more about Andy. Tom hadnât checked out the progress of the house still being built down the beach but planned to the next morning, a Saturday. I told him about the meeting the following week to see if a groupââweâre thirty-three concerned citizensââcould persuade those in charge to somehow short-circuit any plan to build more monster houses in Truro and to get them to sack building inspectors on the take, of which we had no evidenceâthe lot is too small, the dune is shifting beneath the house, the top story exceeds the legal height limitâexcept common sense. I hit a nerve with this; Tom is not quite but almost a libertarian and, although he deplores the impulse that makes a person want to build a house ten times larger, with three times as many rooms and bathrooms as they need, he doesnât like the idea of the governmentâany governmentâtelling you that you canât build a house as big as Fenway Park if thatâs what you wantâso long as it doesnât hurt anyone.
âBut thatâs just it,â Beth said. âIt does hurt someone. It hurts a lot of people.â
âHow so?â Tom said.
âIt hurts our sense of place and proportion,â Beth said. âIt hurts us just to look at them.â
âYou donât have to look. Try averting your eyes and look at the bay and the birds and the cute guys on the beach.â
âWhat cute guys? If there are any in these parts, they donât hang out here. Theyâre on the other side.â She meant the ocean side, where waves sometimes reached a terrifying five or six feet. Whatever studs there are seem to enjoy parading up and down the beach in shiny black wet suits, their surfboards jammed up under the armpit.
It went on like this for a while, the conversation turning somewhat edgy but not enough to make one of us bolt from the table and slam a door.
But I went to bed convinced that the impulse to practice excess Tom alluded to did leave its mark on other people, strangers as well as neighbors. You canât do something shocking and expect it to leave no evidence, visible or unseen. It was like the murder of that poor Tinkham womanâstill unsolved, and, from the looks of things, not likely to be. The clues were so cold they were frozen; traces of the killer were almost obliterated. It made us uneasy.
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Next morning I worked hard and fast, managing to wrap up my assignment and get it priority-mailed from the post office before noon, after which Tom and I took a walk while Beth visited friends in Provincetown. It was a warm, clear day and the faux-Florentine tower in PâTown looked like a stone needle pricking the sky. Tom took my hand and we nudged hips. When he feels like it, he can be very sexy. âIâm over fifty,â I said. âWhen you were a boy, did you ever think youâd be sleeping with a woman half a century old?â
âYouâre not old,â he said.
âMaybe not ancient, but you havenât answered my question. Did you thinkâ¦â
âOf course not,â he said. âHow about you?â
âI always liked older men,â I said.
âMy God,â he said as we got near enough to the monster house to make out details invisible from a distance. âWhat are those gizmos under the eaves?â We walked across the dune and up the short wooden staircase slapped against the dune until we got close enough to make out details: the gizmos were small carved versions of shore birds, nestled up close to the overhang of the roof. âAnd get a load of that tower. Rapunzel is about to let her hair down from that window. What do they need a tower for? Youâd think, given what happened last year, folks would draw back a little.â
Towers, I told him, were this yearâs architectural necessity. âThere are a few more between here and Well-fleet if you want to go look. Your house isnât complete