“I’m not kidding, Lucy.”
“Good-bye, Tina.”
“I’m going to call Alison, okay?” I yelled after her. “Tell her I’m going to call.” She disappeared into the courthouse entryway and didn’t look back.
Pete didn’t have any luck with Doug either. Doug and Lucy, neither of them was built to walk away from a fight, or the past. As it turned out, however, Pete and I were. After six months of wrangling with co-op boards and landlords and mortgage brokers and buildings all over the Upper West Side, we got a place of our own, farther uptown. It’s a two-bedroom, with a tiny dining room, tiny living room, tiny kitchen, and a sliver of a view of the river, if you stand against one of the windows and lean over exactly right.
Jennifer White comes over to babysit for us now. And once in a while, Alison comes for dinner. She plays with the baby and then puts her to bed while I try to finish my homework so I can finally get through college. After we’re done sharing our lives, she fills us in on all the legal wranglings and what Doug is up to and what Lucy is doing and what clever trick Ira Grossman introduced last week and what new witnesses Doug found who are willing to state definitively that Mom and Bill were unhappy and crazy and why the one will is meaningless and why the other wills—the crazy fake one as well as the ones that never got written—are not. And then we laugh and kiss each other good night.
A year after I moved in and out of the Edgewood, the anthropological botanist Leonard Colbert was found dead in his penthouse. Apparently he had been regularly ingesting rare hallucinogens, which police suspected he was cultivating in his extensive greenhouse. Since it was clear that he had died by his own hand, a full investigation was never conducted. The penthouse apartment of the Edgewood was known to be worth fourteen million dollars easily. He did not leave a will.
Acknowledgments
My very good agent, Loretta Barrett, informed me two years ago that writing a second novel would most likely be the most difficult challenge of my writing life. She was right. Since then I have had myriad discussions with dozens of writers about this specific nightmare, and while I despaired when Loretta and my excellent editor, Shaye Areheart, urged me to just get on with it, I now know that I could not have done so without their pushy support. I thank them for that, and for their mysterious confidence in me. Thanks also to Georgina Chapel, Abi Fellows, Amy Brownstein, Kate Snodgrass, Laura Heberton, Misha Angrist, Bill Rebeck, Susanna Sonnenberg, and Scott Burkhardt for providing essential pieces to the ongoing puzzle of my life as a novelist. Ira Pearlskin explained the practices of New York inheritance laws over and over, until I barely understood them. David Colman explained the ins and outs of Melo clasps and Balenciaga dresses. Tamara Tunie and Gregory Generet also opened their lives and their home to me in this enterprise in so many sturdy and tangible ways it would take its own book to describe them.
Marisa Smith is my second reader, and Jess Lynn, my husband, is my first. Their unwavering assurance was bracing and cheering and ultimately the thing that kept me on my path.
Ten years ago, my dear friend Susan David Bernstein invited me to visit her at her aunt Sherry’s ten-room apartment overlooking Central Park West. I never forgot it. To Susan and Aunt Sherry, I say thank you for opening the door to the beginning of this book.
About the Author
THERESA REBECK is the author of the novel Three Girls and Their Brother, and her plays include Our House, Bad Dates, Omnium Gatherum (a Pulitzer finalist), The Scene, and Mauritius, which won Boston’s prestigious IRNE and Elliot Norton Awards and premiered on Broadway in 2007. Rebeck lives with her husband and two children in Brooklyn, New York.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Theresa Rebeck
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Shaye Areheart Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Shaye Areheart Books with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rebeck, Theresa.
Twelve rooms with a view : a novel / Theresa Rebeck.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. Inheritance and succession—Fiction. 3. Stepbrothers—Fiction. 4. Rich people—Fiction. 5. Apartment dwellers—Fiction. 6. Apartment houses, Cooperative—Fiction. 7. Eccentrics and eccentricities—Fiction. 8. City and town life—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. I. Title. II. Title: 12 rooms with a view.
PS3568.E2697T84 2010
813′.54—dc22 2009044560
eISBN: 978-0-307-59236-1
v3.0
Twelve Rooms with a View Page 37
