Free No Lease on Life by Lynne Tillman

lately. He read a lot of the books in the bookstore where he worked. They discussed, with an intensity that astonished Elizabeth, the letter to the landlord. Elizabeth didn’t want the letter to be too meek or too hawkish. She wanted the right tone. When you demand to be treated fairly, you must appear to be just, right but not righteous, and, especially, Elizabeth knew, you must appear to be above suspicion mentally. The last thing she wanted the City to think was that she and Ernest were irrational, that they didn’t have a reasonable leg to stand on.
    The very next night Ernest came over. He sat next to her on a chair. She sat at her desk, at her laptop. Roy sat in the kitchen, reading. She typed the letter. They considered everything in it, every detail.
     
To the City,
    xxx and xxy are TWO SEPARATE buildings…[they both wanted capital letters]. No hallway renovation was done in our building; in fact there is NO downstairs hallway at all [a surprising turn; good to be entertaining]… Tenants of our building do not benefit from the hallway work done on the building next door—they are ENTIRELY separate buildings [making the point another way]… Landlord has been belligerent with tenant, who complained of inadequate hall maintenance. [The tenant was Elizabeth. Ernest urged, Go on, put that in. Elizabeth happily typed it in.]… Entry to xxx can be made without key, merely by pushing door open. (Tenant complains of strange man sleeping in hallway 4/93.) [Ernest was on the top floor. Homeless people slept and shit at his door.]… Tenants feel it is unfair for building to have been neglected for so long and then landlord receives increase for fixing it. [Absolutely, they said in unison.]
    Elizabeth was especially content with the summary.
     
The landlord has misrepresented its claims on both xxx and xxy… hallway repairs ACTUALLY done were feeble. [Feeble? Elizabeth asked Ernest. That’s good, he said. His brow furrowed. He repeated the word. FEEBLE. Perfect, be said.] Number of rooms in xxx and xxy is exaggerated. [The use of exaggerated was a convincing understatement.] Cleanliness of xxx in particular is poor. The building is not SAFE. Landlord has received MANY complaints.
    Late at night, beyond sleep, she read over and corrected the words she’d typed. She grew more outraged at the landlord’s bold-faced lies. Her aggravated blood made her face and body blush. Indignation charged through her. The letter was a romance novel to her. Roy told her not to believe everything she read. He reminded her that she wasn’t going to do anything about the landlord’s letter until Ernest came along. Elizabeth hung her head in shame. Then she laughed until she cried.
    Ernest mailed the fourteen-page, thoroughly documented letter to the appropriate City agency. With the Polaroids, with maps, with drawings of windows, with measurements, with tenant letters and testimonies, with the valuable petition. Ernest had done his work, Elizabeth had done hers too. Ernest and Elizabeth nailed the landlord in a scandal of lies. They also mailed a letter to the landlord, telling the landlord they had filed with the City. The landlord was on notice.
    Then Elizabeth and Ernest rested their case. They waited. They waited for months.
     
A man went to his psychiatrist and said, Doctor, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m a tepee, I’m a wigwam, I’m a tepee, I’m a wigwam, I’m a tepee, I’m a wigwam. The psychiatrist said, Relax, you’re two tents.
    The landlord backed down. The landlord was forced to back down. Each tenant received a letter saying that the increase wouldn’t go into effect. The landlord didn’t say why, the landlord didn’t admit to having been challenged by the tenants. The landlord in fact pretended it was out of concern, some human tenderness on its part, that it had decided to rescind the rent hike. For the time being.
    It was an empty victory. No one but her, Ernest, Roy, and Herbert, the deaf guy,