As Jacob Kopens emerged from the soup of foam and sea-spinach a large man came over a sandy rise and headed straight for him. To Jacob he was a complete stranger, a man he had never seen on the club beach before, never seen anywhere. But there was nothing about him that remotely fit the word trespasser. The man moved with such aggression he seemed to possess every inch he walked on, no matter what any club deed said. He was in a plain white t-shirt and battleship gray swim trunks, and his legs were menacingly overbuilt, a human being with the underpinnings of a draft horse. The man towered over Jacob, and he had a facial feature even more outsized than his legs. His forehead was more prow than brow. A white brush-cut shock of hair accentuated it, like an ax blade. He bore down on Jacob, a ram-headed cruiserweight looming over an eagle-nosed welterweight.
“How’s the water?”
“Fine, but a little scuzzy.”
“Scuzzy. How so?””Oh, temperature’s fine. But because of the storm, lots of seaweed. So it feels scuzzy on your skin.”
“Scuzzy. Really?”
“Well, yes. Really.”
The large man’s brow pushed out at Jacob like the bow of a surfacing submarine. The mass of bone and skin formed a dark, inquisitorial hood over his eyes.
“That’s what makes a beach a beach,” he announced. “You must be new to this area.”
New was a word Jacob didn’t like to hear. Not after having fought as hard as he had fought to be taken into the club.
“No, not really,” he said. “I moved here in 1984, and I’m from Boston, born and brought up there. I’m a native New Englander.”
What Jacob didn’t say is, are you a member of this club? I am.
“Really. Well, seaweed is what makes a beach a beach. I hunt up in Maine and come back down the coast. There’s always seaweed. That’s the charm of it.”
“Charm. Is that what you call it?…”
The man shook his head gravely, as though he were in deep disagreement with Jacob over a point of politics. Or morality.
“Well then, you should jump right in,” Jacob said. “You’re really going to love it today.”
He extended the sentence by four words - you son of a bitch – spoken only to himself - as he shook the man off and paraded away over the dunes. He chugged up the planked pathway to the old shabby-chic asphalt circle, cratered like the moon, and began the leg home over the old town road.
Normally, the bracing sea water worked like a mood-changer on him, a natural shock treatment. But today he stayed on edge, fretting over minutia, all courtesy of the six feet of feces in the plain gray trunks. A beach fascist. He had never met the species before, and having met him he couldn’t forget him. Not him in particular. But everything he stood for. It lingered like Hurricane Isabel’s last dirty gust. Not the mood he wanted to be in with the son and the new flame driving up.
So the goal of the day was to get happy or else by dinnertime. Joyce expected no less. The son blew in from his wandering once in four seasons or so, maybe, and he was even overdue on that. As Jacob speed-walked he repeatedly looked up into the clear, strong blueness, seeking solar assist. But each time his eyes came back down they bumped into a piece of Isabel’s debris.
Where the road turned away from the church steeple and plunged into the Burnham Woods – where what was left of the old townie population still lived, in their shacky houses with tar-paper peaks and wood-burning stoves - he had to climb over the trunk of an oak whose fall had squashed two roofs in one blow, totaling a worm-eaten single-car garage and the old Dodge pickup sticking out of it. The faded gray Dodge was a dead-on color match with the gray swimming trunks of the seaweed chauvinist, not a good coincidence. It made him obsess more darkly over where the lout had come from, how he could walk the club beach as though he owned it, all without Jacob ever having seen him at the club. It disturbed him, too, how this frenzy called Isabel had reshaped the tall old-growth trees, snapping and ripping up so many of them there was a canopy of tangled branches overhead, blackening everything and giving the whole place the look of a medieval forest. Not New England but some schwarzwald. On this stretch of road – well below the hill that Jacob’s home and lawns dominated - the human structures were humble and few and far between. Rickety houses and camps that, in the witchy shadows of the crippled trees, knocked the lenses of his mind off kilter – and gave him an alien’s sense of entering a foreign domain, some third-world Appalachia or Transylvania in a new continent or hemisphere, for the very first time.
So the old boyish spine-shivers were already there when Jacob’s left sneaker hit something both pliant and stiff. Before he actually saw the big dead crow his feet were in the air, twisting and jumping to avoid further contact. When he hit ground again he had cleared the bird corpse, but stumbled so violently his bare shin hit the feathers and felt the toughness of the muscle and bone below, the presence of a true chest and shoulders – things he had never associated with any creature light enough to fly. Reflexively he slapped his leg, batting at the invisible demon presence of rabies and cadaver germs. Then he saw more – a garter snake cutting graceful S-curves, not ten inches from his right heel. He and the snake froze at the exact same moment, and the creature did something he had never thought was even in a garter snake’s repertoire. It coiled and confronted him, head aimed like a pistol and tongue flicking defiance, a bizarre skinny imitation of a rattler on red alert.
Even breaking through the Burnham Woods and returning to his property, the greatest home of his life, even getting inside the gloriously arching mahogany door gave Jacob Kopens no sense of sanctuary. Not today; not after the bastard on the beach. He escaped upstairs to the shower and turned the sleek controls until the downpour was scalding, vaguely hoping the torrent of heat would burn away the dark thoughts, the way the ocean sun burns off the morning fog. As he toweled and dressed he could hear Joyce addling the cook over menu and table settings for the evening. They had plans for a quick lunch together but even that was impossible. He had hardly popped an olive in his mouth when the bell and the big dogs went off at once, the big dogs whimpering like spaniels, reminding him that today was the day the disaster afflicting the great room would be diagnosed at last.
Dan Gannett, the architect who had designed Jacob’s grand door, and every last inch of the massive rehab, had pronounced the sickness in the beams to be outside his competency. Over malt with Jacob at the club bar he had said, “we can’t solve this alone – you and me and The Balvenie. You need a structural engineer, the best in the business. You need Stanley Orne.”
“I want to warn you,” Gannett had said as the club valets brought around their cars – and Jacob would remember and replay the warning as if he had it burned into a disc - “Stanley Orne isn’t a Balvenie man. He’s more old school, straight rye and a beer chaser, a boilermaker kind of guy, and he looks it. But he knows his shit.”
Like a man possessed, Jacob ran from Joyce and the lunch table and gripped the hand-cast brass pull of his proud door. The wide mass of mahogany swung open, and now he stood face to face with an all-too-familiar man – that man; the sub-human who had roiled him on the beach about swimming and seaweed. This time, the draft horse legs were hidden under canvas pants, but the forehead that loomed like armament was as battle-ready as before.
In their shared moment of recognition, Jacob watched the visitor’s brow stiffen and jowls redden, just as he felt his own skin pull tight and white with the frost of contempt.
“You don’t know my name, do you? It’s Orne.”
“I know the name,” Jacob said. “I didn’t know it was yours.”
He held out a hand for Jacob to consider shaking, but it seemed as much a challenge as an offer – as in touch me, if you dare to.
Jacob considered a joke about orne, ornery to lessen the tension, or perhaps intensify it, but dropped it for no other reason but contempt. He brushed the extended paw and inched back from the threshold. This Orne had ruined his morning; why should he make Orne’s entrance to his home even one hair easier?
He threw Joyce a dark look. She caught it and nimbly brought her usual greeting flurry down several registers, turning it to an exercise in mere diplomatic politeness. With a flip of her cornsilk hair, Joyce could turn from hostess to helmsman to hellion. Her people came from the sea, just as Jacob’s had once come from the desert. Joyce’s father had been the club commodore. But even so, Jacob had had to claw his way in, winning votes one by one, always doing this or that to smooth his rough edges. His given name, after all, had been Jack Kopinsky … a name from the days of phylacteries and stuffed cow’s gut and chicken neck. The deli days from the old pushcart part of Boston, the part these North Shore clubbers hardly knew existed. Jacob’s ladder … that’s what he called Joyce. His shore wife, who’d smashed his old city-sidewalk wife like a thundering wave. And now he had a home and lands he called Burnham, trumping the very woods of the townies.
Orne acknowledged Joyce courteously, but did it all without managing to hint at a smile. Then he became businesslike, fixed his hands on his hips and aimed his brow down the hallway like a surveyor’s instrument. Although the entire reason for Orne’s visit was the great room, they moved towards it at the glacial, hateful pace set by Jacob. When minutes had passed and they were still within sight of the mahogany door, Orne made a digging comment, and bluntly turned his head Jacob’s way to show his words were meant for him. “If we stand here too long,” he said, “it all might fall down.”
“Mount Rushmore will fall down first. My architect made me that promise.”
Old school, boilermaker kind of guy. Who was Gannett kidding? Orne was a savage, a bully. Right under Jacob’s Galicia slate roof, Orne pulled out that word - McMansion - to describe the space he was standing in.
“Snazzy door you put on. What were you thinking? – new knobs on an old actress?”
It was as if the morning on the beach had never ended. The bile surged in the pit of Jacob’s stomach, sending waves of fire up his gullet.
“We’ve got a job here,” he said. “Let’s get to work.”
They entered the great room, the capstone of Gannett’s magnificent revision of a hulking townie wreck, the biggest Burnham Woods relic ever condemned by the building inspector. Orne cast his eyes up and down and around, finally fixing them on the tortured beams. “Did you retain anything from the old house?”
“You’re looking at them,” Jacob said, waving his hand at the beams.
The engineer moved from the center to the periphery. He took measurements, made a few cuts in the wall to look behind the blueboard, and scribbled his calculations on a wadded bar napkin produced from his back pocket. As he went through the numbers he thought out loud, muttering. “You have a wall, you have a roof, you have pressure per square inch. If it were blood pressure, you might be dead.”
Orne took delight in proclaiming his diagnosis. The beams were twisting, ripping and heaving from stress he described as dangerous in the extreme. The PSI was unacceptable. The word he used was shear.
“Like the blades of a scissors,” he said, “One force from one direction, the other from the opposite direction. Together they shear the beams, like pieces of paper. This happens quickly, the beams can go just like that, no warning whatsoever. Your McMansion has overloaded them…”
Jacob wanted to say,“you’re overloading me - with this bullshit.” Instead he sucked in his hate and hissed, “And what if I don’t believe you?”
Orne narrowed his eyes. “Shear gives no warning. But you’re a lucky man. You have your warning. From me. I’ll send a full report to you and your architect.”
Orne made his exit like a storm trooper, thumping down the hall so loudly the paintings shook. On the way he noticed the kitchen wall, slashed by the fury of Isabel. The storm had thrown a maple limb against the house, slamming the wall so hard the phone had flown across the room like a catapult had hurled it. The receiver struck and shattered one of Joyce’s favorite pieces, a China Trade bowl originally brought over from Canton by one of her sea captain ancestors. The wall’s paint and plaster bore a long fissure, jagged as a lightning bolt.
“That wall …” The engineer stopped dead in his tracks, like a lion considering prey. “That wall was where my father kept his guns.”
And without further word Orne loped for the arching mahogany door. He reached it before either Jacob or Joyce caught up to him, and he didn’t wait on ceremony. He twisted the knob in his big right hand as though he were opening the main valve of a steamship’s boiler, and he barged over the threshold. The engineer walked away without once looking back, and whether he planned it or not, he slammed the door in Jacob’s face. The slamming wood actually grazed Jacob’s nose; for a moment the intricately finished mahogany could have been blunt steel, could have been the door of a prison or a vault.
“These townie men, they have their gripes,” Joyce said, “but don’t let it rattle you. Why is it your fault his parents couldn’t afford the taxes on their own house? Three centuries in America and what did they do? They dug clams.”
“He’s not a clamdigger. He’s a structural engineer. And he still sees his father’s guns hanging on our wall.”
“He’s a clamdigger to me. I can smell the pitchfork and the muck.” Joyce flipped her flaxen hair. “Now go be the old Jacob and call Gannett, and let’s get a plan for those beams.”
Jacob did indeed want to call Gannett, but only because he wanted to verbally kick his ass like a soccer ball. Blowing the mathematics of beam stress was bad enough. But on top of that he’d given Jacob a problem beyond architecture. A problem worse than buried hazardous waste or termites. He’d given him Stanley Orne.
“We’re in a club. Our club. Why couldn’t he send us someone who’s in the damn club?”
As he spoke he watched the blue in Joyce’s eyes turn from the color of sky to the color of steel. Whenever this happened he understood, from a place deep in his gut, what the term blueblood really meant. It meant that every drop in Joyce’s veins could turn blue as cold steel when the circumstances required it; when that which she considered hers was being threatened. As long as Jacob was in the category of that which was hers, this show of blood was a good thing, a thing he could welcome.
“Listen to yourself,” she said. “The club, the club, the club. Twenty years ago you weren’t talking like that. Were you? You, Jack Kopinsky?”
“Why would I? I was an outsider looking in. Through the glass of my father’s pastrami counter. But you fixed that. You and the Commodore.”
“Nobody wanted to be in the club more than you, Jack. You worked it like a man running for President. You changed your name for it. Your name. And I didn’t even ask you. I never would.”
“I didn’t change it. You’re dead wrong. I adjusted it, I gave it a new shape.” He gave a bitter little laugh and brushed his hand over his nostrils. “It was like a nose job.”
He stared into her face, searching for a hint of détente, a faint mirror of his grin. But the blue steel didn’t bend.
“It’s still my nose,” he said. “It’s still me. I’ll always be me. And I mean it.”
He had wanted the mahogany door. He had wanted mastiffs, and still did, even though now he recognized his choice had been driven by perception and not reality. The beasts proved to be fey, fussy eaters; they whined and were disease-prone; they crippled young at the hips. He had also wanted an early Mulliner Park Ward Corniche, the Rolls of Rolls, and Joyce had indulged him, even though she knew this was the car of heavyweight boxing champions and gutter entrepreneurs.
Jacob Kopens sat thinking of these things, the stupid minutia rich people obsess about, as Joyce and her cook snipped the watercress and chose the candlesticks. He sat in the gathering dusk opposite the wall that had disgorged the phone, staring at the jagged scar left by Isabel, the long lightning-bolt of a crack that glared back at him like a gaping fault line. He had combed through the town phone books, but he had found no Orne listing at all, not a trace. When the huge house made a sound in its bones, any sound in any room at all, Jacob heard it as a growl or a groan, a bestial utterance he connected with the storm-mangled woods and the tribal rage of Stanley Orne.
Tribal was his word for the nausea that gripped him, the sense of vertigo he felt even though he was up no further than a kitchen stool’s height from the French-polished teak and ebony floor, Macassar ebony. In America you could change tribes; that was what America was all about. You could keep your right foot in one tribe and plant your left in another. Do that in the Congo and they’ll nail your head to a tree. In the Congo, they’d hunt you down. But never here. Or so he’d thought. But he had never accounted for the Orne tribe, the evicted ones; and now he saw Stanley Orne more as structural avenger than structural engineer. He saw him as the raging townie exile stalking the dunes and the woods torn up by Isabel, finally getting his chance to crash inside the hated mahogany door and call his chits. This, the call, was what Jacob felt in his skinny legs. The bony thighs were crossed tight as blades of a scissors, shivering.
Night fell and the son came to dinner. So did the flame, who turned out to be a brown boy with sharp, painted nails. Joyce was cordial and her eyes stayed steel blue, inscrutable as the edge of a dirk. Jacob’s vertigo worsened. The sense of staring down from a fearfully nauseating height afflicted him, even though he was only seated in his customary Chippendale at the table’s head. He looked at the brown boy as if he had emerged from somewhere under the earth, blasted out through the crack in the wall by a demonic force. The plan was for dinner at home and late nightcaps at the club. He thought of brown-boy fingers and painted nails passing under a gauntlet of hating eyes: the Commodore’s comrades, with their blazers and Nantucket reds. As he sat and sipped he could feel the foreshock of tribal catastrophe vibrating the rails of his Chippendale. It was even making its way across the teak and ebony to the panels of the mahogany door.
Now he had a name for it too. Shear.