Trophy House Read Online Free PDF Page B

without it has a tower. Now you understand why Beth and I are so upset. This place belongs in a theme park.”
    â€œWe’re trespassing,” Tom said.
    I shrugged off his misgivings.
    We saw the house’s owner before we heard him and, apparently, he had seen us before we saw him—the man I’d seen on the beach, the one with the eyebrows like mustaches, had pulled open a slider and come out to see who was invading his space. The fancy poodle stood by his thigh. Marshall growled in a token sort of way and turned himself around to study some newly planted beach grass. The man said, “Can I help you?” in a voice that implied he’d prefer to shoot us.
    Tom approached and stuck his arm straight out. There was no way the man could have avoided shaking the hand on the end of it. “Hi,” Tom said. “I’m Tom Faber. This is my wife Danforth—Dannie. We live in that humble house over there.” He pointed in the direction of our house, whose only visible element was the peak of the roof.
    â€œMitchell Brenner,” the man said. “Met your wife on the beach the other day.”
    â€œWell,” I said, “not quite met.”
    â€œCan I show you around?” Something had apparently made him change his mind about us. Probably pride of ownership had got the better of a naturally brutish personality.
    I nudged Tom and said, at the same time, “We’d love to see it. Are you sure we’re not disturbing you?”
    Mitchell Brenner assured us we were not, although I sensed, from his briskness, that he had important business to conduct. He guided us through room after sterile room. In apologizing for the unfinished look of the place, he told us the outfit he’d ordered furniture from had managed to misdeliver, or not to deliver at all, the remainder of the furniture. He expected it by midweek. He cursed half under his breath, then looked at me to see if I’d heard. There was a five-person, L-shaped off-white leather couch in the living room, but nothing else. He made us poke our heads into five bedrooms, two of which had bedsteads with naked mattresses in them. The master bedroom was over twenty feet long and, like rooms in the rest of the house, featured a sort of pickled walnut stain on the floorboards. One wall was covered with mirrors. Lying in bed, the Brenners had that best of all views: the bay and Provincetown in the far distance. He guided us to the doors of four bathrooms, gleaming and barren, and an entertainment center with a gigantic wall-mounted plasma television set, speakers, DVD, VCR, and God knows what else. “We’re going to install the dish next week,” he said. My heart fluttered at this, but I managed not to let my dismay show. “And this is my rogues’ gallery,” he said, opening a door to a room off some room or other; there were so many I couldn’t keep track of what he said each was used for. This was a smallish room with one clerestory window. The walls were almost hidden beneath framed eight-by-ten photographs of Brenner standing next to an assortment of celebrities and smiling as if he’d just had spectacular sex. Brenner and Dan Quayle, Jack Valenti, Britney Spears, an Arab sheik in full regalia; Henry Kissinger, Margaret Thatcher, Slobodan Milosevic, Michael Eisner (I had to be told who this person was), Princess Di. With Di he wasn’t smiling but looked properly grave. Michael Jackson wearing a face mask. “All these folks stayed at one or the other of my hotels. Did I mention I own hotels? Seven of them. Three are in California and the Middle East, not the safest place in the world, but somehow they manage to keep running at capacity.” So it wasn’t malls, it was hotels. He pointed to a stack of leather-bound albums on top of a chest made to look rough-hewn but, as a reader of shelter magazines, I figured to cost in the two-thousand-dollar range. “I’ve got some