Theresa Rebeck - Twelve Rooms with a View

“Something wrong?” Len asked me, hanging out of the kitchen door. I mean, obviously there was something wrong; I was holding the phone out and staring at it like it was about to explode.

“The phone doesn’t work,” I told him. “I mean, it worked just an hour ago. Now it doesn’t work.”

He held out his neat but dirty hand and I gave it to him. He listened for less than one second, then nodded. “Well,” he said. “I need to introduce you to Frank.”

Frank was the doorman. Len took me downstairs to the front lobby, and there he was, Frank, a kind of good-looking Hispanic guy with a beard and really long hair, in a beige uniform with little gold things on the shoulders. He had one of those weird haircuts that are short in strange places, with a crazy zig-zag lightning bolt running down the back of his head. With the dopey uniform it looked really nuts, but he seemed nice enough.

“Hey Len, what’s up?” Frank asked.

“This is Tina Finn, Olivia’s daughter.” Len made a little wave with his hand, seeming to indicate for a moment that I might be some sort of fancy dish that was being served up. I felt like bowing.

“Nice to meet you, Miss Finn,” said Frank, reaching out and shaking my hand politely. “I’m real sorry about your mom.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Tina is going to be staying in the apartment for now, while they settle things up with the estate,” Len informed Frank. It was genius, seriously; coming out of Len, “she’s staying in the apartment” sounded pretty good. At least, Frank the doorman had no problem with it.

“Well, welcome to the Edge,” he said. “If you need anything, you let me know.”

“There is something,” Len nodded. “It looks like her phone’s been cut off. Could you put a call in about it?”

“Sure. Who’s your carrier?” asked Frank, reaching for the phone receiver on his desk.

“You know, I’m not sure who they had,” I said.

“Well, let’s see then, maybe I’ll put a call in to Doug—that’s Bill’s son,” he told me. “There’s probably just been some mistake, he cut the phone off maybe. Did he know you were going to be staying up there?”

“Yeah, we talked you know, we just talked yesterday about it,” I said. “Look, you don’t need to bother him, I’ll call him myself.”

“I got it right here,” Frank said, dialing. “It’s no bother.” He was dialing away when Len tapped him on the shoulder.

“It’s probably better to just give her the number,” Len said under his breath, like he was trying to keep me from hearing what he said. Frank looked at him, a little confused, and Len did that thing with his hands, opening them up, apologizing to the universe for the stupidity of the human race. “There’s got to be a lot going on, Frank. You probably don’t want to put yourself in the middle of it.” It sounded so much like he was taking care of Frank there that for a minute I forgot he was actually taking care of me.

It was, however, starting to occur to old Frank that maybe this story didn’t add up. “But you did see Doug last night?” he asked, a little worried now while he rooted around for a pen.

“We hadn’t figured out what we were doing last night, when we talked. Everything was such a mess. With Mom’s funeral, I was kind of a wreck and we hadn’t actually thought about the practicalities. I mean I was just like crying and crying so I really didn’t get the details straight,” I fibbed.

“I know what that’s like.” Frank nodded. “I lost my mom fifteen years ago, I still miss her.” He looked at me and I swear to God, in that split second you could see the sadness rise up in his face, nothing too much, just enough to make his cheeks flush a little and his eyes well up. He got embarrassed right away and looked down, like he was still searching for that pen even though it was in his hand, and because that hideous uniform looked so terrible on him it made me feel a little bad to be lying like this. I mean, he was significantly nicer than Len, who probably was just taking care of me so that I didn’t mess with his moss. But this guy Frank was just a nice person who missed his mom. His little haircut was so sweet and stupid I thought my head was going to split.

“Well…thanks Frank,” I finally said. “I’ll go call Doug right now and make sure he knows everything about me staying there and all that and you know make sure that he knows not to turn anything else off.” I turned away a little, so that Frank would have a moment of privacy to collect himself. And then there was old Len, at my elbow, showing me to the door, like a friendly undercover agent. “There’s a Verizon store two blocks up and one over, on Columbus,” he informed me cheerfully, under his breath. “They sell those throwaway phones. You don’t need a credit card, you can just pay cash, isn’t that convenient?”

“Very,” I agreed. “Thanks for the tip, Len.”

A throwaway phone was exactly the thing, of course, because I had no cell phone and no credit card and now no landline. So Len was right to suggest it, and while I was out putting his sensible suggestion into action I also poked around a couple of clothing stores so that I had something more than one skirt, one pair of jeans and one sweater in my wardrobe. I could have called that bonehead Darren and asked him to put all my clothes in a box and send them, but I had no reason to believe he would actually do that, even if he said he would. So I ducked into a couple of really cute little shops where I learned that my seven hundred dollars, minus one throwaway phone, might buy me one pair of excruciatingly expensive blue jeans and half a tank top, which seriously annoyed me until I found a Gap, where there was a whole lot of stuff on sale which fit fine and looked cool enough and cost quite a bit less. Then I was hungry and I had a burger in a seedy sort of deli place, and then I needed underwear, and honestly I couldn’t find anyplace to buy it except one of those really cute little shops and that cost a complete fortune but there was nothing else to do. So the seven hundred dollars was more or less whittled down to two by the time I decided to head back home.

That was the first time my head said that, “Let’s go home, and I know it sounds kind of ridiculous that I thought of it that way? But no kidding, I was already in love with that place. 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.