Summer People (20 page)

The Stigma of the Beaten ~ An Unexptected Encounter at the Club ~ Eldwin Speaks of Demons ~ Leah Explains ~ Almost Another Conflagration ~ Ellen Visits Nathan's Bed ~ A Portrait of Desire ~ Consummation on Stone Island

W
aking felt like a little victory until he attempted to yawn. Sharp pain radiated through the right side of his face, and as he threw back the sheets, a dull ache swelled in his ribs. He approached the mirror and found that the purplish blotch on his forehead had developed a sickly yellow ring.

“Fuckin' A,” he murmured, leaning forward over the bureau for a closer inspection. After he'd dressed, he noticed Ellen was not in her bedroom, and he hurried downstairs into the kitchen.

She was sitting in her bathrobe at the table, chewing an unbuttered piece of toast.

“Morning,” Nathan said. Reluctant to explain his injury, he'd already pushed as much hair as he could over his forehead and kept his back to her as he prepared their breakfast.

“Good morning” Ellen said.

Nathan glanced sidelong and was glad to see her staring out the
window at the sailboats. He prepared for each of them orange juice, buttered toast, and cereal, and then assumed a weary pose at the table, his forehead resting in his hand. As the minutes passed and the posture became more uncomfortable, however, Nathan accustomed himself to the fact that Ellen would inevitably notice his injury. He couldn't hide it from her forever, and the more uncomfortable his posture became, the more he wanted her to recognize the suffering her madness had caused. Sitting back, he was in the middle of prattling on about the forecast for the next couple of days when he noticed Ellen no longer looking at his eyes but about an inch above and between them.

“What happened to your—?” she asked, pointing to where her own age-spotted forehead was now furrowed with concern.

Nathan gave a pained smile. “Do you remember how I told you that Mr. McAlister's wife was very angry with us for visiting her house, and how she thinks I tried to hit her with the car? Well, her grandson saw me outside last night, and he and a few of his friends attacked me.”

“My word,” Ellen said, shaking her head. She was still staring at the bruise and Nathan fought the urge to cover it.

“Did they take your money?” she asked.

“Uh, no.”

Ellen shook her head sympathetically and picked up her spoon to eat her cereal. They ate in silence for a while, then Nathan cleared his throat and resumed his monologue about the weather.

 

L
ater that morning, after the nurse had given her a bath, Ellen asked the question Nathan had hoped not to hear.

“Would you like to go to the club?”

Nathan had spent much of the morning striding in and out of the downstairs bathroom to assess and reassess the garishness of his bruise. In front of the mirror, he would tilt his head in different directions, hoping to discover that the bruise didn't really look as ridiculous as it initially had seemed. But then the unrelenting reality of the purple-yellowish blotch would overwhelm him. Cursing, he would retreat into the living room to
flip through a magazine or watch TV, until it occurred to him that perhaps the bruise was not really as bad as he thought, whereupon he would return to the bathroom.

Nathan answered, “We could do that. Or, it's so nice out, we could drive over to Kennebunkport and maybe stop along the way by that place that sells ice cream.”

Ellen fingered her chin, looking away, as if to better imagine this possibility, then she wrinkled her nose and asked, “Why don't we go watch some tennis?”

After fetching his keys and wallet, Nathan searched a few of the closets for a baseball cap, but found only Ellen's pastel yellow visor, which, given the situation, he might have worn, if it had not advertised a women's golf tournament. In the upstairs bathroom, after scrounging for makeup that might diminish the obviousness of his injury, he discovered an old tin containing a peach-colored cream. Ellen probably hadn't used this makeup in years—its surface was as cracked as a dried-up riverbed—but Nathan mixed it with some water then spread some onto his bruise. A moment passed during which he stared into the mirror, wondering whether it was better to appear like he'd been beaten, or like he'd been beaten and tried to conceal it by smearing clumpy makeup across his forehead. He washed it off, muttering, then trudged back down the stairs.

 

A
t the club, Nathan arranged himself in what was now a familiar pose: head propped in one hand in order to cover his forehead. But as the minutes wore on, he wondered why he felt embarrassed, anyway. This unsightly blotch should shame everyone else at the club, not him! Two of their own had attacked him like animals. Nathan was trying out this new, emboldening way of viewing his bruise—as a kind of third eye whose knowing stare should make
others
uncomfortable—when Kendra Garfield bounded off a near tennis court toward them.

“Ouch,” she said, squinting as she wiped the perspiration from her brow. “What happened to you?”

“I was in a fight.”

“With who? Oh my God, I think I heard about this. You were fighting Jean's grandson, weren't you?” She gestured out to where Thayer was playing with his back toward them on the far-left-corner court. It shocked Nathan to see him, and he wondered how he could have been so preoccupied with his bruise so as not to have noticed. Thayer and the young woman beside him wore the requisite tennis whites, both listening to the instructions the tennis pro was calling to them across the net. It was impossible to determine the damage the gravel might have done to Thayer's face, even if that had been what Nathan had cared most about at that moment. He leaned forward in his chair to get a better look at Thayer's partner. When the tennis pro served, both Thayer and the young woman waited for the other to hit the ball, letting it bounce out of bounds. The young woman pushed Thayer playfully on the arm, then skipped behind him to pick up a few of the balls scattered along the base of the fence. Crouching, her dark hair fell over her face, and as she pushed it away, tucking a lock behind her ear, Nathan knew it was Leah. For one paralyzing moment, he thought she glanced over and saw him sitting there slack-jawed on the other side of the courts. But if she did, she didn't wave, and he saw no change in her frisky behavior on the court.

“Thayer and one of his friends attacked me,” Nathan corrected, although he felt detached from Kendra's inquiry.

“Are you okay?”

“I'm fine.”

“Did they do it because of your accident with the cigarette?” Kendra asked, her voice lowered in a tone of genuine sympathy.

Nathan frowned at her. “I don't smoke.”

After glancing at Ellen to judge the truthfulness of Nathan's statement, Kendra threw her head back in laughter. “Well, then, I am
all
mixed up about you. Were you even there for Bill's fire?”

It took a while for Nathan to realize she was serious, and that she had heard from someone who had heard from someone that Peewee had been ignited by a stray ember not from the fireplace but from Nathan's carelessly handled cigarette. In grade school Nathan's teacher had played a
game wherein she would whisper a sentence to one student and that student would whisper it to another, until it finally arrived at the last student in the class, who then would stand and report what was almost always a hilariously distorted version of what the teacher had initially said. Nathan had loved the game as a child, but now he found its lesson grim. Even as he was explaining to Kendra in detail what had actually happened and, inevitably, why he had been at Mr. McAlister's that evening, he knew that other, competing versions of the story were now circulating and that it was only a matter of time before one of them would be related to Glen.

“So Thayer attacked you because he thinks you tried to hit Jean?”

“That's the reason he's angry with me. He attacked me because he's an ape.”

Kendra shook her head.

It seemed almost incomprehensible to Nathan that the conversation could segue to other, less dramatic subjects, but for minutes that seemed like eons, Kendra proved how easily it could be done. She told Ellen that Lucien had to go back to Boston to finish up a real estate deal involving an abandoned theater space that she would help him renovate and convert into condominiums. Ellen nodded politely while Nathan tried not to be obvious about his anxious staring at the far-left-corner court. If Kendra already knew of the fight, then for God's sake, how could Leah not know of it, too? The tennis pro continued serving balls while Leah laughed and talked with Thayer as if he hadn't tried to maim Nathan last evening. Or as if Nathan no longer mattered. When Kendra's daughter came over, hanging on her mother's leg and begging for something to drink, Kendra said gaily, “Good-bye, you two. I hope you feel better, Nathan.” She took her daughter's hand and accompanied her into the clubhouse.

Nathan waited a minute, then said, “Ellen, do you mind if we go back to the house for a little while? I'm not feeling very well.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, I just feel kind of achy, and a little bit nauseated.”

Ellen tilted her head at him conspiratorially. “Are you bored?”

Nathan hesitated, taken aback by Ellen's sudden watchfulness for
deception. “No, I'm not bored at all. It's kind of the opposite. I just feel like going home and lying down for a while.” He lifted his forehead from his hand in the hope that revealing his wound might make her feel more sympathetic toward him.

She glanced at the tennis match in front of her and sighed. “Okay, let's go.”

On the way back to the car, Nathan had an uncomfortable sensation that Leah and Thayer had stopped their lesson in order to watch him and Ellen leave. His muscles felt coiled with the need to turn and ask Leah what the fuck she thought she was doing, or to sprint to the car and drive away. But he neither turned nor moved faster. He remained beside Ellen, holding her hand against his arm, walking in slow, deliberate steps beneath a sweltering sun.

 

W
hile Ellen napped, Nathan took great pains not to do something dumb and/or destructive. The view of Albans Bay would be calming, so he sat out on the porch with his sketch pad and Sophie's letter. After sketching for a while, he picked up the pink sheet of paper and initially felt reconnected to her not only because of her alluring words, but because he was touching something that she had touched. He sketched for a while longer, then picked up the letter again. He had hoped having it with him would remind him that she was waiting for him back home, and would make him feel less anxious about what he had witnessed that morning. But the longer he meditated on the letter, the more he remembered all the things that had made his relationship with Sophie so fraught with tension and high drama.

Wearing Jim Beam belt buckles and Harley-Davidson T-shirts with an indeterminate amount of irony, Sophie often made clever, disparaging remarks about brooding artistic types while at the same time voicing genuine enthusiasm for Nathan's art. She made him feel—well, big. Bigger and different from other brooding artistic types, and it was harder to feel that way without her. But she had also been a black hole of neediness, with shockingly little patience when she felt Nathan was taking her for
granted. And he had taken her for granted. Many Fridays had passed with Nathan working on his comic instead of accompanying her to some art show or party, and by the time he had realized that he'd lost her, it was already too late.

“If you fuck this guy, it's done,” he'd told her the night she announced she was dating someone new.

“It is done, Nathan! It's
over.
”

Nathan hesitated, unsure if she had just admitted to having slept with the Cro-Magnon already, and whether he even wanted to know. “I mean I could never forgive you.”

Sophie had had a blemish on her cheek, and Nathan kept hoping that her self-consciousness about it (her pale skin was almost always perfect) would make her softer, more forgiving, but she only whispered, “Well, maybe that will make things easier.”

Now, after rereading certain portions of the letter again—
because I like you so much…redirect the faith of a certain Sophie Hurst…have lots of stars to look at and blond hair (mine) to touch
—Nathan took it with him into the bathroom. He tried imagining having sex with her again, but these thoughts morphed into fantasies of sex with Leah, and then of sex between Leah and Thayer, until Nathan's desire passed from him and he rested his head against the cool, blue tile wall.

Drained of the energy to sketch, he poured himself a drink and fell into Ellen's living room chair. Clouds passed in front of the sun so that rhomboids of light at his feet became the same drab mauve as the rest of the carpet. Nathan turned on the television and watched an old G.I. Joe cartoon he used to watch as a child after school, while his mother cooked supper upstairs. All of this contributed to Nathan's sense of being slowly suffocated by the stale atmosphere of the afternoon. He reconsidered going out onto the porch to sketch again, but sketching required concentration and he now could think of little else besides Leah. Hearing her explain the situation—if only to confirm Nathan's suspicion that she was more attracted to Thayer—would be preferable to his own darkly churning thoughts. After mixing another drink, and watching the rest of
G.I. Joe, he conducted another fruitless search for a man's hat, then walked outside to find her.

Eldwin answered the door of his house, massaging the imprint of a wrinkled bedsheet on his left cheek. “Come on in,” he said, yawningly, pushing open the screen door for Nathan to follow him. The interior of the house looked much as Nathan remembered. In the living room, blocks and puzzle pieces were strewn over the throw rug, while clothes and beach towels were draped haphazardly across the furniture. But most of the disorder was in the kitchen. Eldwin leaned over a sink stacked high with dirty dishes to peer out the window at the empty play set in the yard. “I guess they're not here. Maybe they went down to the beach.”