Twelve Rooms with a View (36 page)

We took the vodka to the great room, and I poured Frank a stiff drink. He knocked it back without protest, and I poured him another.

“What’s wrong with him?” Jennifer asked.

“It’s complicated,” I started, but the vodka had brought vitality back to his spirit, and he started rambling again, in Spanish. “Frank,” I said, taking his hand. “Frank. Speak English, Frank.”

“No, it’s okay,” said Jennifer calmly. “He’s upset. He loves her, but it’s hopeless, she is a goddess and he is nothing. And his father, there’s some—
que quieres compartir con nosotros tu familia
, Frank?”

So it turns out that a private-school education in New York City is pretty thorough. Also, Jennifer was in the Spanish Club, so her comprehension didn’t fall completely apart when someone started talking fast.

“He lives with his father and his two brothers in a one-bedroom apartment in Queens,” Jennifer translated. “He came from the Dominican Republic six years ago and sent money to them faithfully, but they were never grateful, never—they became jealous. No matter what he sent, it made them unhappy and greedy for more and so they came here. He is here legally but they are not. He can’t, they use up all the money—they—” He interrupted her with a long explanation, and she asked him some questions before continuing. “He doesn’t blame them because the life they had in the Dominican Republic was nothing, there are no jobs there and they want to be men, but they cannot find work, and if the INS finds out that they’re staying with him he’s afraid he’ll be deported too. He told one of his brothers
—como se llama tu hermano
horrible—”

“Manuel,” Frank answered, trying to continue and contradict her about the “horrible” part, but she cut him off.

“He has a horrible brother who threatens him. He is supporting all of them, and this brother, Manuel,
threatens
Frank that if he doesn’t bring home more and more money he’ll have to turn himself in to the INS and they will all have to go back, even though Frank totally has his green card, I know he does because the building would never hire him if he didn’t, and my mom was on the committee that interviewed him. They love him here, they’d never let that happen. Frank,” she continued, turning her attention back to him.
“Es impossible, lo que se dice su hermano. El es un mentiroso. Un mentiroso,”
she insisted. He protested firmly, but I could tell he knew that whatever she was telling him was right.
“Porque no ayudan?”
she continued.
“Porque no trabajan, todo su familia viven aqui en Nueva York, aqui nadie le importa si usted tiene una tarjeta verde! Aqui a la Edgewood, si, es importante, but muchas otras lugares no no no. Todos los restaurantes en la cuidad, nadie le importa!”

He disagreed with her. They argued back and forth. He finally started to cry. She put her arms around him and he wept about his hopeless situation, the trap of his family, his love for a woman who was so far above him that the only word he could use to describe her was
diosa
. Now Frank was drinking straight out of the bottle, and by the time we had the whole story out of him, he was stupefied with grief and completely smashed, so there was really no way he could go back to work. I got him a pillow and a blanket from my bedroom, and he fell asleep on the floor, with the light fading from gold to blue all around him.

Jennifer looked up at the changing light and checked her watch. “I’ve got to go,” she said, nervous. “I left Katherine playing in her room and we locked the door and she knows not to open it? But she’s seven, she could just forget and open the door and then anyone could come in and then what would happen.”

I was following her back, through the kitchenette and the laundry room. As we moved, she quickly filled me in on what she had found out by just hanging around, hiding behind doors, and listening in on the flurry of phone calls that had come in and out of the Whites’ apartment over the past two days.

“People are really mad,” she said. “Mom told them she knows you and you’re okay. I told her she had to tell them that, because you are such a good babysitter and a godsend, but you know there’re a lot of rich assholes in this building, and they kept talking about you and your sisters and how this is such a famous apartment, that, um, you know—they can’t just let it go down the toilet, shit like that.”

“Oh that’s lovely,” I said. “Such swell manners they have here on the Upper West Side.”

“Oh, you know people say things like that, and you know.” She shrugged, not knowing how to say what came next. She decided to just say it. “You know, Tina, they didn’t like your mom.”

“Some of them did. Len did.”

“I don’t think you should trust Len, Tina,” Jennifer suggested cautiously. “Mom said, she was talking to him in the elevator? And he said he knew your mom, they had a deal where he kept some plants here, so he came by all the time, and he saw her and Bill together, and she kept Bill drunk so she could get him to sign things.”

“He didn’t say that.”

“That’s what my mom said he said. He claims to be a real witness, like he
saw
all this and he’s ready to testify. And he had some idea about having a big press conference? To get you out of here?”

“Yeah, I was down there earlier. It was a total scene down in the lobby.”

“Well, Mom said that was his idea.”

“It was his idea? Len’s?” The sheer betrayal of it hit me like a fist to the stomach. I felt sick.

“That’s what she said.”

“It’s lies. My mom wouldn’t, she wasn’t like that. She …” I stopped myself, completely caught by how much I didn’t know about my own mother and what she might or might not have been doing for the last three years of her life. “I don’t know why he would do something like this.”

Jennifer looked kind of sad, like she was sorry that I wasn’t savvier about people like Len. “They’re all like that here, Tina. They’re all, well, you know. They live in the Edge,” she concluded lamely.

I gave her a quick hug good-bye as she glanced around the lost room at all the junk and the thrown-away details of the lives of the people who had lived there. Katherine was apparently still content; we could hear her up above, chattering to herself in some near corner of her room.

“Frank’s right, you know,” Jennifer suddenly announced, turning back for a second. “Julianna Gideon
is
a goddess. And I mean, in my social studies class they all talk about democracy and America and immigrants and New York being this big melting pot, but he’s a
doorman
from the Dominican Republic and he’s got a horrible family, and she’s like, a
goddess
. And the Gideons just have pots of money, they are truly stinking rich, just like everyone else who lives here. You don’t think about things like that. But, you know, it really is hopeless.” And with that hopeless remark, she ascended to her sister’s room.

I
N MY ENORMOUS FRONT ROOM UNDER A MOONLESS SKY, ON A BED
of horrible mustard-colored shag carpet, Frank slept the sleep of the hopelessly drunk while I considered the master keys he had handed me earlier. It was a relatively innocuous-looking set, five in all, two of them larger than the others. Those two clearly had some outdoor use; I was less interested in them. But I was quite interested in the three smaller keys, which presumably would let you into any apartment in the building.

Those keys were mine for as long as it might take Frank to sleep it off. Unfortunately, all three were stamped with the words DO NOT DUPLICATE, so I was relatively quick to conclude that any hardware store that didn’t take bribes would refuse to duplicate them. So all I had was three or four hours before Frank woke up and wanted his keys back. I didn’t waste a lot of time thinking about my options. Abducting that ancient plant might give me some leverage with Len, which I definitely needed. Jennifer’s account of his lies, along with my own glimpse of his snarling rage, was unnerving, and while I didn’t know what he was up to, I did know I had to get him to back down. I pulled out my throwaway cell and dialed.

“I have a way to get us into Len’s apartment,” I told her. “How fast can you get over here?”

There was a pause. “Twenty minutes,” she said.

“Okay, do you know where the service entrance is?”

“I lived in the Edge for seven years,” she said. “Of course I know where the service entrance is.”

“Well, then can you tell me?” I asked. “I think it would be better if I met you there and we snuck up the back.”

Twenty-five minutes later we were on the landing in front of Len’s
door. Charlie didn’t ask a lot of questions about how I had gotten my hands on the master keys; she was blessedly uncurious about anything other than getting through the door of her father’s apartment and making off with her plant. She stood silently behind me as I lay down on the floor of the landing and peeked through the crack at the bottom of the door to see if any lights were on inside. I hoped that Len was still downstairs with the rest of that hysterical co-op board, but I needed to be sure. After five minutes of utter silence it seemed safe to assume we were alone.

So within half an hour, I found myself standing in Len’s silent greenhouse next to his tall, elflike daughter, wondering what we were looking for. The last time I had seen the plant, it was small, and in a little white plastic cup.

“Do you know what it looks like?” I whispered. A quiet breeze blew through the lush foliage of the deciduous room, but that was the only answer I got. Charlie glided ahead into the night, and before I could find my bearings and follow her, she was gone.

“Shit,” I said, to myself mostly. “Charlie?” There was no answer, and the place was pitch black. I felt a wave of panic; this wasn’t the plan, that she would just go off and leave me standing like a dope by the front door. Or maybe that was the plan. I realized that we hadn’t actually made a plan, and Charlie did know the layout of the greenhouse since she had lived there for seven years. So I waited by the door for an exceptionally long time, and then I started to wonder if I shouldn’t just leave.

That is doubtless what I should have done, but it didn’t feel right. For a sick moment I realized that once again I had put all my trust in a person I barely knew, and maybe since Len had surprised me with his many unexplained betrayals, I shouldn’t expect his only daughter to behave all that much better. What was she doing back there? Why was this taking so long? “Hey, Charlie,” I whispered, taking a step forward into the darkness. “Come on. Charlie?” I waited for another moment, listening for any signs of non-plant-based life. I heard nothing but water and the strange omnipresent sense of things growing. Charlie had completely disappeared. I took another step forward.

Len had rigged up a series of night-lights, which cast spooky little glows in obscure corners of the greenhouse, but they were next to useless under the weight of that moonless sky. The foliage was dense, and lights from the street below were too far away to do any good; the few leaves I could make out were black against black, and only my fingers could really discern the subtle differences as I moved deeper into their jungle pathways. My eyes couldn’t seem to get used to the darkness, so I finally closed them to keep from straining for sense, and slowly the logic of the conservatory, room after room, bloomed in my head. The kid had said the seeds were from Africa, and the Latin notes on the woodcut print mentioned Malaysia, so there were only a few places in the greenhouse it might be.

And then, past the orchid room, right on the edge of the poisonous plants room, on a small platform lit with a bank of dull purple neon lights, was a small shrub with thick, short stems and fierce shiny dark green leaves. The tiniest of bulbs was forming on one branch.

“Holy shit,” I said.

It wasn’t very big—nowhere near as big as the picture in the mossery indicated it might be. But even though it hadn’t flowered yet, it was clearly the plant in the medieval print on my wall. There was something peculiar about how specifically it matched, almost as if it were a carefully manufactured bonsai version of something much larger but equally specific that had appeared on the earth two thousand years ago. It was the perfect example of the botanist’s art; every scrap of knowledge that humanity had attained over centuries of cultivation had been showered on this strange growing thing, and it virtually quivered with its own perfection. That may have been the effect of the three separate humidifiers that surrounded its perch under the neon lights and breathed a hissing steam upon the leaves and branches; in any event, there was no question that this was the piece of greenery I was looking for. I reached out to touch it.

“How many times do I have to remind you, Tina,” Len whispered, right in my ear. “It’s called a poisonous plant for a reason.”

I just about jumped out of my skin. “Man, Len, what the fuck!” I threw the words at him fast, assuming friendly aggression was the only
path available in these dicey circumstances. “You’re like a fucking snake hiding in the grass. How long have you been here?”

“Since I’m not the one who’s been caught breaking and entering, I don’t actually have to answer that,” he said, unseen. “And as I recall, the snake encouraged Eve to pick the apple, even though it went against her best interests. I’m suggesting quite the opposite.”

“I came up to talk to you,” I said, tap-dancing wildly. “I’ve been calling about the moss, and you don’t even pick up the phone.”

“You broke into my apartment in the middle of the night so that you could talk about moss? I don’t know that I’d take that approach with the police, Tina, it does not sound very likely. Especially since I can honestly testify that I found you sneaking around my apartment, looking to steal a rare plant that is very valuable to me.”

“You know, Len, it’s not right that you took that kid’s plant. Charlie told me you just took it and now you’re hiding up here, and you won’t call her back. She’s the one who should be calling the police.” I looked around, hoping that Charlie would take this cue to reveal herself. She did not.

“She’s deluded,” the voice in the darkness observed.