No Lease on Life by Lynne Tillman Read Free Book Online Page A

smell. But she didn’t want it to be overpowering. It was hard enough to visit people in their apartments or ride in a taxi driven by a maniac who didn’t know his way around. Some people burned incense day and night or wore sickeningly sweet perfume. Some taxi drivers hung furry green-and-white odor-eaters from rearview mirrors. Elizabeth often became nauseated.
    —You smell good, she told Roy yesterday.
    —That’ll change, he said.
    The morons were gone. The block was a moron-free zone. She was free. Elizabeth liked her block. She felt possessive about it. She liked her apartment.
     
A horse goes into a bar and sits down.
The bartender asks, Why the long face?
    When the landlord was about to raise the rent, Elizabeth received a letter. All the tenants did. The landlord stated that because they’d given the tenants new windows, which weren’t put in right, they’d measured wrong, because they’d replaced the old mailbox, which had been broken since she’d moved in, and because they’d put in a light in the front hallway, which was required by law, the landlord regretfully was raising the rent a certain amount per room for every tenant. The landlord assessed the number of rooms at two more than Elizabeth thought she had.
    Elizabeth shoved the letter under a stack of junk mail. She ignored it for a day. Then she took it out. She did the figuring. She added up her rooms and multiplied to find what it would cost monthly. It wasn’t astronomical. She could live with it or die with it. She might do both. She wasn’t going to fight it. Fight the increase. The phrase appealed to her—fight the increase. It was what she should do. But she wasn’t going to, not after Gloria had insulted her. Six dollars more per room for the rest of her life, even for rooms she didn’t have, was better than standing in a poorly ventilated room next to Gloria.
    Being reasonable with the Big G was murder.
    Roy read the letter. He thought they should do something. He glanced at Elizabeth and shoved the paper over to her side of the table.
    —I can’t rouse myself to action, she said.
    —Rouse yourself to inaction, he said.
    —No.
    —Answer the letter. Do something.
    —I can’t. You do it. Do something yourself.
    —I don’t do that kind of thing.
    —Why not?
    —It’s beneath me.
    —I don’t do floors, either.
    Their upstairs neighbor was aroused. Ernest was an actor. He worked in a bookstore. Ernest shoved a letter under their door one night. It was addressed to her. He wanted to discuss the tenant situation, their position. Long sentences covered the unlined paper. He said he wanted Elizabeth’s help in fighting the rent increase. He used the compelling phrase. He followed his letter with a telephone message that took up five minutes on her answering machine. They’d never even talked or seen each other in the hallway. She hadn’t seen him. She’d heard him above her, she’d heard what she thought were his footsteps. He exercised.
    Then Ernest showed up, after the note and call. He was likable. He told her that when he read the landlord’s letter, he went berserk. He couldn’t sleep, he was infuriated by the injustice, the lies. He wanted to take the landlord on, with her assistance. He’d do the hard work, the field work, go to City Hall, search for the building plans, for the architectural drawings. He just wanted her assistance.
    The same letter that swamped her in lethargy was the key to an ignition switch in Ernest. Indignant, he enlisted Elizabeth. She was inert and apathetic. But he knew, somehow, that she of all the tenants would be open to his plea. He may have heard her walking late at night, heard in her gait some telltale sign of anxiety. Maybe he even discerned in it a desire for a better world, for justice. That was impossible, she supposed. It was probably because she was friendlier than most of the other tenants. Maybe he had seen her in the hallway and she’d smiled, unaware of who he was. Yes, OK,