9. Lena
LENA
The key sticks. It always stuck.
You have to lift the door a little on its hinges while you turn, because the building settled toward the alley sometime before I was born and nobody ever wanted to spend the money to fix a door that works fine if you know it.
I do the lift without thinking about it.
My hands remember before I do, and the lock turns over with that grinding little complaint, and my chest goes so tight I have to stand there a second with my palm flat on the wood.
Five years since I’ve been inside.
The property manager is hovering behind me with his clipboard, and he’s been apologizing since the sidewalk. He’s a decent man, mid-fifties, keeps his pens in his shirt pocket, and I get the feeling he’s been dreading this appointment in a way that isn’t about liability.
“It’s dry,” he says. “That’s the main thing. The heat’s been on low the whole time, so nothing’s frozen and split. Roof’s sound. There’s some staining on the third floor from a gutter, but it’s cosmetic.”
“Thank you.”
“I want you to know I’ve been going through it once a month.” He clears his throat. “Nobody asked me to.”
I look at him. “Thank you,” I say again, and I mean it differently, and he goes red and looks at his clipboard.
Then I push the door open and the smell comes out at me.
Old wood and cold plaster and dust, and underneath it, so faint I’d never be able to prove it to anybody, lemon.
It shouldn’t be possible. Nobody’s cleaned in here in all that time.
But a building keeps things in its floorboards, and this one has been holding on to a lifetime of my grandmother’s cleaning schedule, and it hits me in the back of the throat.
Marisol takes my elbow. I let her, for about a second, and then I make myself walk in.
The lobby’s dark because the shutters are closed, and the light coming through the transom over the door lies down across the floor in a long stripe, and the black-and-white tile is exactly as filthy and exactly as beautiful as I knew it would be.
The pressed tin’s up there in the dark. The radiator under the window has a sock of dust on it.
And the desk.
Somebody covered it in a drop cloth, which was a kindness.
I pull the cloth back and the wood underneath is worn pale in a shallow scoop on the left side, right where the edge meets the return, because that’s where I stood every day of my twenties with my hip against it, and where my grandmother stood before that.
You could put my hand into that hollow right now and it would fit.
I don’t cry. I’ve done nothing but cry for a week and this is different. I go quiet all the way down, steady and enormous, like an engine turning over.
Behind the desk, the wallpaper’s faded everywhere except for the pale rectangles, up high, where the key rack hung and kept the sun off.
“Oh,” Marisol says softly, seeing them.
“Yeah.”
“It’s on a nail in a mattress store.”
“I know exactly where it is,” I say.
The door opens behind us and lets a wedge of daylight in, and a man’s voice says, “I’m going to guess this is not a good moment to be enthusiastic about a transom.”
Andrew Reid is taller than his photograph and older in a way that suits him, in a canvas jacket with a folding rule sticking out of the pocket, and he’s carrying a cardboard tray with two coffees in it. He hands one to Marisol. He hands one to the property manager.
Then he stands there with nothing in his hands.
“You didn’t get me one,” I say.
“I did not.” He tips his head toward Marisol. “She warned me. She said if I guessed how you take it and got it right, you’d refuse it out of spite, and if I got it wrong you’d drink it to be polite and think less of me. So this seemed like the only move available.”
“That’s aggressive.”
“It’s cowardice, mostly.” He looks up past me at the ceiling and his whole face changes, and the man’s a nerd, and I relax a little. “That’s original tin. Somebody skimmed the cornice in the eighties and made a mess of it, but the field’s fine.”
“There’s a dropped ceiling in the dining room hiding a better one.”
“Of course there is.” He’s already writing.
Grief does a strange thing, or whatever the last week has been. I’ve been flattened. I’ve been sleeping on a pull-out with my whole life in cardboard. And then somebody asks me a technical question and I turn back into myself in the middle of a sentence.
We start in the basement, because that’s where I always start.
I show him the stack and the plumbing, half copper and half whatever came before it, and the joists over the breakfast room that got sistered after the ’89 flood—you can tell which ones because the new lumber never got stained.
I put my hand on a post and tell him this is what everything above it stands on, and somewhere in there Andrew stops writing and just listens.
Up on two I give him the walls, which ones are original and which went up when somebody decided every room needed its own bath, and the linen closet that’s lying about being a linen closet. There’s a window in it, and nobody builds a linen closet with a window. He laughs, easy, and we keep moving.
The breakfast room is the one that nearly gets me. Blue tile, wainscot height, all the way around, that specific soft blue that stopped being made a long time ago. There’s a run of it by the door where somebody dragged a cart into the wall and cracked a handful of pieces.
Andrew crouches and touches the cracked ones. “So we’d match these. There’s a place upstate that does reproduction glaze. They’re slow and they’re not cheap, but?—”
“No.”
He looks up.
“We repair those. Not replace.” I crouch down next to him. “You take out the shards, you clean the bed, you fill and you tint. You’ll see it if you look. That’s fine. My grandmother put a cart through that wall herself and swore in front of a bishop and I would like to be able to point at it.”
His eyebrows go up, and it’s recognition, nothing flirtatious in it.
“That’s an unusual client,” he says. “Most people want the crack gone.”
“Most people are renting the idea of an old building. I’m not.”
Then the fourth floor.
I go up the last flight ahead of everybody and I stand in the doorway of the owner’s apartment, and it’s smaller than it lives in my head.
Kitchen along one wall. The bad little bathroom.
The balcony with the iron rail that my grandmother put a chair on so she could watch the street and be seen watching the street, because half of running a hotel is being visible.
Andrew comes up behind me. “This is a beautiful apartment.”
“It’s the best light in the building,” I say, “and it’s rentable, and I’ve been standing in this doorway since I was twenty-two thinking about the view instead of the business.
” My voice comes out flat and certain and I hear my grandmother in it.
Strange thing to hear coming out of my own mouth.
“Nobody’s living up here. Not me, not anybody.
Wall out here, and here, run the corridor through, and this becomes the reason people book the top floor. ”
Marisol, from the stairs: “Are you okay?”
“I’m great,” I say, and I actually am, in a way I can’t explain to anybody who hasn’t spent years being decorative.
Andrew’s writing again. Then he stops and says, without looking up, “Can I ask you the annoying question?”
“Ask it.”
“What do you want this place to be? Not what you want it to look like. What’s it for.”
I open my mouth to say something short, and it comes out anyway, standing in an empty room with dust hanging in the light.
“Warm. Not precious. There’s a whole industry now of hotels that are exhausting to stay in—the lighting’s a puzzle, the shower has opinions, they leave you a card explaining the concept of the towels?—”
“The towels have a concept?” Marisol says from the stairs.
“The towels always have a concept. I want the opposite. A tired person walks in at eleven at night and knows where everything is and doesn’t have to be impressed by anything.”
“Okay,” Andrew says. “Keys?”
“Real ones. Brass, on a fob. Guests will steal them?—”
“They will absolutely steal them,” Marisol says.
“Let them. A real key in your hand tells your body you’re somewhere.
” I turn around. “Blue tile repaired, not replaced. A pot of actual coffee in the lobby, not a machine you stand in front of like it’s going to tell your fortune.
And somebody at the desk who’s allowed to make decisions without calling a manager. ”
“That last one’s a payroll question,” Andrew says.
“That last one’s the reason we’re standing here.
” My throat goes tight and my voice comes up and I let it.
“The staff get paid properly. Not competitively. Properly. And they get told they can fix problems, so nobody ends up apologizing to a guest with their hands tied. Every miserable hotel I’ve ever been in was miserable because the person in front of me wasn’t allowed to help.
I have watched a family spend more on lobby flowers than it paid the woman standing under them. ”
The room goes quiet. Marisol’s eyebrows are somewhere in her hairline.
Andrew closes his notebook.
“Right,” he says. “That’s the building, then. Everything else is just what it costs.”
We come back down and I go to the front window to open the shutter, because I want to see what the light does in here at this hour, and that’s when I see him.
Connor. Across the street, beside a black car, hands in his coat pockets. Not hiding. Just standing there in the cold on a Wednesday, looking through my grandmother’s window at me and the man beside me.
The floor drops out from under my stomach.
Heat floods up through my chest into my face, and it’s all of it at once, no order to any of it—glad, that old dumb gladness that gets there before I can stop it; guilty, with Andrew’s shoulder half a foot from mine and nothing on this earth to be guilty for; furious, at the car, at the coat, at the nerve of him standing on a public street being the thing I want.
My hands have gone cold on the shutter latch.
Andrew is close to my shoulder, saying something about the mullions.
I step to the side. Not a big step. Just enough that there’s daylight between us, and it’s done before I’ve finished deciding to do it.
If I ever put my hand on that man’s arm, it’ll be because I want to, and not because somebody’s watching.
Across the street, Connor sees the step. I watch him see it. He doesn’t do anything with his face at all. That’s his training, a lifetime of it. Then he opens the car door and gets in and pulls away without ever making me wave him off.
Andrew’s stopped talking. He’s followed my eyes and gone back to the window frame with a tact I notice and appreciate.
“You’ve thought about this place a long time,” he says, after a while.
“Since my wedding day,” I say.
He waits, in case there’s more. There isn’t. He doesn’t ask.
Then he crouches down and starts measuring the sill, and I stand there in the stripe of light off the transom, in my grandmother’s lobby, with my hands not quite steady and my heart still going from a man in a coat across the street, my whole life on the floor in pieces, and for the first time since October I know exactly what I’m doing tomorrow.