Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

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.

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?

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.