“Look, could you, you know…” I was starting to get really annoyed with this guy. I was getting frankly annoyed with just about everyone: Lucy, those shitheads who barged in on me in my sleep, my mother, my ex-boyfriend Darren, everyone in New York City, the universe. “I think, you know, whoever you are, Len, I think uh this isn’t a great time for me to maybe visit, and I’m not sure what you’re doing here.”
“Sorry.” he smiled, suddenly looking down and dusting himself off, like he remembered something about how actual people behave. “I’m being ridiculous, you’re right to be upset. Did you stay here last night? You must have done. I’m so sorry for your loss, it must have been a terrific shock. Well, it was for all of us. Such a shame. She was really a terrific person. I’m Len Colbert, like I said. I was a friend of your mother and Bill, I live in the penthouse here on the top floor. Well, of course it’s the top floor, that’s where penthouses are, aren’t they?” He laughed at himself, bemused by this astonishingly obvious statement of fact. “I’d shake your hand but mine are not presentable, I’m a, well, it’s complicated what I do,” he sighed. “Not complicated. I’m an anthropological botanist, I was, that is, I don’t teach anymore. But the uh—the kitchen here—have you seen the kitchen?”
“The moss?” I asked.
“Yes, the moss.” He smiled. No surprise, this elflike character had a fantastic smile, charming and self-involved and devilish as hell. He also had the most alarming blue eyes I’d ever seen, dark edges but sky blue around the middle. For a second I was seriously grateful that that dude was at least thirty years older than me because in spite of the fact that he was so odd I could see the appeal of eyes like that. “Bill and I had an arrangement. He rented me his kitchen,” Len the blue-eyed elf continued. “He lets me, that is—both he and your mother—they let me use it as a kind of greenhouse. My own greenhouse, up on the roof, is obviously untenable for a mossery, not that I didn’t try, but to maintain the habitat, the hydration alone, not that, it may be possible that we just didn’t solve it. But people were not enthusiastic overall, you can imagine. The terror of a few bryophytes! Anyway it was finally impossible. I investigated the possibility of renovating the plumbing, you know, to provide the additional, and there was no support from my fellow tenants. None whatsoever. One may even say, open hostility. At least, lawsuits were threatened. Anyway you’ll have to come see it.”
“See…”
“The greenhouse. It’s a rarity to find one in the city, but the light, as you can imagine, so far up, utterly spectacular, even, the views, not to mention what you can accomplish. With that much light? I am I think not unduly proud. I’d love for you to come up; you should take me up on this. But it is absolutely useless for moss. Our solution—Bill and I—to our mutual needs—was as you see.” He made an elegant gesture toward the kitchen behind him. “Actually it’s a bit of a secret. There’s a lot of misunderstanding, in the building, about moss. This confusion between moss and mold—it’s ridiculous. They’re not even the same species. Bill and Olivia were very understanding. And discreet.” He smiled at me and nodded, apparently finished with this unintelligible explanation.
“So you have a key?” I asked.
“Oh yes. They spent most of their time in the other half of the apartment, it wasn’t any kind of, as you can see this part of the apartment has not been in use for years.”
“Well, okay, but it looks like I’m going to be living here now,” I said.
“Reeeeallly?” Len asked, cocking his head at this, as if it were the most extraordinary news. Actually, he made it sound like such extraordinary news that it was just the slightest bit too extraordinary to be believed.
“Yes, until the will is settled. I’m staying here.”
“And what do the boys have to say about that?” Len the elf asked, sort of half to himself.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?” I asked him, edgy
He smiled at me, clearly amused by my tone. “The boys, he repeated. “I ran into them last night, in the lobby. They didn’t mention to me that you would be living here. So I’m just surprised to hear it. As I assume they were.” He folded his hands in front of his chest, with a sort of odd little gesture of delight, and smiled at me again, as if I would find his clever little bit of deduction charming.
“Look, you’re going to have to go,” I said. “I don’t know anything about this, and you know, you want me to be discreet and everything but I don’t know, this is clearly some sort of illegal thing you got going here.”
“Moss is not a controlled substance,” he informed me, laughing.
“Oh sorry, I maybe misunderstood you, before,” I said. “Because you said something about how people in the building got all mad when you were trying to grow it up there on the roof, so I was just thinking maybe they wouldn’t like to find out, so much, that instead you decided to grow it on the eighth floor, like in the middle of the building, where it might actually spread.”
“Ah,” said Len Colbert from the penthouse. “I understand why perhaps you thought I said that.”
“Yeah, it sounded a little like that, like people maybe wouldn’t be so thrilled to hear what you were doing here.”
“That’s not what I was saying,” he said.
“So I don’t actually need to keep my mouth shut about this?
Elfman laughed again, to himself this time.
“What’s so funny, Len?” I asked.
“Nothing, no, nothing,” he replied. He looked back at the kitchen, this time with real longing. “Do you like moss?” he asked me.
“Honestly, I never thought about it that much,” I said.
“It is a rare spirit that appreciates moss,” Len told me, as if this were news. “There are seventeen different species in this particular mossery, some of them exceedingly beautiful. The curators at either of the public botanical gardens in the city would give their eye teeth. Frankly, it’s actually a bit of an achievement that I could do what I’ve done, and under these conditions? Please. Let me show it to you.”
“That’s not necessary, Len,” I started.
“Please,” he said, holding out his elegant and dirty hand, like a prince at some ball, waiting to sweep me into a dance.
“What the hell,” I said.
So for the next hour this strange guy walked me through the intricacies of moss, gametophores and microphylls and archegonia—that’s the female sex organ of moss, who knew—and how much water moss needs to fertilize, and how long it takes for sporophytes to mature. He talked about liverworts and hornworts; he had mosses in there that were actually only native in the Yorkshire Dales moorland, and he had mosses that only grew in cracks in city streets, and he had mosses that only grew in water. As it turns out, in World War II sphagnum mosses were used as dressings on the wounds of soldiers in Europe because they’re so absorbent and they have mild antibacterial properties. Also some moss can be used to put out fires, don’t ask me how they would do that but apparently it’s historically accurate. Old Len knew a ton about moss, and he made sure that I knew how great his mossery really was, and how no one builds them anymore, and what a tragedy it would be if anything were to happen to his mossery.
“That would be awful,” I agreed. I looked around the transformed kitchen. Len had even hung a picture of an old medieval tree on one wall, presumably to keep the moss company. “So how much did Bill charge you, to rent out his kitchen like this?” I asked.
“Oh,” he said, looking at me kind of sideways for a second. “It was a very friendly arrangement.”