Trophy House (6 page)

On Sunday, Justin Sheed, a popular, occasionally retro minister in Wellfleet, arose before his Protestant flock and delivered a sermon on the perils of excess and the almost biblical aphorism “What goes around comes around.” He instructed the congregation to remember Terence's advice—“moderation in all things”—and advised them to resist the temptation to “acquire mindlessly at the expense of virtue,” stopping just short of saying the owners of the besmirched house deserved what they got. This sermon caused a sensation. All the local papers covered it and the
Boston Globe
sent a reporter down to sniff out some of the gamier facts. She arrived at my front door—“Hi, I'm Megan Solomon”—at ten in the morning two days after the incident, having called me first to ask if I would see her. “You're the closest neighbor,” she told me, at which I twitched with pleasure—someone wanted to interview me! I offered her a drink, which she declined. “I'm all set,” she said.

Megan looked younger than Beth, who sat down with us and I think had a hard time letting me answer Megan's questions. Most of these dealt with what she called “issues” (When had problems become issues? About the same time houses became homes) in Truro and the surrounding area. How did we feel about new people coming in and building houses as big as the Brenners'? Had I ever come across anti-Semitism in Truro? She had pushed the right button, and I took off with opinions that had been shaped and hardened over the past few years. She was writing a lot of what I told her in a notebook while keeping an eye on the small, pricey tape recorder she'd brought with her and which presumably was whirring away, recording my words for the ages. She asked me about the Tinkham murder. “There's absolutely no connection,” I said, sensing the direction she was pointing: Truro—trouble in paradise. I tried to assure her that crime was almost unknown here—the police have nothing more to do than look out for windows blown open in the winter when the summer folks have gone back to wherever they came from. “You'll have to admit that two incidents in so short a time indicates something,” Megan said.

“Well yes,” I said. “But that's just a coincidence.” Her eyebrows shot up.

Beth said, “We don't lock our doors…”

“Is that so?” Megan said. “Is that going to change, do you think?”

“Absolutely not,” I told her.

“I'll have that iced tea now,” she said.

 

Megan stayed for lunch—tuna fish sandwiches and one of my quickie cold soups. It turned out that she and Beth had friends in common, people who they started babbling about. Well, this was going swimmingly and maybe she would soften her attitude toward the very rich.

When Megan Solomon's piece appeared later that same week, my fears were realized. “The majority of the residents of Truro, a small, isolated rural community—it boasts neither supermarket, gas station, nor community center, not to mention bar and grill—seem to think that, because they are ecologically virtuous, they are immune to the ills that plague modern society, things like greed, corruption and violence. And so they were awoken with a start last week when an ecoterrorist, a man who calls himself Lyle Halliday, a clever and elusive individual, allegedly poured fake blood all over a new house and left a hate message behind.” Solomon's piece touched on the unsolved murder as well, implying that the Truro police had demonstrated not even minimum competence. She had interviewed a dozen people, all the way from the one member of the Tinkham family willing—and stupid enough—to talk to a reporter, to the owner of the biggest and noisiest gay bar in P'Town, to the owner of the incrowd's restaurant in Wellfleet, to the owner of the place with the swimming pool, to just regular folks—including me. She got people not only to talk but to blab. She was very good—cheeky behind a reticent exterior.

Solomon's article didn't bother me the way it bothered some—Molly, for instance, who wondered how this green kid could come out here and get the whole picture in forty-eight hours. “I've lived here for fifteen years and I still know squat about what really goes on.” Even Raymie grumbled. “She was a little hard on us. I mean as far as most communities go, I know we're not exactly the model of virtue, but we're hardly the most morally dense either.”

I said I thought Solomon had done what she came here to do. “She had an agenda. On the other hand,” I told her, you couldn't discount how much satisfaction it gave certain people to dump on trophy houses—or alternatively, “McMonsters.” These folks were venomous. And do you know what was so odd about the situation? That people like Mitch Brenner thought the rest of us were envious of him and his hideous house. I worried there was nothing to compare this to. Then I realized I was wrong—there was: “You know how you said you don't want to wear anything that has somebody else's name on it, not even an alligator. But the people who pay big bucks for a Coach bag or a Burberry—they think they're the cat's pajamas—not the clothes, but themselves. They think we're all dying to wear the same crap they are and the only reason we don't is that we can't afford to. Personally, I'd rather stick pins in my eyeballs.”

 

Things sped up. The trail Lyle Halliday left behind grew faint and fainter, like an ink drawing left out in the rain. No bloodhounds, the Truro and Provincetown police did not have the equipment—technical or cerebral—to follow it and Halliday lost himself somewhere in the great landscape of the United States. The
Cape Cod Times
twitted the authorities for losing him without a fight, day after day, sometimes in a feature, sometimes an editorial, and most awfully, a cartoon showing cops in the Truro dump, kicking pretzel-shaped beach chairs and broken pottery with clumsy boots: “leaving no stone unturned in the Halliday investigation.” The police's response to the Halliday vandalism was compared and contrasted ad nauseam to the Tinkham murder, not only still unsolved but yellowing with age. It was really an exercise in self-loathing because, after all, we were one of only three or four remaining nearly crime-free areas in the country. What struck me and my friends—Molly, Raymie, the ladies at the Truro Historical Society where I volunteered once a week, and my irregular lunch group—as far more important than the crime rate was the rate at which the McMonsters were being erected.

Beth—whose imagination is even livelier than mine—said she believed a bunch of aliens had landed on Earth and, bringing with them their own construction crews, put these big houses strategically over the sweetest terrain on the East Coast, and when it came time, they would swoop down on us, carry us to their domains and make us their slaves. I asked her when she thought that time would be. She didn't have any idea. “But doesn't it seem odd to you that five years ago there weren't any trophy houses and now there are dozens?”

Not odd at all. Instead of trickling down, money was defying gravity and dripping up into the hands of people who had never had much, if any, before and, I said, “I probably shouldn't be saying this out loud, but they haven't the foggiest idea what constitutes good taste.”

Beth said she didn't know why that was such an awful thing to say.

I sat down and began to draw my version of the perfect trophy house. Vaguely but insincerely Italianate in style, with compulsive symmetry, a double-staircase entry, with plant-bearing urns on either side of the entrance. The door was wide enough to drive a Hummer through and the roof sloped not ungracefully. To break the symmetry I added a rectangular tower with a peaked roof. This went up about twenty feet beyond the roof line, more or less like that of the Brenner house. It was very wide and the number of windows suggested that inside were more rooms than even a family of five needed, not to say bathrooms galore. “Would you like me to color it?” I asked.

She nodded and I colored it tan, with a bit of blush pink. Tan all over. “Here,” I said, handing her the picture, “you can have it.”

It seemed to me—although it may have been wishful thinking—that Beth was slowly emerging from the fog of her breakup with Andy. I had caught her that morning with her hand on the telephone. She jumped when she saw me and moved away, so I figured she was trying to call the ex-boyfriend but was ashamed to have me know it. She said, “It's pretty good, Mom, but not awful enough. How do we know how big it is compared to the next house?”

I asked for it back and lightly sketched in an imaginary Truro beach house. The pairing reminded me of Diane Arbus' piquant photograph of the circus giant standing next to the circus midget. Beth was pleased with it. “Why don't you do a book about them?” she said.

I told her I wouldn't be able to live with the subject for the time it would take to complete it.

“Beth,” I said, “how long are you going to stay here with me? Not that I wouldn't like it to be forever. I was just wondering about your job…”

“I don't really know.” She sat in a chair that faced halfway away from me. “I loved it in the beginning. I loved seeing my name on the masthead.”

I nodded, knowing the feeling. But it was Andy, she told me in the most roundabout way, who wanted her to stay at
Scrappy.
Was it the paycheck? It seemed that was a part of it. He wasn't bringing in any money, but he would graduate soon; he had been just about promised a job in one of the firms hard at work on designing a plan for Ground Zero. “An entry-level job, but it's a high-visibility place—and his uncle's one of the partners.”

“That'll do it,” I said. “And why not? Why not make use of every door open even just a crack? He'd be stupid not to.”

“Using pull,” Beth said, as if she were considering this amazing concept for the first time. “Andy's not stupid.”

Again, I asked her what she had told her boss, Maria, when she'd come up here. “I saved a bunch of sick days I didn't use. Then Maria told me to take an extra few days if I needed to. She likes me, she likes my work. I guess she doesn't want me to leave. Jesus, I don't even wear lipstick. And I certainly don't put goop on my eyes. And here I am, advising these teenagers to waste their money…”

“Does Maria like Andy?”

“What's that got to do with anything?” Beth said. “You know what, Mom, I think you're hooked on this Andy thing.” Her eyes filmed with tears. I wanted to tell her how lucky she was to be out of his clutches but, wisely, bit my tongue. Instead, I apologized and suggested we drive into town. “I'd like to see Tom,” I said. Beth brightened somewhat and said she thought that was a good idea. Then she stuck it to me. “Why do you two spend so much time apart?”

This was sort of abrupt. But I guess she had every right to ask me this. It was an odd arrangement, more interesting in what it suggested than in what it really was—or so I thought at the time.

“What do you think, Beth?”

“Who cares what I think. But it's not my idea of marriage.”

“I care, Beth.” She turned away as it occurred to me that maybe she didn't really want to know.

“Okay, we'll go to Boston. I can miss the stop-the-Stop & Shop meeting and my lunch group. I'm tired of this place.” I was lying. I almost never tire of Truro. The longer I live here, the more I admire the land and its moods. I like being here by myself and working in the quiet and the occasional wind. Beth can't understand this, but she will when she acquires some patience. It's not that I don't miss Tom, because I do, but it's not an ache the way it used to be when we were living apart; it's that I like our conversations, I like to watch his brain at work and I'm delighted that he seems to enjoy being with me. I don't even particularly mind his libertarian take on things; it's a good corrective for my going off half-cocked and always jumping to the left.

When I was in Watertown, I felt like that very rich woman they used to write about in the gossip columns who owned four houses and had a complete wardrobe stashed away in each one so she wouldn't have to bother with the business of packing each time she moved from one to the other. “I only need a teeny overnight bag,” she was supposed to have said. I have two sets of art materials. So it's no big deal with my work. But the pace is different; the air isn't so clean; the noise, even on quiet Whitman Street where our house is, sounds baleful, at least to my ears; streetlights; ice on the sidewalk people are supposed to scrape and often don't; whackos muttering and gesturing as they make their way up the street; etc. If this sounds like I'm fed up with civilization, that's not far off the mark. If I thought human beings had managed to pull themselves out of the muck of primitive existence and its violence, bestiality, cruelty, and sloth, then maybe I wouldn't mind it so much.

But at least I could walk around the corner and buy some of the Middle Eastern food I love.

I
GATHERED A FEW
of my more presentable clothes—pants with a visible crease, a couple of sweaters and shirts, a pair of real shoes, along with most of the perishable food, and deposited them haphazardly in the trunk of the Saab with its seven Truro stickers. We headed toward Boston on Route 6. It's not the most eye-catching stretch of highway; in fact, it's boring, having few vistas and little to break the wall of heavy trees on either side of the road, a good many of them infected with some sort of crinkly brown blight. I had a subdued Beth for company; along about Sandwich she stuck those little black things in her ears and listened to a CD that reached my own ears as a high whistle. She had that slightly queasy look that suggested she was thinking about Andy, on whom, in spite of the facts, she had turned a rosy light. You can't say it often enough: people believe what they want to believe, no matter how weighty the evidence against doing so.

There wasn't, thank God, much traffic on a weekday in mid-September. The usual plumbers' and contractors' vans, a few SUVs crammed with junk not to be used until next summer. As we approached Sandwich and the Sagamore Bridge, my heart did its familiar dip of resignation. I hated crossing that bridge and returning to a life that in many respects was easier and more convenient—food shopping, nearby dry cleaner, drugstore and post office within easy walking distance, and friends to have lunch with. But somehow the convenience had a stifling effect on me. Living in Watertown meant a dozen decisions a day rather than two or three, and an urban landscape interchangeable with any fairly prosperous middle-class city in the U.S. I don't want to sound like Thoreau, because as far as I'm concerned he was a self-righteous prig: I'm more spiritual than you are because I own only one tin cup and a pencil I made myself. My Truro life isn't about being spiritual—whatever that means—but about not having “things” and commitments pressing against you all the time. On the Cape I have my work and my meals, a few protest meetings to keep me on my toes, and my trusty telephone lifeline. My existence there is spare but hardly primitive: I seem not to want anything—that is, any material objects—beyond what I already have.

We got stuck, bumper-to-bumper, as the Boston skyline loomed. The so-called Big Dig, a sweeping abstract notion, animated, that involved removing a long stretch of elevated highway while not disturbing traffic coming and going, had, for the past five years, jammed cars together just when they most needed to hurry. We put up with it mostly in silence, counting on the powers that be to do it right while it costs taxpayers huge bucks and opens itself up to continual claims of mismanagement and fraud. Typical city troubles.

I had to pee and there was nothing to do but sit in the car stoically and wait while the traffic jam slowly, so slowly, sorted itself out. Beth said, surprising the hell out of me, “I'm thinking of quitting my job.”

I asked her why, while trying not to sound happy about it.

“The things I do are so unmeaningful. Lipstick, eye shadow, fasting for your figure. Should you have cosmetic surgery or Botox at sixteen, or should you wait until you're twenty-one? It's disgusting. If you don't look like Britney Spears or a rock star, you might as well throw yourself over the nearest cliff. I'm not doing them any favors.”

“You're beginning to sound like me.”

I could look over at her because we weren't moving. I saw on her face an expression I hadn't seen before—a look that means I know you're right and I thank you for the compliment but I'm certainly not going to admit it.

I asked her what she thought she might do and where she intended to live. I was surprised to hear that she had some “leads” to work in the Boston area, which meant she had actually begun to plan for a future without Andy. “I thought I'd find a place somewhere like Jamaica Plain or Charlestown. I've got friends both those places—they're looking around for me. Or I might move in with one of them.”

The line of cars started up again and eventually we reached the Mass. Turnpike, paid fifty cents to leave it, skirted Cambridge and drove up Mt. Auburn Street to Watertown. The trip door-to-door took just over three hours; it should take just over two.

It was afternoon when we drove into our driveway and unpacked the car, making several trips from trunk to front door. The answering machine was beeping. Our house was a nice old place, built around 1910, with blondish floors and colorful area rugs, a lot of light, and furniture reflective of maybe four different decades, beginning in the sixties. Tom and I had done the so-called decorating together, long before, when we got along so well a look from one of us to the other said as much as an entire act from a long play. A friend of ours, visiting for the first time and expecting glamour, told us, “You people live like graduate students.” He didn't mean it as a compliment, but that's how I took it. I hate when everything matches perfectly, when it looks like a room in a spec house.

I asked Beth to find out who had called, while I stored our food and tried to decide whether or not we had to do some food shopping or could make do with what we had.

“It was Dad,” Beth told me. “He won't be home for dinner. A meeting or something…”

“Oh?” I said. The day before, he had told me that he would be home in time for dinner. I phoned his office and there was no one there; I left a message saying that I'd got his message and couldn't wait to see him. At least I wouldn't have to go to the market until the next day.

Beth and I ate dinner around the corner at the Town Diner, a Watertown fixture featuring things like a Middle Eastern platter and old-fashioned meatloaf. When we got back, around eight, Tom was still not home. Beth remarked on it, without inflection, just something about her father's changing his habits. I watched a stupid television show, until I heard Tom's key in the front door, heard the front door close with a soft thud. “Anybody home?”

I went out to the foyer. Tom was standing inside the front door with his barn jacket still on, looking somewhat baffled, as if he weren't sure he'd stepped into the right house.

“Hi, Dannie,” he said, and started to take off the jacket.

I went up to him and hugged him. “I'm so glad you're here.”

“Me too,” he said. He rubbed the back of my head.

I asked him if he'd eaten and he nodded. “I had a bite in the student cafeteria.” I asked him what the meeting was about. The usual damn thing, he told me, namely how to dole out beginning courses among senior faculty. “Someone always wants it to be ‘fair.'”

“You're not one of them, I suppose,” I said.

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I'm beat; I can't think of anything right now except a good night's sleep.”

By the time I had taken a shower and put on my pajamas, Tom was asleep on his back, snoring softly. I kissed his cheek but he didn't stir. I had a very hard time falling asleep—I usually have insomnia the first few nights in a different bed. I finally fell asleep around 2
A
.
M
. and by the time I opened my eyes again, it was eight-thirty and the man of the house had already left. I found a note on the kitchen counter next to the butter, which he had neglected, as usual, to put back in the refrigerator. There were toast crumbs to sweep into my hand and deposit in the convenient Insinkerator (what a name!). I have a view over the kitchen sink: the house next door, a brown-stained wooden structure of no particular distinction with a kitchen window approximately opposite ours. Sometimes I see my neighbor, Alicia Baer, standing at her sink, doing her dishes. We wave and nod. The note said he hadn't wanted to wake me—“You looked so warm and peaceful”—but he'd see me later, after work. “I'll try to phone you later.”

I assumed Beth was still asleep. I sat down at the kitchen table and ate breakfast while reading the
New York Times
(another small convenience).

Truro seemed, at this distance, on the other side of the planet. It fell, like my past, into a place where memory trumped everything else. I phoned Raymie to let her know I was in Watertown.

“You'll never guess where I went yesterday.”

“I haven't a clue.”

“I went to see Mitch Brenner in the hospital.”

“You
what?
”

“I visited your neighbor. He's in Cape Cod Hospital. He's still in traction.”

I listened to details of legs broken and rebroken, minor kidney problems, a touch of pneumonia. And where was the wife? Ruthie had taken a hike when it became apparent that she would have to be a full-time nurse for several months at least and would be bathing him instead of partying with him. He was understandably bitter about this and called her an assortment of unflattering names. Raymie agreed. “That's what you get when you marry a trophy wife. Only in health, never in sickness. First sign of an ugly rash and I'm out of here.”

But what had induced her to visit the enemy? Well, she'd heard about Ruthie's defection and felt sorry for him. I was so nonplussed by this news that I had a hard time responding, and trying to figure out exactly what I thought.

Raymie went blithely on. She had found him almost pathetically grateful for her visit; it seemed that she was only one of very few people willing to travel from wherever they lived all the way to Hyannis. Some had sent flowers instead and his private room was crammed with them, several of them wilting on their stems. “He's not so awful, really,” she said. “He was nice to the nurse.”

“That's a terrific sign,” I said, wondering how he behaved when no one was looking.

He and Raymie had had a wonderful visit. “He really loves the Cape,” she said, even though there was no nightlife to speak of and you had to create your own pleasures. He had offered her Italian chocolates his son had sent him. The son lived in Boulder. He hadn't come to see his father, since the injuries weren't life-threatening. And what about his daughter? She lived in Switzerland and she wasn't about to come either. Although still on painkillers, Mitch was fixated on catching the person who had vandalized his house. He referred to him as a terrorist.

I thought that was something of an exaggeration, but I suppose that when someone pours blood on your house without even making your acquaintance first, you're apt to lose a sense of proportion. I asked her how long she had stayed.

“Well,” she said, “I drove more than an hour to get there; I wasn't about to turn around and come right back. A couple of hours, I guess. I'm going again next week.”

“You're not,” I said. It just popped out.

“What's the matter, Dannie? Why shouldn't I? Here's this guy, he'll never walk right again, someone desecrated his house, his family are all shits, and I feel good about making him less miserable. I'd like to know what's wrong with that?”

I asked her why she was being so defensive, not exactly the most tactful response, and Raymie bristled. This was the first time, she said, that she ever heard of someone being ragged on for showing compassion. And I suppose she had a point. Pity had never been Raymie's strongest point. Not that she didn't have any but that other traits came first: imagination, humor, intelligence, warmth.

“Well,” I said, “when you go back, say hello for me.” I was uncharacteristically baffled. What did Raymie have in mind?

 

My workroom was on the third floor of our house, once a dusty attic. It has a sloping ceiling and a skylight cut into the roof over the spot where I work. My art things were where I had left them months earlier, carefully, if not compulsively cleaned, lined up, boxed, stacked, accounted for, the wastebasket empty, the cupboard latched. It looked as if a good person worked here, an orderly person. I started on a new project. My favorite children's book editor, David Lipsett, a man with a seriously sexy voice, whom I had never met, kept sending me work, one book after another. I lost myself in time, thinking of nothing but story and shape and color. I worked until the phone rang. It was Tom, asking if I'd like to go somewhere nice for dinner. We discussed the relative pluses and minuses of various places to eat and settled on one in Cambridge, in Harvard Square, that he seemed to know quite well—that is, he reeled off some of the items on the menu and said it was a nice, quiet restaurant: you could hear yourself think. I realized, really for the first time, that, not a particularly good and certainly not an ardent cook, Tom must eat out quite often whenever I was on the Cape and he wasn't. I pictured him at a table alone, with an open book propped against the bread basket, eating simply and maybe not noticing that they had brought him spinach salad and not the garden greens he had ordered. It made me feel sorry for him, wanting to talk to someone about his research or a paper he was writing or even engage in the kind of small talk that happens over a meal. We agreed to meet at seven. Beth was still living in the house, but she had given me and her father instructions not to ask her any questions that began with the word “when.” She also said that I should assume she would not be home for dinner unless she told me otherwise. It was obvious that she was uneasy about the ties that bind getting tighter and tighter until she could no longer breathe.

When I got to the restaurant, Tom hadn't yet shown up. The headwaiter led me to our table, set for four. I ordered a glass of the house wine, sipping it while I studied the menu, choosing silently. Then I looked up and saw Tom and a man I didn't recognize. Tom leaned over and kissed my cheek. “You look nice,” he said. “Very healthy.” He introduced the man as Doug Herbert. “Doug's just joined the department.” I wondered why Tom hadn't told me about our third wheel. He was perfectly pleasant but basically bland. He didn't get the point of a joke Tom told and had to have it explained. Then he told us about his new Toyota and all the high-tech stuff in it. When I asked him where he lived, he gave me the long answer: a condo with a slice of a view of the Charles River, a laundry in the basement, “superior” security, central AC and a parking place reserved for himself. I caught Tom's eye and read his message back to me: “Sorry.” Holding up a dinner-table conversation with this man was as exhausting as carrying a heavy toddler up three flights of stairs. My mood began to shift and I found myself hating Douglas Herbert and blaming him for my falling spirits.