Twelve Rooms with a View (39 page)

“A ‘questionable character’?” said Jennifer. “What does that mean?”

“It means, I don’t know, it means—I don’t know what it means,” I said. “But I’ve, honestly, I’m really thinking that I just want to do this
right, I don’t want to screw things up again. My mom—this is my mom we’re talking about, and my sisters—and
I
—I love this place! I love it! I don’t want to screw this up. I don’t want to give them
rope
. There’s already been too much—and then of
course
the other lawyer—”

“There’s another lawyer?”

“Yes. From the other side, representing the Drinans, who truth be told, I’m sorry, but what they did is also not so great.”

“What did they do?”

“It doesn’t matter. But this other lawyer—the questions—it’s all so—the things they said. And tried to get me to say.”

“Like what?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“You’re in a bad mood,” Jennifer observed. She hopped off the counter and started to look through the cabinets. “How come you never have anything to eat around here?”

“I have things to eat,” I said. “There’s half a sandwich in the refrigerator.”

“That thing is really old, Tina. I looked at it before you got back, and it is like truly disgusting. I’m not saying you’re anorexic or anything, but seriously. If I were you I wouldn’t wait until I was sixty to figure out how to eat.”

I looked at the bottle of orange juice in my hand and actually considered throwing it at her. I’m not kidding, a wave of something truly evil came over me, I even raised the bottle for a moment and looked up at her with the thought in my heart,
just throw it at her
. I could feel the rage physically rise up the back of my neck; it was the way I felt the last time I did something truly worth getting arrested for. Jennifer just took a startled little step back and held up her hands, confused but sensible.

“Whoa, Tina, what’s up, are you okay? I didn’t mean anything. I just meant, you should go to the grocery store and get some eggs or something, crackers, carrot sticks, you know, stuff to eat when you get hungry. Or a chicken. Even if you don’t like to cook, the grocery stores sell these roasted chickens; they’re pretty good.”

Honestly, what she was saying was so simple, but my head seriously wasn’t processing. I set down the orange juice and looked around the
counter. “You know what, though, is why, why isn’t there a cookbook, then?” I asked her. I opened my arms and included the entire kitchen in my conversation, as if it, or Jennifer, or anyone, really, might know the answer to this question. “It’s not like I haven’t looked! Where are the recipes? How would you know what to do? If you never did it? How would you know?”

“You can buy cookbooks pretty much anywhere,” Jennifer told me, strangely and wonderfully knowing what I was asking.

“Then why isn’t there one here?” I asked. “Where did she learn how to do it?”

“I don’t know,” said Jennifer. “Don’t people just know how to cook?”

“No,” I told her. “They
don’t.”

We looked. For forty minutes. We went through all the cabinets and in all the boxes under the bed in Bill and Olivia’s bedroom. We looked under the couch. We looked in closets that had nothing in them; we checked the shelves over the washer and the dryer; we looked under the sinks in the bathrooms, and then we went through the boxes of books one more time. There were no cookbooks; Olivia seemingly never bought one.

“Or she threw it away after he died,” Jennifer speculated.

Which is finally what made me cry. It wasn’t like I was bawling or anything, but tears just started running down my face and I couldn’t seem to stop them.

“Oh,” Jennifer said, sort of embarrassed and surprised in a sad, sardonic way. “I don’t know. I mean, what do I know?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

“No, it’s okay, you had a long day.”

“You have homework,” I observed.

“Yeah,” she said. “Okay, I’ll see you tomorrow.” And with that she turned, grabbed her geometry book off the floor, and fled.

After an hour of sitting in my mother’s little living room in front of the blank television screen, alongside her empty kitchen, I went out and bought myself a roast chicken. I couldn’t eat it, unfortunately; once it was on the kitchen counter it just looked stupid to me. So I put it in the refrigerator and channel-flipped for half the night.

No matter what you do, it’s never enough, I thought.
No matter what you do, it’s never enough
. Mom said that all the time, that was one of my big memories, along with the perfume she never wore,
no matter what you do it’s never enough
. And that’s what I did with the entire next day. I sat around in my empty apartment, counting and recounting the last of my money, trying to think what I could to make more, having a cocktail, looking through someone else’s photographs, channel-flipping, counting my money again, thinking,
no matter what you do it’s never enough
. This went on for an entire day before I changed the mantra to
to hell with it
, got myself up off the couch, and walked to the store.

They have a grocery store on the Upper West Side called Fairway, of all things, and it’s famous as grocery stores go, so that is where I went. I fought my way through enormous crowds of shoppers while trying to figure out what ingredients to buy to make a real meal for myself. As it turned out, they had little recipe cards perched everywhere, and they were free. It was like a service that the store offered for people like me who didn’t have a clue: you take one of these cards, buy all the ingredients on the card, take it all home and follow the recipe, and then, presto, you’ve cooked a meal. Buying all the ingredients totally cleaned me out cashwise, but I managed to get everything I needed for pasta with scallops and pears in a lemon cream sauce. It sounds fancy, but the instructions made it seem not so hard to cook. I thought of inviting Jennifer to stay for dinner.

Frank was the first to warn me that the evening might not go as planned. “Your sisters are here,” he said as he reached out to help me carry my groceries to the elevator. Not only was he back to being nice Frank, he was particularly nice to me. We had never spoken about what happened the day he confessed his love for Julianna Gideon, but it was there between us. I think just that much is sometimes enough to give people hope.

“Thanks for the warning,” I said, holding the elevator door open so he could put my bags on the floor for me. “Did they say anything?”

“You know what, they did,” said Frank. “They wanted to know what apartment Vince lived in.”

“Vince?
What did they want with Vince?”

Frank gave me a friendly little “who knows” gesture. “I told them I couldn’t give out that information, but the pushy one didn’t believe me.”

“She never takes no for an answer,” I said.

“No, she don’t. Anyway she just went through the junk mail I leave by the radiator until she found it.”

“Yes, she’s clever too.”

“Boy, she is,” he said, tapping the elevator button and sending me off.

As I opened the door to the apartment, I actually felt my heart thump a little in anticipation. I hadn’t seen much of Alison or Lucy lately, and I was getting lonely. It was hard to sit in that apartment night after night and wonder who I was. Plus things had gotten so complicated, with press conferences and clouds and screaming co-op boards, I was frankly hoping that Lucy might explain to me what was going on.

There was Alison, as soon as I stepped in, in the front of the apartment, scrubbing down the kitchen.

“I see you got rid of the moss!” she exclaimed, really happy and excited. She had never let go of her first impression, that the stuff was dangerous and would cost millions to get removed, and we might be on the hook for it even if we didn’t win this case. And now the stuff was miraculously gone. After Charlie had poisoned it beyond repair, I had tossed all the trays into garbage bags and taken them straight out to the Dumpster so the stuff that had killed the moss wouldn’t get everyone else in the building. Alison didn’t know that, of course; all she knew was that the scary green stuff was gone. It made her cheerful.

“How’d your deposition go?” I asked.

“Terrific,” she said. “Just great. I like that Jackson, don’t you? He really thinks we’re going to win this. He was very reassuring.”

“Was he?”

“And so cute! I mean, not my type, I’m happily married! But that doesn’t mean I can’t look!”

“What can I do for you today, Alison?”

“Oh, Lucy and I just thought maybe we should come over and help you keep this place clean,” she explained with that cheerful smile. “It just didn’t seem fair that you should have to do all the work of keeping this big place presentable while the lawyers and the real estate people and the people who run the building try and work out their problems. I mean, who knows how long that is going to take! And you’re not a slave!”

“There’s not that much to do, actually,” I told her, trying to figure this out. “Most of the rooms don’t get used. The moss thing, as you’ve noticed, has been taken care of.”

“So that man who owned it—Len, is that his name?”

“Yes?” I said, wondering where this was going.

“Len Colbert?”

“Did I mention his name to you?”

“I just, I saw a Len on the names for the co-op board, and I wondered if that was him.”

“Yes, that is him. He was the one ranting at that press conference they threw in the lobby, where they told the entire city of New York that we’re white-trash interlopers. That was his phrase, I think. He got mentioned in all the articles. Lucy’s friend over at the
Times
especially gave him a lot of ink.”

“Well, I didn’t read any of it, because I knew it would upset me, but Daniel did, and he did mention that this Len person seemed particularly upset. And if he’s angry already, we don’t want to make him any angrier. I was going to suggest we should leave the moss where it is.”

“No, it’s gone.”

“Well, maybe you should let him know that if he wants to keep it here, he is welcome,” she said, smiling at me brightly, like a Girl Scout leader.

“Listen, Alison, is something going on?” I asked. She was being so cheerfully weird I had to comment on it.

“What makes you ask?”

“Oh—nothing.” I could tell that she didn’t want to be the one to deliver whatever bizarre news she and Lucy had come to unload on me, so I decided to spare her for now. “Is Lucy in the back?”

“No, she had to run out for a moment,” Alison reported, nervous.

“Really? Frank said she was up here.”

“She was. She’ll be right back. Would you like some tea? I think I saw some in the closet in the back kitchen. I would love a cup of tea,” she enthused, clearly working to get her act back on the rails.

“Terrific,” I said. “Let’s go do that, then.”

We hiked through the great room and down the endless hallway to the other kitchen. “Hey, Alison, do you remember if Mom ever cooked?” I asked.

“Mom? Cook?” Alison said, startled. The idea seemed as nonsensical to her as it had to me. “Well, she boiled water for spaghetti, I remember her doing that. But that was pretty much the extent of the cooking.”

“Do you cook?” I asked.

“Daniel and I both work, you know that.”

“Lucy doesn’t cook,” I observed.

“When you live in Manhattan, you don’t have to cook. Manhattan is thirty-five square miles of room service!”

“Well, I think I’m going to cook tonight,” I said. “I bought a bunch of groceries because I thought I’d like to try it. You want to stay for dinner?”

“Oh,” she said, like this was a really bad idea.

“You don’t have to stay. I mean, you can stay if you want. It’s probably going to be a disaster. But you never know. I’m making scallops and pears in a lemon cream sauce. I read the recipe, and it doesn’t look as hard as it sounds. You just boil some pasta and sear the scallops and the pears—do you know how to sear?”

“No, I don’t, I really don’t,” she said, inexplicably getting all upset again.

“It’s not that big a deal, I can figure it out.”

“I think that’s Lucy,” she said, picking up the tiny change in the atmosphere that occurs when someone opens the front door of the apartment. “LUCY! IS THAT YOU?” she asked, and then she scurried away.

Even after Frank’s forewarning, I couldn’t put together what their plan was. Lucy had to just come out and announce it to me. She breezed into the kitchen with Alison hovering behind her and tossed it off like a fancy new pair of leather gloves.

“I was just down on the fifth floor talking to your friend Vince,” she told me, as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

“You were what?” I said.

“He really likes you, Tina. Well, we knew that.”

“Okay, can we back up for a second? You went down to see Vince Masterson?”

“His father is the president of the co-op board.”

“So?”

“So we—Daniel and Ira and I, and Alison—think that’s a good relationship to build. Obviously, no one is happy about the co-op’s response to this situation. That press conference they held made a big impression on the media, and Sotheby’s has, well, I think it’s obvious that their interest has cooled. We were all set to move ahead with the renovation, and that, all of it, has been put on hold.”

“What renovation? You want to renovate this place? With what?”

“There are investors willing to come on board with us. We told you this.”

“You did not tell me this.”

“If I didn’t tell you all the details, it’s because you can barely hold on to the three or four in front of you at any given time.”

“Stop talking to me like I’m an idiot, Lucy—”

“I’m not talking to you like you’re an idiot. I’m telling you the facts. You’re angry because we don’t always give them to you; well, I’ll give them to you now if you’ll stop whining long enough to listen.”

“That’s charming.”

“Please, please don’t fight,” Alison interrupted, suddenly near tears. “It’s terrible, Tina. You don’t know how bad things are. We’re going to lose everything. We’re going to
lose.”