Nutmegger

Nutmegger

Erik Torkells

Copyright 2011 by Erik Torkells

All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or locales is coincidental.

Smashwords Edition

Contents

1. Welcome to Litchfield

2. On Boredom

3. Write What You Know

4. You Couldn’t Make This Up

5. Omission Accomplished

6. Hand in Glove

7. Our Hero

8. Down the Garden Path

9. Tea Is for Trouble

10. The Plot Ripens

11. Mr. Fix-It

12. A Sneaking Suspicion

13. Leo Rising

14. True or False?

15. Hunting the Gatherers

16. This Time It’s for Real

Endnote

Acknowledgments

1. Welcome to Litchfield

Gripping the steering wheel with his knees, Jed checked his phone to see if he had any new emails. Given that the car was at a standstill, he could probably put the car in park and take a nap in the backseat.

Your turn, said Molly, who didn’t mind that Jed took a long time to play as long as he stayed focused on the game.

OK, he said. How about watching back-to-back screwball comedies at Film Forum?

"Absolutely. But I can beat that. Having dinner at Per Se. And I’m talking the full twenty-nine courses, wine pairings and everything."

That’s good. Jed’s stomach gurgled at the thought of even one course. He looked around, hoping there might be a sign for a gas station or a McDonald’s, somewhere he could get a snack, but Interstate 684 was flanked by an infinite army of trees. He forced his mind back to the question of better ways to spend four hours. We could be flying to Denver.

To visit your mother? I think I’d rather be tied to the roof of the car.

Hoping to get a jump on the Memorial Day weekend exodus, Jed and Molly Hopkins left the city at 3:30 p.m. Everyone else had the same idea, however, and what should have been a two-hour drive at most had stretched to twice that. Their little game was joyless, but it did manage to distract them. They had never rented a house before, and they hadn’t seen this particular house since early March, when they went to scout summer rentals. What if it turned out to be a dump? What if they hated the country? Would they grow bored?

They had settled on Connecticut’s Litchfield County, in the foothills of the Berkshires, because neither of them were beach people, and anyway they didn’t want the asshole factor of the Hamptons. At least once a year, the New York Times ran a story about how the Catskills were rebounding after decades of decline, but Molly heard that the infrastructure was lacking. (I’m not eating iceberg lettuce, even ironically, she said.) While in college she had spent two summer weeks at a friend’s family’s place in the town of Kent, in western Litchfield County, and she remembered two-lane roads, covered bridges, antique stores, and not a lot of people. It’s as good a place to start as any, she said, suggesting they take a field trip and make an appointment with a broker.

The county’s new slogan, was Jed’s reply. Litchfield: Why Not? If nothing else, they reasoned, their car would get the opportunity to go over 40 miles per hour.

The house they ended up choosing was the sixth one they looked at, two-and-a-half miles from the center of the town of Litchfield. A white-on-green sign at the start of the unpaved driveway announced the house’s name as Toad Hill, but the house itself was 100 serpentine yards through the woods; it abutted a three-acre lawn the way other houses abut lakes. Painted white with dark green trim, it had the character of an old farmhouse. The interiors were redone within the past decade, but with a gentle touch: The floors were wide, uneven planks and the ceilings had never been raised. Jed and Molly loved that no other houses were visible and that there was a terrace (rimmed by a low, mortarless stone wall) and, halfway across the clearing, a small pool. And because the house only had two bedrooms, it was relatively affordable. Three days after looking at Toad Hill, they signed the lease. For $15,000, which Molly negotiated down from $18,000, they would have it from the Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day. There were other costs—fortnightly housekeeping, a pool guy, the gardener—for which they would be billed at the end. When they began telling their friends about the house, they realized that the details had already blurred, and they kicked themselves for not having taken photos. The ones on the broker’s website—they stayed posted even after the lease was signed—made the house look cramped, dingy, even woeful.

By the time Jed and Molly reached the driveway, vowing to leave earlier or later next weekend, dusk was losing ground to night. They wove among the trees, and the light changed as if a four-year-old were toying with a dimmer switch: first down to near darkness, then, as they emerged into the clearing, back up to the liquid gold of late spring. Jed parked the car and they scrambled out.

The house was adorable, even better than they remembered. They ran wild, schoolkids on recess, out to the pool, all over the house, poking through cabinets and closets. They hollered to each other as they encountered things they didn’t notice before or hadn’t remembered—the toad-patterned wallpaper in the powder room, the badminton net in the garage, the birdhouse in the tree by the back door, the vegetable garden, which when they were last at the house had been fenced-in nothingness, as if it were a pen for invisible animals.

I believe in love at first sight, said Molly, climbing onto the stone wall.

Second sight, technically speaking.

Don’t lawyer me.

Jed pulled her down and folded her into his arms. The slight chill brought out the warmth of each other’s skin. Do you think we could spend all summer here? murmured Jed into her ear. Renting a weekend house was more Molly’s doing then Jed’s. He didn’t mind the idea, only a prison warden could argue against fresh air, but he tended to be more careful with money because, as a journalist, he made less. They didn’t need to rent a summer house; it was nearly impossible to justify, if you really thought about it, but Molly had insisted that they deserved a little fun, a place to relax. And for the first time, Jed’s career was at a place where he could reliably get away for weekends. She heard his question for the concession it was, and she pushed her body closer.

Rather than drive to a restaurant, they uncorked the bottle of Lambrusco they brought and ordered a pizza from a place they passed on the way up. Jed lit some votives, wondering if he would remember to replace them at the end of the summer. What was the etiquette on that? Or the paper napkins in the pantry? Should they do a full inventory so they would know what to restock? He stopped himself: For $15,000, the owners could suck up the cost of a few napkins.

Over the past few weeks, they talked nonstop about how excited they were to do activities they couldn’t do in the city: hiking, kayaking, maybe even tubing on the Farmington River. But by 11 a.m. on Saturday, they were still deep in new-house infatuation. Each of them had been New Yorkers long enough that they suffered from recurring dreams about real estate: You moved into a new apartment that has all sorts of huge, hidden spaces—where you open a closet door and there’s a previously undiscovered wing hiding behind it. Jed explored the attic and basement, dragging up the yellow-and-white-striped umbrella that went with the table already out on the terrace, while Molly grew a little more exasperated every time she noticed that the owners had locked away something essential. I understand that I’d be neurotic about certain things, too, she said. "But measuring cups? Were they platinum or something?" She had convinced herself that this was the summer she would finally become the kind of person who bakes.

If a rented house has any personality at all, you can’t help but make guesses at to whose personality it might be. Jed contacted one of the owners—who had the Google-resistant name of Peter Wallace—just once, to ask if there was anything they should know about the trash or recycling or whatever. Wallace replied that he left instructions on the kitchen counter and that the key was atop the light by the back door. Any personal photos had been sequestered, so Jed and Molly scoured the bookshelves for clues. There was a lot of history, a bit of gardening and golf, more poetry than Molly and Jed thought was normal. "Owning The Collected Poetry of D.H. Lawrence is one thing, said Molly. Probably even admirable. But displaying it on the coffee table…."

Pretentious, said Jed aiming for an English accent but ending up in India. Privately, he noted that the book could be used to hurl at an intruder. He couldn’t shake his fear of a home invasion—there had been two high-profile ones in the news since they signed the lease, incidents where thieves brazenly entered houses and tied up the residents, and worse. He wasn’t used to living someplace where no one could hear you scream. Pushing the thought away, held up a book and read from the back cover: "‘The Surrender is an erotic memoir about one woman’s rhapsodic experience with sodomy.’"

Molly sighed. Anyone looking at our bookshelves would think we were boring. She heard how that sounded. And no, that does not mean I want to ‘surrender’.

They decided to go to the Litchfield farmer’s market, because Toad Hill’s vegetable garden looked like it needed another couple of weeks before they could harvest anything. It was just a dozen stalls, only half of which sold fruit and vegetables—and one of those was a sort of co-op, where locals’ donated produce was sold for charity. There were also stalls for a beef purveyor, a gourmet store, a bakery, and the Hickory Stick bookstore in Washington Depot. Because books are the fruits of writers’ labors, said Jed, but Molly refused to even award him an eye roll.

The longer Jed and Molly had been together, the more they had gotten into food: trying the latest hot restaurants and hole-in-the-walls, improving their cooking—Molly was the alpha chef—and going down to Union Square on Saturday mornings and then making a big dinner with whatever they bought at the Greenmarket. (Jed used to joke that food was the yuppie replacement for sex, until Molly pointed out that it didn’t reflect particularly well on either of them.) In fact, part of the appeal of a weekend house was having a bigger kitchen, growing their own vegetables—or at least eating vegetables grown on the premises, since a gardener was doing all the work—being near farms and farmstands, dining outside, inviting people up and letting the party go on for as long as it wanted.

After a quick once around, they decided on two dinner menus and divided to conquer. Molly bought bread, cheese, and a foccacia for lunch, and Jed picked out the vegetalia, a made-up word he loved to torment Molly with. Jed bought peas, ramps, radishes, and asparagus, and he couldn’t resist spending $1.60 on something called scapes; the woman working the stall said they were garlic shoots and offered Jed a printout of a recipe for scape pesto. As he was strolling around the market, he laughed at the irony: They had rented a house in the country only to end up replicating an experience they had at home. He was wondering how rustic this area was—doesn’t the very idea of a farmer’s market imply that there must be a lot of people who don’t have farms?—when he saw a young boy point at a bin of snap peas and say, Mommy, look! Edamame! That probably didn’t happen in the Catskills.

They drove into downtown, admiring the 18th- and 19th-century mansions, each with numbers above the front door commemorating the year it was built. To Jed and Molly’s modern eyes, the mammoth houses looked odd sitting so close to each other, like America’s first McMansions. They had so much personality, though, that Jed and Molly couldn’t help daydreaming what it would be like to own one—until Jed jabbed them both awake by wondering aloud about the heating bills.

Saturday night was quiet: After a dinner of crostini with ricotta and ramps, asparagus with horseradish butter, and a grilled pork tenderloin, they were in bed by 10 p.m. and asleep 20 minutes later, lulled by the cool temperature and the dead calm. Jed woke up early, made coffee, and went outside. A slight breeze had come up across the clearing. He could see the trees moving and hear the leaves whispering, but the air right around him wasn’t moving at all. A line of birds flew silently overhead, like carpoolers with nothing left to say to each other. Sitting there reminded him how much he used to enjoy camping—before he moved to New York and no longer had room to store all the equipment. If we lived in Oregon, every morning would be like this, he thought, ignoring the meteorological odds. He sat there for an hour, so relaxed that it was as if he were in one of the drug ads that Molly’s company churned out.

Was he becoming the kind of person who prefers calm to excitement? His first years in New York, he would have sooner died than leave. The sense that anything could happen at anytime with anyone compensated for the more aggravating aspects. Even the dirt, the noise, and the smells were thrilling because the suburb he grew up in was sanitized by comparison. But the novelty of the city slowly wore off, and if that took a while to notice because he made friends, his career got traction, and he fell in love for real, over time the grind became impossible to ignore. (When you ride the subway twice a day, it’s less a marvel of civil engineering than a round of Russian roulette.) He craved light and air and quiet and space in a way that no park could satisfy. Buying the car—a Mini they nicknamed Mr. Cooper—had helped them escape now and then, but the joy was increasingly fleeting.

He and Molly talked about leaving New York someday—some distant day—but part of them still loved the city, despite the fact that they only went to a Broadway show when relatives were in town and rarely stayed up past 11 p.m. The reason they chose to live there instead of pretty much anywhere else hadn’t changed: In New York, everything mattered more, including them. Moving away would be like failing or quitting. many of their friends had retreated to the suburbs, but not before having kids.

Kids. Jed had a theory that many couples started families because they don’t know what to do next. Life is a series of seismic shifts, from high school to college to working to getting engaged to marrying. But after the honeymoon there’s a lull, when your life doesn’t change in a fundamental way, when nothing major happens unless you do something like move to Japan, learn to fly a plane, or have kids.