Lionel Shriver - So Much for That

“Didn’t you sell Knack of All Trades for, like, a million dollars? Jesus, Shep!”

In his next life, he would keep his mouth shut. “My resources aren’t infinite. I have – other commitments. And if Dad stayed in decent health for another five to ten years, what you’re suggesting could leave us completely strapped.”

Beryl’s eyes smoldered; she obviously pictured his other commitments along the lines of an iPod for Zach. “Well … what if Dad moved in here? There’s Amelia’s old bedroom.”

“No,” Shep said flatly, irked with himself, since breaking the news in the car would have obviated much of this discussion. “Not now.”

“What about your place?” said Glynis. “It’s palatial, in Manhattan terms. And if you can’t do your part financially …”

“True,” said Shep, playing along. “And then I could help you out with incidentals.”

Of course his sister’s newly forged filial concern would never extend to her personal inconvenience, but he thought they’d cornered her sufficiently to at least make her squirm. Instead, her eyes lit from sullenness to rage.

“Sorry, won’t fly,” said Beryl, her tone clipped, victorious. “That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about.”

It was, Shep intuited, the thing she wanted to talk about. They moved to the kitchen, where the lasagna was starting to burn.

For many years Beryl had lived in a vast, high-ceilinged apartment with all the original fixtures on West Nineteenth Street for which she paid a pittance. Possession of the three-bedroom walk-up had delivered her disproportionate power in her many volatile romances. She could always threaten her partners with exile from a residence whose pantry was larger than the apartment they could afford outside her door. Shep wouldn’t claim that her swains loved her for her lease, but even if they did fall in love with Beryl, they fell in love with her apartment first.

For hers was one of the diminishing number of buildings still covered by an anachronistic regime of rent control brought in after World War II. So desperate were owners of these protected buildings to dislodge sitting tenants, thus restoring the apartments to “fair market” rents, that whole codes in the statutes addressed the rules of vacancy and re-inhabitation when landlords set their own buildings on fire.

“Every time a tenant has died,” Beryl regaled them, stabbing her salad, “and I mean, while the body is still warm – whoosh , in sweep the workmen to ‘renovate,’ and never mind ruining those glorious old cornices and chandeliers! They rip the guts out. The landlord’s completely redone the lobby, though it was in mint condition, and converted the basement to disgusting little studios, so we don’t have laundry facilities anymore. Anyway, he finally got his hands on my neighbor’s place down the hall – AIDS – and that did it. Seventy-five percent of the building is now officially ruined, which qualifies as ‘substantial renovation.’ That takes it out of rent stabilization, totally. I don’t know what I’m going to do!”

“You mean he can now charge you what your apartment is actually worth?” asked Glynis.

“Yes!” Beryl fumed. “Bingo, my rent could go from a few hundred bucks to thousands! Thousands and thousands!”

“I’m surprised,” said Shep. “Sitting tenants under that regime are usually protected like endangered species.”

“We are an endangered species. I might have been okay, except the moment my landlord hit that seventy-five percent mark he hired some goons to go on a witch hunt for illegal subletters. The guy who’s purely as a technicality on my lease and lived there, like, five tenancies ago, back in the Stone Age, moved to New Jersey. I paid him a fortune in key money, too. But the idiot changed his voter registration, so they found out.”

“You mean it’s not even your lease?” said Shep.

“Morally, of course it is! I’ve been there for seventeen years!”

Despite Shep’s intuition that Beryl’s headache was about to become his as well – her problems often exhibited a transitive property – his sister’s real estate welfare coming to an end was insidiously satisfying. “On the open market,” he observed, “that place might go for five or six grand a month.”

Glynis didn’t look insidiously satisfied ; she looked delighted. Ever since her diagnosis, she’d seemed to relish anyone else’s misfortune; so much the better if it was Beryl’s. “So what’s the game plan? Don’t tell me you want Amelia’s room.”

“I’d like to sue .”

“Whom for what?” asked Shep.

“That guy has been scheming to reach the seventy-five-percent threshold for years, and practically none of that ‘renovation’ was necessary.”

“It is his building.”

“It’s my apartment!”

“Only if you can afford the rent. Listen,” Shep forked a black rippled edge from a noodle, “maybe you should think ‘glass half full’ here. About how lucky you’ve been. What a great situation you’ve had all these years. Okay, it’s over—” His voice caught. How lucky you’ve been; what a great situation you’ve had; okay, it’s over . He could’ve given the same speech to himself.

“Nobody feels lucky ,” said Beryl, “when their luck has just run out.”

“You can say that again,” said Glynis. Rare accord.

Shep served second helpings. He’d broken out Glynis’s famous sterling fish slice for the meal, a little unwieldy for lasagna, and admittedly incongruous with the beaten-up aluminum baking pan. But he wanted his wife to feel accomplished, to take advantage of a rare opportunity to show off on her behalf. When they’d first sat down to dinner, the lithe line of the silver, the oceanic Bakelite inlay of sea green and aquamarine, had obliged his sister to admire the very metalcraft that she was loath to concede Glynis ever got around to fashioning. The transparent insincerity of Beryl’s compliments provided his wife a backhanded pleasure.

Glynis declined another serving. Please, he whispered. Please . He placed a small square on her plate anyway, mumbling, You don’t understand. It’s not about food anymore, about whether you want it . Beryl was too caught up in the loss of her rent stabilization to infer what the exchange might mean. With no idea how to bend the evening’s subject matter around to the real issue, he tried to shift it by degrees.

“You know, speaking of bum luck,” Shep raised offhandedly, “do you carry any health insurance?”

“I’d hock my firstborn child, but I don’t have one.”

“So what would happen if you were in an accident, or got sick?”

“Beats me.” Beryl’s manner was defiant. “Don’t emergency rooms have to take you in?”

“Only for immediate care. And they still stick you with a bill.”

“Which they could shove where the sun don’t shine.”

“That could ruin your credit rating,” he said, cringing inside; the likes of credit ratings were exactly what he had yearned to flee in Pemba.

“That’s your world, big brother. Out here in mine, I could give a shit.” Apparently Beryl’s furious resentment had leached from her pending eviction to encompass her staid brother, his conventional house in Westchester, his gas-guzzling SUV, and his spoiled dilettante of a wife.

“But if something terrible happened to you …” Shep ventured. “Well, the person who would really end up paying for it is me, right? Who else, with Dad on a pension? In fact, that’s why I pay for Amelia’s insurance.”

“I’m not stopping you, if you want to buy me health insurance, too. Since from the sound of it you’re not really worried about me, but about yourself.”