Trophy House (17 page)

David tried to make sure that I had a decent place to work. He suggested the back room on the ground floor, which gave out through French windows onto a scruffy, dusty patch of so-called garden. “This is the lightest room in the house,” he said. At one time it had been a formal dining room with fancy sconces on the wall and a stone floor covered here and there by small rugs. I told him it would be fine but kept silent about the light—it had a southern exposure when what I need is north light. When I wasn't working on illustrations for various publishers—luck was running with me; I had more offers of work than I could handle—or taking pictures for our Cape book, David and I spent as much time together as we could. I felt younger than Beth. We went out to dinner at least once a week, not fancy restaurants, but places where the bar and the dining area occupied the same space and the food was good but not too pricey. David said you had to be a real New Yorker to know where these spots were; magazine and newspaper reviewers usually passed them over, so they had to try harder and charge less. He wanted me to walk around neighborhoods I wouldn't have visited by myself: Chelsea, site of the infamous hotel where rock star Sid Vicious slaughtered his girlfriend, thus living up to his name; the Armenian section, New York's pale emulation of Watertown; the Lower East Side, where David's grandparents had lived five flights up in a tinderbox called a tenement. David knew the building was on Hester Street but didn't know which number—how quickly our pasts are erased. He took me to Katz's delicatessen, where he ordered a tongue sandwich and a pastrami sandwich so crammed with meat that my jaws couldn't fit around it. We stood above Ground Zero, where, as at the Vietnam Memorial, I found that tears blocked speech. As we walked uptown and away from the hole, I told David I thought they ought to leave it just the way it was—what better reminder? Why try to gussy it up with sparkling new structures, a park and fountains and God knows what else? Keep it stark. David said, “How about one small headstone with a few words on it?” “Okay,” I said. We went to Ellis Island; zipping around New York, he was like a high school sophomore showing off his school's new athletic facilities.

As much as I was co-opted by David's enthusiasm, the city sometimes made me gloomy. Sad little trees with limp yellow leaves and dog poop surrounding them; the dog poop reminded me of how much I missed Marshall. Buildings hid the clouds. There was constant noise that I took personally; horns, brakes, car alarms that no one paid any attention to, tires screeching, whistles, shouts, garbage trucks grinding and thrashing, sirens, glass shattering, and assorted thumps, bangs, crashes, and howls. I made David take me to the Central Park Zoo so I could hear some birds. He bought me a CD with nothing but bird sounds on it, but it only made me sadder when I listened to it. I told David I thought there were too many people in New York. “Too many? This is Mecca. This is the promised land.”

“Depends on what you want,” I said.

“You know, I'm almost afraid to ask you what you want.”

I was thinking that maybe I didn't know what I wanted and that was the trouble. I wanted to live with David, talk to him, cook with him, go to bed with him, see his five o'clock shadow first thing in the morning. And I also wanted the minimalist life I had composed for myself in Truro. How could one person want two things so different from each other? It was like wanting to be the commanding general and AWOL at the same time. Was I trying to do something impossible?

The day I received a letter in an envelope addressed not by a lopsided sticker but by a hand holding a pen, I knew it had to contain news either very good or very bad. The letter was from an editor whose name I had heard but who I had never worked with. He overpraised my work— “the preeminent illustrator of children's stories”—and went on to inquire if I would be interested in doing the illustrations for a centennial edition of
Peter Pan
. “I am afraid,” the letter continued, “that we can only pay you a flat fee of ten thousand dollars. But we plan to do a hefty promotion for this volume, as well as a special leather-bound limited edition.” I ran to the phone and called David at work. “I'm really excited,” I said. “How could he know how much I like Barrie? I guess I have to admit I feel very honored.” “You should feel honored,” David said. “I'm proud of you.” Then he asked me how I was going to get this project done, along with all my other work. I told him I'd just have to work twice as hard and long. And, I added silently, “In lousy light.”

Mark came down to spend a weekend with us. I hoped he had come with an open mind about me and David. After all, his father had hooked up with a new significant other so it was only fair that I do too. But I had a lingering inflammation over the way he and his sister had come off in the
Times'
Vows piece. The three of us were sitting around before dinner. I wanted Mark to see that I wasn't waiting for him and me to be alone before I challenged him, that I considered David to be a member of family. “Why did you tell that person that Judith was a perfect match for your dad?” David looked down into his glass of wine. Mark shuffled his big feet. “You didn't have to say that, Mark. Didn't you stop to think about what it would do to me?”

“Mom,” he said, “I didn't say that. The lady asked what I thought about my father marrying Judith. I said he seemed okay with it. She put those words in my mouth. Anyway, what would you like me to say? ‘This is a no-good marriage?' C'mon Mom, we were at the reception!”

“I think he's got a point?” David said.

“Who asked you?” I said, but in a voice that indicated I was joking.

“Look, Mom,” Mark said. “You may hate Dad but we don't—”

“I don't hate your father,” I said, interrupting.

“Whatever,” Mark said. “Anyway, Beth and I would like to see him, well, maybe not happy but at least happier than he was. Same goes for you, Mom.”

It was obvious Mark was trying hard to put the brightest light on everything and everybody. And I couldn't help being pleased about this. The next day David and Mark took a walk together while I prepared Sunday brunch. It turned out they had talked about the kind of music Mark plays, something I know next to nothing about. They brought me back a bunch of flowers.

Mark had got a raise at work and it seemed as if he was gradually accepting the fact that he was not going to be a rock star after all. This I took as a sign of hope. When he left, he gave me a great hug while whispering directly into my ear, “I think you got yourself a really good guy.”

As soon as he closed the door behind him, David put his arms around me. I dropped my chin into the hollow just beside the bottom of his neck, a place that held my chin like a warm palm. He said that Mark was a good kid. “He knows who he is.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Absolutely. You and Tom did something right.”

The phone rang. David answered. “It's for you. Raymie.”

“You'll never guess what Mitch and I have decided to do,” she said.

“Tie the knot?”

“No, something even better.”

R
AYMIE WAS JUST
about to tell me what she had done this time when David, on the ground floor, started yelling and cursing “Oh shit, oh fuck!”

“I've got to call you back, Raymie, David's shrieking.”

Pulled by the noise, I found David in his study, a room he had converted from a pantry. There wasn't much light in there—but after all, he wasn't a painter so he didn't need more than one focused lamp. He had left the old soapstone sink where it was; it was filled with papers he said he couldn't throw away. “What happened?” I said.

He was sitting on the floor, barefoot, in his bathrobe. His face was gray, his features twisted. “Oh my God,” he said, “I think I broke my foot.”

“How?”

He nodded toward a brass elephant paperweight. It lay on the floor on its side, as if dead. “It got me here,” David pointed to his instep. The foot looked okay to me. I asked him what made him think it was broken. The pain, he said. It was really bad. Could he stand up? I offered to help him, but he shrugged me off, saying he wanted to see if he could do it by himself. Holding on to the side of his desk and groaning softly, he hoisted himself upright. He was wearing shorts and a tee-shirt under the bathrobe. I asked him what he was doing half-dressed. “I was about to take a shower,” he said.

“Now?” I said.

“Why not? It's as good a time as any.”

“Then what were you doing down here? The shower's upstairs.”

“Do I have to file all my flight plans?” he said.

“I'm sorry. It's none of my business.” He didn't dispute this point. Gingerly, he placed the injured foot flat on the floor. “Yow! I'm sure it's broken.” I looked again. It still looked okay, but what did I know about how long it takes before a break turns your flesh purple? “We've got to get you to the E.R.,” I said.

“It can wait 'til tomorrow,” he said.

“Are you sure? Why don't you ice it and lie down?”

I fetched one of those blue things filled with a chemical that I store in the freezer for keeping sandwiches cold and chilling bruises. David was very tractable and followed me, hopping upstairs to the bedroom, where he lay down. I had wrapped the icer in a towel. Since his toes pointed upward, I had to tie the thing to his foot with the towel. He thanked me lavishly, as if I had saved him from a burning building. “Hey,” I said, “I didn't do anything.”

“Yes you did. You didn't get angry.”

I asked him what he was talking about. “Did your mother get mad at you when you hurt yourself?”

“She'd scream at me and tell me I was a klutz,” he said.

“That's terribly sad,” I told him. “I want to hear more but right now I've got to call Raymie. I hung up on her when you hurt yourself.”

Raymie answered the phone: “What's up?” I apologized for interrupting our conversation. “What happened?” she asked.

“David dropped a paperweight on his bare foot. He thinks it's broken.”

“Ouch,” Raymie said. “He should put some ice on it to keep it from swelling.”

I told her I'd already done that. And now, what was her news? “Are you ready for this?” she asked.

“We'll see, won't we?” I couldn't have guessed in a million years what Raymie told me then. “Mitch and I are going to turn part of this house into a bed-and-breakfast. What do you think of that?”

I told her I was glad I was sitting down. “You're joking, yes?”

“I'm joking, no. Here's the thing.” It had started out as a semijoke, she told me, when one morning at breakfast Mitch had pointed out that each of them had been in the same racket. At first she didn't understand. “The hotel business,” he'd said. The fact that he owned several glitzy, resort-type hotels—now managed by the errant son, who turned out to have a flair for running things—and Raymie had run one small B & B at the end of the earth, was irrelevant. They both had done basically the same thing, namely, made their guests happy enough so they would want to come back. They would tell their friends about the place, so they wouldn't mind—or wouldn't notice—paying a steep price for clean towels, scrubbed toilets, and halfway decent food. At this, Raymie said she objected: she actually made very little, maybe fifteen dollars on each guest, maybe not even that much. Mitch had looked at her in a way that suggested he could have nudged this net up without distressing any of the customers. It was the little things, he'd insisted, like dried flowers in an antique vase on the bureau, like real napkins at breakfast, and so on. So here they were, two middle-aged bodies, one not all that mobile, living in a house so large that Raymie admitted she had entered one of the upstairs rooms only once—to close a window that had blown open. She needed something to do; she was going nuts not doing anything but weeding the garden. She loved to cook. “Irish oatmeal, French toast, English muffins, Belgian waffles. I overheard someone,” she went on, “calling this house a starter castle, and that's when I decided that Mitch had a pretty good idea.” That wasn't all: she and Mitch wanted me to take the pictures for their brochure. I told her I'd never heard of a B & B doing a brochure. “So what?” she said brightly. “
We're
going to.”

I told her I'd have to think about it. I was pleased that they wanted me to do the picture (how on earth do you make a house like that look warm and fuzzy?), but if I did it, it would mean abandoning my muscular—and largely useless—principles. Mitch Brenner's style—mental, physical, aesthetic—was so different from mine that I couldn't see myself working with him under any circumstances. The only reason I put up with him at all was that he was holding my best friend captive. “Not only the brochure,” Raymie continued as if she hadn't heard me say that I'd have to think about it, “but we'd like you to decorate the three rooms we want to turn into guest bedrooms. You know, the best in Cape antiques—and not the kind that are going to collapse under an active couple, if you know what I mean. Good stuff, sleigh beds, canopy beds, bureaus seven feet high—sturdy but beautiful. Also the dining area. Linens, flatware, you know, the whole nine yards. We want this place to be a gem.”

“The best?”

“Exactly. I haven't seen Mitch this excited since I visited him in the hospital. We'll pay you ten thousand dollars; five up front.”

“That's a lot of money.”

“Honey, he's got it. By the way, in case it makes you feel better, Mitch announced that he thought he might have made a mistake letting the architect talk him into building this monster house.”

“He feels guilty?”

“I don't know about that,” Raymie said, “but he wants more of it to be used by people who'll appreciate the quiet and the view.”

Again, I told her that I would let her know as soon as I'd made up my mind.

“Don't take too long. We want to get this thing off the ground.”

 

The next day David called his doctor, who referred him, over the phone, to an orthopedist. He told me not to come with him. “You have to work. I can do it by myself.”

“What if you can't find a cab?”

“Please, Dannie, don't worry about me. I'll be fine.”

While David was being tended to, I got down to work. I had one book half done and I'm afraid I bagged my usual leisurely, deliberate approach. I sketched out several ideas using a pencil and a large pad, and tried to persuade myself that I was satisfied. But haste made me feel I was short-changing the book. So what did I do? I threw everything away and started over again, having wasted three hours; I felt better and worse at the same time. The
Peter Pan
editor said he was sending me a copy of the book—it was mine to keep whether or not I decided to do the illustrations.

I hadn't told David about Raymie's proposal because I wanted to make up my mind alone, without being swayed by anyone else's agendas. So I worked on through the morning, trying not to think about Raymie's offer. Around twelve-thirty David called me on his cell phone and said he'd had his foot X-rayed and was now sitting in a little cubicle, with nothing to read but a three-year-old copy of
Popular Mechanics
. He'd been waiting for the doctor to come back with a reading of the X-ray and, presumably, a diagnosis for “half a fucking hour.” Meanwhile his foot had swelled to almost twice its normal size and was turning the color of eggplant.

I rummaged through our freezer and found some lamb shanks, food that David especially liked, and started off the evening meal by defrosting and then braising them with cinnamon, allspice, and tomato paste. When David finally came home, close to five, he was encased up to the knee in a cast. Fortunately, it was the kind you could remove to take a shower. He had a pair of aluminum crutches and a sort of slipper thing on his broken foot. His expression was plaintive. “Hello, pet,” he said. “I'm back from the wars. Four little bones broken. Give us a kiss.”

I asked him how long he would have to be on crutches.

“About six weeks.”

He made us each a whiskey and soda and sat wearily down on our living room couch, placing the crutches on the floor beside him. He stared at his broken foot—or what he could see of it. Then he beckoned me to come and sit with him. “I wish I wasn't such a goddam klutz.”

I told him not to dwell on it. There was nothing he could do except maybe be a little more careful. I told him I loved him. Jimmy Stewart had fashioned a whole career out of being clumsy. Women liked this trait; it brought out the hidden mother.

During dinner David looked definitely “peak-ed”—a favorite expression of my own mother. “This is really very good,” he said, pointing with his fork at the glistening lamb thigh on his plate. “But I guess I'm just not very hungry.”

“Who would blame you?” I said, although I was vaguely irritated. As for me, not having eaten since breakfast, I was ravenous. “We'll have it tomorrow.”

 

I kept waking up all during the night, almost every hour on the hour. David, having taken a pill of some sort, snored heavily beside me. I woke again a few minutes before six. I think I was seeing the first pale streaks of light in a day that promised nothing but very bad weather. I didn't want to believe it. The forecast had been so rosy.

David—funny, I never thought of him as “Dave”—had more than a little trouble managing the crutches. His foot began to ache and he wondered whether he should call the doctor. It was out of the question for him to take the subway to work as he generally did, so he would have to look for a cab—at rush hour. I suggested that he could work from home for a while, until he felt more comfortable. “What a good idea,” he said. “Why didn't
I
think of that?” At this, I did a double take. Why
hadn't
he thought of it? Was I slipping into the role of—which was it, caretaker or caregiver? Although he made me glow inside and out, what price would I have to pay for this pleasure? Did I want to be his mommy?

David phoned his office and explained the situation, so that was fixed. I loved having him there—he seemed as interested in what I had to say as he had been when we first met. This amazed me, as I was used to Tom, who always seemed to be listening to me with one ear only. But the downside was that he was always in the house. Isn't that awful? I'd never quite understood what women meant when they said about their retired husbands, “He's always underfoot.”

I honestly think he tried to let me work in peace, but he just couldn't help interrupting me at work to ask for my opinion about this or that—usually a manuscript he was considering, or an illustration. He also seemed blithely unaware of where certain things were stowed—in his own house! As soon as the little woman moved in, she was the keeper of toilet paper, bath soap, scratch pads, bottle opener, warm gloves. More. It's a silly list meant only to convey how helpless he thought he was. “How did you find things before I moved in?” I said, making sure my tone stayed in the light range. There it was again: How helpless can a man be? Did I truly want to find out?

“Mostly, I didn't,” he said. “What would I do without you?” He came to me and kissed me on the mouth, melting my challenge. He was a great kisser. “I promise, I'll try to do better. I do love you. I feel like I'm eighteen years old and living in what my old bubba would have called ‘sin.' Very exciting, really.” How could I resist him, he was so even-tempered and reasonable? He never had a tantrum, didn't throw things, kept the verbal abuse at a wattage so low it burned out before it reached me. We made love at least four times a week.

Meanwhile, I embarked on the
Peter Pan
job, buoyed by having been asked to do this; it was unquestionably a plum of a job. I didn't want to make the characters cute, nor did I want them to seem like alien creatures. They were human and superreal at the same time. To get it right I tried over and over again, each time able to blur the distinction between realism and fantasy a little more. I was patient with myself.

I had several conversations with Raymie, who kept pressing me to accept her offer. And I kept pushing her deadline forward. “What does David think?” she said. “What's that noise?”