started wiping down the counters deliberately, like I had not done a good enough job.
“Fuck you,” I said, sounding like a peevish teenager. “Fuck you. Call me when he’s gone.”
“He might want to talk to you,” she said, all deliberate and chilly and mean, like some nasty old high school nun. “About being hauled into the police station. We’re in the middle of a real estate war! And they had you arrested? You should tell him about it, it might help sell the story.”
“Go to hell, Lucy.” As I left I slammed the door behind me, good and loud. I am sure Mrs. Westmoreland heard it and took notes.
Wandering the Upper West Side of Manhattan can be entertaining when your life is less screwed up, but when you’re in a bad mood, both about having been arrested and having a sister who consistently behaves like a jerk, it is not all that much fun. I walked up and down Amsterdam for a while, then cut over to the park and wandered around, hoping that a little urban nature would make me feel better. It was a lonely and pathetic endeavor, but after an hour it started to have a little bit of a positive effect. That section of Central Park was in fact particularly utopian; old ladies and their dogs wandered along charming, curling pathways where young boys and girls on Rollerblades flew by, calling to each other with hopeful, nonsensical glee. College kids lay on the grass and laughed at each other while inching ever closer to having sex. I passed a mossy lake and a giant statue of an angel coming down to earth. An Arab guy at a little Plexiglas stand under a green-and-white umbrella was selling falafel sandwiches and cans of soda. Life was coming back into focus, and the exhausting, endless night finally seemed over.
Twelve Rooms with a View Page 17
