Yes, I cleaned the Brownsteins’ house and the Grinstaffs’ too. After the accident, everyone made a huge deal about that, as if I was the lynchpin somehow, the glue to every bad thing that stuck to that family. How did that happen? Exactly the way you think it would. Bear Brownstein saw me at the Warners’ back in April, about six months after he’d bought the house. I did one of the Warners’ twice-yearly big cleanings that month, beating rugs on the porch, airing things out, telling the window cleaners where they missed a spot, and he came over and said it looked like I knew what I was doing. And I said, “Well, I ought to. I’ve been doing it for twenty years.”
“It can’t be easy keeping that house clean,” he said then with a kind of sigh.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, so much stuff. All of it old.”
“Well, when it’s clean, it feels newer.”
“That’s an excellent attitude.”
“Thank you,” I said.
I’d stopped beating the rugs, because the dust would have gone into his face. He looked out of place on the lawn, framed by the blue sky and the blue water, in his black blazer and jeans and black T-shirt. Like he belonged in New York, somewhere dark, without all that blue behind him. Not that I’d ever been to New York. No desire. I can see skyscrapers and Broadway shows in Boston or even Providence.
“How much would you charge to clean an easier house?”
I laughed. “I charge by size, not by quote-unquote ease. And if your house is the one I think it is, it’s very, very big.”
“Well, that seems backward.”
“It’s the only fair way to do it.”
“Wouldn’t hourly be the fair way to do it? In the city, they charge by the hour.”
“Well, we’re not in the city,” I replied. “And out here on an island, if you buy me for three hours, trying to save money, you’ll be unhappy, because parts of your house won’t be clean. You know what I mean?”
“If there’s less furniture, and fewer knickknacks, and smoother surfaces, and only one nice, very clean person living in it, you should be able to clean a house in three hours.”
“How do you know? You ever try to clean your own house top to bottom?”
He laughed, and that made me smile. He could dish it out, and he could take it, and really, what more could you ask for? People around here claim that New Yorkers are different from people from Boston, Philadelphia, the Midwest. Buying up the houses, adding on crazy things like wine cellars and gift-wrapping rooms and fancy basements with pool tables that’ll just get ruined with the first nor’easter that comes through. All that Wall Street money and no good old-fashioned sense. But I didn’t see that with him, not at all. He was modest, clean, kept to himself. So I started working for him. Fit him in the next day, early, from 6:00 to 10:00 a.m., since he said it didn’t matter how early I began. I liked that about him too, his flexibility.
And yes, I liked him in a way, but I hadn’t met his family yet. When you start cleaning a house, you aren’t cleaning for one person but a group. And there are always different people in that kind of lineup, like a committee. Someone who bugs you. Someone who mistreats you. Someone who spills hairspray all over the wooden furniture and then blames the house cleaner. Someone who claims a ring was “stolen” when they really misplaced it. The whole Brownstein clan was coming up in August, and there was a wedding planned for his daughter. And that’s about all I could say about things.
And yes, you can get to know a family through their home, their belongings. It takes time, and sooner or later, you stumble onto harmless secrets, like a dildo in a drawer, and some not-so-harmless ones, like Tom Warner’s bourbon hidden in the laundry cubby. And it’s easy to see what people are like on the surface: Do they love needlepoint? Do they hunt deer? Do they paint watercolor? And unfortunately, you do become intimate with their menstrual cycles and their stomach issues. I can spot irritable bowel syndrome at ten paces, my friends. But Bear was there alone, and he was right—he owned hardly anything.
Call it modern; call it minimalist. His living room in the main house—I’d never cleaned in the pool house, because it was being renovated, and he thought it was a waste to clean something that was going to be demolished—was furnished like something out of a men’s magazine. Nothing feminine in the whole place. A tall wall of bookshelves with one of those library ladders. A low credenza, two gray sofas that barely had arms or backs. A chrome bar on wheels that held glasses and wine and needed to be dusted. A sheepskin rug, which seemed ridiculous at a beach house. It would be the hardest thing to clean in the whole house if someone spilled on it. There was nothing in the credenza, only a few photographs on the walls. In the corner, a sculpture of what looked like a clothespin, which he told me never to clean because it was too risky.
“I guess you don’t have grandkids,” I said, and he laughed.
“Don’t rush that. I’m only fifty,” he replied.
I didn’t tell him I was forty and had two. The less he knew about me, the better.
His bedroom had nice clothes hanging in the closet, beautiful wooden hangers. No curtains, only thin linen shades that were too complicated for me; they had their own remote and moved in multiple directions. I just left them be.
So yeah, I made a few beds. I vacuumed; I dusted. His bathroom wasn’t messy at all; it made me wonder if he worked at an office somewhere and didn’t spend much time at his house. He was hardly ever there when I was there. Even at 6:00 a.m., he was gone or on his way out, and I preferred that, I did. And he left me cash, always. No checks. I preferred that too.
So all in all, I liked him. I wish all my clients were that clean, that flexible, that cash-heavy, and that gone. There was one car in the driveway, always—a Range Rover. Maybe he had a second car. I never saw a bike. Billy Clayton kept asking me where he walked, and it was hard to imagine him walking along the beach in blue jeans and a blazer. Easy to imagine him in a restaurant or bar. But he didn’t drink. I never found a wineglass or old-fashioned in his sink or his dishwasher, and all the wine bottles on his bar cart were dusty, for show. There was none in his refrigerator, no wine cellar, wine refrigerator. No bottles in recycling. Billy Clayton looked disappointed when I told him that too. What did he hope for? A drunk man who snuck around on foot, spying on all his neighbors, plotting revenge? Some kind of crazed real estate magnate who wanted to skirt the historic society and buy all of Brant Point?
What more did they want me to tell them? He lived simply; he seemed uncomplicated. If you asked me to guess what he did for a living, I would say accountant. Or a librarian who inherited a lot of money.
They were looking for evidence of the crimes, yes—lawn mowers, axes, ladders, gloves, accelerants—but also something darker, harder to pinpoint. They wanted to believe he had a black heart. And how do you find that? What do you search for?
It’s not that I didn’t snoop, didn’t open a drawer or a closet or a cupboard. Of course I did. It’s part of the job, to know what’s where. Not because I care what they own, but because I need to inventory, I need knowledge, in case I’m accused of anything.
And sometimes I thought that was where Billy Clayton was heading. Dancing around questions about my houses, heading toward questions about me. Where I was July 4, and not what I saw.
But I know this: building a home and following the law and pointing out when someone else was breaking it was not a crime. It was being a good citizen, not a bad one. I know I’m in the minority on this, but I don’t care.
I clean ’em as I find ’em.
I call ’em as I see ’em.