Twelve Rooms with a View (2 page)

“But you said there might be some question about the will,” Daniel reminded him.

“No, no question—well, no question about Mr. Drinan’s will. Your mother, as you know, does not seem to have left a will,” he said, trying to drag us back into this nonsense. But now that the words “eleven million” had come out of his mouth, none of us was listening.

“We’d really like to get a look at the place,” Daniel announced.

“Before we lose the light,” Lucy said.

Sometimes I am amazed at the lines she pulls out. She just says this stuff like she really means it, even though she had said maybe a second ago that we needed to get over there and get Tina moved in to make it clear that we were taking ownership right away, because if there was going to be any contention or cloud on the title we’d need to have established a proprietary right to the property. She’s not even a lawyer; that’s just the way her brain works. She figures out the meanest truth, gets it out there and deals with it, then a second later pretends that what’s really worrying her is some weird thing about the light. It’s spectacularly nervy and impressive. And maybe Daniel doesn’t like it because Alison is the oldest, which means that they should be calling the shots? But he just married into this situation, and there is no way around how smart Lucy is.

Meanwhile, I am the problem child who doesn’t get a vote. She’s caused too many problems; she doesn’t get a vote anymore. Even when it’s a question of where Tina is going to live, Tina doesn’t get to vote. I didn’t care. The truth was, I didn’t have anything better to do than let my sisters move me into my dead mom’s gigantic apartment on Central Park West. At the time I was living in a trailer park, for god’s sake, cleaning rich people’s houses out by the Delaware Water Gap. I didn’t even have a bank account because I couldn’t afford the monthly fees, and I had to borrow the fifty bucks for the bus to the funeral from my stupid ex-boyfriend Darren, whose bright idea it was to move out to that lousy trailer park in the first place. Oh well, the less said about the whole Delaware Water Gap fiasco the better, as it was not my smartest or most shining hour. So when Lucy leaned back in her chair and said, “We probably should take ownership right away, just to be safe—Tina
can stay there,” I wasn’t about to put up a fight. Move into a palace on Central Park West, why not?

So we got the keys, crawled through traffic to the Upper West Side, actually found a meter four blocks away from the promised land, and there we were, before the light was gone, while the sun was setting. The building itself was huge, a kind of murky dark brown stone with the occasional purple brick stuck in. Strange and gloomy gargoyles snarled from the cornices three stories up. Underneath them, two serious-minded eagles with the tails of lions guarded the entryway; these characters didn’t look like they were kidding around, but they also didn’t look like they intended to eat you or spit molten lava at you, unlike the ones above. Plus there were actual gas lamps, the old Victorian ones, burning by the heads of the eagle-lions, and another gas lamp, a really big one, hung dead center over the door, right above a huge name in gothic type: EDGEWOOD. In fact, all the windows on the first two floors had scrollwork and carvings and inexplicable Latin words inscribed above them. It all added up into a gothic sort of Victorian mess that was quite friendly while simultaneously seeming like the kind of place you might never come out of alive.

The foyer was predictably spectacular. Marble floors dotted with black stone tiles, vaulted ceilings, and the biggest crystal chandelier you’ve ever seen in your life. A huge black chair with actual wings, which I later found out was carved ebony, sat right in front of an enormous fireplace, with two more giant eagle-lions on either side. The fireplace was filled with an enormous sort of greenery, which I later found out was made of silk. The doorman’s station, a nice little brass stand piled with FedEx packages and a couple of manila envelopes, was empty. Behind that were two brass elevators with elaborate doors.

“Wow,” I said. “Check out the chair with wings.”

“We’ll have time for that later,” Lucy told me grimly, giving me a little shove toward the elevators.

“We should wait for the doorman, shouldn’t we?” I said, looking around. The place was deserted.

“Why? We live here,” Lucy announced, pressing her lips together, like don’t mess with me, as she pushed the elevator button. She kept
tapping at that stupid button, as impatient as Moses whacking the rock, like that might hurry god up instead of just pissing him off.

“Seriously, we can’t just go up there,” I said. The whole situation suddenly seemed dicey. Alison started pushing the elevator button too, pressing it really hard. Both of them were in such a rush, like rushing through all this would make it okay. It reminded me of Darren and the whole Delaware Water Gap fiasco—things happen too fast and you end up stuck in the middle of nowhere with a complete shithead and a boatload of trouble. I was about to explain this to my sisters when the elevator dinged and Daniel swung open the outer door.

“You guys, wait a minute,” I said. “We should wait for the doorman.”

“Who knows where he is?” Daniel said. “We’re not waiting.”

And since no one showed up to stop us, I got in.

According to the keys the Egg Man had given us, Mom’s apartment was 8A, so we took the elevator to the eighth floor, where it disgorged us on a horrible little landing. An old green fluorescent strip light flickered feebly, making us look like ghosts, and the venetian blinds at the windows were so old and cracked and dusty that even a hapless loser like me found them offensive. It was startling to find a landing so grungy in this fancy building, but this was the least of the improbabilities that were coming my way. It was taking Lucy a long minute to figure out how to work all the keys and I was in a bad mood by this time. I thought we really should have waited to tell the doorman we were there, and I was worried about a total stranger showing up and saying, “Hey! What are you doing?” A door to the side and behind the two elevators had been painted a sad brown maybe a hundred years ago, and next to it was another door, painted a gorgeous pearly gray, with “8B” in heavy brass. The “8A” on our door by contrast was in those sticky-backed gold-and-black letters that you buy at the hardware store. It was a sad little sight; it really was.

And then Lucy figured out the locks, and there was a click and a sort of a breeze, and the door to the apartment swung open.

You couldn’t tell how big the place was right away. The blinds were
drawn, and we didn’t know where the switches were, so we all stepped tentatively into the gloom. It smelled too, a sort of funny old-people smell, not as if someone had died in there, but more like camphor and dried paper and mothballs. And far off, in with the mothballs, was a hint of old flowers and jewelry and France.

“Hey, Mom’s perfume,” I said.

“What?” said Lucy, who had wandered into the next room looking for a light switch.

“Don’t you smell Mom’s perfume?” I asked. It seemed unmistakable to me, even though she hardly ever wore that stuff because it was so ridiculously expensive. Our dad had given her a bottle of it on their wedding night, and they could never afford it again, so she wore it only once every three years or so when he had an actual job and they got to go to a cocktail party. We would watch her put on her one black dress and the earrings with the sparkles and the smallest little dab of the most expensive perfume in the world. Who knows if it really was the most expensive in the world, I rather doubt it, but that’s what she told us. Anyway there it was in that huge apartment, in with a bunch of mothballs, the smell of my mother when she was happy.

“What was the name of that stuff?” I asked, taking another step in. I loved the apartment already, so dark and big and strange, with my mother’s perfume hiding in it like a secret. “Mom’s perfume. Don’t you smell it?”

“No,” said Alison, running her hand up the wall, like a blind person looking for a doorway. “I don’t.”

Maybe I was making it up. There were a lot of smells in there in the dark. Mostly I think it smelled as if time had just stopped. And then Daniel found the light switch, and there was the smallest golden glow from high up near the ceiling. You could barely see anything because the room was so big, but what you could see was that time actually
had
stopped there. Between 1857, say, and 1960, things had happened, and then just like that, they had stopped happening.

The ceiling was high and far away, with shadowy coves around the corners, and right in the middle of this enormous lake of a ceiling was the strangest old chandelier, glued together out of what looked like iron
filings, with things dripping and looping out of it. It must have been poorly wired, because it had only three fake-candle fifteen-watt bulbs, which is why it gave off so little light. And then there was this mustard-colored shag carpeting, which I believe I have mentioned, and one lone chair in a corner. It was a pretty big chair, but seriously, it was
one
chair.

“What a dump!” Daniel whistled, low.

“Could we not piss on this before we’ve even seen it, Daniel?” called Lucy from the kitchen. But she sounded friendly, not edgy. She was having a pretty good time, I think.

Alison was not. She kept pawing at the wall. “Is this the only light? There has to be another light switch somewhere,” she said, all worried.

“Here, I’ve got one,” said Lucy, throwing a switch in the kitchen. It didn’t really do much, because the kitchen was a whole separate room with a big fat wall in front of it, so there was just a little doorway-sized bit of light that didn’t make it very far into the living room, or parlor, or whatever you wanted to call this giant space.

“Oh that’s a
big
help,” said Alison.

“Wow, this kitchen is a mess, you should see this!” yelled Lucy. “Oh, god, there’s something growing in here.”

“That’s not funny,” Alison snapped.

“No kidding,” Lucy called back, banging things around in a sudden, alarming frenzy. “No kidding, there’s stuff growing everywhere—ick, it’s moving! It’s moving! No, wait—never mind, never mind.”

“I am in no mood, Lucy! This is ridiculous. Daniel! Where are you? Tina, where did you go? Where is everybody! Could we all stay in one place, please? DANIEL.” Alison suddenly sounded like a total nut. It’s something that happens to her—she gets more and more worked up, and she truly doesn’t know how to stop it once she starts. No one is quite sure why Daniel married her, as he’s pretty good-looking and certainly could have done a lot better. Not that Alison is mean or stupid; she’s just sort of high-strung in a way that is definitely trying. Anyway, that apartment was literally starting to drive her crazy. She kept slapping the wall, looking for another light switch, and Daniel was ignoring how scared she was; he was heading across the gigantic room into the gloom on the other side, where that one chair sat, next to a big hole
in the wall. Well, it wasn’t a hole, it was a hallway. But from where we were standing, it looked like a hole, and the sloping black shadow that used to be Daniel was about to disappear into it.

“Daniel, just wait, could you wait, please?” Alison yelled, completely panicked. “I cannot see where you are going!”

“It’s fine, Alison,” he said, sounding like a bastard, then disappeared.

“Daniel, WAIT,” she yelled, almost crying now.

“Here, Alison,” I said, and I pulled open the blind at one of the incredibly large windows. A beautiful gold and red light shot through and hit every wall in that room, making everything glow and move. The sun was going down, and the light was cutting through the branches of the trees, shifting in the wind. That big old room went from being all weird and dreary to being something else altogether, skipping everything in between.

“Wow,” I said.

“Yes, thank you, that’s much better,” Alison nodded, looking around, still anxious as shit. “Although that isn’t going to be much help when the sun is gone.”

“Is it going somewhere?” I asked.

“It’s going
down
, and then what will you do? Because that chandelier gives off no light whatsoever, it’s worse than useless. You’d think they’d have some area lamps in a room this size.”

“You’d think they’d have some
furniture
in a room this size,” I observed.

“Okay, I don’t know what that stuff is that’s growing in the kitchen,” Lucy announced, barging into the big light-filled room, “but it’s kind of disgusting in there. We’re going to have to have this whole place professionally cleaned before we put it on the market, and even that might not be enough. Oh god, who knows what that stuff is? And it’s everywhere. On the counters, in the closets. Who knows what’s in the refrigerator? I was afraid to look.”

“There’s really something growing?” I asked. The more dire her pronouncements, the more I wanted to see the stuff. I slid over to the doorway to take a peek.

“Is it mold?” Alison asked, her panic starting to rev up again. “Because that could ruin everything. This place will be useless, worse than useless, if there’s mold. It costs millions to get rid of that stuff.”

“It doesn’t cost
millions,”
Lucy countered.

“A serious mold problem in an exclusive building? That’s millions.”

“You’ve never had a serious mold problem in
any
building, Alison. You don’t know anything about it,” Lucy said bluntly.

“I know that if the other owners find out, they could sue us,” Alison shot back. “We would be the responsible parties if mold in this apartment made anybody in the building sick. It could be making us sick right now.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Lucy said, looking at me and rolling her eyes. Everybody rolls their eyes at Alison behind her back, even if she might be right. She’s just so irredeemably uptight.

“Holy shit,” I said when I finally got a good look at the kitchen.

“What, is it bad? It’s bad, isn’t it.”

“No, no, it’s not that bad,” I lied. The whole kitchen was green. Or at least most of it. “And I don’t think it’s mold. I think it’s moss.”