Twelve Rooms with a View

I was actually about to put this idiotic plan in motion—I mean, I was literally sneaking to the door of the pink room, and easing it open as silently as I could—when I heard them coming down the hallway. So then I had to sneak back and slide into the futon against the far wall, so that when Lucy looked back through the crack in the door she could see me sleeping peacefully and tell herself that I was a mess, but not a problem. Her shadow hovered in the doorway for a moment, watching my back, curled against the light in the hallway. Then she thought whatever it was she needed to think, and she left.

I lay there for a good five minutes after I heard the door thump shut, and the three different tumblers turn in their locks. And then I waited another five minutes. I didn’t want anybody coming back and interrupting me, which was a complete possibility, given the devious mind of my older sister. But after fifteen minutes I was fairly sure that they had in fact driven away, so I turned the light on and I pulled out the sack I had hidden underneath all the clothes that I had bought that afternoon, and then I retrieved my afternoon’s purchases from where I had stuffed them in my backpack.

So this is what I had: one Philips-head screwdriver with exchangeable heads, one zinc-plated steel four-inch spring-bolt lock, and two brass chain door guards. Both the spring bolt and the chain guards came with their own set of screws, but screws are cheap so I bought an extra half dozen just in case.

And then I spent the next fifty minutes locking myself into that apartment.

I knew it would piss off absolutely everybody that I was doing this—Lucy, Alison, Daniel, those Drinans, maybe even Len the moss lover and Frank the doorman, both of whom had really been so nice to me. Nobody was going to be happy that I had figured out a way to be the one who said who could come in and who couldn’t. But honestly I didn’t see that I had much choice. In case you hadn’t noticed, in spite of the fact that I was totally invaded the night before, not one person all day actually had spent one second figuring out how I was supposed to protect myself, given that those Drinan brothers had keys and also that they clearly thought it was well within their rights to use them at any given moment, and that they actually had badly frightened me, twice. Lucy was spending all her time cooking up plans to pull a fast one and get one over on those guys; well, if you ask me it wouldn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that they were doing the same thing to us. I needed protection. I needed a spring bolt, and two security chains.

CHAPTER SIX

I was right. I mean, I was like, immediately right. Like within ten minutes of finishing the installation process. I was back in the kitchen pouring myself a tumbler of vodka grapefruit surprise when the yelling started. You could hear the guy all the way back there, he was that mad.

“What the fuck? HEY. WHAT THE FUCK,” he yelled, starting to pound the shit out of the door. Then he started yanking and pulling at it, and pounding some more. It was enormously satisfying.

“GO AWAY!” I yelled in return, while I sauntered back up to the front of the apartment. “I’M CALLING THE COPS!”

“I AM THE COPS!” he yelled. “OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR.” By this I knew it was the other Drinan, the cop with the sexy eyes. Not that I was surprised.

“I’M SLEEPING IN HERE AND I’M NOT BOTHERING ANYBODY. GO AWAY,” I yelled.

“OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR,” he yelled back.

“What, you got like three sentences, is that all you know how to say?” I asked him, through the door. “Open the door, I’m a cop, what the fuck, is that all you know how to say?”

“I’d open the door, Tina Finn,” he warned me.

“Oh yeah, why?” I said to the door, kind of bold and cocky. It was weird; all of a sudden I felt like I was flirting with someone in a bar. “What are you going to do to me, officer?”

“I’m going to arrest you,” he announced.

“I’m not the one trying to break in and harass an innocent citizen in her home, dude,” I retorted. “If I put a call in to 911, you’re the one who’s in the shithouse.”

“There’s a stay on the apartment, Tina,” he informed me, through the door. “No one’s allowed to fuck with the locks. You’re in violation of the law.”

“Except I didn’t fuck with the locks, Pierre,” I informed him back. “I put in a spring bolt and some chain guards. The locks are fine. When I’m not here? The locks work just fine. When I am here? YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED IN.”

There was a pause, and then a kind of bump, right at my shoulder. “Shit,” I heard him mumble. He must have been right up against the door. For a second I thought, Wow, this door is thin, I can hear everything and if I can hear everything he can probably pry it open with one of those little battering ram things cops carry with them, whether or not I have the spring bolt in place. And then I thought, Is he the kind of cop who carries those things? What kind of a cop is this guy anyway? Does he have a gun on him? He didn’t have a gun, or a uniform, the last time I saw him, but obviously since I wouldn’t let him into the apartment there was no knowing if he any of those things—gun, uniform, battering ram—right now. I took a step back, because it did occur to me that if he started whacking at the door all of a sudden I didn’t want to be leaning up against it. But whacking at the door did not seem to be on his mind. For the moment, at least, he was quiet.

And then someone else started talking, someone who wasn’t him.

I couldn’t hear at all what the other person was saying. The other voice was much softer, more from a distance; it was a murmur, and a question. He answered it, only now I couldn’t hear him, either; he was practically whispering all of a sudden, to whoever else was out there. This should have been good news to me—let’s face it, having an angry cop screaming at me to let him into my apartment in the middle of the night was not anything like an ideal situation—but the whispering voices actually made me more anxious. I stepped back to the door, and put my ear up against it, to see if I could hear what the other person was saying, or what my angry friend Pete Drinan was saying. But while a second ago I felt like Pete was practically in the room with me, now I could barely hear him. He wasn’t up against the door anymore; he was down by the elevators. The other person asked him another question, that I couldn’t hear, and he answered again, and I couldn’t hear the answer. I thought he might be talking to his brother, that would make the most sense, but it didn’t really sound like him; whoever this person was actually talked more carefully, and Drinan was talking carefully back. I truly couldn’t tell what was going on.

Given my options I decided I’d better go for it, and slid back the spring bolt quietly and carefully. Which was exceptionally difficult; those spring bolts hold together pretty tight, what use would they be if they didn’t? Luckily Drinan was far enough away now, and the conversation was apparently riveting enough that he wasn’t supernaturally attuned to the sound of a spring bolt being slowly scraped back into the unbolted version of its identity. He had already thrown the tumblers in the three door locks, so all I had to do then was make sure the chain guards were in place and open that door as silently as possible, and find out who the hell was out there with him. I cracked the door.

He was past the elevators, his back to me, and he was talking to whoever it was who lived in the other apartment, 8B. Of course he was! It made so much sense when I saw it that I almost laughed out loud about how paranoid I was being. The lady—I could see it was a lady, with kind of messy brown hair—was standing in her doorway, like all the yelling had just woken her up, and she needed to come out and complain about whatever nonsense we were involved in, just across the hall from her doorway. But she didn’t seem to be angry. She had her hand on Drinan’s arm and every now and then she would pat it, like she was comforting him, and he would nod, and look at the floor. He had a bottle of beer in his left hand that he was kind of holding behind him, like a teenager who doesn’t want his mom’s friend to know that he’s got a beer back there. His thumb was hooked into the top to make sure the fizz didn’t go.

They didn’t know I was there listening, so they just kept talking. “God rest her soul, I miss her every day,” said the lady.

“I do too,” he told her, quiet.

“It would have just killed her to see this, just killed her! Oh my God when they were selling the furniture, all I could think was this would have just killed Sophie, the way Bill is just letting everything go.”

“Actually she hated most of that stuff,” Drinan noted.

“So many beautiful pieces. Worth a fortune! And then the paintings, I thought I would just cry when the paintings—”

“She didn’t like them either.” He sounded like on every line he wanted to take a hit off that beer bottle, but she wasn’t giving him an opening.

“Your inheritance, it was all your inheritance, gone, that’s what she wouldn’t have liked. Your father should be ashamed of himself.”

“Yeah, well, he never was.”

“God rest his soul you got that right. And he never asked me. If I wanted them? I thought at least ask, I would have been happy to step in, and keep them in the building. I would have done that for your mother, God rest her soul. I told him! But you couldn’t talk to him. Well, you know that.”

“Yes.” He shifted on his feet and for about fifteen seconds I got a better look at the woman, who had a very good face, underneath that big head of messy hair. I was sort of not liking her much until I saw her face, then I wasn’t so sure, because she seemed sort of sensible, even though she was saying slightly dotty things and clearly was just cranky that she couldn’t get her hands on those paintings and all that furniture. She also had on some kind of silk robe, sage green with a burnt orange stripe; the bit I could see hanging off her shoulder suggested it might be spectacularly beautiful if I could get a better look at it. Drinan shifted again, and I lost the sightline.

“Well, thank you for your thoughts, Mrs Westmoreland,” he started. His hand, holding the beer, was getting a little slippery, plus I could see from the way his shoulders were scrunching together that he was getting pretty desperate for that drink. Before he could take a step backwards and turn to take a fast hit off it she touched him on the sleeve again, and held him there. Ai yi yi, I thought, this is getting interesting.

“But these people, who are these people?” she asked, all concerned. “Coming and going, acting like they own the place. Frank says that one of them has moved in. I’m horrified.” I went back to not liking her. What on earth was she complaining about, she was “horrified” about me living in an apartment I had every legal right to live in? She was just some Upper West Side snob who had the hots for a dude half her age, that’s what I decided, on the basis of admittedly hardly any information at all.

“It’s something to do with Dad’s will.” He shrugged. “He left everything to Olivia.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Look, it’s fine, it’s going to be fine.” You could hear that he was already kicking himself for letting go that much. And it did seem, in fact, to be a terrific and instant mistake.

“He left everything to Olivia? He barely knew her!”

“They were married two years,” he corrected her.

“Did you know he was doing that? Did you agree to it?”

“He didn’t actually ask us to agree,” Pete said. His voice was starting to get real uptight. “He told us. Doug tried to talk him out of it. But Dad wanted to do something for Olivia.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Yeah, well, he was worried she wouldn’t have anything if he died. That’s what he said.”

“She didn’t deserve anything!”

“Well, that’s what he felt, anyway. He, you know, he knew he was dying and he wanted her to have some security after he was gone.”

“Surely you could have put a stop to this.”

“We had a big fight about it. Doug was, you know he pretty much felt what you were saying. Dad got real mad about it. It wasn’t…we didn’t really talk much after that.”

This was so much more information than I’d ever had about Bill I was momentarily thrilled. I was once again delighted to find how successful snooping at doors could be. I was also happy to have a shred of good feeling for Bill since he did the right thing by Mom in the face of opposition. He was instantly transformed, in my imagination, from a selfish drunk into an eccentric recluse who had lousy kids.

“But Olivia is dead now. And these other people, what rights do they have?”

“I don’t know. Honestly, I just don’t know.” Pete trailed off, clearly wanting to get out of this hideous conversation. But she was a sharp one. And she was as completely fascinated as I was by what he had told her already.

“He didn’t even know them, he refused to meet them!” she told him. “He was afraid of just this scenario, that complete strangers would come after his property, that’s why he told her they were never to set foot in the building!”

“She told you that?”

“She did! I asked her one night. She had just come back in from having dinner with the rest of them, apparently. It was so rare that you ever saw either one of them leave the apartment, so when I saw her in the lobby I said, ’This is a treat! You and Bill don’t go out much, do you?’ and she said, ’I was having dinner with my daughters,’ and we rode up in the elevator together, and I said, ’Are we going to meet your daughters?’ and she said, ’Oh no, Bill prefers to keep me all to himself!’ And I said, ’Well, that hardly seems fair. You must miss them a lot.’ And she said she did, very much, and that she had tried to speak to him about it but he was very worried, these were her own words, he was worried that other people were after his property, and he had to protect it. Those were her exact words. And then I saw him one day, not long after that—I actually saw him, putting trash in the bin, which he never did—and I said, ’Why, Bill! There you are!’ He looked terrible, I don’t need to tell you that, he was sick for a long long time and I know he refused to see a doctor—”

“Yeah, but you said you talked to him?”

“I did. I took the opportunity. I said, ’Bill, Olivia tells me you’ve never even met her daughters. Aren’t you curious to even meet them? She’s your wife!’ I was reluctant to say anything to him at all, I couldn’t believe he brought another woman into your mother’s apartment. It was the Livingston mansion apartment, it is an historic property! He should have let it go, is my opinion, when your mother died. He should have sold it to someone who might take care of it, someone in the building who would appreciate it. He never appreciated it. She was the one.”

“But he said something? About these daughters?”

“He said, yes, he said they were trash. He said, ’Those daughters are trash and I’m not meeting them.’ That’s what he called them. Trash. And he wouldn’t meet them. All they wanted was his money.” At which point old Bill went back to being an alcoholic asshole, in my imagination.

Pete Drinan thought about this. It was not an uninteresting bit of information to him. “Was he drunk?” he finally asked.

“Well, I only saw him for a moment, so I couldn’t really say,” Mrs Westmoreland admitted. “I know he did like to drink.”

“Yes, he did.” Pete sighed, his hand curled around the beer bottle behind his back. “Listen, Mrs Westmoreland—would you be willing to talk about this? To our lawyer?”

“Oh, a lawyer…” She sighed, all worried, but excited too, like she was secretly happy to be asked. “You mean, officially?”

“Well, yeah,” said Pete. “It might make a difference—that you spoke to him directly and he told you that he didn’t want the property going out of the family. That that was his intent? That’s what she said, huh, that was his intent?”

“That was my understanding. But if this is an official situation—I don’t know. Do you want to come in, have a cup of tea? I want you and your brother to have your inheritance. But obviously I don’t want to get into some complicated legal mess. But I did love your mother. Maybe, do you want to come in and have a cup of tea?”

“Oh,” said Pete, his fingers twirling around the neck of that beer bottle. I started thinking about how that beer was probably getting all warm and flat, and then I thought, Well, if I’m thinking that I bet he is too. And sure enough he leaned back on his left leg, ready to edge away again. But she was not letting go. She actually had her fingers twisted in his jacket sleeve now. Her door had swung completely open by this point. What little you could see of her place from my vantage point was gorgeous.

“Your mother was my neighbor for thirty years. This whole story breaks my heart,” she explained, leaning up against the doorway.

“Mine too, Mrs Westmoreland.” He nodded, leaning back.

“Good heavens, Peter.” She sighed. “After all this time I think you could consider calling me Delia.”

“Yeah, well…”

“Come in, let me get you that tea. Or a drink! Maybe a whiskey. That sounds like a policeman’s drink!” she said with a smile.

He turned, to finally take a hit off that beer bottle, and stared me straight in the face. We looked at each other, through the crack in the door. He looked tired. And then he kind of remembered, I guess, what was going on, and he took a fast step in my direction, and I remembered too, and I slammed the door and slid the bolt back in place. I thought he was going to start pounding again, but he didn’t, he just waited. I could hear the woman from 8B start to gripe again, about how awful it all was; I couldn’t really hear the words but the tone of her voice was not complimentary. He didn’t say anything back to her. I stood at the door and listened, and he didn’t say anything at all. I wasn’t sure what was going on, if he was going to try and bust the door down with one of those sticks, or what. Finally the woman from 8B stopped talking, and things were really quiet. I thought maybe he was gone. And then a little white card slid under the door. At the last second, it kind of wafted, like he had pushed it. After another second I picked it up. It was a really plain business card, with the NYPD shield on one side, and his name, Detective Peter Drinan, right in the middle, and a cell number on it. I turned it over. On the back, written in ink, in teeny little block letters it said, CALL ME WHEN YOU’RE READY. I thought about that for a second, and I kept listening at the door. He was still out there; in fact, from the shadows it looked like he was sort of hovering down there near the floor to see if I had actually picked the card up. So I took the paper bag that they gave me at the hardware store, and I looked through my backpack, which was still right there where I had dumped it, and I found a pen, and I ripped a piece off the paper bag, and I wrote on it: OKAY. And then I shoved that through the door. And then I watched, through the crack, while he picked it up. And then I heard him laugh. The lady in the other apartment squawked some more questions at him, and he said something else to her, but then I heard the elevator ding, and the door close. And when I went out there, in the morning, he was gone.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Len’s greenhouse was so big it had rooms: the deciduous room, the desert room, the rainforest room, the heirloom plants from other centuries room, the plants that only grow on other plants room. Some of these rooms were apparently subsets or extensions of rooms, and some of the rooms overlapped before growing into new rooms—like the plants growing on other plants room turned into the orchid subset of a room, which evolved into the spectacularly gorgeous and weird plants room, which turned a corner before becoming the poisonous plants room—so that the whole place seemed actually to be growing, itself; it covered the roof and threatened to crawl down the side of the building, in some places. It was truly the only greenhouse I have ever seen that is big enough to get lost in. I told old Len that I thought it was pretty surprising he could get enough water up there to make a greenhouse that big—especially since it had a rainforest in it—but he couldn’t get enough water up there for a little bit of moss. He said, “I know, it is surprising, isn’t it? By which I knew he really was full of shit, and there was no reason that he had to stash the moss in my apartment, except for the fact that he had run out of room in his. That, and there really was quite a bit of sunlight. He got light on six sides up there. It was like being on Mount Olympus, with a whole bunch of plants.

As much fun as it had been to talk to Len about his moss, it was nothing compared to hearing him go on about plants. He started out delivering information sort of like a university lecturer, which he had been at some point in his life. Everything was all about the genus and the species and the Latinate name and the common name, and the historical derivatives of the names. But he couldn’t hold on to the formality of it all, frankly. In no time flat he was talking to the plants, checking out the texture of the leaves, telling the pretty ones how pretty they were, telling the ones that were all spiky and weird looking that looks didn’t matter, the pink coleus is just a slut for showing off like that, beauty comes and goes so quickly and she was only an annual anyway. He thought the cactuses were sly and devious, he called them the “tricksters of the desert”, which I didn’t quite follow because I have to admit all those spikes didn’t look so sly to me, they were pretty direct, in fact, but when I pointed that out Len just laughed, like there was so much about cactuses that I just didn’t know. Which of course how could you argue with that, I actually don’t know anything about cactuses, I was just making an observation. And then he took me into the orchid room and I got an earful about the orchids. He had truly more than a hundred different kinds, each one stranger than the next. Some had spots all over them, which I had never seen before on any flower. They were pink and purple and yellow and white, and dark red with black centers, and there was one that was black everywhere, which was strangely frightening, to see a completely black flower. There were some that looked like stars and some that looked like butterflies, some that looked like tarantulas, some that looked like hornets or some other kind of stinging animal, and then of course there were just dozens that looked like sex organs. Seriously, all of those flowers looked like they want to have sex with humans. It was a bit creepy, honestly. I was somewhat afraid to touch them.

This turned out to be a good impulse on my part, as Len sort of casually informed me once we were done with the orchid room.

“Some of them are poisonous,” he admitted. “The pollen, the ovules, the nectar, this little darling here—don’t touch—not that it would really hurt you permanently, but you very well might lose all feeling in your arm, for at least a day.”

“Come on, Len,” I said.

“Do you want to try it?” he asked, raising those eyebrows at me.

I didn’t. “But if orchids are poisonous how come everybody has them in their houses?” I asked.

“Only certain species, Tina. Use your head,” he told me, pulling out a very small pair of clippers and snipping some extraneous vines away from a line of bright yellow star-shaped flowers which wound down the side of a tree. “Please don’t touch that.”

“You can’t touch any of them?” I asked.

“Until you know which ones are poisonous, and which aren’t, no, in fact, you can’t touch any of them.—

“How did you find out which ones are poisonous?”

“The hard way,” he informed me. “I studied.”

The place smelled like growing things, and sounded like water. He had little fountains in corners, and strange pools suddenly appeared behind tree trunks, or alongside a hillside of ferns. That greenhouse was so big it had hills—small hills, but there were definite undulations. And everything was green, a thousand different greens, each one more subtle than the next. In spite of the pink coleus and the startling sexuality of the many-colored and poisonous orchids, green was what you saw, everywhere. And sky. You forgot, honestly, that you were in a building, in a city, on an island. I don’t know where you were, but it was not where you thought.