Mr. Bones (42 page)

That was a defining day. It was as though she was saying, You saved my life, and so I am here because of you, and therefore my life is yours. But I did not take advantage of her. I was careful to remind her that we were still friends, that she was an employee, that I was grateful to her for helping me. Of course she remembered my drunken and indecent proposal from earlier in the summer, the thing I had wanted. She was willing to grant that to me now, out of gratitude.

All I wanted was to sit beside her, drink with her, hold her hand sometimes, watch the terns diving over the marsh grass at sunset. And sitting there, I thought: This is perfect. I don't need that big house. I am happy here, doing this.

“You are Buddhist.”

“Ya.”

“But no temple on the island.”

“Temper hee,” she said, and touched her heart.

We had short conversations, and afterward long silences. The silences were the most telling, because they expressed our deepest contentment. I wanted nothing more and for nothing to change.

Not long after that, she woke me in the middle of the night, startling me until I saw her small figure shivering beside my bed.

“What's wrong?”

“Canna slee.”

“Why not?”

“Bah dree.”

“What kind of dream?”

“Folly offa bow.”

A drowning dream.

“Say me. Plee, say me.”

She got into my bed, and as with the business in the ocean, and the way we hung on to each other in the water, it wasn't just me, it was something both of us badly wanted.

 

Days of bliss followed. Weeks. We were more than a couple, we were a team! After we started sleeping together I didn't know whether to pay her more or to stop paying her entirely. I asked her. She said, “Same.” More money was like prostitution, no money was presumption. I wanted to do the right thing, because I didn't want this to end.

The routine suited me—paperwork and phone calls after breakfast, a nap after lunch, a drive to the dunes after the nap, and birdwatching or else fishing, some effort in order to stimulate a thirst, a drink before dinner, and then early to bed, Nhu beside me.

One day early on in this blissful period, we went clamming at low tide out on the harbor flats. She dug a bushel. Her first time handling a clamming fork and she's hoisting twenty pounds of littlenecks and quahogs and I am hooting in admiration and hugging her.

“Why you lie me?”

“Because I've never known anyone like you,” I said. “You're always, ‘Okay, boss!' You don't bitch.”

She was much too cheerful to care how I praised her and I could not explain how much she meant to me. She washed my car, she trimmed my hair, she mixed drinks for me, she cooked for me, she caught fish and fried it, she made me laugh, she aroused me.

How old was she? Mid-twenties, maybe, as she'd said—no memory of the Vietnam War but intimate knowledge of its aftermath.

“My fadda take me to jungoo. He see snae, bih snae! He catch snae and—yum! yum!”

Snake-eating in the thickets of the Delta.

“He plan rye. Me hep.”

Father and daughter, knee-deep in the paddy fields, bending over their reflections.

“And then you came here.”

“Bludda come. He hep me come affa.”

Less than half my age but she had lived as much as I had. We were made for each other. When I was with her I forgot who I was, and I had the impression that when she was with me she was similarly euphoric. I hardly considered the strangeness of it all, that I was a multimillionaire cohabiting with my maid in a mansion on Nantucket, for I was happier than I had ever been in my life.

You tend to see yourself most objectively when you imagine how other people see you; other people's eyes are colder. But there were no other people around. We were isolated enough here so that I seldom thought about our living arrangement, and when I did think about it I was just grateful. More weeks went by, but time moved at a different pace now, because I was happy. I had stopped thinking about building the grand house on the Neck. I was reconciled to living on this island in this secondhand mansion, because this woman was making me happy, and this was possible because she was happy.

I wanted nothing more. She wanted nothing more. The Buddhists are right: eliminate all desire and you've found peace.

“I lie you. You happy. No worry.”

When the person you love returns your compliments, you know all is well.

All would have been well—nothing would have changed—if we had stayed in the little clapboard paradise we had made, of meals and naps, noodles and clamming, early to bed and up at first light. All
was
well, but there came a change.

The Figawi Ball at the Club was an annual islanders-only gala, held around Memorial Day after the big Figawi Race from Hyannis, before the summer people arrived. I had avoided the event, because as a youth I had been a waiter and a hired hand at the Club, and I knew it would bother me to see the members and be reminded of the suffering menial I had been.

Going was Nhu's idea, but she raised the subject as an example of pure irony, which was how I knew that it meant a lot to her. We were at the market and she saw the Figawi Ball poster taped to the front window.

“Crab dan.”

“A perfect way of describing it.”

“We go togevva, yah!”

The very idea of going was out of the question, and so she joked about going, even joked about what T-shirt she would wear, and which sneakers, to the great island event, open to Club members only, the tickets hard to get and expensive. Even the Brazilian menials knew about it and tried to work at it, just to be part of the glamour.

“You want to go?”

“Crab dan?”

“Right.”

“Yah. For dan and seen. Ha!”

Understanding the profound impossibility she was suggesting with this mockery, I said, “Okay, we're going.”

We were in the car by then, driving back to the house. She went silent, she was pale, I saw she was terrified.

“No can,” she said. Then she pleaded, “No crab dan.”

“You're my guest.”

“No got dreh for way.”

“I'll buy you a dress.”

“Cannot for dan.”

“No dancing. We'll just sit. We'll eat. We'll drink wine.”

“Adda peepoo!”

But she knew all the other people on the island—more than I knew, and she knew them intimately.

I had made my peace with the island. I had given up the idea of building my mansion on the Neck, but I had no intention of leaving. I thought: If I'm going to live here, these people will have to get used to me. They'll have to understand who I am and what I do. I am proud of my life. This was not a summer fling with my housekeeper. Winter had come and gone. Spring was here. Summer was coming. The rest of my life was coming.

She was just the right size to carry off a little black dress and make it seem elegant. This she insisted on buying herself with money she had saved. I gave her the money for new shoes, beautiful ones from a boutique on Main Street which added three inches to her height. Her Brazilian friend at the beauty salon did her hair and nails. The result was a vision of loveliness, a transformation, from a little Third World doll to a First World dragon lady of intimidating beauty, upswept coiffure, crimson talons.

I would never have guessed how much she liked dressing up, and not just putting on new clothes but being glamorous. Glamour is a little girl's game, played with costumes and mirrors. New clothes made her a different person, one she liked better, someone who fitted in. And this transformation took her mind off the main event and made her less apprehensive.

Driving to the Club the night of the Figawi Ball, with Nhu beside me smelling sweetly, I thought again, My life is complete.

She said nothing. Silence was also part of the transformation, a kind of dignity and drama—and I suppose she was terrified, too.

The valet parkers eyed her, seemed to recognize her in some dimly admiring way, but no one else noticed us. The foyer was filled with members—men in suits or club blazers, women in gowns—all of them shouting excitedly at each other. I hurried Nhu past them to the ballroom, lifted two glasses of wine from a passing tray, and toasted her. She was both excited and shy, dazzled by all the people, bewildered by what I now saw as the roaring men and their shouting overdressed wives.

She stuck close to me. Rotberg and Nickerson from the Building Committee came up to me and started talking, saying how nice it was to see me, all the while staring at Nhu. They had detached themselves from their wives, who were standing to one side, casting glances our way.

I was hardly listening. I found that I was seeing all this with Nhu's eyes, and I was keenly aware of being in a room of big loud oafs, who had nothing to say and not even the grace to apologize for opposing the building of my house on the Neck. Their attitude was: We're all buddies now!

“Barghorn!”

Seeing that I wasn't listening, they began bantering with Nhu.

Rotberg: “Hope you're treating him all right!”

Nickerson: “Don't wear him out!”

This seemed to me in bad taste, so I steered her away, but while I was getting more drinks for us, I saw a man approach Nhu and begin monologuing. He was Hal Walters from the Historic District Committee, his wife a little way off and glaring at Nhu.

They were all there, all the people who had turned me down, looking pleased that I had appeared at a Club dance for the first time ever. It was proof to them that I would not be a problem. I was one of them. I even had a woman in tow.

The music was loud, incomprehensible to me, but Nhu knew the lyrics and was murmuring them. Another revelation: she liked pop music. She seemed slightly drunk, but quite happy as long as she was by my side.

I monitored a few nearby conversations, all of them dishonest complaints—one bitching about the high price of real estate, another about winter storms, and one beefy-faced man was moaning that it was harder and harder for him to find parking space for his private jet at the airport. You had to be a resident here to know that all of this talk was a form of boasting.

Without warning, a woman blindsided us, and in a drunken and demanding voice said, “Aren't you going to introduce me to your friend?”

I had no idea who she was, but it took me only an instant to see that she was not talking to me.

Nhu blinked and said, “Miz Row.”

That might have been “Lowell”—there was such a couple at the Club. Other women circled, seeing this Lowell woman close to us, and they hovered like hyenas.

Nhu smiled at her, and she seemed confused for, really, she had no name for me that could be uttered in a public place.

“I hope this doesn't mean what I think it means.”

All the women smiled, hoping for a devastating remark from their friend.

“That you won't be available to do my windows.”

After that, nothing mattered. I considered hitting her, or throwing my drink into her face and howling at her. But I smiled and steered Nhu to the exit, for I had a much better plan.

Only the feeblest, the weakest, the most naïve of them tried to stop me. The shrewdest, the strongest, the wealthiest, the truly connected ones did not lift a finger against me. They were smart enough to know that they would fail, that I would break them and bankrupt the Board of Selectmen—that it was much less costly for them to go along with me, to humor me, to praise my extravagant house.

And these fat ones also knew how lawless the rich can be. I was one of them. And the ways we break the law are trivial, mere nuisances, compared to the plunder and mayhem we get away with legally. The worst of us are seldom breaking the law. The law is on our side—it ought to be; after all, we are the ones who make it.

The ones who tried to stop me sent an emissary from the Building Committee, who appeared one afternoon on my doorstep, smiling and making small talk.

I said, “Now tell me what's really on your mind.”

“Local ordinance, as old as the town. You can't build without permission.”

“I'm building.”

“Then you need to apply for a permit.”

“I did that.” I smiled at him. “It didn't fly.”

“If you try to build, we'll have to stop you.”

“How?” I was still smiling. “A lawsuit?”

He blinked at me, perhaps trying to summon the courage to speak. I knew what I was about to say would be repeated a thousand times in town and would become part of the island's mythology, so I kept it simple and memorable.

“Sue me,” I said. “You'll lose. I've got more lawyers than you. I've got more money than you. I could tie you up for a hundred years. I could bankrupt your board. I could destroy you. Don't talk to me, talk to someone who knows me. People who know me would not dare to stop me. This meeting is over.”

I did not shut the door in his face. I watched him stammer and sigh and turn away. He walked self-consciously down the path to the street.

Building a house on a small island is a public event. Every aspect is visible: the arrival of the container trucks, two a day, on the morning ferry; the deployment of workers, the coming and going of carpenters, plumbers, electricians—they filled the ferries, the commuter flights, the charter boats, the barges. The disruption of the island the rest of that year was constant; it continued through the spring and into the summer, season of shortages and stress and no space, and on into the fall.

Who could find a plumber or an electrician or a painter? I had hired all the best ones. I had commandeered the stock in all the warehouses and hardware stores. Islanders were told, “We're out of cement,” “We're down to our last roll of cable,” “No more rebar.” Other building projects on the island were put on hold because mine was proceeding. And there was nothing that anyone could do except reflect that they had brought this on themselves.