Twelve Rooms with a View

“I did. I took the opportunity. I said, ’Bill, Olivia tells me you’ve never even met her daughters. Aren’t you curious to even meet them? She’s your wife!’ I was reluctant to say anything to him at all, I couldn’t believe he brought another woman into your mother’s apartment. It was the Livingston mansion apartment, it is an historic property! He should have let it go, is my opinion, when your mother died. He should have sold it to someone who might take care of it, someone in the building who would appreciate it. He never appreciated it. She was the one.”

“But he said something? About these daughters?”

“He said, yes, he said they were trash. He said, ’Those daughters are trash and I’m not meeting them.’ That’s what he called them. Trash. And he wouldn’t meet them. All they wanted was his money.” At which point old Bill went back to being an alcoholic asshole, in my imagination.

Pete Drinan thought about this. It was not an uninteresting bit of information to him. “Was he drunk?” he finally asked.

“Well, I only saw him for a moment, so I couldn’t really say,” Mrs Westmoreland admitted. “I know he did like to drink.”

“Yes, he did.” Pete sighed, his hand curled around the beer bottle behind his back. “Listen, Mrs Westmoreland—would you be willing to talk about this? To our lawyer?”

“Oh, a lawyer…” She sighed, all worried, but excited too, like she was secretly happy to be asked. “You mean, officially?”

“Well, yeah,” said Pete. “It might make a difference—that you spoke to him directly and he told you that he didn’t want the property going out of the family. That that was his intent? That’s what she said, huh, that was his intent?”

“That was my understanding. But if this is an official situation—I don’t know. Do you want to come in, have a cup of tea? I want you and your brother to have your inheritance. But obviously I don’t want to get into some complicated legal mess. But I did love your mother. Maybe, do you want to come in and have a cup of tea?”

“Oh,” said Pete, his fingers twirling around the neck of that beer bottle. I started thinking about how that beer was probably getting all warm and flat, and then I thought, Well, if I’m thinking that I bet he is too. And sure enough he leaned back on his left leg, ready to edge away again. But she was not letting go. She actually had her fingers twisted in his jacket sleeve now. Her door had swung completely open by this point. What little you could see of her place from my vantage point was gorgeous.

“Your mother was my neighbor for thirty years. This whole story breaks my heart,” she explained, leaning up against the doorway.

“Mine too, Mrs Westmoreland.” He nodded, leaning back.

“Good heavens, Peter.” She sighed. “After all this time I think you could consider calling me Delia.”

“Yeah, well…”

“Come in, let me get you that tea. Or a drink! Maybe a whiskey. That sounds like a policeman’s drink!” she said with a smile.

He turned, to finally take a hit off that beer bottle, and stared me straight in the face. We looked at each other, through the crack in the door. He looked tired. And then he kind of remembered, I guess, what was going on, and he took a fast step in my direction, and I remembered too, and I slammed the door and slid the bolt back in place. I thought he was going to start pounding again, but he didn’t, he just waited. I could hear the woman from 8B start to gripe again, about how awful it all was; I couldn’t really hear the words but the tone of her voice was not complimentary. He didn’t say anything back to her. I stood at the door and listened, and he didn’t say anything at all. I wasn’t sure what was going on, if he was going to try and bust the door down with one of those sticks, or what. Finally the woman from 8B stopped talking, and things were really quiet. I thought maybe he was gone. And then a little white card slid under the door. At the last second, it kind of wafted, like he had pushed it. After another second I picked it up. It was a really plain business card, with the NYPD shield on one side, and his name, Detective Peter Drinan, right in the middle, and a cell number on it. I turned it over. On the back, written in ink, in teeny little block letters it said, CALL ME WHEN YOU’RE READY. I thought about that for a second, and I kept listening at the door. He was still out there; in fact, from the shadows it looked like he was sort of hovering down there near the floor to see if I had actually picked the card up. So I took the paper bag that they gave me at the hardware store, and I looked through my backpack, which was still right there where I had dumped it, and I found a pen, and I ripped a piece off the paper bag, and I wrote on it: OKAY. And then I shoved that through the door. And then I watched, through the crack, while he picked it up. And then I heard him laugh. The lady in the other apartment squawked some more questions at him, and he said something else to her, but then I heard the elevator ding, and the door close. And when I went out there, in the morning, he was gone.

CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_509ae61e-a89f-5864-ad60-ed13ce6ef8a1)

Len’s greenhouse was so big it had rooms: the deciduous room, the desert room, the rainforest room, the heirloom plants from other centuries room, the plants that only grow on other plants room. Some of these rooms were apparently subsets or extensions of rooms, and some of the rooms overlapped before growing into new rooms—like the plants growing on other plants room turned into the orchid subset of a room, which evolved into the spectacularly gorgeous and weird plants room, which turned a corner before becoming the poisonous plants room—so that the whole place seemed actually to be growing, itself; it covered the roof and threatened to crawl down the side of the building, in some places. It was truly the only greenhouse I have ever seen that is big enough to get lost in. I told old Len that I thought it was pretty surprising he could get enough water up there to make a greenhouse that big—especially since it had a rainforest in it—but he couldn’t get enough water up there for a little bit of moss. He said, “I know, it is surprising, isn’t it? By which I knew he really was full of shit, and there was no reason that he had to stash the moss in my apartment, except for the fact that he had run out of room in his. That, and there really was quite a bit of sunlight. He got light on six sides up there. It was like being on Mount Olympus, with a whole bunch of plants.

As much fun as it had been to talk to Len about his moss, it was nothing compared to hearing him go on about plants. He started out delivering information sort of like a university lecturer, which he had been at some point in his life. Everything was all about the genus and the species and the Latinate name and the common name, and the historical derivatives of the names. But he couldn’t hold on to the formality of it all, frankly. In no time flat he was talking to the plants, checking out the texture of the leaves, telling the pretty ones how pretty they were, telling the ones that were all spiky and weird looking that looks didn’t matter, the pink coleus is just a slut for showing off like that, beauty comes and goes so quickly and she was only an annual anyway. He thought the cactuses were sly and devious, he called them the “tricksters of the desert”, which I didn’t quite follow because I have to admit all those spikes didn’t look so sly to me, they were pretty direct, in fact, but when I pointed that out Len just laughed, like there was so much about cactuses that I just didn’t know. Which of course how could you argue with that, I actually don’t know anything about cactuses, I was just making an observation. And then he took me into the orchid room and I got an earful about the orchids. He had truly more than a hundred different kinds, each one stranger than the next. Some had spots all over them, which I had never seen before on any flower. They were pink and purple and yellow and white, and dark red with black centers, and there was one that was black everywhere, which was strangely frightening, to see a completely black flower. There were some that looked like stars and some that looked like butterflies, some that looked like tarantulas, some that looked like hornets or some other kind of stinging animal, and then of course there were just dozens that looked like sex organs. Seriously, all of those flowers looked like they want to have sex with humans. It was a bit creepy, honestly. I was somewhat afraid to touch them.

This turned out to be a good impulse on my part, as Len sort of casually informed me once we were done with the orchid room.

“Some of them are poisonous,” he admitted. “The pollen, the ovules, the nectar, this little darling here—don’t touch—not that it would really hurt you permanently, but you very well might lose all feeling in your arm, for at least a day.”

“Come on, Len,” I said.

“Do you want to try it?” he asked, raising those eyebrows at me.

I didn’t. “But if orchids are poisonous how come everybody has them in their houses?” I asked.

“Only certain species, Tina. Use your head,” he told me, pulling out a very small pair of clippers and snipping some extraneous vines away from a line of bright yellow star-shaped flowers which wound down the side of a tree. “Please don’t touch that.”

“You can’t touch any of them?” I asked.

“Until you know which ones are poisonous, and which aren’t, no, in fact, you can’t touch any of them.—

“How did you find out which ones are poisonous?”

“The hard way,” he informed me. “I studied.”

The place smelled like growing things, and sounded like water. He had little fountains in corners, and strange pools suddenly appeared behind tree trunks, or alongside a hillside of ferns. That greenhouse was so big it had hills—small hills, but there were definite undulations. And everything was green, a thousand different greens, each one more subtle than the next. In spite of the pink coleus and the startling sexuality of the many-colored and poisonous orchids, green was what you saw, everywhere. And sky. You forgot, honestly, that you were in a building, in a city, on an island. I don’t know where you were, but it was not where you thought.

And then all of a sudden you turned a corner and you were back in his apartment. His apartment was quite small. You would say that it was quite small in comparison to the size of the greenhouse, but the fact is that it was quite small in comparison to anything; it was one little room, right at the center of the roof. There was a linoleum counter and a kitchenette, completely cluttered with pots and pans and a blender and lots of mismatched dishes on open shelves. And then across from the counter there was a wall with a lot of books, all about plants, and a chair and a little table, and then to one side of that there was a big overstuffed blue couch that had magazines and books piled all over it, and then behind that, in a corner, there was an unmade bed. And then next to the bed there seemed to be some sort of closet, and then at the back of the closet, or to the side, actually, there was a very small bathroom that had a skylight and lots of plants in the bathtub. And then on the other side of the bathtub there was one of those Plexiglas walls they sell you in fancy bath stores, and just beyond the Plexiglas was the room with all the ferns. Seriously you could step out of that bathtub and into the greenhouse. I mean, Len had walls, he did have actual walls in some places, just not as many walls as most people have. So that the greenhouse actually did seem to grow out of that tiny apartment, and then it just kept growing.