Trophy House (5 page)

I suggested we go back down to the beach. When we got there, the man had vanished. “Bummer,” Beth said. “I was looking forward to a little excitement.”

She was not to be disappointed. As we drew closer to the house, we saw a man strapped into a narrow chair being lifted up the stairway that connected house and beach, by three men, one guiding the other two, the actual carriers. A woman I guessed was Ruthie, the wife, brought up the rear, waving her arms and yelling something I couldn't quite make out. “That's Mitchell Brenner,” I said.

“You mean the guy who owns that horrible house?”

“That one. He looks like he was hit by a bus.”

“Let's find out what happened,” Beth said.

“I don't think so.”

“Why not?”

“I can't tell you exactly. It just doesn't seem like the right thing to do. We hardly know him, and I haven't even met her. Come on, we'll go back to the house, where I'll bet you anything the phone will be ringing.”

We walked back up the beach. Shaky from what we had just seen, I poured each of us a glass of wine. I couldn't throw off the feeling that things were out of control, that there were too many creases on the once-smooth sheet of my Truro life. The anniversary of the catastrophe in New York, Beth's pain, Raymie's theft, the accident down the beach. I felt as if time were quickening, as if the planet were turning on its axis too fast and the centrifugal force would spin us off its gravity. I held on to the counter and said, “What next?”

W
HENEVER I'M FACED
with something I can't understand, I open the door of her cage and release my imagination. She still flies with relative ease, though her wings are somewhat frayed. I think she enjoys the pain involved in drawing the most lurid picture to explain it: buckets of blood, jagged edges, buildings turned to rubble, flames, torn bodies, corpses strewn over the landscape. Because whatever money I make, I make by using my imagination, and because this picturing the ugliest possible scenario is a habit of long standing—triggered, I'm certain, by the scene in the movie of
Gone with the Wind
where men writhe on the ground, shrieking, outside an Atlanta hospital—I went with the worst possible scenario: someone had tried to kill Mitchell Brenner—and probably because they hated his house.

Sometime later Raymie drove over from P'Town, parked her car at Ryder Beach and walked up to the Brenner place, where she was told to leave “
now
” by two Truro cops as they symbolically contained the property in yellow plastic tape—“Crime Scene.” But before she did that, she was on the phone with her pal, the Provincetown cop, who told her that someone had splashed blood—or pretty good red paint—all over the front of the Brenner house, buckets of it apparently. Then he'd taken a large brush and written
JEW PIG
on the front door. “Nice, huh?” Raymie said.

“Yes, but how did Brenner end up hurt?” I said.

“Apparently, he caught sight of Halliday just as he was taking off and ran after him. He slipped on the stairs and fell halfway down. They think he broke one or both legs pretty bad.”

I was surprised to hear that Mitch Brenner was Jewish. “I'm not sure whether he is or isn't,” Raymie said. “But that creep, Halliday, apparently isn't. Fucking anti-Semite! What's happening to this place? Things like this never used to happen.”

I reminded her about the Tinkham murder, still unsolved. The idea that Halliday was loose in the neighborhood made me extremely nervous. Raymie said, “Can I have some of that?” pointing to the wine. I got her a glass. She sat down on the couch and slipped into a thoughtful mode. “And speaking of Jews,” she said, “that yellow tape made me think of an eruv. That's a hugely long piece of string observant Jews use to sort of cordon off an area—sometimes an entire town—inside of which they are permitted to violate rules of the Jewish Sabbath. My cousin Ellen married an Orthodox Jew—and incidentally got read out of the family until she got pregnant. Then all was forgiven. Ellen told me about this eruv thing. It's basically a weasel, if you ask me. Either you obey the rules or you don't. You shouldn't try to get around them. I said as much to Ellen and she had the nerve to tell me I wouldn't understand. Don't you love it?” Raymie—who feels right at home in my house—got up and made us some iced tea. “I probably shouldn't be saying this, but this Brenner guy with his fat wallet and bad attitude was asking for it.”

“You sound like one of those redneck judges who tell the rape victim she was wearing ‘inappropriate' clothes…”

“Something like that,” Raymie said.

“I think that's BS, if you don't mind me saying so,” Beth said. “The girl doesn't ask for it.”

“Never?”

I didn't enjoy hearing Raymie talk like this. A new Raymie. Where had she come from? And, more to the point, why? Or maybe she had been like this all along and I was too dense to see it.

For the second time since the end of August, Raymie had no paying guests. She tried to pretend it didn't matter, but I could tell she wasn't exactly thrilled about it. She needed the money.

The three of us sat around, suspended in inactivity and small talk while the afternoon wore itself out. I called Tom, who said he was sorry he wasn't here with me. “Please don't let it get to you, Dannie. If I tell you it's not really our business, I know what you'll answer so I won't say it. But try not to overreact.” This struck me as a supremely silly instruction. How else could I be expected to act when something awful happens to a neighbor, no matter how unappetizing he happens to be?

We ignored the gorgeous sunset and then, I suppose inevitably, as anniversaries always stir up the unconscious, started talking about what had happened a year ago. “It's like there's this big gray shadow over us, the way it was in the City. Even here, where we're probably safe,” Beth said. It had taken me two days to reach her by phone. By the time I finally got through to her, I was a basket case. She was horribly upset; from her office window she had seen the towers go down.

We ate a meal of leftover vegetables piled on angel hair spaghetti—pretty good, if you ask me. I sometimes think I should change my game and be a chef. We tried to talk about other things and kept returning to Mitch Brenner and his house, as if talking about it would hold it steady. At one point I said, “Most of the time, we don't get to see anything really awful. We know someone who knew someone who saw a crime being committed, but that's already one step away. People like us are cushioned. Somehow we manage not to stumble over the corpse on the beach. I know all these people are killed on Route 6, but I've never actually seen a car crash.” Raymie said she'd seen one and that it was nothing you'd want to remember. “The driver's head was sheared off not twenty feet from where I'd stopped my car. You know that place where you're making a left-hand turn across the opposite lane, to get to Wellfleet Center? Well, this guy was in a convertible and he ran a red light and this other car was making the turn and they crashed head-on. I still see it sometimes when I can't sleep at night…” Beth, it turned out, had been near enough to get the visual gist of a knife fight between two teenagers in Tribeca. “They took one of the kids to the hospital,” she said. “You know how they say ‘It left me shaking'? Well, it left me shaking—and I didn't even know them.” I thought of her living in a place where people settled disagreements with knives and it made me tremble for her.

“How come you never told me that before?” I said.

“I guess I forgot,” she said. But I'm certain she meant she didn't want to have to deal with my anxiety, a faculty that occasionally gets out of hand.

Raymie's cell phone did an aria. She pulled it out of her purse, unfolded it and answered. She listened briefly, then said, “They took Brenner to Hyannis. Pete says it's both legs, but they think he's going to be okay.”

I thought how convenient it was for Raymie to have a direct line to behind-the-scenes at police headquarters. “By the way, Pete's fairly certain it was Lyle Halliday,” Raymie said. “All the pieces fit.”

“It fits too well,” I said. “It's too obvious.”

“No such thing as too obvious,” Raymie said. “Haven't you read Sherlock Holmes?”

“I know,” Beth said brightly. “He hated the trophy house. He couldn't stomach what it stood for. He was like an activist, an ecoterrorist and a Nazi. To say nothing of his being a whack job.”

“Interesting combination,” Raymie said.

“We don't know anything yet,” I said, more upset by what had happened than I probably should have been. Violence had stopped in at Truro again for the second time in just over two years. Why should we be exempt? We pride ourselves on leaving our front doors unlocked and being able to stand in the moonlight without fear of being mugged. Excepting the Tinkham murder, nothing dire had occurred here in more than thirty years, not since a nut named Costa went on a killing spree and buried two of his female victims in the local cemetery. It's not exactly pride—it's more like complacency.

Finally, around ten o'clock, Raymie left and Beth and I went to bed. Whenever Tom wasn't here, I swung my legs over to where he should be lying, half-liking the emptiness. After a few rough years we had arrived at our accommodation together. It was a plan that fell short of perfection for both of us, but if we hadn't decided on a split life, the only other choices would have been for one of us to cave completely or else get a divorce.

 

When I woke up the next morning, I knew right away, from the brightness of the light inside our bedroom and the way it boldly crossed the floor and hit the glass over a watercolor of Provincetown Harbor, where human dwellings are the size of baby snails—but you can tell exactly what the artist saw and why he wanted you to see it this way—I knew it was one of those crystalline days that happen mostly in April and early fall. When I looked out over the bay, I thought I had only once before, exactly a year ago, seen a sky so coherently blue; the blueness seemed double-strength and there wasn't a wisp of cloud or haze to blot it. Beth noticed it too. “Just like last year,” she said. “We don't have skies like this in New York very often. Sometimes I don't know why I like living there.”

“You can't eat the sky,” I said. “You can't hold a conversation with it. You can't make a living off it.”

Beth wouldn't let me fix breakfast for her, not even put a slice of bread in the toaster. “You don't have to treat me like a guest,” she said. “Just do your thing. I'll be fine.” I asked her what she was going to do all day. She said she was going to get some rays and read a book without a single redeeming social value.

“You're not fed up with your job, are you?” I said. I couldn't, myself, imagine writing about lip gloss and acne cream all day without slipping into a self-loathing mode.

“I don't know what I am,” Beth said, and I got the sense that her uneasiness had everything to do with Andy's leaving her; she was suffering from prefeminist abandonment syndrome. “Maybe I'll like go make a shitload of money somewhere,” she said. “I've got the credentials.”

I told her that I was going to take Marshall for a beach walk before I started working and that she knew where everything was, didn't she?

“Mom, please, just go.”

I grabbed a jacket and went down to the beach. Coming abreast of the Brenner house, I saw the yellow tape fluttering slightly in the breeze. The house seemed empty; it's odd, but you can tell when a house is unoccupied, just as you can sense when you're being stared at. I started up the wooden staircase and when I reached the top, I spotted a Truro police car on the land side of the house. A barely nubile cop was sitting in the driver's seat, reading a newspaper. He saw me before I had a chance to leave, unnoticed. He got slowly out of the car and stood looking at me across the top of the Ford Crown Victoria.

“Hi there,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“Nothing, really,” I said. “I live just a little ways down the beach. I was curious about what happened here yesterday.”

“They don't tell me that much,” he said. “But I do know this creepy guy from off-Cape splashed red paint all over this new house.”

I asked him if they had caught the guy.

“He got away,” the cop said. “Would you like a doughnut?”

I shook my head. “But thanks.”

“I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but you know Corn Hill?”

I nodded.

“Well, a couple of weeks ago it was Wednesday, no Thursday, I know because that's the day I got early shift and they sent me up to the Corn Hill parking lot to check it out. Somebody put these flyers on some cars left overnight. They said, like
BEWARE! DON'T LET THE JEWS TAKE OVER TRURO
. Something like that.”

“My God,” I said. “Do they know who did that?”

“Uh-uh.”

I asked him if he knew where Mrs. Brenner was. He didn't know that either. He was not exactly bursting with information.

Just then a piece of electronic equipment started crackling inside the car. “Gotta get that,” he said, and ducked inside.

I turned to leave. Nice kid.

As I walked back to my house, troubled by what I'd heard, I was sorry I hadn't accepted the doughnut.

The police were now certain that Raymie's erstwhile guest was the perpetrator. They were also thinking of charging him with attempted murder. But they had no hard evidence, as he had successfully covered both his previous and current tracks, making an efficient getaway, presumably off the Cape and into the great American landscape beyond. I wondered why he had chosen Truro in which to activate his spleen—I know, firsthand, similar monstrosities in easier places to get to and away from, like Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and on the North Shore. Actually, they're all over the affluence map. Sometimes what the new owner of a perfectly fine house does is tear it down and build another twice or three times as large on the same modest lot. They look as if someone had tried to squeeze a fat woman into a dress two sizes too small for her.

The phone lines from Hyannis to the tip of Provincetown were abuzz. Everyone was talking to everyone else about the vandalism and the anti-Semitism, and don't think for a minute that an awful lot of people didn't say the Brenners deserved it for violating the Lower Cape unpretentiousness code, predicting it would happen again, and furthermore they hoped whoever did it would escape punishment permanently—and hopefully go on to rid the landscape of the big-house blight. People felt that strongly.