Theresa Rebeck - Twelve Rooms with a View

So we got the keys, crawled through traffic to the Upper West Side, actually found a meter four blocks away from the promised land, and there we were, before the light was gone, while the sun was setting and making those windows glow. The building itself was huge, a kind of murky dark brown with the occasional purple brick stuck in the mix. Above, strange and gloomy gargoyles snarled at everyone from the cornices three stories up. Two gargoyles guarded the entryway as well, on either side, serious-minded eagles with the tails of lions. While they didn’t look like they were kidding around they also didn’t look like they intended to eat you or spit molten lava at you, with the ones higher up, you were not quite so sure. Plus there were actual gas lamps, the old Victorian ones, burning by the heads of the eagle lions, and another one of those gas lamps, a really mammoth one, hung dead center over the door, right above a huge word in Gothic type that said EDGEWOOD. In fact all of the windows on the first two floors had additional scrollwork and carving and additional inexplicable Latin words inscribed over them. It all added up into a kind of castle-type Victorian abode that was quite friendly while simultaneously seeming like the kind of place you’d never come out of alive.

The foyer of this place was predictably spectacular. Marble floors, dotted with some kind of black stone tiles for effect, vaulted ceilings and the biggest crystal chandelier you’ve ever seen in your life. A huge black chair which I later found out was carved out of pure ebony sat right in front of an equally enormous fireplace, and improbably, the chair actually had wings. Two more of the giant eagle-like lions stood on either side of the fireplace, which was filled with an enormous sort of greenery arrangement I later found out was plastic but which was convincing and impressive nonetheless. The doorman’s station, a nice little brass stand piled with FedEx packages and a couple of manila envelopes piled on top of it, was empty. And then behind that there was a tiny bank of two elevators.

“Wow,” I said. “Check out the chair with wings.”

“We’ll have time for that later,” Lucy told me, giving me a little shove toward the elevators.

“We should wait for the doorman, shouldn’t we?” I said, looking around. The place was deserted.

“Why? We live here,” Lucy announced, pushing the elevator button, pressing her lips together, like don’t mess with me. She kept tapping at that stupid button, as impatient as Moses whacking the rock, like that might hurry up God instead of just pissing him off.

“Seriously, we can’t just go up there,” I said. The whole situation suddenly seemed so dicey to me. Alison started pushing the elevator button too, pressing it really hard. Both of them were in such a rush, like rushing through all this would be what made it okay; it was just like Darren and the whole Delaware Water Gap Story—things happen too fast and you end up stuck out in the middle of nowhere with a complete shithead and a shitload of trouble. I was just about to hopelessly attempt to explain this to my two sisters when the elevator dinged and Daniel swung open the outer door.

“You guys, come on,” I said. “We should wait for the doorman.”

“Who knows where he is?” Daniel said. “We’re not waiting.”

And since no one showed up to stop us, I got in.

According to the set of keys the egglike lawyer had given us, Mom’s apartment was number 8A so we took the elevator to the eighth floor, where it disgorged us on a tiny, horrible little landing. Green fluorescent lighting flickered from an old strip light and didn’t make anyone look good, and the speckled linoleum tiles on the floor and Venetian blinds were so old and cracked and dusty even a hapless loser such as myself would have to find it offensive. The door to 8A was triple locked, so it took Lucy a long minute to figure out how to work all the keys. I was in a little bit of a bad mood by this time. I really did think we should have waited to at least tell the stupid doorman we were there, and I was worried about what might happen if a total stranger showed up and said, “Hey! What are you doing?” There was one other door, just behind the two elevators, which had been painted a kind of sad brown maybe a hundred years ago, and next to it another door, painted a gorgeous pearly grey, with heavy brass fixings which announced “8B”. The 8A on our door was just a couple of those gold and black letters that you buy in the hardware store that have sticky stuff on the back. It made you wonder all of a sudden: Eleven million dollars? For this dump? Which in fact had not even crossed my mind, up to this point.

And then Lucy figured out the locks, and there was a little click, and then a sort of a breeze, and the door to the apartment swung open.

You couldn’t tell how big that place was right away. The blinds were drawn and obviously nobody knew where the switches were, so we all stepped tentatively into the gloom. It smelled, too, a sort of funny old people smell, not like someone died in there, but more like camphor, and dried paper, and mothballs. And then somewhere far off, in with the mothballs, there was something else that smelled like old flowers, and jewelry, and France.

“Hey, Mom’s perfume,” I said.

“What?” said Lucy, who had wandered into the next room, looking for a light switch in there.

“Don’t you smell Mom’s perfume?” I asked. It seemed unmistakable to me that that’s what it was, even though she hardly ever wore the stuff because it was so ridiculously expensive. My dad gave it to her on their wedding night, and they could never afford it again so she only wore it once every three years or so when he had an actual job and they got to go to some cocktail party, and we would watch her put her one black dress on, and the clip-on earrings with the sparkles, and the smallest little bit of the most expensive perfume in the world. Who knows if it really was the most expensive in the world, I rather doubt it, but that’s what she told us. Anyway there it was, way back in that huge apartment, lost in with a bunch of mothballs, the smell of my mother when she was happy.

“It’s that perfume. What was the name of that stuff?” I asked, taking another step in. I loved that apartment already, so dark and big and strange, with my mother’s perfume hiding in it like a secret. “Don’t you smell it?”

“No,” said Alison, running her hand up the wall, like a blind person looking for a doorway. “I don’t.”

Maybe I was making it up. There were a lot of smells in there, in the dark. Mostly I think it smelled like time had just stopped. And then Daniel found the light switch, and turned it on, and there was the smallest golden glow from high up near the ceiling, you could barely see anything because the room was so big, but what you could see was, of course, that time actually had stopped there. Somewhere between 1857 and 1960, things had happened and then just somehow stopped happening. The ceiling was high and far away with sealike coves around the corners, and right in the middle of this enormous lake of a ceiling there was the strangest of old chandeliers, glued together out of what looked like iron filings, with things dripping and crawling out of it. It seemed to have been poorly wired, because it only had three working fake-candle 15-watt bulbs, which is why it gave off so little light. And then on the floor there was this mustard-colored shag carpeting, which I believe I have mentioned before, and then there was like one chair, in the corner. It was a pretty big chair, but seriously, it was one chair.

“What a dump,” said Daniel.

“Could we not piss on this before we’ve even seen it, Daniel?” called Lucy, from the kitchen. But she said it friendly, not edgy. She was having a pretty good time, I think.