Summer People (21 page)

“Did I wake you up?”

“Yeah, but I was just dozing on and off. I should probably get up, anyway. If I get on Rachel's sleep schedule, I'll never leave the house. You want anything to drink?” He opened the refrigerator. “We've got soda, orange juice, beer?”

“I'll have a beer.”

They sat at the kitchen table with their beers among a scattering of bowls of half-eaten cereal. Nathan counted nine of them and wondered how long they had been there.

“How's your head feeling?”

“Better than it looks.” Nathan leaned back in his chair, resisting the temptation to put his hand over his forehead. “I think I'm going to buy a hat.”

“Could you maybe pop the darker parts—let some of the blood out?”

Nathan glanced around for a mirror, but couldn't find one. “I don't know. Jesus. Can you pop a bruise?”

“I don't know,” Eldwin said, slowly peeling the label from his beer. “It just looks like you've got some blood trapped in there.”

“I think I'm just going to buy a hat.”

“It doesn't look that bad,” Eldwin said. “People won't shriek when they see you. Children, maybe. But not adults.”

“How did it go picking up Leah last night?” Nathan asked.

“Her train got delayed so she didn't get in till one thirty in the morning.”

“What did she say about her trip?”

“She said it went okay. We didn't talk that much, it was so late.”

“Did you tell her about Thayer attacking me?”

Eldwin shook his head. “No. I didn't know if you wanted to tell anyone.”

“I saw her today at the club, playing tennis with him.”

“Thayer?” Eldwin asked. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah. I don't know if she knows about the fight, though. I guess she does. I mean, other people at the club knew about it, and I'm guessing he would have some scratches and bruises he'd have to explain.”

The family Labrador had begun barking in the side yard, and Eldwin stood to open the side door. “Harmon!” Eldwin called. Then, turning to Nathan: “Do you feel like walking down to the beach?”

Outside, the sun burned through the clouds to make for a hazy, humid afternoon. As they walked over a small rise in Ellen's yard to allow them to survey Parson's Beach, he saw no sign of Leah. Two older women were lying out beneath an umbrella near the dunes. After he and Eldwin had walked past them, both women glancing twice at Nathan's head as they said hello, Eldwin took the leash off of Harmon and let him bound through the water. Eldwin asked if Nathan had been doing much drawing lately, and Nathan admitted he'd been doing some.

“What kind of stuff?”

“Just occasional landscapes and portraits, some scenes that have taken place while I've been here.”

“Are these scenes you think you'll use later in a graphic novel?”

Nathan said, “I don't know. I don't know if I'm going to do graphic novels anymore. It's solitary as hell, and I'm never really happy with what I've done.”

“Sounds like being a pastor.”

Nathan smiled. “But it's not
that
lonely, is it? Your job seems pretty social—going around, talking with people, spreading the good news.”

Eldwin tucked his chin down into his neck. “Yeah, but most people don't want to hear their pastor tell them about his own demons or his own crises of faith.”

“You're talking about metaphorical demons, right?”

“Right.”

“Hmm. I would be more interested if you had literal demons.”

Eldwin chuckled in a constricted way that seemed to push down something within him.

Nathan said, “So why do you do it?”

“Why do I continue being a pastor? Fuck. Well, there are moments when it makes me happy, definitely, but I don't think life is just about achieving your own happiness. Happiness is important, although it's interesting that no one really talked about happiness before Socrates. But I think that living a virtuous life is more important.”

“Yeah?”

“I'm married to a woman who right now is…I don't know what's going on, Nathan. But she's seriously, seriously depressed. So depressed that I can barely get her interested in what our kids are doing, and our last attempt at sex was like necrophilia.” Eldwin was fumbling to pull a cigarette out of its pack. “But what am I supposed to do? I have to believe that making some sacrifices, enduring some hardships, is part of living a virtuous life. And that in the end, the reward of such a life might be a deeper, more substantive happiness than I could otherwise have known.”

Eldwin lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply.

Nathan asked, “Is she on any medication?”

“Yeah, she's on Zoloft now, but it gives her gas,” Eldwin said. He called Harmon out of the water.

On their way up the yard, Nathan glanced at the house and was startled to see Ellen standing on the porch, hands perched on the railing, overlooking the harbor. In her tatty blue bathrobe, her long, white hair billowing back off her shoulders, she looked like an aged Penelope still waiting for Odysseus to return.

 

T
hey did not have enough food, Ellen said, and after a quick look in the refrigerator, Nathan agreed to take her to Gilman's. The cashiers and clerks there had asked about her so often in the past that Nathan escorted her through the screen door, ready to bask in the glow of her celebrity. Meg, the cashier, waddled out from behind the counter with arms outstretched; then, perhaps deciding a hug might be too presumptuous, simply clasped Ellen's free hand.

“Hey, Frank? Cindy?” Meg called out above the aisles in her low, cigarette-scarred voice. Only Frank was available. He emerged from the back of the store, donning his glasses and smiling broadly, as if he'd sensed all day that something good was going to happen, and here it was. They talked about the new aisle of organic food they'd added to the store and the fresh seafood they'd just received, and after enough time had passed for them to understand that Ellen would smile and say things like, “Oh, that's wonderful,” but would no longer talk with them in the way, perhaps, they remembered, Nathan escorted Ellen to the dining booths along the back wall. There was a newspaper on a nearby counter, and Nathan brought it over to where she sat beside a window overlooking the bay. He had been shopping for just a few minutes, crouching down to survey the cans of clam chowder, when the front screen door creaked open and he heard sandaled feet slapping across the linoleum floor.

“Don't run,” came a woman's voice, and Nathan recognized it as Leah's.

He stayed crouched as the children opened and shut the sliding glass refrigerator doors, but then he stood to peek over the aisles. Eliot and Meghan stood with their backs to him, dressed in bathing suits and T-shirts, picking through the lower shelves of ice-cream sandwiches and freezer pops, chirping to each other about which would be the better option. Leah stood behind them in a T-shirt that stretched down to the back of her thighs.

“You don't have to keep the door open,” she admonished, but apparently noticing Ellen at the back of the store, Leah abruptly turned to look behind her.

Nathan stared down at the can of clam chowder he was holding, and then, although he knew his face was flushed, looked up and feigned surprise. “Hey,” he said, lifting the can of soup in salutation.

Leah reminded the children to keep the door closed until they made their choice, then she walked over to talk with Nathan. Her flawless, radiant face compelled him to raise a palm to his forehead and force a smile.

“So, how was New York?” he asked.

“It was really good. Is that from the fight?”

Nathan let his hand drop. “Hmm. Yeah.”

“Are you okay?”

“I'm fine. Did you hear about it before or after your tennis lesson?”

Leah looked pained. “He told me after the lesson. He'd left a message for me earlier asking if I wanted to join him, because Danielle couldn't make it. I didn't know at the time you'd been in a fight with him.”

Nathan shrugged but said nothing.

“So you were there at the club today?” Leah asked.

“Yeah, I was.”

“Why didn't you say something to me?”

“You were having your lesson and Ellen wasn't feeling well, so we had to go.”

Leah glanced back at where Ellen was staring out the window at the water.

“Is she okay?”

“Yeah, she seems better now.”

Eldwin's children wandered uncertainly behind Leah, Meghan carrying her freezer pop and Eliot already chomping into his ice-cream sandwich. Dark crumbs clung to his lips, as if he'd been eating dirt.

“Are you guys ready?” Leah asked.

Eliot said, “What happened to your head?”

“I got hit.”

“By what?”

“Well, I'm not sure. I couldn't see.”

“But what do you
think
it was?”

“I think it was an ape.”

“An ape?” Eliot screwed up his face at Leah, wondering if he was supposed to believe such an answer. But Leah only cocked an eyebrow at him in feigned confusion, then asked him and Meghan to follow her to the checkout. Her assistance in keeping information from the children made Nathan feel close to her again, and he sensed that such collusion must be one of the pleasures of parenting.

“Do you want to take a walk later?” Leah asked, prying Meghan from her leg to hold the child's hand.

“Yeah, I could probably do that.”

Walking backward toward the cashier, she said, “I'll try and stop by after they've gone to bed.”

Nathan peered down at the autumn-colored soup cans arrayed in front of him, but he could not stop glancing at Leah. After she paid, she held the front door open, letting the children pass beneath her outstretched arm. Eliot bounded outside to shout at someone, and Leah glanced back at Nathan, smiling and shaking her head. Nathan smiled down at the can of clam chowder in his hand and read and reread the label several times before the words began to make any sense to him.

 

F
or dinner Nathan decided to grill salmon. He'd found some old coal downstairs in a corner of the cellar when he arrived. But when he tried to throw it out, Ellen had entered the kitchen just as he was stuffing the crumpled bag into the trash.

“Are there still coals in there?” she asked.

“Yeah, but they're really old. I tried using them last night and they don't light very well.”

“They don't light at all?”

“Well, they
light.
It just takes forever to get them going.”

Ellen pulled one of the coals out of the bag and held it up like a giant diamond. “Well, why don't you try and use them up?”

Nathan used the old coals, but he doubted it saved Ellen money. He
had to empty nearly a quarter of the container of lighter fluid just to get the briquettes to light. It was even more difficult when the briquettes were damp. This had occurred a few times because the grill lid was missing a piece to close its ventilation, and because it had not occurred to Nathan until recently to pull the grill into a corner of the porch where it could be shielded from the rain by a nearby tree.

Due to a sticky wheel that made the grill frustrating to maneuver, on this sunny evening Nathan pulled the grill away from overhanging tree branches, but not very far from the house. When he tossed the match onto the coals, the flames jumped two to three feet into the air, which he expected, but then licked at the house's clapboards, which he had not expected at all.

Almost unconsciously it occurred to Nathan that if he burned down this house, the story about igniting Peewee with his cigarette would now be considered more sinister by those who didn't know any better. Had it really been an accident? Might it be more than coincidental that he was involved in two devastating house fires? Nathan crouched to grab the handle and drag the grill a few feet more toward the railing, but the clapboards were already aflame. Swiveling his head, scanning the empty beach, he breathlessly murmured, “Oh help,” before realizing that the only time to prevent disaster was now. He tried pouring his rum and Coke on the fire, but the stream splattered too far to the right, and it was only after he pulled off his favorite gray T-shirt to beat the flames that he was finally able to subdue them. An ashen streak roughly a foot wide and three feet high remained on the white siding. Nathan cursed as he inspected his shirt for singe marks, then, half-blinded by the alabaster sheen of his chest, he pulled the shirt back over his head.

When Ellen hobbled out of the kitchen, Nathan tried to situate himself between her and the burnt clapboards. But Ellen gestured behind him with her cane.

“What happened there?”

Turning behind him to face the damage, Nathan found it just as bad
as he remembered. “You know how I was telling you those coals I've been using were really old?” he began. He omitted the part about the initial proximity of the grill to the house, but concluded by saying, “I'll get it fixed in the next couple of days.”

When Ellen ambled back inside, Nathan licked his thumb, pleased to find he was able to rub some of the smoke stain off the otherwise pristine siding. Perhaps he could perform the repair himself. He flipped the salmon over and leaned back on the railing, inhaling deep lungfuls of air that smelled—depending on which way the wind blew—of charcoal and salmon or of flowering trees and the ocean. The twilight had turned the white porch such a luminous seashell pink that if Ellen had been a better conversationalist, he might have asked her to dine outside. Most of their meals now took place in the living room, in front of the television, which was why, when the salmon was ready, Nathan found Ellen in her recliner, waiting for him to pull her TV tray out from alongside the couch. In those rare, delightful moments when the television made no sound, it was possible to hear live voices and laughter wafting up to them from Parson's Beach. That was where real life was being lived. The fading light of the room and
Wheel of Fortune
's strained conviviality and Ellen's still clinking silverware all felt like a heavy shroud on Nathan's soul. He had started clearing the dishes and dismantling Ellen's TV tray when Mr. McAlister appeared at the door.