Summer People (13 page)

The sound of the television—lively voices and laughter—emanated from the room, making it seem pitiable when only Mr. McAlister trudged into the hall. Wearing black dress socks and a gray bathrobe, he had the swollen, saggy eyes of the recently awakened. “Hold on, Peewee, I'm getting it for you,” he mumbled, rubbing his whiskered face as his dachshund trotted behind him. When his eyes narrowed at the three people staring back at him, he pulled the folds of his bathrobe closer to cover the wispy hairs of his chest. “What? Is the party spreading up here?”

Thayer said, “No. Sorry, Bill. I was just showing them around the house.”

“Well, don't let my privacy stand in the way of your tours,” Mr. McAlister grumbled with semi-ironic indignation as he proceeded into a room across the hall. When he came back into the hallway, he carried a rolled-up magazine and a jangling blue ball that he immediately dropped for the dog. “Things going okay downstairs?” he asked, folding his arms across his chest as he watched Peewee bite the ball and carry it back into the bedroom.

“Yeah, it's okay,” Thayer said.

“Well, make sure you wipe the blood off the walls.”

“We will.”

“Ellen already in bed?”

Nathan's eyebrows arched with surprise at the question, but he stammered, “Yeah. Yeah, she was sleeping soundly when I left.”

Mr. McAlister nodded and sighed. “Okay, I guess I'll see you tomorrow.”

On the way back down the stairs, Thayer told them how a friend of Mr. McAlister had given the ridiculous-looking wiener dog to him after
his first wife died of cancer—to provide him with a companion, but also to remind him of the comedy in life's absurdity. Nathan smiled an appropriately jaded smile, but the notion of life as absurd always made him uneasy, and this uneasiness was compounded by his wondering whether he should return to Ellen's house. He'd told Mr. McAlister that she was sleeping soundly when he left, but perhaps he'd been irresponsible to leave her on the night before Carl's funeral. She'd been upset earlier that evening. What if she was awake, searching for him, or just wandering aimlessly around the house? And wouldn't his concern be a good excuse to avoid donning the stupid bathing suit he was carrying?

When they returned to the back patio, Nathan was about to ask Leah if she felt like meeting up with him later at Ellen's house, but she excused herself to use the restroom, and Thayer returned to where he'd been sitting on the floor. Nathan lingered in the patio doorway, trying to look occupied with the view of the harbor and then with the selection of beers inside the mini-refrigerator. Casually leaving the bathing suit behind the leafy plant on top of the fridge, Nathan pulled out another Corona and took a seat on the nearest couch. The freckled girl who had answered the front door was sitting beside him, her bare feet tucked beneath her, but she was talking with a bearded young man to her right. Another young man, with round eyeglasses, changed CDs on the portable stereo while Nathan continued sipping his beer, saying nothing, sometimes smiling at people who glanced at him.

“Did you know that?” the freckled girl asked, abruptly turning to face him.

Nathan stopped drinking and wiped his lips. “Know what?”

“That I was the mascot for the New York Mets last summer?”

“No, I didn't know that. What is a Met, anyway?”

The girl had her mouth open to say something, but nothing came out. “I don't know,” she said, frowning. She turned and interrupted her friends to ask them, but no one else knew.

“It doesn't matter, anyway,” she said. “I wasn't a Met. I was a baseball.”

“Was it hot wearing that outfit?”

“Oh, my God, yes,” she said, falling back on the couch as if the mere memory was exhausting. “I had to wear a bathing suit inside it and even then I nearly passed out.”

She leaned forward to pick her beer can from the floor and cupped it between her crossed legs. She said her uncle knew one of the publicity directors and that they had needed someone small to fill in for the last few weeks of the season. “I wouldn't have been small enough if my mother hadn't smoked when she was pregnant with me.”

She continued telling Nathan what it was like to be
the
New York Mets mascot, and Nathan was interested for a while, and then less so, until he was just grateful to have her near him so that Leah—who had reappeared in the doorway, talking with others—could witness how easily he was able to converse with other attractive young women. After the freckled girl had talked at some length about her mostly dysfunctional family, the bespectacled boy near the stereo popped in a much more frenetic song and a few people stood up to dance.

The freckled girl began rocking her head, singing along with the music, and occasionally smiling at Nathan. “Do you want to dance?” she asked. The volume had been turned up so loud that she almost had to shout into Nathan's ear.

Nathan smiled and shook his head. “I'll embarrass you.”

The young woman pushed out her lower lip in a pout. When Nathan continued to shake his head, she took his beer, set it down, then led him by the hand to where the others were dancing. Nathan was hesitant at first, but soon most of the people who had been sitting stood up to dance, and he felt less and less self-conscious as he glanced at the young men and women around him. He assumed they came from wealthy families, but they were dressed in the faded jeans and thrift-shop shirts that perhaps demonstrated a longing for the authenticity they associated with the poorer classes. Nathan too longed for an authentic-feeling life and also wore a faded T-shirt. As other, similarly spirited songs played, Nathan smiled at the bobbing faces surrounding him. Maybe some of it was the beer, but he felt somewhere deep within him the warmth of those faces
smiling back at him. They were sunny, life-filled faces, and for a little while Nathan felt not only that he could dance, but also that, despite everything, people were basically good at heart. Turning in place, flapping his hands periodically against his chest, he saw Leah step across the patio toward him.

“You're a dancing machine,” she shouted, moving in a little circle around him.

“Machines don't have this much soul.”

“What?”

“Machines don't—”

But Leah had already glanced away, grinning, attempting to ignore his lame joke. Nathan took the beer from her hands and drank.

“Do you want to go in the hot tub in a little bit?” Leah asked.

“I do, but Ellen was acting so anxious earlier, I was kind of thinking maybe I ought to go home and make sure she's all right.”

Leah nodded and touched his shoulder to pull him closer. “Let me know if you want me to go with you,” she said, her warm, boozy breath in his ear.

 

N
athan hoped that dancing at the party had let Leah see the side of him capable of expressing spontaneous joie de vivre. The suddenly roisterous atmosphere of the evening encouraged Nathan to feel as if they were the desirable young people in movies who are always doing zany things like dancing on top of beds, or just laughing and driving down long country roads, a hopeful pop song playing in the background, and he didn't want to lose this momentum. On the way up from Cleveland, he had overheard a gas station attendant giving directions to the coastal edge of Kennebunkport, where you could see George and Barbara Bush's estate. Nathan suggested to Leah that, after checking on Ellen, they take a late-night drive. They stopped at the house so Nathan could creep inside and get the car keys and make sure Ellen was still asleep. Then Nathan grabbed a bottle of cabernet from the dining room and hoisted it victoriously as he trotted outside to the car.

As he drove, they talked about how good the music had been, how the right song at the right moment can totally transform the nature of a party, then Nathan made the mistake of telling her what he thought of Thayer. “I think the guy comes off a little presumptuous—he was that way when he came over to borrow Ellen's boat, and I thought he was kind of that way tonight—like I felt he assumed that we would want a tour of the house.”

“You didn't want the tour?”

“No, I did,” Nathan said. “But I didn't like him assuming that I would, you know? I just feel like there's an arrogance about him.”

“Yeah, but I think it's funny,” Leah said. “I was talking with that girl Danielle, who is sort of seeing him? And she kind of thinks the same way.”

“What way?”

“Just that…” Leah paused, grinning as she stared out the passenger window. “It's like what he was saying about
Angels in America.
Have you read that play?”

“No.”

“Well, it's a really hard play—a
really
hard play to do—and the fact that he thinks he can pull it off is kind of funny but also pretty cool too, you know?”

Nathan grunted noncommittally.

Leah said, “I think he was trying really hard to be nice to you.”

“What reason does he have
not
to be nice to me?”

Leah frowned at Nathan as if he was not being very sympathetic. “He wants his grandmother and Bill to get back together again, Nathan, and you took Ellen over to Bill's party while Thayer's grandmother was
there.
The woman was so upset she had to leave. He doesn't know if you knew about Ellen and Bill's affair, so he's trying to give you the benefit of the doubt.”

“I didn't know!” Nathan laughed and glanced out at the gray-blue of stone wall that separated the road from the woods. “Who told you he was trying to be nice to me?”

“Danielle.”

Nathan disliked being cast as a beneficiary of Thayer's benevolence, so he tried to attack the statement's veracity. “Did you tell Danielle that Thayer was apparently so furious with Ellen that he came over to her house wanting to borrow her dinghy?”

“I think he had to do that…to get out to the
Daydreamer.
”

“Well, how about inviting me to his party?” Nathan added, even though he knew Thayer had only invited
him
when he thought he might not be able to personally invite Leah.

If Leah knew the answer to Nathan's question, she was merciful enough not to reply. He pulled back the sunroof so that moonlight filled the front seat and they could smell the surrounding birch and pine. After a while, Leah asked, “Were your parents still happily married when your mother passed away?”

Nathan tried to let go of his earlier irritation and exhaled loudly before answering. “Yeah. I mean, it wasn't a happy time while she was sick, and they had fights every once in a while, but I think they loved each other very much.” He took a moment to remember his father in the hospital, holding his wife's hand when she was no longer coherent, her eyes sunk into her sallow head—but he tried not to let the memory overwhelm him. Rubbing his face, he asked, “How old were you when your parents divorced?”

The question rang so familiarly in his ears, and seemed so
routine,
that it felt almost trite. But as they drove, Leah told him how, when she was eleven years old, she had unwittingly participated in a stakeout with her mother to catch her father leaving his mistress's apartment. “There's Daddy,” Leah remembered saying. Her mother stalked across the street, cursing, until she was close enough to try and scratch out her husband's eyes. But he grabbed her wrists and pushed her down so that she collapsed to her knees on the pavement. He picked up his briefcase, which had fallen, and stumbled backward up the street. Glancing at the car where Leah sat, geography homework still in her lap, he climbed into his own car and drove away.

The dramatic details of her story swirled through Nathan's consciousness along with other details of other girlfriends' parents' breakups as it
occurred to him that he had never been in a serious relationship with someone whose parents were still together. Outside, the pine trees were gradually replaced by sidewalks, wooden signs, and the clapboard store-fronts of downtown Kennebunkport. They stopped at a gas station for directions, turned around, and were soon cruising along a winding coastal road with the windows open, the sea breeze fluttering the map Leah held down against her legs.

“I think this is it,” she said, directing Nathan to pull over where the road's shoulder broadened for sightseers to park. Climbing from the car to the embankment of moonlit, rocky shoreline, they both stared at the Bush estate. Despite the half dozen pine trees in the yard intended to shield the grounds from public view, Nathan could see a sprawling ranch house, a tennis court, and what appeared to be guest quarters, all spread out on a little peninsula like a finger bent into the sea. House lights illuminated a driveway with a golf cart and two black SUVs, and several hundred yards away from these vehicles, a tall, chain-link fence separated their property from public coast. Nathan and Leah walked slowly over the rocks toward the compound—holding hands occasionally, for balance—until they sat down on a flat boulder.

Once they had made themselves comfortable, and Nathan was opening the bottle of cabernet, he told Leah the story about Ellen telling Vice-President Bush that she hoped he was a better president than he was a golfer.

“Yikes,” Leah said, holding up her cup for him to fill. “That's harsh.”

“I'm sure she was just teasing him.”

“So you like her?”

“She's okay. It's kind of hard to say because I feel like I'm getting to know a kind of handicapped version of the person she was, but she seems all right.”

“She doesn't seem suicidal?”

“No. I don't know. I don't think so.”

“Danielle says Thayer thinks Ellen was pressuring Bill to marry her and they must have had some kind of blowout the night she drove her car
into the rock. Did you know that they had gone out to dinner that evening?”