Twelve Rooms with a View. Theresa Rebeck
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The stuff about my mother drinking herself to death there, and my sisters being so uptight and bossy, and crazy drunk guys showing up in the middle of the night—that seemed like just not so serious, when I picked up my eighteen packages and thought about going home. I kind of half wondered, What are you going to do when you get home? And then I thought, Well, maybe I’ll just make myself a cup of tea and read a book or something, there are at least a thousand used mysteries still shoved under the bed in Bill and Mom’s bedroom. So on the way home I stopped at one of those little shops and I bought myself some fancy tea, and I was well on my way to becoming a totally different person—the kind who lives on the Upper West Side and drinks tea in the afternoon while reading mystery novels—when I got back to the lobby of my fabulous new apartment and found out that I was still the same old Tina I had been just a couple hours ago.
The place was packed. I had only been to the lobby twice before, but the first time me and my crazy little family were the only ones there, and the second time it was just me and Len and Frank the doorman. This time there were a lot of people milling around, a bunch of kids in school uniforms clustered around the elevator, arguing with each other and hitting the buttons on the elevator bank, and a woman in a bright red jacket with a fur collar trying to get Frank’s attention at the little brass podium he sits at. Frank was talking to two big guys and they were all kind of yelling at once, which sounded loud because it wasn’t the biggest space to begin with, but the ceilings were so high and curved the sound bounced around in it. The lady in the red jacket was clearly supposed to be somehow related to the kids, because she would occasionally yell, “Stop it, Gail! All of you, would you just wait until I see if your father’s package has arrived? Frank…” But the other two guys were talking on top of her, and Frank was totally dealing with whatever they were saying, which I couldn’t hear because of the other noise. Then there were two more ladies behind the one in the red jacket, who 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, like no one really wears clothes like that except the people who do. I couldn’t see their faces right away because their backs were to me; all I could see were those strange fashionable outfits and that one of them had the most astonishing black curls tumbling down her back while the other one had white hair that was kind of short and flipped around her head. Then the one with the black hair turned for a second, like she heard something just behind her, and she turned out to be one of those people who are just so idiotically beautiful that you think you’re on drugs when you see them up close. Her eyes flicked in my direction, but then the other woman she was with was yanking at her arm.
“This is ludicrous,” the other woman said. “I’ll hail my own cab.”
“That’s what I said ten minutes ago,” said the younger, spectacular-looking woman. She turned around and headed right for the door. But the older lady didn’t follow her, in spite of the fact that the whole idea of hailing your own cab for once was hers.
“We will get our OWN CAB, FRANK!” she 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 at the front.
“Maybe you could just take a second to look through the deliveries, we’ll just get out of your hair, Frank,” said the lady in the red jacket at the same time, trying to be nice but also trying to get her own way too, sort of poking through the stuff that was piled on the console. The kids continued to scream as the furious white-haired lady turned, muttering to herself about how nuts it all was.
Poor Frank was now 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 at the same time. 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, and talking to me. “She says she’s living there now, and that you met last night and that you spoke about it—I’m not sure, but that’s the young lady, she said that you know each other,” Frank told the guy at the front of the line. “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 I just got a little…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 total dirty look.
Obviously this moment, for me, was a bit of a drag. The Upper West Side glamour 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 them, trying to do his job. Those loud and insane kids finally managed to get the elevator to arrive but their mother was not yet ready to pile into it with them; she was too busy giving me the once over, like she thought 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 being polite but too forceful to actually have it 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 there either, after my father died.”
“That’s not what my lawyer tells me.”
Okay, this for some reason 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 totally not expecting it, obviously; even last night when he showed up with his brother totally wasted and they were both really mad and reactive, nobody put their hands on me. I had one of those terrible minutes where I thought, Oh no, this is one of those guys who’s worse when he’s not drunk; all that disappointment and sadness and his thinning hair is just too much for him in real life.
“Let go of me, let go let go,” I said, real nice real fast. I didn’t want to find out if he actually had it in him to hit me; I truly didn’t.
“Look, I got a bunch of other jobs. Is this going to happen? the other guy asked. He had kind of a bad leather jacket and jeans on, and one of those old tool kits, and he looked really bored by all this. Somehow you knew right away that he saw this stuff all the time, people arguing about who had the right to own the locks to some house or apartment or whatever, and that it wasn’t all that earth-shattering, which made me realize that I probably was not going to get hit. Anyway, he sure didn’t think so. He sort of looked away, like he didn’t give a shit who won this battle, but also like he was pretty sure that whoever won this battle it was not going to be me so there was no use even acknowledging that I existed.
In any event, 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 actually touched me. Then he turned and yelled back at Frank, who was all the way outside, still trying desperately to hail a cab for the fed-up Mrs Gideon and her babelicious daughter. “We’re going up!” he announced. Frank didn’t even notice. Doug and the locksmith headed for the elevator but there was no way they’d get in as 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, heading for the other