If We Lived Here (16 page)

But the longer Emma sat slumped in the bar booth, sandwiched between Nick and Sophia, and across from Luis, who between utterances sipped infuriatingly small quantities of club soda through a long straw, the more Emma was reminded of a childhood maxim: To “assume” is to make an “ass” out of “u” and “me.”

“The reason we set up this meeting,” Emma began, “was because it’s come to our attention that the apartment we’ve rented from you is infested with bedbugs.” At this, Sophia gasped, making Emma feel like she was starring in a soap opera before a rapt live audience—more and more she was regretting letting the girl tag along. The bigger surprise was that Luis began laughing.

“This is very interesting,” he said. “None of my other tenants have ever had a problem with my walls, but then you two show up and the place isn’t good enough, so you bring in your noisy construction crew.” Emma wasn’t sure how one worker could be construed as a crew, but she was too stunned to respond. Luis went on: “And none of my other tenants have ever complained about bugs, but then the two of you come around and suddenly my building is infested. Very interesting.”

“Are you suggesting we’re making this up?” Emma was indignant. She felt a hand on her knee—Nick’s—so she softened her tone. “What motivation would we possibly have for inventing a bedbug infestation?”

“I’m just wondering, is all. I wonder, too, maybe the worker brought in the bugs?”

“This is rich,” Emma said. “I sent you the pictures, right, of the bedbugs crawling out of the walls? Would you like to see them again?”

“Ooh,
I
would,” said Sophia. Emma ignored her.

“Look,” said Nick, “regardless of who brought in the bedbugs, they’re there now, so we have to deal with them.”

“Whatever you say, teacher man,” said Luis.

Although Emma now felt less confident about her spreadsheet of solutions, she whipped it out anyway, and began explaining the different options to Luis—the sniffing dogs, the industrial-grade vacuums, the specially trained exterminators.

Luis snorted. “Last time I checked, dogs sniff out food and the assholes of bitches, not little bugs. Who exactly is going to pay for all this?”

On her phone Emma pulled up the housing law Web site; she scrolled to the statute about a landlord’s responsibility to provide a bedbug-free environment for tenants, and how the expense of eradication fell to the owner. Despite her jumpy stomach, the legal jargon calmed her; this was official, government-decreed, indisputable.

“This is a joke, right?” Luis asked, waving the phone away. “You hire some handyman who comes in, makes a racket all day long, then tells some story about scary bugs, and now you expect me to pay a fortune to get rid of this so-called problem?”

Emma felt disoriented; it had never occurred to her that Luis would hear the law and simply consider himself exempt. Despite her doubts, she still thought she might appeal to his sense: “The legitimate companies charge by the procedure,” she said. “So if they brought in the dogs and found nothing, you’d only get charged for the evaluation.”

“Oh, how generous,” Luis seethed. “Okay, I’m going to be reasonable with you.” An unreasonable-looking grin spread itself across his face. “I’ll go to Home Depot and buy a few cans of foggers, which are probably ten dollars a pop. That’s on me, my treat.”

“But.” Emma looked to Nick for help, but he seemed paralyzed, his knuckles clenched white. Although she’d bookmarked the page on the Health Department site that explained how foggers were a scam and could actually exacerbate a bedbug problem, she sensed the futility of calling it up on her phone. In fact, she, too, found herself frozen. Here before her was one of those people she’d heard about but had never really believed existed—the ones who didn’t subscribe to reason, who were suspicious of science, and who, based on ignorance or anger or Emma didn’t know what, had invented their own set of rules for how the world worked. The worst part was, unlike a muttering nut on the subway whom you could escape by sliding a few seats away, Emma and Nick were bound and beholden to this particular nut—by contract.

Luis continued: “I’ll tell you what else. I’ll indulge your little fantasy about the creepy-crawler invasion. I’ll hire an exterminator. But I’m not going to tell him about the so-called bedbugs, because then he’ll do what any smart businessman would do: rip me off. Who wouldn’t? He’ll go along with it and charge me a fortune to get rid of the ‘problem’”—here Luis made air quotes—“that was never there in the first place. So I’ll have him look around and see what he finds. If it’s bedbugs, fine, I’ll get the foggers. Or if you two want to hire your fancy experts, that’s on you. And that’s final.” Luis slurped up the last of his soda, and then placed his hands on the table. “Excuse me, I need to go relieve myself.” He stood up, saluted them, and sauntered to the back of the bar.

“Holy shit,” said Sophia, as soon as he was out of sight. “What a psycho. Is every landlord in New York like that?”

Emma’s head was churning. She was working furiously to devise a more convincing tactic, to figure out an approach that would make Luis understand their perspective. A tug at her shirtsleeve jolted her from her strategizing. “Emma,” Nick said. “We’ve got to get out of this lease.”

“What?”

“Luis is dumb and dangerous. Do you really want this to escalate any more?”

“But—”

“Can you imagine if something goes wrong with the plumbing, or if the heat breaks down? We’d be living under that guy’s reign of terror. We’d be held hostage by this lunacy.”

“But both our leases are up in less than two weeks. We’ll have nowhere to live.”

“We’ll find somewhere else.” Nick nodded, as if to close the case. He signaled to the waitress with his empty pint glass.

Emma began rubbing her temples. She looked up to see Sophia’s beseeching grin. “So this might not be the perfect time, but I’m curious, did you happen to save any of the bug carcasses? I bet I could make an awesome installation out of them.”

Emma found herself giggling in a pitch an octave higher than usual. “Sophia, that’s an excellent idea. Why don’t you ask Luis? Maybe he can sponsor your exhibit, and write up the commentary. He can expound upon our culture’s obsessive fear of bedbugs, and how the infestations are often just a product of our deranged, middle-class imaginations. He can theorize how this speaks to the guilt of the modern-day gentrifier, a xenophobic paranoia about urban living spaces, an uneasy symbiosis with nature, a—”

“Easy there,” Nick said, cutting off her ramble. “Let’s save the postmodern crackups for the privacy of our home, okay?” Sophia, who’d been furiously scribbling Emma’s words onto a cocktail napkin, looked disappointed.

Luis had reappeared. “So, my tenants, what do you say? How are we going to handle this big, scary bug situation?” He wiggled his fingers in front of his face.

Nick tilted his head at Emma. She looked down in defeat. “Luis, we want to talk to you about ending our tenant-landlord relationship. We’ve realized this is not the right living situation for us, and we’d like to terminate the lease.”

He shrugged. “Fine by me. I have the paperwork here—we can tear it up right now.”

“Excellent,” said Nick. “So you can just write us a check for, let’s see, first month, last month, security, the broker’s fee . . . We can call the repairs even.”

Luis laughed. “Be serious, man. You wasted my time and energy, you terrorized my tenants with your construction, you made crazy claims about bedbugs, and now it’s too late for me to find another tenant for October. I say you count yourself lucky that I’ll let you out of our contract without penalty, instead of charging you twelve months’ rent as I could definitely do. Let’s say we tear up the lease, all shake hands, and walk away.”

“Without all the money you owe us?” Emma asked, incredulous.

“Like I said, I don’t believe I owe you guys shit. We had a deal, fair and square. You want to pull out of the deal? Be my guest, but you’ll have to face the consequences.”

“Emma,” Sophia said. “You need to talk to a lawyer. I think I can help.”

Without waiting for Emma’s okay, Sophia turned to Luis, and said, “Hold your horses, mister. Don’t tear up a thing. We’ll get back to you soon enough. And we’ll have the law on our side!” Despite the lines that seemed lifted from a bad cowboy movie, Emma welled up with gratitude for the girl’s gumption—and for her fake ID.

 

After Luis fled from the bar, muttering on his way out about “the goddamn gentrifiers,” Nick ordered them a pitcher of beer, then another one, and then several drinks in, Emma caved and let Sophia have one, too, and then it started to seem like a good idea to join Sophia at a party uptown where she claimed they’d find her housing lawyer friend. (Emma was reluctant to call her lawyer brother, for fear that Max would skew the story into an I-told-you-so opportunity.) It didn’t occur to her to question why Sophia was going to a party on a school night, or to consider the inappropriateness of attending said party with her teenage client; although she did think to ask why, at age seventeen, Sophia was partying with someone who was old enough to have completed law school.

Sophia waved away the concern. “All my friends are older. High school kids are immature.”

“She has a point there,” Nick said, emptying the remains of his glass.

“Anyway, you should really come.”

Nick shrugged his concession, and Emma, more than willing to spend the rest of the evening avoiding their current predicament, said, “Why not?” Her beer-fogged brain was still calculating the best subway route up to Seventy-second and Second when Sophia announced a car service was on its way. Moments later they were beckoned to the curb by a honk that sounded almost polite, as if to expose the car’s prim Upper East Side origins.

Emma was expecting a stately high-rise with an equally stately doorman, vases of freshly cut flowers, and polished, shiny surfaces, but the car pulled up to a building as battered-looking as Emma’s own Lower East Side tenement. “Thanks, Gordon,” Sophia chirped. She reached to pat the driver on the shoulder, then shimmied her way out and guided Nick and Emma inside and up three sets of stairs.

The door swung open, and a waifish guy in his early twenties planted a peck on Sophia’s forehead. “Darling, hello. Who’s this, your nanny?”

“This is my tutor-slash-friend-slash-life-coach, Emma,” said Sophia, giddy. Emma felt herself blushing. “Also her lover, Nick.” Nick shot Emma a skeptical look.

Post-introductions, Sophia pulled them into a large room that resembled the set of a down-market Benetton ad: Each of the dozen or so people was an unusual take on attractive, and each projected a variation on a thrift-store-chic aesthetic. Genevieve would’ve fit right in, with her long blond hair and vintage wardrobe, Emma thought. Emma considered texting her, before she remembered with a twinge her friend’s recent chilliness—although maybe Gen really was just busy with her nursing school applications, as she’d claimed. After a few moments, Emma realized that no one in the room had moved or spoken; they all lounged, wearing listless expressions and draping long, limp limbs across the furniture; she half wondered if there’d been a gas leak. Sophia made introductions, but Emma couldn’t quite follow the names that either sounded like medications (Allegrina? was it Frescaline?) or else just things (Branch, Lyric, Bird,
did she say Nickel?
). The painted walls were accented with snaking lines of poetry, some of which Emma recognized as Langston Hughes and Pablo Neruda. Nick nudged her. “I need a drink, stat.”

In the kitchen was a guy busy transferring most of a bottle of vodka into a plastic cup. “Aloha,” he said, his marble eyes a hypnotizing hue of blue. “I’m Wade.”

“Oh,” said Emma, suddenly hopeful. “You’re the lawyer Sophia told us about.”

“Did she?” Wade raised his eyebrows, which made his eyes pop even more vividly. “Yep, I’m doing the legal education thing at Hunter—starting with Constitutional Law this semester, and I think I’ll try Torts next. I’m taking it slow so I can really experience each class fully, you know? Also so I have time for my art.”

“Your art—of course.” Nick said it with an edge, but Wade nodded in earnest. “Mind if I pour myself a drink?”

“Be my guest, bud. And one for the lady?”

Emma grabbed a cup, her hopes of getting help from Wade dwindling. “So then you’re not a lawyer.” She didn’t even bother phrasing it as a question.

“I’m not sure I’ll end up taking the bar. It’s, like, I definitely wanna help people who get screwed over by the system, but at the same time, I don’t wanna be part of perpetuating the man’s bullshit with some elitist degree. I mean, what does it even mean to call oneself a Juris Doctor?”

So that she wouldn’t have to respond, Emma gulped at her drink—vodka with a trickle of tonic. She decided they should leave, and was about to say so to Nick, but then Wade set his electric-blue gaze upon her, and she understood how he could get away with spewing such nonsense. No straight woman could laugh those eyes out of the room. Wade draped an arm each around Emma’s and Nick’s shoulders, and asked, “But what’s going on with you guys, I mean legal system–wise?”

Their whole sob story tumbled out of Emma, as Wade “mmm-hm”-ed along in sympathy and Nick freshened all of their drinks.

“Well, you’re screwed,” Wade declared after Emma finished describing the afternoon’s altercation. “I hate to say it, but if this guy wants to bogart your money, your only real recourse is to sue his ass. And the government’s slashed the shit out of the courts’ budgets, so you’re looking at a six-month wait time, minimum—and that’s
if
you make it before a judge at all. Usually they triple-book the cases. Even if you go all cheapskate and rep yourself, and even if you do get your case heard and manage to win, if this dude knows anything about how fucked-up shit is in the law, he can just straight up not pay. Then it’s on you to go all Sherlock on his ass and track down his assets, fill out a shit-ton of paperwork, freeze his bank accounts, and more or less mire yourself in a total cluster-fuck of governmental incompetence. Don’t even get me started on appeals.”