Creature Discomforts

barely old enough to be out of high school, they’d graduated from Oberlin three years earlier, married soon after that, traveled in Europe, and then settled in as the caretakers of the Beamon Reservation. Because of Effie’s chattiness, I hadn’t had to ask many questions, and those I’d asked had been vague enough to hide my ignorance. Quint and Effie’s house, she told me, was on the private road to the right of the reservation parking lot, opposite the road to the guest cottage and main house; I remembered seeing it on Gabrielle’s map. Effie used one room as a pottery and weaving studio. Quint, she informed me, was a cabinetmaker. The couple shared a homespun look. Effie’s long, dark hair was French-braided. She wore layers of flowing cotton garments. On her feet were Birkenstock sandals over thick woolen socks. Quint had cherubic blond curls and was dressed in jeans and a multicolored woolen jacket that looked Guatemalan or Peruvian, but may have been handcrafted by his wife. Without actually looking like the Campbell Kids, the O’Brians radiated a New Age version of red-and-white soupy wholesomeness. Effie was at that very moment pouring steaming vegetable soup from a thermos into a small pottery bowl. She’s already told me, with a censorious look in her husband’s direction, that as a vegetarian, she didn’t eat lobster or clams.
    “Quint,” she’d explained, “is a pesco-ovo-lacto-vegetarian, meaning that he eats fish. And eggs. And milk.”
    “Meaning,” Quint had expanded, “that to a purist like Effie, I’m not a vegetarian at all.”
    They’d locked eyes and burst into laughter.
    “We have an ongoing purer-than-thou competition going here,” Quint told me. “Pardon us. We’re obnoxious.” They weren’t. Or I didn’t find them so. In fact, when Wally Swan finally disinterred the lobsters, steamers, com, and potatoes, Quint and Effie invited me to eat with them. They also went out of their way to include the Pine Tree Foundation’s secretary, a dark-haired, pixielike young woman named Tiffany, who clearly knew the other guests but had still been cast to the social periphery. Luckily for me, Tiffany took an instant liking to my dogs, who used a variety of mournful expressions, smiles, vocalizations, and similar tactics to convince her that they perceived unique and fabulous traits in her character that no one else, human or canine, had ever noticed before. Tiffany’s captivation by malamute voodoo freed me to eat dinner. With what I now see as astonishing competence, she took Kimi’s leash and assumed the task of preventing Kimi from filching the food on people’s paper plates. With a quick hand signal, she promptly got Rowdy, too, to drop to the ground in a sphinx-like pose. “Well-trained dogs,” she commented. “Stay!” Anyway, I was thus able to disjoint my lobster and ask a vague nonquestion about the Pine Tree Foundation for Conservation Philanthropy. For all I know, Effie’s snippy response was justified; maybe Norman Axelrod had talked me to death, so to speak, on the subject. Still, I ignored Quint’s objection to the expression about death and said, “No, not really.”
    “Well, I’m surprised to hear that,” Effie said, “because it was one of his favorite, uh, points of contention, although as you probably noticed even on short acquaintance, he had so many that it’s a wonder he didn’t, uh, prick himself to death on one of them long ago.”
    “Effie!” Quint apparently devoted himself to monitoring his wife’s figures of speech.
    “Well, it’s the truth,” Effie insisted. “He was like a bull that went through the world seeing red flags everywhere.” After taking a bite of a sandwich she’d brought with her— bean sprouts wiggling from slices of a whole-grain loaf— she swallowed, and amended the claim. “Not everywhere. Axelrod operated on the principle that if other people wanted something, or liked it, or supported it, or whatever, then no matter what it was, he was violently opposed to it. Except for his thing about celebrities. Especially Stephen King. Not that Norman stalked Stephen King. He just liked people to think they were friends.”
    “They weren’t,” Quint added. “It was just that he was a name-dropper. Norman, not Stephen King. Norman would kind of alternate between this adulation of some famous person he was pretending he knew and, on the other hand, this mean-spirited opposition to—“
    Effie interrupted.