Twelve Rooms with a View

“A ballpark. A ballpark,” he said, smiling back at me. “I don’t know. Eleven million?”

There was a big fat silence at this.

“Eleven million?” I said. “Eleven million what?” I swear I know that sounds stupid, but what on earth was he talking about? Eleven million pesos?

“Eleven million dollars,” he clarified. “That is of course almost a random number, there’s no way really of knowing. But it is twelve rooms, with a view of Central Park, on a very good block. I think eleven million would be considered conservative. In terms of estimates.”

So then there was a lot more talk, yelling even, people getting quite heated and worried over things that hadn’t happened and might not be happening but maybe were happening and had happened already, and the solution, apparently, to all these things that no one understood was for me, Tina, to move into that big old eleven million dollar apartment, like right away, like that very day.

So it was complicated, how that happened? But that’s where I ended up.

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_77163d04-fe03-5b7e-a564-5053161cea54)

This is the thing you have to understand about these big old apartments in NewYork City: they are more completely astonishing than you ever thought they might be, even in your wildest hopes. When you walk by them, like, just walking along the edge of Central Park at sunset, and you look up at the little golden windows blazing and you think Oh My God those apartments must be mind-blowing, who on earth could possibly be so lucky that they get to live in one of those apartments? My mother and her husband were two of those people, and they lived in an apartment so huge and beautiful it was beyond imagining. Ceilings so high they made you feel like you were in a cathedral, or a forest. Light fixtures so big and far away and strangely shaped that they looked like bugs were crawling out of them. Mirrors in crumbling gilt frames that had little cherubs falling off the top; clocks from three different centuries, none of which worked. So many turns in the hallways, leading to so many different dark rooms, that you thought maybe you had stumbled into a dwarf’s diamond mine. The place was also, quite frankly, covered in mustard-colored wall-to-wall shag carpet, and the walls in one of the bathrooms were papered with some sort of inexplicable silver-spotted stuff that you couldn’t figure out where that shit even came from, plus there was actual moss growing on the fixtures in the kitchen, no kidding, moss. But none of that was in any way relevant. The place was fantastic.

There was nobody there to let us in—we had to let ourselves in, with the keys that the nice round lawyer handed over, telling us about six different times that he didn’t think it was “necessary” that we take immediate ownership. Seriously, he was so worried about the whole idea—that I would just up and move into this huge old empty apartment where my mother had died—that he kept repeating himself, in a sort of sad murmur, “There’s no need to rush into anything. Really. You must all be overwhelmed. Let me walk you through this.”

“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 pointed out, trying to drag us all back into this nonsense. But now that the words “eleven million” had come out of his mouth, none of us were listening.

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

“Before we lose the light,” Lucy said.

Sometimes I am amazed when she pulls out lines like that. She just says this stuff like she really means it even though she already said maybe a second ago that we needed to get over there and get Tina moved in so that it was clear right away that we were taking ownership because if there was going to be any contention or cloud on the title we would need to have already 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, deals with it, and then a second later pretends that really what is 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 in his imagination that they should be calling the shots? But as I already noted, he just married into this situation, and there is no way around how smart Lucy is.

I, meanwhile, am the problem child who doesn’t get a vote. This is the reason, I guess, they don’t explain anything to me. Why bother? She’s caused too many problems; she doesn’t get a vote anymore. Even when it comes down to the question of where is Tina going to live, Tina doesn’t get to vote. I didn’t care. The truth is I didn’t have anything better to do anyway 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 there 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—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 and making those windows glow. The building itself was huge, a kind of murky dark brown with the occasional purple brick stuck in the mix. Above, strange and gloomy gargoyles snarled at everyone from the cornices three stories up. Two gargoyles guarded the entryway as well, on either side, serious-minded eagles with the tails of lions. While they didn’t look like they were kidding around they also didn’t look like they intended to eat you or spit molten lava at you, with the ones higher up, you were not quite so sure. Plus there were actual gas lamps, the old Victorian ones, burning by the heads of the eagle lions, and another one of those gas lamps, a really mammoth one, hung dead center over the door, right above a huge word in Gothic type that said EDGEWOOD. In fact all of the windows on the first two floors had additional scrollwork and carving and additional inexplicable Latin words inscribed over them. It all added up into a kind of castle-type Victorian abode that was quite friendly while simultaneously seeming like the kind of place you’d never come out of alive.

The foyer of this place was predictably spectacular. Marble floors, dotted with some kind of black stone tiles for effect, vaulted ceilings and the biggest crystal chandelier you’ve ever seen in your life. A huge black chair which I later found out was carved out of pure ebony sat right in front of an equally enormous fireplace, and improbably, the chair actually had wings. Two more of the giant eagle-like lions stood on either side of the fireplace, which was filled with an enormous sort of greenery arrangement I later found out was plastic but which was convincing and impressive nonetheless. The doorman’s station, a nice little brass stand piled with FedEx packages and a couple of manila envelopes piled on top of it, was empty. And then behind that there was a tiny bank of two elevators.

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

“We’ll have time for that later,” Lucy told me, 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, pushing the elevator button, pressing her lips together, like don’t mess with me. She kept tapping at that stupid button, as impatient as Moses whacking the rock, like that might hurry up God instead of just pissing him off.

“Seriously, we can’t just go up there,” I said. The whole situation suddenly seemed so dicey to me. 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 be what made it okay; it was just like Darren and the whole Delaware Water Gap Story—things happen too fast and you end up stuck out in the middle of nowhere with a complete shithead and a shitload of trouble. I was just about to hopelessly attempt to explain this to my two sisters when the elevator dinged and Daniel swung open the outer door.

“You guys, come on,” 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 set of keys the egglike lawyer had given us, Mom’s apartment was number 8A so we took the elevator to the eighth floor, where it disgorged us on a tiny, horrible little landing. Green fluorescent lighting flickered from an old strip light and didn’t make anyone look good, and the speckled linoleum tiles on the floor and Venetian blinds were so old and cracked and dusty even a hapless loser such as myself would have to find it offensive. The door to 8A was triple locked, so it took Lucy a long minute to figure out how to work all the keys. I was in a little bit of a bad mood by this time. I really did think we should have waited to at least tell the stupid doorman we were there, and I was worried about what might happen if a total stranger showed up and said, “Hey! What are you doing?” There was one other door, just behind the two elevators, which had been painted a kind of sad brown maybe a hundred years ago, and next to it another door, painted a gorgeous pearly grey, with heavy brass fixings which announced “8B”. The 8A on our door was just a couple of those gold and black letters that you buy in the hardware store that have sticky stuff on the back. It made you wonder all of a sudden: Eleven million dollars? For this dump? Which in fact had not even crossed my mind, up to this point.

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

You couldn’t tell how big that place was right away. The blinds were drawn and obviously nobody knew where the switches were, so we all stepped tentatively into the gloom. It smelled, too, a sort of funny old people smell, not like someone died in there, but more like camphor, and dried paper, and mothballs. And then somewhere far off, in with the mothballs, there was something else that smelled like 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 in there.

“Don’t you smell Mom’s perfume?” I asked. It seemed unmistakable to me that that’s what it was, even though she hardly ever wore the stuff because it was so ridiculously expensive. My dad gave it to her on their wedding night, and they could never afford it again so she only wore it once every three years or so when he had an actual job and they got to go to some cocktail party, and we would watch her put her one black dress on, and the clip-on earrings with the sparkles, and the smallest little bit 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, way back in that huge apartment, lost in with a bunch of mothballs, the smell of my mother when she was happy.

“It’s that perfume. What was the name of that stuff?” I asked, taking another step in. I loved that apartment already, so dark and big and strange, with my mother’s perfume hiding in it like a secret. “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 like time had just stopped. And then Daniel found the light switch, and turned it on, 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, of course, that time actually had stopped there. Somewhere between 1857 and 1960, things had happened and then just somehow stopped happening. The ceiling was high and far away with sealike coves around the corners, and right in the middle of this enormous lake of a ceiling there was the strangest of old chandeliers, glued together out of what looked like iron filings, with things dripping and crawling out of it. It seemed to have been poorly wired, because it only had three working fake-candle 15-watt bulbs, which is why it gave off so little light. And then on the floor there was this mustard-colored shag carpeting, which I believe I have mentioned before, and then there was like one chair, in the corner. It was a pretty big chair, but seriously, it was one chair.

“What a dump,” said Daniel.

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

Alison was not. She kept pawing at the wall. “Is this all the light? There has to be another light switch somewhere,” she said, sounding 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 then there was just a little doorway-sized window of light that didn’t actually make it very far into the living room, or parlour, 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 there in a kind of sudden, alarming frenzy. “No kidding, there’s something growing—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 just gets more and more worked up, and she truly doesn’t know how to stop it once it gets going. No one is quite sure why Daniel married her, as he’s pretty good looking and seriously 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, right about now was when that apartment literally started to drive her crazy. She kept slapping the wall, looking for another light switch, and Daniel was just ignoring how scared she was; he was heading all the way across that 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 all stood it looked like a hole, and the sloping black shadow that used to be Daniel was about to disappear right down it.

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

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

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

“Here, Alison,” I said, and I pulled open one of the blinds.

And then we were all showered with light. This incredible gold and red light shot through the window and hit every wall in that room, making everything glow and move; the sun was going down so the light was cutting through the branches of the bare trees, which were shifting in the wind. So that big old room went from being all weird and dreary to being something else altogether, and it skipped 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.”