Tanya Kriel
Tanya Kriel hated Nantucket. She had sworn never to come back, but here she was, struggling through another winter on the rock. Well, at least she had a good reason, the best possible reason: revenge.
She wasn’t one of those people with an “It used to be nice on Nantucket” bumper sticker. It was easy to imagine Nantucket with fewer SUVs, more open land, no ugly trophy houses, all of that. It was easy to imagine it with no electricity, too, but so what? It was probably worse in the old days, before the Irish and the Jamaicans and the eastern Europeans arrived: all white bread old money wasps, adding up their stock portfolios and drinking martinis in those hideous pink pants. The island had obviously been a haven for rich people at least since the twenties. They might have changed, but they didn’t change much. Tanya actually preferred the ostentatious new millionaires. She found the moneyed biddies who insisted on driving rusty Hondas and getting their clothes at the dump even more pretentious, more insidiously smug, than the red-cheeked dot com scavengers in their Humvees.
Her own ’92 Ford Ranger had a homemade bumper sticker. It said:
Consider Privilege.
Checking her rearview mirror, she was pleased to note that it made the occasional tiny woman in a massive gas-guzzling truck suitable for industrial towing or wartime troop transport, wince uncomfortably. Maybe she was making them think, but probably not.
She was happy to make them nervous for a few seconds. She picked her battles carefully.
She had returned to the island with a mission and it was easier to concentrate on that mission in the winter. Apart from a brief flurry of conspicuous consumption in December, the place was fairly quiet from November to May: just the slaves driving from the barracks to the job-sites, making everything perfect for the perfectionist housewives who had nothing to do but redecorate. She knew the word “slaves” was highly charged. She had gotten into arguments about it. Plasterers and housepainters had gotten furious with her at the Box or the Muse when she described them that way. They felt free. She understood that, but it was an illusion. They made just enough money to pay for the necessities of their lives. It was a lot of money, but Nantucket’s economy was precisely calibrated to leave them with nothing at the end of the month. No health insurance, no savings, no prospects—just a rented room, a leased truck, and an ever-increasing debt load.
Tanya didn’t have any debt. She didn’t have any credit cards. She didn’t have a credit rating. She owned her battered old pickup outright, stayed with friends or took house-sitting jobs and tried her best to stay under the government radar. She had never been arrested or fingerprinted. She didn’t own a computer, and had never been on the Internet. No “cookies” defined her tastes and predilections for the benefit of large corporations. She paid cash at Stop & Shop; she didn’t have a Stop & Shop card. She wasn’t on their database. People thought she was paranoid. That was fine with her.
She was standing in front of a wooden stepladder, not painting the window sash set up on two nails driven into the ladder’s legs to make a crude easel. Her mind was wandering. Slaves. Yes, she had re-entered the slave economy, but there was no other way to do what needed to be done. She needed access, and housepainters got it. They were supposed to be inside people’s houses when no one was home; trespassing was part of their job description.
So she had driven by the Lomax job site on Eel Point road last June, hoping to find out who the painting contractor was. It had all happened faster than she expected. She’d met Mike Henderson that afternoon and he had hired her on the spot. He was short-handed and she was experienced. He was attractive and she was beautiful—that had something to do with it. The difference between them was, she knew the effect her looks had on people, and he had no idea about his own. She could tell he saw himself as an awkward lug in need of a shower, with a big head and a small bald spot, shy despite his size, hen-pecked and stinking of thinner. But she loved his looks instantly. She loved the lack of vanity in his disarrayed hair and paint-spattered Nantucket Whalers sweatshirt. She loved the natural authority with which he ran his crew, showing a new kid how to smooth the paint with the flat of the brush, doing it gently, saying “Here’s a little trick—it’ll make your life easier,” helping another kid who had spilled some paint onto a drop cloth on the new deck. The kid had no idea how fast the paint would penetrate that thin cotton, but Mike did. He bundled it up and was rubbing the cedar planks with dirt a few seconds later. Tanya had grabbed a handful of garden soil and joined him. He grinned up at her.
“Painting is the perfect job if you never grew up,” he said. “Where else can you clean things with dirt?”
The main thing was, he didn’t yell.
Tanya was used to men who yelled. Her sister Anna had been, too. Maybe that was why Anna got involved with Lomax in the first place.
She knew Mike was attracted to her, but she soon found out that he was married and she kept the flirting low-key. She didn’t want any complications or distractions; she didn’t want to get sidetracked. She had a job to do and she was making progress. She was getting to know the two brothers, Danny and Eric, flirting with them, playing them off against each other, chipping at them for information, digging and brushing off each find like an archaeologist reconstructing an ancient city in the desert. She was making good progress. It would be criminally stupid to slow herself down with some useless infatuation.
But that was exactly what had happened.
She set her brush in the paint can and stepped back from the ladder with a sigh. She couldn’t concentrate this morning, and she wasn’t here to paint anyway. She was thinking about Mike Henderson all the time now. Any time when she wasn’t thinking of something specific—what to paint next, what to buy at the grocery store, what Diane Reem was saying to the author of the latest “extraordinary book” on NPR—she was thinking about Mike. Her mind was pulled there. His smile had its own gravity. She liked the tug of it, like the soft pressure on your knees and your thighs when you’re lying in bed on Sunday morning. The whole mass and rotation of the planet seems determined to keep you horizontal. She never really wanted to get out of bed and she didn’t want to stop thinking about Mike Henderson, either. It was a form of laziness. She didn’t have the energy to turn away.
So instead she was doing this. She had gotten out of bed on Sunday morning to come here. Mike was meeting her. They were going to prime the spindles on the sweeping grand staircase. It was a two-person job, so it made sense to do it together. It also made sense to do it on Sunday when there would be no carpenters, Corian guys, electricians, plasterers, and plumbers crowding them and kicking up dust. In fact the site was deserted, just as Tanya had hoped it would be. She glanced at her watch. Mike was due any second. She bent down and untied her sneakers, toed out of them and pulled her socks off. The house was warm but the wood floor was cool. She unbuttoned her pants. Mike had been undressing her with his eyes for weeks, especially since she stopped wearing a bra under her T-shirt. Now it was time for the real thing. She wasn’t sure what she was hoping for. Did she want him to leave his wife? The morals of home-wrecking didn’t trouble her. Mike didn’t have kids and Tanya was Darwinian about marriage. Weak animals got predated by stronger ones; if his marriage was flimsy enough to be killed off by some stray girl and her ten-ounce Kegel weight exercises, it deserved to die—just like the slowest eland in the herd.
Besides, if Tanya were doing the venal marriage hunt there was much better prey than Mike available. That was the last thing she wanted. She didn’t want to marry Mike; she could imagine him stumbling around some tiny apartment, reeling from his divorce, displaying all his bad habits and sanitary lapses at close quarters. He probably snored and left wet towels on the bed. No, it was nothing like that. It was much simpler than that.
She pulled her T-shirt over her head.
Maybe this would be bad and the disappointment would break the circuit in her head; maybe it would be so good that Lomax wouldn’t seem important anymore. Maybe it was just an itch and scratching it would allow her to concentrate. She didn’t know and it didn’t matter. The speculation would be over soon. She pulled down her panties and kicked them aside. She was naked in the big unfinished foyer of the Devil’s trophy house.
After today she’d know.