Theresa Rebeck - Twelve Rooms with a View

“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 end of the lobby. Locksmith guy followed him. I did not. I finally got a clue, pulled out my brand new throwaway cell phone and called in the Marines.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Lucy, all annoyed as soon as I got her. “Where have you been?”

“They cut off the phone,” I told her.

“No kidding. I tried calling you three hours ago and got the message that the phone had been stopped,” she said. “Where have you been?”

“I went out to get a cell phone—”

“You’ve been out buying a cell phone for three hours?”

“Well, I needed some other stuff too and—”

“I thought you were broke. What are you using for money?”

“Would you listen to me, Lucy? They’re here! At least one of them is here and he’s trying to change the locks. He has a locksmith here and he says I have no rights and—”

“Relax. I’m two blocks away, I’m taking care of it,” she told me.

“What do you mean you’re two blocks away? I called you at work,” I said, all confused again.

“And my assistant patched you through to my cell,” she informed me.

“So you’re on your way here? How did you know to come?”

“Tina, when the phone got cut off what did you think was going on?”

“I don’t know. I thought I needed to get a cell phone.”

“Well, I thought a little harder than that. Just stay right there in the lobby; I’ll be there in two minutes.”

She hung up on me, just as Frank trotted back in. He looked a little shell-shocked, but in a more or less delirious kind of way. I thought he was going to be mad at me because I had basically just caused a huge scene, resulting in utter chaos in his little lobby, with people threatening to have him fired and all sorts of unpleasant bullshit. Frank, however, seemed to have barely noticed. He was actually humming a little tune, as he headed over to his podium and started picking up the packages which were still all over the floor. I thought for a moment that he was one of those strange sad people who need a little action to feel alive, but then I took another look, and it was like he was glowing a little bit, around the edges, you could almost see little beams of light coming out of his cuffs and collar. I thought, Oh, he’s in love, Frank is in love with the unspeakably beautiful Julianna Gideon. And he just got to be near her, he got to hold the cab door open for her for half a second.