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.