Twelve Rooms with a View

CHAPTER FIVE

“The moss guy isn’t in. Frank buzzed him about eight times but he wasn’t answering,” I told Lucy. “So I asked for his phone number, but it’s unlisted and the doorman isn’t allowed to give it out. Anyway, I left him a message with the doorman to call as soon as he got in, so when he does I’ll tell him that we need him to move all that stuff. Here, I got a set of keys for you and then also an extra one, in addition to the ones I have. Soaring right through the lie about Len, I started fumbling with the keys. She didn’t even look up as she took them from me.

“You didn’t leave my number as well?” she asked, pecking away at her laptop. She had set it up on that little coffee table back in the apartment side of the apartment and there was a whole mess of documents and file folders kind of falling out of her briefcase on the couch. She clearly had decided to spend the rest of the day back there. I felt like I had been invaded.

“He and I got kind of friendly so I just thought it would be better for him to call me,” I said.

“You thought it would be better if I let you handle it,” she said, making this sound like a stupendously idiotic idea. I looked at the floor and acted like I was really sorry that I was such a stupid person, which worked, because that’s what she thinks I am anyway. Smart people are easy to fool about really stupid things. It’s all about the assumptions.

The door to the bathroom behind the little laundry room swung open and a woman appeared. I just about jumped out of my skin, but Lucy kept on typing.

“Fantastic,” the woman said, smiling at me like we were old friends. She had very tight hair, blonde and tight to her head, and she was exceptionally tanned. She also wore a tight beige microsuede pantsuit—pants and a jacket made out of synthetic beige polyester—and then she also had on actual panty hose and a kind of boring-looking pair of low brown heels. I’m sure that everything she was wearing cost more than I made in a month of cleaning houses, but frankly I don’t fully understand why people dress like that.

“This place is fabulous,” she informed me, striding over and holding out her hand for me to shake. “Hi, I’m Betsy Hastings. Did I hear you saying something about the moss, in the front kitchen?”

“We haven’t been able to get hold of the guy who owns the moss,” Lucy announced, “but it’s being handled.”

“No worries, no worries,” said Betsy Hastings. As opposed to my sister, she couldn’t have been nicer. “This whole place is amazing. It’s incredible when a place like this comes on the market. Just thrilling.”

“You’re the real estate person,” I guessed.

“A lot of people are already interested, Tina,” Lucy informed me. “And there are a lot of questions that need to be answered. Things are very preliminary at this point.”

“No question, no question,” Betsy agreed. “I would love it if you would let me handle this. I have a number of corporate clients who would pick it up immediately, as is. I mean, I don’t think you need to worry about anything, the moss, the carpets, the appliances, you’re in a situation where you can completely let the buyer take care of all of that. Even in this market, which obviously has cooled considerably in the past couple years. But you don’t have anything to worry about; this place is amazing.”

“We’ve noticed,” Lucy observed.

“Absolutely. Absolutely.” Betsy Hastings nodded, running her hand over the pocket doors. “A property like this, my advice would be to let a professional pick it up and do the renovation, even at eleven or twelve million it’s going to be considered undervalued, which is good; you want them to see the potential for a fast turnaround and a big profit. You don’t want to get involved in the level of renovation that a place like this would need, to pull in the really big numbers. There are agents out there who will tell you that you could take in twenty or even twenty-two on this, but that’s going to require enormous investment on your part up front and I really would let someone else take care of that.”

“Why don’t you put together a strategy and call me tomorrow,” Lucy nodded, not even looking at her. She held out her card. She did everything but tell Betsy to her face that her wild enthusiasm had completely put her out of the running.

“That’s not to say, if you’re looking for the bigger numbers, I can work with that too,” Betsy explained, taking the card with a little shrug. “This end of the market, it’s always a question of how long you want to wait. If you can afford to take the time and put a few million into it yourself, then we’re talking about significantly larger numbers. It’s just a different approach. As I said, I’d love to work with you on this. Really, it’s a great place. Just the size of it, and the details! I love it when these old places open up. New York. There’s no place like it, there really isn’t, you just get such a sense of history. Fantastic. I’ll give you a call tomorrow, we can go over a couple of different plans.” I had to give it up to that old Betsy Hastings; it was pretty inspired bullshit. I mean, everything she said was true, and she really did have a kind of excitement about the apartment which I totally agreed with. But obviously she was mostly talking about money, which also obviously contributed to the fact that everything she said sounded pretty phony.

So Betsy took off, and then this young kind of swank Indian character showed up and he went into overdrive explaining how if we could take a year and sink a million into the joint and break it down into three separate but spectacular separate apartments we could pick up twenty-two easy. Which made me actually kind of like Betsy even better, because she totally called that, that some other agent was going to show up and tell us this version of events, and then that actually happened like within the hour. And then this older white guy came by, wearing an extremely expensive suit, and he just looked around and acted like the place really wasn’t so great after all, and that the fixtures were all just inappropriate, and the appliances were from the seventies, and he would have to think about whether or not he was interested in taking this on, even if we could work out the legal difficulties. He was the only one who brought up the “legal difficulties” which, perversely, it seemed to me, cheered Lucy up quite a bit; she just shrugged and said something like, “That would be up to you.” He was really pretty snotty, and they were quite snippy with each other, and his approach may have been a posture that he thought would make us want him more, but I’m not sure why he thought that because clearly we were sitting on the mother lode, in real estate terms, legal difficulties or not. Anyway it was all very nerve-wracking by the end of the day, when Daniel and Alison came by so we could have a powwow over Chinese food.

“There’s no way we’re going to be able to push through a sale before they slap a cloud on the title, if that’s their intention, and it sure as hell would be mine,” Lucy explained as she picked pieces of chicken out of one of those little cartons. “It’s going to cost a fortune and the legal tangle will be considerable. What’d your friend tell you, inheritance taxes are due within the year?”

“Six months,” Daniel nodded. “Although it’s apparently not much of a problem getting an extension when the will’s being probated. We can get Wes to file for us if it becomes necessary.”

“When,” said Lucy. “When it’s necessary; there’s no use being naïve about this.”

“How much is this going to cost us?” asked Alison, all worried as usual.

“Much more than we have,” Lucy admitted. “The only way we’re going to be able to afford this is to get into a partnership with a real estate agency. I’m going to talk to Sotheby’s about it tomorrow.

“That guy from Sotheby’s was an asshole. He was the least interested of anybody,” I pointed out.

“That’s how I know he wants it,” Lucy said, spearing a shrimp with slashing efficiency. “We need someone who’s going to be willing to work around the legal problems. Those other two were too spooked to even mention it. Losers.”

“What if Sotheby’s gets behind the Drinan side of this?” I asked.

“I sent over a packet of the documentation. They’ll look at it and decide, but it’s pretty clear we’re going to win.” Lucy shrugged.

“How can you be so sure? I just don’t know how you can talk about all of this like you know what’s going to happen. How could anyone know what’s going to happen?” asked Alison. “You keep acting like this is all going to just work out and I don’t see how you can know that.” I thought this was a pretty good point but Lucy didn’t even respond. Daniel reached for some beef and broccoli thing, and he didn’t bother answering Alison either. “These legal situations aren’t sure. They never are,” she persisted. “And if we spend all our money, if our money isn’t enough to cover the costs, costs can go through the roof and instead of everything what if we end up with nothing?”

“Alison,” Daniel finally said, impatient. “I spent the day on the phone with four different lawyers; all of them gave us the same answer. This is a no-brainer. We’re in the clear.”

“If it’s so totally clear that we’re going to win this, how come it’s all such a surprise to those Drinans?” I said. “I mean, they knew that he was leaving it all to Mom.”

“They told you that?” said Lucy. “Wait a minute. They told you that they knew he was leaving the place to Mom?”

“They didn’t say it. I just kind of figured it out,” I said, eating. “Anyway, they definitely knew.”

“That he was leaving the place to Mom.”

“Yeah, they knew that part. But they totally didn’t know the rest, that then we would show up and get it. Like, why would they know that part but not the other part?”

“What else did they say?” asked Daniel. He sounded even more uptight so I looked up from the Chinese food finally, and they were all staring at me. For a second I considered lying some more, because I was beginning to feel like Lucy and Alison and Daniel were acting like such unbelievable sharks, that’s what they deserved. But I didn’t see any point in protecting those Drinans either. It was hard to know whose team I was on, already. And we had only been at this for a day and a half.

“They were just sad and drunk and kind of mad, that’s all. I shrugged, opting for a vague non-answer for now. “One of them talked about all the furniture being gone like it was so sad. Like he was a little surprised, I think, that so much of it was gone.”

“Why would that surprise him?” Alison asked.

“Not totally surprised. But sad. Like they hadn’t seen the place in a little while, like they knew what it was like in here but not all the way. Sort of like that.”

“They probably weren’t allowed in very much.” Lucy stared into her spicy shrimp, putting it all together. “By all accounts Bill was a Howard Hughes-level freak. Then when he died, if Mom didn’t want them around, she didn’t have to let them in. Maybe she was afraid they’d try and kick her out. They probably would’ve tried to kick her out; they haven’t been exactly civil, have they? Anyway it was only three weeks ago, they didn’t exactly have a ton of time to figure out a game plan. They probably didn’t even know they needed a game plan. Most people don’t think ahead.”

“What was only three weeks ago?” I asked.

“When Bill died.”

“Bill only died three weeks ago?” I blurted.

Okay, I honestly do not know why I didn’t know this. But I didn’t know; the whole situation with my mom was that screwy. One day she was living in Hoboken and working at some H & R Block office, filing tax returns, then all of a sudden she was getting married and moving to Manhattan. Then it was done before we even knew it, practically, when it became “Bill’s private, he doesn’t see a a lot of people,” or “We’re really busy this month, maybe the fall would be better. I mean, before she went off and married this guy it’s not like I saw that much of her anyway. Mostly we communicated through phone messages: the man who lived underneath her got a dog and it was barking day and night, or the phone company screwed up her billing and they were just driving her crazy, or she was trying out a new recipe and did I ever hear of Asiago cheese? It makes my head hurt now to think of how lonely those messages were and that obviously I should have tried a lot harder to see her, while I could. I’m not saying that all of us had abandoned her. Alison saw her more than me or Lucy, I knew that Alison would come out and see her and Lucy saw her too. But not all that much. So when she went ahead and married a guy who didn’t want us around it didn’t make a huge impression.

The truth is last time I even spoke to her was almost a year and a half ago, when the three of us took her out to dinner. Mom suggested it. I think she felt guilty because none of us had been invited to the wedding. So there we were, six months after our mother went and married a total stranger, arguing over where we should take her to celebrate. Bill of course was not coming, but she made kind of a big deal about not going too far from home, because he might get uptight if she went too far. Then Lucy got bent out of shape about whether or not it would be a place we could afford, as she assumed we’d be “taking” Mom and she didn’t want the bill split two ways between her and Alison because she really got the short end of the stick in these situations since “Alison” covered Alison and Daniel which meant that she, Lucy, was stuck paying for me as well as half of Mom so expensive places got really quite expensive really fast, from her point of view. She was completely blunt about all this, as usual, which I took exception to, because even though I’m consistently strapped it’s not like an occasional nice dinner out is a complete impossibility. But of course Lucy was right—we ended up at a place that charged $22 for a plate of spaghetti with red sauce, which made everyone, especially me, uptight.

So that more or less set things off on an unfortunate foot. Mom had a vodka tonic which I think cost $12, and the rest of us drank tap water. Lucy as usual totally monopolized the conversation, blathering on about the big corporations she did PR for and how difficult it was to work with corporate jerks and none of them really want to talk to a woman and how they’re all in love with themselves and their own power and she really thinks they’re all closet cases anyway. Alison never actually got over the prices on the menu, and she kept letting us know how worried she was about how much things cost, and then she got Daniel to keep a running tab on the paper tablecloth, which he did methodically, with a mechanical pencil. I told them all I was going to move out to the Delaware Water Gap with Darren, and how he had this business plan set up, that so many really wealthy people had summer homes out there now and he was putting together a company that did caretaking year round and he already had six or seven clients and I was going to help him with the bookings and also do sort of personal services for people like shopping, say.

So that was the dinner. And Mom was fine, really. Kind of a little too perky, maybe, like she was trying too hard to seem happy. But I don’t know, how can you know something like that? She never said anything at all about Bill, or how it was going with him, even though Lucy made a couple of stabs at it.

“So are we ever going to meet our so-called stepfather?” she asked, sipping her cappuccino. Since nobody had wine with dinner Daniel and Alison had relented and let people order cappuccino and biscotti after the expensive spaghetti was cleared away.

“You’re all grown, you don’t need a stepfather,” Mom said, laughing a little and looking at the last traces of her second drink.

“Wait a minute. You guys haven’t met him yet?” I asked. This fact somehow had gotten by me. I assumed the reason I hadn’t met Bill was that I was out of town too much. The fact that Lucy and Alison, who lived so close by in Brooklyn and Queens, hadn’t met Bill did actually catch me off guard.

“He’s so private, I told you, sweetheart. That’s just the way he is. Some day we’ll make it work out,” she said, patting my hand.

“You live like right around the corner from here, right? Lucy noted. “Let’s do it now. He’s home, right?”

“I don’t think he’d like that.”

“We won’t stay. We just want to come by and see where you live!” she persisted.

“I’ll tell him. Maybe we can work something out for next month.”

“Is it a dump? Are you living in some sort of crazy dump?”

“No, not at all. He’s just private, you know that.”

“He’s crazy, is what it sounds like.”

It was pretty uncomfortable, frankly; the fact that Lucy was putting it out there to Mom in front of me and Daniel and Alison made the situation really sound as creepy and weird as you kind of worried it might be. Mom just shrugged a little bit and looked down and then she sighed, like this was all too much.

Lucy took offence. “It’s a fair question, Mom,” she pointed out, kind of edgy. “You’ve been married to this guy for six months. Why can’t we meet him?”

“He doesn’t want to, is why,” Mom said. And she wasn’t apologetic about that at all.

“But he’s nice to you, right?” I said.

“You don’t have to worry about me, sweetheart, I’m fine!” she said, and she smiled at me and squeezed my hand. Which okay is maybe why it finally occurred to me after she was dead that maybe what she meant was worry about yourself you dingbat; you’ve just agreed to go to Delaware with another loser.

It also occurred to me that maybe she was ashamed of us, that’s why she didn’t want Bill to meet us. A year and a half later, sitting there on the floor of that ridiculous little television room, eating Chinese food out of cartons, and trying to figure out how to screw over the two guys who grew up there, and whose Dad had died just three weeks before our Mom died, it certainly did occur to me that maybe we weren’t acting so well.

“Are you crying?” Alison asked me, suddenly.

“It’s this Kung Pao chicken. I bit into one of the peppers, I said. “I wonder if there’s any Kleenex around here.” I stood up and looked around, confused. Lucy held up a wad of those lousy paper napkins that they dump in the carry-out bag, and breezed on with her clever plan. “I’ll have the Sotheby’s guy call Long in the morning. Eventually he’s going to have to transfer the files anyway, and they’ll have a better sense of how soon that needs to happen. Surely they know how to work this so we can start to proceed with the sale even though the property’s still in probate,” she told us, licking her fingers like a cat. “There’s no question they’ll fight it, but we could get at least a little bit of a jump on those Drinans. Potentially we could leave them in the dust.”

“They’re already in the dust. Their father just died,” I reminded her.

“Their father, who disinherited them,” she retorted.

“Precisely,” I said. “Precisely.”

“You’re not going to get all moralistic about this,” Lucy said, looking up from her docs finally. “Oh, no no. This is not a situation of our making.”

“You’re sitting here—plotting!” I said.

“Plotting to make you rich. Oh, a couple million dollars, that would suck. You might have to give up cleaning houses.”

“I wasn’t cleaning houses,” I told her, suddenly feeling peevish as hell. “I was managing properties.”

“Well, my way you can own the properties you manage, how’s that for a thought,” she said, starting to close up the Chinese food cartons. “And you can go back to college and finish your oh-so-useful degree in pottery, and you can start your own little pottery shop and throw clay around for the rest of your life and never worry ever ever ever about whether or not you make one red cent off any of it. That’s what can happen to your life, Tina, if you just sit still and let me make you rich.”

“That was mean,” I said.

“What?” she said, looking at me like I was nuts. “That was mean?”

“Yeah, mean. You’re being mean to me again, Lucy.”

“We’re all tired. It’s been a long couple of days,” Daniel chimed in, soothing. He was being Mr Good Brother-in-law now, asking quietly supportive questions and making sure Lucy knew that We Were In This Together. “Lucy’s worked hard to protect us all, and I for one appreciate it.” He smiled at her, oh so appreciative. I wanted to smack them both. Instead, I smiled wanly and nodded my sheepish little head.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m still shook up about Mom.”

“We all are,” Alison said, like she thought maybe I was being a bit too morally superior about this after all.

“I know I know, I mean, what I mean is I didn’t get much sleep last night.” I nodded, fully in retreat mode because what other option did I have? I rubbed my little eyes for effect. “I think I’d better go lie down.”

“Be my guest,” Lucy shrugged, continuing to clean. Which was her way of letting me know that this wasn’t my apartment, it was her apartment, and I wasn’t calling the shots. As if I ever called the shots with this crew. In any event, I went and hid in the bedroom with the futons on the floor, and I stared at the stars on the ceiling and waited for my so-called family to leave. Which they did not do for what seemed forever, or at least long enough for me to start worrying that maybe they were out there plotting about what they were going to do to cut me out of my share of the loot once we got our hands on it. And once it occurred to me that that was probably what they were doing, I got myself worked into a complete paranoid frenzy, and I almost went back out there to just hang out and make sure they knew that they weren’t pulling any fast ones on me, and I was a full member of this little tribe of pirates, and there would be no sneaking around and cheating anybody out of anything. Then I thought that I probably shouldn’t be so confrontational, that that would make them think I was paranoid and weak, and that the smartest move actually would be sneaking through the pink room and into the empty room next to the television room, where I could hide behind the door and find out about their diabolical maneuverings with a clever bit of eavesdropping.