Summer People (12 page)

“Hell, yeah. The job market for professors is terrible.”

Nathan laughed as he sipped his beer, debating whether to ask Eldwin what he meant about the possibility of the miraculous. Nathan prided himself on seeing, or at least
trying
to see, the world rationally, and he was concerned that if he and Eldwin confessed to profoundly different world-views, they might end up thinking less of each other and spoil what up until then had been a pleasant evening.

Eldwin said, “So what's going on with you and Leah?”

“What's going on? I don't know. We're going to a party tomorrow night.” Nathan stroked the dark water with his fingertips. It had been a long time since dinner and he was beginning to feel the mind-muddling effects of the alcohol. He added, “I guess it's one of those things where we both know that at the end of the summer, she's going to New York to do her thing and I guess I'll be headed back to Cleveland.”

“You got a lot keeping you there?” Eldwin asked.

Nathan tried to explain, but he knew his life back home didn't sound very alluring. Maybe—if he begged—his manager would rehire him to work part-time at the library. Then life would resume as before. Living in his small, one-window room in the shared house, he would return to work on his art, endure the company of three emotionally retarded housemates, and occasionally visit his father.

“My father's been pretty depressed since my mother's death,” he said, gloomily. This was the truth, but not the whole truth. His father had wrestled with depression long before Nathan's mother grew ill, but she had always been an optimist capable of tempering his pessimism, a light
illuminating his darkness. And it was obvious to anyone who cared to look that his father was suffering tremendously from her loss. Nathan certainly did not have such illumination in him, and he sensed within himself and within his father a muted frustration at not being able to provide it for each other. Nathan loathed feeling this way, like he was failing his father because he couldn't help him, and he was keenly aware of how much he and his father depended on the women in their lives to sustain them.

“What were you saying earlier about your belief in the miraculous?” Nathan asked. His head lolled back and he stared openmouthed at the sky.

Eldwin said, “Just that I've had some things happen to me that I don't know how to talk about or explain in other terms.”

“Like what?”

“Well, just strange occurrences that seem to suggest something more than just strangeness or coincidence…that seem to suggest something like a plan. When I was younger, in junior high, my parents got divorced and I moved around a lot with my father. We moved into one house where my bedroom had this wall-size photographic mural of an incredibly tall and beautiful waterfall out in Yosemite National Park in California. And I used to lie in my bed and stare at that picture and have this powerful sense that that was where I needed to go, that I would have some kind of life-changing and liberating experience there. When I was fourteen or fifteen, I even tried to go there. I left the house and walked a couple of miles to this marina. I broke into a houseboat and stole a bottle of vodka and then walked to the train tracks and climbed into this coal car and lay down with my bottle, waiting for the guards to pass by, and when the train started moving…I felt this incredible sense of freedom, like I was on my way to great adventure, to this new life and maybe this new way of living. Then the car slowed to a stop. I waited, and then the car crawled another thirty yards and stopped again. To kill time while the car crept along, I ended up drinking enough of that vodka that I passed out…and when I woke up in the morning, we were only about a fucking mile out of the train yard, so I just got disgusted and jumped off.”

Nathan laughed. “So where's the plan?”

“Well, then not that long afterward, I was at this girl's house where she was living with some other people, and I had sex with her—more or less in exchange for heroin. And afterward, while she was sleeping, I stepped out into the living room where other people were sleeping, and this porno was on television and it was of a priest fucking a woman. I sat down in a chair and suddenly saw a blinding flash of white light and experienced this overwhelming calm, where I felt like I was going to be okay—like I was aware that I had bottomed out but that something was telling me I was going to be all right.”

“Had you shot up the heroin before you went into the living room?”

“No. I wasn't high at the time. So fast-forward several years and I'm in graduate school and at a party in an old gym on the outskirts of Ann Arbor, and I'm talking with a beautiful woman—more beautiful than anyone I ever dated growing up—in the middle of this old boxing ring, and something happens in this conversation. Some kind of connection takes place so that the next week she and I are traveling across the country together and we end up camping at Yosemite National Park. We hike to the falls—to the same falls I used to stare at on that mural when I was growing up, and there was a moment when I kissed her—or she kissed me—and I've tried to describe this before and always fail. But it was like there was a real electrical charge, not a metaphoric one but a real one passing between us, and when we pulled away tears were streaming down both of our cheeks. There's a passage in the Zohar—this classic text of Jewish mysticism—about a kiss of true love, which sounds kind of like what I experienced, and I don't know how else to explain it other than in these mystical terms because I think they are experiences outside of what we can give a rational explanation.”

“Was the woman your wife?”

“Yeah, Rachel.”

Rational explanations for what happened had been flickering in Nathan's mind throughout the conversation. Eldwin's overpowering sense of Yosemite Falls as a place of liberation had grown out of a young man's
endless nights of longing to get away from a troubled home. The blinding flash of white light had been a biochemical explosion in his brain from having injected so many drugs. And the kiss was about trying to make the simply wonderful seem unique by taking a hackneyed metaphor and making it literal.

But even as Nathan doubted Eldwin's outlook on life—doubted that the white gull soaring above them, so strange to see so late at night, could be more than a random, meaningless occurrence—he could not help searching his past for moments of significance in a plan he might not yet recognize or understand. As he and Eldwin rowed toward shore, the possibility that perhaps he was meant to come to Brightonfield Cove and meet Leah instilled within him an uncertain hope. Thoughts of his father made Nathan feel netted down by grief and responsibility, but he did not want to end up one of those people who spend their whole lives tangled up in a parent's miserable and life-sucking neediness. His life back home was already almost as lonely as his father's. Maybe it would be better for both of them if Nathan did go someplace else, maybe even New York. He knew a guy from college who now lived there. Maybe Nathan could stay with him for a month or so, just until he could find his own apartment. Of course he didn't mention any of this as he and Eldwin paddled ashore and carried the kayak back to the shed. Nathan thanked Eldwin for inviting him and wanted to tell him how heartened he felt by their conversation and how long it had been since he had experienced an evening of male camaraderie that left him feeling less alone. But the alcohol was wearing off, so he just shook his hand and turned to go. He was concerned that Eldwin already viewed him with some pity and Nathan did not want to make it worse.

More Friends Are Dying ~ Thayer's Party ~ Visiting the George and Barbara Bush Estate ~ A Volkswagen Commercial ~ The Morning of the Funeral

F
or much of the next day, Nathan ruminated about the upcoming party. He wouldn't know anyone except Leah, and he was certain the place would be congested with young men like Thayer—with polished Ivy League confidence and rowers' builds—who would make Nathan's own boyishness and skinny frame seem much less appealing by comparison. He brooded about this all afternoon at the club and was still thinking about it in the early evening when he smelled the lushly sweet scent of a cigar wafting into the living room. Through the open window above the couch, he saw Mr. McAlister flicking embers into the flower bed beside the front steps. When Nathan opened the door, he noticed the old rogue looked better than he had when he'd visited to break the news about Carl. His rugged face was freshly shaved around his mustache, and his gray-brown eyes indicated a melancholic generosity. Ellen had been nodding off in front of the television but looked up when she heard Nathan greeting him at the front door. Mr. McAlister took a seat beside her on the
couch and asked her in a low, still-in-mourning kind of voice, “You been doing okay?”

Nathan wandered into the kitchen to wash the dishes and then went up the back stairs to his room. At the wooden desk in the corner, he worked on a drawing of himself and Eldwin in the kayak as they'd drifted idly through the bay. In the drawing, Eldwin held a can of beer in one hand and his big forehead in the other while Nathan slouched in the back seat, staring up at the sky. An hour passed, and as Nathan grew more and more pleased with his work, he began to hope Mr. McAlister would stay another couple of hours. That way—without Ellen safely in bed—Nathan would have a good excuse not to go to the party. Maybe Leah would say she didn't want to go without him and ask if she could just hang out with him on the porch, or at least these were the thoughts he was entertaining when Mr. McAlister called from below. Nathan opened the door into the hallway and saw him standing with his hand on the banister at the base of the stairs.

“Hey, I was just telling Ellen that Carl's funeral is tomorrow afternoon at one o'clock at St. Michael's.”

Nathan nodded. “All right, we can be there.” He glanced down into the fading light of the living room where Ellen remained on the couch.

Mr. McAlister ran his hand over his widow's peak. “Okay, then, I'll see you both there at one. Good night, Ellen,” he said, leaving.

Nathan came downstairs and sat across from Ellen in the burgundy recliner. After the wooden chair upstairs, the cushiony seat felt so comfortable that Nathan stifled a yawn. Ellen smiled and glanced down at her hands.

“You doing all right?” Nathan asked.

“I'm okay,” Ellen said feebly. She nodded as if to persuade herself, but then added, “I guess I'm just a little…concerned.”

“Yeah? What are you concerned about?”

“Well, a lot of my friends are dying,” she said, her lower lip trembling as she picked at the upholstered arm of the couch.

Earlier that afternoon at the club, an old woman with wispy hair had
told Ellen about a friend of theirs who'd died of heart failure, and another who was now battling pancreatic cancer, but Nathan could not remember their names. He got up and sat beside her, telling her that he understood her sadness, but, look, she had also been making new friends, younger friends, all her life, hadn't she? Nathan had seen them at church and at the club. Those friends were still around, and they would eventually have to suffer losing her the way she was suffering the loss of other friends now. That was the way it worked, Nathan thought, and he didn't know what else to say. Her concerns about growing older and dying were the same concerns already twisting within him. He knew no way to assuage them except through religion or weariness, so he eventually stopped talking and just held her hand.

 

N
athan had told Leah he would pick her up around nine, but because of his conversation with Ellen, he arrived half an hour late. “I was just about to call you,” Leah said, opening the front door before he'd knocked. She was wearing jeans and an army green T-shirt with the Red Cross symbol on the front. “Did you bring your bathing suit?”

“No.”

“Oh, you should get it,” Leah said, evidently not joking. “Thayer told me there was a hot tub we could use.”

Nathan glanced down at the canvas satchel that he supposed contained her bikini. “Well, he didn't mention it to me and I'm not sure I feel like hot-tubbing it tonight. Plus, I'm kind of afraid if I went back inside, I might wake up Ellen and then I'd have to wait for her to go back asleep.”

Leah shrugged as she closed the door and then followed Nathan away from the house. With their shoes scuffing through the gravel of Harbor Avenue, she asked, “So how was it kayaking with Eldwin?”

“It was good. It was more fun than I expected.”

“Did you guys drink when you were out there?”

“I think we each had a couple of beers.”

Leah frowned doubtfully, and said, “I was going to call and tell you that Eldwin had already drunk a six-pack by the time he left. I was afraid for
you going out with him. I know he can drink a lot without getting drunk, but I thought for sure you would notice it. You didn't smell it on him?”

“No, I mean, we were outside—and he wasn't stumbling around or slurring his words. How long did he take to drink the six-pack?”

“Like half an hour—I'm serious!—while he was reading the paper.”

“Well, I guess the guy can hold his booze, because I didn't notice anything different about him and I never felt like we were in any danger.” Nathan looked up from his shoes at Leah. “I'm touched you were concerned about me, though.”

“For an artist, you're not very perceptive,” Leah said.

“Well.” Nathan smiled. Her admission of being worried was acting on him like the best kind of liquor, invigorating him and giving him confidence, so he was no longer as anxious about the party. When he told her a little of what he and Eldwin had talked about while kayaking—including why Ellen supposedly drove her car into that rock—Leah said, “Oh, that's so sad. How does Ellen react when she's around Mr. McAlister's wife?”

“She seemed more than okay at the party. Given how everyone seems to know about her affair with McAlister, it seems incredibly bold for us to have been there. Why the hell would that guy have invited her if he knew his wife was going to be there?”

“I don't think he knew she was going to be there. I think they were angry at each other for a while, but now Thayer says they're talking and that they might get back together.”

“She doesn't live with him?”

“Not since they separated. She's been staying in their completely gorgeous house near the Point.”

Nathan nodded distractedly. He often thought of his late teens and early twenties as a period of romantic tumult that he must pass through until he found refuge in the warm embrace of a marriage like his parents'. He disliked remembering that sometimes the romantic tumult never ended, that alliances were always vulnerable, and life-changing heartache was always a glance away.

Leah continued, “Thayer says that his grandmother was really upset
after her first divorce and that she had a hard time adjusting to living with Bill, but now she really, really wants him back. By the way, do you know who Thayer's real grandfather is?”

Nathan shook his head.

“Brent Delphy. He's the publishing director at Epoch—and Thayer says he's going to let him know about me so maybe I can talk with him when I go to New York this fall.”

“That's great,” Nathan said. He wanted to ask how often she was talking with Thayer to have learned all of this about his family, but he wasn't sure it would help his confidence to know the answer. Searching for ways in which he was better than Thayer, passing by the Alnombak club and the stately homes of Admirals Way, Nathan was heartened to remember that being wealthy often weakened a person's character—not to mention his abilities as an artist. Look at what money had done to Hemingway! And weren't R. Crumb's comics a lot worse now that he was cozily ensconced in the south of France? Wasn't Nathan more likely to be not just a superior artist, but a superior man, because he was connected by the gnarled cord of suffering to what was
real
?

Moon shadows were stretching across the gray lawn as Nathan and Leah walked toward the warmly lit portico of Mr. McAlister's home. The young woman who opened the oak door was petite, with sandy brown hair and a dense constellation of freckles across the width of her face. “Hey, cool, more people,” she said, smiling. After introducing herself with a name Nathan immediately forgot, she led them through the sunken living room—the epicenter of Mr. McAlister's party—to the screened-in back porch. A corner floor lamp illuminated roughly a dozen college-age men and women lounging on the two adjacent couches or on the floor. The multicolored digital display of a portable stereo flickered festively as jam-band music played at a low volume and a few of the young men occasionally nodded their heads to the rhythm. Thayer was sitting on the floor with his legs extended—playing a card game—but when Nathan and Leah entered, he glanced up with an inebriated grin. “Hey, hey, you made it!” he called, getting up and stepping over a few people to ap
proach them. His T-shirt was tucked in only above his belt buckle, and his eyelids hung so heavily that he seemed to tilt his head back to see. He hugged Leah and shook Nathan's hand, then guided them over to the mini-refrigerator against the wall to pull a few Coronas off the shelf.

In the awkward pause that followed, Thayer said, “So, you want a tour?”

He didn't know much about the house, really, except for the purposes of the rooms and which ones had the best views of Albans Bay. So as they walked down the hallway, peeking into the bathroom and laundry, Nathan broke the silences by asking Thayer questions about himself. He was a senior at Columbia, he said, majoring in history and theater. But it was the theater he really loved. And not just acting, but directing, too. He'd already directed
The House of Yes
last year, and next year was planning to direct Tony Kushner's
Angels in America.

When they followed Thayer into the library, Nathan tried to demonstrate that he was a learned person, too. He inquired about the old, leather-bound copy of
Don Quixote
he'd noticed during Mr. McAlister's cocktail party, and drew attention to the quality of Doré's illustrations.

Thayer took the tome from him and paged through a few illustrations, not spending much more time on one than any other, then slid the book back onto the shelf, saying he didn't know where it had come from. “Bill bought this place about ten years ago, but he only started living here again in the summers after he and my grandmother separated…so…I think he uses this room to smoke his cigars.”

“Just you and Mr. McAlister live here?” Nathan asked.

“No, it's just him. I mostly stay with my grandmother. I just thought this would be a better place to have people over, and Bill said it was cool.”

“These books are really beautiful,” Leah said, paging through an illustrated 1906 edition of
Huckleberry Finn.
Nathan stepped closer to look over her shoulder at the illustrations and smell her vaguely apple-scented hair.

Thayer stared at the wall of books, then said, “Do you want to check out the other side of the house?”

Nathan and Leah followed him back through the sunken living
room toward another long hallway offering separate rooms for playing billiards, watching a large-screen TV, or stewing in a hot tub or sauna. This last room was wood paneled, with a large bay window through which Nathan could see the distant porch light of Ellen's house.

“Did you bring your suits?” Thayer asked.

Nathan said, “She did. I didn't.”

“Well, if you want, when we go upstairs I can try and scrounge you up one.”

With Leah watching him, Nathan shrugged. “Yeah…if you do, that's fine.” As they exited the room, a young couple wearing bathing suits and carrying towels approached them from down the hall. The young man had a broad, sculpted chest and a handsome lantern-jawed face, and he was laughing alongside a petite, buxom blonde with a perfectly proportioned smile. As Thayer introduced everyone, Nathan shook hands and laughed with them, but he was rankled by the conventionality of the couple's attractiveness and the fact that—unwittingly or not—they were pressuring him. If Thayer found Nathan a swimsuit, and everyone, including Leah, climbed into the hot tub, what excuse would Nathan have not to join them? He wasn't opposed to revealing his body to Leah. He had just envisioned doing it in a darkened room where she wouldn't be able to see him very well.

Upstairs he and Leah followed Thayer down the hall and into a room with an imposing, four-post, oak bed—the kind for men named Odysseus or Achilles—and a pile of clothes on a corner chair. From a mirrored bureau on the far side of the room, Thayer pulled out a green bathing suit with a white flower print. Lobbing it at Nathan's chest, he said, “See if those work.” The bathing suit was long legged, more like a pair of capri pants than shorts, but Nathan nodded, and said, “Cool,” as they walked back out of the room.

They peered into a few other guest rooms, then into an office with an old rolltop desk and a view overlooking the harbor. While Leah and Thayer stared out the window, Nathan entertained a vision of his future wife seeing him at such a desk, his head cradled in his hands, nobly suffer
ing for his art. It was a vision he had in different variations all the time, with variously beautiful wives, and it usually ended with her moving to wrap her arms around him, admire his work, then ask if he wanted to have sex. Nathan was half-adrift in this pleasant dream of his future when he heard the click of a door opening a few yards to their left.