Twelve Rooms with a View (16 page)

I turned to smile a good-bye to him, my hand on the spring bolt. But before I could open the door, he grabbed my shoulder, flipped me around, and got his tongue down my throat a second time. I considered resisting for about half a second, but honestly, it is not always easy to consider consequences at moments like that. So much for walking away, I thought, my hands going after the top button of his jeans. He already had mine unzipped when we heard a voice in the hall.

“Tina? Are you in there? Tina?” There was a little rapping on the door, the sound of keys. I stopped.

“Yeah—Lucy—just give me a minute.” This made not the slightest impression on old Vince, who was wrapping his arms around my waist. I very weakly tried to extract myself. “Put your clothes back on, come on,” I whispered, dragging him away from the doorway.

“Tell her to go away,” he murmured in my ear as his fingers continued in their determination to undress me.

“I would, but she doesn’t do what I tell her,” I said, shoving him. The locks were flipping. I was not going to have Lucy find me in a clinch with Vince Masterson with my clothes half off.

“She can’t be your mother, your mother’s dead.” Vince laughed, as I desperately buttoned my jeans.

“She’s worse, she’s my sister,” I told him. He laughed again and leaned against the wall, completely amused by my predicament. Lucy stepped through the doorway. Her eyes swiped over us, then raked the room, finding the empty red wine bottle in the middle of the floor, where Vince had simply dropped it. She looked back at us and didn’t say anything. She didn’t even set her briefcase down. Vince stifled another laugh. I elbowed him.

“Ow, what’d you do that for?” he said, acting like a frat boy. “Hi, I’m Vince Masterson. I live on the fifth floor, Tina was just showing me the apartment. It’s fabulous, congratulations. What did you say your name was?” All his sexual and class confidence merged into one dazzling bit of arrogance as he ignored the utterly disheveled state of his clothes and held out his hand for Lucy to shake. She looked him in the eye before glancing down at his hand, trying to decide if it was clean enough to touch, because it was not at all clear where his fingers had recently been. I wanted to hit her.

Vince just laughed and brought his hand up, touching her carelessly on the elbow as if that had been what he intended all along. “Terrific meeting you,” he said, smiling. “Tina, you were just showing me out, weren’t you?”

He looked back at me and held out his hand. I obediently reached for it and let him drag me to the front door, which was still standing open. He leaned down and kissed me on the cheek. “I feel like I got caught in the back of the schoolhouse with the parson’s daughter,” he murmured in my ear.

“It was
so
great to meet you, Vince,” I said loudly.

“Likewise,” he agreed. “Give me a call.”

I shut the door and turned to find Lucy picking up the empty wine bottle. She held it out to me.

“Do you think you could put this in with the recycling? I don’t want this place turning into a dump,” she said.

“It’s one empty wine bottle,” I told her with deliberate indifference.

“It’s trashy,” she informed me. “And we’re not going down that road
this time, is that understood? It’s not happening!” And then she shoved me. I think she just meant to poke me in the shoulder for emphasis, but her anger got the better of her and she
shoved
me. It really hurt.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s your problem?”

“You
are my problem. Jesus—I would just, I would just like to fucking kill you!” she hissed. I didn’t particularly enjoy the fact that she had walked in on me making out with a cute guy, but this was a bit out of control.

“Chill out, will you?” I said. “That guy—”

“I don’t want to hear about that guy.”

“He lives in the building.”

“He lives in the building! Terrific! Is that enough of a reason to bring him up here and have sex with him?”

“I didn’t have sex with him! I was trying to make friends with him—”

“Well, you seem to have succeeded. Well done, Tina. And what’s this?” She looked at the front door, where my rigged-up spring bolt and door chains sparkled in the afternoon light.

“It’s my security system,” I said. “Too many people have keys to this place and seem to feel they can let themselves in any time they want. We’re not doing that anymore. If I don’t want people to come in, I’m not going to let them in.”

“I didn’t agree to that.”

“I don’t give a shit if you agree or not,” I said, turning back to television land. It was rough coming down from near-sex with a really hot and deeply problematic guy to getting yelled at by your bossy sister. I needed more wine.

“Don’t you dare walk away from me,” Lucy snarled over my shoulder. She was spitting mad. I headed down the hallway.

“Relax, would you?” I said. “I’m getting myself a glass of wine.”

“Don’t you think you’ve had enough to drink?”

“No, actually, I don’t. Want some?” I cut through the TV room and back to the laundry room to score another bottle from the stash.

“No,” Lucy countered, tossing her briefcase onto the couch. It landed right next to Vince’s jacket and tie. “Oh look. Your friend, whom you’re not sleeping with, left his clothes.”

“Yeah, great, I’ll get them back to him. It’ll give me an excuse to go up to his place and not fuck him there.”

“This is no joke, Tina!”

“Lucy, if you want to sell this place, we have to get by the co-op board,” I said, returning with the fresh bottle. “And they can stop a sale if they feel like it, and right now that is how they feel, they don’t like us. Oh wait! One of them likes us—Vince likes me.”

“He wants to have sex with you. It’s not quite the same thing.”

“For most people it’s close enough. And if you had sex on a regular basis, you might know things like that.”

“Thank you for once again elevating the conversation. Really, it’s terrific having you around to put things in perspective.” Lucy stood there in her tight gray suit, not even looking at me, her thumbs moving restlessly through the air above her ever-present BlackBerry, and I knew that nothing I said, sensible or otherwise, would make an impression.

“Look, is there a reason you’re here?” I said. “Is there some dazzling legal maneuver you’re about to pull, or did you just stop by to make me feel shitty?”

Lucy paused for a good long time before deigning to answer. She kept reading her BlackBerry, then decided she was done with that, pocketed it, and reached for her briefcase before glancing in my direction. “Well, let me just tell you this much: we don’t have to worry about the co-op board for now,” she finally said. She snapped open the clasps on her briefcase, flipped the cover up, and reached inside for a crisp manila envelope, which she tossed onto the coffee table. I could tell by the way it hit the wood that it contained freshly minted documents.

“What’s that?” I said, feigning indifference. I was pretty sure it was something big, but she was really working my nerves so I thought I’d return the favor.

“You can read, right? I mean, you did acquire that skill before you dropped out of college to run off with some loser, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I can read, but since I’m stupid it takes me a real long time. Maybe you could just summarize in ten words or less and tell me what I’m supposed to get myself all upset about today.”

“We have a court date.”

“A court date for what?”

“The Drinans are objecting to the will.”

“Well, what does that mean?”

“They’re claiming that their father was mentally incapacitated when the will was executed and that Mom used undue influence, and that we came into possession illegally, so they’re suing for damages.”

“Well, they
are
damaged, but whose fault is that? Not mine.”

“They’re suing you for it. And they’re suing me, and they’re suing Daniel and Alison to the tune of twenty million dollars.”

“Come on.”

“You asked me to summarize.”

This sounded so bizarre I couldn’t believe it. I decided it might be smart to take a look at the documents myself, so I opened the envelope. Lucy went back to making love to her BlackBerry.

“There’s a preliminary hearing in Surrogate’s Court on December seventh,” she said. “That’s three months from now. It’s unheard of to get a date set that quickly, so they’re clearly pulling strings. They also went judge shopping—we’re scheduled to be heard by the one judge who thinks she can do whatever she feels like with the law. The one who’s a cop, he probably had enough clout in the legal system to put this where they wanted it. The other one is some sort of principal at the Dalton School, so he knows absolutely everybody. In any case, they pulled strings.”

I paged through the papers in front of me and tried to make sense of them. They seemed utterly incomprehensible, and for a moment I thought,
Maybe Lucy’s right, maybe I never really did learn to read properly
.

“They’re suing us—like
suing
us, for money?”

“That’s a separate action, they’re just trying to scare us. They want us to make a counteroffer.”

“What kind of counteroffer?”

“Well, let’s see, what do they want? The apartment! I think if we offered them the apartment, this would all go away.”

“What if the judge gives them the apartment?”

“We’re not going to let that happen.”

“But they’re suing us? So we could lose the apartment, and then if they win the lawsuit we’ll have to pay them money too?”

“You’re not going to have to worry about that, though, are you, Tina, because you are completely without resources. Isn’t that right? Do you have any money left from the stash you found in Bill’s wallet?”

“Some,” I admitted.

“How much?”

“Maybe a hundred?”

“You’re going to have to come up with some more and buy some decent clothes. And I do mean decent, none of this boho-loser-chic stuff you think is so cool. A skirt and a blouse and sensible shoes. Something good and ugly. You’re going to have to stop dressing like a slut.”

“Anything else, mein führer?”

“When there is, I’ll let you know.” She picked up her briefcase and looked at me, sprawled on the couch, wineglass in hand, watching her with my best sullen disregard.

“Before you take off, can you at least tell me who my lawyer is? You said you were going to replace that nice Egg Man. Did that happen?”

“We have a new and very good lawyer, yes. His name is Ira Grossman, he’s very experienced in these kinds of litigious inheritance situations.”

“Can I call him?”

“No, you can’t call him! Every time you call him it costs a hundred dollars, which you don’t have!”

“Yeah but—”

“Tina, please, I don’t have time to hold your hand on every single thing. If you have questions about your legal status in this situation, read the pleadings.”

“I can’t understand this shit!”

“No? Then I guess you’re going to have to rely on me and Daniel and Alison to tell you what to do. Get that shit off the door, buy some decent clothes, and keep this place clean. Oh, and tell that guy to come down here and get rid of the moss. Sotheby’s has agreed to
represent the apartment as a historic property, and no one is going to understand a roomful of moss when they start to show the place.”

“How come—”

“That’s all you have to worry about. Okay? Okay?”

“Okay.”

She smiled grimly, as if she found it satisfactory to hear me say “okay,” but she didn’t look satisfied. She looked like her suit was too tight and she wasn’t eating enough red meat and her shoes hurt. She had little gray smudges under her eyes, and her hair was pulled back in a bun, which was an extremely bad look for her, and usually she knew better than to try it. Her mouth was pinched together, bitter and worried, and for the first time I saw what Vince had seen instantly under the skin of my smart, ferocious sister: an old schoolmarm in a rage because the world had overlooked her.

“Hey, Lucy,” I said, feeling completely awful all of a sudden. “No kidding, Lucy. Maybe we should just offer to split it with them. Even split five ways, we’d all end up with a ton of money. Has anyone offered to split it?”

“I don’t believe that’s been discussed, no,” she said, with a kind of infantile brightness that had yet another sneer behind it.

“Yeah, I guess that’s pretty stupid,” I said. “Sorry. ‘Compromise.’ What a boneheaded idea.”

“You said it, not me,” she murmured under her breath.

She left. And I decided to stop asking questions nobody had any answers for anyway and just let things happen.

T
HREE DAYS LATER, WHEN
L
EN CAME BY TO CHECK IN ON CURRENT
events, he was not particularly happy with the state of his mossery. He was thoroughly appalled that someone had been messing with his trays, knocking over bags of mulch, and tossing shards of glass all over the floor. During our abortive but completely memorable makeout session, Vince and I had also, it seems, damaged a display containing a delicate species of hornwort, several large sections of which had turned a distressing shade of mottled brown. The picture of the tree was so far askew it looked like it was about to fall off the wall.

“For seven hundred dollars a month, I think it’s understood that the mossery is protected space,” he informed me, straightening the picture with annoyed precision. “Your mother took great care with it; you, I see, do not have her touch. I’m going to have to ask you to refrain from even entering my room unless I am here to supervise you.”

“It’s not your room, Len,” I reminded him, a tad defensive, since I knew he was right. “You’re just renting it.”

“Renting it from whom, that’s the question,” he said with a sharp little nod of contempt. He leaned past me to open the tiniest sliver of a closet door that was squashed between the refrigerator and the wall. He retrieved a whisk broom and a dustpan, which had been hung just inside the door at eye level. I watched as he swept the shards of glass together and disposed of them in the plastic dustbin next to the sink. Then he swept the floor again, and then he did it a third time, each time picking up ever more delicate pieces of broken glass. Then he reached up, pulled a roll of paper towels out of the cabinet above the moss, and dabbed carefully at every corner of the linoleum, finding little sparkles of glass dust everywhere. He folded the paper towel, put it to one side, and considered the dirty red wine stain that had spilled in ugly blotches everywhere.
Honestly, when Vince knocked his wineglass over, it hadn’t seemed like there was much in it. But there was more than I thought and now those little spots of wine had set. Len glanced up at me, his face a mask of disappointed annoyance. “How long has this been here?” he asked, exhausted by my incompetence.