Trophy House (7 page)

Tom ordered dessert, then espressos, and by the time he'd paid the bill and set Herbert free into the Cambridge night, I was far from sanguine. We got into the Saab in silence. Tom let me drive.

“Is something wrong?” I said.

“Nothing's wrong. Why do you ask?”

“I mean this is the first time we've been alone since I got back.”

“We were alone last night,” Tom said. “How's the car behaving?”

“It's fine. I love it,” I said. “For five minutes. We were alone.”

“I was really beat,” he said.

“What's with this guy you brought along to dinner?” The lights were out in most of the houses we drove past. It's a sleepy part of the world.

“Doug? He just joined the department,” Tom said, using the exact words he'd used earlier. “Just went through a divorce. Apparently not the amicable kind. I thought I'd be kind for once and invite the poor guy to join us. He knows hardly anybody in Cambridge.”

“Why do you say that? You're kind a lot of the time,” I told him.

“If you say so,” Tom said. “The light's green.”

I was uncomfortable, my food backing up slightly. I asked Tom for my Rolaids. “They're in my purse.” He plunged his fingers into the bag, looking as if he weren't sure a family of mice hadn't made a nest inside it. “What's all this junk?” he said. “Do you have indigestion?”

“Just a touch,” I said. “The duck was too rich.”

By the time I had caught Tom up on Beth's news and my own—what there was of it—we had reached our house. “It's sort of nice to be back,” I said.

“Shall we celebrate your return?” he said somewhat archly. He meant we should make love. So we did and it was okay, though in the middle of it I found myself thinking about our odd dinner and afterward was afraid to ask Tom what he was thinking about. Within a minute or two Tom was asleep and I figured I might as well visit dreamland myself.

 

The next morning Tom was cheerful. Sex does have a way of making the air brighter. He went off to work, kissing me on the cheek and telling me how nice it was for him to have me home.

As always, I had work to do. I went to the third floor and applied myself to the job, with a small radio tuned to WGBH—they play nothing but classical music until late in the afternoon. They were doing Mozart's
Requiem,
which makes my heart bleed.

I worked until some time after noon, when I realized I was too hungry to concentrate. As soon as I opened the refrigerator door, the phone rang. It was David Lipsett, the editor of the book I had been struggling to illustrate. I wasn't pleased with my efforts because the book was another helping of Cream of Wheat. I complained to David and he said, “That's the last of her,” meaning the author. “We had a contractual obligation.” Then he told me he'd called to find out how I was doing. “I see you're back in Watertown,” he said.

I told him I'd moved back for the winter. He asked about “the family.” He said the air downtown was still loaded with particulates; his secretary had suddenly developed asthma. “She's a middle-aged woman. She can hardly breathe.” He seemed to want to linger on the phone. I asked him whether he thought one of his books might be right for photographs instead of hand-done artwork. “I didn't know you were a photographer too,” he said. Then he suggested that I show him some of my work. “I'd have to come along with it,” I said.

“That sounds fine,” he said. “I'd like to see what you look like after all these years.”

“I haven't been to New York in a couple of years.”

“It's changed a lot since you were here last,” he said. “It's about time you paid it a visit. It's perfectly safe, you know—all things considered. And I'd really like to see your work.” I could have said that I thought those things considered were considerable and that his secretary's health problem was the least of it. But I didn't say anything. He kept me on the phone until I'd promised to let him know when I planned to come.

I made myself a salad of mostly leftover vegetables and ate it while doing the
Times
crossword puzzle. The salad didn't do the trick and I went back for peanut butter.

New York. Where would I stay? I had a cousin, Caroline, a woman I rarely saw but whose Christmas cards always included an invitation to “stay with us when you come to the Big Apple.” Her husband was a congenital grouch. But the idea of going to New York appealed to me. No, more than that. I was excited, although it wouldn't do to let David Lipsett know how eager I was to accept his invitation. I knew next to nothing about him, whether he was married, nor whether he was straight or gay. It was never safe to draw premature conclusions about a New Yorker, especially if he was in publishing.

That afternoon I took the bus to Harvard Square, where I dropped off some of my best photographs at Ferranti-Dege to be enlarged: a couple of twiggy dunes at dusk, one of Raymie at her stove, perspiring, one of Marshall looking dumb and troubled, one of Provincetown Harbor from half a mile away and a couple of others—an assortment I figured would show my range and depth. I felt about eighteen years old, which says something about how my expectations had, over the past several years, grown flat, flattened, how the line of my life had so few dips and rises that I might as well have been lying comatose in some intensive care unit. Conversely, the anticipation of a solo visit to the most exciting city in the world was as heady as a couple of strong drinks. It was almost as if the last thirty-plus years had never happened.

I inspected my closet. Most of my clothes went back to the eighties; I couldn't seem to get rid of them. A couple of things were quaintly out of fashion while others had, inexplicably, shrunk. What did they wear in New York? Black. Black for work, black for a party. Black for grocery shopping and a dentist appointment. Did they wear black nightgowns and panties as well? I had one pair of halfway decent black wool crepe pants and an off-white silk blouse. But no jacket I would be caught dead in. I drove over to the Watertown Mall, not your most upscale emporium, but a place where you could find a bargain if you knew what you were looking for. I bought a black linen jacket. It had been almost a year since I had bought anything new besides a bathing suit and a pair of hideous gray walking shoes with wraparound rubber soles and long white laces that dragged on the ground. Beth teases me about how little money I spend on myself. It's true, but why bother when you're alone so much of the time? And when Tom was with me, did he notice?

 

The next time I talked to Raymie, she had just come back from the hospital where Mitchell Brenner was rehabbing. She was almost giddy. “We had him all wrong,” she said. “He's really a pussycat.” I couldn't match this appraisal with the Mitch Brenner I knew. But I wasn't stupid enough to believe that a person always wears the same face, no matter who he's with or how he feels. Smarmy to his superiors, pissy to the flight attendant. But still, I was sure this man was bone-deep arrogant and foolish. Beth would have said “asshole.”

“I don't quite see that, Raymie,” I said.

“Well, you two must have got off on the wrong foot.” I reminded her that she had seen him first, at Caro's, when he bribed the headwaiter for the Mailers' table. He wasn't a pussycat then, was he? She didn't answer.

“What about his house?” I asked. Had they found Halliday?

Fed up with the Truro police, Mitch had hired a P.I. to track the vandal. “It's costing him big bucks,” she said, “but he wants to nail this guy. So do I, for that matter. They think he's still on the East Coast.”

“By the way,” I said. “Why did he write ‘Jew Pig' if Mitch isn't Jewish?”

“Mitch
is
Jewish,” Raymie said. “Though you wouldn't know it by anything he does or says. He doesn't talk about it. He's very skeptical about religion in general. He hates Baptists the most.”

“Well,” I said. “Who cares as long as he's good to his girlfriend? And if Halliday's looking to do it again, there are plenty of trophy houses in the area, though so far, thank God, none in Watertown.”

I guess Raymie figured it was about time to drop her bombshell: Mitch had asked her to move in with him as soon as the kitchen was up and running. She had agreed.

“You're going to live there?” Had she gone round the bend?

“He needs someone to look after him.”

“Oh, he's going to pay you?”

“He offered to, but I told him I didn't need a salary.”

Didn't need a salary? What was she thinking of? If she gave up her B & B and went to live in the monster house with the monster and then something happened, say he got tired of her and kicked her out, where would she go? How would she live? Whatever it was that made her take this sudden turn in her life, the future didn't seem to matter to her as much as it did the rest of us.

While all this was going on inside my head, Raymie clarified her role: “Call me a companion,” she said. “He's going to need a lot of help around this house. And you know what a fabulous cook I am.” Should I tell Raymie what I thought about this scheme? She hadn't asked me, but it was easy to see that she didn't want to hear anything except approval. Deciding to keep my thoughts to myself, I asked what she was going to do with her bed-and-breakfast.

“How would you like to take it over?” she said. “Just kidding.”

 

Mark came over for dinner. Beth stayed in to join us. Tom was in one of his better moods; he likes having his children around. The four of us hadn't sat down together for a meal in a long time. Mark was characteristically vague about his future; he and Beth built a fantasy about the two of them running a ski-boarding school—something neither of them knew how to do—along with a jazz bar nestled somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Here were two adults with no more idea of what they would be doing in five years than Marshall did. And this didn't seem to bother them in the least. It would have driven me nuts—but I was born in 1950, when certainty ranked high and footloose was taboo—except for the beatniks who practically invented it. But it makes a mother feel warm all over to see her children get along so well together.

After Mark left and Beth went to her room, Tom mentioned that his department was going to give a small party for the new man in town. “We're inviting significant others,” Tom said. “Do you want to come?”

“You know how I love those events,” I said. “The laity all stand together and talk about local real estate, and day care, and, if they're really hard up for a topic, the weather, while you guys huddle and talk shop. The food is squares of white American cheese on toothpicks and crescents of mushy apple. The wine is so-so and—”

“Then don't come,” he said, interrupting me.

“I'm sorry,” I said. I'd hurt his feelings. I don't know why I do things like that. “Of course I'll come. When is it?”

“Friday,” he said. “Five o'clock.”

The party turned out to be less parochial than others I'd been to. In the first place, it was held in the Faculty Club, high above sea level, with a glowing view of the Boston skyline, beyond the Charles River, thousands of lights twinkling behind apartment and office windows. In the second, they served real booze and real hors d'oeuvres—triangular spinach pies, stuffed mushrooms, catered items like that. I figured MIT was having a fat year, based, no doubt, on spectacular antiterrorism devices. Not for nothing was the place known as the Military Institute of Technology. The women were dressed up—at least for Cambridge, which meant no jeans or sneakers. I wore my new jacket, which Tom didn't recognize as new but I let it pass. I began to have a passively good time, talking to a couple of faculty wives—Jean, Greta—not about real estate but about their work—and mine. Jean wanted to tell Greta about the Tinkham murder (which everyone seemed to know about) and the vandalism. I told her it was a neighbor's house, not quite finished. She made me describe the house. I sort of embroidered the damage, but as I spoke, I was drawn backward in time and realized how agitated I had been when it happened.

“Who's that woman?” I asked, pointing my chin in the direction of Tom, where he was chatting it up with a woman about my age, maybe a little younger but not much, in a smart gray skirt suit and black pumps. She was looking at him as if he was telling her something supremely fascinating, something that no one else had any inkling of, something that would change her life from blue to red, from tiny to huge, from dull to sparkling.

“The one with the great skin?” Jean said. “That's Judith Levy. She's on a Knight Fellowship—they're science writers. MIT brings them here for a year and lets them sample the assorted academic wares. If you ask me, she seems to be devoting an awful lot of time to anthropology.”

I looked hard at Judith Levy. Even across the room you could tell she had that kind of silken skin that converts an ordinary-looking woman into a stunner. It seems to be infused with its own natural makeup, pale and creamy, soft as a butterfly. “She does have a fairly nice complexion,” I said. “Excuse me, I think I'll go over and meet her.” As I said this, I caught a look that passed from Jean to Greta and back. I wanted to tell them to get a life but I kept my mouth shut.