Trophy House

Trophy House Read Online Free PDF

Book: Trophy House Read Online Free PDF
Author: Anne Bernays
more about Andy. Tom hadn’t 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 group—“we’re thirty-three concerned citizens”—could 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 evidence—the lot is too small, the dune is shifting beneath the house, the top story exceeds the legal height limit—except 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 doesn’t like the idea of the government—any government—telling you that you can’t build a house as big as Fenway Park if that’s what you want—so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone.
    â€œBut that’s just it,” Beth said. “It does hurt someone. It hurts a lot of people.”
    â€œHow so?” Tom said.
    â€œIt hurts our sense of place and proportion,” Beth said. “It hurts us just to look at them.”
    â€œYou don’t have to look. Try averting your eyes and look at the bay and the birds and the cute guys on the beach.”
    â€œWhat cute guys? If there are any in these parts, they don’t hang out here. They’re on the other side.” 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 can’t do something shocking and expect it to leave no evidence, visible or unseen. It was like the murder of that poor Tinkham woman—still 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.
    Â 
    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 P’Town 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. “I’m over fifty,” I said. “When you were a boy, did you ever think you’d be sleeping with a woman half a century old?”
    â€œYou’re not old,” he said.
    â€œMaybe not ancient, but you haven’t answered my question. Did you think…”
    â€œOf course not,” he said. “How about you?”
    â€œI always liked older men,” I said.
    â€œMy God,” he said as we got near enough to the monster house to make out details invisible from a distance. “What are those gizmos under the eaves?” 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. “And get a load of that tower. Rapunzel is about to let her hair down from that window. What do they need a tower for? You’d think, given what happened last year, folks would draw back a little.”
    Towers, I told him, were this year’s architectural necessity. “There are a few more between here and Well-fleet if you want to go look. Your house isn’t complete
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