Trophy House (15 page)

And what about the Watertown house? Tom's lawyer suggested we sell it and split the proceeds. Beth didn't like this idea, and neither did Mark. It was not only their house but their home, even though Mark hadn't lived there for years. I told them they could have my half of the money from the sale, but that didn't make a dent in their opposition. I told them I had decided. “You two rent a couple of U-Hauls and take what you want. It's yours.” I acted as if getting rid of the house was no more difficult to me than putting a stained carpet out on the street for the trash people to pick up. I was heartbroken, the house having become precious now that it was going to be snatched away and put on the market. What stranger would sleep in the bedroom, drink coffee in the morning in the kitchen, sweep the front steps, clean the closets, set the table for eight in the dining room and light candles? Who would stand at the sink and look at the trees, bone-like in winter? Who would hang what hideous clothes in my closet, put on a skirt and look in the mirror, asking herself if she looked fat? Who wouldn't sweep the basement floor? Who would open the front door to welcome her children or grandchildren with a tight hug, then follow them into the warmth inside and shut the door behind her? I couldn't stand thinking about it.

“Where are you going to live?” Beth said.

“I don't know,” I said. “The Truro house.”

“Not all winter,” Beth said. “You'll start drinking.”

“Not me,” I said. “That's not my thing. I'll find plenty to do.” What I wasn't telling them was that I had almost made up my mind to move to New York and share David's apartment. I don't really know why I transformed my plans into secrets to be kept from my children. Why did I do it? Partly because I sensed—in Beth at least—a strain of resistance to most of what I did. It was like a tic: Mom says A, Beth insists on B. Except for our joint project—that had an alphabet all its own.

It turned out that this Hugh person was married—though separated from his wife. I figured that maybe that made him safe to be with—no threat to her independence from men. She kept making excuses for us not to meet, which meant, of course, that she was—what? Ashamed of him? Afraid I wouldn't like him and tell her so? Afraid he would say something “inappropriate”? I called Mark and asked him if he had met Beth's new “roommate.” He said he had, once, briefly. “Seems nice enough. A little geeky if you ask me.” Was I surprised—I'd had him figured as a stud. Did it make any difference?

On a gray, chill day late in April, Beth and I drove to the Cape. I was not at my most serene, having run a tag sale on the sidewalk in front of our house. (My mother, in Florida, would have had a fit. Largely ignorant of many of the earth-shaking events of the last twenty years, including the events of September 11, which she refused to admit was more than a minor accident with a couple of “poor souls” dispatched by the flames, she existed inside a transparent shell that let in only the sunny hours. Why disabuse her?) The tag sale, which grossed and netted the same amount, namely eight hundred-plus dollars, had taken a lot out of me. Off in the arms of strangers went a silver tea service, a set of crystal wineglasses still in the box they came in, a blackboard from Mark's childhood room, three cartons of books, and scores of other items I had no room and/or need for. But it hurt to see them go nonetheless. You have fewer things, you're less of a person, right?

We got off straight and boring Route 6 after we crossed the Sagamore Bridge and took instead Route 6A, which meandered its way through small towns like Yarmouthport and Dennis. These are hardly swinging towns, but largely white enclaves, not of the rich so much as of the old and careful and patriotic. I was surprised to see how many American flags there were—not the big stuck-in-the-ground kind but more discreet, on mailboxes and in windows. To be honest, I had bought a flag pin shortly after September 11 and had worn it until George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld began to scare me with their angry elephant noises. We wanted to find an unoccupied house so we wouldn't have to deal with its owners. Taking a narrow paved road off 6A on the bay side, we drove for about five minutes when Beth said “Stop!”

We were abreast of just what we were looking for: a weathered, shingled saltbox with one chimney, a brick path, a few trees that looked as if they had grown up there, not bought at a nursery, and shutters, trim and front door of the proper Cape gray-blue. “Is it too perfect?” I said. “I don't want our book to look like a calendar.”

Beth got out of the car with her notebook and pen and started to take notes. I followed her with my camera and my bag of equipment. The thing was, I was sure, to find one flaw in what looked to be a Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce dream house and focus on that. The beetle crawling up the side of a mound of apples and pears in a still life. Beth had disappeared around the side of the house when the front door opened and a woman's face appeared in the crack.

“May I ask what you're doing here? This is my property and I'm afraid you're trespassing.”

The woman to whom the face belonged had steely gray hair held in place by a black band, a square jaw, and glasses on a cord around her neck. She was wearing a Fair Isle cardigan and a pleated wool skirt that hung past her knees. She had on flat brown shoes with laces. She might have been pretty had she smiled. I suppose I was gaping.

“I need to know what you're doing here.” It sounded more like an instruction than a question.

“I'd like to take a picture of your beautiful house.”

“That's all very well, but why do you want a picture? Do you work for the
Times
?” I assumed she meant the
Cape Cod Times
. At this point, she was standing at the top of the two curved brick steps that led to the front door.

I told her that I thought this was one of the best examples of Cape Cod architecture and that I was planning a book of photographs.

She asked me if I had a publisher and I had to tell her “not yet.”

“In that case I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you not to take any pictures. I'm sure you understand.”

I didn't understand and my face must have registered this lack of comprehension.

“I have nothing against you personally, I simply can't let a perfect stranger start snapping pictures of my house.”

“My daughter…”

“What daughter?”

“My daughter. She went around to the back of the house. We thought it was empty.”

“That was a mistake. What made you think that? Because there's no car in the driveway?”

She began to follow me down the path, slowly, but with the moral force of a rhino. I called Beth who, for whatever reason, took her time coming around the side of the house. “Meet the owner,” I said.

“Hi,” Beth said. “Great grape arbor.”

“Thank you, dear,” she said.

I pulled Beth by the arm. “We're leaving,” I said.

We got into the car as quickly as we could. Beth wanted to know why “that old crock” had been so pissy. “In my line of work people would kill their mothers to get their house's picture taken,” Beth said.

Since I tend to view things as omens, I began to get that discouraged feeling but promised myself I could shake it off. “She was a mutation,” I said. “Before we get discouraged, let's look for another house.”

“What was her problem?”

“Xenophobia. Hatred of strangers. Maybe she thought we were Arab terrorists or something.”

Beth began to muse out loud about how people seemed on the edge—and some of them right over the edge—of madness. It had all happened, she insisted, since September 11. She kept coming back to that, as if civilization had cracked, like a dry twig, setting people and events off in wild spinning. I told her it was just some Puritan woman with panic in her chest, not to make a big deal of it, even as I thought she had a point there, she had a point. Nothing since September 11 was wholly familiar, everything skewed, change coming faster than a tornado, the ends of the circle no longer meeting.

I
T WASN'T AS IF
I believed that something would happen so that I could hold on to my house. I was long past that stage. But the people who bought it! I don't know why I minded so much. The house belonged to them now, they were paying for it. And what they paid in 2003 was three times as much as Tom and I had paid for it twenty years or so earlier. Still, you realize that when you have to let something go, money doesn't figure into it; money is the last thing you think about.
Candid
Camera
once asked people on the street who were walking their dogs how much money they wanted for the dog. A raggedy woman holding a leash at the other end of which was a dog as raggedy as she was said, “I wouldn't take nothing.”

Mr. Funt said, “A hundred dollars. Five hundred?” The woman kept shaking her head. Funt worked his way up to a million. The woman still shook her head. “She ain't for sale.” I know what she was thinking: would you sell your child?

The closer I came to having to move out, the more I loved my house. I had a shark agent, Francine Schweitzer, an “associate” from one of the high-end agencies that do very well in the Boston area. She drove a new Lexus and wore high heels and silk scarves. She brought me a plastic bag and handed it to me. “Simmer this on the front burner.” I asked her what was in it. “Sweet spices. Star anise and cloves and other good stuff. It makes the house smell heavenly. Are you sure you don't want a fluffer?”

“What's a fluffer?”

“She goes around your house fluffing pillows and generally disguising the rough spots. Sometimes she moves the furniture around.” I told her I could fluff my own pillows.

“I think you're making a mistake,” she said, examining the windowsill in the front room where Marshall had scratched off the paint.

“You mean if I have some stranger come in here and smooth the bedspread and sweep up a few crumbs that I'll get a better price on the house?” Francine told me I'd better believe it. “It's what everyone does. And by the way, put those family pictures of yours away for the time being.” I asked her why. “When they're trying to decide whether or not to buy a house, folks don't want to see other people's smiling children and black-and-white ancestors in
their
house.”

I offered her a cup of tea—which she accepted, slipping out of her shoes and draping her scarf over her chair. “That really hits the spot,” she said. “Is it decaf?”

Francine had asked me to leave the house whenever she brought prospective buyers to look at it, saying that the owners were apt to trail the client, explaining things. It was a distraction. I promised I wouldn't do that. But she insisted so I agreed. She'd call me from her office suggesting I take a walk around the block or go to the movies. Usually, I went next door and visited with Alicia Baer, whom I liked more than ever now that I wouldn't be seeing much more of her. But Alicia wasn't always at home and by the second week—“We have some nibbles but no bites as yet. Don't give up, honey, this is a great property. We won't go down in price for another couple of weeks”—I began to feel like an alien in my own house. I asked Francine if they were allowed to open drawers and closets. “Not drawers. But closets and cabinets,” she said. “Wouldn't you do that if you were thinking of buying a house?”

But they were staring at my things! My too many pairs of shoes and the crawl space on the third floor, crammed with old suitcases and broken picture frames, and the kids' forgotten toys and games, along with the detritus of decades. Maybe I ought to burn the place down and collect the insurance. Alicia was a definite plus. She assured me that next to death and divorce and losing a job, moving was the most stressful of human activities. “And you've got two of them.”

“All I need is a death.”

“Have some wine. It'll chill you out.”

I told her that the day before, Francine had shown up with a couple before I had a chance to leave the house. “Well, to be honest, I didn't want to leave. Francine was surprised and asked me what I was doing there. I told her I was just about to leave. But I didn't, you see, and she couldn't very well start hassling me while these people were listening. And just as I expected, they didn't just look, they snooped. I was trailing them, I admit, but not explaining anything. Furtively, the woman opened the junk drawer in the kitchen, a room they hated. The woman called it ‘god-awful.' They were discussing how they'd rip out a wall and put in a—get this—‘guest lavatory.' Have you ever used the word ‘lavatory'? Well me neither. I was steaming.”

“If Matisse bought your house, you'd hate him too.”

She was right. It didn't matter who bought it; it was the idea of shedding it. “I'll try to be more philosophical about this,” I said. “But you should have heard them. They'll take this lovely old place and ‘modrenize' it. They'll rip out the stove, tear down the walls, paint the bathroom purple and lay down wall-to wall carpeting. They'll do everything I hate. By the way, Matisse would leave it pretty much as it is. Except maybe he'd freshen up the paint.”

The sale eventually went through without any major problems. I had to sit in Francine's Cambridge office with the new owners. Their names were Edward and Phyllis Nissen and their two children: Edward junior—called, of course, Teddy; and Samantha—called, of course, Sammie. At the house, Sammie had opened the cookie jar and helped herself to a couple of Fig Newtons. When I left off trailing them, the children were arguing about which one of them would get the best room.

It wasn't until I handed over the keys that I realized the Nissens were about the same age Tom and I were when we bought the house and that their children were the same ages as mine. I don't want to make too much of this coincidence. But it did bring home in an especially acute way the accuracy of
plus ça change…
Phyllis was me, Ted was Tom, etc., and instead of making me more miserable, the parallels seemed to cheer me up, reminding me of circles and cycles, the inevitable, whatever promise the future held.

I put most of my furniture and other stuff in one of those awful “self-storage” holding pens and moved out to Truro. It was late winter—cold, damp, with a biting wind. David came up for two weekends; his visits warmed me more efficiently than a cast-iron stove. He spent a good deal of time pleading with me to marry him. I said, “I want to see how we are at living together before I decide.”

“Well, then, when are you going to join me in my lonely apartment?”

Two months later, Tom and Judith Levy married. For some reason that I will never be able to understand, the
New York Times'
Vows column covered their wedding. This was the story, verbatim.

VOWS

David was on the phone to me before I could call him. “Have you seen it?” he said.

“It made my skin crawl,” I told him. “I didn't want to read it all the way through but I made myself. Would you like me to deconstruct it for you? How much time do you have?”

“Will it make you feel better?”

“I don't know. I hope so.”

He told me to go ahead. It was very nice of him.

In the first place, I told him, they got Judith's age wrong. I happened to know that she was closing in on fifty-one. I thought the
Times
had fact-checkers. Secondly, we were not “separated” when they met. We were still living in the same house and hadn't yet admitted that our marriage was about to go south. That woman just lied to the reporter. As for his taking her to a hockey game, that was so much crap. “He's never been to a hockey game in his life.” David said maybe she had changed him. “People don't change,” I said. “They just get older.” I was annoyed. It sounded to me as if he were taking their side.

“Whose side are you on?” I said.

“Nobody's. I'm just listening. Why do you think he took her to a hockey game?”

“Beats me,” I said. “Maybe it's his way of getting back at me.” As soon as I said this, I realized how silly it sounded.

“Go on,” David said.

“Tom knows rap the way I know Sanskrit. What is she
talking
about?”

“You know, Dannie, you shouldn't believe most of the stuff in that column. It's mostly made up.”