Trophy House (14 page)

“Please don't make this any harder for me. He just left yesterday.”

“But the girlfriend thing. How long has that been going on?”

“Oh I don't know, a few months.”

“My God.” She seemed distraught, shaking her head, getting up and walking back and forth rapidly, rubbing her face. I couldn't understand it. I could have expected surprise, but this reaction was over the top. Her father and I had finally done what almost 50 percent of married people do and she was acting as if I'd dropped Marshall into a vat of boiling oil.

“Beth, it's not the end of the world.”

“Why do you keep such a big thing a secret from me? Does Mark know?”

“I don't think so.”

“Honestly, Mom, you haven't done it right.”

“By your lights maybe. Now suppose you tell me why you came back in the middle of the night without any warning or anything.”

It felt good to lob the ball back to Beth.

“I'm going to call Dad.”

I told her to go right ahead. I told her things would work themselves out, they always did. Life's little bumps, life's rough patches, pieces of broken glass embedded in a beautiful lawn, storms that uproot trees and fell power lines. Metaphors galore for the short stretch of human existence. “My God,” I said finally, “you're on your own now. You can't let what we do change your life or alter your plans. It's not good for either of us, Beth.”

She seemed somewhat bewildered by my vehemence. “Now suppose you tell me why you're back.”

“This person, this man, one of the other staff members, well, we'd had a few beers and I guess, I don't know, I guess he thought I had something in mind I didn't have and he got a little rough.”

“He raped you?”

“Almost. I screamed and someone heard me and pulled him off of me.”

“You were drinking?”

“Everybody did. It was an awful place. Drugs too. The kids dealt. I guess I didn't know what I was getting into. What to say? I kept my mouth shut…Good omelet,” she said.

“Thanks. What's that mark on your neck?”

She just looked at me and nodded. I felt terribly sorry for her. Could I have predicted something like this? Absolutely, but so what? The moral value of being right—and letting everyone know it—has always escaped me. So I was right. So what?

I told her she ought to follow up, report the guy for attempted rape. She blew off that idea: “I don't want to have to think about it,” she said. I told her to take her time. She could stay here as long as she wanted. Had all this happened before, in a slightly different version?

Beth said she was upset. More about her father leaving than about the job, which sucked anyway. “Nothing seems to happen right since September eleventh,” she added.

I asked her if she thought two people ought to live together if they couldn't stand each other. But, she said, Tom and I weren't like that. I assured her we were. “Not always.” I said that things and people have a way of changing so that you no longer recognize them. And please not to blame September eleventh for her miseries. “You might as well blame God,” I said. “It's just as useful.”

“I don't believe in God.”

As I waited for Beth to regain her equilibrium, David waited for me to stop bleeding from my wounded pride. I thought it might be a good idea to tell Beth that I had a friend in New York. She understood, asked if I meant a boyfriend. He was hardly a boy, I told her, he was even older than I am. “Have you slept with him?”

“I don't think I have to answer that.”

“That means you have,” she said, satisfied. “I'm all right with it, Mom. You seem to forget what year this is.”

I let this pass, as far off the mark as anything she'd said in a long time. “Then why did you ask?”

“I wanted to see how serious you were. Who is he?”

We were folding laundry in the basement. The walls smelled of mildew, and the light that came in through the two tiny windows above eye level was filtered through a mist of some god-awful particles I didn't especially want to know the nature of. Beth had been helping me with chores without being asked. I was a little leery of this, since it could mean she wanted to make herself indispensable to her poor old mother—and then never leave home. She had gone to see her father and had met the Other Woman, who, she reported back to headquarters, was nice-looking and bossy. “She wants things her way,” Beth said. And did he seem to enjoy giving her what she wanted? Beth was certain he did. “He was grinning. She made an antipasto and focaccia from scratch. It wasn't all that good, but he said, ‘Isn't this the best thing you ever tasted?'” The man was either deeply, truly in love or else physically smitten. Did it matter which? Levy could have him.

“Would you like to meet my friend?”

“Sure,” she said, patting a pile of towels. “I wish we had a cat.”

“Not me,” I said. “I think I could persuade David to come up here for a visit.”

“That's good,” she said. “Mom, I've got to go now or I'll be late for my interview.” She was trying for a job on a Boston-based online magazine for twenty-somethings. Part politics, part celebrity gossip. She had said, “I don't much like the sound of it. But the pay's okay. And I'm sure there are about a gazillion of us applying.” I told her to go. “Break a leg.”

When I spoke to David—we had already decided that he was coming to see me the following weekend—I told him Beth might not be at her most courteous. “She doesn't seem all that anxious to meet you.” He told me he didn't blame her. “Why should she?” When he said this, I realized that Tom rarely, if ever, said anything that reflected a willingness to empathize. Maybe he did it inside his head, but I never heard it. And that's what counts.

“Well, if I were in her place, I certainly would.”

“Don't be too sure,” he said. And then we talked about other things. There were a lot of things that made me want to be with David. One was the sex, which continued to flame high, and the other was our conversations, which often went bouncing back and forth, pulling new ideas out of the ether. We hooked onto each other's notions and verbal trifles in a way that was nothing like what I had done with Tom. Tom always seemed to be taking me by the hand, leading me somewhere I didn't necessarily want to go.

Change is very hard for me. When I have to make up my mind about something that will result in change (big, small, doesn't matter), I feel as if I'm up to my waist in water, trying to walk. All my life I've attempted to manage it without wild moments and without letting on what I'm going through, and I must say I've done pretty well, considering. Working often acts as a tranquilizer, blocking out the storm that inevitably accompanies change, but you can't work all day and all night. I spent more time with my next-door neighbor, Alicia, who didn't seem to mind my talking about myself, partly because I usually punctuated the complaints and worries with mockery and digs at myself so I wouldn't sound like a victim. I hate victims. Alicia might have been glad for the company of a woman herself, even though she was the kind of person who seemed to have limitless supplies of what my father used to call “self-reliance,” a concept he got from having read Emerson as a prep school student in the thirties. Alicia went to movies by herself in the afternoon. She went to the South Shore to bird-watch, carrying her lunch in a backpack. She took yoga and practiced it. She went to look at the Grand Canyon by herself. She had the backbone I wished I had.

A few mornings later, while Alicia was sitting in my kitchen drinking coffee and knitting something large and colorful for a grandchild who had not yet arrived, the phone rang. It was Tom, calling to find out if I had seen a lawyer yet. I asked him what the hurry was. “Judith and I would like to get married. But we'll have to wait until you and I are divorced. It's no-fault in Massachusetts, so I don't expect there'll be much wrangling.”

“So long as I get the Truro house,” I thought but did not say. I wanted this stipulation to come out of the mouth of my lawyer. “I've talked to a lawyer over the phone,” I said. “I have an appointment with her on Friday.”

He wanted to know her name. “Why do you want to know?”

“Just asking. Old habits.” For a moment I thought he was going to say “Let's call the whole thing off.” There was that catch in his voice, preliminary to a good cry. Sentiment comes so easily when you don't have to do anything about it.

“Her name is Jessica Green. She went to Stanford Law School and she's got two kids.”

“I see. Well.”

“Well what?” I said.

“Well, I better get back to work. I'll see you later.”

 

Beth actually landed the job and began to do some of the same sort of things she had done at
Scrappy
but she didn't appear to mind it as much. Maybe she was just relieved to be out of her last job. From what she let drop, she was dating several men, one at a time of course, but when I asked her who they were and what they did for a living, she gave me only minimal information, as little as she could without actually telling me to go fuck myself. I suggested she get her own place and she said that she'd been looking but was thinking of moving in with Hugh. “Who's Hugh?”

“A friend.” She said she was going to Market Basket and did I want anything, and this triggered something that I'd forgotten: the book we were going to do together. I mentioned it and Beth brightened. “Really?” she said. “You want to do a book with me? I'd forgotten all about it.” She postponed her trip to the market and we sat down together and took notes on what we wanted to accomplish. The real true thing. Shacks and houses a notch or two above these. By the way, when had houses become homes? No one says “house” anymore. Home for sale, not house. A house is a thing with a door and a chimney with smoke coming out and flower beds in front. A home is a concept, an abstraction. “You and I are going to do houses, not homes.”

Beth said, “How about for the last page we show one trophy house, the biggest and ugliest we can find. And print that without any text or caption. Just this big, stark, hideous thing blocking out the sky. Sort of like an atomic explosion.”

“You're a genius,” I said.

“Do you think David's publishing house would do it?”

This was the first time Beth had said his first name without giving it some kind of edge. I told her I thought it was hard to find a publisher for books of photography because they were expensive to produce and didn't have that large a market. “The glitziest ones are called coffee-table books. Which means you put them out on the Bombay table where they reflect the sun coming in through the French windows across the immaculate lawn. Nobody really looks at them.”

“They'll look at this one,” Beth said. “It makes a political statement. No glitz.”

Sensing Beth's excitement, I didn't want to let her see my own in case this ended in failure before it even got started. I told her I'd talk to David about our project and then reminded her that this book would take a good deal of work, a lot of just driving around the Lower Cape, back roads, etc., and looking and taking notes. Then there'd be the actual shoot, rolls and rolls of film, the light just right. And the text itself. She would have to get the tone right too. Did we want to do interiors as well as exteriors? And if we did, would we want a chronicle of the house's inhabitants over the years? Many questions, many possible problems.

“Mom,” she said, “I really want to do this.”

“Me too, pet.”

She went off to the market, with a list from me, and I e-mailed David. “Does your house do books of photographs?”

He e-mailed back: “Sometimes. Why?”

“Just asking. How's Rudy?” He had named his penis after the rigid and heroic mayor of New York City.

“Longing for thee,” he said. “When am I going to see you?”

“Very soon I hope. Beth and I have something in mind.” I didn't want him to see it until it had some professional polish. I was glad I didn't have an agent; I didn't want to deal with David through a third party. Beth and I had decided to hit the road, so to speak, the following Saturday. David asked me how I was coming along with the latest book he had sent me to illustrate. I wanted to do pictures that children would remember because they had some frightening element in them, or something baffling. This was much harder than pretty. Pretty was a snap. Menacing used every drop of imagination I had. I felt as if I hadn't moved forward in my line of work for years. Same old thing: cute children with wide eyes and determined chins. High self-esteem was an important element. Parents are hooked on self-esteem; it's today's dimples. Having begun to go stale on illustrating, I looked to the house project to take over.

Jessica Green, my nice lawyer, assured me I would get the Truro house. She had talked to Tom's lawyer and it seemed that he was not only willing but eager for me to have it. “Seems he just wants out. The woman he's living with—Levy is it?—appears to have some money of her own. Isn't that convenient?”