Theresa Rebeck - Twelve Rooms with a View

“You mean the apartment,” Egg Man insisted.

“Yes, the apartment.” Daniel was still acting all above it all, like he was the one who had the right to be annoyed.

“So it’s not a house,” I said.

“No, it’s an apartment. Olivia had been living there. Up until her recent death.”

“Recent death, that’s an understatement,” I said.

“Yes, yes, this is I’m sure overwhelming for you,” the lawyer said, kind of nicely. He had very good manners, compared to everyone else in the room. “But I take it from your questions that you’ve never actually seen the apartment?”

“Bill didn’t like us,” I said. “So we weren’t allowed to come over.”

“He was reclusive,” Alison corrected me. “As I’m sure Mr Long is aware.”

“Mom told me he didn’t want us to come over, because Bill didn’t like us,” I said.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Alison.

“Could we get back to the point?” Lucy said. “What about this house—this apartment? We’re inheriting this place, right?”

“Yes, well—the apartment was directly willed to your mother,” Egg Man agreed. “Because her death came so close upon her husband’s the title was never officially transferred, but that will most likely be considered a technicality.”

“But it was her house,” Daniel reminded him. He was really stuck on this idea that it was a house.

“Technically it is, as I said, specifically included in the estate,” our round lawyer repeated. “Why don’t you let me walk you through this?”

“Why don’t you just tell us how much the place is worth?” Lucy threw in.

Mr Long blinked, but otherwise ignored her poor manners. “Obviously it’s not possible to be specific about the worth of the property until we have a professional evaluation,” he informed the room.

“You really don’t know?” Lucy persisted. “Like, it could be worth ten dollars or ten thousand dollars, or it could be worth a million dollars, but you don’t know?”

Before Egg Guy could answer, Daniel tried to rip control of the meeting back to his side of the table. “She’s just a little impatient,” he explained. “Sweetie, maybe we should let Mr Long—”

Lucy actually rolled her eyes at this. “Just a ballpark, Daniel sweetie,” she shot back.

Mr Long cleared his throat, clearly uncomfortable. “Well, I guess I could—”

“Yes, why don’t you,” I said, trying to be nice because frankly I was starting to feel a little embarrassed that they were acting like this. Also, like everyone else in the room, I really wanted him to give up a number. “Just a ballpark,” I said, smiling with as much adorable charm as I could muster under the circumstances. I thought Lucy was going to gag, but it did the trick.

“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.

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?