Twelve Rooms with a View (7 page)

The lobby was packed. People were milling about, a bunch of kids in school uniforms were clustered around the elevator, arguing with one another and hitting the buttons on the elevator bank, and a woman in a bright red jacket with a fur collar kept trying to get Frank’s attention at his little brass podium. Frank was talking to two men, and they were all yelling at once, and it sounded loud because the ceilings in that small space were so high and curved that the sounds bounced around in it. The lady in the red jacket was clearly related to the kids, because occasionally she would yell, “Stop it, Gail! All of you, would you just wait until I see if your father’s package has arrived? Frank …” But Frank was dealing with whatever the two guys were saying, which I couldn’t hear because of all the other noise. Two ladies standing behind the one in the red jacket 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. I couldn’t see their faces right away because their backs were to me. All I could see were those strange fashionable outfits, and one of the women had the most astonishing black curls tumbling down her back while the other one had short white hair flipped around her head. Then the one with black hair turned for a second, like she had heard something just behind her, and she was one of those people who are so idiotically
beautiful you think you’re on drugs when you see them up close. Her eyes flicked in my direction, but then the woman she was with yanked at her arm.

“This is ludicrous,” the older woman said. “I’ll hail my own cab.”

“That’s what I said ten minutes ago,” said the spectacular-looking woman. She turned around and headed right for the door. But the older lady didn’t follow.

“We will get our OWN CAB, FRANK!” the old lady 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.

“Maybe you could just take a second to look through the deliveries, then we’ll just get out of your hair, Frank,” said the lady in the red jacket, poking through the stuff piled on the console, trying to be nice but trying to get her own way too. The kids continued to scream as the furious white-haired lady turned away, muttering to herself about how nuts it all was.

Poor Frank was apologizing to everyone at the same time. “I can do that, sure let me—sorry, Mrs. Gideon, I am so sorry, so sorry, Julianna,” Frank called after the ladies heading for the door. “If you give me just a second here—oh, she’s here!” he said suddenly, looking both harried and relieved. And then the lady in the red jacket knocked all the packages off the top of the podium.

The whole scene was so complicated that it took me a second to realize that Frank was looking at me. He said to one of the guys he’d been talking to, “She says she’s living there now, and that you met last night and you spoke about it—I’m not sure, but that’s the young lady, she said that you know each other.” Then he turned to me. “Tina, there’s some kind of confusion here with Doug about the locks, he says he needs to change the locks, but you didn’t say anything about that, so can you come talk to him while I deal with this? Hang on there, Mrs. Gideon, let me get you a cab. You can go ahead and look through all this, Mrs. White, but I didn’t see anything.” Frank rushed by me, opening the door for the infuriated Mrs. Gideon and her fabulous daughter Julianna. Mrs. White continued to yell
at her children while she poked through the packages on the floor. Doug Drinan turned and gave me a dirty look.

Obviously this moment was a bit of a drag. The fabulous Upper West Side fashion plates were pushing by me while I tried to grab up my Gap bags, apologizing like a loser, “So sorry, sorry, sorry …” Frank practically shoved me aside while he raced after the women, trying to do his job. The loud, insane kids finally managed to get the elevator to arrive, but their mother was not yet ready to pile in with them; she was too busy giving me the once-over, like I was someone who was trying to break into their building. Which in fact I was.

“The doorman seems to be under the impression that you’re living in my father’s apartment,” Doug announced. “And he thinks that I somehow agreed to this.”

“Well, we did have a conversation about this last night, Doug, and I don’t think you could have been really surprised that Frank told you that,” I announced back. We were both pretending to be polite, but our voices were too forceful to count as polite.

“Last night we were decent enough not to kick you out onto the street,” he told me. “The understanding was you’d be gone in the morning. You have no right to be here—your mother actually had no right to be here either, after my father died—”

“That’s not what my lawyer tells me.”

For some reason this caused old Doug to really lose it. He was suddenly furious, his face going all red, and he actually grabbed me, right up at the front of my shirt, and yanked me toward him, to do what I wasn’t sure. I was not expecting it; even last night when he showed up with his brother totally wasted, and they were both really mad and reactive, they didn’t put their hands on me. For one terrible minute I thought, oh no, this is one of those guys who’s worse when he’s
not
drunk; all that disappointment and sadness and thinning hair are just too much for him.

“Let go of me, let go let go,” I said, real nice, real fast. I truly didn’t want to find out if he had it in him to hit me.

“Look, I got a bunch of other jobs. Is this going to happen?” the guy with Doug asked. He had on a bad leather jacket and jeans and was carrying a tool kit, and he looked really bored. Somehow you knew right
away that he saw this stuff all the time, people arguing about who had the right to change the locks to some house or apartment, and it wasn’t all that earth-shattering. I realized I was probably not going to get hit. Anyway, the lock guy didn’t seem to think so. He looked away like he didn’t give a shit who won this battle, but also like he was pretty sure it was not going to be me, so there was no use even acknowledging that I existed.

The little interruption gave Doug a chance to recover. He let go of my shirt, giving me a little push, like he couldn’t believe he had actually touched me. Then he turned and yelled back at Frank, who was outside trying to hail a cab for the fed-up Mrs. Gideon and her babelicious daughter. “We’re going up!” Doug announced. Frank didn’t even notice. Doug and the locksmith headed for the elevator, but they couldn’t get in, because it was full of all those kids in school uniforms and the lady in the red jacket. But Doug was on top of his game now.

“We’ll take the stairs,” he announced, walking over to the other end of the lobby. The lock guy followed him. I did not. I finally got a clue, pulled out my brand-new throwaway cell phone, and called in the marines.

“O
H FOR GOD’S SAKE,” SAID
L
UCY, ALL ANNOYED, AS SOON AS
I reached her. “Where have you been?”

“They cut off the phone,” I told her.

“No kidding. I tried calling you three hours ago and got the message that the phone was no longer in service,” she said. “Where have you been?”

“I went out to get a cell phone—”

“You’ve been out buying a cell phone for three hours?”

“Well, I needed some other stuff too and—”

“I thought you were broke, what are you using for money?”

“Would you listen to me, Lucy? They’re here! At least one of them is here, and he’s trying to change the locks, he has a locksmith with him, and he says I have no rights and—”

“Relax, I’m two blocks away, I’m taking care of it,” she told me.

“What do you mean you’re two blocks away? I called you at work,” I said, all confused again.

“And my assistant patched you through to my cell.”

“So you’re on your way here? How did you know to come?”

“Tina, when the phone got cut off, what did you think was going on?”

“I don’t know, I thought I needed to get a cell phone.”

“Well, I thought a little harder than that. Just stay right there in the lobby; I’ll be there in two minutes.”

She hung up on me just as Frank trotted back in. He looked a little shell-shocked in a delirious kind of way. I thought he was going to be mad at me because I had just caused a huge scene, bringing utter chaos to his little lobby, with people threatening to have him fired and all sorts of unpleasant bullshit. Frank, however, seemed to have barely noticed. He was actually humming a little tune as he went back to his podium
and started picking up the packages that were all over the floor. I thought for a moment that he was one of those strange sad people who need a little action to feel alive, but then I took another look, and it was like he was glowing around the edges, you could almost see beams of light coming out of his cuffs and collar. I thought, oh, he’s in love, Frank is in love with the unspeakably beautiful Julianna Gideon. And he got to be near her, he got to hold the cab door open for her for half a second.

“She’s pretty, huh,” I said, testing out my theory.

“Oh my god,” he agreed. “I can’t even, when I look at her …” He glanced out the door, taking pleasure in seeing the place he had last been allowed to look at her.

“Does she know you like her?” I asked.

“What?” That was a bad question; it shook him out of his fantasy, and he remembered he had a real right to be mad at me.

“Did you get things straightened out with Doug?” he asked, suddenly stern. “He was quite certain that you are not supposed to be living up there in 8A. I didn’t know what to say. This has put me in a very awkward position. I put a call in to building management, and I don’t know what they’re going to say. There’s already been so much controversy around that apartment, I’m sure they’re going to want to talk to both of you about it.” He was trying his best to sound really mean, but the guy didn’t have it in him. He was reading me the riot act, but he sounded like he was apologizing.

“I’ll try to keep this out of your hair from now on,” I said.

“I would appreciate that.” He didn’t sound angry, he sounded like he really would appreciate it. Just then Lucy walked in, wearing a sharp gray suit and heels, carrying a big briefcase, and looking like the queen of the universe.

“Lucy! Hey, this is my sister Lucy,” I told Frank. “She’ll have this solved in five minutes, I guarantee. You don’t have to talk to building management.”

“I’m sure they know all about this already,” Lucy announced, a little clippy. “Tina tells me there’s some confusion about the locks?”

“Confusion, I should say so,” Frank said. “Doug Drinan, he’s Bill’s son?”

“I know who he is,” Lucy said, nodding, trying not to make that little can we hurry this up please sign with her hand.

“Well, he’s up there, having the locks changed,” Frank told her. “He says he doesn’t know anything about you having a claim on the place. I didn’t know what to tell him. Your sister tells me she’s staying there, I got no reason to doubt her, but Doug was Bill’s son—”

“And we are his wife’s daughters.” Lucy smiled, completely professional. “No worries. We’ll clear this up in no time.” She took a couple of smooth steps over to the elevators and pressed the call button; as far as Lucy was concerned, this was as good as done. Frank smiled at me, relieved. When she isn’t being annoying as hell, Lucy does have that effect on people. You know who’s in charge.

Doug Drinan and his pal the locksmith were, sadly, not quite as easy to snow. We more or less fell over them on that eighth-floor landing—that is, I stumbled out of the elevator with all my packages, while Lucy popped out like a genie and presented Doug with a huge stack of documents.

“Mr. Drinan? Hi, how are you? I’m Lucy Finn, Olivia’s daughter, it’s a pleasure to meet you after all this time,” she announced, talking quickly. “As you are aware, our mother passed only a few days ago, so obviously we are reeling, completely caught off guard, so I’m sure this is our fault. But I think there’s been some confusion about the status of the estate. We spoke with Stuart Long just yesterday. He was in possession of your father’s will—have you seen it? I brought an extra copy in case you hadn’t.” She handed it to him and kept talking. “Anyway, there is some real question about who the beneficiaries of the estate are at this time. Your father seems to have expressed in no uncertain terms that our mother was to inherit everything, largely meaning the apartment, it’s unclear what else is included, but in any event I’m going to have to ask you to hold off on changing the locks for now. Until we get this sorted out.” She smiled at him, very pleasant, but there was a definite don’t-fuck-with-me edge behind it all. She works in PR and she can be very daunting.

Doug Drinan, unfortunately, didn’t get on board with what she was saying. He barely glanced at the papers she handed him, then tossed them
on top of the old radiator that was hissing in the hallway. “I’m aware we’re going to be in a holding pattern for a little while with regard to the dispensation of the will,” he told her. “Which is why I thought it important to secure the apartment. Obviously we can’t have just anyone wandering in and out, disturbing the effects before we’ve even begun to probate this situation. I hate to say it, such a sad time—I mean really, condolences on your loss—but it sounds to me like this is going to get pretty complicated. This is just precautionary. Don’t want things to get ugly down the line or anything.”

Okay, the speech was good, but he was not as good as Lucy. He pressed those thin lips together, trying to smile and explain things like a nice guy, but he couldn’t be bothered to pretend all that hard, so it came off like what it was, condescending and mean and like he was kind of enjoying messing with us. Which maybe he was. The more I saw of this guy the less I liked him. His hair really was dirty, and he had too much disappointment in him. Sometimes those are the worst people to deal with because they aren’t even thinking anymore, they’re just hoping they can make you as miserable as they are.