Twelve Rooms with a View

by Theresa Rebeck

  “Oh, great,” he said. “Now I’ll hear about that all day.”

  “I want you to,” I told him.

  After he was gone, I went back to bed. I woke up to the sound of that throwaway cell ringing away.

  “It’s been four days. Have you heard from Vince?” Lucy started.

  “Not since we had dinner, no.”

  “Have you called him?”

  “No”

  “Tina, you have to follow up! And push a little! Have you met his father yet?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, that needs to happen. You can make sure he understands our position and supports it, and then, if he does, maybe we can enlist him to speak to other board members on our behalf. Call Vince right now and let me know what he says.” Then she hung up. Twenty minutes later Alison called.

  “Hi, how are you!” she chirped.

  “You know, I’m pretty good, Alison,” I started. “I had a terrific weekend and I learned quite a bit about this place.”

  “About the co-op board?” she asked. “Lucy said you were calling Vince, have you talked to him?”

  “No, I haven’t really called him yet.”

  “Well, then, what good was it?” she started, almost crying with frustration. “It is so important to just work with the building! It’s what Mom would have wanted, I know it.”

  “Mom told you specifically that it wasn’t what she wanted,” I reminded her.

  “She wouldn’t want them to have it!”

  “No,” I agreed. “That’s not who she wanted to have it.”

  “So you’re going to call him, right?”

  “Who?” I asked, getting confused again.

  “Vince,” she said, almost crying again. “For heaven’s sake, Tina! This is no joke!”

  They called four more times that day and then twice on Tuesday. I stopped answering the phone. I realized that any minute they would be coming over to harass me in person, so I needed to pack Sophie’s stuff back into those boxes and haul it all back to the storage room. That took most of the day, and by the time I was finished, I was exhausted. I took a moment to sit in that lost room and think about what to do next. The boxes were in place. The light was evaporating. And then the ghost started up, mournful and frightened and inevitable. She murmured inside the wall, gently complaining about her traps and her losses and the impossibility of her life. She wept and worried in her unknown language, right there with me and unbearably far away. I let her go on, thinking that maybe she would be able to explain something to me, even though I didn’t understand a word she said. She couldn’t explain anything at all.

  “What are you doing in there?” I asked. “Why are you so stuck?”

  “I’m not stuck,” said a friendly voice. “It just takes a minute to get out of here. It’s pretty tight.” And with that, the ghost voice disappeared and Jennifer clambered into the room, dusting herself off with teenage disgust. “Ugh, it’s so gross in there. There are live things in there. We have to figure out a better way to talk to each other.”

  “You could call me on the phone,” I reminded her.

  “It’s too dangerous,” she said, quite serious. “Someone might hear me. There’s no privacy in our apartment. You wouldn’t believe the stuff I heard today. They’re going to try to kick you out.”

  “I know that part.”

  “You do? Because it’s supposed to be top secret.”

  “Vince Masterson told me they were going to try it last week, but his dad couldn’t be at the meeting.”

  “Well, he’s going to be there tonight,” Jennifer informed me grimly.

  “Tonight?” I said, startled. “It’s tonight?”

  “They’re meeting at six. Oh. That’s ten minutes ago.”

  “Thanks for the notice,” I told her, not sounding particularly grateful. “And thank you, Vince,” I muttered to myself.

  “So where are they meeting?” I asked her.

  “The Gideons’ apartment on eleven,” she told me.

  I looked up at that horrible bricked-up staircase, inhabited by rats and spiders and god knows what else. My hands started to sweat.

  “This thing goes all the way up through the building, right?” I asked.

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  “Look,” I said, “if I don’t come back in six hours, tell somebody I might be stuck in the wall. Tell Frank.”

  “You’re going up there?”

  She sounded aghast. And why not? It was an idiotic idea. No one in their right mind would even consider it.

  “I think I am,” I said. And with that I climbed up onto the edge of the tiny doorway, put my fingers on one of the steps, crouched forward, and started to climb. “You need a flashlight!” Jennifer called after me. “It’s dark in there! What if the Gideons blocked off the entrance? What are you going to do when you get there? What if someone …” Her voice trailed off as it became obvious that I was going through with it.

  There are advantages to being someone who thinks rules are made to be broken. Finding yourself stuck in an airless, dank, Victorian crawl space that might very well lead nowhere is not one of them. Even though Jennifer had opened the wall plug in Katherine’s room, only a faint amount of light came in, and once I climbed beyond its friendly solace—the last moment that I might have bailed out of this insane endeavor—it was pitch black. I had to lead with my hands, which more than once landed on something crunchy and alive, and then my face went through some weblike, sticky stuff filled with little nublike things that were probably dead bugs. At some point I realized that I didn’t know how far I’d have to climb to get to the Gideons’ apartment and that I might have passed it already. I didn’t know if I should go back down or continue up. Then, when I reached over to steady myself against the wall, I grabbed at something that moved and actually hissed; terrified, I jumped back and hit the wall, which had somehow transformed itself from brick to wood. It made a big thump.

  “What was that?” someone asked. I froze.

  “Did you hear something?” the voice asked again.

  “Margarita thinks there are rats in that old crawl space,” another voice announced. It was Mrs. Gideon, and you could tell even without seeing her that she thought Margarita was a moron. “I’ll mention it to Frank.”

  “Frank’s the doorman, Mother,” the other voice, the beautiful Julianna, replied.

  “You really are sentimental about him,” her mother replied with a little sneer.

  “I’m not sentimental, I’m respectful.”

  “You encourage him, and it’s ridiculous.”

  “We are not talking about Frank, Mother, please! I think I heard something, I know I did. It sounded like a rat or something in that crawl space. I think Margarita is right, there’s something in there. You need to mention it to the super—or why don’t you tell the board, since they’re all here anyway.”

  “We are not gathered to talk about rats. Or perhaps we are,” Mrs. Gideon observed. Then Julianna said something I couldn’t quite pick up, as she clearly had moved away from the wall and the giant rats inside it. There was some further murmuring and then silence, as the two women apparently went into the next room or someplace beyond.

  Here is where the true stupidity of my plan revealed itself. I had succeeded in landing right in the middle of the Gideons’ apartment without anybody knowing I was there, but I had no way to get out of that wall. I hung in there, my heart pounding, my head leaning against some sort of old cabinet, and let my fingers probe the wood. I found a giant bolt, but there was no way to open it. My fingers continued to probe it, and I told myself that if I were anything like a functional thief I would have brought picks for the lock. But then I thought, it’s a deadbolt, you can’t open it from this side, you’d have to saw through the wall to get that thing off—or an axe, a short-handled axe, or a gun, maybe a gun would do it. I ran through all the possible solutions for opening a deadbolt, none of which were feasible in any kind of reality other than the mo
vies. I was stuck in the wall; there was no way to get out.

  Then a voice whispered, right next to my head, “Tina? Are you in there?”

  It took me a second, honestly. I couldn’t quite catch up.

  “Tina. Tina. If you’re in there, knock or something. I don’t have a ton of time.”

  “Jennifer?” I said.

  “Knock where you are, knock where you are, I can’t tell, and we have to do this fast,” she told me. I rapped gently on the wall several times.

  “Okay, that’s good, that’s good,” she said, rapping on the panel right in front of me. “Is this it? This is the doorway?”

  “There’s a bolt,” I told her. “Right in front of you, they’ve got a deadbolt holding it shut.”

  “Yeah, I see,” she said, working on it. “It’s painted shut. Shoot. It’s—oh. Hang on. I have to find something—oh wait. Not so bad, the paint’s pretty old. Oh!” And with that, the door swung open three inches and she smiled in at me. “Come on, come on,” she said, excited, pulling the door open against the resistance of the paint, which was half of what was holding it in place. She reached in and grabbed me by the arm, forcing me to climb out. “It’s a good thing you’re little,” she observed.

  “What are you doing here?” I whispered. I was shaking, half with relief and half with the sheer terror of what I had just been through. “God, it’s horrible in there. Don’t go in there anymore.”

  “Yeah, it’s not nice. I knew you weren’t going to be able to get out of there. You didn’t think of that. Get down, you don’t want them to see you,” she advised me. She shut the cabinet door carefully, holding it in place with her shoulder while she flipped the ancient deadbolt back into place. The kid was a marvel. She was grinning with delight at her own cleverness. “Anyway,” she said, dropping down to the floor so she could talk to me, “as soon as you left, I knew you were going to need me, so I took the elevator and interrupted the meeting and said I needed to talk to my mom. So she came to the door, and I told her I had a fight with Louise, and she told me they were busy and to go home, so then I told her I needed to use the bathroom, which is supposedly what I’m doing now. I’ve got to go. They’re all in the living room, it’s down that hallway, you pass the dining room and some sort of den, and then it’s right there. There’s a whole lot of them in there. The whole board, and then a couple others, they look like lawyers. We’ll make for the den, you can hide behind the door and hear everything, I checked it out on the way. Come on, we have to go. I’ll make a lot of noise when I go back out through the meeting, so I can distract them while you’re finding some place to listen. Ready? Let’s go.”

  I was still so freaked out from being stuck in the wall that my brain was not functioning fully, so I was glad to have an excited teenager telling me what to do. She breezed ahead of me silently, glancing back to make sure I stayed down and hidden by furniture in case anyone suddenly appeared looking for a glass of water or something; then she took me into a dark room with plush couches and low lighting, all done in red with the slightest touches of gold sprinkled through. I got nothing more than a sense of its opulence as Jennifer quickly waved her hand behind her, pointing to a corner behind the open door. She stood in the doorway for a moment, waving her hand impatiently, and then she marched deliberately into the next room.

  “Thanks for the use of your bathroom, Mrs. Gideon,” she announced to the whole room. “Mom, can you at least call Louise and tell her that I don’t have to put Gail and Mary Ellen to bed, they’re big enough to get themselves to bed anyway, and it’s not my job and plus I have a lot of homework.”

  “That’s fine, Jennifer,” Mrs. White noted tersely.

  “Well, she’s being horrible. Can you call her at least?”

  “Jennifer, I said go home,” Mrs. White told her with finality.

  The door from the den to the living room was wide open, and a couch stood against the wall, just inside. Behind the door and beside the couch was a clever little area of carpet invisible to either room: that was my spot. Fully half of the room was out of my line of sight, but the other half was completely visible. I could see Jennifer scoot into the hallway by the front door, passing that ridiculous table with the spindly legs where Mrs. Gideon had given me the evil eye, then she quickly disappeared from view. The sound of the door opening and closing behind her was obscured by the rustle and settling of fifteen people in the room next to me.

  “Thanks to everyone for making this a priority,” announced a tall, absurdly handsome man who was standing to address the others, most of whom I couldn’t see. He was clearly Vince’s father; he looked just like him and he carried himself with even more self-involved confidence. Next to him, his son looked like a cheerful puppy. I immediately understood why Vince hated him so much.

  “The petition to have the illegal tenant in apartment 8A removed is being passed among you for signatures,” he explained. “We have asked everyone to sign, because if a lawsuit should result from this action, we want to make it clear that the entire board is in agreement and no one can be singled out for culpability.”

  “Can they sue?” asked someone unseen on the other side of the room.

  “Why don’t we let our lawyer answer that one, that’s what he’s here for,” Vince’s creepy dad responded. “Gary?”

  Another good-looking guy in a suit stood up. I swear to god, he looked like every other lawyer I had met during this fiasco except Stuart Long, the Egg Man. These guys all looked like the suits they were wearing. “From what Roger has told me, and what I’ve gleaned from phone calls with many of you, these people are aggressive and determined,” announced Gary the lawyer. “Under these circumstances, lawsuits are always a possibility. Lawsuits are, however, expensive. It is clear that they have few resources other than the speculative value of the Livingston Mansion Apartment. We’ve spoken to the legal department at Sotheby’s, and they have reassured us that they will not support any action on behalf of the so-called heirs of Olivia Finn until the co-op has had the opportunity to state its legal position concerning the property.”

  “Do we have a position?” asked Mrs. Gideon, sounding like she was standing in front of the door right next to me. “Other than we wish they would go away?”

  “That’s what we’re here to discuss,” Vince’s hyperconfident ice cube of a father asserted.

  “My husband told me not to sign anything until we have our lawyer look at it,” came another voice from beyond my sight line. But I recognized this one: it was Mrs. White, who sounded nervous and kind of unhappy.

  “We can have copies sent to your lawyer, certainly, and wait a few days for your signature,” said Mr. Ice Cube. “The reason we asked Gary to be here was to set your mind at ease about the legality of these documents.”

  “But he’s not our personal lawyer. He doesn’t represent me or my husband. And the interests of the co-op are not necessarily our interests, are they?” continued Mrs. White, insistent. She really sounded bothered, like she might secretly be on my side. That is what I told myself anyway. I wished I could see her face for a moment. I wondered what color suit she was wearing.

  “No one should sign anything they’re not comfortable signing,” said the lawyer, trying to be soothing and looking more like a shark than ever. “I am happy to interface with anyone’s attorney around all of this.”

  “He’s already spoken to my guy,” someone offered up.

  “Mine as well,” Mrs. Gideon purred. “I’m completely satisfied this is the appropriate move to make.”

  “Look, we can get her out of here with a simple majority of votes, and legally we don’t need more than six signatures,” Gary explained. “But if the co-op wants to send a message to these people and to the real estate community and to the city in general, my recommendation is that it be loud and unanimous. That’s why I hope to have everyone’s signature on the documents of removal.”

  “I want to support the building, I do,” protested Mrs. White. “Maybe I could call m
y husband at the end of the meeting and just make sure it’s okay.”

  “You do whatever you need to, Alice,” said Ice Pop. “We all have a lot at stake here.”

  “Once they’re gone, though, does it really change anything?” a woman asked. “I saw all the things on television and the papers, and it sounds like these two sets of heirs are going to fight it out whether we like it or not, and we’re going to be dragged into the press for who knows how long. Is there anything we can do—beyond asserting our right to have the apartment remain empty?”

  “That’s an interesting question, Jenny,” Ice Pop agreed. “And it’s why I made sure that all of us could be here tonight. As it turns out, there is something we can do. Len, maybe you could explain the situation.” He made one of those graceful little gestures that mean “the floor is yours,” and Len stepped out of the invisible side of the room and into the front and center. He was wearing the dark green suit coat I’d seen him in at the press conference, and he carried a cream-colored folder with some papers in it. He had a big bandage on his left hand. Their nocturnal confrontation had taken place almost two weeks ago. For all her claims that she wasn’t trying to hurt him, Charlie must have scored a real hit.

  But Len wasn’t acting wounded. With his calm, treelike posture and wry smile, he radiated strength and gentle wisdom to the entire gathering. “I do have some rather interesting—some exceptionally interesting—news about the legal status of the Livingston Mansion Apartment,” he claimed. “As some of you know, I was quite friendly with Bill and his wife Sophie for many years before her death. I was in fact a confidant of them and their sons.”

  “And the second wife, the one who made all the trouble?” someone called.

  “I knew her, yes, and yes she was—problematic. Some of the things I saw her doing to her husband made me very unhappy, because of the degree to which she was maneuvering him around these questions of inheritance and the apartment.”