Trophy House (20 page)

I told him I thought we should wait until later. He wanted to know when later was. “Just later,” I said.

“I thought something like this was going to happen,” he said. He was having trouble talking.

“You did?”

“Of course. Do you think I can't read signals? Do you think I'm stupid?”

I suppose there was something healthy in his mounting anger; it was a better reaction than crying would have been.

“David, let's go out somewhere nice and try to plan something. I can't live in New York, you know that, and you can't just quit everything and live in Truro. You don't like it that much anyway. We'll figure something out.”

He said he really appreciated my positive attitude. Before my eyes, the ugly side of David came crawling out from where it had been. In a sense, it was a relief, as I had thought him—aside from the accident thing—almost any woman's ideal man. So he was not above playing dirty when I had hurt him. We traded sarcasm, each giving as good as he or she got, then stopped suddenly as I decided that I didn't want to leave him with this foul taste in my mouth. “Please, David, let's not do this anymore. Please let's try to…” I stopped, unable to say “end on a lovely note.” He made a snorting noise at this. “You must be nuts,” he said. “Would you say you have been stringing me along all this time?”

“I would say I haven't,” I said. “Maybe I'm not like other women. I need more than a man to go to bed with and to eat breakfast with.” David said I sounded like a feminist of the 1970s. “My postfeminist friends would never say such a silly thing.”

“Silly? Okay, if that's what you want to think.” And all the time my body was cramping with sexual desire. I could hardly stand it. What was I doing? “But Dannie,” I told myself, “the sex act occupies, at best, only a few hours a week. What about the rest of the time? Are you going to live in this city and forsake your home for a few hours of exquisite pleasure? You are? I don't believe you. Anyway, if you married David, the sex would stop being so cool after a while. Then where will you be?”

David headed into the bedroom—our bedroom!—saying, over his shoulder, that he was going to change his pants and put on a pair of shoes. He and I were going out for a “last supper.”

We went to an upscale fish restaurant—no one was wearing a lobster bib—and it was, miraculously, quiet, in spite of the fact that almost every table was occupied. We each ordered a drink and sat mooning at each other. “It's not the end of the world,” I said.

“Whose world is it not the end of?”

“Neither mine nor yours,” I said. “Now let's just try to be with each other without saying anything hurtful. I'm as sad about this as you are—maybe more so.”

“I doubt that.”

I asked him if we could possibly work out a compromise, an idea that had been at the edge of my consciousness for a while and which the martini I had ordered shoved into clarity. I articulated the idea. He loved New York City. I loved Cape Cod. We loved each other, we loved each other's company, so why couldn't we continue to be together as often as we possibly could, given the expense and the distance between the two places. We would trade weekends. He could spend his vacation with me in Truro, I would take the train or bus or hitch a ride to New York whenever I felt I could take a breather in my work. “I don't want to stop seeing you.”

“But I want to be with you all the time.”

“It's not possible,” I said. “This will be the best of two worlds. We won't get bored with each other this way. Maybe, in another twenty years or so, we'll both end up in the same place. I'll pick up things for you when you can't bend over anymore. You'll read the
New York Times
to me when I can't see anymore.”

“What if I meet someone else?” he said. He had barely touched his sole.

“That's a chance I'll have to take,” I said.

D
AVID ADJUSTED TO
our new arrangement with a speed that, while it failed to squeeze tears of anguish from my eyes, didn't, on the other hand, suggest that I had reason to celebrate. What could his recovery mean but that he wasn't heartbroken enough to fall into a depression, or come after me with a pistol and threaten to shoot me—“If I can't have you, then I'll see to it that no one can”—or even that he couldn't work or sleep. Basically, I'd rejected him, but he seemed to rally the way he might have if he'd eaten a plate of rotten fish; it only takes three days or so to get the bad stuff out of your system. When I proposed it, I wasn't sure at all that he would agree to return to a long-distance romance. But his e-mails and cheery phone calls suggested he had made a near-miraculous recovery from being dumped. In fact, we both thrived. Every time we were together, whether in New York or Truro, I was stung by the same craving for his affection—in all its forms, all the way from raw sex to explicit approval, something I realized Tom had been stingy with—yet, how could I have known this without something to compare it to? The arrangement turned out to be a model solution. Beth claimed not to understand, but that's because she was, I guess, more conventional than I am; she would have liked there to be a clean resolution: either split or marry. This was messier, more ambiguous, but in its own way more satisfying, mainly because it combined intense desire with intense pleasure. It was never, not for a minute, boring.

I can hardly remember what we did before e-mail slid into our lives. For one thing, it's a shortcut; you don't have to crack the shell in order to get to the meat. It has the virtue of instancy, even more than the telephone, which depends on both of you being in the same mood at the same time. It lets you be raw, unlike a letter, where you have to craft sentences and make sure they parse. David and I e-mailed each other several times a day. Some of his messages were love letters, some hilarious descriptions of problems at the publishing house, some had to do with food, others with his children. Some of them were just right for the
Times'
Metropolitan Diary. He seemed to have no hang-ups when engaging in this form of communication. And I guess I was equally forthcoming. I let him know—for the first time—how I really felt about his accidents. It wasn't, I explained, that he
had
them but that I didn't have the stamina to take care of him when they occurred. I wanted both of us to be equally resilient—at least at this point in my life. When I get older—if I get older—I wouldn't mind looking after him. But not yet. I hoped he'd wait.

One of his (ungrammatical) e-mails said: “While this fucking Bush war is going full steam—and having screwed the U.N.—your New York admirer is turning inward and seeing a shrink once a week. Don't laugh. Don't say I told you so. It's not as painful as I thought it would be. She doesn't want to know about my mother or my potty training (I remember it vividly!) as much as my day-to-day hang-ups. She wants to know about you. I wish she'd do more of the talking. More later.”

I wondered if she were pretty, like Dr. Melfi on
The Sopranos.
Dr. Melfi had great legs, which she crossed in a manner that could only arouse poor Tony's lust. I wondered if David's shrink had great legs. I asked him about the legs in my next e-mail and he answered back that he had no idea. That had to be a lie.

Meanwhile, I was tutoring myself in the buying of antiques. I went to a couple of shows, one in Boston, one in Rhinebeck, New York, spread out over the Dutchess County Fairgrounds. Some of the stuff was spectacular. I wanted to know why it had ended up in a tent rather than in the houses of the owners' children. Hard times? A rejection of their parents' style and taste? I bought some books and magazines. I talked to people who seemed to know about how you decide what's substantial and what's going to fall apart. I liked seven-foot-high bureaus and hefty beds. I liked washstands with a hole for the basin. I hated stripes on anything. I was tempted to ask Raymie to help me decide whether or not to buy a sleigh bed from a dealer in Chatham, on the Cape. It was twenty-five hundred dollars. Even if the money wasn't coming out of my bank balance, I balked at paying so much for a bed. I finally told the owner of Chatham Antiquities—who told me right off the bat to call him Guy—that I would like to buy the bed. He said, “You're making a very wise choice; this is one of the finest examples of nineteenth-century craftsmanship I've seen in ages. I believe William Howard Taft slept in it—all three hundred pounds of him.”

“You told me that the last time I was here,” I said, smiling so that his feelings wouldn't be hurt. I wondered why he felt he had to keep selling the bed after I agreed to buy it. Guy stroked the headboard. “Feel the luster,” he said, examining his palm. “Where is this handsome piece going?” he asked, almost as if he were reluctant to lose it.

“Truro,” I said.

“Oh my,” he said. “That
is
a ways.” Not really, I told him. A matter of less than an hour. He said he had a mover who worked for him two days a week. Any day would be fine, I said, since this is going into a bed-and-breakfast that isn't going to be open for business for a while yet. “A B & B,” he said. “Oh dear. I hope you're not going to allow smoking in your establishment.”

“It's not mine,” I said. “I'm just the person buying the furniture.” I refused to identify myself as an interior decorator. “Why didn't you tell me you were a decorator?” Guy said. “I would have taken a little something off the price.” I told him I wasn't a professional but was doing this for friends. If I had been told a year and a half earlier that I would ever refer to Mitch Brenner as a friend, I would have sneered, “In a pig's eye.” And now look.

Mitch and Raymie were crazy about the bed. “Sturdy enough for a fat president,” I said. “I have my eye on a canopy bed in Yarmouthport.”

There was a lot to do. I was finishing
Peter Pan;
the editor was pleased with my work but kept tweaking things. He objected to the nose I gave Peter—too adult. He objected to the dimples I gave Wendy. “Too cute. Dimples are out.” He asked me to deepen the colors—too pastel for what he had in mind. He was the most demanding editor I had ever worked with and it made me doubt my own competence. If he didn't like my stuff, why did he choose me? A couple of times I considered dropping the project and giving the money back. David told me not to. “I know this person,” he said. “He's one of the best. His books—every other year at least one prize. Stick with it.” I wanted to hug him but I was sitting at my laptop.

I bought furnishings for the house with deliberate slowness. Mitch kept at me. “At this rate, the place won't be open until next summer. Can't have that.”

“You weren't seriously thinking of having guests this summer?”

“I was.”

I told him, sure, if he wanted me to buy the first thing I saw, okay, but it wouldn't be what he wanted. “I've got to take my time,” I said. Raymie and I took a long walk on the beach during which I asked her to help put the brakes on Mitch. She promised. I felt a rush of warmth for my friend, who had, incidentally, dropped the preppy look and was more than halfway back to her old style of old clothes: aged jeans and a ratty old sweater. I wondered if Mitch had noticed the slippage.

The brochure was a rush job, but it came out fairly well, with my photograph (I wanted black and white, Mitch wanted color; I did color) of Trophy House on the front cover and, inside, a view of the beach and another of the deck with tables and chairs arranged prettily, potted flowers on the tables, cushions on the chairs and a boiled lobster at each place setting. I told him I felt funny about the lobster pictures—we were a B & B, after all; dinner was not included. “No one'll make that connection,” Mitch said. “The lobsters give the place extra class—not that it needs it.” None of my pictures had the slightest suggestion of ambiguity or bad weather. Mitch loved my work. Trophy House was a paradise within a paradise. He had several thousand brochures printed in Boston and distributed them to travel agents and chambers of commerce. And halfway through August, when I had finally finished buying beds, bedside tables, chairs, love seats, bureaus, towels, sheets, curtains, rugs, vases and pitchers, bowls and potpourri, he hired a Webmaster who designed a Trophy House Web site. We were off and running. I had become a constituent of the enterprise.

Mitch decided to celebrate the grand opening of Trophy House with a Labor Day bash. “I know we don't have much time,” he said, “but I'm going to open with as many dogs and ponies as I can round up.” Raymie said, “Mitch, Labor Day's only two weeks away. We can't possibly do this in two weeks.”

“I thought you knew me, baby,” he said, squinting his eyes into a love twinkle. “Just you watch.”

Mitch engaged a Boston publicity person at an inflated price. Raymie reported that the woman—her outfit was Synergy by Sylvia—doubled her fee because this job meant she would have to stop working for her other clients for two weeks. “Mitch was okay with that,” Raymie said. “I told him that people in Truro hated publicity. You know what he said? He said, ‘They'll like this.'” Mitch obtained a list of every registered voter in Wellfleet, Truro, and North Truro and instructed Sylvia to send out invitations to every one of them by e-mail. Sylvia argued that printed invitations were more appropriate. Mitch said getting them made would take too long. She was skeptical but, as she told Raymie, “It's his money, it's his party.” The invitation asked them to “help inaugurate Trophy House, the only world-class Bed-and-Breakfast on the East Coast, featuring a spectacular view of Cape Cod Bay and equally spectacular sunsets. Once your friends stay here, they will never want to spend a week anywhere else.” With this last blandishment he had hooked into the Truroite's dread of houseguests. Houseguests had a way of spending more time in your house than they were invited for. He hired my son Mark's rock group, Dandruff, to play for three hours. The food was to be catered by Puff Pastry, a place in Provincetown that specialized in gay and lesbian parties, figuring, as he said, “that those folks really care about good food, and know how to present it.” He rented four all-terrain vehicles and four young hunks to drive them from the two closest public lots, where guests could park, up (or down) the beach to the foot of Mitch's stairs.

I found myself caught up in the excitement; then I stepped back and wondered what the hell I was a part of. Distressed by the Brenner style, so antithetical to what washashores and wannabes cherished, I still viewed Mitch as a panther who had crept into the aviary. I called David and told him about my misgivings. He asked if he was invited to the party. “Of course you are,” I said. “What do you think?”

“I'm looking forward to it,” David said. “You're taking this too seriously.”

“You don't understand.”

“I think I do,” he said.

Where do you go from this? I told him Beth was disgusted with me. “She thinks I've sold out to the enemy. As far as I'm concerned, the enemy [I was thinking of the way this country had turned from a nice, somewhat naïve kid into a cynical bully] is far worse than Mitch Brenner. At least he wants to do something about his mistake.” David said that Beth would probably get over her attack of ideals. “I'll bet she comes to the party.”

“I'll bet she doesn't. What are we wagering?”

“There's nothing I really want,” he said. “Except you.” I figured he meant it maybe about sixty percent.

 

Mitch was delighted when most of Truro's washashores showed up at his party. Not only year-rounders who lived here in well-insulated houses back in the woods and away from the most howling of winds, but some folks who actually worked here: off-duty policemen, employees of the library and Town Hall, owners of big dark restaurants on or just off Route 6, and a couple of motel owners. Every segment of this insular winter community was represented. I caught a glimpse of Norman Mailer and his wife and a couple of small children, one of whom he introduced as “Wiggy.” Still, I was certain that what drew these people to the party was more curiosity than a desire to help Mitchell Brenner celebrate. Truro folks wanted to check out the house and declare it showy, impossible. Raymie drank wine nervously. Mitch was wearing white loafers with no socks, a blue cotton blazer and a captain's hat with a visor. Mark and his group played loudly, numbers that sounded great but that I couldn't have named if you held my toes to the fire. David talked to Raymie and my
Peter Pan
editor. The food—a raw bar of cherrystones and oysters, small triangular spinach pies, chicken wings, cheese and onion roll-ups, slices of smoked salmon on black bread—couldn't have been better. The waiters and clam shuckers wore pink cotton jackets and white pants. Mitch invited his guests, only a few of whom he actually knew by name, to inspect the place. People formed an orderly line and made their way through the house, subdued, as if they were in a national shrine or a famous writer's abode. I placed myself in back of a woman I didn't know who, with her husband, I had heard making a remark about Mitch's having greased a couple of palms to get a business variance. But when she saw the first of my rooms, she said: “This is perfectly lovely. I would stay in this room myself. Who would have thought it, from the outside?” I slipped away.