The House (3 page)

It was shortly after noon as she hurried back to her office. She had a partners' meeting at one o'clock, meetings scheduled with three clients that afternoon, and fifty pages of new tax laws to read that night, all or some of which would be pertinent to her clients. She had a stack of messages waiting on her desk, and she managed to return all but two of them before the meeting with her partners. She would return the other two, and whatever new ones she had, between client meetings later that afternoon. She had no time for lunch … any more than she did for babies or marriage. Stanley had made his choices and mistakes in life. She had a right to make her own.

Chapter 2

Sarah continued to send books
and relevant articles to Stanley, as she always did, through July and August. He had a brief bout of flu in September, which didn't require a hospital stay this time. And he was in remark ably good spirits when she visited him on his ninety-ninth birthday in October. There was a sense of victory to it. It was a remarkable achievement to reach ninety-nine years of age. She brought him a cheesecake and put a candle in it. She knew it was his favorite, and reminded him of his childhood in New York. For once, he didn't scold her about how hard she was working. They talked at length about a new tax law that was being proposed, which could prove advantageous to his estate. He had the same concerns about it she did, and they both enjoyed batting theories back and forth with each other, about how current tax laws might be affected. He was as clear and sharp as ever and didn't seem quite as frail as he had on her previous visit. He had a new nurse who was making a real effort to make him eat, and Sarah thought he had even gained a little weight. She kissed him on the cheek, as she always did, when she left, and told him that they'd be celebrating his hundredth birthday the following October.

“Christ, I hope not,” he said, laughing at her. “Whoever thought I'd make it this far,” he said as they celebrated together.

She left him a stack of new books, some music to listen to, and a pair of black satin pajamas that seemed to amuse him. She'd never seen him in better spirits, which made the call she got two weeks later, on the first of November, more shocking somehow. It shouldn't have been. She had always known it would come. But it caught her off guard anyway. After more than three years of doing legal work for him, and enjoying their resulting friendship, she really had begun to expect him to live forever. The nurse told her that Stanley had died peacefully in his sleep the night before, listening to the music she had given him and wearing the black satin pajamas. He had eaten a good dinner, drifted off to sleep and out of this world, without a gasp or a whimper, or a final word to anyone. The nurse had found him when she went to check on him an hour later. She said the look on his face was completely peaceful.

Tears sprang to Sarah's eyes as she heard it. She'd had a hard morning at the office, after a heated debate with two of her partners over something they'd done that she didn't agree with, and she felt they'd ganged up on her. And the night before, she'd had a fight with the man she dated, which wasn't all that unusual, but upset her anyway. In the past year, they had begun to disagree more. They both had busy days, and stressful lives. They confined their time together to weekends. But sometimes she and Phil got on each other's nerves over minor irritations. Hearing about Stanley dying in the night was the topper. She felt suddenly bereft, reminded of when her father had died when she was sixteen, twenty-two years before.

In an odd way, Stanley was the only father figure she'd had since then, even though he was a client. He was always telling her not to work too hard, and to learn from his mistakes. No other man she knew had ever said that to her, and she knew how much she was going to miss him. But this was what they had prepared for, why she had come into his life, to plan his estate, and how it would be dispersed to his heirs. It was time for her to do her job. All the groundwork had been laid over the past three years. Sarah was organized and ready. Everything was in order.

“Will you make the arrangements?” the nurse asked her. She had already notified the other nurses, and Sarah said she'd call the funeral parlor. He had long since selected the one he wanted, although he had been emphatic that there be no funeral. He wanted to be cremated and buried, without fuss or fanfare. There would be no mourners. All his friends and business associates were long dead, and his family didn't know him. There was only Sarah to make the arrangements.

She made the appropriate phone calls after speaking to the nurse. She was surprised to see that her hand shook as she made the calls. He was to be cremated the next morning, and buried at Cypress Lawn, in a spot he had purchased in the mausoleum a dozen years before. They asked if there would be a service, and she said no. The funeral home picked him up within the hour, and she felt somber all day, particularly as she dictated the letter to his unsuspecting heirs. She offered a reading of the will in her offices in San Francisco, which Stanley had requested, should they wish to come out, at which time they might like to inspect the house they had inherited, and decide how they wished to dispose of it. There was always the remote possibility that one of them would want to keep it, and buy out the others' shares, although she and Stanley had always considered that unlikely. None of them lived in San Francisco, and wouldn't want a house there. There were a multitude of details to attend to. And she had been advised by the cemetery that Stanley would be interred at nine o'clock the next morning.

She knew it would be several days, or longer, before she began hearing from his heirs. For those who didn't wish to come out, or couldn't, she would send them copies of the will, as soon as it had been read. And his estate had to be put into probate. It would take some time to release the assets. She set all the wheels in motion that day.

By late afternoon, the head nurse had come to the office to bring all the nurses' keys to her. The cleaning woman who had come in for years, just to clean the attic rooms, was going to continue working. There was a service that came in once a month to clean the rest of the house, but nothing was changed for them. It was startling how little had to be done at this point. And Stanley had so few personal effects and so little furniture, that when they cleaned out the house for a real estate broker, Goodwill could take it all away. There was nothing the heirs would want. He was a simple man with few needs and no luxuries, and he had been bedridden for years. Even the watch he wore was of no consequence. He had bought a gold watch once, and had long since given it away. All he had were properties and shopping malls, oil wells, investments, stocks, bonds, and the house on Scott Street. Stanley Perlman had had an enormous fortune, and few things. And thanks to Sarah, his estate was totally in order at the time of his death, and long before.

Sarah stayed at the office until nearly nine o'clock that night, poring over files, answering e-mails, and filing things that had sat on her desk for days. She realized finally that she was avoiding going home, almost as though the emptiness of Scott Street now might have been transmitted to her own home. She hated the feeling that Stanley was gone. She called her mother, and she was out. She called Phil, glanced at her watch, and realized he was at the gym. They rarely, if ever, saw each other during the week. He went to the gym every night after work. He was a labor attorney in a rival firm, specialized in discrimination cases, and his hours were as long as hers. He also had dinner with his children twice a week, since he didn't like seeing them on weekends. He liked keeping his weekends free for adult pursuits, mostly with her. She tried his cell phone, but it was on voice mail when he was at the gym. She didn't leave a message because she didn't know what to say to him. She knew how stupid he'd make her feel. She could just imagine the conversation. “My ninety-nine-year-old client died last night and I'm really sad about it.” Phil would laugh at her. “Ninety-nine? Are you kidding?… Sounds like he was way overdue, if you ask me.” She had mentioned Stanley once or twice to Phil, but they rarely talked about their work. Phil liked to leave his at the office. She brought hers home with her, in many ways. She brought files home to work on, and worried about her clients, their tax problems and plans. Phil left his clients at the office, and their worries on his desk. Sarah carried them around with her. And her sadness over Stanley weighed heavily on her.

There was no one to say anything to, no one to tell. No one to share the overwhelming feeling of emptiness with her. What she felt was impossible to explain. She felt bereft, just as she had when her father died, only this was worse. There was none of the shock she'd had then, and none of the relief. There was no real loss when her father died, except the loss of an idea. The idea of the father he'd never been. He had been the phantom father her mother had created for her. The fantasy her mother had propagated for him. At the time her father died, although they lived in the same house, Sarah hadn't really talked to him in years. She couldn't. He was always too drunk to talk or think, or go anywhere with her. He just came home from work and drank himself into a stupor, and eventually didn't even bother to go to work. He just sat in the room he and her mother shared, drinking, while her mother attempted to cover for him, and worked to support all three of them, selling real estate, and coming home during the day to check on him. He died at forty-six, of liver disease, and had been a total stranger to her. Stanley had been her friend. And in some strange way this was worse. With Stanley gone, there was actually someone to miss.

She sat in her office and cried, finally, as she thought about it, and then she picked up her briefcase and left. She took a cab home and let herself into her apartment in Pacific Heights, a dozen blocks from Stanley's house on Scott Street, and walked straight to her desk. She checked her messages. Her mother had left her one earlier. At sixty-one, she was still working, but had shifted from real estate to interior design. She was always busy, with friends, at book clubs, with clients, or at the twelve-step groups she still attended after all these years. She had been going to Al-Anon for nearly thirty years, even all these years after her alcoholic husband died. Sarah said she was addicted to twelve-step groups. Her mother was always busy and spinning her wheels, but she seemed happy doing it. She had called Sarah to check in, and said she was on her way out for the evening. As she listened to the message, Sarah sat down on the couch, staring straight ahead. She hadn't eaten dinner and didn't care. There was two-day-old pizza in the fridge, and she knew she could have made a salad if she wanted one, but she didn't. She didn't want anything tonight except the comfort of her bed. She needed time to grieve, before doing everything she had to do for Stanley. She knew the next day she'd be fine, or thought she would, but right now she needed to let go.

She stretched out on the couch and hit the remote for the TV. All she needed was sound, voices, something to fill the silence and the void she felt welling up in her. Her apartment was as empty as she was tonight. The apartment itself was in as much disarray as she felt. She never noticed it and didn't now. Her mother nagged her constantly about it, and Sarah always fobbed her off, and said she liked it that way. She liked to say her apartment looked studious and intelligent. She didn't want fluffy curtains, or a bedspread with ruffles. She didn't need cute little cushions on the couch, or plates that matched. She had a battered old brown couch she had had since college, a coffee table she'd bought at Goodwill in law school. Her desk was an old door she'd found somewhere and put on two sawhorses. She had rolling file cabinets stashed underneath it. Her bookcases took up one wall, full of law books that were crammed into the shelves, with the overflow stacked up in piles on the floor. There were two very handsome brown leather chairs that had been a gift from her mother, along with a big mirror that hung over the couch. There were two dead plants, and a fake silk ficus tree her mother had found somewhere, a tired-looking beanbag seat Sarah had brought back from Harvard, and a small battered dining table with four unmatched chairs. She had venetian blinds instead of curtains, but they worked fine for her.

Her bedroom looked no better. She made the bed on the weekends before Phil came over, if he did. Half the dresser drawers no longer closed. There was an old rocking chair in the corner, with a handmade quilt thrown over it that she'd found in an antique store. She had a full-length mirror with a small crack in it. Another dead plant sat on the windowsill, and the bedside table had another stack of law books on it, her favorite bedtime reading. And in the corner, a teddy bear she had salvaged from her childhood. It wasn't likely to be a spread in
House & Garden
or
Architectural Digest
, but it worked for her. It was livable, serviceable, she had enough plates to eat dinner on, enough glasses to have a dozen friends in for drinks, when she felt like it and had time, which wasn't often, enough towels for her and Phil, and enough pots and pans to make a decent meal, which she did about twice a year. The rest of the time she brought home takeout, ate a sandwich at the office, or made salad. She just didn't need more than she had, no matter how much it upset her mother, who kept her own apartment looking as though it were going to be photographed any minute. As she put it, it was her own calling card for her interior design business.

Sarah's apartment looked no different than any of hers had since she had been in college and law school. It was functional, if not beautiful, and it served her needs. She had a stereo system she liked, and Phil had bought her the TV, since she didn't have one, and he liked watching it when he was at her place, mostly for sports. And she had to admit, now and then she enjoyed it, like tonight. She liked hearing the droning of the voices on some innocuous sitcom, and then her cell phone rang. She debated answering it, and then realized it might be Phil, returning her call. She picked it up, glanced at the caller ID, and saw that it was. She saw his number with a mixture of dread and relief. She knew if he said the wrong thing, it would upset her, but she had to take the chance. She needed some form of human contact tonight, to make up for Stanley's absence from now on. She turned down the volume on the TV with the remote in one hand, flipped open her cell phone with the other, and put it to her ear.