Chapter 31: Winter Wonderland

The timing for my trip to Cloudrest proved inspired. The rest of October turned nasty. Sleet and freezing rain do not make for good driving, but boating is even worse. November brought stormy weather, followed by a brief warm spell. At my suggestion, a set of cameras were stationed on Cloudrest's hilltop, giving 24-hour video coverage of things like the main house, the Woodshop and a set of weather instruments.

Vivian wrote a program to track and time-stamp the temperature, humidity, barometer, rain/snowfall and wind speed. She considered it trivial. It was one more detail that was going into the growing list of video and other projects. Another camera recorded the sunsets. I gave them to Sheila. She created a screen saver with the sunsets from November. Sean was giving them to clients as a Christmas Card. I looked forward to one that did the whole year.

My Alderman position had settled into a siege. Every time I tried to use "my" City of Nashua resources to do something, it would be blocked. That meant I needed to be creative. Most of the needed information I could get from the internet or my little old lady circles. I was even learning bridge. Elspeth was already an accomplished cardsharp, but we were both learning mahjong.

I should mention Elspeth's role in Nashua. It goes without saying that she handled all the paperwork and most of the negotiations. She was also a Lady among my ladies. Her Boston breeding was the cause of great envy and, probably, much discussion. It did not hurt that Elspeth loved to gossip.

Naturally, I was a favorite subject. There was a lot of concern when I showed no interest in the various men that the ladies paraded in front of me. I can be dense. I never noticed until Elspeth pointed them out to me. When Elspeth explained about Siemens, and where Lars had been posted, sympathy gushed out. Several of the ladies were military wives during Vietnam or the Gulf War.

Elspeth was also the conduit for another one of our core team. While I was in Concord all summer, trying to prime the pump, Elspeth was shuttling between Boston and Nashua, acting as my eyes, ears and voice. As the ongoing projects at Cloudrest grew, she started having communications problems with tech speak.

I would have called one of Sean's people or Richard Willingham. Elspeth chose to ask around Nashua. One of my ladies had a nephew attending Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). He dumped a summer job at Target to serve as Elspeth's tech liaison. His name was Leon L. Lusk, a.k.a. Trip.

Trip did not have many obvious assets, other than being a nerd. His high school grades were top notch, but grades at RIT were only so-so. Though still an undergrad, he was already twenty-four years old. Worse, his study path was laser physics. However, he understood both computer and communications tech-speak. I figured, why not? He would work cheap, it would look good on his resume and he would enjoy it. So it proved.

The problem was that he wanted to keep working, rather than finish his degree. I had been there, done that and wanted none of it. While I was still in Concord, we spoke on the phone. At my insistence, he went back to finish at RIT. We first met on a cold, rainy day just before Thanksgiving. I almost slapped my forehead for missing the obvious. The short version is Richard Willingham, without the breeding.

I once told Elspeth that I thought she would make an exceptional wife and mother. One look at Trip Lusk told me she could be his wife and the mother of his children. The urgent question was what to do about it, what Sheila calls her inner yenta. I tried to avoid conflict by asking personal questions. Unlike most people, Trip did not react badly. I suspect he had never managed a big date, so he had not been interrogated by a girl's father.

The situation was like something from a romance novel. Trip had a successful father, which I already deduced from what I knew of his mother. While this was good in some ways, it was difficult in others. Trip's father was an account representative for Allied Chemical. As a salesman, he was often away from home. When they were together, Trip was not the sort of boy his father admired—asocial, non-athletic, indifferent to status and not at all entrepreneurial.

It was so much like my own story, my heart ached. I could also see immediately why Elspeth was both drawn to him and repulsed. Elspeth wanted a firm hand. Trip gave directions as naturally as breathing, but no one ever listened. There were many reasons for this, starting with his clothing. They were a male geek version of my own baggy clothes and army boots.

I had another of those moments when many things suddenly made more sense. Sean had a genius for seeing potential under the surface. Once I recognized camouflage for what it was, the person underneath became easy to see. Trip was uncomplicated and direct, because his mind did not process many of the status symbols that others used. A lifetime of peer abuse made him shy, which conflicted with his natural tendency to take charge. Loyalty was both his most valuable asset and the trait he valued most.

I said, "Trip, I am glad we finally meet. If you were in charge of the renovations, what would you do?"

For the next hour, he talked nonstop. There were at least twenty ideas no one else had floated. On the other hand, his viewpoint was very narrow. He only knew the things that were going on locally in Nashua. If nothing else, I needed to widen that horizon. The first thing that caused him to falter was Elspeth.

She was as perfect as a male geek was likely to meet. Elspeth was attractive, dressed well, spoke well and never fumbled a social grace. In a sense, though Trip never made the connection, Elspeth was his father's ideal daughter-in-law. More realistically, Elspeth excelled where Trip was lacking.

The symmetry, of course, was that Trip excelled where Elspeth was lacking. The difficulty would normally be in getting them to trust each other. That hurdle was already passed. They already found each other attractive, though Trip did not truly believe it of Elspeth. What they needed was time together. That I could arrange, but first things first. I asked Trip how fast he could get a degree, any degree.

The answer was one I might have given. He could take twenty hours in the spring and graduate after summer session, provided he could get his project done. The trick would be getting the project done, on top of the class overload. Easy peasy. I picked up the phone and called George. Trip would go to California, to develop his project, between finals and New Year. He could tweak the paperwork during the semester. That handled academics.

Next, he would be getting a makeover. Been there, done that, recommend it. In this, I conspired with Elspeth and his mother. My rules were very specific. They could do his hair. Everything else he had to pay for. There was an argument, but they both understood the logic. I unbent a bit, by allowing Trip's mother to give him a $100 prepaid card. That would not go far in a mall, but Elspeth knew how to get creative.

Before they left, I gave Trip a box of condoms and the address of a motel where I had made them a reservation. I was very specific that I wanted Trip to give Elspeth the condoms. She would carry them and she would apply them. They both knew the theory of coitus, but neither knew the practice. To help out, I gave him a checklist of erogenous zones to inspect. If that was not enough of a map, we were in trouble.

Sunday proved my worries unfounded. Trip's disheveled hair looked intentionally disheveled. The jeans were well faded and clung to his ass. The T-shirt was from a concert, not a physics project. All this was beside the point. Trip could not stop smiling, Elspeth could not stop blushing and neither could stop looking at the other. I left Elspeth with Trip's mother and took Trip to a coffee shop.

Coffee is a great way to waste time while someone else fills the silence. Trip gave me a lesson in my own tactics. I was ready for a warm up before he finished adding creamer and sugar. Oh well. When he finally took a sip, I asked if all the effort was worth cold coffee. To give him credit, he caught an extra level to my comment. Baby steps.

I told him that fussing with coffee, or cigarettes, or personal grooming, or whatever, could be used to allow another person the first word. On the other hand, it could be rude. If he was with another person, he needed to be with them. That's a line from Hitch. The whole movie is about paying attention to the other person. Trip did not identify with Albert, but he could see Elspeth as Allegra Cole.

What made things click was when I said Hitch did not mold the parts of Albert that Allegra liked. To the contrary, Allegra liked what other people joked about, spilling mustard, dancing badly, using an inhaler. It was a big leap, but Trip was a smart guy. He worked his way from being picky and exacting about coffee, to being picky and exacting about Elspeth. When the realization dawned I said, "Elspeth likes a firm hand."