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 MCIs, 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 trouble. It was a sorry place for sorry situations. Elizabeth was desperate in desperate places. Hector the super’s daughter-in-law walked in to the squalid office. Elizabeth said hello, and everyone nodded. Hector’s daughter-in-law was having trouble with her landlord and her husband. Elizabeth knew that. She’d already had two kids and the two kids were miserable. Even before their parents separated, the kids were falling on their faces, having too many awful accidents, and were being rushed, bloody, to too many emergency rooms. The daughter-in-law was tragic at eighteen.
Elizabeth worried that the girl would mention seeing them to Hector the super, seeing them in the free tenant lawyer’s office. Hector would tell the Big G. Ernest told Elizabeth they were within their rights, doing what they were doing, they were absolutely within their rights. Nothing would happen to them. He smiled benignly at her.
Elizabeth wasn’t sure if being within her rights covered being seen as a conspirator, an agitator, and whether her rights would keep her from being tormented before being thrown out of the building illegally in the middle of the night. It wouldn’t happen, Ernest went on reassuringly. They were sitting tenants with leases. She was, she repeated to herself, a sitting tenant with a lease.
One night, when no one was around, except the morons on the street, Ernest and Elizabeth collected evidence for their dossier against the landlord. Pictures had to be included with the letter to the city. They needed photographs of the filthy halls, walls, and broken stairs. It was so late, the building was quiet, like the Tombs, Ernest said grimly. They arranged to meet in front of her door. They moved stealthily through the halls. They skulked. The naked lightbulbs were stark illumination. The light accented the streaks on the walls. Shadows made it harder to know where the dirt was and also made the dark spots darker. It was just the way shadows in gangster and romantic movies obscure and enhance the seamy sides of life.
The joke was that they needed photographs of holes in the floor. Any one of the tenants could have tripped or caught their heel in the ugly recesses, they could have fallen down and broken their nose. They could have fallen down and in a freak accident died because of the way their head hit the floor. If they were drunk, they could have tripped, hit their head, and bled to death on the floor. The tenants could’ve sued the landlord. Elizabeth thought the landlord would’ve wanted to repair things, to avoid being sued. But if everyone’s too poor to get lawyers, or too intimidated, why should the landlord repair anything, or if people like her — whatever that meant — couldn’t even respond when their rent was being raised unfairly, then landlords didn’t have to fix anything. She’d heard about someone who broke his arm falling out of bed to answer the phone, though his bed was on the floor. Accidents happen all the time.
The ugliest hole was in the deepest shadow. It was too dark in the vestibule to take pictures. The light overhead was the dangling naked bulb that the landlord had recently put in, the one they wanted the tenants to pay extra rent for every month. It was weak. If anyone wanted to mug you in the small vestibule, you’d never see him well enough to identify him. The weak light wasn’t a deterrent in any way. Just the opposite. Ernest and Elizabeth were standing very close to each other in the small entryway. She could feel his anxiety. She liked it and hated it.
— I need more light, Elizabeth said.
— You don’t have a good enough view? Ernest asked.
— I can see the hole with my eyes, but it won’t come out on the photograph.
— Let me open the door, he said.
He opened the front door as wide as it would go. Then he studied her with a worried expression.
— Is that better?
Is that better? she thought. The way he said, Let me open the door, his perplexity about photographing the hole, the way he said, Is that better? was priceless and ridiculous at the same time. She fell in love with him. For a minute. He changed in her eyes in the dark, ugly vestibule.