Trophy House (19 page)

“You don't give a shit, do you?”

“Well, actually I do give a shit,” I told her. “But it's not large enough to make Raymie hate me. Besides, it might be a hoot. I can buy whatever I want—money being no object—take as many pictures with film bought by someone else, furnish rooms I'd never live in myself but which I think I can make presentable if not actually beautiful. Who am I hurting?”

With the certitude of the young, Beth said that I was hurting myself. And I told her that maybe, when she got to be my age, she'd find out what I was talking about. She seethed. She was angrier than I'd seen her in a long time. “And now, I'm going over there to ink the pact,” I said. “You can come or not, as you please.” I was pretty ticked off myself, which just goes to show how hard it had been for me to make up my mind—and how ambivalent I still felt. I put on a good show for my daughter, but I hadn't entirely convinced myself. But that was okay too. I was looking forward to spending someone else's money.

W
ALKING OVER
unyielding sand toward the Brenner house, I realized—abruptly and with a touch of denial—that whenever things got rough, I retreated alone to Cape Cod. It bothered me that I had done the same thing over and over again without having been fully aware of it. This only reinforced the doleful fact that most of the time we don't know squat about why we do the things we do. The rest of the time we're at the mercy of creatures crawling around in the murk below, far below. Not that there was anything wrong with my retreat; it was less expensive than shopping, less destructive than drinking. All the same, I would have liked to be consciously brave and up to the challenge of trying to figure out what I wanted.

The opposite of a beach resort, Truro in late March requires a kind of tempered stoicism. Not too many people have the stomach for it. I didn't see myself as a bleak sort of person, but as cheerful with just a pinch of sadness. The more I covered myself with solitude, the better I felt. Simply put, I liked being alone. I can't really count Marshall, although he's the best company there is.

The tide was going out. Crescents of sea grass lay on the shore in a perfect rhythm that echoed the waves. The sky was studded with clouds and the sun was unusually bright for this time of year. My cheeks began to burn.

It took me about just under ten minutes of vigorous walking to get to what I had already begun to think of as Trophy House—not as
a
trophy house but as an institution. Marshall took one look at Mitch's poodle, Rambo, and tried to get back outside. I told him it was okay, I'd see that Rambo didn't hurt him. Raymie poured champagne into a flute and handed it to me. I don't really like champagne; it makes my head hurt. But it's the drink to solemnize significant occasions with so I accepted and sipped. Mitch came limping into the room. “Well, well,” he said, “here's our newest washashore.” There was something ironic about this man patronizing me in these terms; he had barely established himself as a Truroite and here he was, greeting me like a newcomer, I who had lived here for thirty years, on and off. But it was this “on and off” that had kept me from being a washashore. To be a true washashore you had to live here year-round, perpetually, through the bleak winter, through periods where no sun ever shines, where the wind gets down your throat, when even the dog won't go outside. During the “season” it means living with the day-trippers and renters who get into fistfights in the parking lot at Ballston Beach and who buy all their groceries at Jellies, the Cartier of convenience stores.

“You know, Mitch, I still haven't decided to live here year-round. I have this friend in New York—”

“Her boyfriend,” Raymie said, interrupting me. “He wants them to get married.”

“Why get married?” Mitch said. “Look at Raymie and me. We get along great. Why fix something that ain't broken?”

“You mean why buy a cow when milk is so cheap, don't you?” Raymie said. Mitch went over to Raymie and fingered her bottom. At least I think that's what he did; you couldn't be sure, it happened so fast. But Raymie smiled indulgently.

“Drink up,” Mitch said to me. “That's the real French McCoy.”

“Mitch, Dannie doesn't have to be told.”

Mitch invited me to sit down. I picked one of the leather armchairs. He asked me whether I'd decided to help them design the best little B & B on the East Coast—maybe in the whole US of A?

Raymie said, “That's why she's here, Mitch.”

“Well then, let's get down to business.”

“Can I ask you something, Mitch?” He looked at me with a trace of impatience. “Why do you want me to do this when there are plenty of professional decorators looking for work?”

Was I fishing? No doubt. He told me that he and Raymie had chosen me because, as he put it, “you're an artiste, you have an eye for what goes well with what, you're not just out to rob the client blind.” At this, he pulled out a contract for me to read over and then sign. Every possible—and some implausible—contingencies had been included. I asked him if a lawyer had worked it up. “You betcha,” he said. “I don't expect my lawyer to manage hotels. I don't know much about drawing up a contract. I believe in getting the best advice. Experts.” I nodded. It was all right with me if my being “deceased” was one of the contingencies. Raymie said, “Mitch leaves nothing to chance, do you, honey?”

I immediately thought of Lyle Halliday. “Did they ever catch Halliday?” I said.

Mitch said, “How did you know? They apprehended him day before yesterday. He was living in this run-down cabin or shack house with about a dozen other whacked-out, like-minded individuals.” These were, he said, mostly men along with a few women (I figured them to be the food gatherers and dishwashers) who wanted to keep the earth pristine but also to wipe “mongrel” races off its face.

“It's about time we were mongrelized,” I said.

“Whatever,” Mitch said. I don't think he found this such a cool idea. “The little prick hates Jews, African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics.”

“Latinos, Mitch,” Raymie said. “They want to be called ‘Latinos.'”

“Whatever,” Mitch said. “In any case, these folks had a lot of firearms and manuals on how to manufacture explosives. They also found stacks of flyers—you know, the kind someone put on car windshields parked at Corn Hill last summer.”

I said it was weird, the combination of environmentalist and neo-Nazi in the same person. Mitch said, “When you think about it, it isn't that weird. They don't want anyone doing stuff to the land.”

“They want to keep it for Aryans?” I said.

“And get this,” Raymie said. “This guy had a prior record. When he was a little kid, he'd been put away for a while for zapping small animals in his mother's microwave oven.”

“That's cute,” I said, unable to block the picture my imagination produced. It was a black kitten. I felt sick.

“They're out there,” Mitch said, as if that made it all right. “What say we talk about our expectations for this house? We're counting on you to make it a showplace.” I told him I would try not to disappoint him, although “showplace” was not exactly what I had in mind. I was still so rattled by the image of the kitten exploding inside the microwave that I had a hard time focusing.

Raymie took over: “We want this place to be elegant but not showy,” she said.

“I don't know what you mean by ‘showy,'” Mitch said.

“Of course you do, honey. Just think Ruthie.” This must have penetrated because Mitch nodded.

“I guess Raymie told you, we want to pay you handsomely for a handsome job. This fee doesn't include whatever monies you spend on furniture and the like. We also want you to keep an accurate record of everything you spend and on what. I mean, not just ‘bed,' but a description of the particular bed.” Was he being nitpicky? No doubt, but it was his money so I guess he was entitled.

We went over the contract sentence by sentence. My stomach growled just as Raymie said, “I'm going to fix us some lunch.”

As soon as she left the room, Mitch asked me if I didn't think Raymie was the best little old gal anyone could want to spend their days with. “She's a regular jewel.” I smiled. Whether she was the best little gal or not, it was very nice that he thought so; it would make things easier as time lurched on.

The lunch Raymie fixed was delicious and obviously planned well ahead: squash soup, crab cakes, mesclun salad, berries (frozen, thawed). Mitch and Raymie ate well. We talked for a while about my ideas for the house. I hoped to persuade them that I had given a good deal of thought to the matter but was in fact improvising as the soup went down. “I see mostly white, blue, and a bit of pale yellow.” I went on to say that the markup of antiques anywhere on the Cape was out of sight. On the other hand, if you bought things off-Cape, you paid an exorbitant price to get them trucked over the bridge.

“Six of one, half a dozen of the other, eh?” Mitch said. “Look, Dannie,” he said, in a different tone altogether. “I don't want to micromanage this project. That's why we hired you.”

I caught Raymie's eye. She nodded almost imperceptibly. “Right,” I said. “I understand.”

 

When I got back to the house, Beth was on the phone. She hung up when she saw me. Marshall went over and nudged her crotch. “Go away,” she said. “Nasty dog.”

“Who were you talking to?”

“Dad,” she said.

“That's nice, I'm glad you're in touch.” I was dying to know what they had talked about but I didn't ask; I held my tongue, difficult though it was.

Beth wanted to know how it went. “I still can't believe you're doing this.”

I told her it went swimmingly. I told her what we had talked about and stopped short of saying that I thought that Mitch, for all his gnomelike sensibilities, was not as awful as I once believed him to be. Could I have lived with him? No. Could I work with him? Probably. He struck me as being basically sensible when it came to business.

“Don't you want to know why I called Dad?”

“Sure. Okay.”

“I called to wish him happy birthday,” she said.

“Oh my God. March twenty-first!”

“It's okay, Mom. You're divorced. You don't have to remember.”

“I remembered for thirty-five years,” I said. Beth came over and threw her arms around me. I began to cry. She stayed with me until I calmed down, then she went off to Provincetown, to do what, I had no idea.

 

I could no longer put off making up my mind. I had brought my
Peter Pan
work with me and worked like a beaver, chewing her way through log after log. It was going reasonably well. David called me twice a day, once before I started working, and again late in the afternoon as the sun sped toward darkness. The shoreline of the bay on the Outer Cape is the only place on the East Coast where the sun seems to set into the water. People come from all over, park their cars as close as they can get to the actual beach, and watch this display with open mouth. It's easy to see why: wonder and resolution at the same moment.

Around six o'clock, while Beth and I watched the news, David phoned. He told me he wanted me to come back to New York. “What else is new?” I said.

“That's mean,” he said. “Why are you doing this?”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I thought you'd take it as a joke. I meant it as a joke.”

“I don't know,” he said.

“What don't you know?” I didn't wait for his answer but told him I was planning to come back to New York in a couple of days, when “we have to talk.”

“That sounds ominous,” David said.

“It doesn't have to be,” I said, knowing it was. What lay ahead reminded me of a line from a 1930s Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers movie, spoken earnestly by a Slavic malaprop: “It's time to face the musicians.”

“The musicians” was this choice: either I marry David or cut myself loose. It cannot be true, as I have been told, that if you have genuine trouble trying to decide between A and B, then it doesn't matter which one you choose. For a while I had been almost, but not quite, persuaded by this bit of sophistry. I loved David but I was almost fifty-four. I didn't see me fitting into the mold of newlywed. It was too goopy. It was too complicated. Tom could easily take all that on. In hindsight, I viewed my ex-husband (I think objectively) as oblivious to most of the complications life tosses at you without discrimination or fairness. He just went on doing his thing—and making it work out for him. It wasn't like that for me. David was wonderful; every time I saw him afresh I melted exactly the way Beth had when Andy pleaded with her to come back to him. That lure is more dangerous than a riptide, especially when sex is in the mix, mainly because you can't get your head straight.

As I looked out the train window, I saw ugly Bridgeport through a film of tears. How do you know, until after your big chance has come and gone, what makes you happy—or some reasonable facsimile? By then it's too late. “I never knew what true happiness was until I was married—and then it was too late.” This is a joke my father used to tell my mother from time to time until she ordered him not to repeat it again. “It's stopped being funny, Ted,” she told him.

The minute I walked into David's apartment, I knew I just couldn't live there. The place didn't smell like home, and an air strange and unfriendly surrounded me, as if I were seeing it for the first time. There was his couch, his lamp, his art on the walls—he liked abstractions with broad patches of muted color that bled into each other. They were perfectly okay of their kind, but they weren't what I would have bought—too hidden. David was waiting for me. He was wearing a sweatshirt and chinos and hadn't shaved for a couple of days—a Tom Cruise sort of look that turns me on. “Come here and give us a kiss,” he said as soon as I put my bag down. As soon as our mouths convened, he started trying to pull off my jacket. “David,” I said.

“What is it?”