Theresa Rebeck - Twelve Rooms with a View

Anyway, in the door of the refrigerator I also found a half a jar of ruby red grapefruit juice, which meant I could have an actual cocktail instead of trying to down the vodka straight or over melted ice. So I made myself a drink, put the water on to boil for the noodles and turned the television on for company. They only had basic cable so I found one of those stations that runs endless documentaries all the time and started to look around.

The bedroom was not really a bedroom, even though there was a bed in there. There were huge pocket doors which were clearly meant to shut the room off, but they had been left open for so long they were stuck on their rails. Another set of enormous pocket doors made up the entire wall on the other side of the room, but they were stuck closed and the bed was shoved up against them. Then there was a little cove that had been built into one wall, with fancy plasterwork up the sides and a crown at the top. That had a little dresser in it. Other than that there were no closets—just clothes everywhere on the floor—which in addition to the huge pocket doors made it clear that this room was not in fact ever meant to be a bedroom, and was more likely intended as a dining area. Daniel had said that there were two dining rooms but I don’t think there were two, I think this bedroom was really the dining room, and the room behind it with the television was supposed to be the original kitchen, and the servants would cook back there and then come in with the food, through the pocket doors, which presumably opened and closed at some previous point in history. Well, honestly, I had no idea what was supposed to be what in this crazy apartment in the other century when it was built. But that’s what I thought.

I also thought, I wonder where Mom’s perfume is? Because back in that sort of freaky half-bedroom-half-dining room you smelled it everywhere; it was in all the clothes and the blankets and the sheets, along with the red wine and the cigarettes and dirty laundry and mothballs. I kind of had it in my head that I might find that little black bottle and snag it before Lucy turned it into some big issue for no reason whatsoever. Seriously, you just never knew when she was going to get all twitchy and start making lists and arguing about everything, and Alison sometimes goes along with that shit just because in general it’s not really worth arguing with Lucy. Then the next thing you know, Lucy’s telling everybody that we have to put everything smaller than a paperback into a box and sell it all together because that’s the only way to be fair, and then she’s handing it over to some thrift store for ten dollars or something, not even enough to buy a pizza. It made no sense to me to let Lucy try something like that, so I started looking. I was pretty sure if I found that little bottle first I could stick it in my backpack and no one would ever know.

The first place I checked was the dresser in the alcove. It seemed to me that that was probably the only place where Mom might have put anything of value to her; the rest of the room really was nothing but piles of clothes, a chair, a couple of books on the floor, and the unmade bed. Besides, the dresser really did look like she might have been using it as a vanity; there was an old gilt mirror glued to the wall above it, with the feet of half a cherub hanging down from the top. The top of the dresser had a few things on it—a hairbrush, a comb, a couple of empty glasses with some dry little well of alcohol stuck to the bottom. Then there was a completely tarnished little round silver boxlike thing, with curlicues and a big French fleur-de-lis right on top that when you opened it there were a whole bunch of keys and an old wedding ring and three little bitty medals inside. One of them said CHEMISTRY on it. In addition to the round silver box there were a couple of really old photographs in really old frames of no one I knew, and then there were a couple photographs unframed, behind them, with the edges curling toward the middle. One of them was of me, when I was about fifteen and going on the first of many disastrous dates with Ed Featherstone. He was a mighty jerk, but at fifteen who knew? But seriously it is a bit of a shock to see yourself seventeen years ago, with your arms around someone who is now seventeen years older and who made a fortune on Wall Street back when everyone was doing that, got out while the getting was good and now owns lots of property in Connecticut. Whatever. I set aside the can of keys, which I thought might be useful for future exploration, and then I looked in the drawers.

The top drawer had her underwear in it, lots of sad bras and panties, several old pairs of neutral-colored support hose, and a quart bottle of good vodka. Then in the other drawer, just beneath it, was Bill’s underwear, gigantic pairs of white and light blue cotton briefs. I so did not want to go pawing through that stuff—I mean, really, I wanted to find that little bottle of perfume because I wanted to have it and honestly I didn’t think anyone else would want it, but I was quickly losing my nerve. I had never even met this nutty alcoholic; who knew what lurked in his underwear? Rather than just give up, I pulled the drawer all the way out of the dresser and upended it. There was nothing in there except all those huge pairs of underwear, and a wallet.

A wallet; there was a wallet, and the guy who owned it was dead, and everything he owned got left to my mom, who left everything she owned to me and my sisters. I figured that gave me some rights, so I sat on the floor and looked through it, and lo and behold there were three receipts from a liquor store, a couple more pictures of people I didn’t know, and a lot of money. A serious wad of money, the bills smooth and neatly pressed together, like they give it to you at the bank, if you are the sort of person that a bank will actually give money to. So I thought, Oh thank God, and I took it out to count it and those crispy new bills were all fifties and hundreds; Bill had seven hundred dollars in that wallet, which would I think be a significant windfall to pretty much anybody, but was a virtual miracle to a person of my limited means. I pocketed the cash.

When I leaned over to sort of half-scoop the now empty wallet and all that underwear back into the drawer I also happened to notice the no-man’s-land under the bed, which was crowded with boxes. These turned out to be really hard to get to, because they all were just a little bit too big for the space which meant they were really squashed in there. They also each weighed a ton, as I discovered, since they were full of used paperbacks, most of them mysteries. After about twenty minutes of dragging those boxes out of there I was ready to completely give up, until I got to the very last box, which was up by the headboard on the far side of the bed. That one was not full of books. It was full of junk, a crummy handbag, a little red change purse, two pairs of reading glasses, and an old cedar jewelry box filled with fake pearls and junky necklaces, another quart-sized bottle of vodka, nearly empty, and a tiny bottle of French perfume.

It looked just the way I remembered it, pitch black, and shaped like a heart. The ghost of the word Joy ran across one side, in elegant gold letters. And then of course, as much as I wanted it, it suddenly just seemed unbearably awful to me. That perfume started with her at the beginning of her past, when she thought that lots of glamorous things were in store for her. I know that’s why she was so careful with it; she was waiting for her life to be as exciting as that bottle of perfume, and the closest she ever got was a couple of cocktail parties with my father, who hardly ever had a job, and whose temper was the bane of her existence. I tipped the bottle to one side, trying to figure out how much perfume was still in there, after thirty-seven years. It was impossible to say.