Authors: Chris Knopf
“Cheeky.”
He nodded and took a deep breath, struggling to maintain forbearance. “I invited her to stay at the house for the funeral. She hadn’t been there for, Lord, decades, always choosing to stay at the club in Southampton. Having her at the house seemed like the appropriate thing to do under the circumstances. That was a month ago and she’s never left. Last week she reports to me that she likes the air on Long Island and has decided to take possession of the property, thank you very much. She offered to pay the movers to pack and ship our things to wherever I wished. Our things. The whole house is
our things
. How ridiculous can you get?”
I had an answer for that, too, which was a lot more than you could possibly imagine, buster, but I didn’t say it. Instead I asked, “You said ‘our’ things. Does that include Elizabeth’s?”
His face shifted slightly from outrage to grief.
“Yes. I’m only now going through her unopened correspondence. It’s not a pleasant process.”
“Do you know if Eunice has a lawyer?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“No. I don’t know. No one she’s told me about. Not that we’re talking. She’s talking, I’m not listening.”
I spent the rest of Sergey’s free hour getting his vital statistics and breaking the news that he’d have to pay for all the other hours, beginning with the first eight paid in advance, by personal check if he wanted, but not to expect me to do anything until it cleared. This was one of the few practical things I learned from my father, who had a civil engineering practice Up Island. Never work off your own money. If customers aren’t willing to commit up front, they’re getting ready to stick it to you.
Sergey took it all pretty well. He had to, after making such a big deal about owning a five-million-dollar house. Claiming to own. When I asked him why he didn’t already have a lawyer, he told me he used to, but the guy had died.
Ah, I thought, great new marketing strategy. Outlive the competition.
I stuffed one of my business cards in the chest pocket of his Howard Hughes shirt and gently shoved the beleaguered old guy out the door. After being reasonably sure no fresh clients were about to appear, I took a break to finish the latte from the morning that I’d stuck in the refrigerator for some reason and an inch-long roach I knew was lurking in the ashtray under a week’s worth of stubbed-out Marlboro Lights. I like the idea of smoking dope and drinking coffee at the same time. Let the caffeine and tetrahydrocannabinol fight it out. Winner gets to pick whether you go uptown or down.
I was going to use the break time to stare at the windmill, but instead found myself pecking at the computer keyboard, wandering on to the Town of Southampton municipal site, then using the password they gave me as an officer of the court to sneak into areas where I didn’t belong, like where the tax department kept their property records.
The database was easily accessible by typing in either owner name or address. So I put in both.
There it was. Sergey and Elizabeth Pontecello, 34 Hunter’s Plain Road, Sagaponack, New York. The tax map told me more. The address was in an area where five-million-dollar houses were a regular thing. In fact, five million was probably the cost of the ante.
So Sergey was telling the truth, at least to that extent. After copying down the name and address, I clicked out of the screen and headed over to the first stop on a routine title search. It looked like Sergey’s taxes were all paid up. He was about to get reappraised, the result of which would probably come as an unpleasant surprise. It always did. Reappraisals are a good governor on the urge to brag about how much your house is worth, especially in earshot of the appraiser.
I was about to get back to my paying work when for the hell of it I checked for mechanics’ liens. Not an unusual thing for an older, longtime homeowner to get into it with a contractor, now that the price of a kitchen rehab used to buy the whole house.
And there it was. Not a mechanic’s lien, but something I hadn’t expected. A mortgage. Actually, one mortgage in the form of a credit line for $45,000 and a personal note, totaling $4,685,000. Most of the value of the house.
Lien holders Harbor Trust Bank and Eunice Hamilton Wolsonowicz, respectively.
I burnt my fingers putting out the nearly extinguished roach. Good lesson. Never mix curiosity with cannabis. Nothing good ever comes of it.
I know there’s a lot written about women living on their own. I don’t know what any of it says because I can’t stand to read it. I try, but after the first paragraph I’m getting all choked up and before I know it I’m weeping like a rainy day.
And I like living on my own. Most of the time. After my husband died, I spent about two months doing nothing but sobbing, listening to Pink Floyd, and smoking about two acres of grass and half the state of Virginia worth of cigarettes. Every grief counselor in the world advises you not to do any of those things, but it worked for me.
It was realizing that my biggest fear was living alone in the house, which after two months I began to like, that started me on the cure. That and a lot of legal work God gifted to me as a distraction.
I don’t know why magazine articles that’re supposed to make you feel better about whatever lousy thing you’re dealing with make me feel even lousier, but that’s what happens. So I never read that kind of stuff, or self-help books, and never watch television except for cop shows. Plus, I never join organizations that might put me in the position of having to talk about what it’s like to be a widow at twenty-five and an unmarried woman in her late thirties. Because, frankly, that’s nobody’s business but my own.
One of the best things about living alone is getting off the bra and scratching that poor, tortured skin under my boobs that no matter what kind of bra I buy always feels itchy and chafed at the end of the day. You can’t do this with full satisfaction in front of somebody else, I don’t care how long you’ve lived with him. There’s no such thing as a bra that fits and looks good at the same time. Anyone who says there is owns a bra factory or is lying through her teeth.
Some people in the Hamptons, either crazy old-money types or tasteless slobs flush with undeserved good fortune, name their houses. They put out signs such as
DUNE VIEW
or
BUY LOW, SELL HIGH.
If I were going to do that, I’d call my house Cognitive Dissonance.
It’s a horrible, horrifying mess. My brain has no idea how it got that way and how anybody could possibly live in such squalor. My heart loves it.
This is another advantage of living on my own. I only have to make excuses for the house to myself. Since I’m easily swayed by my own arguments, the conflicts are more fleeting and less destructive to the relationship than when there was a whole separate human being to contend with.
I was there in my squalid house trying to remember how to run the VCR, which I was determined to get some use out of before replacing it with a DVD player or whatever dazzling technology they came up with next, when my cell phone rang. I usually remember to turn it off at night, so I found the sound a little disturbing. I answered it anyway.
“Why can’t I just call the police?” said Sergey, after I said hello.
“You can. But they’ll probably tell you to take a sleeping pill and go back to bed.”
“It’s the same as having an intruder. They’d do something about that.”
“They would, but this isn’t the same. Not technically. Can we talk about this tomorrow? I’m sure we can work something out, but I
don’t think now’s the time. Bold accusations in the middle of the night, however legitimate, can only work against us.”
He was quiet on the other end of the line.
“I suppose you’re right. It’s only that she’s taken over the master bath, put all my toiletries in a paper bag, and locked the door. She’s in there now, I’m sure of it. I’ve been standing here holding my damn toothbrush for an eternity. It’s beyond the pale.”
A tiny traitor part of me urged the more sensible part to ask about the lien the dirty bathroom hog had on his house, but the sensible part shut her up. Nothing was going to happen between now and tomorrow, which would be soon enough to confront that issue. All that was needed now was more wine.
With the cell phone held to my ear by my shoulder, I was able to open another bottle and pour a big girl’s glassful.
“I’m going to immerse myself in your case first thing in the morning, Mr. Pontecello. You are my highest priority. I’m sorry about the bathroom, but I’m sure there are other places around the house to brush your teeth. Just console yourself with the fact that these indignities are nearly at an end.”
He was quiet again for a while, which, of course, I interpreted as hurt feelings, but then he said, “I suppose I could continue organizing Elizabeth’s papers.”
“You could. It’s not an easy thing to do, but it might be therapeutic.”
“You are a thoughtful person, Miss Swaitkowski. I am grateful. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, matching the gravity of the moment. Then I hit the end button.
I went back to the VCR, which rewarded me about an hour later with a tape that started jumping around right at the moment the serial killer was using a skeleton key to jimmy the heroine’s apartment door lock. The cell rang again just as the door clicked open and the music turned Hitchcock. I looked at the screen and saw Sergey’s number.
“Sorry, dude, done for the night,” I said, and let the phone ring itself out. Then I turned it off like I should have done in the first place.
I downed the wine and refilled. I tossed the remote for the VCR back on the landfill in the middle of the room and lit a cigarette. I scratched my head as a totally ineffectual way of dealing with that other itch growing in my brain. The one no amount of scratching would ever relieve. That jittery, nasty, unscratchable itch of curiosity.
Like a girl attached to someone else’s remote control, I felt myself lugging wineglass and cigarette out to the dank and moldy sunroom off the back of the house where I had my home office, now more a museum dedicated to my early professional inadequacies. The old computer was still there, however, still hooked up to the Internet and eager to please.
I snuggled my butt into the office chair and fired up the old HP. The feel of the mouse and keyboard was comforting, like the busted-in driver’s seat of a paid-off car. I shoveled off a clear spot on the desk for my wineglass and waited for everything to boot.
First I searched for Eunice Hamilton Wolsonowicz. Which yielded nothing on her but a few hundred thousand bits on Antonin Wolsonowicz, the painter. I’d never heard of him, but a lot of other people had. He’d come from a well-off family in Czechoslovakia, owners of a furniture business that he was supposed to take over, but instead he ran off to Paris to be an artist. Whatever conflict this might have caused was settled by the Munich Agreement, which basically handed the country over to Hitler. Mom Wolsonowicz was a Polish Jew who’d turned Catholic for her husband but wasn’t about to take any chances. They were lucky enough to sell the factory and split for Paris, where Antonin found them a villa in the outskirts of the city. It was a great gig for Tony, a rising star of the salon, with his doting parents and their deep pockets still out there in the burbs, within easy reach.
Great gig until Hitler was back on their doorstep and once again they had to get out of town. This time they opened up a little more air,
escaping through the Azores to Havana, and from there slipping into Miami as the guests of a drunken American war correspondent they’d known in Paris who by all rights should have been Ernest Hemingway but instead was a guy named Edgar Staltz.
The rest of the commentary featured Tony W., as he became known, showing up in all these American cities where he was a dazzling success as an artist, a rakish bon vivant, an A-list partygoer, and all this other stuff that went with being rich and famous and that always sounded made-up to me. Though I know sometimes it’s not. Some people just end up living those kinds of lives. I know this because I’ve lived in the Hamptons all my life, and I’ve met a few of those people, some I actually like.
In 2000, a month into the new millennium, Tony dropped dead at his studio in Scottsdale, Arizona. This made me sorry for him but glad for my research. I dug up the obituary and finally found evidence that he had a wife named Eunice, who was fifteen years younger, a daughter named Wendy, and an adopted son named Oscar. The subtext of the reports was that he’d sold a lot of art in his life, and bought a lot of real estate with the proceeds, leaving Eunice, Wendy, and Oscar pretty free to grieve in the comfort to which they’d become accustomed.
The kids had both moved to Long Island after college. Mom kept the house in Arizona as home base, while maintaining a membership at the Gracefield Tennis Club in Southampton—complete with residence privileges—inherited from her parents. The second thing the English settlers did when they got to the Hamptons, after thanking God for the great-looking real estate, was to found the Gracefield Club. Anyway, that’s what the club wanted you to think. The place was so exclusive the members would exclude themselves if they could figure out how.
There was more I could have read, but I’d finally tired myself out,
which was part of the strategy. I need to be completely exhausted to go to sleep at night. I need to feel myself nodding off at the desk or on the sofa in front of the TV. Otherwise I might be in bed with my eyes closed but my brain still dangerously in gear, revving up for a nighttime of psycho-insomnia.
This is another key to living alone. Never go to bed with your hopes and fears still awake. Make sure they’re beaten unconscious before you get within ten feet of the bedroom.
Which is what I did successfully that night. Teeth brushed and lights out, the alarm set with a half-hour snooze already programmed in, flat on my back on top of the covers in my favorite pajamas, the ones plastered with pictures of tropical drinks, about to pass blissfully into the abyss.
Then my home phone rang. I keep it on the night table on the left side of the bed. So when it rings and I’m half asleep, I stick the receiver to my left ear.