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“Wait a minute. Would you wait a minute?” I said. “There’s somebody here.” And there was, there was somebody in the apartment.
“Who is it? Is it them?” she asked.
“I don’t know, but it’s someone,” I whispered. I was all the way in the back, on that little couch and television island where Bill and Mom had drunk themselves to death. But it was like all the air in the back of the apartment was moving differently, like someone had opened a door far away and that affected the whole place, like the wind comes just before the train in a subway station. And then I could hear somebody moving somewhere far away, but inside. I could hear it.
“Tina, go find out who it is, and then if there’s a problem, call me back,” she instructed me, only half interested. “I’ll tell my assistant to come get me out of my meeting if you really need me. All right?”
“Can you just hold on a minute?” I said.
“No, sorry, I actually can’t. For heaven’s sake. It’s not like it’s the middle of the night and they’re walking in and threatening you. I can understand why that upset you, but this should be easy. Handle it, would you? You’re not a child.”
“Look, don’t talk to me like that, okay?” I said, really annoyed now. “I don’t appreciate it. We’re all in this together.”
“That’s my point. If you need me call me back.” Okay, she said that, and then she hung up. No kidding. She hung up on me, without saying goodbye.
“I hate my family,” I said to myself. I knew calling Alison would be useless in the complete opposite direction: she would just get all uptight and start freaking out and have no idea what I should do and then she and Daniel would come by and he’d try to take over everything. I was not terribly interested in that option, so I just thought I’d better head back to the front of the apartment and see what the hell was going on.
I heard another sound, kind of like pots banging in a kitchen, six miles away. “Hey!” I yelled. “Who’s in here?” Which was not particularly sly, but I wasn’t looking for the surprise element since I assumed it was just those two boneheads, or one or the other of them. “You need to get out of here!” I yelled. I was charging through the maze of rooms now, all determined and cocky. The apartment looked considerably friendlier in the morning light. Even though there wasn’t much furniture and the carpeting was shitty, the walls were really all painted beautiful colors, which glowed in the morning light. It gave me courage, which was good because I didn’t have much else to go on. “Get out of here and call your stupid lawyer and stop bothering me!” I shouted, charging into the giant room at the front of the apartment.
“Helllooooo,” said a man. “Who are you?”
Okay, I practically jumped out of my skin. Because I turned the last corner and there was a man, a different man now, standing in the middle of that giant empty room. This one was not tall, he was actually quite short, and he was very tidy, like a tidy little person in clothes with dirt all over them. I half expected him to evaporate but he didn’t evaporate, he just stood there and stared at me until I recovered the part of my brain that wasn’t completely hung over and flipped out.
“Who am I?” I said. “Who are you?”
“Oh wait, oh wait,” he said. “I know who you are. You’re Tina! Alison, Lucy and Tina; you’re Tina. Olivia showed me pictures. I’ve seen pictures of you.
“You’ve seen pictures of me?” I said.
“Look at you, you’re pretty, you’re much prettier in real life, you don’t photograph well. I think that’s strange, don’t you, how some people look just lovely when you meet them, and then you see them in pictures and you think, Well that just didn’t translate. Well, anyway. I’m Len! Your mother…didn’t…? Didn’t she?”
“Didn’t she what?”
“Nothing,” he said, kind of sad. “Oh well. She said you didn’t talk; I didn’t realize that meant you didn’t talk at all. You didn’t talk at all?”
“Listen, Len, I don’t…”
“No, of course, not my business! Not my business. And honestly it’s not that we spent a lot of time on it but she seemed, much more so than Bill, to have a kind of yearning, you know you should have called her, you really, oh well. You don’t have to answer that; I know things were complicated. She didn’t blame you, so who am I?” He seemed to think this was a point well worth making, but at the same time he didn’t seem to want to continue our conversation. He glanced over toward the kitchen, distracted.
“Look, could you, you know…” I was starting to get really annoyed with this guy. I was getting frankly annoyed with just about everyone: Lucy, those shitheads who barged in on me in my sleep, my mother, my ex-boyfriend Darren, everyone in New York City, the universe. “I think, you know, whoever you are, Len, I think uh this isn’t a great time for me to maybe visit, and I’m not sure what you’re doing here.”
“Sorry.” he smiled, suddenly looking down and dusting himself off, like he remembered something about how actual people behave. “I’m being ridiculous, you’re right to be upset. Did you stay here last night? You must have done. I’m so sorry for your loss, it must have been a terrific shock. Well, it was for all of us. Such a shame. She was really a terrific person. I’m Len Colbert, like I said. I was a friend of your mother and Bill, I live in the penthouse here on the top floor. Well, of course it’s the top floor, that’s where penthouses are, aren’t they?” He laughed at himself, bemused by this astonishingly obvious statement of fact. “I’d shake your hand but mine are not presentable, I’m a, well, it’s complicated what I do,” he sighed. “Not complicated. I’m an anthropological botanist, I was, that is, I don’t teach anymore. But the uh—the kitchen here—have you seen the kitchen?”
“The moss?” I asked.
“Yes, the moss.” He smiled. No surprise, this elflike character had a fantastic smile, charming and self-involved and devilish as hell. He also had the most alarming blue eyes I’d ever seen, dark edges but sky blue around the middle. For a second I was seriously grateful that that dude was at least thirty years older than me because in spite of the fact that he was so odd I could see the appeal of eyes like that. “Bill and I had an arrangement. He rented me his kitchen,” Len the blue-eyed elf continued. “He lets me, that is—both he and your mother—they let me use it as a kind of greenhouse. My own greenhouse, up on the roof, is obviously untenable for a mossery, not that I didn’t try, but to maintain the habitat, the hydration alone, not that, it may be possible that we just didn’t solve it. But people were not enthusiastic overall, you can imagine. The terror of a few bryophytes! Anyway it was finally impossible. I investigated the possibility of renovating the plumbing, you know, to provide the additional, and there was no support from my fellow tenants. None whatsoever. One may even say, open hostility. At least, lawsuits were threatened. Anyway you’ll have to come see it.”
“See…”
“The greenhouse. It’s a rarity to find one in the city, but the light, as you can imagine, so far up, utterly spectacular, even, the views, not to mention what you can accomplish. With that much light? I am I think not unduly proud. I’d love for you to come up; you should take me up on this. But it is absolutely useless for moss. Our solution—Bill and I—to our mutual needs—was as you see.” He made an elegant gesture toward the kitchen behind him. “Actually it’s a bit of a secret. There’s a lot of misunderstanding, in the building, about moss. This confusion between moss and mold—it’s ridiculous. They’re not even the same species. Bill and Olivia were very understanding. And discreet.” He smiled at me and nodded, apparently finished with this unintelligible explanation.
“So you have a key?” I asked.
“Oh yes. They spent most of their time in the other half of the apartment, it wasn’t any kind of, as you can see this part of the apartment has not been in use for years.”
“Well, okay, but it looks like I’m going to be living here now,” I said.
“Reeeeallly?” Len asked, cocking his head at this, as if it were the most extraordinary news. Actually, he made it sound like such extraordinary news that it was just the slightest bit too extraordinary to be believed.
“Yes, until the will is settled. I’m staying here.”
“And what do the boys have to say about that?” Len the elf asked, sort of half to himself.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?” I asked him, edgy
He smiled at me, clearly amused by my tone. “The boys, he repeated. “I ran into them last night, in the lobby. They didn’t mention to me that you would be living here. So I’m just surprised to hear it. As I assume they were.” He folded his hands in front of his chest, with a sort of odd little gesture of delight, and smiled at me again, as if I would find his clever little bit of deduction charming.
“Look, you’re going to have to go,” I said. “I don’t know anything about this, and you know, you want me to be discreet and everything but I don’t know, this is clearly some sort of illegal thing you got going here.”
“Moss is not a controlled substance,” he informed me, laughing.
“Oh sorry, I maybe misunderstood you, before,” I said. “Because you said something about how people in the building got all mad when you were trying to grow it up there on the roof, so I was just thinking maybe they wouldn’t like to find out, so much, that instead you decided to grow it on the eighth floor, like in the middle of the building, where it might actually spread.”
“Ah,” said Len Colbert from the penthouse. “I understand why perhaps you thought I said that.”
“Yeah, it sounded a little like that, like people maybe wouldn’t be so thrilled to hear what you were doing here.”
“That’s not what I was saying,” he said.
“So I don’t actually need to keep my mouth shut about this?
Elfman laughed again, to himself this time.
“What’s so funny, Len?” I asked.
“Nothing, no, nothing,” he replied. He looked back at the kitchen, this time with real longing. “Do you like moss?” he asked me.
“Honestly, I never thought about it that much,” I said.
“It is a rare spirit that appreciates moss,” Len told me, as if this were news. “There are seventeen different species in this particular mossery, some of them exceedingly beautiful. The curators at either of the public botanical gardens in the city would give their eye teeth. Frankly, it’s actually a bit of an achievement that I could do what I’ve done, and under these conditions? Please. Let me show it to you.”
“That’s not necessary, Len,” I started.
“Please,” he said, holding out his elegant and dirty hand, like a prince at some ball, waiting to sweep me into a dance.
“What the hell,” I said.
So for the next hour this strange guy walked me through the intricacies of moss, gametophores and microphylls and archegonia—that’s the female sex organ of moss, who knew—and how much water moss needs to fertilize, and how long it takes for sporophytes to mature. He talked about liverworts and hornworts; he had mosses in there that were actually only native in the Yorkshire Dales moorland, and he had mosses that only grew in cracks in city streets, and he had mosses that only grew in water. As it turns out, in World War II sphagnum mosses were used as dressings on the wounds of soldiers in Europe because they’re so absorbent and they have mild antibacterial properties. Also some moss can be used to put out fires, don’t ask me how they would do that but apparently it’s historically accurate. Old Len knew a ton about moss, and he made sure that I knew how great his mossery really was, and how no one builds them anymore, and what a tragedy it would be if anything were to happen to his mossery.
“That would be awful,” I agreed. I looked around the transformed kitchen. Len had even hung a picture of an old medieval tree on one wall, presumably to keep the moss company. “So how much did Bill charge you, to rent out his kitchen like this?” I asked.
“Oh,” he said, looking at me kind of sideways for a second. “It was a very friendly arrangement.”
“He didn’t charge you rent for this? But they were broke, weren’t they?”
“What makes you say that?”
“I spent the night here. There’s nothing here. They were living on vodka and fish sticks and red wine,” I said. “Which he paid for in cash.”
“You have been busy, and you say you just arrived yesterday? Len observed.
“So he really gave you this room to grow moss in, for free?”
“I didn’t say that.” Len smiled. “I said we had a friendly arrangement.”
“Like under the table, like friendly like that?” I asked.
“Bill liked to fly under the radar,” he admitted with a small shrug. “He did prefer cash.”
“How much did he charge you?” I asked, direct. Len looked at me sideways and then he went back to examining one of his moss beds, poking at it carefully with his middle finger. “One thousand dollars a month,” he said, raising an eyebrow.
“You know what, Len?” I said.”I think this mossery is fantastic, and I see no reason why you couldn’t just keep it here for as long as you want. I’m gonna go make a phone call.”
“Lovely.” Len smiled. “I’ll just continue my work then.”
Figuring that I might need to keep the cash coming, it did seem like a reasonable idea to let this guy keep his mossery. But I also figured that this was maybe going to be a little bit of a problem, given that the first thing Lucy and Alison both said when they saw it was we have to get rid of the moss. I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to finesse this situation but I felt pretty sure something would come to me. Anyway, I went back to TV Land and picked up the phone and started dialing, meaning I made it halfway through Lucy’s number before I realized that the phone was dead. There was nothing on the line—no clicks, no beeps, no dial tone, just nothing. I hung it up and tried again, and then I did that about eight more times, and then I plugged and unplugged the phone about eight times and then I tried it eight more times. Then I tried it in three other jacks, in three of the little bedrooms.
“Something wrong?” Len asked me, hanging out of the kitchen door. I mean, obviously there was something wrong; I was holding the phone out and staring at it like it was about to explode.
“The phone doesn’t work,” I told him. “I mean, it worked just an hour ago. Now it doesn’t work.”
He held out his neat but dirty hand and I gave it to him. He listened for less than one second, then nodded. “Well,” he said. “I need to introduce you to Frank.”
Frank was the doorman. Len took me downstairs to the front lobby, and there he was, Frank, a kind of good-looking Hispanic guy with a beard and really long hair, in a beige uniform with little gold things on the shoulders. He had one of those weird haircuts that are short in strange places, with a crazy zig-zag lightning bolt running down the back of his head. With the dopey uniform it looked really nuts, but he seemed nice enough.
“Hey Len, what’s up?” Frank asked.
“This is Tina Finn, Olivia’s daughter.” Len made a little wave with his hand, seeming to indicate for a moment that I might be some sort of fancy dish that was being served up. I felt like bowing.
“Nice to meet you, Miss Finn,” said Frank, reaching out and shaking my hand politely. “I’m real sorry about your mom.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Tina is going to be staying in the apartment for now, while they settle things up with the estate,” Len informed Frank. It was genius, seriously; coming out of Len, “she’s staying in the apartment” sounded pretty good. At least, Frank the doorman had no problem with it.
“Well, welcome to the Edge,” he said. “If you need anything, you let me know.”
“There is something,” Len nodded. “It looks like her phone’s been cut off. Could you put a call in about it?”
“Sure. Who’s your carrier?” asked Frank, reaching for the phone receiver on his desk.
“You know, I’m not sure who they had,” I said.
“Well, let’s see then, maybe I’ll put a call in to Doug—that’s Bill’s son,” he told me. “There’s probably just been some mistake, he cut the phone off maybe. Did he know you were going to be staying up there?”
“Yeah, we talked you know, we just talked yesterday about it,” I said. “Look, you don’t need to bother him, I’ll call him myself.”
“I got it right here,” Frank said, dialing. “It’s no bother.” He was dialing away when Len tapped him on the shoulder.
“It’s probably better to just give her the number,” Len said under his breath, like he was trying to keep me from hearing what he said. Frank looked at him, a little confused, and Len did that thing with his hands, opening them up, apologizing to the universe for the stupidity of the human race. “There’s got to be a lot going on, Frank. You probably don’t want to put yourself in the middle of it.” It sounded so much like he was taking care of Frank there that for a minute I forgot he was actually taking care of me.
It was, however, starting to occur to old Frank that maybe this story didn’t add up. “But you did see Doug last night?” he asked, a little worried now while he rooted around for a pen.
“We hadn’t figured out what we were doing last night, when we talked. Everything was such a mess. With Mom’s funeral, I was kind of a wreck and we hadn’t actually thought about the practicalities. I mean I was just like crying and crying so I really didn’t get the details straight,” I fibbed.
“I know what that’s like.” Frank nodded. “I lost my mom fifteen years ago, I still miss her.” He looked at me and I swear to God, in that split second you could see the sadness rise up in his face, nothing too much, just enough to make his cheeks flush a little and his eyes well up. He got embarrassed right away and looked down, like he was still searching for that pen even though it was in his hand, and because that hideous uniform looked so terrible on him it made me feel a little bad to be lying like this. I mean, he was significantly nicer than Len, who probably was just taking care of me so that I didn’t mess with his moss. But this guy Frank was just a nice person who missed his mom. His little haircut was so sweet and stupid I thought my head was going to split.
“Well…thanks Frank,” I finally said. “I’ll go call Doug right now and make sure he knows everything about me staying there and all that and you know make sure that he knows not to turn anything else off.” I turned away a little, so that Frank would have a moment of privacy to collect himself. And then there was old Len, at my elbow, showing me to the door, like a friendly undercover agent. “There’s a Verizon store two blocks up and one over, on Columbus,” he informed me cheerfully, under his breath. “They sell those throwaway phones. You don’t need a credit card, you can just pay cash, isn’t that convenient?”
“Very,” I agreed. “Thanks for the tip, Len.”
A throwaway phone was exactly the thing, of course, because I had no cell phone and no credit card and now no landline. So Len was right to suggest it, and while I was out putting his sensible suggestion into action I also poked around a couple of clothing stores so that I had something more than one skirt, one pair of jeans and one sweater in my wardrobe. I could have called that bonehead Darren and asked him to put all my clothes in a box and send them, but I had no reason to believe he would actually do that, even if he said he would. So I ducked into a couple of really cute little shops where I learned that my seven hundred dollars, minus one throwaway phone, might buy me one pair of excruciatingly expensive blue jeans and half a tank top, which seriously annoyed me until I found a Gap, where there was a whole lot of stuff on sale which fit fine and looked cool enough and cost quite a bit less. Then I was hungry and I had a burger in a seedy sort of deli place, and then I needed underwear, and honestly I couldn’t find anyplace to buy it except one of those really cute little shops and that cost a complete fortune but there was nothing else to do. So the seven hundred dollars was more or less whittled down to two by the time I decided to head back home.
That was the first time my head said that, “Let’s go home, and I know it sounds kind of ridiculous that I thought of it that way? But no kidding, I was already in love with that place. The stuff about my mother drinking herself to death there, and my sisters being so uptight and bossy, and crazy drunk guys showing up in the middle of the night—that seemed like just not so serious, when I picked up my eighteen packages and thought about going home. I kind of half wondered, What are you going to do when you get home? And then I thought, Well, maybe I’ll just make myself a cup of tea and read a book or something, there are at least a thousand used mysteries still shoved under the bed in Bill and Mom’s bedroom. So on the way home I stopped at one of those little shops and I bought myself some fancy tea, and I was well on my way to becoming a totally different person—the kind who lives on the Upper West Side and drinks tea in the afternoon while reading mystery novels—when I got back to the lobby of my fabulous new apartment and found out that I was still the same old Tina I had been just a couple hours ago.
The place was packed. I had only been to the lobby twice before, but the first time me and my crazy little family were the only ones there, and the second time it was just me and Len and Frank the doorman. This time there were a lot of people milling around, a bunch of kids in school uniforms clustered around the elevator, arguing with each other and hitting the buttons on the elevator bank, and a woman in a bright red jacket with a fur collar trying to get Frank’s attention at the little brass podium he sits at. Frank was talking to two big guys and they were all kind of yelling at once, which sounded loud because it wasn’t the biggest space to begin with, but the ceilings were so high and curved the sound bounced around in it. The lady in the red jacket was clearly supposed to be somehow related to the kids, because she would occasionally yell, “Stop it, Gail! All of you, would you just wait until I see if your father’s package has arrived? Frank…” But the other two guys were talking on top of her, and Frank was totally dealing with whatever they were saying, which I couldn’t hear because of the other noise. Then there were two more ladies behind the one in the red jacket, who were waiting a little more patiently, but not much. Both of them were spectacularly thin, and wearing the kind of clothes you only see in ads in the New York Times, everything tight and fitted and slightly strange, like no one really wears clothes like that except the people who do. I couldn’t see their faces right away because their backs were to me; all I could see were those strange fashionable outfits and that one of them had the most astonishing black curls tumbling down her back while the other one had white hair that was kind of short and flipped around her head. Then the one with the black hair turned for a second, like she heard something just behind her, and she turned out to be one of those people who are just so idiotically beautiful that you think you’re on drugs when you see them up close. Her eyes flicked in my direction, but then the other woman she was with was yanking at her arm.
“This is ludicrous,” the other woman said. “I’ll hail my own cab.”
“That’s what I said ten minutes ago,” said the younger, spectacular-looking woman. She turned around and headed right for the door. But the older lady didn’t follow her, in spite of the fact that the whole idea of hailing your own cab for once was hers.
“We will get our OWN CAB, FRANK!” she announced, in quite a loud voice. “And I’m going to call the management company, do you understand? This chaos is NOT ACCEPTABLE.”
“I want to talk to management as well, you get them on the phone,” said one of the guys who was arguing with Frank at the front.
“Maybe you could just take a second to look through the deliveries, we’ll just get out of your hair, Frank,” said the lady in the red jacket at the same time, trying to be nice but also trying to get her own way too, sort of poking through the stuff that was piled on the console. The kids continued to scream as the furious white-haired lady turned, muttering to herself about how nuts it all was.