Wicked Fix (4 page)

to grow in town, too, of scholars, artisans, and

craftspeople. As we climbed the hill I noted the lights in

Ron Cumberland's potting studio, in the old stone

house now occupied by a museum curator, and in the

neatly kept cottages of a small but increasing bunch of

painters, writers, and musicians.

But even among these, Victor with his meticulous

appearance and deliberate city airs was a curiosity. Not

all the attention he attracted around town was entirely

benevolent, though he was working to change this.

"It probably," I said, "just makes him a natural

target for a guy like Reuben." I was trying to convince

myself, but in fact it wasn't Reuben Tate's behavior

that troubled me; it was Victor's. And the reason was

simple:

Victor didn't suffer fools gladly, especially with a

few martinis in him. And when your line of work involves

cutting holes in other people's heads and repairing

what you find inside there, you either develop a lot

of confidence or you find a way to fake it, somehow.

Which Victor had. He should have stood up to

Reuben Tate and blustered at him until it was Victor's

ear that Reuben decided to take a bite out of. It was the

only reaction consistent with Victor's character.

Instead he had looked frightened. And knowing

him as I did, I couldn't help suspecting that I understood

why.

"Hey. Going to invite me in?"

We had come to my own house on Key Street: an

enormous 1823 white-clapboard Federal with dark

green shutters, forty-eight tall, double-hung original

wooden windows, and the original stone foundation,

much patched but still as fundamentally solid as it had

been two centuries earlier when the oxcarts hauled the

granite blocks there, and the men laid them into the

cellar hole.

It's the rest of the house that is gradually falling

down, but that is the natural condition of very old

houses. As long as I kept working on it, I could stay

ahead of it.

I hoped.

"Oh, I guess you can come in," I told Wade. "Seeing

as your shaving kit's upstairs, and your clothes, and

your work stuff for tomorrow. We should try practicing

some restraint once in a while, though, don't you

think?"

He drew me nearer. Much nearer. "I'm practicing

it right this minute."

"Oh. Well, in that case, let us not delay," I managed,

and his answering chuckle implied absolutely no

restraint whatsoever.

Going in the back door, we met Monday, my black

Labrador retriever, who greeted us with her own canine

version of the old buck-and-wing, toenails clicking

on the hardwood kitchen floor.

"Hey, mush-head," Wade told the dog affectionately,

opening the refrigerator and the freezer at the

same time, and I really knew better than to accept the

chilled, cut-crystal flute of ice-cold, perfectly delicious

champagne he offered to me then.

But I did accept it, and the next one, too, so that

one way and another--

--and what with keeping the dog not only off the

bed but actually out of the whole bedroom--

--I forgot what Reuben Tate had said to my ex

husband, Victor, that night at La Sardina.

And I shouldn't have.

My name is Jacobia Tiptree, and when I first

came to Maine with my son, Sam, I had

ideas about how our lives would be, here.

For one thing, I thought I would go back

to Manhattan a lot. I was well fixed financially, still

reasonably young, and decent-looking; not gorgeous,

but my face didn't stop clocks. And I'd lived in the city

since I'd gotten off a Greyhound there at age sixteen,

alone, penniless, and without an idea of how to do

anything useful.

But nobody in the world is so interested in money

as a poor girl, and I'd pursued my fascination with a

vengeance, first at night school, eventually via grants

and graduate work. Soon I was managing large

amounts of other people's money along with my own,

and I'd become skilled at life in Manhattan:

I could get a cab in the rain, a good table at Four

Seasons, or a bagel so fresh that just by eating it, you

could learn whole phrases of vernacular Yiddish. In

short, I'd grown up in the city, and I thought I might

miss it. On the other hand, I was also miserable:

Victor's idea of an amicable divorce had turned out

to be one in which the parties stopped short of using

automatic assault weapons. No woman, no woman,

had ever dumped him before, and my doing so had

deeply affronted him; his idea of monogamy was serial

monogamy--he was faithful to the girlfriends, anyway,

although not to me--and the number in the series had

climbed to the triple digits by the time I bailed out. But

he still felt I was being unreasonable.

Then there was Sam, whose new attitude toward

me lay in the no-man's land between carelessness and

contempt. Since achieving puberty, a condition he ap

patently equated with immortality, he'd been running

with a posse of computer-literate young outlaws with

nicknames like Pillz, Wanker, and Doctor Destructo

357--this latter nom I had seen painted artistically in

bright, poisonous Day-Glo yellow on subway overpasses,

up there with the wrist-thick high-tension

cables, the sight of which did not reassure me in the

slightest--whose collective mission in life was, I gathered,

to hack into a top-secret military database and start

World War III.

At anything else--anything lawful--they were

hopeless, which was a part of what made them all so

angry. Sam could barely read, a problem that at the

time I attributed to his behavioral difficulties, and the

others had ditched school entirely. But their illiteracy

and general ineptitude overall was, to me, no particular

comfort; at World War III I thought this bunch might

succeed. For one thing, their personalities fitted their

goals: dark. Suicidally apocalyptic and brilliant.

Sam, I discovered during my bouts of shameless,

terrified eavesdropping, was especially useful to the

project, since while he could barely decipher the label

on a cereal box, he could fix absolutely anything. Even

while stoned on marijuana, which often he was without

even bothering to hide it anymore, he was a real

mechanical genius, unfortunately for civilization as we

know it.

As for the notion of discipline or a heart-to-heart

talk: oh, please. For all that boy listened to me, I might

as well have been speaking Urdu. I tried everything,

including a psychologist who believed in back-to-the

womb regression. When she turned on the sloshing

sound of the amniotic fluid and the lub-dub of what

was supposed to be his mother's heartbeat, Sam bolted

from her office and didn't come home for two days.

Toward the end, I found myself standing before a

Santeria shop window in a neighborhood up above

125th Street, desperately examining a display of magic

candles and some vials of powdered sheep entrails,

wondering if maybe ...

Well, I bought a candle--you can always use candles

--and a week later I discovered Eastport and fell in

love with it at once, in the same sudden, irreversible

way that a person might be struck by lightening or run

over by a bus.

The town was on Moose Island, as far up the

Maine coast as you can get, and reachable only by a

narrow causeway. There was no reeking smog, no hostile

gangs of drug-addled, dysfunctional little teenaged

computer terrorists. Also, there was no Victor, and to

get away from Victor at that point I'd have signed up

for a colony on Mars.

Still, even as I sold my Manhattan penthouse, complete

with twenty-four-hour uniformed doorman, private

elevator, and panoramic view of Central Park--

and even as I signed the papers that meant I

owned the shambling, dilapidated but utterly charming

antique house on Key Street, stepping into it afterward

filled with the shimmering knowledge that something

momentous had happened.

Even then, I had no intention of giving up my

status as a streetwise, dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker. I

would go back to the city often, I thought: on weekends,

and during Sam's school vacations.

All of which strikes me as fairly hilarious now, because

after a week in Eastport I forgot whether Park

Avenue runs uptown or downtown, and didn't care.

Soon whole chunks of my past life began dropping

away from me like pieces of a plaster body cast, leaving

me feeling liberated and exposed, my skin unaccustomed

to the air moving freely on it.

Meanwhile Sam's expression took on an odd listening

quality, as if he were hearing music. I held my

breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop; when he got

bored, I thought, he would start agitating to go back to

New York.

Instead he took up walking, from one end of the

island to the other. He scoured the shore for periwinkles

and beach glass, examined obsessively every boat

he could wheedle his way aboard, and returned in the

evenings with his face glowing pink from all the exercise

and fresh air. When he was home he ate like a

horse, slept like the dead, and said very little, but when

he did speak, he spoke politely.

And there was another thing, which he only confided

to me later: in those first days, he really had been

hearing music. The tune--he could hum it straight

through, and a local Historical Society member eventually

heard him, and identified it--was an old one, written

by a man who had once lived in our house. Town

legend hinted that he had died there, too, and under

mysterious circumstances.

But when I learned all this, I was busy and preoccupied;

at the time, Victor had just begun threatening

to move to Eastport. Probably the tune had survived in

downeast Maine lore, I decided, and Sam had picked it

up somewhere, possibly from one of the men on the

boats.

So I paid little attention to the old town legend.

At the time.

I Early on the Saturday morning after our dinner

at La Sardina, Ellie White and I found