Trophy House

by Anne Bernays

  “You know, Mitch, I still haven’t decided to live here year-round. I have this friend in New York—”

  “Her boyfriend,” Raymie said, interrupting me. “He wants them to get married.”

  “Why get married?” Mitch said. “Look at Raymie and me. We get along great. Why fix something that ain’t broken?”

  “You mean why buy a cow when milk is so cheap, don’t you?” Raymie said. Mitch went over to Raymie and fingered her bottom. At least I think that’s what he did; you couldn’t be sure, it happened so fast. But Raymie smiled indulgently.

  “Drink up,” Mitch said to me. “That’s the real French McCoy.”

  “Mitch, Dannie doesn’t have to be told.”

  Mitch invited me to sit down. I picked one of the leather armchairs. He asked me whether I’d decided to help them design the best little B & B on the East Coast—maybe in the whole US of A?

  Raymie said, “That’s why she’s here, Mitch.”

  “Well then, let’s get down to business.”

  “Can I ask you something, Mitch?” He looked at me with a trace of impatience. “Why do you want me to do this when there are plenty of professional decorators looking for work?”

  Was I fishing? No doubt. He told me that he and Raymie had chosen me because, as he put it, “you’re an artiste, you have an eye for what goes well with what, you’re not just out to rob the client blind.” At this, he pulled out a contract for me to read over and then sign. Every possible—and some implausible—contingencies had been included. I asked him if a lawyer had worked it up. “You betcha,” he said. “I don’t expect my lawyer to manage hotels. I don’t know much about drawing up a contract. I believe in getting the best advice. Experts.” I nodded. It was all right with me if my being “deceased” was one of the contingencies. Raymie said, “Mitch leaves nothing to chance, do you, honey?”

  I immediately thought of Lyle Halliday. “Did they ever catch Halliday?” I said.

  Mitch said, “How did you know? They apprehended him day before yesterday. He was living in this run-down cabin or shack house with about a dozen other whacked-out, like-minded individuals.” These were, he said, mostly men along with a few women (I figured them to be the food gatherers and dishwashers) who wanted to keep the earth pristine but also to wipe “mongrel” races off its face.

  “It’s about time we were mongrelized,” I said.

  “Whatever,” Mitch said. I don’t think he found this such a cool idea. “The little prick hates Jews, African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics.”

  “Latinos, Mitch,” Raymie said. “They want to be called ‘Latinos.’”

  “Whatever,” Mitch said. “In any case, these folks had a lot of firearms and manuals on how to manufacture explosives. They also found stacks of flyers—you know, the kind someone put on car windshields parked at Corn Hill last summer.”

  I said it was weird, the combination of environmentalist and neo-Nazi in the same person. Mitch said, “When you think about it, it isn’t that weird. They don’t want anyone doing stuff to the land.”

  “They want to keep it for Aryans?” I said.

  “And get this,” Raymie said. “This guy had a prior record. When he was a little kid, he’d been put away for a while for zapping small animals in his mother’s microwave oven.”

  “That’s cute,” I said, unable to block the picture my imagination produced. It was a black kitten. I felt sick.

  “They’re out there,” Mitch said, as if that made it all right. “What say we talk about our expectations for this house? We’re counting on you to make it a showplace.” I told him I would try not to disappoint him, although “showplace” was not exactly what I had in mind. I was still so rattled by the image of the kitten exploding inside the microwave that I had a hard time focusing.

  Raymie took over: “We want this place to be elegant but not showy,” she said.

  “I don’t know what you mean by ‘showy,’” Mitch said.

  “Of course you do, honey. Just think Ruthie.” This must have penetrated because Mitch nodded.

  “I guess Raymie told you, we want to pay you handsomely for a handsome job. This fee doesn’t include whatever monies you spend on furniture and the like. We also want you to keep an accurate record of everything you spend and on what. I mean, not just ‘bed,’ but a description of the particular bed.” Was he being nitpicky? No doubt, but it was his money so I guess he was entitled.

  We went over the contract sentence by sentence. My stomach growled just as Raymie said, “I’m going to fix us some lunch.”

  As soon as she left the room, Mitch asked me if I didn’t think Raymie was the best little old gal anyone could want to spend their days with. “She’s a regular jewel.” I smiled. Whether she was the best little gal or not, it was very nice that he thought so; it would make things easier as time lurched on.

  The lunch Raymie fixed was delicious and obviously planned well ahead: squash soup, crab cakes, mesclun salad, berries (frozen, thawed). Mitch and Raymie ate well. We talked for a while about my ideas for the house. I hoped to persuade them that I had given a good deal of thought to the matter but was in fact improvising as the soup went down. “I see mostly white, blue, and a bit of pale yellow.” I went on to say that the markup of antiques anywhere on the Cape was out of sight. On the other hand, if you bought things off-Cape, you paid an exorbitant price to get them trucked over the bridge.

  “Six of one, half a dozen of the other, eh?” Mitch said. “Look, Dannie,” he said, in a different tone altogether. “I don’t want to micromanage this project. That’s why we hired you.”

  I caught Raymie’s eye. She nodded almost imperceptibly. “Right,” I said. “I understand.”

  When I got back to the house, Beth was on the phone. She hung up when she saw me. Marshall went over and nudged her crotch. “Go away,” she said. “Nasty dog.”

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “Dad,” she said.

  “That’s nice, I’m glad you’re in touch.” I was dying to know what they had talked about but I didn’t ask; I held my tongue, difficult though it was.

  Beth wanted to know how it went. “I still can’t believe you’re doing this.”

  I told her it went swimmingly. I told her what we had talked about and stopped short of saying that I thought that Mitch, for all his gnomelike sensibilities, was not as awful as I once believed him to be. Could I have lived with him? No. Could I work with him? Probably. He struck me as being basically sensible when it came to business.

  “Don’t you want to know why I called Dad?”

  “Sure. Okay.”

  “I called to wish him happy birthday,” she said.

  “Oh my God. March twenty-first!”

  “It’s okay, Mom. You’re divorced. You don’t have to remember.”

  “I remembered for thirty-five years,” I said. Beth came over and threw her arms around me. I began to cry. She stayed with me until I calmed down, then she went off to Provincetown, to do what, I had no idea.

  I could no longer put off making up my mind. I had brought my Peter Pan work with me and worked like a beaver, chewing her way through log after log. It was going reasonably well. David called me twice a day, once before I started working, and again late in the afternoon as the sun sped toward darkness. The shoreline of the bay on the Outer Cape is the only place on the East Coast where the sun seems to set into the water. People come from all over, park their cars as close as they can get to the actual beach, and watch this display with open mouth. It’s easy to see why: wonder and resolution at the same moment.

  Around six o’clock, while Beth and I watched the news, David phoned. He told me he wanted me to come back to New York. “What else is new?” I said.

  “That’s mean,” he said. “Why are you doing this?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you’d take it as a joke. I meant it as a joke.”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “What don’t you know?” I did
n’t wait for his answer but told him I was planning to come back to New York in a couple of days, when “we have to talk.”

  “That sounds ominous,” David said.

  “It doesn’t have to be,” I said, knowing it was. What lay ahead reminded me of a line from a 1930s Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers movie, spoken earnestly by a Slavic malaprop: “It’s time to face the musicians.”

  “The musicians” was this choice: either I marry David or cut myself loose. It cannot be true, as I have been told, that if you have genuine trouble trying to decide between A and B, then it doesn’t matter which one you choose. For a while I had been almost, but not quite, persuaded by this bit of sophistry. I loved David but I was almost fifty-four. I didn’t see me fitting into the mold of newlywed. It was too goopy. It was too complicated. Tom could easily take all that on. In hindsight, I viewed my ex-husband (I think objectively) as oblivious to most of the complications life tosses at you without discrimination or fairness. He just went on doing his thing—and making it work out for him. It wasn’t like that for me. David was wonderful; every time I saw him afresh I melted exactly the way Beth had when Andy pleaded with her to come back to him. That lure is more dangerous than a riptide, especially when sex is in the mix, mainly because you can’t get your head straight.

  As I looked out the train window, I saw ugly Bridgeport through a film of tears. How do you know, until after your big chance has come and gone, what makes you happy—or some reasonable facsimile? By then it’s too late. “I never knew what true happiness was until I was married—and then it was too late.” This is a joke my father used to tell my mother from time to time until she ordered him not to repeat it again. “It’s stopped being funny, Ted,” she told him.

  The minute I walked into David’s apartment, I knew I just couldn’t live there. The place didn’t smell like home, and an air strange and unfriendly surrounded me, as if I were seeing it for the first time. There was his couch, his lamp, his art on the walls—he liked abstractions with broad patches of muted color that bled into each other. They were perfectly okay of their kind, but they weren’t what I would have bought—too hidden. David was waiting for me. He was wearing a sweatshirt and chinos and hadn’t shaved for a couple of days—a Tom Cruise sort of look that turns me on. “Come here and give us a kiss,” he said as soon as I put my bag down. As soon as our mouths convened, he started trying to pull off my jacket. “David,” I said.

  “What is it?”

  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.

  Chapter

  12

  DAVID 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 m
ore 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.