Twelve Rooms with a View

by Theresa Rebeck

  “I don’t believe it,” he said. He was standing in the doorway of the bedroom, watching us wake up. At least we weren’t having sex, I thought, but Doug didn’t see the upside of that. He was already in a state. “What the fuck,” he seethed. “What the fuck are you doing with her?”

  “Oh, shit,” Pete muttered, groggy.

  “Get up,” Doug hissed. “Get up so I can hit you.”

  “Dial it down, Doug. I’m still waking up,” Pete said.

  “In our apartment,” Doug exploded. “In our room! With her! You know what she is! You know what her mother did to our family!”

  “My mom didn’t do anything, she was a really nice person and she took really good care of your father,” I started.

  “Tina, stay out of this,” Pete warned me.

  “We know what she did. She stole our home,” Doug informed me. “We have evidence—what she was doing, we know what she did, and we know what you’re doing, at least those of us who aren’t thinking with our dicks have something of a clue—”

  “Hey hey hey, I said dial it back,” Pete repeated. I opened my mouth to say something that would not have been helpful, but Pete put his hand up in a fast silencing gesture as he stood.

  “We’re not going to talk about it this way, Doug,” he stated. “I want you to step out into the hallway.”

  “Don’t you fucking ‘cop’ me,” Doug sneered. “I’m not the crook in this fiasco. I can’t believe you’re this stupid. Or yes I can, actually, I can believe it. After what you did—what you did, to Mom—”

  “Come on, don’t start this again.”

  “It was your idea! What happened? You were the one who, you and Dad, she didn’t want to go, I told you don’t do it—”

  “That’s not the way it went down and you know it—”

  “And then she died in there alone. She was alone—”

  “She was there because she needed help! She couldn’t stay here! Christ, she tried to kill him, more than once, Doug—”

  “So he said—”

  “I saw it! You saw what she would do, you saw the bruises, come on, man, let’s not relive this.”

  “He made that happen. She was defending herself. He would get drunk and start those fights—”

  “I’m serious, Doug, don’t do this.”

  “You’re doing it! You did it! You’re just like him. She used to say, your brother is just like your father, a a a lowlife and a drunk—she would tell me—”

  “I know what she said, come on, Doug, let’s just take this down the hall—”

  “No! She needs to hear this! She needs to know what you are, what you did, what you—she—” His rage took over as he glanced at me, utter madness in his face. I crept back against the wall a little. This was not a good situation. And it just goes to show, I thought: pictures don’t tell the whole story. I thought of all those photos of the happy boys and their cool, interesting, rich, hippie mother. They didn’t tell this story at all.

  “I could kill you for this,” Doug continued, pacing in a tight circle in that tiny room. “This was Mom’s, everything. This place. And you’re just throwing it away! On those—that woman, who Dad let come in here, like it wasn’t Mom’s. When it was only hers. This place is hers. It was the only thing she really loved.” The words hung out there like a curse as soon as he said it. I was embarrassed to have heard it.

  Pete shook his head. “You know that’s not true. She loved us. I remember how much she loved us. That’s what I choose to remember. I make that choice every day.”

  “That’s convenient. Considering what you did to her, what you and Dad—what you did.”

  Pete didn’t answer at first. The whisper of loss was rising around them. Doug looked completely spent. He glanced up at the ceiling for a moment, that old trick of raking your eyes frantically to keep them from betraying you. He looked at that awful painted sunset on the wall and started to shake with a terrible and relentless grief. Pete waited, still, while his brother wept openly for what seemed a long time before he shook himself back into some semblance of control.

  “Sorry,” Doug finally said, abrupt and ungracious.

  Pete nodded, pretending the apology was better than it was. “There was something wrong with her brain,” he continued quietly. Doug accepted the facts as Pete recounted them. “We talked to a lot of people. You remember that. The chemicals went bad. It wasn’t her fault, but it wasn’t his fault either.”

  “She wasn’t well.”

  “No, she wasn’t. We got a lot of opinions, Doug, you know we did what we had to do.” The two of them stood there looking at each other, mournfully resting in the end of an argument they had had far too many times. For a long moment they just looked at each other. Pete reached up to touch his brother’s shoulder. And Doug slugged him, hard, right across the face.

  31

  “THEY’RE KICKING YOU OUT, TINA,” FRANK INFORMED ME UNDER his breath when I snuck out past the doorman’s station several days later. “They’re real mad at you.”

  I wasn’t surprised to hear it.

  The pearls I left at Sotheby’s. Leonard Rubenstein, the man who looked like a lion, gave me an official estimate of their worth, somewhere in the range of $350,000. The clasp, apparently, was much more valuable than the pearls themselves. He knew of a jeweler who would take the necklace quickly and essentially break it up for parts. He promised to call me by the end of the day with an offer. Then I called one of my friends from the hot tub, Lyle, who had had the foresight to slip his phone number into that little alligator handbag. He suggested he could come by the apartment and price out the rest of the stuff, so I said sure.

  “Really?” he said, almost cooing on the other end of the line. “Can I bring Roger? Or Andrew? Or Steve? They’ll kill me, they really will, if they find out that I got to see the apartment and they didn’t.”

  “Whoever wants to come see the apartment,” I said, “is welcome.”

  It was a good little party. Andrew brought champagne and foie gras, and Roger and Steve and Edward and Dave came too, and they loved every square inch of the place; they appreciated every strange corner and disastrous choice. They even loved the mustard-colored shag rug.

  “It’s so hideous,” Andrew said in an admiring tone. “And who would have thought to use so much? It’s a sea of mustard. I think it works, I really do.”

  “You’re insane,” said Edward, but he kissed him, so I knew he wasn’t in love with Vince anymore, which I thought was definitely a good thing.

  “Tina, can I talk to you for a second?” Lyle called from the hallway.

  He took me back to the storage room so we could talk business. “All right. A lot of this—everything over here—it’s sentimental value, I’m sure, but that’s how you need to see it,” he explained, waving at a pile of boxes full of old shoes and knitting paraphernalia and wrinkled cotton skirts. “The Salvation Army maybe would take it off your hands if they didn’t have to come pick it up. It’s not worth anything. Over here, on the other hand, we have some things that probably are worth quite a bit.” He stepped back out into the laundry area and led me around the corner toward the TV room. There he pointed toward the doorway of Bill and Mom’s bedroom, where he had used the arched pocket doors as a frame for a little fashion show.

  “What a lovely presentation,” I told him.

  “Thank you,” he said, smiling. “I think it’s important, with beautiful things, to display them properly, so we can decide in an aesthetic way what is the best course of action.”

  “The only course of action I’m really interested in is money,” I said.

  “Yes, sweetheart, I’m well aware.” He nodded. “You can be a philistine all you want. The rest is for me. Okay. The Balenciaga cocktail dress will bring in, conservatively, two thousand dollars.”

  “Two thousand?” I said, hoping I was hearing this right.

  “The alligator bag, I already know who I can take that to, and there’s no question he’ll pay four. The ev
ening gowns are a little more specific and not quite as classic or timeless as the gowns that bring in the big bucks, but they’re in good shape, the sea green one is really a beautiful color, we’ll stay conservative and estimate another two for both of them.”

  “So what is that, eight? That’s pretty good. How long will it take to sell them?”

  “Wait wait wait. First, my darling, first we have to talk about this.” He walked over to the display area, reached up against the wall, and presented me with a piece of the ugliest luggage I had ever seen.

  “What about it?” I said.

  “Do you know what this is?” he asked.

  “You can have it, nobody wants this stuff,” I assured him.

  “You know nothing! Nothing!” he said, incensed with delight at how much I didn’t know. “Six pieces—a matched set of Hermès airline luggage from the sixties. I’ve never seen even one piece before today—you have a whole set! And it’s pristine! It’s in perfect condition! I don’t know what you might get for it. I just don’t even know.” He was dialing away on his cell phone, he was so excited.

  “But do you know anybody who would buy it?” I asked him. “I need the money fast. They’re going to kick me out any second. I have to get this stuff out of here.”

  “We’ll buy it, Tina, don’t worry,” said Andrew, handing me a glass of champagne.

  “You’ll buy it,” I said. “No no, come on you don’t have to, to to—”

  “To take care of you?” he asked. “But we want to take care of you. And if Lyle says it’s worth something, trust me, it is. I’m sure it’s a terrific investment.”

  “Do not take less than twenty-five, Tina,” Lyle warned me while he consulted with someone on the phone.

  “Twenty-five,” I said. “Thousand?”

  Andrew gave me a check right then and there, then went with me to cash it. On the sidewalk outside the bank I called Jennifer on her cell; she was just getting out of school and walking home. “You have to sneak out tonight. Tonight’s the night,” I told her. “Be at my place at eleven.”

  “Eleven, like eleven P.M.?” she said, stunned.

  “Actually, make it half past ten,” I said. “We have a lot to do.”

  Six hours later there were five gay men waiting for her in the lost room. They helped her climb out of the crawl space and slip through the darkness into one of the many empty bedrooms, where there was a makeup station, a hair station, party dresses in three different sizes, four evening jackets, and eight pairs of shoes for her to choose from.

  “What is this?” she said, laughing.

  “It’s party time,” I told her. “We’re going to a club.”

  She protested, but not too hard. “It’s a school night.”

  “Yeah, you’re going to have problems staying awake in history tomorrow,” I admitted, picking up a pair of strappy heels, hoping we got the right size.

  “What is this you’re wearing?” Andrew asked her, a little worried about that plaid skirt.

  “It’s a uniform, I go to a Catholic school up on Ninety-eighth,” she explained, eyeing the party dresses with undisguised hunger.

  “Come on,” Roger said, his voice drenched in disbelief. “They have Catholic schools in Manhattan?”

  We dressed her up and took her out. Edward rented a limo, and we went to three separate clubs. Jennifer danced with everyone in our entourage, and then she danced with a bunch of more appropriate college guys, whom we met up with later at an all-night diner in the Meatpacking District. She flirted outrageously with one of them, and they ended up making out on a street corner until five A.M., at which point I thought I’d better get her home so we could perhaps end the evening without parental discovery and Catholic recriminations and have it just be a wonderful night for her to remember forever.

  In the car she threw her arms around me and hugged me with happiness. “Thank you thank you thank you,” she said.

  “Thank you, Jennifer,” I said. “You did as much for me as anyone I’ve ever known in my whole life.”

  “I have to tell you something,” she whispered, and her hand slipped into mine as she put her head on my shoulder. “My mom voted for you.”

  “What?” I said, trying to remember what that meant.

  “She voted for you. She didn’t want them to kick you out. She said you did a good thing, telling the cops about the phony will, that was the right thing to do. And she also said you were really nice and a good babysitter. And she voted for you.”

  The next day Frank was fired when he told a representative from the co-op board that he would not hire a security firm to help remove me from the building. It didn’t matter. I was already out of there, and I had a lot of money in my pocket, which was about to come in very handy.

  A month later Julianna Gideon bumped into Frank at a restaurant where she was having lunch with her roommate from Princeton. Frank looked especially handsome; he was wearing an extremely well-cut Armani suit that cost three thousand easily. He explained that he had a new job with a small but well-regarded investment firm that was looking to expand their business in several South American capitals. Julianna’s roommate had done her sophomore year in Spain, so she and Frank carried on a quick and intelligent conversation in that most romantic of languages. Julianna was even more charmed than before, and without notifying her mother, she agreed to have dinner with Frank the following week. By their third date, Frank felt comfortable enough to invite her back to his apartment, which was small but beautifully furnished. He lived alone, he explained, because his father and brothers had recently come into money and returned to their family home in the Dominican Republic. She spent the night.

  Gcina Motufe, an illegal immigrant from Somalia, presented her petition for amnesty to the INS later that week. Her extremely clever lawyer convinced the INS that because Gcina was underage, she should be in foster care until her case comes before the courts. She’s currently living with a nice, wealthy family out at the Delaware Water Gap.

  Vince Masterson was angry that once again his father had dismissed his considered opinion and had voted with the board to have the Finns removed from the Livingston Mansion Apartment. He told his father so, rather more forcefully than usual, which his father took poorly, observing that if Vince didn’t like living rent-free in one of the most exclusive buildings in Manhattan, he was welcome to leave. A few months later, Vince did. He moved to Moscow, invested every penny of his trust fund in the Russian banking system, and managed to triple his fortune within four years. Every spring he goes golfing in Dubai.

  Five months after I left the Edge, I showed up at the Surrogate’s Court in lower Manhattan. After a series of postponements, our probate, or at least the first of a series of hearings on our probate, was finally on the docket. It was a nice morning in mid-April; the warmth of the air seemed mysterious and lively, like something was truly about to be born if we just had the patience to wait for it. Who would go inside on a morning like that?

  “Well, look who it is,” Lucy said, clipping up the courthouse steps like a warrior, her hair pulled back, severe and businesslike as usual in her gray suit. “I guess I’m not surprised.”

  “Hi, Lucy,” I said. “I’m glad to see you.”

  “You know, Alison’s been worried sick,” she informed me crisply. “You could have called. We had no idea whatsoever where you were.”

  “Neither of you guys really have room for me,” I told her. “I needed to take care of myself for a while.”

  “And you couldn’t be bothered to make a phone call?”

  “I had a lot of things to take care of, and I needed to think,” I told her. “And you know, could you tone this down? I came here to talk, and I don’t need you going at me before anybody’s even said anything, okay?”

  “By all means, Tina, tell me how to behave, since you are such an ideal role model for us all.”

  “Okay, fine, if that’s the way you want it, I guess that’s the way things are always going to be,” I said. �
�I’m sorry. I’m sorry we don’t understand each other.”

  “And whose fault is that?” she said in a nasty tone. She didn’t even look at me; she was too busy checking her BlackBerry.

  “Yours,” I said. “I think it’s yours.”

  “Of course you do.” She nodded.

  “Where’s Alison?” I asked, looking around.

  “She’s not coming, she’s too upset. She and Daniel are probably splitting up. And since they were married for ten years, he still expects his share of the apartment, and he thinks Grossman is completely incompetent, so we have a whole extra set of lawyers to deal with now, which is an utter delight.”

  “Alison and Daniel are splitting up?” I said.

  “Yes, Tina, you might have known that if you had been anywhere reachable, which of course as usual you weren’t.”

  “Well,” I said. “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “You never liked Daniel,” Lucy said, dismissing my regret like yesterday’s news.

  “No, I didn’t like Daniel, but I do like Alison,” I told her. “So she’s not coming today?”

  “No,” said Lucy. “There’s no need. I’m the administratrix. Neither of you needs to be here. As usual, I will do the work.” She turned, dismissing me, and headed inside.

  “Hey, Lucy,” I said. “Count me out. I’m going to walk away from this. Okay? I want nothing to do with it. And you know, honestly—honestly, I think you should do that too.”

  “What?” she said, like this was the most insane thing she had ever heard.

  “There’s something wrong with that apartment,” I said. “It’s like, enchanted. Everything is so beautiful but you know, there’s poison in the walls. You should just walk away.”

  “Well gee, Tina, thanks for the advice. As usual, you’re so sensible.”