Part 4 (1/2)
”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 G.o.d, in that split second you could see the sadness rise up in his face, just enough to make his cheeks flush a little and his eyes well up. He got embarra.s.sed right away and looked down, like he was still searching for that pen even though it was in his hand, and because that uniform looked so hideous on him, it made me feel kind of bad to be lying to him. I mean, he was significantly nicer than Len, who probably was just taking care of me so I wouldn't mess with his moss. But this guy Frank was just a nice person who missed his mom. He had a kind of bad haircut, which 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 about me staying here and all that and, you know, make sure that he knows not to turn anything else off.” I turned away so Frank could have a moment of privacy to collect himself. And then old Len was 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 I'd have 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 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, which had a whole lot of stuff on sale that fit fine and looked cool enough and cost quite a bit less. Then I was hungry, so I had a burger in a seedy deli, 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 I had no choice. So the seven hundred dollars was more or less whittled down to two hundred by the time I decided to go back home.
That was the first time my head said ”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. All that stuff about my mother drinking herself to death there, and my sisters being so uptight and bossy, and the crazy drunk guys showing up in the middle of the night-none of it seemed that serious when I picked up my eighteen packages and thought about going home. I 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 a little shop and bought 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. Then I got back to the lobby of my fabulous new apartment where I found out I was still the same old Tina I had been just a couple hours before.
The lobby was packed. People were milling about, a bunch of kids in school uniforms were cl.u.s.tered around the elevator, arguing with one another and hitting the b.u.t.tons on the elevator bank, and a woman in a bright red jacket with a fur collar kept trying to get Frank's attention at his little bra.s.s podium. Frank was talking to two men, and they were all yelling at once, and it sounded loud because the ceilings in that small s.p.a.ce were so high and curved that the sounds bounced around in it. The lady in the red jacket was clearly related to the kids, because occasionally she would yell, ”Stop it, Gail! All of you, would you just wait until I see if your father's package has arrived? Frank ...” But Frank was dealing with whatever the two guys were saying, which I couldn't hear because of all the other noise. Two ladies standing behind the one in the red jacket 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. I couldn't see their faces right away because their backs were to me. All I could see were those strange fas.h.i.+onable outfits, and one of the women had the most astonis.h.i.+ng black curls tumbling down her back while the other one had short white hair flipped around her head. Then the one with black hair turned for a second, like she had heard something just behind her, and she was one of those people who are so idiotically beautiful you think you're on drugs when you see them up close. Her eyes flicked in my direction, but then the woman she was with yanked at her arm.
”This is ludicrous,” the older woman said. ”I'll hail my own cab.”
”That's what I said ten minutes ago,” said the spectacular-looking woman. She turned around and headed right for the door. But the older lady didn't follow.
”We will get our OWN CAB, FRANK!” the old lady 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.
”Maybe you could just take a second to look through the deliveries, then we'll just get out of your hair, Frank,” said the lady in the red jacket, poking through the stuff piled on the console, trying to be nice but trying to get her own way too. The kids continued to scream as the furious white-haired lady turned away, muttering to herself about how nuts it all was.
Poor Frank was 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. 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. He said to one of the guys he'd been talking to, ”She says she's living there now, and that you met last night and you spoke about it-I'm not sure, but that's the young lady, she said that you know each other.” Then he turned to me. ”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 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 dirty look.
Obviously this moment was a bit of a drag. The fabulous Upper West Side fas.h.i.+on plates were pus.h.i.+ng 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 the women, trying to do his job. The loud, insane kids finally managed to get the elevator to arrive, but their mother was not yet ready to pile in with them; she was too busy giving me the once-over, like 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 pretending to be polite, but our voices were too forceful to 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 here either, after my father died-”
”That's not what my lawyer tells me.”
For some reason this 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 s.h.i.+rt, and yanked me toward him, to do what I wasn't sure. I was not expecting it; even last night when he showed up with his brother totally wasted, and they were both really mad and reactive, they didn't put their hands on me. For one terrible minute I thought, oh no, this is one of those guys who's worse when he's not drunk; all that disappointment and sadness and thinning hair are just too much for him.
”Let go of me, let go let go,” I said, real nice, real fast. I truly didn't want to find out if he had it in him to hit me.
”Look, I got a bunch of other jobs. Is this going to happen?” the guy with Doug asked. He had on a bad leather jacket and jeans and was carrying a tool kit, and he looked really bored. Somehow you knew right away that he saw this stuff all the time, people arguing about who had the right to change the locks to some house or apartment, and it wasn't all that earth-shattering. I realized I was probably not going to get hit. Anyway, the lock guy didn't seem to think so. He looked away like he didn't give a s.h.i.+t who won this battle, but also like he was pretty sure it was not going to be me, so there was no use even acknowledging that I existed.
The little interruption gave Doug a chance to recover. He let go of my s.h.i.+rt, giving me a little push, like he couldn't believe he had actually touched me. Then he turned and yelled back at Frank, who was outside trying to hail a cab for the fed-up Mrs. Gideon and her babelicious daughter. ”We're going up!” Doug announced. Frank didn't even notice. Doug and the locksmith headed for the elevator, but they couldn't get in, because 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, walking over to the other end of the lobby. The lock guy followed him. I did not. I finally got a clue, pulled out my brand-new throwaway cell phone, and called in the marines.
4.
”OH FOR G.o.d'S SAKE,” SAID LUCY, ALL ANNOYED, AS SOON AS I reached 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 was no longer in service,” 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 with him, 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 a.s.sistant patched you through to my cell.”
”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 sh.e.l.l-shocked in a delirious kind of way. I thought he was going to be mad at me because I had just caused a huge scene, bringing utter chaos to his little lobby, with people threatening to have him fired and all sorts of unpleasant bulls.h.i.+t. Frank, however, seemed to have barely noticed. He was actually humming a little tune as he went back to his podium and started picking up the packages that were 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 around the edges, you could almost see 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 got to be near her, he got to hold the cab door open for her for half a second.
”She's pretty, huh,” I said, testing out my theory.
”Oh my G.o.d,” he agreed. ”I can't even, when I look at her ...” He glanced out the door, taking pleasure in seeing the place he had last been allowed to look at her.
”Does she know you like her?” I asked.
”What?” That was a bad question; it shook him out of his fantasy, and he remembered he had a real right to be mad at me.
”Did you get things straightened out with Doug?” he asked, suddenly stern. ”He was quite certain that you are not supposed to be living up there in 8A. I didn't know what to say. This has put me in a very awkward position. I put a call in to building management, and I don't know what they're going to say. There's already been so much controversy around that apartment, I'm sure they're going to want to talk to both of you about it.” He was trying his best to sound really mean, but the guy didn't have it in him. He was reading me the riot act, but he sounded like he was apologizing.
”I'll try to keep this out of your hair from now on,” I said.
”I would appreciate that.” He didn't sound angry, he sounded like he really would appreciate it. Just then Lucy walked in, wearing a sharp gray suit and heels, carrying a big briefcase, and looking like the queen of the universe.
”Lucy! Hey, this is my sister Lucy,” I told Frank. ”She'll have this solved in five minutes, I guarantee. You don't have to talk to building management.”
”I'm sure they know all about this already,” Lucy announced, a little clippy. ”Tina tells me there's some confusion about the locks?”