We were under the lights, so Lucy couldn't snap, "What does it matter, Tina," even under her breath. She just stood next to me and smiled, with a little perplexed look on her face, which said to both the audience and Grossman, isn't my sister silly and adorable. This guy was Lucy's friend. She'd told me about him. He was a plant. If I gave good answers, they'd all get into the New York Times.

"Yes, I write for the city page of the New York Times, is that all right?" he asked smugly.

"Oh, that's sensational," I told him. "As far as being arrested, let me tell you, that was my fourth time, and honestly the other ones were a lot more spectacular. The one in Hoboken, in 2003, I actually slugged a cop! Although that was a complete misunderstanding. Anyway, I'd give this one two stars, it was a little boring by comparison."

The reporter nodded and wrote this down, smiling to himself. I got another laugh, but it was a tad uncomfortable as laughs go. Several flashes went off at once. Leonard leaned forward and spoke into the microphone, fluidly edging me the slightest bit out of the way with his shoulder.

"Are there more questions about the property itself?" he asked. Someone in another unlit corner raised her hand.

"What is it listing for?" she asked. And with that, my part of the song and dance was over.

20.

"NICE DRESS," SAID THE NOTE. THAT WAS ALL, JUST THE TWO WORDS, "nice dress."

"Where did this come from?" I asked Frank.

He glanced up from his copy of Spanish People, but just barely. "Vince Masterson, he came by for his mail and then he left that, said for me to give it to you. He said you were on television." He went back to his magazine, but you could tell he wasn't really reading it. He had dark rings under his eyes, and his uniform didn't quite fit him anymore. The corny epaulets hung way too far over his shoulders, as if he had started to shrink inside it. There was no question that Frank was deteriorating.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"Sure, I'm fine," he said, not much interested in the question. "I didn't get any sleep last night because my stupid brother was up watching wrestling on the television and drinking beer until three in the morning. Other than that, no problem." It sounded to me like there was a problem.

"You look thin," I told him. "Your uniform's falling off you, Frank."

"My uniform?" He looked down at his clothes, completely annoyed now. "It's not mine. Mine's at the dry cleaners. This is the extra one they keep in the storage closet."

"Well, that's a relief, but I'm not kidding, you look like you're not eating."

"Tina, you maybe should worry about yourself, huh?" Frank said, going back to his magazine but again not reading it. "Vince said to remind you he's in 5B."

I could have ignored this summons from the problematic Vince Masterson, but I was pretty curious about Vince having seen me on television. I knew there were news cameras, but the possibility that we would get on the evening news had seemed pretty far-fetched. I mean, I know that New Yorkers are a little nutty about real estate, but is the sale of an apartment something you would put on the evening news? I decided to go see Vince, partly because I wanted to find out about that, and partly because I was relieved that someone in the building would actually invite me over.

Apparently a press conference about real estate is actually big enough news to put on television in New York City. New York One, the local public-access news station, broadcasts things like city council meetings and roundtables about real estate developments in Brooklyn. They also have strange overwrought talk shows with slightly crazy-looking people screaming at each other about off-Broadway theater. That was the program Vince and his friends were looking for when my turn in front of the cameras popped up.

"Well, we cheered, as you can imagine," Vince told me, pouring an icy and perfect vodka gimlet from a silver bar shaker and expertly twisting a lime wedge over it. "I said wait wait wait that's the girl! The one who's squatting in the fifteen-million-dollar apartment! No one believed me. And then you started talking about how many times you'd been arrested, and you were wearing that incredible dress, and I thought, what have you been up to, Tina, and why haven't you come by to visit me?"

"I've been busy," I said, taking my gimlet from him with both hands so I wouldn't spill it.

"So I gather, darling," he said, smiling. "Come and meet my friends!"

He took me by the hand and led me like a prize from the perfectly appointed black marble kitchen and into the equally well-appointed living room of his father's apartment. The walls of this room-what you could see of them behind the floor-to-ceiling bookcases-were painted a deep maroon. There was an enormous blue-and-gold Turkish rug on the floor, plus a leather couch, a coffee table, coffee-table books, two dark brown leather chairs, and eleven gay men. Which would have been intimidating in any room, but it was particularly daunting in this one because in contrast to my apartment, which was cavernous and fascinating and incoherent, Vince's father's apartment was gorgeous, coherent, and quite small.

"We're so excited to meet you, Vince has told us all about you," one of the men announced, standing and reaching to shake my hand.

"Not everything, I hope," I said, trying to laugh and feeling completely out of my element. I took a sip of my gimlet. It was, no surprise, perfect.

"That dress is amazing, is it a Chanel? It looks antique," said a second man.

"It's pretty old," I said. "But not Chanel. The tag says Ballen-something."

"Oh my G.o.d it's Balenciaga," someone sighed. "Of course it is."

"Where did you find it?" asked a fourth.

"In a closet," I said, wondering how long I might be able to just tell the truth to these guys and get away with it.

"And the alligator clutch was just tucked away in there as well? Look at this, Lyle, how much is this worth?" A fifth guy took it from my hand and held it up, waving it to someone across the room.

"Stop it!" said Lyle, making his way over to eye the clutch.

"You were hilarious at that press conference," said a sixth. "Have you really been arrested?"

"Yes," I said.

"Could someone show some manners here?" said a seventh, walking over to me. "Hi, my name's Jonathan." He stopped, shook my hand, put his arm around me, and steered me toward one of the chairs. "Could one of you ladies be a gentleman and offer her a seat?" Two men leapt up and offered me one of the leather chairs. I sat down, and they took my shoes off, handed me another gimlet when I finished the first, and we watched the recording of the Sotheby's press conference six times. Every time I announced, on television, "The one in Hoboken, in 2003? I actually slugged a cop!" everybody cheered, and then, when I said, "Anyway, I'd give this one two stars, it was a little boring by comparison," they cheered again. I do think most of them were drunk-I certainly was, after my second gimlet-but they were fun and excitable and happy to have me at their party.

"Vincent says your place is completely gorgeous, twelve-foot ceilings and marble arches and mirrors everywhere and square footage galore," said one of them.

"That's actually pretty accurate. Except the arches aren't marble, they're more that kind of dark red wood."

"Cherry?" asked another.

"Walnut," Vince observed, and three of these guys moaned, like walnut door frames were some especially appealing kind of p.o.r.nography.

"Yeah, they're pretty nice," I admitted. "Can I have one of those?" There was a bag of fancy potato chips behind Jonathan's arm, on the floor.

"Absolutely, have you not eaten?" he said, handing the bag over.

"Sotheby's didn't feed you?" Vince tossed over his shoulder. "Shame on them." He went off to the kitchen with the authority of someone who knew there was really good food in there, but all he came back with was a cell phone. "How about sus.h.i.+?" he asked, dialing. The men murmured some kind of a.s.sent, but he wasn't really paying attention; he was already talking to some underling. "Hi, I'm over at the Edgewood and we're going to need a couple platters," he announced. "Just some of those big ones that you do, tell the chef omakase is fine. Oh, and some of those little fried chicken appetizers. Do people want j.a.panese fried chicken?" he asked the room. Then he went right back to the phone, without waiting for an answer. "Just bring some of the fried chicken," he ordered.

"Christ, he is such a young G.o.d," Jonathan said under his breath. I watched him watch Vince with a kind of deeply amused wonder. Vince was leaning in the doorway with his head down, listening to the guy at the sus.h.i.+ joint repeat back his chaotic order, and then he turned, untucking his pale blue oxford s.h.i.+rt from his dark blue wool trousers, like it was suddenly too hot or something. Oblivious to the fact that every guy in the room was staring at him-or maybe not so oblivious-Vince tapped the phone off and went back into the kitchen. "Twenty minutes," he called back to us.

"Ooh la la," someone sighed. "I need a cigarette. I'm going out on the balcony. Tina, do you want to come?"

"Vince has a balcony?"

"It isn't a balcony; it's a fire escape, darling," my new friend informed me. "Although I like the compet.i.tive nature of the question. Come on, let me show you Vincent's apartment. His father's apartment, that is," he said casually but loud, so that Vince, returning from the kitchen, could hear him all the way across the room. Vince wagged a finger in our direction, which made everyone laugh, although it was a pretty edgy joke. I didn't have time to register whether Vince really was annoyed, because my guide was already narrating in my ear.

"I know he hates that, but please, how many people get to live in the Edge for free. He should just count his blessings, of which he has quite a few. Check out the closet, he has a walk-in closet that is bigger than my entire apartment, and look at this. Somebody painted the woodwork sage, it's genius, don't you think?"

"I do," I said. It was relaxing listening to this stranger blather on. He had the same att.i.tude all these gay guys seemed to have: even though we had never before met, he a.s.sumed a level of complete understanding between us, which was surprisingly accurate considering that I was having trouble remembering his name.

The apartments on the fifth floor had been subdivided three times since the building was built, which meant that Vince's dad's apartment was only four rooms-a bedroom, a living room, a den, and a kitchen-and they were all rather small, even though the walk-in closet was, as my new friend Andrew noted, quite large. The bedroom had a sleekly square king-size bed that took up virtually the entire s.p.a.ce, except for the three feet in front of an enormous flat-screen television, which was screwed into the wall like a giant piece of pop art. But the bathroom was enormous and a thing of beauty. Pink Italian tile rose up the walls and framed an actual Jacuzzi, which was tucked neatly into a corner so that unlike the bed in the next room it didn't take over the entire s.p.a.ce.

"A Jacuzzi," I breathed. I suddenly felt completely exhausted. "A Jacuzzi."

"And he's mad because his father hasn't put the lease in his name. I'm going, taxes? It's not in your name, so who pays the property taxes, you could also look at it that way ... oh, look what I've found!" Andrew plucked something off the bottom shelf of the tiniest teak cabinet I'd ever seen, which stood next to the pedestal sink. "This looks like a bottle of bubble bath with your name on it. Look, it says 'Tina Finn,' right here," he announced, waving it madly in the air and leaning over to turn on the faucets.

I admit that it's a little crazy that I took off my dress and got into that hot tub, but I was so tired and drunk on vodka gimlets that it seemed like a good idea. The bubbles smelled like lavender, and the Jacuzzi jets were whipping them into a complete state of frenzy, and those guys were being so nice to me. At first it was just Andrew, who, as I said, simply started filling the tub as if this were a done deal, and then Scott with the silver hair came in to use the bathroom, but he immediately got into the spirit of the thing and started running around looking for towels. Then Lyle (short) and Roger (buzz-cut) showed up, reporting that Dave and Edward and Christopher were all in love with Vince, and he was driving everyone crazy and he just didn't want to watch it anymore. So they were just coming back to say good-bye before taking off, but then they thought that having a Jacuzzi with Tina sounded like fun, so they decided to stick around, but we all needed another round of drinks. While they were getting the drinks, the sus.h.i.+ arrived, which they brought back along with the drinks, and then everyone took turns getting in and out of the Jacuzzi, but I didn't have to get out because they all thought of me as somebody truly special who deserved for one night to be treated like a queen.

And they wanted to know everything. All of it. Every time I tried to streamline the story, they would say I wasn't telling near enough.

"Okay," said Andrew. "Let's start at the beginning. Your mother died-"

"Yes, they said that on television, you know that."

"No, back up beyond that," said Scott, sounding slightly abrupt, but that was just his manner. "Where were you when she died?"

"I was out at the Delaware Water Gap-"

"The Delaware Water Gap? Why?" Scott demanded.

"I had this boyfriend, he had this idea that we would clean houses-"

"He had you cleaning houses? Back up," said Lyle.

"Well, we were supposed to be caretakers for the homes of rich people who had places out there. But Darren didn't have it worked out."

"Back up. What do you mean it wasn't worked out?" Lyle held his hand out to silence the other three, so he could get the information he wanted.

"Well, you know, he didn't really know anybody there, so we went out and there was no place to live, not even an apartment to rent because there just wasn't, so we ended up living in this trailer-"

"You went from living in a trailer to living in the Edge?" said Roger, clearly entranced by the magic of this.

"Don't rush her, we're not there yet!" Scott interrupted. "So then your mother died."

"Yes. My mother died."

"And when was this?" he continued.

"About two months ago."

"Two months?" someone murmured.

"It was just two months ago? Oh, sweetie. Oh, Tina. That's such a loss." All of them were silent for a moment, thinking about what a terrible thing it is to lose a mother. And it did feel like that suddenly. For the first time since she died, I knew I was talking to people who wanted to hear about my mom.

"It was," I said. "It really was. But the fact is, I had already lost her! I hadn't seen her in so long. Years. I hadn't seen her in years."

"So you lost her twice," said Andrew, mourning that double loss quietly with the question.

"I lost her even before that," I admitted. "She started drinking when I was in high school. And it wasn't her fault."

"Spoken like the true daughter of an alcoholic. I see some Al-Anon meetings in your future, darling," Scott observed.

"I don't mind that she drank," I said. "It didn't make her mean or anything, it just made her kind of dopey. Honestly, I thought it made her feel better. n.o.body was really very nice to her. My father was a nightmare."

"Did he hit her? Did he hit you?"

"He hit everybody." Soaking in a tubful of bubbles, surrounded by nice gay men, somehow made it not so hard to admit that.

"Did he drink too?"

"Well, sure, he always drank. He drank beer. Her drink was vodka."

"G.o.d, I love vodka," Roger said with a sort of spiritual sigh. "Okay, so he was always a drinker, and she started when you were in high school," Lyle narrated, making sure we were all on the same page.

"Yes," I said.

"It happens like that sometimes," said Andrew, the compa.s.sionate realist. "People don't know they have options and so they get dragged into it."

"Is anyone worried that we're all sitting here getting smashed while we talk about Tina's tragic and clearly alcoholic parents who both died terribly young? They died terribly young, right?" said Scott, the less compa.s.sionate realist.

"My father died in a car crash when I was twenty," I said. "He was forty-seven or something."

"Did you cheer?"

"No, everyone just pretended it was all so sad," I remembered. "It was weird. Lucy and Alison and I were all out of the house by then-"

"You were in college," Scott supplied.

"No, I dropped out of college."

"You dropped out of college?" Roger exclaimed, as if this were really astonis.h.i.+ng.

"Let her finish," said Lyle.

"Yeah, so I was living with this guy," I fumbled.

"Darren?" suggested Roger.

"No, a different guy, there were-several-different guys," I admitted.

"I'm sure," Scott said, nodding.

"Anyway, Lucy and Alison and I went back to my parents' house after the funeral-there was like a little thing after the funeral." I had a terrible moment as I realized that we had had a little party for my oh-so-s.h.i.+tty father, and we didn't have one for mom. But I didn't want to stop and fill in all the ironic extra details anymore; as nice as these guys were, I was afraid that I might suddenly drown. "Anyway, there were neighbors and some friends of his from work, and people brought food and stood around. We lived in a little duplex, one of those places that has aluminum siding on it, it was pretty nice, Mom always kept it clean. And so people were there after the funeral, talking about how it was such a shame and what a relief that he didn't suffer, and then they all left. Mom was drinking by then, it was like one in the afternoon, and she was totally just-but she didn't really show it. She would go into the kitchen when no one was paying attention and come out with a gla.s.s of grape juice or orange juice, pretending like that's all it was. I mean, she never said, 'oh, I need another drink,' she would just disappear and come back and then eventually she would fall asleep. She would put her head down on the table and mutter something like 'whatever you do, it's not enough.' That was like her mantra, I used to hate her for it. She was such a quitter."

"Tina, shush, she's dead, sweetheart," Scott reminded me.

"So Alison and Lucy and I," I said, pus.h.i.+ng on with the story, "we knew she was about to pa.s.s out, she kept disappearing into the kitchen, so we all a.s.sumed, and we were getting ready to take off. Alison had put all the dishes in the dishwasher and it was running, and we were leaving. And then Mom was, she just showed up in the doorway and said, 'Can you take that out of here?'" I couldn't believe I was remembering all this. Sitting there in all those bubbles, it all seemed so clear, like a movie playing in my head. "And she sort of lifted her hand just a little, because she was really drunk, she was, she was just smashed-" Okay, and then I did start crying, because that seemed like the worst detail of the whole story, that she was so drunk. "And she was pointing at his chair. He had this chair, it was so ugly, this brown plaid Barcalounger that he would just, he sat there all the time and got drunk and watched stupid sports on television, and it was like him. It was just him. And she said it, she didn't have to ask twice, we knew what she was asking. Just, get that thing out of here. Which we did, the three of us, we went over and picked up that horrible chair and took it to the front door, and I don't know how we got it out but we did, we took it out to the curb and left it there. And it sat out there for like a week and a half, and then the garbagemen got tired of ignoring it, I guess, because it was finally gone. Like him. No one could explain how it happened that we were all just-free."

Andrew poured another vodka gimlet into my gla.s.s. He had a little shaker tucked by the side of the Jacuzzi, on the floor. "Thank you," I said, clutching the slippery gla.s.s. I had to concentrate to do that, and then I was able to stop sobbing, which was a relief.