Nantucket Sawbuck

by Steven Axelrod

  “Painting is the perfect job if you never grew up,” he said. “Where else can you clean things with dirt?”

  The main thing was, he didn’t yell.

  Tanya was used to men who yelled. Her sister Anna had been, too. Maybe that was why Anna got involved with Lomax in the first place.

  She knew Mike was attracted to her, but she soon found out that he was married and she kept the flirting low-key. She didn’t want any complications or distractions; she didn’t want to get sidetracked. She had a job to do and she was making progress. She was getting to know the two brothers, Danny and Eric, flirting with them, playing them off against each other, chipping at them for information, digging and brushing off each find like an archaeologist reconstructing an ancient city in the desert. She was making good progress. It would be criminally stupid to slow herself down with some useless infatuation.

  But that was exactly what had happened.

  She set her brush in the paint can and stepped back from the ladder with a sigh. She couldn’t concentrate this morning, and she wasn’t here to paint anyway. She was thinking about Mike Henderson all the time now. Any time when she wasn’t thinking of something specific—what to paint next, what to buy at the grocery store, what Diane Reem was saying to the author of the latest “extraordinary book” on NPR—she was thinking about Mike. Her mind was pulled there. His smile had its own gravity. She liked the tug of it, like the soft pressure on your knees and your thighs when you’re lying in bed on Sunday morning. The whole mass and rotation of the planet seems determined to keep you horizontal. She never really wanted to get out of bed and she didn’t want to stop thinking about Mike Henderson, either. It was a form of laziness. She didn’t have the energy to turn away.

  So instead she was doing this. She had gotten out of bed on Sunday morning to come here. Mike was meeting her. They were going to prime the spindles on the sweeping grand staircase. It was a two-person job, so it made sense to do it together. It also made sense to do it on Sunday when there would be no carpenters, Corian guys, electricians, plasterers, and plumbers crowding them and kicking up dust. In fact the site was deserted, just as Tanya had hoped it would be. She glanced at her watch. Mike was due any second. She bent down and untied her sneakers, toed out of them and pulled her socks off. The house was warm but the wood floor was cool. She unbuttoned her pants. Mike had been undressing her with his eyes for weeks, especially since she stopped wearing a bra under her T-shirt. Now it was time for the real thing. She wasn’t sure what she was hoping for. Did she want him to leave his wife? The morals of home-wrecking didn’t trouble her. Mike didn’t have kids and Tanya was Darwinian about marriage. Weak animals got predated by stronger ones; if his marriage was flimsy enough to be killed off by some stray girl and her ten-ounce Kegel weight exercises, it deserved to die—just like the slowest eland in the herd.

  Besides, if Tanya were doing the venal marriage hunt there was much better prey than Mike available. That was the last thing she wanted. She didn’t want to marry Mike; she could imagine him stumbling around some tiny apartment, reeling from his divorce, displaying all his bad habits and sanitary lapses at close quarters. He probably snored and left wet towels on the bed. No, it was nothing like that. It was much simpler than that.

  She pulled her T-shirt over her head.

  Maybe this would be bad and the disappointment would break the circuit in her head; maybe it would be so good that Lomax wouldn’t seem important anymore. Maybe it was just an itch and scratching it would allow her to concentrate. She didn’t know and it didn’t matter. The speculation would be over soon. She pulled down her panties and kicked them aside. She was naked in the big unfinished foyer of the Devil’s trophy house.

  After today she’d know.

  Chapter Seven

  Propositions

  Driving out to Eel Point on Sunday morning, Mike Henderson found himself thinking about the old Downyflake restaurant on South Water Street, near Hardy’s hardware, which was gone now, too, making room for clothing stores and antique stores and even a luggage store. He had never understood that one. What does a tourist on Nantucket need with luggage? Something to stuff all the hideous Lily Pulitzer clothes and Nantucket University sweatshirts into? The Nobby shop across the street had changed, too.

  It was all for different reasons, Mike understood that. The Hardy’s people had just retired and cashed out. The Nobby shop had been forced to bring the building up to code after a fire. And an explosion in the kitchen had wiped out the old Downyflake. But they were all gone, along with Robinson’s Five & Ten and Cy’s Green Coffee Pot. Cindy complained that there was nowhere to buy a thimble on the island anymore. It wasn’t just stores either; the airport had been given a makeover. It was bleak and sterile now, like the new Steamship Authority building. All the charm of the island was being scrubbed away or demolished. The Historical District Commission tried to protect the outsides of houses, but there was no law about the interiors. Why did rich people feel the need to ruin the things they loved? Maybe they couldn’t feel it was truly theirs until they had marked it somehow. Mike had been part of that process for a long time. He was part of the problem. All that new trim needed to be painted, all those new floors needed to be refinished. Mike had made a pretty good living from the rape of the island.

  He knew that his brother-in-law, Nathan Parrish, was planning to build a mall out in the moors near the Pout Ponds. He had sworn Mike to secrecy, but of course everyone knew about it. The island was too small and the news was too big. Mike had thought of begging Parrish for the painting contract, but the job was out of his league, and asking Nathan for favors would just brand him as a loser. You only got special treatment when you didn’t need it. He hated the idea of the mall, anyway. He knew that the Nantucket he loved was fading but fast, but a Kmart in the shadow of Altar Rock felt like a death blow.

  He didn’t want to be part of that. And he didn’t need Parrish—he had the Lomax job. Of course that was moral sleight-of-hand, too. Nathan had told him, extracting melodramatic vows of secrecy, that LoGran, Preston Lomax’s company, was one of the major investors in the Moorlands Mall. Everything was connected. Pretending to be above it was arrogant and silly. He could scarcely set himself up as a moral paragon. Here he was, driving to a deserted construction site to ogle some girl in her twenties. Of course he wouldn’t put a move on Tanya Kriel. She was almost half his age. It would be disgusting. It would be reprehensible. But he didn’t fool himself that way either. He had stayed true to Cindy during the worst times of their marriage, but it was a circumstantial fidelity. No woman had tried to seduce him; there had been quite a few he would have gladly gone to bed with if they had made the first move. But they hadn’t. So nothing had happened. Hardly something to brag about.

  The thought of Tanya Kriel putting his flimsy morals to the test made him queasy. She was so beautiful: austere Nordic features and a firm athletic body that approached human perfection. Of course Cindy couldn’t compete with that; Tanya was young, her presence radiated health and hormones and fertility, energy and eagerness and grace. He had never seen her make an awkward movement. She had worn absurdly short cutoff shorts all summer. She had dancer’s legs, supple and strong. He would catch a glimpse of the tendons in her thighs flexing as she climbed a ladder. It felt like sunstroke. She had caught him watching her, fighting to keep his eyes on hers as she pulled her shoulders back and stretched as they talked. Now it was winter, she was bundled up and the tension had slacked off a little.

  But she still stalked through his fantasies and speculations: what would he do if she did this, or that, if she touched him, if she said something unmistakable. Which of course she wouldn’t. It was all pathetic and sad. Even thinking about it was asinine.

  But the fact remained: He couldn’t turn down an opportunity to be alone with her for a few hours. He shrugged as he turned onto Eel Point Road. Was that really so bad? He had made love once with his wife in
the last three weeks, and just twice in the three months before that. He knew it for certain; he had started marking the dates on his calendar. He was horny and lonely, but daydreams kept him going. He was in jail and Tanya was the pinup on his jail-cell wall. Nothing wrong with that.

  He parked in the wide circle in front of the house. Tanya’s Ranger was parked at the other side of the driveway. He killed the engine and stepped out into the sharp northeast wind. He looked around. In the spring there would be about eighty thousand dollars worth of new plantings here, saplings and hedges and flowers. Now it looked raw and unfinished. He could smell the ocean. The harbor was a dark iron blue; the exact color of Tanya’s eyes.

  He braced himself and opened the front door.

  She was standing just inside, naked, and after the first shock of seeing her he could feel reality filling the gaps of his ardent but inadequate imagination: This is what she really looked like. Her nipples were darker, her stomach softer than he had guessed. There were no tan lines. She must have sunbathed nude all summer. She was absorbing the force of his undivided attention nervously. She was actually blushing.

  “Did I make a mistake?” she asked him.

  “No,” Mike said, “but I’m about to.”

  He stepped up to her, ran his hand across her ribs and up to cup her breast. At the first touch he could feel the combustion inside him, chemical fire, instantly out of control. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt this way. Maybe he never had.

  She took a step toward him and they were kissing.

  His clothes came off and they found their way to a pile of drop cloths. The thought scampered across the dark road of his mind that she had planned this carefully; but he was glad. It was good to lie down with her, on her. Her hands were moving over his stomach and his chest. He knew the concept of skin hunger but he was beyond that. He was ravenous. He was starving.

  So was she. So they devoured each other.

  After the first time, Tanya said “They delivered the beds yesterday. Let’s get comfortable.”

  They slipped upstairs to the king-sized mattress in the master bedroom. There was a drop cloth draped over it, but it slipped out from under them somehow as Mike grabbed the big oak headboard for leverage.

  It would have been perfect, except for a small catastrophic detail: Kevin Sloane, the youngest member of Mike’s paint crew, had left his iPod on the job, and he chose ten-thirty on Sunday morning to retrieve it. He recognized both of their trucks and when he slipped into the house, he heard them going at it upstairs. He found them easily and snapped picture after picture on his smartphone. Finally they noticed him. Mike jerked stiff, paralyzed. Tanya just stared. The moment had outdistanced their ability to react. There was nothing to do anyway.

  They were busted.

  Finally Kevin spoke into the shrieking silence. “Looks like I’m getting a big raise,”

  Then he turned and walked out of the house. It was going to be a really big raise.

  And that was only the beginning.

  Chapter Eight

  Fiona Donovan

  I’d been saving Fiona Donovan since the first day I met her.

  Today I was going to have to save her from herself.

  When I pulled into the parking lot of the Faregrounds Restaurant, she had a man’s head caught by the edge of her passenger-side window, the glass up to just under his chin, immobilizing him against the frame. Another eighth of an inch and he’d be strangling. She could probably decapitate him if she closed the window all the way, but I wasn’t going to wait around to find out. I trotted over to her old Jeep Wagoneer.

  I heard her voice first, that lilting Irish accent. “Now do you understand your attentions aren’t welcome?”

  “I urgh—” was all he could get out.

  “Roll the window down, Fiona,” I said.

  She spoke to her victim. “I need a better answer than that. Try to speak clearly.”

  “Yes,” He gagged. “Yes!”

  She released him as I walked around to the driver’s side. The man stumbled backward and fled.

  “Was that the man from Ram’s Pasture?”

  “One of his friends. Acting on the lad’s behalf.”

  I had met Fiona in October, hiking at Sanford Farm. Some drunken carpenter had been stalking her and they were in the middle of a shoving match when I came around a bend in the path. I grabbed him and shoved my badge in his face.

  “This is a public park,” he said. “I got a right to be here.”

  “Sure, you can be here. You just can’t talk to this woman.”

  “You can’t stop me.”

  “Yes I can. Consider this a restraining order.”

  He stared at me for a long moment. Then he started trudging back toward Madaket Road.

  She stuck out her hand. “Fiona Donovan.”

  “Henry Kennis. Chief of Police.”

  We shook. Her grip was strong. “And they say you can never find a policeman when you need one,” she said.

  “Well, on Nantucket we don’t have that problem. We’re working toward a one-to-one ratio, cops to citizens.”

  “That will be cozy.”

  “I hope so,”

  “Well I can do my part. Let me buy you a beer.”

  That’s how it began, and it had been moving along that easily ever since. Women were usually a lot more difficult—from my ex-wife Miranda to my old flame Franny Tate, who had told me flat out that she wouldn’t waste the airfare flying to the “outskirts of nowhere” to visit someone who had given up and chosen the life of a small-town loser. I don’t mind the label. Everyone on Nantucket except the few remaining natives had failed somewhere else before they wound up here. The place is like a bird sanctuary for dreamers and eccentrics.

  I walked Fiona into Faregrounds, now—the site of our first drink and our primary hangout ever since. Patriots football was super-charging the atmosphere of rowdy boosterism.

  She caught the bartender’s eye. “A Guinness and a Bud Light,” she said, just before Tom Brady threw a forty-nine-yard bomb to Rob Gronkowski, who caught it in double coverage and ran it in for a touchdown. The bar went wild. The Pats were playing Detroit and the game was a rout. That didn’t bother the half-drunk Nantucketers around us, but I knew Fiona preferred to watch a real contest.

  Half an hour later we were walking out into the snapping cold air. The wind had picked up. There was more snow coming.

  “I’m terrified of turning into an American,” she took my arm. “Some sort of fake attempted American, like the girls who live with me. Wearing Old Navy jeans. Reading idiotic magazines about celebrities. Using outdated surfer slang and pining for a Big Mac.”

  “I don’t think you have to worry about it,” I said.

  “I don’t even watch actual football anymore. Except the World Cup. And I’m losing my accent.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “I didn’t even know I had an accent until I came here.”

  “And all the men found it so devastatingly attractive?”

  “They do, don’t they?”

  “Well, I can’t speak for all of them.”

  We walked through the parking lot in silence. We passed her car and headed for mine. The wind was thrashing the trees, straight out of the northeast. We could hear the faint dark rumble of the ocean between the gusts.

  “So, did you like the poem?”

  “It was lovely. But I wouldn’t say it was particularly encouraging.”

  “No?”

  “I tell you life is too short. You try to cheer me up by saying it’s shorter than I think and I’m a bit of foam falling behind a ferry. For some reason that fails to brighten my mood.”

  “But it’s true.”

  “That’s not enough, Henry.”

  “It is for me.”

  She took my
hand and gave me a rueful smile. “Lucky man.”

  We walked along in silence for a while.

  “Come home with me?” I asked finally.

  “It’s your Sunday night with Tim and Caroline.”

  “They like you.”

  “They like having you to themselves. As you very well know.”

  “We could drive around for a while and make out.”

  “In a police car?”

  “Why not? We can park at Surfside, scare all the kids away.”

  “Not tonight. I have things to do and you need to get home. Doesn’t Miranda drop the kids off at five?”

  I shrugged. “Checkmate.”

  “Next week, I promise. Take me to dinner and ply me with liquor.”

  I laughed. “That should work.”

  “All right. I’ll ply you with liquor.”

  “Now you’re talking. Two glasses of wine and you can pretty much have your way with me.”

  I had tried getting her drunk on one of our first dates. I bought Irish whiskey and matched her shot for shot. She was very maternal and business-like, giving me a glass of water and wiping my face with a warm towel when I puked, and then putting me to bed. Her note the next morning had said simply, “Nice try.”

  “Wednesday night?” I asked her.

  “I’ll pick you up at seven. Dinner at the Boarding House. I’ll buy you a split of pinot grigio, and pounce.”

  We were at my truck. She stood on her tiptoes to kiss me. “Don’t be late.”

  I took off. As usual I felt she was keeping things from me—her true feelings, her plans and ambitions, the way she spent her time when were apart. But that was all right. In this gossip-ridden little town, the capital city of Too Much Information, Fiona’s secrets were a relief. What you don’t know, you can’t judge. I was happy to leave it that way.