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

I will, she said finally. He was asking next to nothing of her.
    She would make a few phone calls, knock on tenant doors, get some names on their petition. She’d help write letters, do some minor evidence gathering, contact various City agencies only by phone if he asked her to. She’d use her proofreader’s expertise on the letters. The letters would spell doom, defeat, for the landlord’s illegal hopes. Elizabeth told Ernest that she’d make sure there weren’t any errors of fact or grammar in the letters, no typos. Elizabeth would see to their correctness. The landlord had applied for
MCI
s, Major Capital Improvements, Ernest explained. They were requesting more than they deserved. They wouldn’t get it, he said.
    They spent time together, side by side, strategizing. They had to determine how the landlord should be rebutted and combated and what information they needed. The landlord stated that their building and the one next door were one building. That way any repairs on the one next door counted as money spent on their building. Their building could be charged higher rents for work done on the other building. An evil-twin situation, Elizabeth thought. She’d once wanted to be a twin, but now it repulsed her. The two buildings’ separate registrations had to be found. The other building had double the number of tenants too, double the trouble.
    Ernest was relentless. He was on fire. He went downtown to a vast City building. He walked through room after room and floor after floor, through hundreds of rooms of file cabinets and computers and documents. He dealt with clerical people who ignored him. He waited on long lines and wasted his life. Elizabeth read that people waited on line at the post office five years of their lives. Waiting added up. Then Ernest would get to the head of the line and as part of a tradition or ritual he would be told he was on the wrong line and he should see another clerical person, somewhere else, on another floor or building, and that person would keep him waiting too, be rude, or tell him to see someone else and finally someone else would tell him he or she couldn’t help him, and he had to start all over, in another location, on another line. He did that. Elizabeth was impressed. He took action. He was a hero in a local way.
    Ernest even found a free tenant lawyer. He came back from the first meeting with pages of yellow paper; he’d taken detailed notes. He absorbed and learned acronyms for all the City agencies and departments, and he learned legal terms too. Elizabeth didn’t know exactly what the acronyms stood for. Since Ernest did, she didn’t need to. A
PAR
, he repeated patiently, was a Petition for Administrative Review.
     
A man was going away and he asked his brother to look after his cat. Then he phoned home to ask how the cat was. The brother answered, Your cat is dead. The first brother asked, How can you tell me like that? Why didn’t you prepare me? You could’ve said, Your cat ran away. I’ll look for it. Call back in a day. Then when I called back, you could’ve said, The cat’s on the roof. And the next time I called, then you could’ve told me the cat was dead. You should’ve prepared me. His brother said he was sorry. Some years later, the man went away again. He called his brother. He asked, How’s Mom? His brother said, She’s on the roof.
    Ernest asked Elizabeth to attend one of the legal sessions with him. The office wasn’t far, and the meeting wouldn’t take much of her time, he said. Elizabeth agreed, shamed by his commitment. The meeting was in a shabby brown room, with fake wood furniture. The lawyer wasn’t a lawyer but a paralegal; she used the acronyms Ernest used and knew. MCI. PAR. Elizabeth tried to appear involved. She knew if this was a documentary she’d be caught looking uninterested. There were stacks of paper on the harassed woman’s desk, thousands of claims against landlords, standing for thousands of tenants in