You're Married to Her? (14 page)

 

Selectmen are members of a town council. The term originates in eighteenth-century New England, the ascetic home of Puritan repression, Cotton Mather, and the public torture of sexually active women accused of being witches. But within minutes of shyly edging my way into the back of the Board of Selectmen's meeting, I was hooked. It had little to do with the zoning issue; that was quickly referred to the planning board (and eventually Marge did lose much of the worth of those lots). No, it was all about the stories.

I wrote fiction all day every day, creating characters and narrative that couldn't compare to the conflicts that raged before the Board. The most miserable misanthropic hermit in town demands a guarantee that if she collapses in her kitchen only those members of the rescue squad whose names she had scotch taped to her screen door would be granted permission to resuscitate her. There was the man indignant about his arrest for shooting his friend in the foot when the friend insisted he didn't mind being shot and the father who ran naked from the shower to chase the neighbor's pit bull away from his daughter. You could not make this stuff up. The restaurateur arguing that the Senior Center was stealing his business because it served coffee; the mother who refused to come down from a tree on the town green because her children were told by the police not to climb it. I became a regular.

My presence did not go unnoticed. I was considered a fresh young face. The fact that I washed and shaved it regularly was a plus, as was the fact that nobody could actually place it. An election was approaching and in due course I was summoned to a meeting of the town's power brokers, a dozen retired businessmen in their eighties whose politics were so wildly dissimilar that they would never have remained in the same room if they weren't too deaf to hear what the others were saying. I wore my tweed sports coat and a bold rep tie and they eyed me like a suspiciously low-priced used car.

“Gentlemen,” I began. “I'm flattered. But I have
to admit that I have no opinions on town matters, no knowledge of town history, and no name recognition.”

A long weighty silence ensued during which they came to a consensus. No problem! Everyone else they asked had refused to run.

I was one of five candidates in a race for two open seats. The serious competition consisted of a religious school teacher named Eulalia Hammer and a native born oysterman from one of the oldest families in town. My sole advantage was the fact that the town's demographics were changing and we had one of the largest per capita populations of retirees in the country. The bulk of my supporters were new people in town, former suburbanites retired to live year round in their vacation houses and to them I represented a heartwarming reminder of home, the frizzy-haired Jewish kid who smoked pot with their daughters in the basement.

As to the issues, I was advised to avoid them and concentrate on the one strength that differentiated me from the other candidates, an unctuous desperation to be liked. It turned out that no one actually cared about my political positions, only that I listened to theirs, a strategy antithetical to Mrs. Hammer's, who viewed every question as a rare opportunity to converse with someone more than 10 years old and whose every answer sounded like a warning that Jesus was watching to see if you washed your hands after using the potty. The oysterman was armed with statistics about the environmental damage caused by the building of houses by all the new people
in town but this only pissed off all the new people in town, while the natives' attitude was summed up by one old man who said, “All that may be, but your great uncle knocked up my grandpa's sister afore he ran off to World War One, so you can go to hell.”

And so I was elected with a large plurality, followed by Mrs. Hammer, and we joined a Board that dedicated itself to reforming town government by humiliating and, when possible, firing everyone who worked for it.

The Board was chaired by an erudite woman with soldierly bearing, Mrs. Flay, the daughter of a Canadian Air Force Major General who dressed herself in a uniform fashioned from an Orvis catalog: red wool blazer, twill slacks and riding boots. At first she seemed to me detached and coolly dispassionate, as on the night she sat at rigid attention in the presence of the totally soused owner of the pit bull. “You're Nazis, all of you!” he railed at the Board. “Can anyone prove those bite marks are from
my
dog's teeth? As soon as that little hypochondriac gets out of intensive care I demand DNA tests, do you hear me?” It had never occurred to me that Mrs. Flay might be as shit-faced as the petitioners themselves until she began to telephone me every evening at happy hour. “Oh, Ira, I do hope you have a moment.” Her overture was a breathy supplication, a hostess in a velvet caftan crossing the carpet with a tray of cocktails. Loaded myself by 5:30 in the afternoon, I welcomed these disembodied flirtations, tentative but alive with suggestion, like the accidental brush of
a hand on your bottom, as we proceeded to shop the latest town gossip.

In my own work at this time I was fielding a string of rejections for a novel I had begun with the wildest, most entertaining twenty-five pages I had ever written but that, like a fart, began with a bang and progressively diminished in intensity until it left the reader with the faint redolence of cheese. But who needed fiction? I was in the thick of real life drama. If gossipy telephone trysts gave me the opportunity to harmlessly roast people in private, selectmen's meetings were an opportunity to do serious damage. Town employees were routinely reduced to sputtering rages and occasionally tears as Mrs. Hammer used a sublimely sadistic method of attack she had perfected during her years as a religious educator. At one meeting she blandly began questioning Doug Toomy, an ex-heavyweight college wrestler now on the rescue squad. “You were driving down Route Six last night in a town-owned vehicle, weren't you, Doug?”

“I suppose I was, Missus.”

“Well, I saw you, Douglas, so there is no need to suppose is there?” Then, with the bashful falsetto of a child hiding behind a curtain, “Why were you breaking the law?”

He slid to the edge of his chair. “I wasn't breaking any law.”

“Do we want to tell a lie, Douglas?” She glanced briefly at the ceiling as if to remind him he was standing before an authority even more important than the
Board of Selectmen. “I know you were breaking the law because you passed me while I was driving at the posted speed limit.” But she was hardly finished. “What if there had been a child in the road, Douglas?”

Speechless, the large man dropped his eyes to his size thirteen boots.

After Columbus Day the restaurants closed and the boats were pulled from the water. People boarded up their summer businesses and began reading the local newspapers again, delighted with weekly reports of a juicy auto-da-fé. My phone rang constantly with calls from people anxious to tell me stories of municipal waste and gross misconduct. At happy hour I could count on Mrs. Flay's latest cocktail gossip.

To put this in perspective, my most popular novel,
The Kitchen Man
, came out to rave reviews, sold mass market and foreign rights, and was optioned to Universal Pictures. Of the number of people I interacted with on a daily basis, only a handful knew I had even written a book and the rest viewed it as less interesting than an angry letter to the editor. As a selectman I was in the news every week. Decisions I made were immediately enacted by staff as opposed to novels that took years to write before moving glacially through one editorial committee after another. I was the boss, not a petitioner at the mercy of an agent or editor. I got paid regularly; a pittance, but no publisher ever kept up my health insurance. The truth was that I was happier as a small town politician than I had ever been as a writer. Before long I had the friendships
that had eluded me when I first moved to town, almost all of them made through town government.

Porter Dudley, the new Town Administrator, hired in my third year of office, was the closest. After we reduced his predecessor to a quaking mass of facial tics, we earned a reputation as a town without pity, the kind of quaint New England village described in stories like “The Lottery.” Although our advertisement offered a competitive salary, few applicants wanted a job that would end in a Moscow show trial. Dudley was the best of the crop. He was not experienced but worked the job night and day to get up to speed, offering a sympathetic ear to people who felt they'd never had a voice.

He spoke incessantly about his kids and his wife—to whom he wrote rhymed verse, which he insisted on showing me when he discovered my wife was a poet. His family still lived in Ohio until he could afford to bring them east. Therefore most evenings found him at the local pub where he was nicknamed Old Port and played darts with the fishermen, many of whom I had barely known until Dudley introduced us.

A short rubber-faced man with loose jowls and a flat, misshapen nose, Dudley was a great storyteller, a compassionate listener, and a mimic who did impressions. He did a police sergeant pulling up his pants as he chased after a skate boarder. He did the recreation director, pumping his fist after beating a 9-year-old in tennis. He did me, the way I got bored and sleepy at meetings and slouched, my legs splayed, my butt slipping so far
down the chair that I might have been doing the limbo. He did Mrs. Flay and her breathy, patronizing voice: his fatal mistake and one that reached her with viral speed.

The Chairwoman had never liked Porter Dudley. He was a begrudging choice from a poor pool of applicants and from the beginning she had dubbed him “Any Port in a Storm.” She preferred professionals with impressive degrees and crisp wool suits. Dudley was just too common a man for her to respect but more to the point, too well liked. He replaced her in the eyes of the people as the most important person in town. Even when a letter appeared in the newspaper praising him, she called him Dudley Do-right. In time she began to repeat rumors in our nightly cocktail conversations. “Oh, Ira, I hear that he returns from lunch at the pub quite tipsy every day.”

The Board of Selectman's meetings became a star chamber in which his petty oversights were exaggerated to enormous proportion. One night Eulalia Hammer cross-examined him about a light bulb. “Mr. Dudley, I happened to drive down to the harbor the other night and I was shocked to find it dark in front of the harbormaster's building.”

“Probably a bulb needs changing. I'll see to it.”

In her most angelic voice: “What if a child had been down there?”

“That was how late, Ma'am? In the off-season? What would a child be doing down at the harbor?”

“Well, what if a little boy was in the car with his grandfather? And what if his grandfather had a heart attack?
And what if a violent pedophile had escaped from the state prison for the criminally insane that day?”

Dudley began to sweat. “Is this a likely scenario, Madame Chair?” But Mrs. Flay sat at military attention, her shoulders as square as the uprights of a guillotine, her gaze looming over him like a blade.

 

It is a cold and soggy night in early December and except for the spinning tires of an occasional pickup, the distant yelps of a coyote pack in the marsh, there isn't a hint of life on Main Street. Even the teenagers have abandoned the bench in front of Town Hall. Through the tall windows in the conference room a fluorescent lamp casts its wan blue light over five tired people sitting at an old oak table, four of them determined to end a man's career, me opposed. There is no audience tonight. There are no reporters. An executive session has been called, closed to the public, for the alleged purpose of discussing contract negotiations, but there is very little discussion and no negotiating, only accusations of Dudley's ineptitude without Dudley present to defend himself—in my eyes a violation of the Open Meeting Law. Although Hammer and Flay and the other two Selectmen have the votes they need to refuse to extend Dudley's contract, they know he is popular and they crave a unanimous decision. My negative vote is the one pitiful claim to power I have left. It is fifteen minutes to midnight and we have been inhaling each other's rancid breath since six. Mrs. Flay makes a last tired plea, “Oh, Ira, admit it, he's a
loser.” Once again she reads off the litany of his offenses. “You have to admit he's incompetent.”

I didn't think he was anything of the kind. The snow got plowed. The garbage got collected. The rescue squad got people to the hospital. Were we selling off mineral rights? Bombing innocent civilians? Sending indigent teenage soldiers off to fight and die? In comparison to the federal government this little town was the kingdom of heaven.

The vote was taken at five minutes past midnight. It was decided that Dudley's contract would not be renewed and that no announcement need be given the press. Once advised that he was about to be canned, Dudley would have no option that would save his reputation but to quietly resign.

Mrs. Flay waved a friendly good-bye as we hustled to our cars, the moist air cooling to hoar frost, the parking lot slippery with black ice, and I was confronted with one of those movie moments, when the sound track gives way to the slow beating of the heart and there is an important decision to be made, usually in tight close-up, a choice in which true character is tested. For instance, I could admit my loss, make peace with the others on the board, or back over her with my truck. An easy decision. I returned her wave. But the choices kept presenting themselves.

I could either discuss the situation with my wife when I returned home, take the opportunity to calmly face the fact that I was powerless to save my friend's
job—or close myself off with the TV on and a bottle of scotch. I filled a glass with ice.

I could come up with a strategy that would work for the benefit of the town, leverage my role as the Board's conscience to negotiate a good settlement package for Dudley. Or, I could call the reporters and blow the whistle, expose their covert little cabal to the light of day.