Twelve Rooms with a View. Theresa Rebeck

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       CHAPTER FIVE

      “The moss guy isn’t in. Frank buzzed him about eight times but he wasn’t answering,” I told Lucy. “So I asked for his phone number, but it’s unlisted and the doorman isn’t allowed to give it out. Anyway, I left him a message with the doorman to call as soon as he got in, so when he does I’ll tell him that we need him to move all that stuff. Here, I got a set of keys for you and then also an extra one, in addition to the ones I have. Soaring right through the lie about Len, I started fumbling with the keys. She didn’t even look up as she took them from me.

      “You didn’t leave my number as well?” she asked, pecking away at her laptop. She had set it up on that little coffee table back in the apartment side of the apartment and there was a whole mess of documents and file folders kind of falling out of her briefcase on the couch. She clearly had decided to spend the rest of the day back there. I felt like I had been invaded.

      “He and I got kind of friendly so I just thought it would be better for him to call me,” I said.

      “You thought it would be better if I let you handle it,” she said, making this sound like a stupendously idiotic idea. I looked at the floor and acted like I was really sorry that I was such a stupid person, which worked, because that’s what she thinks I am anyway. Smart people are easy to fool about really stupid things. It’s all about the assumptions.

      The door to the bathroom behind the little laundry room swung open and a woman appeared. I just about jumped out of my skin, but Lucy kept on typing.

      “Fantastic,” the woman said, smiling at me like we were old friends. She had very tight hair, blonde and tight to her head, and she was exceptionally tanned. She also wore a tight beige microsuede pantsuit—pants and a jacket made out of synthetic beige polyester—and then she also had on actual panty hose and a kind of boring-looking pair of low brown heels. I’m sure that everything she was wearing cost more than I made in a month of cleaning houses, but frankly I don’t fully understand why people dress like that.

      “This place is fabulous,” she informed me, striding over and holding out her hand for me to shake. “Hi, I’m Betsy Hastings. Did I hear you saying something about the moss, in the front kitchen?”

      “We haven’t been able to get hold of the guy who owns the moss,” Lucy announced, “but it’s being handled.”

      “No worries, no worries,” said Betsy Hastings. As opposed to my sister, she couldn’t have been nicer. “This whole place is amazing. It’s incredible when a place like this comes on the market. Just thrilling.”

      “You’re the real estate person,” I guessed.

      “A lot of people are already interested, Tina,” Lucy informed me. “And there are a lot of questions that need to be answered. Things are very preliminary at this point.”

      “No question, no question,” Betsy agreed. “I would love it if you would let me handle this. I have a number of corporate clients who would pick it up immediately, as is. I mean, I don’t think you need to worry about anything, the moss, the carpets, the appliances, you’re in a situation where you can completely let the buyer take care of all of that. Even in this market, which obviously has cooled considerably in the past couple years. But you don’t have anything to worry about; this place is amazing.”

      “We’ve noticed,” Lucy observed.

      “Absolutely. Absolutely.” Betsy Hastings nodded, running her hand over the pocket doors. “A property like this, my advice would be to let a professional pick it up and do the renovation, even at eleven or twelve million it’s going to be considered undervalued, which is good; you want them to see the potential for a fast turnaround and a big profit. You don’t want to get involved in the level of renovation that a place like this would need, to pull in the really big numbers. There are agents out there who will tell you that you could take in twenty or even twenty-two on this, but that’s going to require enormous investment on your part up front and I really would let someone else take care of that.”

      “Why don’t you put together a strategy and call me tomorrow,” Lucy nodded, not even looking at her. She held out her card. She did everything but tell Betsy to her face that her wild enthusiasm had completely put her out of the running.

      “That’s not to say, if you’re looking for the bigger numbers, I can work with that too,” Betsy explained, taking the card with a little shrug. “This end of the market, it’s always a question of how long you want to wait. If you can afford to take the time and put a few million into it yourself, then we’re talking about significantly larger numbers. It’s just a different approach. As I said, I’d love to work with you on this. Really, it’s a great place. Just the size of it, and the details! I love it when these old places open up. New York. There’s no place like it, there really isn’t, you just get such a sense of history. Fantastic. I’ll give you a call tomorrow, we can go over a couple of different plans.” I had to give it up to that old Betsy Hastings; it was pretty inspired bullshit. I mean, everything she said was true, and she really did have a kind of excitement about the apartment which I totally agreed with. But obviously she was mostly talking about money, which also obviously contributed to the fact that everything she said sounded pretty phony.

      So Betsy took off, and then this young kind of swank Indian character showed up and he went into overdrive explaining how if we could take a year and sink a million into the joint and break it down into three separate but spectacular separate apartments we could pick up twenty-two easy. Which made me actually kind of like Betsy even better, because she totally called that, that some other agent was going to show up and tell us this version of events, and then that actually happened like within the hour. And then this older white guy came by, wearing an extremely expensive suit, and he just looked around and acted like the place really wasn’t so great after all, and that the fixtures were all just inappropriate, and the appliances were from the seventies, and he would have to think about whether or not he was interested in taking this on, even if we could work out the legal difficulties. He was the only one who brought up the “legal difficulties” which, perversely, it seemed to me, cheered Lucy up quite a bit; she just shrugged and said something like, “That would be up to you.” He was really pretty snotty, and they were quite snippy with each other, and his approach may have been a posture that he thought would make us want him more, but I’m not sure why he thought that because clearly we were sitting on the mother lode, in real estate terms, legal difficulties or not. Anyway it was all very nerve-wracking by the end of the day, when Daniel and Alison came by so we could have a powwow over Chinese food.

      “There’s no way we’re going to be able to push through a sale before they slap a cloud on the title, if that’s their intention, and it sure as hell would be mine,” Lucy explained as she picked pieces of chicken out of one of those little cartons. “It’s going to cost a fortune and the legal tangle will be considerable. What’d СКАЧАТЬ