Trophy House (10 page)

“Come and see my garden,” she said. “It's out in back.” We slipped out through a slider to the land side of the house. It wasn't warm enough for any flowers, so, except for evergreens and heather, you could only see the beds she had dug. Raymie told me which flowers were going to come up where. Off to one side was a plot where, she said, she was going to plant vegetables: squash, eggplant, tomatoes, spinach. “We brought in two tons of topsoil,” she said. “It's so nice not having to worry about where every penny for anything you want is going to come from.”

“Anything new on Halliday?” I asked.

“Apparently, they're still on his trail. At least they claim they are. How is one to know? How can someone like that disappear? You know what I think? All this stuff about terrorists in our midst? People like Halliday are small potatoes compared to some guy planning to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. They're just too busy looking for diaperheads to bother with the likes of our whack job.”

“Sounds right,” I said. I was so close to telling her about David Lipsett that I could feel the words crowding my mouth, pushing against my lips. In the old days, before Mitch screwed around with her head, she would have got an earful: “I met this man and it's driving me crazy. I can't stop thinking about him. He seems to like me, but I'm not sure whether with him it's just sex or something else as well. He's in New York, which of course makes it easier for me on the one hand and harder on the other. Easier because I can't flop into his lap whenever I feel like it, but harder because I can't see him and his adorable face. What do you think I ought to do?”

And the old Raymie would answer, “And what about Tom? Are you ready to dump your husband of thirty years for a man you hardly know?”

Mitch appeared at that moment, holding a sheet of paper. “Raymie,” he said, “that son of a bitch Halliday, or whatever his name is, just sent me this.” He thrust the sheet of paper at Raymie, who took it, squinted at it and told Mitch that she'd left her reading glasses inside. “Here, I'll read it to you,” Mitch said, grabbing back the piece of paper. “It says here on this e-mail, ‘I'll be back to finish the job.' It's signed ‘cleanser666.'” He stopped there, letting it sink in. “That should be easy enough to trace,” I said. Mitch looked at me as if he had just found out I was retarded. “No, Dannie,” he said. “You can use any number of sender names. Then you just go to the local library, sit down at the terminal and grind out your message.” Raymie said, “This really sucks. How does he get away with it?”

“Who's to stop him?” Mitch said.

“I'm going to call Pete Savage,” Raymie said.

“What's a Provincetown cop going to do for you that Jerry Braccio can't?” I assumed that Mr. Braccio was the P.I. Mitch had hired. It seemed to me that neither he nor Savage had done that much to find the man, but nobody asked me for my opinion so I kept my mouth shut.

Raymie went into the house to phone Savage. Mitch looked at the e-mail once again, then folded it neatly and stuck it in the back pocket of his shorts. “It takes all kinds,” he said, more to himself than to me. I thought this was a healthy reaction, considering, and I told him so. “What are you going to do?” he said. “Build a bunker and spend the rest of your life in there? Hire armed guards? That's not my idea of a life.”

I have to admit, I admired him for this little declaration. I asked him to say goodbye to Raymie for me and thanked him again for lunch.

“No problem,” he said.

I walked double-time back to my house, hoping to work off some of the large meal. I was thinking about Raymie and realizing, with a pang, that she had gone over to the other side, the side that has their garbage collected rather than hauling it to the dump, the side that has all their forks and knives from the same set, the side that never eats at Moby Dick's on Route 6. For my money, Moby's serves up the best fish on the Outer Cape, but if you don't get there for lunch at eleven forty-five, you better be prepared to cool your heels for at least fifteen minutes. It was not so much about how much money you had as about how what you did with it looked to other people. Raymie and Mitch were together now, joined in a way that erased what had been basic differences. So that, really, they were more like one than two. Could I put up with it?

 

I was watching the news at six when I learned that someone had splashed blood—they hadn't determined what kind of blood, human or otherwise—against the front door of a house in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a fancy suburb of Detroit, and also left an anti-Semitic message. The sheriff of Wayne County came on, standing in front of what was clearly a McMonster, pillared, gabled, towered, with twin urns crowded with what looked like fake flowers, one on each side of the front door, and a curved window two stories high smack in the middle. The sheriff shifted uncomfortably in the eye of the camera, his glasses catching light and sending it back at us. “This is a first for us here in this community,” he said. “We're not ruling out calling it a hate crime.” We were invited to tune in to a late-night investigative report focusing on ecoterrorism and anti-Semitism. It sounded as if they couldn't make up their minds whether it had to do with the size of the house or the ethnicity of its owners. Had Halliday fired another round in his campaign to save the world from Jewish excess?

I called Raymie and told her to turn on the news. “I've seen it,” she said. “Maybe he runs a training camp for Jew-hating ecoterrorists who need to demonstrate their distaste for the way other people live. Why don't they get a life?”

I told Raymie I wouldn't be surprised if the trasher turned out to be Halliday. “He seems to like big houses.”

I was mildly joking about something that wasn't the least bit funny. How could you lead a normal life when maniacs lurked behind every dune and hedge, waiting to get you? The answer was, you couldn't. How did the people living in Israel get used to it? Go to the beauty parlor to have your hair done and when you return, you find your apartment building has turned into a pile of rubble.

Raymie said Mitch thought it was Halliday. He'd been on the phone again with his private investigator. “Really,” she said, “I wish he'd stop spending so much money on this manhunt.”

Could I ask her just how much was so much? Did I care?

 

I continued to hear from David Lipsett, mainly via e-mail, one of the most useful inventions, right up there after the paper napkin. His messages were carefully crafted and seemed to be bristling with subtext. “I'm sitting at my desk thinking about how best to use your work; you have many talents.” “When you come to New York again, I think it's important that we talk about your future.”

Meanwhile, Tom and I had drifted into what surely was the last phase before a couple split: no yelling, recriminations, sly tricks, competitive games. I suppose it was something like what often comes over a person about to commit suicide—the rough places go absolutely flat. If you're just about to ingest a handful of pills, does it matter that you owe the MasterCard people fifteen thousand bucks, or that your brother has just been convicted of aggravated assault, or that your spouse called you a rotten pig? We had retreated into a freezer, surrounded not by haunches of uncooked prime beef and legs of lamb but by memories—and both of us too cold to talk. How had we ended up here? From desire and affection to indifference and irritation—I grew to hating the way he chewed on his eyeglasses, a habit I had once found sweet and boyish. I couldn't stand the way he picked at his fingernails, sometimes until they bled.

David occupied more and more of the space inside my head. I sent him an e-mail telling him I was thinking of coming to New York in the next few weeks—would he have time to look at some more of my photographs? He answered back within an hour. “A terrific idea! When?” I looked through my portfolios and decided that only one of them would do. So I took my camera and prowled my Watertown neighborhood, caught some pleasing moments—a fat old man eating an ice-cream cone with the melted stuff dripping across his fist, two people leaning against a car, talking fervently. I found a homeless woman huddled under a filthy blanket in the unused doorway of a hardware store. I took her picture without her knowing it—this is something I don't like to do, but I did it anyway because she had, under the grime, a beautiful face.

I had the pictures developed and printed, chose a few and stuck them between the jaws of my portfolio, and picked out the clothes I would wear while in New York. I knew the photographs were just an excuse to bring David and me together, a nice, businesslike convenience, the subtext of our meeting. The pictures carried the weight of what did not have to be said.

I told Tom I was going to New York. I expected him to say “Again? What for?” But he didn't. He said, “That's nice.”

“Tom,” I said. “When I get back, don't you think you and I should talk about things?”

“What things?”

“Us.”

“What about us?”

“Something's happened to what we used to be.”

“We got old,” he said.

I told him to speak for himself. “And anyway, what does how old we are have to do with anything?” I was being as disingenuous as anyone trying to score emotional points. Of course age had something to do with it. I wish I could have accused him of beastly behavior, but I couldn't. He was good old Tom who had lapsed into a routine that no longer included me. His work absorbed him like a bride. And maybe he was, as they say, “seeing” someone else as well. But that wasn't it either.

“For chrissake, Tom, can't you even look at me?”

“Why are you yelling, Dannie?”

“Because it's so much louder than gnashing my teeth.”

I guess we had stepped out of the freezer for a moment and although we warmed up a little, it was not a success.

 

This trip to New York, I stayed at a hotel that I found on the Internet by telling hotels.com that I didn't want to spend more than a hundred and twenty-five dollars. It was a perfectly nice place in Midtown, although the lobby looked as if nothing had been seriously done to it for twenty-five years or so. I brought my portfolio over to David's office, as I had the last time. He looked at the photos and pronounced them “interesting.” Then he reminded me that he was a children's book editor. I asked him why not find someone to write a children's book about a beautiful homeless woman. “Who is really a breathtaking princess transformed by an evil witch jealous of her beauty?” asked David.

“I'm crazy about it,” I said.

“God, you look good,” he said.

I thanked him, eyes lowered.

“I have a meeting uptown this afternoon,” he said. “How about dinner?”

“I don't see why not,” I said. Actually, I saw one big reason why not and I was fooling myself if I believed he didn't too. It was how we all seem to know the rules even if we haven't played this particular game before. Except in movies, and HBO, the true, lusty message hides under layers of rectitude, politesse, innuendo.

“Good,” David said. “I was hoping you'd say that. Look, I know what you're probably thinking. You're a married woman, I'm single. I assume we both saw the movie
Fatal Attraction.
” (I nodded). “That movie either did a great deal of harm or an awful lot of good—I can't decide which—but what happens is everyone is scared to indulge in a friendship. You and I have been working together for years, for chrissake, what's the big deal?”

“Did I say anything?”

“I guess not,” he said. “I sound defensive?”

I nodded again.

“Well,” he said, standing and looking at his watch. “I'll pick you up at your hotel, say seven-thirty?”

I spent the afternoon in Soho, going to half a dozen galleries where I saw work that my art teacher in college would have dismissed as “junk,” not willing to give it half a chance. Aesthetics had given way to emotion—“How romantic,” I thought, “just like the nineteenth century.” In one gallery I saw four pairs of soccer balls hanging from the ceiling in soft net bags, suggesting, if anything, testicularity. Was it art? It made you wonder what, in fact, art was. And all the time I was in and out of these places, along with other visitors, most of them in the most amazing outfits and colored hair and rings in their noses, ears, eyelids, lips, tongue (only one of those) and I could only imagine where else, having heard that some men had pierced their penises—a practice that apparently met with the approval of the women they penetrated. Ouch!

Art had turned a corner while I was doing my little thing with my children's books. Beautiful had been relegated to the hinged box in the attic and you didn't want to go up there because the dust was so thick. And there were mice. I suppose that was okay, mainly because it meant that people who did art moved on from one thing to the next. If they hadn't, we would still paint pictures like Giotto. Still, it felt odd to gasp rather than sigh when looking at some object—let's say a toilet with a cracked seat—set up in a gallery, starkly spotlit, when, if you saw the same thing in a bathroom your only reaction would be to be careful sitting down. Are there little old ladies still painting watercolors of the fruit trees beyond the porch? It's nice to think so, except their work won't hang in Soho, New York. I don't suppose they give a hoot. And if they do give a hoot, a small one, they do so while consigning the newest “art” to the degenerate pile. Was it ever any different?