Twelve Rooms with a View

by Theresa Rebeck

  “Anything for the cause,” I said. “You need anything else, just let me know.”

  I hung up and stared at the ceiling. I thought about calling her back and telling her everything Vince had said—that we would never win this, the building didn’t want any of us, their goal was to boot both the Drinans and the Finns, the building was going to win, and we needed to come up with a better strategy than having Tina sleep with everybody on the board. But she never listened. Alison didn’t listen much these days either; they both seemed like people I had known slightly a very long time ago. I wondered if that might have been why I had just disappeared finally: because nobody was listening anyway. And then I thought about Mom, and what she would say, and what she would want me to do, and I wished I had called her just once from out there at the Delaware Water Gap. Then maybe I would have been the one she called when she needed to talk to someone about doing the right thing, keeping that beautiful apartment for the people who had actually lived there. But I didn’t call her; I just never did. I was too busy running away.

  Finally there wasn’t anything else for it. I went to the Ninety-first Precinct and marched up to the front desk. “I need to talk to Detective Drinan,” I told the desk sergeant. He barely glanced up at me; he was busy opening mail with a plain silver letter opener that looked like a really boring dagger. He took his time, sliding the pointy end into the top of the envelope and moving it carefully all the way across. I don’t know why people think mail is more important than people, but they certainly do. In any case, this desk sergeant finished opening his manila envelope, considered the first three pages of the contents, paper-clipped the docs to the outside of the envelope, and set the whole event down on the other side of his desk. Then he deigned to talk to me.

  “He expecting you?” he asked, picking up a phone on his desk carelessly, like he might make a phone call in the middle of our conversation, that’s how unimportant I was.

  “I don’t think he’s expecting me,” I said. “But you know, he might be. Actually, he actually might be.” My fascinating conjectures held no interest for the desk sergeant, who just nodded and hit a few buttons as he shouldered the receiver.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Tina Finn.”

  “Yeah,” he suddenly said into the receiver, bored as hell, “somebody named Tina Finn is here for Pete.” He paused. “Uh huh.” Another pause. “Uh huh.” Pause. “Yeah, okay.” He hung up the phone and reached into the bag of chips that was sitting alongside the pile of mail. He put a potato chip in his mouth and crunched it a few times, then he picked up his letter opener and started slitting the end of another manila envelope.

  “So, should I wait here for him?” I asked. The desk sergeant didn’t even look up.

  “He’s not here,” he said.

  “He’s not,” I said.

  “He have your number?”

  “No, actually, he doesn’t.”

  “You can leave it if you want,” he said, pulling out some more docs and glancing through them.

  “What kind of police station is this?” I said, a little loud. He looked up, raised his eyebrows at me. I swear, I never did know how to talk to the cops. “I could be a witness for a murder or something, and you can barely talk to me!”

  “Are you?” he said.

  “No. I am not.” And then I held up the brown paper bag I had brought and dropped it into the middle of his mail call. “This is for Detective Drinan. This is important. It is important evidence for a case that he thinks is really important, and you need to give it to him as soon as he gets back.”

  “You can wait for him if you want,” he said, completely unmoved by my theatrics.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not going to wait. He knows where to find me.”

  Which he most certainly did. Seven hours later he was at my front door. In his left hand he held a child’s green hand-knit sweater with a broken cable on one arm, evidence from a previous life, which I had left in the brown paper bag at the front desk of his precinct. “So,” he said, “you have my attention.”

  I already had that, I thought. What I said was, “Come on in.”

  I had spent the afternoon unloading what I could from that room and piling it all over the television area. There was stuff everywhere: clothes and shoes and dishes and books and photos and art projects and knitting.

  “Holy shit,” he said when I walked him back there.

  “Yeah, it’s a lot of stuff,” I agreed.

  “Where’d you find all this, that room in the back he used as a storage space?”

  “I—”

  “You took all this out of the boxes? Why’d you do that?”

  “I thought you might want to see it,” I said, feeling stupider and stupider. I looked over at him as he looked at all the stuff. There was a thin streak of color across the top of his cheeks, but otherwise nothing. He looked like he was viewing a corpse. “I really did, I thought, this is your stuff, this is your—here, I left a space for you on the couch. I thought maybe you’d want to look at the pictures. There are like four boxes of pictures.” He stared at me, then walked over to the space on the couch I had cleared for him. I had stacked the albums neatly on the coffee table next to the boxes of loose photos and negatives. He stood there for a moment, considering the arrangement, then he reached down and flipped open the top album. Still without sitting, he turned the first page, and then the second, sort of casually, like he was only half interested. He looked up, and his eyes flicked over the room again, taking in the piles of stuff, the dusty collected bits and pieces of his childhood, and then he wavered on his feet for a minute, like he was going to fall over maybe.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. “I’m sorry. I just thought you would want to see these things, I really, I …”

  “Yeah,” he said, holding up his hand to stop me from talking. “I know. I’m just going to need a minute.” And then he turned and walked back down the hallway.

  I felt like an idiot. I sat down in the middle of all the crap and wondered what to do. I wasn’t even sure he was still in the apartment; that stupid place is so big you can’t tell half the time if anyone is in there with you; it’s like a mausoleum, just a big empty monument to people who came and went. When he didn’t come back after ten minutes, I went looking for him. And there he was, in my room that used to be his room, sitting on the little bed on the floor and looking at the sunset painted on the wall.

  “I used to dream about it,” he said, not even acknowledging me, more like he was saying something out loud to himself just when I happened to show up. “In all those upside-down ways you dream about things. It would come to life sometimes and try to drown me. She thought it was so cool when she did it. Far as I was concerned, it was like a nightmare painted on the wall.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  “Come on. She loved it,” he said. “And it’s really not very good, is it? I mean, really. It’s just crap.”

  “I like it,” I said, stepping inside the doorway and considering the sunset. He laughed a little, like he thought I was stupid but he appreciated my attempt to say something nice about his mother’s dreadful painting. “I do,” I insisted. “I’m not kidding, I really do.”

  “Well, you’re wrong. Because it’s shit.”

  “Are those real constellations?” I asked, pointing up at the star stickers on the ceiling.

  “No,” he said. “We tried. She was all, let’s put up the ones no one knows, Taurus and Perseus and the Archer, only she was so bent on being original it ended up not looking like anything. It doesn’t really mean anything.”

  “But her stuff. I thought you might want her stuff.”

  “All that shit in the other room?” he said. “Really. You think I might want that.”

  “Yeah, well, you know what? It’s not all shit,” I told him. I went to the closet, picked up that crumpled brown shopping bag, pulled out the pearls, and handed them to him. He turned them over in his hand, considered the clasp
, and looked back up at me, raising an eyebrow like he was waiting for me to explain this again. “Those are real pearls, they’re worth a fortune. I’m not kidding. There’s a lot of stuff out there, who knows how much it’s worth. There’s an alligator purse, someone told me you could sell it for five thousand dollars. And some of her old dresses, they’re probably worth … Sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s fine,” he said. “People need money. I assumed you needed money.” He continued watching me with those impartial eyes. I wished he would laugh again, but I figured that would be an uncommon event.

  “Look,” I said finally. “You should go look through that stuff. Even if you don’t want it because of whatever your reasons are, even if it all seems like—nothing to you—you should go through it. It’s yours.”

  “Our lawyers have been telling us for months that it’s not ours. According to them, any way you look at it, it’s all yours.” He held up the pearls to hand them back to me; they hovered there between us for a moment. He wasn’t kidding. I took the pearls, and then I took a breath.

  “My mother. Called my sister,” I told him. “Before she died.”

  “So?”

  I sat down next to him on the bed. The pearls were lovely to hold, cool and round and heavy. They seemed somehow confident in my sweaty hands, like they knew I could get through this.

  “She knew that she was, that maybe she was dying,” I said. “Anyway, that’s what I think. I don’t know for sure, because I didn’t talk to her. She didn’t call me; I was out there in hell at the Delaware Water Gap, no one knew how to get hold of me.”

  “But she called your sister,” he asked, like a detective reminding a witness to keep the story moving forward.

  “She called Alison. She said something like the will wasn’t right.”

  “No. It was right. He told us we weren’t getting anything. The will was right.”

  “Yeah, but wait. Mom told Alison that she wanted to make a new will for herself, so that you and your brother would get it. If anything happened to her. She was going to make a will.”

  “Did she call a lawyer?”

  “I don’t know. I talked to that Mr. Long just last week. He didn’t say anything.”

  “He didn’t say anything in his deposition either. I saw it.”

  “Yeah, but she told Alison—”

  “It’s hearsay, Tina,” he explained. “It won’t hold up in court.”

  “You don’t know that. You’re not a lawyer.”

  “I’m a police detective; I think I know a few things about how the law works. Hearsay is inadmissible. Even if Alison would admit it.”

  “She admitted it to me.”

  “She won’t admit it in court, and they wouldn’t enter it as evidence even if she did. And then it would only complicate a legal situation that already has way too many complications. I wouldn’t bring it up, if I were you. When did Alison tell you this?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “So she knows how to keep a secret. Good for her. Tell her to keep her mouth shut in the future about your dying mother’s phone call.”

  “Look,” I said. “We have to start getting a clue. The co-op board wants both of our families out of here. They’re trying to steal it out from under all of us. If we got together on this we could at least—”

  “Keep it in the family?” he asked, with a sardonic roll of the eyes.

  “I know you have every reason to be mad at me, but I’m honestly trying to do the right thing,” I informed him. “Don’t you want this? Don’t you want the apartment?”

  He looked over at the painting, and his eyes creased with the worry and sadness of the past. You could see that he didn’t want to think about any of it, but that he wasn’t a coward when called upon to do so.

  “A lot of shit went down here,” he said. “So no, I’m not sure that I do want it. And you know, I lived here for a long time, and then I didn’t live here for a long time. So I’m not so sure I need it.”

  “Whether you need it or not, it’s worth a lot of money!” I insisted. I was tired of his version of the facts. He kept skipping the one fact that had been twisting through everything that had happened since the day my mother died: the money. “Even if you don’t want the stuff, this place is worth a total fortune. It’s worth millions. You could sell it. If you didn’t want it.”

  “Would you sell it?”

  “Me?” I said. “It’s not mine to sell.”

  “So, if you could, you’d just live here forever?”

  I thought about this. I had never even let myself think it, because I knew from the start it couldn’t happen. But if it could? “I like this place,” I admitted. “It’s beautiful. Things happen here. It’s kind of weird, with all the hallways and rooms and hardly any furniture. I really like living here.”

  “People don’t live here, they die here,” he reminded me.

  “People die everywhere. And this apartment is considerably better than the other places I’ve found.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen your record,” he said. “It’s pretty interesting.”

  “I like living here,” I said again, looking around the room, which was quite cozy now with the collection of little pieces I had pulled together to make a home for myself. “I’ll be sorry to go.”

  “You don’t need to be in such a hurry,” he said. “It’s going to take years to get this through the legal system.”

  “No, I’m being kicked out. The co-op board is kicking me out. It’s part of their big plan to get the apartment.”

  “How is kicking you out going to accomplish that?”

  “I don’t know, I’m getting all my information thirdhand. Presumably they have more shenanigans up their sleeves.”

  “Who’s behind this?”

  “I don’t know. They keep saying ‘the building,’ like it has a mind of its own.”

  “Yeah, they used to do that to us too,” he remembered. “They’d get all bent out of shape about something or other, send notes to my dad signed ‘The Building.’ It really pissed him off. My mother screaming all the time, seriously bloodcurdling shit, horrible, and loud, and then we’d get these messages from The Building about appropriate noise levels. I think they threatened to kick us out a couple times—and her family built the place. Assholes. It was always presented in such a creepy way, too. Like, that woman who married beneath her is a little loud when she has her psychotic breaks, but the real problem is those Irish guys who are being rude. They’re a bunch of ‘feckin’ bigots’—that was Dad’s phrase.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “You mean he was really Irish? Like, Irish Irish?”

  “He grew up in Galway. But he was legal, at least after he married her. That was another one they kept tossing around: he married her for the green card. Somebody, or maybe it was ‘The Building,’ tried to argue that he wasn’t allowed to inherit when she died. Our lawyers dug into it, because if he couldn’t inherit it, then he couldn’t leave it to your mother, and that meant it would come to us straight from her. But there’s no legal standing for that one. They may go there anyway, who knows.” He looked around the little room, thinking about all this, then he grinned as a thought occurred to him.

  “That why you’re trying to give it away?” he asked. “To stick it to all of them? If you can’t have it, why not me?” This idea pleased him.

  “I wasn’t trying to stick it to anyone. I’m trying to do the right thing.”

  “The right thing.” He laughed. “You’re a criminal.”

  “Oh, please,” I said. “I’m such a dumb criminal. I am the lamest of criminals.”

  “You have your points,” he said. Then he leaned back, considered the stars above, and stretched his arms over his head, happy. He really was one of those guys, the truth made him happy. I had never seen him so relaxed. “I like criminals,” he admitted. “I mean, some of them are jackasses, and some are truly bad people who should not be on the street. The rest of them—they’re people who want things.
I respect that. I mean, they go too far, they don’t understand rules, but they want life. I get it.”

  There wasn’t any point in waiting for more of an invitation. Sitting next to him on that little bed, I felt the same as I had the moment I first saw him, like I could just leap on that guy at any second. So that is what I did. Or at least, I reached over, took his face in my hands, and kissed him.

  “Well, hello, Tina,” he said when I let him come up for air.

  “I was getting tired of waiting for you to kiss me,” I said. And then I kissed him some more. For about fifteen minutes we made out like teenagers on his bed that was also my bed, which is when he stopped for a moment, pushed my hair out of my face, and considered me.

  “I’m not sure I want to do this here,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah?” I said. “When will you know? Because like I said, they’re kicking me out any minute now.”

  And because neither one of us was all that interested in living in the past, we went ahead and did it, and didn’t let the death all around us take the day.

  29

  WE SPENT THE WEEKEND IN THE APARTMENT, GOING OUT ONLY once to buy more scallops, which I cooked, and we got drunk on red wine and picked through Sophie’s treasures. We lay together in the dark and told stories about our dead mothers, what we knew of them, what we didn’t know, how they failed us, how we failed them.

  Reality eventually reasserted itself; on Monday morning Pete took a shower in the bathroom with the good water pressure and then put his clothes back on so he could go off to his precinct. As he disentangled himself from me at the front door, he stuck his hand in his pocket, looking for his car keys, and his fingers curled around something he found there. “Oh, yeah, I thought you might want this,” he said, and he handed me a little black perfume bottle.

  “So,” I said, “you knew all along that it was mine.”

  “I did know that,” he admitted. “That’s why I wanted it.”

  I looked at it. It was cool in my hand, like a big pebble, but black, unknowable. The word that had once scrolled across the opaque glass was long gone. I opened the bottle, smelled it for a moment, shook out a drop of the precious oil, and touched the back of his neck with it.