“I just wanted to see how you were making out with Bree away.” A girlishness in her tone, something coquettish, disturbed him deeply.
“Where’s Ed?”
“Home. I didn’t tell him I was coming over. I thought he’d be funny about it.”
Furlong could only think that when he was away Ed Willever dropped in on Bree, and that a pattern was being revealed to him. He wanted to say Bree smokes, but he was ashamed to, and she might blame him for her doing it.
“You don’t need me?” Joan said.
What did this mean? He stared at her and said, “I’ve got work to do.”
“The traveler at home,” Joan said. “Strange concept.”
After she left, he sat with his fists pressed against his cheeks as though trying to force a sentence from his head. Nothing came, or only falsehoods came, as he awaited Bree’s return; and he hated the thoughts that were crowding his imagination.
The last sentence he’d written was “The Nepali in the shop sat under a long sticky screw of flypaper, its curls black with bodies.” He could not continue, or extend it. He kept seeing it, more and more bodies accumulating on the hanging paper.
Bree said nothing to him on her return, but the next time at the Willevers’ she spoke up, mentioning the rides, the restaurants, the features of the hotel. Furlong sat, dumb, confused, with growing anger.
Ed Willever said, “You’ve got competition, Harry Dick.”
Bree said, “Of course not. I’d never write about it.”
And that confused Furlong further. He could not help but think that in her absences she’d taken over his life, that her travels were his own trips, but with a difference — she didn’t write about them, she hardly spoke of them, but in a fragmentary way he believed her to be editing, in a spirit of concealment.
When she said she wanted to drive to Seattle, Furlong said, “Take a plane.”
“You can’t smoke on a plane.”
“I want to come with you.”
“No,” she said. “I want to smoke in the car and you won’t like it.” Then, “You have to write your book.”
He did not have the heart to tell her that he couldn’t write.
Bree drove to Seattle, whistling as she left the house. She was out of touch for ten days. She vanished in the way he had always done; and when she was away a part of him vanished — the confident part of him, the risk taker, the wizard, the storyteller; and he was left idle, feeling undermined, staring at his unfinished sentence, following her progress in his head, knowing what he would be doing on that road.
He could only think she had another life, that she dallied with other men in motels and told them lies or half-truths. He made the accusation but she denied it, laughing, blowing smoke at him, tapping her cigarette into a saucer. That maddened him. He saw a wickedness in her smoking. When she told stories of her travels at dinner parties, he did not believe them. Surely she was embellishing, improving, falsifying. And that suspicion — that her real life was out there, wreathed in cigarette smoke — finished him, as a traveler, as a writer, as a husband.
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?