Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories

The First World

NUMBER ONE, I am writing this because the people on this island hate me and they don’t even know me. Number two, they are bound to write the most awful things about me after I am dead, which might be soon. Number three, I don’t give a damn but the woman in question is innocent and not able to defend herself.

I returned to Nantucket and brought my money with me, because as a boy I had worked summers on the island and been treated badly by rich privileged people. Not revenge — I had never envied them enough to want revenge. I wanted something for myself. I had worked hard my whole life, built a company, ran it, and finally sold it. Isn’t the whole point of starting a business in America to sell it at a profit? Retiring to Nantucket island was my reward. I needed in old age what I had craved as a child.

I saw hot-faced kids cutting grass or washing cars and I grieved for the boy I had been, not knowing where my life would lead. There are few situations more frustrating for a young man with no money and no prospects than working for an older man who has everything. It is the condition of a Third Worlder toiling for a billionaire, the cruel proximity, the daily reminders. It was suggested—“Don’t stare, Jimmy!”—that I avert my eyes when the man’s daughter appeared; I had to acknowledge that I was out of her league. Naturally her father was self-made, something in electronic goods, at a time when such things were still made in America. This dumb Mick from Southie regarded himself as an aristocrat.

The day I got accepted at Northeastern he said, “I suppose this means I’ll have to find someone else to cut the grass.”

The island was so flat and so far at sea that the mainland was beneath the horizon even on the clearest day. The sea around the island was dangerous and shoaly, hazards everywhere, littered with wrecks, some hulks bristling in the sand at low tide, corroded stacks, rusty ribs, and the wrecks themselves were hazards. The aboriginals — none survived — had called it, in their own language, “the faraway land”—Nantucket. It was easy for the islanders to believe that they were alone on earth. But “islanders” was a misnomer. The old-timers had been there for centuries, but there had always been locals and year-rounders and summer people, and every season new people, each batch richer than the last.

At night, most of the island lay in darkness — empty roads: who would go out, and where would they go? The wealthiest on the island were among the wealthiest on earth, the poorest just hung on, and there came a point when you became too poor to go on living there — many had been driven out. The island had a Main Street and many churches, a library, an athenaeum, a yacht club, and a golf club.

Fifty years on, the menials were now different: Americans didn’t cut our grass anymore, they didn’t vacuum the pools or look after the kids. Time was when a rising class of hard-up college students took those jobs. No more. It’s all foreigners now, and even the Irish students are gone. It’s Jamaicans, Brazilians, Filipinos, and a scattering of Asiatics.

Nhu was one of these — Vietnamese, a bit vague about when and how she had landed on the island, stuck for a place to stay, looking for a live-in housecleaning job. I suspected that she was desperate, that she had abruptly fled an employer, some tyrant taking advantage. I knew all about that. How enigmatic the wealthy are at a distance, how obvious close up, just brutes in many cases — outright bullies — or else they never would have elbowed their way into business and made their pile. Most of the newly wealthy men I met in my career were physical intimidators.

Later, Nhu said, “Him lie tuss.”

“Really?”

“Weery.”

“Where did he touch you?”

“Hakoochi.”

“What were you doing in the Jacuzzi?”

“Crean it. Him say, ‘Put the wa’ in.’”

“Fill it up?”

“Ya. Then him tuss me.”

“In the Jacuzzi?”

“Teet.”

I gave her the job, for her scruples, for her puritanism, for her conscientious objection, and to demonstrate that we Americans were not all the same. Besides, her country had helped make me rich in the scrap metal business, not that she ever wanted to talk about Vietnam.

Then there were just two of us in the house. At the time I was planning a new house — my dream of inhabiting a house I had made myself, as I had lived the life of my choosing. I told Nhu. There was no one else to tell. She stared at me, probably thinking, What has this got to do with me?

I said, “There’s a little apartment for you. Staff quarters.”

She just stared again — didn’t even nod. She never looked ahead — could not see past the weekend.

“I know you’re thinking you don’t need it. You can live on fish heads and rice.”

“And teevy.”

“You got it. Wide screen.”

“Okay, boss.”

Clever little doll. But that was at the beginning, before the world ended.

So, my life story, the short version. Born on the Cape, salesman father, budget-minded mother. “Money doesn’t grow on trees!” Part-time jobs were more important than homework. The usual public schools: punks and bookworms and bullying teachers. I bagged groceries in the winter and in the summer took the ferry out to the island and cut grass. After a while my friends were slumming Ivy Leaguers, whom I half hated and half pitied. “Joe College.” Northeastern for me — though after-school jobs turned me from a student into a worker, and gave me a nose for business.

The army: Vietnam, the Delta. My first sight of mountains of scrap metal and, after my discharge, my first deal. The simple profitable truth was that scrap metal was available in the Third World and in demand in the First World. The Junk Man, they called me out of sheer envy, and I regarded it as a summing-up of the steel business. Scrap into steel, steel into engine blocks, which became scrap again. I loved the poetry of its transformation, I loved the way it rhymed and made me rich.

Four marriages, much like your one or two. A little bit of pleasure, some conflict, and a lot of monotony — I preferred the monotony. I was always too wealthy to attract a liberated woman, so I got the needy ones who said, “Feed me,” and wanted a meal ticket for life. Strangely, no children of my own, though Number Three had baggage. I bought houses and lost them. My lust and greed were punished; why wasn’t theirs? But I married these women. They did not bewitch me. Then I was sleeping alone and liking it.

I am old enough to remember when junk men were part of the foreground on the Cape, sitting on a wagon, tapping a whip on a horse’s hindquarters and calling out “Rags and bottles,” buying scrap metal and rags by the pound and handing over a few coins to people who would otherwise have thrown the stuff away. The garbage man sold your swill to pig farms.

The army had made me a traveler, travel had made me a merchant. I saw opportunities. Even after Barghorn Scrap Metal became Barghorn Enterprises I still could not look at a freight car full of twisted vehicles and junked girders without seeing money. Space and transport are crucial factors in this business. I shipped it, stored it, processed it, then sold it. The market in rags hardly exists anymore, but scrap metal is more profitable than ever. Is any of this interesting? It is to me.

By the time I got to the island and bought the old Chapin place I had sworn off marriage. Yet I was pursued. I was not the Junk Man then. I was a CEO on joshing terms with Tommy Hilfiger and Harry Johnson and John Sculley. At parties I would socialize and think: What terrific women! Always available! Funny! Accommodating! Positive! Eager to please! Always saying, “I’d love to!”

They wanted, of course, to marry me.

It was about this time, living alone, being pursued, that I submitted the proposal to build my dream house on the Neck. I was happy. I was being looked after by Nhu. “I crean poor… I fix Hakoochi… I make noodoos.” She knew most of the people on the Building Committee — she had worked for them at one time or another.

She would say, “Da Miffs. He dwee and dwee, he get dwun. She pray gol.”

But I knew them too. “Ernie Smith. He’s always saying ‘It sort of melds.’ Trish Smith, I’ve seen her on the course. Wears rompers. What about the Rotbergs?”

“Lobbers — chee weery nye.”

“What about him?”

“He nye. Dey nye peepoo. He lie fitching.”

“So it’s a slam dunk.”

But it wasn’t: I got slammed. The hearing was at seven, and by seven-fifteen they had denied me my permit — absolutely not, no way, never. I asked why.

They said, We’re almost built out and you’re proposing the biggest house on the island. Out of the question, won’t harmonize, stick out like a sore thumb, trophy house.

I said, “I’ll show you trophy houses. In their time, the merchants and whalers were building trophy houses up and down Main Street. Listen, I’ve hired the finest architects.”

They said, It’s a quality-of-life issue, and what about the setbacks? The elevation of my place would change the Neck’s dune profile.

“The dune profile changes every winter with the nor’easters, and if the dune gives way, that’s my problem.”

They said, The Neck’s fragile ecosystem was easily impacted by water and septic parameters — this from a plumber who was a high school dropout, but anyway — and what about the road?

“Berm it.”

They queried the theoretical runoff from the proposed golf course.

“Executive putting green. I’ve put in swales and catchments.”

They said my swimming pool design was nonconforming. Island code had to be followed to the letter.

“Lap pool. It uses treated seawater. Aerates it. No chemicals. It’ll be the only one on the island that’s nontoxic. Next question.”

They said the copper sheathing on my mansard roof would not pass Historic District guidelines.

“Downstream, it will develop a rich patina and look distressed and gorgeous — blackish, greenish.” I looked at Ernie Smith. “It’ll meld with the dune grass.”

But the answer was no — no to the cupola, no to Nhu’s staff quarters, no to the bocce court, no to the helipad, never to this lovely home.

I said, “If I’d listened to people who said ‘never’ to me, I wouldn’t have gotten to this island in the first place.”

My rage made the committee members smile, they enjoyed the illusion that they were more powerful than me, thumbs-down to the Junk Man. And yet what pleased them most was the thought that, deep down, they knew they were all exactly like me — parvenus and opportunists.

“We wish we could help,” Rotberg said smugly. The others agreed, they moved on to other business, and I drove home, still furious.

Nhu was at the kitchen counter, sorting beans.

“I need a drink. Vodka.”

“Olinch?”

“On the rocks. Splash of tonic.”

“Was a messis fom da pumma.”

“About the Jacuzzi?”

“No. Hakoochi wuck okay. Da pumma fom da Bidding Mittee.”

“I just left there. The Building Committee turned me down.”

I felt a little self-conscious confiding my defeat to my Vietnamese housekeeper. But she didn’t flinch, did not react at all, so I went on.

Just then the doorbell rang — Nickerson, the plumber from the committee. I looked at him and thought, “Ecosystem,” “impacted,” “parameters.” I blocked the entrance of my house with my body and said, “Yes?”

He looked a bit chastened, facing me on his own.

“The thing is, Mr. Barghorn, you can resubmit your plan with appropriate changes. You left the meeting before we explained that.”

“Why would I want to make changes?”

He blinked at me. “That way you might get your permit. Your plans have to conform.”

“You mean I have to please you?”

“So to speak.”

I laughed and banged the door in his face.

But the moment I was alone I felt isolated, as though I had shut myself out and was stuck here. I hated living in someone else’s idea of a house. Yet to amend my blueprints, to build a house to someone else’s specifications, was not how I had lived my life. I wanted my own or none at all, yet I could not summon the strength to fight them. And I began to think that I might have retired to the wrong place.

So I sat, uncomfortably, mentally rejecting them all, and I heard an almost inaudible cluck and saw, out of the corner of my eye, a creature in the doorway — Nhu.

“Soy,” she said softly in a tone of regret. “Vey soy.”

I was moved to think that she who had nothing was trying to share the disappointment of someone who had everything.

“Never mind,” I said, embarrassed at being consoled by this skinny little doll crouching in the corner.

“Me may noodoo.”

“Thanks.”

“You wan nudda drin?”

“One more vodka.”

“Olinch?”

“Orange would be very nice.”

She brought the drink. I sat and felt calm. She brought noodles and some dishes on a tray, stir-fried shrimp and bamboo shoots.

“Where did this come from?”

“My foo.”

She crouched by my chair while I ate and drank, and we watched a rerun of an old episode of I Love Lucy, and Nhu murmured with satisfaction. And while all this was happening I thought, I don’t need them, I don’t need anyone. And I slept better that night.

The next day Nhu was up early, baking muffins. She toasted one and served it to me, with green tea, on the deck overlooking the Sound.

I said, “They wouldn’t let me build my house.”

She shrugged.

“And they said no to the staff quarters, where you were going to live.”

She shrugged again. She had a very convincing shrug that conveyed utter indifference. This was the First World but she was from the Third. Her mode of survival was: Learn to do without. Don’t get angry. Don’t show emotion. Beware of needing anything.

“I have the feeling they want us to leave the island.”

“No can sweem.”

Funny! She made a face, wrinkled her nose — clever doll. But her lesson was salutary. I was the needy one. If I was to stay here, I had to learn to be more like her.

I said I had to go into town to buy groceries.

“I geev lees.”

“Don’t bother with a list. Why don’t you just come along?”

And so she did, without a murmur, hopped into the Bronco, smiled as I drove, and at the supermarket hurried ahead of me, tossing items into the trolley that I was pushing. Back home she helped me carry the food into the house. I thought, She makes life easy for me. None of my wives had ever inspired such a grateful thought.

And what was Nhu’s life? Living in the back room, sleeping in a narrow cot, sitting with her fists against her cheeks watching a tiny TV, smoking cigarettes, and slurping noodles. Or else it was fish heads and rice, and early to bed.

We drove one day to Siasconset, and parked facing seaward, and I sat looking for shore birds with my binoculars. Then she drove slowly along the coast, so that I could watch an osprey building a nest on top of a dead tree. I was eating a NutRageous bar. I gave her a piece.

“Rishus!”

I thought, Life could be this simple.

That night I continued to drink after dinner. Nhu had a waitress’s instinct for appearing from nowhere when my glass was empty and asking if I wanted more.

“Sit here,” I said.

She resisted, then she sat on the edge of the chair, like a bird teetering on a branch.

“Drink?”

She said yes with her eyes and a certain motion of her head, and then, “Bland.”

“This brandy is twenty-five years old,” I said.

“Lie me!”

The way she perched and drank made me anxious, for she seemed to be balancing rather than sitting. But after she had two more drinks, her manner of perching seemed a good indication that she could hold her liquor, a rare thing among the Asiatics I had done business with.

I put my arm around her. She stiffened and moved so that she was perched on an even smaller portion of the sofa, as though about to take flight. She faced forward and said, “Nup.”

“What’s wrong?”

“You want sess? No can do sess wee me. We flen. If we do sess, I no can wuck, no can crean, and wha. No be flen.”

I remembered with shame the shocked and disgusted way she had said, Him tuss me. So I poured her another drink, which she held in her hand, and she looked serious.

“If we do sess, me pain here,” and she touched her heart.

We had another drink and then she said good night and went to her room, and to my shame I heard her double-lock her door, the key, the dead bolt. Now I was another employer of whom she could say, Him try tuss me.

But she stayed. I was careful not to presume upon her, and after a while I began to feel a certain relief knowing the limits of my friskiness and the boundaries of my friendship. I reminded myself that I was her employer and how much she mattered to me, how essential her good humor and efficiency were to my well-being on this island.

That was how things stood between us for several summer months. In those months we worked out a routine: she cleaned, I read the paper, then did my desk work. On rainy days we had lunch at home — Nhu eating in the kitchen, me in the dining room. On good days we had lunch on my boat and then went for a run, and I drank beer and steered, and she fished, trolling from the stern. She was good at it — knew the lures, knew the bait, knew the best speed. After a while I would anchor on a shoal and she’d cast for stripers, and now and then caught one, or bluefish, or pollock. She drank beer, too, and after a few would tell stories about the islanders she knew — about cruel husbands, or drunken wives, or unruly kids. She seemed to know most of the people on the island, the millionaires as well as the locals. She did not envy a single one of them, nor was she dazzled by their wealth; her stories were always pitying or gently patronizing.

She was fishing one day on a shoal, the boat anchored, the ebbing tide bubbling with rockweed making the current visible over the shelf of rocks, the greeny-black water purling and frothing. With nothing to do, I propped myself on a cushion and drowsed.

I did not hear her fall over the side, the shoal was so splashy and loud. But something made me mutter to her, and getting no response I tipped up the bill of my cap and saw the empty afterdeck. Then I called out and heard nothing but the current coursing past my hull.

I ran to the side and saw, some distance off, her little head and sprawling hair and one reaching hand, being slapped by the chop and bobbing among the standing waves of the shoal.

I threw out a life preserver on a fixed line and leaped in after it, holding the line. I was yanked in her direction and easily reached her, because I was swimming and she wasn’t. I snatched at her, lost her in the foam, then swam forward and found her kicking foot, so small I could get my whole hand around it. Then her ankle and arm, and soon I had her upright and she was choking and coughing — a good sign, I thought.

Keeping her faced away from me for safety, I held her under her arms.

“You okay?”

“Blaup!” She gagged, she spat, she struggled.

I gave her the life ring to hold, and still she choked and spewed water. We floated for a while in the stiff current of the shoal, and when she was calmer, breathing more easily, I tugged her back to the boat.

She tried not to show her fear, she said she was fine, yet the terror was on her face and in her eyes. She had never looked more like an animal, more helpless, colder, more frightened. She sat wrapped in a blanket — she would not take off her clothes in front of me — modesty even in a near-death experience. We went home without saying much.

I said, “You didn’t catch anything.”

“Catch coh. No fitch.”

She insisted on making dinner for me, and it was a special dinner, stir-fried prawns and bamboo shoots and water chestnuts from her stock of delicacies and imported provisions. Soup made with fresh-picked lemongrass from the pot outside her door, mango pickle, and salted duck eggs from God knows where.

I had not noticed how she was dressed until after I finished eating and she came to me in the living room, wearing her Vietnamese ao dai, her blue and white gown, and looking angelic. I was on the sofa, working on my fourth whiskey, half stupefied from the meal and the boat trip and the effort of the rescue.

“Wan somefin?”

My glass was half full. I said, “This is fine.”

“Wan some uvver? Uvverfin?”

I was bewildered. I was not hungry and could not understand her pampering manner, for I was fine. She was the one who had had a scare, not me. She lifted the sides of her gown and sat beside me.

“Want tuss?”

Only then I realized she was offering herself. I said, “You don’t want that.”

She nodded with such solemnity that I smiled.

“You say me.”

“You were easy to save.”

“You say my lie.”

“I was glad to.”

“Can tuss,” she said, lowering her eyes in a way that was both coquettish and demure.

“You don’t owe me anything,” I said. But I also thought, If she feels that way, it’s money in the bank.

That was a defining day. It was as though she was saying, You saved my life, and so I am here because of you, and therefore my life is yours. But I did not take advantage of her. I was careful to remind her that we were still friends, that she was an employee, that I was grateful to her for helping me. Of course she remembered my drunken and indecent proposal from earlier in the summer, the thing I had wanted. She was willing to grant that to me now, out of gratitude.

All I wanted was to sit beside her, drink with her, hold her hand sometimes, watch the terns diving over the marsh grass at sunset. And sitting there, I thought: This is perfect. I don’t need that big house. I am happy here, doing this.

“You are Buddhist.”

“Ya.”

“But no temple on the island.”

“Temper hee,” she said, and touched her heart.

We had short conversations, and afterward long silences. The silences were the most telling, because they expressed our deepest contentment. I wanted nothing more and for nothing to change.

Not long after that, she woke me in the middle of the night, startling me until I saw her small figure shivering beside my bed.

“What’s wrong?”

“Canna slee.”

“Why not?”

“Bah dree.”

“What kind of dream?”

“Folly offa bow.”

A drowning dream.

“Say me. Plee, say me.”

She got into my bed, and as with the business in the ocean, and the way we hung on to each other in the water, it wasn’t just me, it was something both of us badly wanted.

Days of bliss followed. Weeks. We were more than a couple, we were a team! After we started sleeping together I didn’t know whether to pay her more or to stop paying her entirely. I asked her. She said, “Same.” More money was like prostitution, no money was presumption. I wanted to do the right thing, because I didn’t want this to end.

The routine suited me — paperwork and phone calls after breakfast, a nap after lunch, a drive to the dunes after the nap, and birdwatching or else fishing, some effort in order to stimulate a thirst, a drink before dinner, and then early to bed, Nhu beside me.

One day early on in this blissful period, we went clamming at low tide out on the harbor flats. She dug a bushel. Her first time handling a clamming fork and she’s hoisting twenty pounds of littlenecks and quahogs and I am hooting in admiration and hugging her.

“Why you lie me?”

“Because I’ve never known anyone like you,” I said. “You’re always, ‘Okay, boss!’ You don’t bitch.”

She was much too cheerful to care how I praised her and I could not explain how much she meant to me. She washed my car, she trimmed my hair, she mixed drinks for me, she cooked for me, she caught fish and fried it, she made me laugh, she aroused me.

How old was she? Mid-twenties, maybe, as she’d said — no memory of the Vietnam War but intimate knowledge of its aftermath.

“My fadda take me to jungoo. He see snae, bih snae! He catch snae and — yum! yum!”

Snake-eating in the thickets of the Delta.

“He plan rye. Me hep.”

Father and daughter, knee-deep in the paddy fields, bending over their reflections.

“And then you came here.”

“Bludda come. He hep me come affa.”

Less than half my age but she had lived as much as I had. We were made for each other. When I was with her I forgot who I was, and I had the impression that when she was with me she was similarly euphoric. I hardly considered the strangeness of it all, that I was a multimillionaire cohabiting with my maid in a mansion on Nantucket, for I was happier than I had ever been in my life.

You tend to see yourself most objectively when you imagine how other people see you; other people’s eyes are colder. But there were no other people around. We were isolated enough here so that I seldom thought about our living arrangement, and when I did think about it I was just grateful. More weeks went by, but time moved at a different pace now, because I was happy. I had stopped thinking about building the grand house on the Neck. I was reconciled to living on this island in this secondhand mansion, because this woman was making me happy, and this was possible because she was happy.

I wanted nothing more. She wanted nothing more. The Buddhists are right: eliminate all desire and you’ve found peace.

“I lie you. You happy. No worry.”

When the person you love returns your compliments, you know all is well.

All would have been well — nothing would have changed — if we had stayed in the little clapboard paradise we had made, of meals and naps, noodles and clamming, early to bed and up at first light. All was well, but there came a change.

The Figawi Ball at the Club was an annual islanders-only gala, held around Memorial Day after the big Figawi Race from Hyannis, before the summer people arrived. I had avoided the event, because as a youth I had been a waiter and a hired hand at the Club, and I knew it would bother me to see the members and be reminded of the suffering menial I had been.

Going was Nhu’s idea, but she raised the subject as an example of pure irony, which was how I knew that it meant a lot to her. We were at the market and she saw the Figawi Ball poster taped to the front window.

“Crab dan.”

“A perfect way of describing it.”

“We go togevva, yah!”

The very idea of going was out of the question, and so she joked about going, even joked about what T-shirt she would wear, and which sneakers, to the great island event, open to Club members only, the tickets hard to get and expensive. Even the Brazilian menials knew about it and tried to work at it, just to be part of the glamour.

“You want to go?”

“Crab dan?”

“Right.”

“Yah. For dan and seen. Ha!”

Understanding the profound impossibility she was suggesting with this mockery, I said, “Okay, we’re going.”

We were in the car by then, driving back to the house. She went silent, she was pale, I saw she was terrified.

“No can,” she said. Then she pleaded, “No crab dan.”

“You’re my guest.”

“No got dreh for way.”

“I’ll buy you a dress.”

“Cannot for dan.”

“No dancing. We’ll just sit. We’ll eat. We’ll drink wine.”

“Adda peepoo!”

But she knew all the other people on the island — more than I knew, and she knew them intimately.

I had made my peace with the island. I had given up the idea of building my mansion on the Neck, but I had no intention of leaving. I thought: If I’m going to live here, these people will have to get used to me. They’ll have to understand who I am and what I do. I am proud of my life. This was not a summer fling with my housekeeper. Winter had come and gone. Spring was here. Summer was coming. The rest of my life was coming.

She was just the right size to carry off a little black dress and make it seem elegant. This she insisted on buying herself with money she had saved. I gave her the money for new shoes, beautiful ones from a boutique on Main Street which added three inches to her height. Her Brazilian friend at the beauty salon did her hair and nails. The result was a vision of loveliness, a transformation, from a little Third World doll to a First World dragon lady of intimidating beauty, upswept coiffure, crimson talons.

I would never have guessed how much she liked dressing up, and not just putting on new clothes but being glamorous. Glamour is a little girl’s game, played with costumes and mirrors. New clothes made her a different person, one she liked better, someone who fitted in. And this transformation took her mind off the main event and made her less apprehensive.

Driving to the Club the night of the Figawi Ball, with Nhu beside me smelling sweetly, I thought again, My life is complete.

She said nothing. Silence was also part of the transformation, a kind of dignity and drama — and I suppose she was terrified, too.

The valet parkers eyed her, seemed to recognize her in some dimly admiring way, but no one else noticed us. The foyer was filled with members — men in suits or club blazers, women in gowns — all of them shouting excitedly at each other. I hurried Nhu past them to the ballroom, lifted two glasses of wine from a passing tray, and toasted her. She was both excited and shy, dazzled by all the people, bewildered by what I now saw as the roaring men and their shouting overdressed wives.

She stuck close to me. Rotberg and Nickerson from the Building Committee came up to me and started talking, saying how nice it was to see me, all the while staring at Nhu. They had detached themselves from their wives, who were standing to one side, casting glances our way.

I was hardly listening. I found that I was seeing all this with Nhu’s eyes, and I was keenly aware of being in a room of big loud oafs, who had nothing to say and not even the grace to apologize for opposing the building of my house on the Neck. Their attitude was: We’re all buddies now!

“Barghorn!”

Seeing that I wasn’t listening, they began bantering with Nhu.

Rotberg: “Hope you’re treating him all right!”

Nickerson: “Don’t wear him out!”

This seemed to me in bad taste, so I steered her away, but while I was getting more drinks for us, I saw a man approach Nhu and begin monologuing. He was Hal Walters from the Historic District Committee, his wife a little way off and glaring at Nhu.

They were all there, all the people who had turned me down, looking pleased that I had appeared at a Club dance for the first time ever. It was proof to them that I would not be a problem. I was one of them. I even had a woman in tow.

The music was loud, incomprehensible to me, but Nhu knew the lyrics and was murmuring them. Another revelation: she liked pop music. She seemed slightly drunk, but quite happy as long as she was by my side.

I monitored a few nearby conversations, all of them dishonest complaints — one bitching about the high price of real estate, another about winter storms, and one beefy-faced man was moaning that it was harder and harder for him to find parking space for his private jet at the airport. You had to be a resident here to know that all of this talk was a form of boasting.

Without warning, a woman blindsided us, and in a drunken and demanding voice said, “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”

I had no idea who she was, but it took me only an instant to see that she was not talking to me.

Nhu blinked and said, “Miz Row.”

That might have been “Lowell”—there was such a couple at the Club. Other women circled, seeing this Lowell woman close to us, and they hovered like hyenas.

Nhu smiled at her, and she seemed confused for, really, she had no name for me that could be uttered in a public place.

“I hope this doesn’t mean what I think it means.”

All the women smiled, hoping for a devastating remark from their friend.

“That you won’t be available to do my windows.”

After that, nothing mattered. I considered hitting her, or throwing my drink into her face and howling at her. But I smiled and steered Nhu to the exit, for I had a much better plan.

Only the feeblest, the weakest, the most naïve of them tried to stop me. The shrewdest, the strongest, the wealthiest, the truly connected ones did not lift a finger against me. They were smart enough to know that they would fail, that I would break them and bankrupt the Board of Selectmen — that it was much less costly for them to go along with me, to humor me, to praise my extravagant house.

And these fat ones also knew how lawless the rich can be. I was one of them. And the ways we break the law are trivial, mere nuisances, compared to the plunder and mayhem we get away with legally. The worst of us are seldom breaking the law. The law is on our side — it ought to be; after all, we are the ones who make it.

The ones who tried to stop me sent an emissary from the Building Committee, who appeared one afternoon on my doorstep, smiling and making small talk.

I said, “Now tell me what’s really on your mind.”

“Local ordinance, as old as the town. You can’t build without permission.”

“I’m building.”

“Then you need to apply for a permit.”

“I did that.” I smiled at him. “It didn’t fly.”

“If you try to build, we’ll have to stop you.”

“How?” I was still smiling. “A lawsuit?”

He blinked at me, perhaps trying to summon the courage to speak. I knew what I was about to say would be repeated a thousand times in town and would become part of the island’s mythology, so I kept it simple and memorable.

“Sue me,” I said. “You’ll lose. I’ve got more lawyers than you. I’ve got more money than you. I could tie you up for a hundred years. I could bankrupt your board. I could destroy you. Don’t talk to me, talk to someone who knows me. People who know me would not dare to stop me. This meeting is over.”

I did not shut the door in his face. I watched him stammer and sigh and turn away. He walked self-consciously down the path to the street.

Building a house on a small island is a public event. Every aspect is visible: the arrival of the container trucks, two a day, on the morning ferry; the deployment of workers, the coming and going of carpenters, plumbers, electricians — they filled the ferries, the commuter flights, the charter boats, the barges. The disruption of the island the rest of that year was constant; it continued through the spring and into the summer, season of shortages and stress and no space, and on into the fall.

Who could find a plumber or an electrician or a painter? I had hired all the best ones. I had commandeered the stock in all the warehouses and hardware stores. Islanders were told, “We’re out of cement,” “We’re down to our last roll of cable,” “No more rebar.” Other building projects on the island were put on hold because mine was proceeding. And there was nothing that anyone could do except reflect that they had brought this on themselves.

By Labor Day the house had risen and was clearly visible from town — although it was fifteen miles away. The talk reached me: the house was ugly, I was a monster, I was a junk dealer who had made money on drugs in the Third World, I was buying up the island, I was an interloper, I had a criminal record, I had physically threatened the Building Committee, I had committed similar outrages elsewhere.

The house was finished in time for us to spend Christmas inside. The wall around it was to code — four feet high — but behind the wall I planted Leyland cypress trees that would grow to twenty feet in no time, five hundred of them, a wall of greenery.

I was the subject of the most vicious gossip. The story was that I lived alone with my Third World servant. In one version, I was a tyrant who satisfied my lusts on her. In another, she was a shrew who tormented me.

All talk. At this stage of my life I am keenly aware of the malicious innuendo and falsehoods spread about reclusive men my age. The things that people say! Just listen to the crap they talk about other people. Are they so much more scrupulous when they talk about you?

Instead of accepting that, I am writing this. I realize that what motivates most other writers in the world is the desire to have control over their obituary.

The other facts, then. We married off-island, in Las Vegas — her choice, and the day she came off the payroll, Nhu revealed a new side of herself, her love for gambling and her winner’s instinct for numbers. She won at blackjack, she knew when to double down or fold, she had a knack for remembering cards that had been played, she knew how to wait, when to collect her winnings, and when to quit. She claimed gambling was like fishing. I did not see that at all, which was probably why I was unlucky at both.

But I was lucky in having her.

She said, “I way you!”

“You might have had a long wait.”

She said that she had decided upon me early on, and that if I had not acted, she would simply have worked for me, whatever happened; no one else would do. All this was in her mind. The plan was fully formed as an intention, but she could not presume; it was for me to make the first move.

No long after that, I was diagnosed with all sorts of ailments — macular degeneration in one eye, cataract in the other, a bad knee — requiring surgery. Ringing in the ears. I was forgetful. Fishing for a box of cookies on a top shelf, I slipped off the chair and broke my collarbone. I was falling apart. Nhu was in great shape, still smoking, working every day to keep the house spotless, fishing now and then.

This is the life I dreamed of. I am ill, but bearably so. I am mild. She runs the house, she runs me. She is wiser, more experienced, shrewder. When we go fishing I steer the boat, she fishes and determines the route, the speed, the duration. I am her servant. It is what I want.

We seldom go out. We see no one. We phone for groceries now. We might take the boat for a run over to Edgartown on a calm day with a fair tide, or even to the Cape. But the rest of the time we live behind our hedge in the huge house I built for her on the Neck.

She will outlive me. She will continue in this house as the Junk Man’s widow. And I will rest easy knowing that long after I am gone, people just off the ferry will look east and, seeing our house, will make faces and say in shock, “What the hell’s that?” It is a symbol of our love.