Summer People (31 page)

The young man who had been eyeing Ralph called out, “Oh, we were going to play another game in a minute.”

“That's cool, we'll play with you,” Ralph answered, waving a racquet at Nathan to come down.

Perhaps noticing Nathan's reluctance, the slim gazelle and her boyfriend acted friendlier toward him than the opposing team did to Ralph. Ralph's team played the first match in muttering communication. But as the matches wore on, his teammates—a goateed young man and his small-eyed, elfin girlfriend—began to interact differently with him. They still laughed at his ungraceful intensity, but he laughed with them, and they eventually applauded his effort. When they had played several matches, they all retired to the lawn chairs near the deck to drink their beers. The elfin girl and her boyfriend were soon to leave for San Francisco. The girl wasn't sure what she wanted to do there, but the boyfriend had a degree in computer science and planned to sign with a company in Silicon Valley.

When the young man asked what Ralph and Nathan did in Cleveland, Ralph told them about his photography, and because Nathan occasionally shelved fiction, he told them he managed the library's literature department.

The elfin girl said, “Oh, that sounds so cool. I know everybody says this, but after I've worked for a few years and made some money, I want to try and start my own bookstore.”

“That sounds great,” Nathan said. They discussed her vision of a cozy little store where people would feel free to sit and read books and magazines, but Nathan's encouraging words rang hollow to him. He knew independent bookstores rarely survived the competition from chain stores, so he suspected the project would consume years of her life and then fail. Nathan wondered if he was traveling a similar path: chasing dreams of artistic greatness and romantic success that he should know were doomed to failure. The elfin girl did not seem unintelligent, and because listening to her quixotic dreams somehow made his own seem more quixotic, Nathan abruptly excused himself to look for Leah.

 

I
nside, the air hung heavy with heat and perspiration, and the stereo speakers worked like magnets, pulling partygoers toward them. Nathan stopped at the keg, then moved forward. Living room couches had been pushed against walls, and the weight of the dancing crowd caused the hardwood floor to tremble.

Standing on the periphery of the crowd, the musty smell of spilled beer, sweat, and cologne wafted over him. UB40's “Red Red Wine” played on the stereo, and although the resurgent popularity of eighties music struck Nathan as evidence of a stagnant culture, the effect on nearly everyone else was narcotic. Heads bobbed smilingly at one another, conveying ironic detachment from the song, as well as real pleasure at being reminded of a shared history and younger, perhaps less self-conscious selves. For the most part, the men seemed restricted to casually thrusting their fists, as if warming up for a fight, but the women's bodies moved like waves. Some backed themselves up into men who nodded their heads affirmatively,
as if something they'd earned was being awarded them. Nathan spotted Thayer near the far wall, grooving with closed eyes, while Danielle undulated beside him, one hand stuck in her hair. Nathan's gaze slid away but then returned when he caught sight of Leah. He lost her behind Danielle, but then she reemerged, looking flushed. Her blue thrift store T-shirt had been pulled farther above her waistline and the sleeves rolled up above her shoulders.

Nathan set his empty cup down on the mantel and began to maneuver across the dance floor. He was feeling audacious with booze as he bobbed his head and tried with one hand to pat his chest in time with the music, but his courage waned. As he inched forward, the thought that perhaps he should wait for a better time to approach—when she wasn't so close to Thayer—began to seem increasingly reasonable. Then Leah met his gaze. She smiled a broad, languorous smile, and seemed to tilt her head in a gesture encouraging him to approach. Closing her eyes, she turned, holding her arms above her head and letting him see the whole lithe and glistening body he'd be missing if he did not continue his march forward. Danielle smiled as Nathan came closer, but Thayer's charcoal eyes remained heavy-lidded with contempt.

“Hey there,” Leah said, smiling, revolving closer to him and then away again. Nathan shifted his weight from side to side as he stared over the heads of other dancers and occasionally smiled down at Leah. When the song was over he asked—prematurely, he knew, but he couldn't help himself—if she wanted to take a break.

“Oh, I will in a while, but why don't we dance a little longer?”

The first percussive beats of the Violent Femmes's “Blister in the Sun” blasted out of the room's corner speakers, and although Nathan had never figured out how to dance to that song, no one else seemed to have any problem. Leah and Danielle turned in place, preoccupied with the movement of their hips and feet, and when the song crescendoed, Thayer began to bounce up and down as if trying to strike something above him with his forehead. Young men all over the dance floor began to dance in this semicontrolled, moshing way, knocking and flailing into one another.
But Thayer danced like a man possessed. Each leap into the air seemed like a painful attempt to slough off his affected ennui. Each time he fell to earth, he fell against someone, and once he even collided with Nathan.

Nathan endured this performance by trying very hard to seem as if he wasn't noticing and also by staying a few feet away from where he thought Thayer's next leap would propel him. When the song ended, Nathan remained long enough for Thayer to leave and a few more girls to join the circle. Then he shouted to Leah that he was going to get himself another beer. Leah nodded. At the opening chords of the Cure's “Just Like Heaven,” she flashed a thousand-watt smile. She said, “I'll take a break in a few minutes.”

Nathan turned and angled back to draw himself another beer. He stood just outside the doorway to the kitchen, waiting through several songs as Leah danced in a congested circle with Danielle, Ethan, and other people Nathan did not know. Then he retreated to the back deck. The elfin young woman and her boyfriend stood on either side of the net, lazily swatting the shuttlecock back and forth as they talked between long silences about their friends. Nathan drank his beer and noticed Ralph and two girls sitting where the light from the house faded into the verdant shadows of the woods. As Nathan stepped down to join them, he found one of the trio, a cherubic-faced girl, talking about her guilty fondness for
Forrest Gump.
He sat in a wooden chair a long time, listening to their excited chatter about movies, but he wasn't listening attentively. He was drunk. He stared up at the stars to remind himself of how little Leah's inattention to him meant within the context of the Grand Scheme. But as was often the case, contemplating his insignificance and the possibility that there might not even
be
a Grand Scheme, made the events in his life seem not less anxiety-inducing, but even more so. If there was no God, and none of Nathan's suffering meant anything—
anything!
—then wresting a few felicities out of existence seemed like the only possible hope.

With these thoughts surging inside him, Nathan left and reentered the party. The climate inside was like a hothouse. Setting his cup down on the mantel again, he pushed through the mass of dancers—sliding past warm,
sweat-slicked skin—and into the heart of the crowd, where he could barely move. He turned in place, nodding and patting his chest distractedly, but in the throng of bodies surrounding him, he saw neither Leah nor the people with whom she'd been dancing. He pushed himself back out of the jostling mob and stood against the wall, both to wait to see if she'd emerge and because he didn't know where else to go. Nathan turned to ask the guy next to him the whereabouts of a bathroom.

“There's one there near the kitchen, and then there's another one upstairs at the end of the hallway, but I don't know if it's cool to use it.”

There was a line for the bathroom near the kitchen, so Nathan trotted upstairs with his head down, as if performing an errand. The staircase emptied out into a hallway of closed doors and framed photographs of Maine lighthouses. He used the bathroom and exited back into the hall just as Ethan was bounding up the stairs in front of him. The solidly built young man's cheeks were flushed from dancing, and after acknowledging Nathan with a surprised, “Hey,” he stepped inside a hallway door. Music pounded up through the floorboards as Nathan reluctantly trudged back toward its source. With his head turned toward the dancing crowd, he failed to notice Leah until he was almost at the base of the stairs.

“Hey,” he said, smiling. “I'm glad I found you.”

“Me, too,” she said, her face momentarily blank with surprise. “Is there a bathroom up there?”

They made idle chatter about how great the music was for dancing while Nathan guided her up the staircase, toward the bathroom. While waiting for her, he stared at a photo of a lighthouse—a phallus rising out of what the photographer must have noticed were distinctly labial-looking crashing waves—until Ethan emerged from his room.

He glanced down the hallway at Nathan. “Is there someone in there?”

“Yeah, my girlfriend,” Nathan said, folding his arms across his chest, and repositioning his feet for greater balance. Ethan stared at him, shook his head, then turned to walk back down the stairs.

When Leah opened the door, Nathan asked her if she would step back
inside where they could talk for a moment in private. In the yellow bathroom, with the door closed, he asked, “Did you really come up here to use the toilet?”

“Why else would I have come up here?” Leah said, tilting her head in apparent confusion. When he continued to look at her searchingly, she asked, “Nathan, are you okay?”

He sat down on the closed lid of the toilet and briefly buried his face in his hands. “I'm fine. I don't want to leave.”

“I wish you didn't have to go.”

“Yeah? I feel like you've been acting kind of strange toward me lately.”

Leah sighed. “And you seem like you're wanting to pick a fight.”

“I'm not,” Nathan said. “I don't know. Maybe I am because that would make things easier. But I'm going to be leaving here in a day or two and I just didn't want you to…I didn't want to leave here without…did you come up here to be with Ethan?”

“What?” Leah crossed her arms, then shook her head in exasperation. “No, I did not come up here to be with Ethan.”

Nathan stared at her a long time, and at the moment he thought she might be getting ready to say something more, to clarify how her no might not really have been a no, he said, “Okay.” He nodded and stared down at the white and yellow tiles between his feet.

“Why are you freaking out tonight?” Leah asked.

“I'm not freaking out…I'm just…I know you're moving to New York after this summer and a lot of these people live there, so…” Nathan hesitated a moment, wondering whether to remind her how a few of them had tried very hard to rupture his spleen, but he continued, “So I know it's a good idea for you to have fun and make friends with them so that you'll have friends to be with in New York. Maybe they can even get you a job. I'm not…I'm not angry with you for doing that.”

“Good,” Leah said. She still had her arms folded across her chest, and Nathan was groping for the words to unfold them.

He smiled at her quizzically, as if her brusqueness indicated she must not be understanding him. “I just…Because I'm not going to be here
much longer and because I've kind of felt you drifting away from me the past couple of days—”

“Nathan, the woman you take care of nearly died, and you've been at the hospital a lot of the time. So I think it's been you as much as me.”

“All right. I just want you to know that if I haven't seemed so…so confident lately…I just want you to know that that's not me. I know these guys all have a lot of money and are—”

“Nathan.”

“No, I know it's not the money, I know they're smart, and probably funny, and charming, and they're probably more accomplished than me in a lot of ways, but I'm just letting you know that I have a lot going for me, too.” Nathan wasn't sure what, exactly, he was going to point to as evidence, so he was relieved when she finally unfolded her arms and sighed, “I know you do.”

“This all must sound pretty pathetic,” Nathan said, smiling and shaking his head. “It's just that a lot of bad stuff kind of happened to me all at once…with my mom…and I didn't handle it as well as I probably should have.” He was surprised to hear his voice tremble, but Leah stepped forward and crouched to put her hand on his knee.

“I probably shouldn't have left college,” he continued, roughly wiping the dampness from his eyes. “I know I shouldn't, and I'm not sure right now about what I'm going to do, but I'm going to get sure. That's what I want you to know…I'm going to get sure because I want to be that kind of person for you.”

Leah's dark eyes softened with understanding, and Nathan gently brushed a lock of hair from her upturned face. “Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” she whispered, smiling compassionately. “But, Nathan, I haven't known you that long and you're leaving in a few days.”

Nathan said, “I know I'm leaving in a few days, but so long as I have money, I can go anywhere I want. And I have money now. Maybe I can come back here or maybe I'll go to New York, but it'll be fine. Let's not worry about that now…I'm drunk…are you drunk?”

Leah laughed and rubbed her nose. “A little…maybe more.”

“Me, too. I know exactly what I'm saying, but I'm drunk and I just want to kiss you again.”

She kissed him long enough that Nathan began to feel that the conversation had been a success. He had told her how he felt about her and now, through her kiss, she was telling him how she felt about him. Resting her forehead against his, she asked, “Do you mind if I go dance again?”