by Anne Bernays
“Young love,” he said, more or less under his breath. Why couldn’t he be a little more empathetic? I knew for a fact that he had had his own youthful heart broken more than once before I came onto the scene.
“She’s almost thirty,” I said. “That’s young compared to us. It’s not so young in the larger scheme of things.”
“You’re not going to start on that biological clock stuff are you?”
“As a matter of fact, I wasn’t. She’s got quite a few minutes left.”
After lunch, Tom took a couple of academic journals out to the deck to read there, and when I went to join him a few minutes later, he was asleep with a magazine across his thighs and his head lolling against the cushion. Like Mitch, he hadn’t bothered to shave and I noticed that some of the hairs sprouting on his cheeks were white. Old and tired. I still thought of Tom as a shy youth. Full of mental bounce and the seeds of immortality. I was obviously wrong. He still had a few years to go before sixty; at what point would he step over the line that divides middle age from old age? Would he end up gaga and/or in a wheelchair? Would he drool? Could I take care of him faithfully? Would I want to?
Meanwhile, Beth seemed to have cheered up a degree or two. “I’m going to call my brother and see if he’ll come down for a day.”
A few minutes later she reported, “Mark can’t come. His band’s got a gig in some Somerville bar tonight. When was the last time he was here?”
“Fourth of July weekend,” I said. “The same last time you were here.”
“I told him about Andy,” Beth said.
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Hallelujah.’ What’s the matter with all of you? You hate my boyfriend!”
“Beth, dear child, we don’t hate Andy. And anyway, hasn’t he left? Didn’t you yourself say it was all over?”
“I hate when you call me ‘dear child,’” Beth said. Then, in a voice reedy with strain she told me that when Andy left he was in one of his moods. This was the first time she had admitted Andy was moody. But then she changed her tack and said that he would probably get over it and come back to her. They had so much in common. They liked the same movies and music; they liked, well almost, the same things to eat. His opinions about most things matched hers exactly. “Isn’t that important, almost as important as great sex?”
I nodded, afraid that if I started to talk I’d get into something I’d rather not have her hear—such as my view of Andy as someone incapable of thinking about the other person, except insofar as the other person made him look good, someone wrapped up in himself like a little boy, a spoiled little boy. “Do you want to hear what I really think, or do you want me to say what I think you want to hear?” At this Beth looked surprised. Maybe she was unaware that I was willing to be devious for her sake.
“I don’t really know,” she said. “Maybe I don’t want to hear what you really think.” I didn’t want to scare her off, but my God, she was twenty-nine years old; when, if ever, was she going to learn how to use the tools life had given her—intelligence, humor, judgment, flexibility? Once, she had been the most resilient member of the Faber family. She was the one who told us the new jokes and brought her friends around to crash in sleeping bags on the floor. Now look at her: disabled by pain. Was it Andrew’s fault? I had only words at my disposal while she had pain. Pain trumps words. It wasn’t lost on me that she had come up here to embrace mother and father and substitute parental devotion for whatever it was that Andrew gave her.
It seemed I couldn’t go to bed without one more call from Raymie. “That man I told you about, Lyle Halliday—if that’s his real name—well, he split without paying his fucking bill,” she said.
I asked her what she was going to do and she said she was going to report it. “It’s not exactly grand larceny, but you wonder—what kind of person does that? I knew he was bad news from the minute he got out of his car. There was something nasty about him.”
“Poor Raymie,” I said.
“I don’t want you to feel sorry for me,” she said. I told her I couldn’t help it.
“How much does he owe you?”
“Two nights, that’s two hundred bucks. Two big—and I mean big—breakfasts. He ate nearly half a pound of bacon each time—that’s another five dollars. It’s not the money…”
Whenever anyone says “It’s not the money,” it most emphatically is. But in any event, Raymie was out two hundred plus dollars and felt, as you do whenever someone steals from you, violated. “I could kick myself,” she said. “He said he was going to spend another night and then, when he wasn’t back by ten-thirty, I went up to his room to check it out. His room was empty, no sign of his ever having been there.”
“I thought you said he hadn’t brought anything with him,” I said, feeling like a mean cop.
“Well, he bought a couple of things while he was here—a hideous polyester sweatshirt and a couple of girlie magazines…”
“You know everything, don’t you?” I said this in a voice meant to tell her I thought she was sharp rather than nosy. She took it as such. “What an asshole,” she said. “You know, in all the time I’ve had this place, no one has ever stiffed me before.”
“You must be blessed,” I said.
The next day, Sunday, I drove over to see Raymie, leaving Tom with his journals. By this time Raymie had lost some of her fury and was busy cleaning up after breakfast for two guests. “Blueberry pancakes,” she said. “I had to buy frozen berries. They think ’cause it’s the Cape that we have berries year-round.”
I asked her if she’d spoken to Pete Savage, her friend on the police force. Not only spoken to him but had gone to the police headquarters where she signed a complaint that fingered Halliday—or whatever his name was. Savage told Raymie the amount of money she was out was too small to trigger an official investigation. Just petty larceny, no big deal. “He told me there are so many similar incidents every summer that they’d had to upgrade their computer’s memory just to keep the database on shoplifters and people who stiffed their landlords up to date.”
“We seem to attract weirdos,” Beth said.
“One of my guests claims our zip code is bad luck, the number’s—get this—Satanic. I told him I’d lived in 666 for a decade without anything dire happening, and I suggested that people who live their lives using superstition as a handbook were wasting a hell of a lot of energy. Well, I didn’t exactly say it that way. I just told him I wasn’t superstitious.”
When I got back to our house, I told Tom what had happened.
Tom’s response: “She needs a boyfriend. She should have had children.”
This wasn’t exactly what I expected, and its simplicity—and its implied sexism—ticked me off, but I resisted the urge to tell him so. But then, as I began to think about it, I realized that he was probably right; children certainly focus your mind—even when you’d rather be thinking about something else. It never ends.
Tom spent the rest of the day doing chores I didn’t feel up to, activities that involved lifting, hammering, replacing, gathering of heavy objects. He’s never liked this sort of work especially, so I was properly grateful. “Do you have to go back?” I said as we sat on the deck after dinner. I knew he had a class to teach the following day, but I asked him anyway.
“You know I do,” he said. “And Mark’s meeting me for dinner.”
I said something about September being the best month on the Cape.
He knows how I feel about spending the fall here, when one layer of the community—the summer people—is shed like the skin of a snake, leaving us to what’s raw and thereby lovely underneath. Is it “realer” or is that just my imagining? Fantasy or not, as soon as the summer people leave, I wake up happier, feeling more like a natural child—although that too is a fantasy.
“I’ll be back next Friday,” Tom said. I thought he was about to reach for my hand, but I was wrong.
Beth was still asleep when I got up at six the next morning with To
m, brewed a pot of coffee and scrambled some eggs for him. The eggs come from one of the few working farms left on the Outer Cape. I find it peculiar how we adhere to these old-fashioned emblems: eggs dropped directly into our palms, well water; shampoo made with distilled essence of something—as if they made any real difference in our lives, already so fraught with risk: cars hurtling down Route 6 (I knew personally four people killed on the spot in Route 6 accidents); maniacs with mini atom bombs inside suitcases; AIDS. “Fresh from the farm,” I told Tom as I served them up with six-grain bread and homemade blueberry preserves (homemade by someone else). He ate quickly, mumbling something about not being quite prepared for his first class. The shadow of anxiety crossed his features. “You’ll do fine,” I said. “You always have.”
After he left, I realized that my spirits—pretty bright that morning—were no different with him gone. I didn’t mind his leaving. This frightened me. That some kind of worm had crawled into the apple was a reality I couldn’t ignore. When a marriage goes sour, it doesn’t do it all at once; it does it over days, weeks, months, maybe years, so gradually that you’re not sure you’re not imagining things. My cousin Caroline, a woman I rarely see precisely because of what she said to me, said to me that the reason Tom and I stayed married when everyone else seemed to be on their second or third spouse was that we were apart so much. “You’re not lovebirds at all,” Caroline told me. “You’re ships that pass in the night.” I hadn’t asked for her opinion. I sent her a postcard: “Congratulations. You’ve just won our Tactless Remark of the Month Award. You have been automatically entered in our annual contest.” The next time I saw her, she pretended not to see me.
When Beth came out of her room, bed-headed and sleepy-looking, like the little girl she was long ago, I wanted to hug her. “Has Dad left already?”
“It’s after nine,” I said. “He’s already in the classroom.”
“Don’t you mind it when he leaves?” she asked me.
“Sure I do,” I said. “But look, if I were back in Watertown, I wouldn’t be seeing him during the day anyway. This way, I get to be here, and you know I like being alone to do my work and take my walks, to do my little things. And to think.”
Beth, clever girl, looked at me as if I was hiding something from her—as I was. I told her I had to get to work on another assignment, this one from Little, Brown, not due for another three months, but I’m the sort of person who, if she doesn’t work every weekday, falls into sloth and indolence.
Beth left for a beach walk; she was doing a lot of thinking herself and sorting things that I guessed were not easily sortable. Sighing for her, I reread the book I was supposed to be illustrating for about the tenth time, trying to pull in ideas from wherever it is ideas reside. The story was about a ten-year-old boy named Chris who flies from Philadelphia to San Francisco by himself, changing planes in Chicago. Like so many books I do the pictures for, this one contains an upbeat message: you can do anything you put your mind to, even something so scary you can hardly breathe. What bothered me about the story was that nothing unexpected happened. Chris’s mother deposits him on the plane with a pile of games and reading, the flight attendant puts him on the second plane, his grandmother meets him at the San Francisco airport. He eats three times, goes to the bathroom twice, talks to the nice man in the next seat, walks through O’Hare, browses in a gift shop where he buys a key ring for his mother. That’s it. No missed connections, no turbulence, not a moment of suspense. If and when I have grandchildren, I’m not going to read them Christopher Is Airborne. It’s Grimms’ fairy tales or Struwwel-peter or nothing.
Beth came back just as I was finishing up my work. The beach had been almost hers, she reported. It was like having your own private seashore, except for this one man who made her feel weird. He kept staring at the monster house, then walking away, then walking back and staring some more. “When he saw me, he looked at me that funny way, like he was seeing and not seeing me at the same time. It was, like, I was there but invisible.” I asked Beth what the man looked like. How old did she think? How was he dressed? Without having laid my eyes on Raymie’s thief, I was pretty sure the man Beth had seen and Lyle Halliday were, as Sherlock Holmes might say in one of his moments, “one and the same.”
Right away I got Raymie on the phone. Then I put Beth on with her. Beth talked excitedly to Raymie, then hung up. “It’s him!” she said, caught up in the thrill of this pursuit. “She’s going to get in touch with the P’Town police and then come over to Truro.”
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?”
Chapter
3
WHENEVER 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?
