Trophy House (3 page)

I interrupted her. “Maybe it isn't quite so bad, pet. It's the way you're feeling about your own life that makes everything look so dark.”

I had my work to do and Beth's problems were cutting into my psychic energy. That was how it should be, I told myself. This is your only and beloved daughter. But that same day I'd received an e-mail from David Lipsett, the book's editor, asking me when I thought I would have the drawings finished—in order to keep to their schedule, they had to go into production ASAP. Beth went down the hall to her old room. I could hear her taking stuff off the bed—I had started to use it as a storage place for some old jackets and sweaters and things like that—and opening and shutting drawers I had filled with some overflow clothes, mine and Tom's.

I spent about three hours doing dogs and little girls, suggesting a park with a zoo, animals and hard-to-read figures. I thought an impressionistic style would let the book's readers fill in whatever was wanted, from their own imaginations. I climbed into the box that was my work and shut the door behind me so no one could disturb me. I was alone with the silly characters of someone else's story and I felt like I was swimming in happiness.

Around five o'clock Beth said, “You have nothing to eat in the house—no wonder you look so skinny.”

I suggested we drive out to the A & P in Provincetown and restock the refrigerator and cupboards. The shortcut I take goes close to the water in North Truro, a road not very much used, as off-Cape people don't seem to realize it's there. On this one short stretch there are two brazen new houses, twice as big as their neighbors. Beth said, “I can't look. What sort of people have this kind of money? Why would they want to live here? Why don't they go to the Hamptons if they want to show off?”

I told her she'd been away so long she didn't realize what was going on; this wasn't your ordinary secret Eden any longer; it was the Hamptons of New England. “Real estate prices have gone sky-high. We could easily get more than a million for our house.”

Beth didn't respond to this, and I figured she must be chewing over the double-edged business of enjoying your plump cushion of money while recognizing, at the same time, how unfair it is to have so much when so many people are poor beyond anything we've ever experienced, poor enough not to eat more than one meal a day and not own one pair of shoes. Maybe it was better to be like the Brenners and not have a clue about the suffering in other parts of the world—or, better yet, not caring. Just being blithe about your appetites and your comforts. Dividing the world's wealth—one of the less successful solutions to unfairness.

The slim arc of Provincetown, resting on the water like a baby alligator, came into view as we rejoined 6A. The sun had spread a film of reddish-gold over the town, and houses along the beach were small enough at this distance to look charmed, like a landscape in an animated film trying not for ominous but for romance. “Wow,” Beth said. “It never fails to get to you, does it?”

“I'd like to stop in at Raymie's for a minute after we finish our grocery shopping.” Beth didn't say anything. I could tell she wasn't all that eager—probably thinking about how she'd have to explain about the missing Andrew. We had a good time at the A & P, fingering tomatoes, sniffing melons, spooning imitation crabmeat salad into plastic containers from the salad bar. Beth seemed surprised to see a Japanese sushi guy at the fish counter, rolling up rice and kelp. I told her this was simply another indication of the way things were headed. We bought some sushi for Beth. And a boneless lamb leg—for Tom, who likes lamb done outside on the grill.

In the parking lot, Beth said, “It's late, Mom, do we have to go to Raymie's?”

“I haven't seen Raymie in a couple of weeks and since we're here…” Here meant Provincetown. “I promise we won't stay long.”

We stowed our bags of food in the trunk and then headed back toward Truro. Raymie's B & B actually straddles the boundary between P'Town and North Truro and was given the choice of addresses by the U.S. government. She chose P'Town because, she figured, for visitors looking for action no matter how tame, P'Town would be a better draw than Truro, where there's nothing but wind, sand, sky and some old houses. Not even a downtown. People coming off Route 6 drive round and round, looking in vain for downtown Truro. One man was known to have driven around for a day and a half before he was willing to ask someone for directions to Truro, only to be told he was already there.

In 1989, Raymie bought a falling-apart late-nineteenth-century house that looked as if no one but mice and squirrels had lived in it for many years. She got a small-business loan and fixed it up with the help of shelter magazines specializing in before-and-after features—along with my kibitzing, as she called it—carefully following good ideas and discarding bad ones. What she ended up with was three bedrooms with queen-sized beds, one with a thin slice of water view for which people were willing to pay twice as much as for those that only looked out on trees and grass. She enlarged the kitchen so that if she's full up the guests can all have breakfast at approximately the same time. She chatted with them at breakfast, gave them tips on what to see and what to avoid, and did the cheerful hostess bit so well that no one could tell when she was blue or under the weather. “It's an act, Dannie,” she told me. “But a lot of the time I really mean it. I really like my guests. I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't.”

We drew up in her gravel driveway and parked alongside a Honda with chipped paint and a dented rear door. It had New Jersey plates. There was another car parked some ways off, a Lexus. As we got out, Beth reminded me that we were only going to stay a few minutes.

“God, am I glad you showed up!” Raymie led us into the kitchen, where she was obviously in the middle of preparing something for dinner. “Can you stay?” she said. “I've made much too much marinara.” Beth threw me an urgent look and I told Raymie we had to get home for dinner; I thought maybe Tom would show up; I hoped he would.

Raymie asked Beth a few questions point-blank: What was she doing here? How was the boyfriend? Beth began to squirm and I said quietly, “Beth's taking a little vacation on her own. Can we leave it at that?” Beth sighed.

Raymie stirred her spaghetti sauce with a long-handled wooden spoon, turning her back to us but talking over her shoulder. She complained briefly about not having the cash to fix the roof. Then she said, “I've got a real strange one staying here for two days. He makes me nervous. I haven't felt this way about a guest since that couple from Arizona…”

“The man who was wanted for mutilating sheep?”

“That's the one.”

I wanted to know precisely what had put her off about her guest. “Well, for one thing, he didn't have any luggage, just a small backpack, not even a change of clothes, nothing. For another, he smoked nonstop, one cigarette from another. You know I don't allow smoking on the premises, but I'm sure he was doing it anyway. You can smell it.” She heard him—through the door, of course—talking in an urgent voice on his cell phone late at night. “He didn't want my blueberry pancakes, just asked for coffee, black. He looked as if he hadn't slept more than five minutes all night.”

“Something on his mind?” I said. Beth had perked up and was listening with interest. “How old is he?” she asked.

“I'd say mid-thirties. While he was out taking a walk—he said—I took a look inside his room—I had to replace some towels anyway. He's got a detailed map of the Truro area and a pair of expensive binoculars. Maybe I've seen too many movies, but I'm sure this guy is up to no good.”

“And what does this all add up to?” I said. I couldn't buy the idea that Raymie's bed-and-breakfast might be the launching pad for someone up to no good. I couldn't share her uneasiness even as I recognized that this person sounded fishy to me as well.

Before we left, I asked Raymie what she was going to do. “I think maybe I'll just give Pete a call, give him a heads-up. Not that anything's happened—yet.” Peter Savage was the man in charge of solving crimes in Provincetown and catching perps. “He knows I have a lively imagination,” Raymie said. “But he'll make a note of it. He's very obsessive about things like that, keeping track of phone calls and writing things down that might be useful sometime.”

D
URING THE DRIVE
back to our house Beth said she thought Raymie was being theatrical. “Why does she have to turn everything into a melodrama?”

If Beth expected me to dump on Raymie, she was going to be disappointed because I wouldn't have even if I agreed with her—which I didn't. “That's just Raymie's style. She needs to give her imagination free rein; that's one of the reasons we get along so well. And besides, this guy apparently was weird,” I said. “Give the woman a break. She works hard, she owes big money to the bank. Can you see yourself being chatty and cheerful with strangers early in the morning every day of your life? One of her guests broke an antique pitcher worth hundreds last summer. So she just lied about it and told the woman, who probably couldn't have cared less, not to worry, that it was something she'd bought for two bucks at the flea market. I think I'd go nuts if I had to run a B & B.”

“Don't worry, Mom, I like Raymie,” Beth said. I patted her left thigh and she smiled.

“Dad's here.” Beth saw his Camry first.

Tom came out of the house. He'd had time to change into shorts and a polo shirt despite a furtive chill in the air. He looked pretty good to me. “Where have you two been?” he said, putting his arm across his daughter's shoulder and giving it a squeeze. “How's my girl?”

“Your girl is okay,” Beth said. But I could see she was on the verge of tears.

“I hear the boyfriend took a hike.” Tom sometimes has a way of being quite frontal. It didn't go over too well—as it often doesn't—but Beth managed not to lose her cool.

“What's for dinner?” Tom said. “I'm starving.” He gave me a kiss on the mouth; he tasted sweet. Tom and I were apart almost as much as we were together. But he sometimes remembered to ask what I wanted; my friends tell me this is rare in a husband—and it's easy to believe, if you pay attention to all those jokes online, portraying men as stupid, lazy, self-absorbed, beer-swilling, tits-obsessed louts. I'm pretty sure Tom wasn't like that. We used to play games all the time, games we made up, like picking a spot up the beach, a house or a stairway up the dune, and guess how many steps it would take us to reach it. The one who got closest won. The prize varied. Sometimes it was an “immediate obedience,” sometimes it was nothing more than a gesture of defeat, accompanied by a rueful smile.

“We hoped you'd be here so we got a butterflied lamb leg,” I said. “Enough for three with some left over for the doggie.”

We cooked the meat on the grill outside but ate indoors because of the chill, the dining table now cleared of the last trace of my art things, everything washed and tucked away in the hall closet. Beth seemed glad to see her father, who, having been prompted by me, did not ask her anything more about Andy. Tom hadn't checked out the progress of the house still being built down the beach but planned to the next morning, a Saturday. I told him about the meeting the following week to see if a group—“we're thirty-three concerned citizens”—could persuade those in charge to somehow short-circuit any plan to build more monster houses in Truro and to get them to sack building inspectors on the take, of which we had no evidence—the lot is too small, the dune is shifting beneath the house, the top story exceeds the legal height limit—except common sense. I hit a nerve with this; Tom is not quite but almost a libertarian and, although he deplores the impulse that makes a person want to build a house ten times larger, with three times as many rooms and bathrooms as they need, he doesn't like the idea of the government—any government—telling you that you can't build a house as big as Fenway Park if that's what you want—so long as it doesn't hurt anyone.

“But that's just it,” Beth said. “It does hurt someone. It hurts a lot of people.”

“How so?” Tom said.

“It hurts our sense of place and proportion,” Beth said. “It hurts us just to look at them.”

“You don't have to look. Try averting your eyes and look at the bay and the birds and the cute guys on the beach.”

“What cute guys? If there are any in these parts, they don't hang out here. They're on the other side.” She meant the ocean side, where waves sometimes reached a terrifying five or six feet. Whatever studs there are seem to enjoy parading up and down the beach in shiny black wet suits, their surfboards jammed up under the armpit.

It went on like this for a while, the conversation turning somewhat edgy but not enough to make one of us bolt from the table and slam a door.

But I went to bed convinced that the impulse to practice excess Tom alluded to did leave its mark on other people, strangers as well as neighbors. You can't do something shocking and expect it to leave no evidence, visible or unseen. It was like the murder of that poor Tinkham woman—still unsolved, and, from the looks of things, not likely to be. The clues were so cold they were frozen; traces of the killer were almost obliterated. It made us uneasy.

 

Next morning I worked hard and fast, managing to wrap up my assignment and get it priority-mailed from the post office before noon, after which Tom and I took a walk while Beth visited friends in Provincetown. It was a warm, clear day and the faux-Florentine tower in P'Town looked like a stone needle pricking the sky. Tom took my hand and we nudged hips. When he feels like it, he can be very sexy. “I'm over fifty,” I said. “When you were a boy, did you ever think you'd be sleeping with a woman half a century old?”

“You're not old,” he said.

“Maybe not ancient, but you haven't answered my question. Did you think…”

“Of course not,” he said. “How about you?”

“I always liked older men,” I said.

“My God,” he said as we got near enough to the monster house to make out details invisible from a distance. “What are those gizmos under the eaves?” We walked across the dune and up the short wooden staircase slapped against the dune until we got close enough to make out details: the gizmos were small carved versions of shore birds, nestled up close to the overhang of the roof. “And get a load of that tower. Rapunzel is about to let her hair down from that window. What do they need a tower for? You'd think, given what happened last year, folks would draw back a little.”

Towers, I told him, were this year's architectural necessity. “There are a few more between here and Well-fleet if you want to go look. Your house isn't complete without it has a tower. Now you understand why Beth and I are so upset. This place belongs in a theme park.”

“We're trespassing,” Tom said.

I shrugged off his misgivings.

We saw the house's owner before we heard him and, apparently, he had seen us before we saw him—the man I'd seen on the beach, the one with the eyebrows like mustaches, had pulled open a slider and come out to see who was invading his space. The fancy poodle stood by his thigh. Marshall growled in a token sort of way and turned himself around to study some newly planted beach grass. The man said, “Can I help you?” in a voice that implied he'd prefer to shoot us.

Tom approached and stuck his arm straight out. There was no way the man could have avoided shaking the hand on the end of it. “Hi,” Tom said. “I'm Tom Faber. This is my wife Danforth—Dannie. We live in that humble house over there.” He pointed in the direction of our house, whose only visible element was the peak of the roof.

“Mitchell Brenner,” the man said. “Met your wife on the beach the other day.”

“Well,” I said, “not quite met.”

“Can I show you around?” Something had apparently made him change his mind about us. Probably pride of ownership had got the better of a naturally brutish personality.

I nudged Tom and said, at the same time, “We'd love to see it. Are you sure we're not disturbing you?”

Mitchell Brenner assured us we were not, although I sensed, from his briskness, that he had important business to conduct. He guided us through room after sterile room. In apologizing for the unfinished look of the place, he told us the outfit he'd ordered furniture from had managed to misdeliver, or not to deliver at all, the remainder of the furniture. He expected it by midweek. He cursed half under his breath, then looked at me to see if I'd heard. There was a five-person, L-shaped off-white leather couch in the living room, but nothing else. He made us poke our heads into five bedrooms, two of which had bedsteads with naked mattresses in them. The master bedroom was over twenty feet long and, like rooms in the rest of the house, featured a sort of pickled walnut stain on the floorboards. One wall was covered with mirrors. Lying in bed, the Brenners had that best of all views: the bay and Provincetown in the far distance. He guided us to the doors of four bathrooms, gleaming and barren, and an entertainment center with a gigantic wall-mounted plasma television set, speakers, DVD, VCR, and God knows what else. “We're going to install the dish next week,” he said. My heart fluttered at this, but I managed not to let my dismay show. “And this is my rogues' gallery,” he said, opening a door to a room off some room or other; there were so many I couldn't keep track of what he said each was used for. This was a smallish room with one clerestory window. The walls were almost hidden beneath framed eight-by-ten photographs of Brenner standing next to an assortment of celebrities and smiling as if he'd just had spectacular sex. Brenner and Dan Quayle, Jack Valenti, Britney Spears, an Arab sheik in full regalia; Henry Kissinger, Margaret Thatcher, Slobodan Milosevic, Michael Eisner (I had to be told who this person was), Princess Di. With Di he wasn't smiling but looked properly grave. Michael Jackson wearing a face mask. “All these folks stayed at one or the other of my hotels. Did I mention I own hotels? Seven of them. Three are in California and the Middle East, not the safest place in the world, but somehow they manage to keep running at capacity.” So it wasn't malls, it was hotels. He pointed to a stack of leather-bound albums on top of a chest made to look rough-hewn but, as a reader of shelter magazines, I figured to cost in the two-thousand-dollar range. “I've got some more pictures if you'd like to take a look…” For a moment Brenner seemed appealingly needy. Then he snapped out of it. “Another time.”

And on we went, into the kitchen, an area rather than a room, equipped with yards and yards of high-end counters topped by Corian. It had two double sinks, two ovens, a built-in microwave, a stainless-steel refrigerator, probably one of those subzero numbers and larger than a phone booth. Also a trash compacter. A small TV sat on the counter, ready to entertain its owners or the cook who worked for them. I thought he might apologize for having so much expensive equipment, but the opposite happened. “Ruthie's a whiz at this sort of thing,” he said. “This kitchen is her baby.” I understood Ruthie to be the wifey. I asked Brenner, who by this time had asked us to call him “Mitch,” if his wife was here. “Not at the moment,” he said.

We climbed a circular staircase to the tower. The view was all around us, a panorama of water and land, hills and a couple of boats bobbing prettily on nonthreatening waves.

“Isn't that something?” Mitch said, and there was no doubting his sincerity. He appeared to be wallowing in the beauty of a view some people would cheat, steal and maybe even kill for.

He needed a shave, but he had been Eddie Bauered or L.L.Beaned in the casual mode; the giveaway for me was

that everything looked as if he had put it on for the first time that morning—tan barn jacket, chinos, over-the-ankle boots with laces. He obviously hadn't learned that the true Truroite is recognizable by how long he or she can drive one car and wear clothes before they start to disintegrate. Or maybe he had learned and thought it was stupid to wear old things when you can buy perfectly good new ones.

I looked closely but covertly at Mitch, trying to guess his age. Judging from the lines around his mouth and eyes, and the loose skin on his neck, he was probably in his mid-to-late fifties, like Tom, but, unlike Tom, he was almost as trim as a boy and could be one of those men who work out obsessively to keep an incipient paunch in check. He had a mean mouth and close-set, unusually bright eyes, and those amazing eyebrows. There was something unpleasant about him—other than that he had built this offensive house—that made me certain I wouldn't want to work for him.

On our way back down the beach, with Marshall indulging in side expeditions along the dune looking for discarded picnic crusts to eat, Tom and I agreed that Mitch had done nothing that anyone could call obnoxious or even impolite. “He was proud of the place,” Tom said. “He probably thinks we're envious because we only have one and a half bathrooms.”

“And the countertops are cracking and stained,” I said. “Well, I'm envious of his countertops.”

I think Tom had difficulty believing this. “But it's not important,” I said. “Rather our way than his.”

“Do you think there's something inherent, maybe programmed into the human mind, that makes us need to rank ourselves higher than our neighbor, if not for wealth, then for moral muscle?” Tom said.

“You're the anthropologist,” I said, “so you should have the answer to that one.” Tom shrugged and changed the subject to our president, whom neither of us could seem to accept—although Gore would have been a less than lovely alternative. To me, Bush 2 was like a doctor you're consulting whom you suddenly suspect never graduated from medical school. Tom said he was a “stumblebum. He can't even talk. And it's not a good time for working folk.” We didn't disagree about the Republican Party, although he came at his opinion from one place and I from another.