Authors: William G. Tapply
I took the first exit after the bridge onto 6A, which took us back under the bridge and would meander along the bay side of the Cape all the way to Provincetown. I like 6A. There’s not a single McDonald’s or Burger King its entire length. Just old Cape-style houses and lots of little shops and here and there glimpses of the ocean across salt marshes.
“Gloria and I brought the boys to the Cape for a week one summer when they were little,” I said to Deborah. “We left the house in Wellesley at something like six-thirty in the morning and finally crossed the bridge at one-fifteen in the afternoon. The traffic heading south on Route 3 was stopped dead from Marshfield all the way to the canal. The boys finally got out of the car and started walking. I believe they would’ve got to the rotary before we did, but they stopped to talk with some people from Connecticut, who gave them Coke and potato chips. Right then I swore I’d never go to the Cape in the summer again.”
“Did you?” said Deborah.
“Nope,” I replied, encouraged by even that unforced conversational nudge. “That was the difference between Gloria and me. Or one of them. Gloria could wait in line forever, if it was something she wanted. Six hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic was nothing to her. And an hour in a line at a restaurant was fine. We went to Disney World once and spent more time standing in lines than doing anything else. She had a wonderful time.”
“You miss her, don’t you?” she said suddenly, turning in the seat to look at me. I glanced at her. She sat sideways, one leg tucked under her. Her gray eyes were solemn. Her black hair was tied back with a red kerchief. I reached over to touch her face.
“I don’t think about it much,” I said.
“You think about it all the time.”
“I do miss the boys, if that’s what you mean.”
“You miss Gloria.”
I shrugged. “Does that bother you?”
She turned back to peer out the side window. “Not for the reason you think.”
In Sandwich, we stopped at a little nondescript restaurant for lunch. A hand-lettered sign on the door said
CLOSED FOR THE SEASON AFTER COLUMBUS DAY.
Less than a week away. This was not, evidently, a place the natives patronized. We were the only customers. The walls were festooned with fishing nets and lobster buoys. Our waitress took our orders glumly then returned to the paperback novel she was reading at a corner table. The clam chowder, we decided, had come from a can.
We drove through Barnstable, Cummaquid, Yarmouth, Dennis, and Brewster, stopping at every antique shop and art gallery we found open. In the middle of the afternoon the rain came hard and cold, angled by the east wind. The snick of the windshield wipers kept a syncopated rhythm with the cello and clarinet music from the radio.
In Eastham, Deborah suddenly sat forward. “Stop here, please,” she said.
“Here?”
The sign outside the little Cape Cod-style shop read
SANTA’S ELVES: CANDLES AND CHRISTMAS.
“This is nothing but a damn tourist trap,” I said. But I pulled into the crushed-stone parking area. Half a dozen cars were there, wearing license plates from New York and Vermont and New Jersey.
“You don’t have to come in if you don’t want to,” she said, and before I could reply she was out of the car and on her way into the shop.
“I won’t, then,” I muttered. I lit a Winston and watched the rain that sheeted on the windshield distort the stunted pines that waltzed in the wind. Across the street I saw a little square building, hardly bigger than a fisherman’s shack. A sign over the door read
WALTER THISTLE, ARTIST, OPEN.
I decided I’d like to meet someone named Walter Thistle, so I dashed across the street and into Mr. Thistle’s studio. A large, ginger dog thumped his tail on the floor. A wood stove simmered in a corner. A voice from another room called, “Look around. Be with you in-a minute. Don’t mind Gregory. He’s not as fierce as he looks.”
Gregory, as if to vindicate his master, roiled onto his back and began to wave all four legs in the air. I scratched his belly, which set his tail thumping at an increased tempo.
Thistle painted watercolors. Some sat on easels, some hung on the plain pine walls, and some were stacked carelessly against table legs and chairs. Thistle painted with a big brush on wet paper, a stroke here and a blob of color there miraculously creating clouds, fog, surf, sand, rocks, flowers, ships, trees.
I had imagined Walter Thistle in a long, white beard, wearing a tattered flannel shirt, his baggy corduroys supported by wide red suspenders. In fact, his beard was sun-bleached blond, his body trim and athletic. His faded blue eyes and the cross-hatching of wrinkles on his cheeks merely suggested his age. I guessed he was sixty. He emerged from a doorway tucking a white dress shirt into his blue jeans.
“See anything you like?”
“I like everything,” I answered. “You’ve got a nice style. Loose. Generous with color.”
He grinned. “They accuse me of being derivative,” he said. “I’ve shown my stuff in New York. The so-called critics laugh at it. ‘Cape Cod art,’ they call it. Well, hey, they’re right, in a way. What they don’t understand is that this Cape Cod art started with Walter Thistle. I came here in forty-six with a little chunk of shrapnel in my leg. Bought me some colors and paper and been at it ever since. Doing Cape Cod art. Been at it longer than the rest of ʼem. I came here to paint, not to sell. The others, they come to the Cape in the summer to make a buck off the tourists. They see the kind of work that Walter Thistle does, they think, ‘Hell, this is simple,’ and they knock off some surf on the rocks, maybe a lighthouse and a beached dory, and, by God, they’re right, you know? Tourists think, ‘Dad gum, we’ve got us an authentic Cape Cod watercolor, Myrtle.’ They come in here, take a look around, and they think they’re seeing the same old stuff. By the time they get to Eastham, see, they’ve already stopped in the other places. They see the imitations first, they think they’re the real thing. So by the time they get here, and see the real thing, they think I’m the imitator.”
I bent to examine a small framed study of a sand dune and beach grass. “How much for this one?”
“Hundred fifty,” he said. “There’s a little sticker on the back. You can get something similar back up the road for sixty,” he added. “Most folks can’t tell the difference.”
He sat on a straight-backed wooden chair and poked Gregory’s belly with the toe of his sneaker and cocked his head at me. It struck me as a challenge.
“I don’t pretend to know that much about art…”
“Most folks don’t,” he said. “You’re probably best off back up the road. Tell your friends you got yourself a genuine Thistle watercolor, they’ll say, ‘Hey, ain’t that nice, now,’ and it won’t be worth a damn. Cape Cod art. Humph!”
“I like it better than anything I’ve seen.”
Thistle began to stuff tobacco into the bowl of a blackened old pipe with a curved stem. “Buy it, don’t buy it. Can’t promise you nothing ʼcept it’ll get prettier and prettier the longer you look at it.”
I lit a Winston and cocked an eye at him. “Hundred fifty, eh?”
Thistle sucked on his pipe. “You’re probably better off back up the road.”
I bought the painting, of course. I couldn’t decide whether it was the beauty of the work or the perverse sales pitch of Walter Thistle that persuaded me. But I decided that I couldn’t take any chance of an imitation up the road. Thistle wrapped the painting in a big square of oilcloth and put it into a plastic shopping bag for me. I shook his hand, scratched Gregory’s belly, and jogged across the street through the rain to my car. I put the painting into the trunk and returned to my seat behind the wheel. Deborah had not returned yet.
A random thought fluttered in my brain like a butterfly, and I tried to pin down its wings so that I could examine it. Paintings and stamps. Authentic and derivative. Beauty and value. Experts and tourists. A concept flitted there, but it succeeded in evading the wild sweeps of my deductive net.
Deborah suddenly opened the door and slid into the car, shaking the rain from her hair, and, for the first time all day, smiling. She held a big paper bag in her lap.
“What’d you get?” I said.
“Nice stuff. Bayberry-scented candles. Some gifts. And look.”
She reached into the bag and pulled out a little box. She opened it and handed me a tiny replica of a lobster pot, no bigger than a match box. I held it up in front of my face by the little string attached to it. Deborah leaned toward me, bracing herself with a hand on my knee.
“See,” she said, her face close to mine, “it opens and closes, like this. It’s even got the little netting inside. It’s a Christmas tree ornament. I’ll hang it on my tree to remind me of our weekend.”
I held the little object in the palm of my and turned it over with my finger. A tiny oval label was stuck on the bottom. I read it to Deborah.
“Made in Taiwan,” I said. I handed it back to her.
She grabbed it and dropped it into her paper bag. “You can be a real bastard,” she said quietly, and she turned her face to the window beside her.
We rented a room in an old Victorian rooming house in Wellfleet, changed our clothes, and had roast beef at a restaurant perched on a hillside overlooking the bay. We sat by a window. The wind had blown the rain away, and we could see the clouds skidding across the face of the low hanging harvest moon. I reached across the table to touch Deborah’s hand.
“Hey,” I said.
She looked up at me. “I’m sorry. I haven’t been very good company.”
“Me neither, I guess.”
She smiled, that quick, sad smile that seemed to reserve the prerogative of transforming itself into a frown at the least provocation, and squeezed my hand.
“I have a surprise for you,” I said. “I wanted to present it to you with lots of pomp and ceremony.”
She smiled again. “I’m afraid I’m deflating your pomp and raining on your ceremony. I’m sorry. What’s your surprise?”
“It’s about your father. I think we found the man who did it.”
“Who killed him, you mean.”
“Yes.”
She nodded. “Good.”
“He’s also the man who killed Albert Dopplinger, the museum man, and the same one who broke into your house. So it looks like you won’t have to worry anymore.” I paused. “He pulled a gun on me the other night. He’s the guy who chloroformed me.”
“He’s been busy,” she said. “I’m glad they found him.”
“But we still haven’t found the stamp.”
She shrugged and aimed her face to look out the window.
“I thought you’d be happy.”
“I am,” she said. “That’s great.”
She took her hand from mine to pick up her coffee cup. I lit a cigarette.
“Look,” I said. “What’s the matter, anyway?”
“Nothing. Really.” As if to prove her point, she turned to smile at me. Then she turned back to the window.
“If it’s about that little lobster pot thing…”
She shook her head.
“Well, then…”
“Just let it be,” she said, with sudden vehemence. “Okay? Let it be, huh?”
“Well, Jesus…”
“It’s me. That’s all. Leave me alone.”
“I thought you’d be happy.”
“I am. I’m happy.”
“You show it funny.”
“You don’t know much about women, do you?”
I sat on the edge of the big four-poster dressed in the pajamas I had bought for the occasion. I held a glass of brandy in each hand. On Deborah’s pillow I had placed the Walter Thistle watercolor, still wrapped in its oilcloth.
She came out of the bathroom wrapped in her old red terry-cloth robe. She sat on the bed beside me. I handed her one of the glasses.
“Cheers, then,” she said, none too cheerfully.
I touched her glass with mine. “Here’s to our weekend.”
“One more day,” she said, sipping from her glass.
“You make it sound like a prison term.”
“Don’t be so damned sensitive.”
I reached across the bed and picked up the painting. I handed it to her.
“What’s this?”
“For you,” I said.
She held the package on her lap and unfolded the oilcloth. She stared down at the picture.
“It’s a genuine Walter Thistle,” I told her. She looked up at me, wrinkling her nose and frowning. “Never heard of Walter Thistle, eh?” I continued with a smile. “He’s the genuine thing. The original Cape Cod watercolorist. All the others imitate him. But he’s the one that gets accused of being the imitator. Do you like it?”
“Very much,” she said softly. “Very much.”
“I wasn’t sure. Your father’s taste in art…”
She touched my mouth with two fingers. “Shh,” she said. She propped the painting on the table beside the bed, sipped her brandy, then placed her glass beside the picture. She took my glass from my hand and set it down beside hers. Then she turned to face me. She frowned under her tousled hair. Her eyes stared solemnly into mine. Moving in a rhythm to music only she could hear, her hands moved down to the sash of her robe. She tugged it, and her gown fell open. She rolled her shoulders and rotated her hips in a slow-motion dance that slid the robe off her body into a puddle around her feet. Under the robe she wore a sheer, floor-length gown. It was cut square across the tops of her breasts, and hung full, touching only her bosom and hips. Its ice-blue color mirrored her eyes perfectly.
I reached to her, but she stepped back out of my reach. “Want me to hold you a little?” I said.
“No,” she said. “No. I want you to make love to me.”
Her passion seemed built from despair, her urgency from desperation, and her release, when it finally came, seemed only to lift her to a different plateau, more distant from me than before. And afterward, when she held me to her, I could feel her cheeks wet against my face.
We crept under the covers and I went to sleep with the scent of her hair in my face and her leg hooked over mine.
I awoke in the blue light that came before the dawn. Deborah was sitting beside me. She hugged her legs tight to her chest, and she rested her cheek on top of her knees, facing away from me. I touched her shoulder and whispered, “Hey?”
She shrugged my hand away, and I heard her sniff.
“What is it?”