After a few years of success, that business folded during the Depression; International Time went bankrupt leaving the local workers and imported Jews to fend for themselves.
What was left of the factory—a few acres of rotting cement, cracking brick and broken glass surrounded by rusty barbed wire—cluttered the landscape just beyond what was left of the once proud pier. There were perpetual rumors that the watch factory would be converted into upscale apartments for summer tenants, an ambitious plan complicated by the annoying discovery that its site was officially designated as highly toxic—corrupted by machine oils, acids, radioactive paint and other chemical carcinogens.
Shortly before Simon’s arrival, the government had paid for an attempt to remove a plume of sludge shaped like an octopus from under the factory’s foundation, and had certified that the building and its site were safe for human and animal habitation. Construction was about to begin on the new incarnation.
Oddly, Serene Harbor’s old-timers didn’t relish the idea of an apartment house replacing their town hulk; the factory was an eyesore, a poisonous mushroom, but it was their eyesore with a certain nostalgic appeal, something like having an ugly cousin in the family. They hired an independent testing company whose findings contradicted the government’s engineers, and all plans for the factory’s conversion were put on hold pending further study.
Despite the eidolon of bitter litigation, because of its valuable water view and the new popularity of Long Island’s South Fork, investors bought and sold the property many times. Every attempt at reconstruction had been blocked. Defending what was left of the watch factory was a classic example of the passion with which Serene Harbor defended its bullyweed identity. Unlike its neighboring postcard settlements—East Hampton, Amaganset, Water Mill and Sagaponack—Serene Harbor battled to avoid becoming a prime destination for the summer elite.
Within a few days of his arrival, Simon landed a part-time job at the Better Days Antique Shoppe on Revolution Street. He’d gone into the store to browse, having nothing better to do, lured by its collage-from-hell window display—a kaleidoscope of discards ranging from a decapitated Howdy Doody puppet to a collection of German beer mugs decorated with fat peasant girls dancing with assorted beasts from the Black Forest.
There were cracked stained-glass window panes, a school desk missing its seat, a rusty cow bell, a pile of lobster traps, paint-flecked duck decoys, a fireman’s helmet, a ship model without its masts, a torn crazy quilt made from flour and burlap sacks, a bucket of marbles, an iron tractor saddle, a bronze crucifix dangling from a red, white and blue ribbon, a stuffed frog, a box of utensils, seltzer bottles in pastel colors, an assortment of bracelets, necklaces and rings in the cubicles of a wooden type-setter’s tray.
Simon remembered his favorite academic, Ms. Tabitha Ulman, explaining the lure and allure of antiques, urging her students to consider that every object contained a numen, the trapped spirit of a former owner. Ms. Ulman carried an antique mirror in her purse claiming she could see shadows staring out at her through its oval of smoky beveled glass. Since then, Simon was respectful of what he’d once considered deified junk; he gave antiques the benefit of the doubt and listened for their whispers.
The inside of Better Times was like its window, filled floor to ceiling with rescued leftovers. At the back of the shop, sitting in an armchair behind a rolltop desk, reading a copy of Life magazine under light from a gooseneck lamp with a green shade, a large woman sat pretending to ignore him. Simon sensed that he was being closely watched, wondering what the woman thought he might steal. He was examining a photograph of Clark Gable framed inside a toilet seat when she pushed herself up from the chair on flabby arms and waddled toward him. “If you need any help, don’t be afraid to ask,” she said. “It’s what I’m here for.”
“Thanks,” Simon said.
“You’re the one who lives in the bus,” she said.
“How would you know that?”
“Everybody here knows everything. You wonder why we haven’t kicked you out of town? Curiosity. What are you doing in this part of the world?”
“Getting a feel for the place,” Simon said.
“Are you some kind of leftover hippie?”
“Why? You want to put me in the window?”
“A drag on the market.”
“I’m looking for a place to settle, at least for the time being. I like your town. It’s got good vibes.”
“Talk English if you don’t mind. What’s your name?”
“Simon Apple.”
“Wanda Hubbard. I own this store. And the rest of the house. I’ve lived here all my life. How old do I look to you?”
“Twenty-one,” Simon said.
“Close. Seventy-eight in the shade. Let’s not crap around. You want a job? Here’s the deal. Wednesday to Friday you watch the store while I go scouting for merchandise or just lay around upstairs playing with my vibrator. Saturday mornings you hold the fort while I drive around to scavenge yard sales. Sunday nights we both drive out to the county dump because you wouldn’t believe what the weekend people who live in those McMansions, the ones you read about in New York Magazine, call garbage.
“You get a room upstairs, utilities included, with kitchen privileges and space in my fridge. You can use the washer-dryer if you ever decide to change your underwear. You get paid thirty bucks a week by check on the books, or twenty-five cash, off. Your choice. Oh, you help with odd jobs like shoveling snow, mowing the lawn, bagging leaves, putting up Halloween and Christmas decorations, and delivering what needs to be delivered or picking up what needs to be picked up.
“Did I mention you don’t screw around with my granddaughter, Martha Marie, when she comes out to visit which is usually every few months because if you do I feed you to the gulls. Think it over before you agree. It won’t be easy. Martha Marie is a doll, a sweet tempered girl, all body and no brains, hot as a barbecue. She’s a former virgin who backs into doorknobs for kicks. You’re gonna be the first guy who backs away. Understood?”
“Understood.”
“Besides, I do not allow any form of spawning in my house under any circumstances because the thumping and moaning brings back too many happy memories that give me indigestion. My slogan is keep the past at arm’s length which might sound confusing coming from the mouth of a lady who sells antiques but life throws curves. I inherited this business from my mother and nothing better came along including Mr. Hubbard, may he rest in peace, and my two daughters they should drop dead. So those are my terms and conditions. Unless you’re a plumber, carpenter or a doctor you won’t get a better offer, not in Serene Harbor, not at this time of year.”
“Sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Simon said.
“Oh, I should have asked you if you’re in any trouble with the cops.”
“No trouble.”
“Drugs?”
“Nothing illegal.”
“Booze?”
“Maybe a few beers. After five.”
“Republican?”
“Independent.”
“Diseases?”
“Not that I know about.”
“Here’s a broom. Sweep the sidewalk. Then skip over to the market and get me a pack of Camels and a box of Oreos. They’re on special, one to a customer. I already filled my quota. Take this fiver. Count your change.”
71
Simon’s days at Better Times had a dreamlike quality. As winter closed in, very few customers jingled the bell hanging from the shop’s door. Most came because they were lost, looking for the way back to Route 27 that led to east to Montauk or west to New York. A handful were genuine antique addicts who explored every store that might hold hidden treasure.
He learned quickly to let the browsers browse in silence and to meet suspicious eyes wary of reproductions—not that there was much in the store anyone in China or Thailand would bother reproducing—with a cordial grin. Wanda Hubbard gave him leeway to drop any item’s price up to 40 perce
nt, but only after acting like he was a rube being raped by bargain hunters.
He invited shoppers to take their time, repeated stories about somebody finding an original copy of the “Gettysburg Address” glued to the back of some innocuous picture like the one of Clark Gable framed inside the well-used toilet seat, or an original Michelangelo sketch tucked inside a child’s picture book. “The other day I saw an article about a teacup from the Ming Dynasty, bought for fifty cents at the Brimfield flea market in Massachusetts, that brought a hundred thousand at auction!”
When wives and husbands disagreed about paying even the sale price for something like a salad bowl with ceramic ducks circling its rim, Simon would say, “Well, money is important but this bowl will give you pleasure for years and if you divide the dollars you spend by all those years, we’re talking about a few inflated dollars a year and you’ll own something that can be proudly displayed, and then passed down to future generations.” He found he had a real gift for salesmanship and won Wanda’s sincere praise when she tallied the day’s receipts, however meager. Meager was better than nothing in winter, and nothing was what she’d expected until the sun returned.
When the shop was as empty as its cash register, which was most of the time, Simon read books with warped covers that smelled like swamp water: novels, biographies, histories, volumes of poetry, cook books, comic books, anything handy. He opened brown, flaking newspapers with urgent headlines about crises as obsolete as hula-hoops that reminded him of his ancient Britannica. He studied sheet music, his fingers trying to follow notes and clefs that lay like drunks sleeping on railroad tracks. He sang their lyrics, gleeful and sentimental, about love in Paris, rain in London, rivers, including the mighty Mississippi, seductive Swanee and sensual Wabash, laments for soldiers fighting forgotten wars, hits from Fred Astaire movies and Broadway blockbusters, patriotic ballads, gospel favorites, standards by Crosby, Sinatra, Presley or the Beatles. Simon sang to amuse himself but also to test his voice against Dr. Mercy Merriweather’s warning that his use of Thumicsk might leach testosterone from his vocal cords and leave him sounding like a plucked pullet. Since Stalagamide had no effect on his condition, Simon’s hopes for recovery were fading fast.
On his days off, Simon drove out to Montauk, climbed to the top of its famous lighthouse and watched the ocean, nostalgic about his Viloxidril days and what might have been if he’d followed through on his plan to live under a sky of waves; he could have been in a meaningful relationship with a pike, wrapped in the tentacles of a giant squid, lolling on The Great Barrier Reef or lounging on a deck chair from the Titanic, trading war stories with a retired shark. He might have found Atlantis, the ultimate antique shop, and been hailed as a savior by a population of tuna, stingrays, sardines, shrimp, clams and crabs.
If he’d become a full-time sea creature before Aquathaline had erased his gills, after a few good years he’d probably have found himself skimming aimlessly through the world’s basement hardly noticing its bounty of bones and treasure, wondering about life among the air breathers, denied memory of the sweet wet furnace simmering between Polly Moon’s endless legs. Spiritually speaking, salmon sex had to leave something wanting.
Simon realized that second-guessing the past squandered the present, but so did watching television. Staring at the ocean—never changing, never the same, a puddle of liquefied eternity—linked Simon to a sense of mystery, tantalized him with unanswered questions, mingled hope with despair, roiled what he assumed was his soul, kindled hopes of immortality even as its corpse-laden beaches confirmed mortality, celebrated transience and permanence, echoed sentiments of awe and wonder, forced him to consider that even the sea was a slave to the pull of the moon. Looking out at that which seemed limitless conjured a brutal awareness of limitation.
Existence was a no-win situation. Without the foundation of logic, lacking any splinter of proof, with no crumb of circumstantial evidence to convince himself that creation was anything but the whim of a demented atom, Simon decided he’d rather be a living witness to ongoing mayhem than a drifting empty shell.
When he wasn’t watching the contradiction of tides, Simon walked the Hampton beaches, rode past cornfields and potato farms, watched horses jump and roll in thick grass, gaped at the castles of the super rich on estates the size of Central Park.
After work, he learned to play a passing game of pool at the Skull & Crossbones, the town’s off-season social center. Serene Harbor’s natives accepted his presence without obvious acrimony. If Simon was OK with “Mother” Hubbard, he was OK with them.
While there were usually a few women who hung out at the Skull & Crossbones bar, most of the patrons were big muscled laborers, and fishermen sporting tattoos of hot babes, angry lions, eagles in flight, wind-blown flags, and the names of wives or sweethearts current or former. They drank beers or boilermakers, smoked cigarettes, chewed cigar butts, talked sports, jobs, weather.
What surprised Simon was that the closest thing to serious conversation—the verbal glue stronger than the usual blather about lousy bosses or the good old days—were complaints about sprained backs, leg cramps, neck spasms, constipated guts, or the occasional busted stitch, broken bone or upcoming hernia operation. The citizens of Serene Harbor, descendants of Ahab and Starbuck, saw themselves as walking wounded.
While he listened to the click of pool balls scattering helter-skelter across dragon green table turf, Simon often had the feeling he was back in the hospital under intensive care instead of standing with a cue in his hand surrounded by jocks built like boulders. He hadn’t realized that even the frightened fragile wear tattoos, a truth hidden from the overprotected sons and daughters of Glenda.
That insight was both pleasing (he felt less of a freak, more one of the boys) and disappointing; Simon would have preferred not knowing that the resident hulks needed glycerin suppositories to coax what he would have guessed were industrial-strength rectums.
Another favorite topic was sudden death, sometimes from a heart attack that exploded the healthiest, hairiest chest but most often the result of a head-on collision down the highway toward Riverhead. If the victim was a distant relation, or only a slight acquaintance, there’d be no mourning at the bar beyond a moment of respectful silence. If the corpse was a regular at the Skull & Crossbones, then there were toasts, reminiscences, and a collection taken for the bereaved family. The really popular victims had their pictures posted on a bulletin board, and an American flag the size of a table centerpiece was lowered to half-mast.
For Simon, the great lesson of the Skull & Crossbones was that nobody is immune from things that go bump in the night or during the average day. As for things that go bump given half a chance, Wanda Hubbard’s granddaughter, Martha Marie, arrived in Serene Harbor on an evening when the first snow surprised the town.
Her unexpected visit came the week before Halloween. In the spirit of the season, dangling straw men, spiders with glittering eyes, cardboard skeletons, paper ghosts and goblins, pumpkins with candle-lit grins decorated doorways and windows. Somebody’d hung a large black bat from the tallest chimney of the abandoned watch factory. The window of Better Times displayed a mannequin from the 1940s wrapped in mummy rags.
When Martha Marie showed up, light from a wispy moon had turned a thin veil of snowflakes to what Simon saw as a shower of rhinestones. Serene Harbor wasn’t ready for the gift of diamonds. Mother Hubbard dispatched him to pick up Martha Marie at the Long Island Railroad station in Bridgehampton. Simon’s minibus skidded along frozen roads, its windshield wipers squeaking, its bald tires fighting for traction. When he reached the station, the train had already pulled out.
Simon wondered how he’d recognize his passenger. That concern was wasted. There was only one person waiting on the platform, a young woman standing close to a tilted lamppost. She was bundled into a ponderous fake fur that made her look like a porcupine. Simon honked his alto horn; the porcupine lifted a small shoulder bag, struggled with a large donut-shaped canvas
case on wheels, and moved toward the sound. Simon climbed down from the driver’s seat to help with her baggage. “You must be Red Riding Hood,” Simon said. “Your grandmother can’t wait to see you.”
“You must be the new person. Sorry to drag you out on a night like this.”
“Not a problem. Where I grew up this weather would be considered tropical. Hand me your stuff. I’ll stow it in back.”
“Be careful of my drums. They’re heavier than they look.”
“So, you’re a drummer? Interesting,” Simon said.
“Not very. Not yet.”
Inside the minibus, Simon waited while Martha Marie tried to buckle her seat belt. It wouldn’t fit around her coat. “Let it go,” she said. “Better a fiery death than dishonor. I got this stupid coat at a thrift shop in Brooklyn. It makes me look like a horse.”
“Porcupine,” Simon said.
“I’d rather a horse if you don’t mind.”
“A horse then. A Clydesdale. No disrespect intended. At least you’re a warm horse.”
“Tell me, new person, how can you stand working for my sweet Granny Hitler?”
“We get along fine,” Simon said.
“I never heard anybody say that. Are you from Tibet or what?”
“Or what,” Simon said. “This new person’s name is Simon Apple.”
“I’m Martha Marie Hoffer.”
“That I know. You mind if I smoke?”
“Why should I mind? Or was that a rhetorical question?”
In the light from a wooden match, Simon got his first clear look at Martha Marie. She was no beauty but she had a pleasant face. Under a barrage of frizzy yellow hair he saw large brown eyes and a wide mouth. A turned-up nose had been badly fixed—it had the pointy look of a high-heeled shoe with nostrils nearly large enough to inhale acorns, the product of assembly line surgery. Simon knew that identical nose from scores of coeds at Celadon College. That nose made her seem like an old friend.
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