Twelve Rooms with a View (41 page)

“What do you mean, they’re evicting me?”

He looked away for a second, annoyed, but it was too late to take it back. “It’s in the bylaws of the building,” he said, reaching for his drink. He shrugged, like this was common knowledge.

“What’s in the fucking bylaws?”

“What I just said! If you don’t have any legal standing—and you don’t, you have none until they settle all the confusion over the wills—”

“There isn’t any confusion over the wills—”

“You have no legal standing, no right at all, Tina, to be in that apartment—”

“Pete Drinan said it was okay. They had an injunction, but it got removed—”

“They don’t get to say! They have no legal standing either! The building gets to say! And the building wants you out.”

“Why? Why?”

“Because you can’t just waltz into one of the most exclusive addresses and take it over; it doesn’t happen that way.”

“I’m hardly taking it over.”

“You’re living in the Livingston Mansion Apartment. It will not be allowed.”

“Tell that to the courts.”

“You’re gone, Tina. Get a clue.”

“Unless what. I’m gone unless
what
?” I asked, feeling a little desperate at the sureness of his knowledge of how places like the Edge worked.

“Unless
nothing,”
he said, laughing now. “It’s a done deal.”

“Then why am I supposed to sleep with you, asshole?” I said. “Why would I do that if they’re kicking me out anyway?” Vince was suddenly caught in the mess of lies he had been telling my sisters and the truths he had been telling me, and his mouth dropped open. It was pathetic. “You can’t do anything for any of us, can you? And you told my sister, you made my sister think that if I slept with you it would make a difference. You got her to sell me out for nothing.”

“No,” he started.

“You’re a fucking piece of shit, Vince,” I told him. And then, louder, as loud as I could, so the whole restaurant could hear me, “You’re a fucking lying piece of
shit.”
And with that I left.

He caught up with me two blocks later, as I stalked up Broadway. I hate heels—they look great on the exit, but then you can never keep it up; boots are much better in a getaway. Unfortunately, though, I was wearing those stupid heels because I was supposed to look all beautiful and sexy for that lying shithead, which meant I could hardly walk, which meant that lying shithead didn’t even have to break a sweat to catch up with me as I stumbled along the sidewalk.

“Tina, I’m sorry. Tina, stop, just stop and listen to me for a second.”

“No.”

“Yes, come on, I’m sorry. I exaggerated. It’s not true what I told you.”

“It sure sounded like the truth. At least, it sounded completely different from all the bullshit that comes out of your mouth otherwise.”

“They
are
kicking you out. They had the vote scheduled for today. But my dad couldn’t be there, so they had to reschedule.”

“Liar.”

“I’m not lying. They need a bunch of signatures to engage in legal action, and he’s the board president so he had to be there. So I did tell your sister I’d put in a good word—”

“If I slept with you.”

“Yes, I did tell her that,” he said, having the grace, finally, to be the tiniest bit embarrassed. “But the fact is, even if he votes for you, it won’t make a difference. They have eleven votes against you. Even if I could swing him your way, you’re gone.”

“Well, then who owns the apartment?” I asked.

“It will take them years to figure that out, and the longer it takes the better it is for the building. I mean, they never liked the Drinans either.”

“It doesn’t matter if they
liked
them or not, it was their apartment!”

“It was the
Livingston
apartment,” Vince corrected me, quite serious for once. He looked startled; there was something about the import of this whole insane situation that I wasn’t getting. “Those people, they came into the building, they weren’t vetted, they just came in.”

“I think they were born there, Vince.”

“It’s not like citizenship, Tina; it’s not like if you’re
born
in a building you have property rights. I didn’t think I’d have to explain that to
you
. And if that first will wasn’t probated? The building has more of a claim than anybody. And maybe they should—you know the story about what happened to the mother, they put her in some loony bin and threw away the key and then she
died
in there. It’s totally Victorian.”

“It’s a Victorian building,” I reminded him.

“Well said, but why should they get the apartment? It was her apartment.”

“What’s your point, Vince?” I asked.

“My point is, neither you or the Drinans is going to get that apartment, I don’t care how hard you try,” Vince said, all convivial now. “It’s the
Livingston Mansion Apartment
, Tina! You might have had a chance with one of the minor apartments. But that one, no way.”

“I see,” I said, although I did not.

“Listen,” he sighed, suddenly filled with pity and goodwill toward me, god knows why. “I’ll see if I can buy you some time. I really can put in a good word, and it might keep dear old dad on the fence for a little while.”

“How many times do I have to sleep with you for that whopping favor?”

“It’s for free,” he said, grinning at this. “Come on, Tina, let’s grab a cab, you can’t walk all the way home in those shoes. I won’t bother you. I promise.”

“Your promises,” I sighed, indicating that I didn’t think much of them. But I wasn’t too mean about it.

“S
O HOW DID IT GO?”
L
UCY COOED ON THE PHONE THE NEXT
morning.

“Just great, Lucy,” I said. “Vince is definitely on board.”

“I knew you could do it,” she replied smugly. “Thanks, Tina. I owe you one.”

“Anything for the cause,” I said. “You need anything else, just let me know.”

I hung up and stared at the ceiling. I thought about calling her back and telling her everything Vince had said—that we would never win this, the building didn’t want
any
of us, their goal was to boot both the Drinans and the Finns, the building was going to win, and we needed to come up with a better strategy than having Tina sleep with everybody on the board. But she never listened. Alison didn’t listen much these days either; they both seemed like people I had known slightly a very long time ago. I wondered if that might have been why I had just disappeared finally: because nobody was listening anyway. And then I thought about Mom, and what she would say, and what she would want me to do, and I wished I had called her just once from out there at the Delaware Water Gap. Then maybe I would have been the one she called when she needed to talk to someone about doing the right thing, keeping that beautiful apartment for the people who had actually lived there. But I didn’t call her; I just never did. I was too busy running away.

Finally there wasn’t anything else for it. I went to the Ninety-first Precinct and marched up to the front desk. “I need to talk to Detective Drinan,” I told the desk sergeant. He barely glanced up at me; he was busy opening mail with a plain silver letter opener that looked like a really boring dagger. He took his time, sliding the pointy end into the
top of the envelope and moving it carefully all the way across. I don’t know why people think mail is more important than people, but they certainly do. In any case, this desk sergeant finished opening his manila envelope, considered the first three pages of the contents, paper-clipped the docs to the outside of the envelope, and set the whole event down on the other side of his desk. Then he deigned to talk to me.

“He expecting you?” he asked, picking up a phone on his desk carelessly, like he might make a phone call in the middle of our conversation, that’s how unimportant I was.

“I don’t think he’s expecting me,” I said. “But you know, he might be. Actually, he actually might be.” My fascinating conjectures held no interest for the desk sergeant, who just nodded and hit a few buttons as he shouldered the receiver.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Tina Finn.”

“Yeah,” he suddenly said into the receiver, bored as hell, “somebody named Tina Finn is here for Pete.” He paused. “Uh huh.” Another pause. “Uh huh.” Pause. “Yeah, okay.” He hung up the phone and reached into the bag of chips that was sitting alongside the pile of mail. He put a potato chip in his mouth and crunched it a few times, then he picked up his letter opener and started slitting the end of another manila envelope.

“So, should I wait here for him?” I asked. The desk sergeant didn’t even look up.

“He’s not here,” he said.

“He’s not,” I said.

“He have your number?”

“No, actually, he doesn’t.”

“You can leave it if you want,” he said, pulling out some more docs and glancing through them.

“What kind of police station is this?” I said, a little loud. He looked up, raised his eyebrows at me. I swear, I never did know how to talk to the cops. “I could be a
witness
for a
murder
or something, and you can barely talk to me!”

“Are you?” he said.

“No. I am not.” And then I held up the brown paper bag I had
brought and dropped it into the middle of his mail call. “This is for Detective Drinan. This is important. It is important evidence for a case that he thinks is really important, and you need to give it to him as soon as he gets back.”

“You can wait for him if you want,” he said, completely unmoved by my theatrics.

“No,” I said. “I’m not going to wait. He knows where to find me.”

Which he most certainly did. Seven hours later he was at my front door. In his left hand he held a child’s green hand-knit sweater with a broken cable on one arm, evidence from a previous life, which I had left in the brown paper bag at the front desk of his precinct. “So,” he said, “you have my attention.”

I already had that, I thought. What I said was, “Come on in.”

I had spent the afternoon unloading what I could from that room and piling it all over the television area. There was stuff everywhere: clothes and shoes and dishes and books and photos and art projects and knitting.

“Holy shit,” he said when I walked him back there.

“Yeah, it’s a lot of stuff,” I agreed.

“Where’d you find all this, that room in the back he used as a storage space?”

“I—”

“You took all this out of the boxes? Why’d you do that?”

“I thought you might want to see it,” I said, feeling stupider and stupider. I looked over at him as he looked at all the stuff. There was a thin streak of color across the top of his cheeks, but otherwise nothing. He looked like he was viewing a corpse. “I really did, I thought, this is your stuff, this is your—here, I left a space for you on the couch. I thought maybe you’d want to look at the pictures. There are like four boxes of pictures.” He stared at me, then walked over to the space on the couch I had cleared for him. I had stacked the albums neatly on the coffee table next to the boxes of loose photos and negatives. He stood there for a moment, considering the arrangement, then he reached down and flipped open the top album. Still without sitting, he turned the first page, and
then the second, sort of casually, like he was only half interested. He looked up, and his eyes flicked over the room again, taking in the piles of stuff, the dusty collected bits and pieces of his childhood, and then he wavered on his feet for a minute, like he was going to fall over maybe.

“Are you okay?” I asked. “I’m sorry. I just thought you would want to see these things, I really, I …”

“Yeah,” he said, holding up his hand to stop me from talking. “I know. I’m just going to need a minute.” And then he turned and walked back down the hallway.

I felt like an idiot. I sat down in the middle of all the crap and wondered what to do. I wasn’t even sure he was still in the apartment; that stupid place is so big you can’t tell half the time if anyone is in there with you; it’s like a mausoleum, just a big empty monument to people who came and went. When he didn’t come back after ten minutes, I went looking for him. And there he was, in my room that used to be his room, sitting on the little bed on the floor and looking at the sunset painted on the wall.

“I used to dream about it,” he said, not even acknowledging me, more like he was saying something out loud to himself just when I happened to show up. “In all those upside-down ways you dream about things. It would come to life sometimes and try to drown me. She thought it was so cool when she did it. Far as I was concerned, it was like a nightmare painted on the wall.”

“Did you tell her?”

“Come on. She loved it,” he said. “And it’s really not very good, is it? I mean, really. It’s just crap.”

“I like it,” I said, stepping inside the doorway and considering the sunset. He laughed a little, like he thought I was stupid but he appreciated my attempt to say something nice about his mother’s dreadful painting. “I do,” I insisted. “I’m not kidding, I really do.”

“Well, you’re wrong. Because it’s shit.”

“Are those real constellations?” I asked, pointing up at the star stickers on the ceiling.

“No,” he said. “We tried. She was all, let’s put up the ones no one
knows, Taurus and Perseus and the Archer, only she was so bent on being original it ended up not looking like anything. It doesn’t really mean anything.”

“But her stuff. I thought you might want her stuff.”

“All that shit in the other room?” he said. “Really. You think I might want that.”

“Yeah, well, you know what? It’s not all shit,” I told him. I went to the closet, picked up that crumpled brown shopping bag, pulled out the pearls, and handed them to him. He turned them over in his hand, considered the clasp, and looked back up at me, raising an eyebrow like he was waiting for me to explain this again. “Those are real pearls, they’re worth a fortune. I’m not kidding. There’s a lot of stuff out there, who knows how much it’s worth. There’s an alligator purse, someone told me you could sell it for five thousand dollars. And some of her old dresses, they’re probably worth … Sorry. I’m sorry.”