Twelve Rooms with a View (38 page)

“I’m sorry about that, Mr. Long. I feel bad that you’re being dragged into this on our account,” I told him.

“Not on your account, no. Bill’s wishes were very clear; he meant to leave the apartment and all his worldly goods to your mother, Tina. I am here because legally, as executor of his estate, I am required to enact his wishes.”

“Yeah, but he didn’t mean to leave the apartment to
us,”
I said. Mr. Long tilted his head, like he had to sort of dramatically think about that, even though it seemed to me that all the legal shenanigans we were about to embark on were premised on that fact.

“Have you spoken to your lawyer about that thought?” he asked me.

“Not precisely,” I admitted.

“Perhaps you should, in private,” he advised. “Before you give your deposition. Opposing counsel will be present, and the deposition itself
will be recorded as a legal document. So the question of Bill’s intent, as you were aware of it, will surely be raised. Haven’t you been prepped on this?”

“They’re going to prep me just before I go in, some underling is going to run through it with me,” I explained. But I was kind of touched that he felt like taking care of me. “What kind of things do they ask you in a deposition?” I asked.

“Well, they’ll probably ask you about your mother, the last time you saw her, what she told you about Bill, things like that.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I meant you. What kinds of questions will they ask
you?”

“Oh.” He nodded, as if that were a really intelligent thing for me to be curious about. “Yes, I will be deposed on completely different matters. Although there will be some overlap. I’m probably the only person who really spent time with Bill and Olivia together, and they’ll want to know about that.”

“You did?” I asked. I don’t know why this hadn’t occurred to me. From the start everybody had said he represented Bill and his estate. And I remembered Lucy saying he was Mom’s lawyer, the day we found out about the apartment. “Of course you saw them together; they had to come into your office and sign things.”

“No, no, they never came into the office,” he corrected me. “Bill wouldn’t leave the apartment. I went to them.”

“You went to them? You went to the apartment?”

“Of course. I had dinner with them many times.”

“You had
dinner
with them?”

“Yes, your mother was a lovely cook.”

“My mother was not a lovely cook, Mr. Long,” I said, almost laughing out loud. “My mother never cooked.”

“Oh. Well. She cooked for Bill. And for me, when I would come by with a legal matter.”

This was so far out of the realm of possibility I didn’t know what to say. “Well, what did she cook?” I finally asked, trying not to sound utterly incredulous.

“She would roast a tenderloin or a chicken,” he replied. “Once we had salmon fillets with some kind of sauce. I think it was an anchovy sauce, it was delicious. And Brussels sprouts in a Dijon mustard dressing, she made that once. There were concerns about Bill’s diet, which she was quite alert to. No potatoes, whole-grain rice occasionally. Dessert was usually fresh fruit. Pineapple. Strawberries when they were in season. Or mango! With a little yogurt, we had that several times.”

“Were there napkins? Napkin rings? Was there a
tablecloth?”
My incredulity had tipped over into a completely childish sarcasm and contempt. Mr. Long the Egg Man tilted his head thoughtfully for a moment and answered the question.

“We used paper napkins. There was no tablecloth because all they really had was that little coffee table next to the television set. I presume you’ve seen it?”

“Of course I’ve seen it.”

“Yes. That’s where we would eat, so mostly we held our plates on our laps. It was quite pleasant, really, sort of like a little picnic, except with lovely food.”

“Made by my mother.”

“Once Bill made the salad.”

“You know what she used to cook for us? Fish sticks. Spaghetti with Ragú sauce from the jar. Hamburgers, the kind that came in those little flat frozen circles. When she really felt like doing something special for us, you know what we’d get? Frozen
waffles.”

“Really?” said Mr. Long.

“Yeah, really,” I said. I felt like I was trapped in a cocktail shaker and someone was giving it a go; the inside of my head had become completely dislodged. “She was still drinking, right? I mean,
please
don’t tell me, I don’t care how shitty it sounds, but I really don’t want to find out that once she was finished with the three of us my mother actually fixed her life. There was vodka all over the apartment when I got there, just vodka and red wine and and and nothing—like nothing else was there when I got there. She was still just a big drunk.”

“They both drank.” Mr. Long nodded, and like everything else it sounded like a fact coming from him. “But I would never have called
either of them ‘a big drunk.’ Neither one of them, to my knowledge, drank before six.” He stopped talking, like that was enough facts for now.

“What do you mean, they didn’t drink before six?”

“I don’t know if it was true when I was not present. But whenever I was present they did not drink before six. They had a certain reverence for the phrase ‘cocktail hour.’”

“But then they kept drinking.”

“We would enjoy wine with dinner and then I would leave. I don’t know if they continued to drink after I left.”

“Cocktail hour. When I was a kid, cocktail hour started at noon,” I said. I sounded like a big whiner, and in fact my voice actually cracked in the most horrifying way, as if I were about to start crying. Mr. Long just stared at the floor with a sort of deliberate and embarrassed disinclination to continue the conversation. “I’m happy, no, I mean I’m really happy for them,” I added. “You too. I’m happy you got to have these lovely dinners with Bill and my mom, that sounds terrific.”

“It was, actually. She was a very good cook. Now that you tell me she didn’t cook often before she met Bill, I understand the pleasure she took in it. There was always a real sense of surprise that she was good at it. And now I know why.”

“Yeah, all those lovely dinners sound terrific.” I picked up one of the magazines on the table so I could act like I didn’t care. Like all the rest of the magazines in that swank office, it looked boring as hell; besides which, I knew I was behaving horribly, so I immediately put it back down.

“She was his cleaning lady. So you knew that, right, before he married her? She was just, like, his cleaning lady?”

“Yes, of course I did. I was the one who introduced them.”

“You
introduced
them?”

“Oh. Yes. It hadn’t occurred to me that you didn’t know. Your mother was doing some cleaning for me, and I knew Bill was looking for someone as well, so I introduced them.”

“Well, how did you know her?” I asked, feeling, inexplicably, more and more outraged by all this.

“She lived a few blocks from me in Jersey City. She advertised her
cleaning services in one of the smaller local papers, and I responded to her ad.”

“That’s, this is all just—crazy,” I said.

“Why is it crazy?”

“So you
knew
her? You
really
knew her?”

“I knew her in several different contexts and through several rather significant changes in her circumstances. So I know about those events, and her experience of those events. Is that what you mean?”

“I—don’t think—I knew her,” I said a bit lamely.

There was silence at this. I’m sure I was just embarrassing the hell out of old Stuart Long.

“Perhaps you should discuss the gaps in your information with your sisters,” he finally suggested. “They seem to have had more consistent contact with her in the past few years.”

“Yes, that’s a good idea,” I murmured, embarrassed for us both now. “Of course, that’s obviously what I should do. I apologize, Mr. Long, really. Please excuse me. I think maybe I need to use the restroom. I don’t, actually, need to use the restroom. I’m not kidding, you have to tell me. This is not, no. All you can say, go talk to Alison and Lucy because they were
around
more? I would but I sincerely doubt that they were paying attention. Nobody was paying attention, nobody was
talking
to her. You should hear the shit I hear from the people who live in that building—they can’t get over the fact that she was a
cleaning lady
from
New Jersey
, and that meant something—that she was a thief and a liar and cheating Bill and keeping him drunk. Because there’s no way it was about anything except the apartment, but that’s not her either, it’s not—it’s not … None of it sounds like anything I remember. None of it.” I stopped finally. “Sorry. Sorry. I don’t know why I’m ranting, I really do sound like an idiot.”

Mr. Long waited, probably to see if there would be any further useless outbursts. When there weren’t, he folded his fingers together and considered his response. And then he considered some more. It seemed to take him forever to decide what to tell me that might rise to the level of some truth about my mother’s life.

“She took very good care of him,” he finally said. “His health was
quite poor those last few years; that was why he never went out. He was afraid to be left alone, but she didn’t seem to mind how much he needed her. And he appreciated everything she did for him, very much. He wanted her to have a home after he was gone. There was nothing dishonest or dishonorable in their relationship. They took great pleasure in each other. It was my impression that they loved each other very much. That at least is what I will report in my deposition.”

“What was Sophie like?” I asked.

Mr. Long looked at me sharply—at least as sharply as a guy who looks like an egg can look. He didn’t have a chance to tell me to mind my own business, though. One of Ira’s legal underlings suddenly appeared and smiled at me from inside his suit. “Tina? Hi, I’m Jackson, I’m going to be prepping your deposition today. I’m so glad I poked my head out, no one knew if you were here or not!”

“Yeah, I kind of slithered in, forgot to tell the girl at the desk,” I said.

“Not a problem, not a problem,” he reassured me. He held out his hand like he was guiding me to my execution. “Right in here, please, we’ll just get started.”

J
ENNIFER WAS NOT ENTIRELY SYMPATHETIC TO MY POSITION ABOUT
my mother, but that may have been because she didn’t understand it. “Okay, so you were mad at her for being a drunk, but now you’re mad because she
wasn’t
a drunk?” she asked.

“I don’t know that she wasn’t a drunk,” I said. “All he said was she stopped drinking. Which she didn’t even, stop drinking.”

“But she didn’t drink as much.”

“That’s what he said. When I was a teenager, she like drank all the time and then passed out in the middle of the day. Then we grow up and she suddenly gets it together to fall in love with a total stranger and
not
drink except at like six o’clock, when everybody drinks?” I said, pouring a huge shot of vodka over a couple of ice cubes.

“My parents drink wine,” Jennifer informed me. She was delicately perched on the minuscule counter in my little kitchen, her plaid skirt falling perfectly over her skinny knees, while she watched me make myself a cocktail. Her geometry book was lying open on the floor, where she had left it when I returned from my torturous afternoon. She had paid Katherine off with a series of minor bribes all week—a Tootsie Roll, a Blow Pop, a two-pack of Mint Milano cookies—so she could visit me for an hour each day while Katherine played in her room with the door locked. I thought it was a pretty clever bit of plotting, and I had come to find it unimaginably delightful to have her there. Lucy and Daniel and Alison were off giving depositions and living their lives, that cloud on the title had scared off the real estate agent for the time being, and Len was probably plotting revenge on me, so it felt pretty lonely in that big apartment. Jennifer was good company in a kind of sardonic teenage way.

“So what was this thing you had to do?” she asked. “You were being decomposed?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what it was, I was being
decomposed
by a bunch of bloodless vampires also known as
lawyers,”
I said. “It was
endless
. This total moron,
Jackson
, that was his first
name
, I hate it when people have first names that are last names. That became cool,
why
? You have to ask yourself. I’m not kidding. This guy, he’s got like the most astonishing suit you’ve ever seen, and even though it’s
my
deposition,
I’m
the one who’s supposed to be answering questions, even so he manages to squeeze into the conversation his weekend in the Hamptons and where he gets his suit made. I mean, who cares? It’s
my
deposition.”

“He sounds like, you know, half of Manhattan,” Jennifer noted.

“Right? Plus then the whole thing is about him telling me what not to say. They’re going to ask you questions about your mother, and these are the things
not
to tell them. You know what I wasn’t allowed to tell them? Everything. Seriously. Everything. Every question, he would say, ‘what’s your favorite memory of your mother,’ and I would say, ‘her perfume,’ and he would say, ‘no no, you can’t say that,’ and I would say, but that is my favorite memory of my mother.”

“She had nice perfume?”

“She had the most expensive perfume in the world.”

“Wow,” said Jennifer.

“Yes,” I agreed. “But she never wore it, because it was really expensive, so she couldn’t afford to wear it, and besides my dad never took her anywhere to wear it.”

“Well, that’s a drag.”

“Seriously,” I said. “So I tried to explain that to this—asshole,
Jackson
—because he’s all ‘you have to be more specific.’ And then when I tell him that, what I just said, which
is
specific, he’s all, ‘no no, you can’t say that.’ And I’m like, well what do you want me to say? And he’s like, ‘tell the truth, be specific, but don’t give them any rope they can hang you with.’ And I’m like, what do you mean, rope? And he’s like—‘they are trying to prove that your mother had a questionable character. You cannot let them prove that.’”