Summer People (33 page)

“You ready?” Eldwin said.

“Hold on,” Nathan said. His face had flushed so suddenly that he felt momentarily faint.

Leah drank from a soda can and then lay on her side facing Ethan. She pulled her bikini bottom higher on her hip.

“Fuuuuck,” Eldwin said, following Nathan's gaze to where Leah was lying on the beach.

Nathan could see only the back of her—naked except for the dark triangle of her bikini bottom and the string over her shoulder blades. As they talked, Ethan occasionally reached out to touch the side of her face. She pulled back as if in protest, but remained steady as he leaned forward to kiss her.

“Nathan,” Eldwin whispered. But Nathan did not answer. Leah and Ethan had stopped kissing, and Nathan thought that perhaps she was
explaining to him that she could be his friend…
but not your girlfriend…because do you remember that one guy who was at the party and dancing with me?
But then she laughed. Ethan reached for her head again, then guided her onto her back and leaned over to kiss her as Nathan moved with weak-feeling legs down the stairs.

“Nathan.”

“What?”

“Where are you going?”

“Where does it look like I'm going?”

“But what's the point?”

“To let them know that I fucking saw them!” Nathan cried, but even as he spoke he felt his strength draining from him. He did not know what the point would be. He could go over and disrupt them, but he was leaving soon. He couldn't shame or argue Leah into wanting him more. He just didn't know what else to do.

“Leave it,” Eldwin said.

Nathan must have spoken more loudly than he'd realized. Thayer, Danielle, Ethan, and Leah were all looking up at him as he stood paralyzed on the boardwalk. Leah turned away and shook her head.

Eldwin said, “C'mon, man. Let it go.”

 

T
he walk down Oceanside Avenue seemed eternal. On the beach, they could have walked in the lengthening shadows of the coastal homes, but on the road, they were exposed to the burning relentlessness of the sun. The air above the blacktop shimmered with heat, and each time a car passed—a gleaming rush of hot metal—flecks of sand and dirt wafted toward Nathan's eyes.

“You know, sometimes the person you're attracted to isn't the best person for you,” Eldwin remarked.

Nathan snorted. “Apparently.”

Minutes later, Eldwin asked, “What are you thinking?”

“I'm thinking that you can only do this kind of stuff and have it all turn to shit so many times without it killing something inside you.”

Nathan couldn't tell if Eldwin was grimacing in the heat or just smiling indulgently.

“You're still a young man.”

“I don't feel young,” Nathan said, his weary voice reminding him of his father. “I feel like I want to destroy something, and then maybe take a long nap.”

After saying good-bye to Eldwin, with promises of getting together again before Nathan had to leave the Cove, Nathan discovered that Ralph's truck was not in the driveway of Ellen's house. In the kitchen, he found a note written in almost illegibly slanting print.

Nathan mixed a drink then went into the living room and sat down in Ellen's chair. Staring out the French doors, he could hear voices drifting up from Parson's Beach, and for a while he watched the sailboats tack toward the mouth of the bay. He did not want to stay in Brightonfield Cove and he did not want to go home. When he finished his drink, he poured himself another. He wandered upstairs to Ellen's bedroom and stared at the lumpy, grayish-crimson stain in the carpet, the emptied closets, the combs and hairpins on the dresser. Then he walked toward the back bedrooms, where Glen and Ralph had stayed. Glen's bed was tightly made and he had left nothing in the sunny, floral-wallpapered room except for an empty wineglass and a Tony Hillerman paperback on the nightstand. Ralph's room was not as tidy. Nathan straightened out the rumpled throw rug, and while bending over to pick up an embroidered pillow near the foot of the unmade bed, he noticed a torn condom wrapper on the floor. Kneeling down amid the dust bunnies that had accumulated along the
baseboards, Nathan warily looked for a used condom but couldn't find one. He sat down on the bed and fingered the faded purple wrapper, setting his drink on the bedside table. Because he'd had sex with Leah not long after meeting her, he wondered how long it would be before Ethan had sex with her, too. Imagining them fucking filled him with erotic anxiety. He alleviated some of this anxiety on the woolen throw rug, then lay panting on his side. Back in his bedroom he grabbed his sketchbook and pencils and took them out onto the porch, where, thumbing through his drawings, he found his portrait of Leah. He'd started it the evening she posed for him in his room, but they had ended up in bed before he'd been able to finish. It was a light sketch, using just a 2H pencil. Suddenly, Nathan had an idea. He would finish the portrait and then leave it for her, along with a poignantly dignified note. Then she would see herself as Nathan saw her, and the recognition of what she had given up would be like a burning lance in her heart. Nathan worked for more than an hour, erasing the eyes several times and puzzling over the right expression for her lips. As his shoulders began to ache, he fetched a comforter from inside and stretched out on the porch floor. At first he drew with excitement and expectation, but after the second hour, he felt disappointed with what he'd accomplished and thought he needed to rest. He lay back on the comforter and closed his eyes.

The sky was a darker blue when Nathan awoke. He turned on his side and, after waiting for his eyes to adjust, stared down at the portrait with mounting impatience and disgust. Her eyes were too narrow and her face seemed somehow bonier than it did in real life. If he gave her the portrait as it was, she might think he was trying to be mean, when what he wanted was to be nice in a way that filled her with gut-wrenching regret. Gazing out at the empty beach, Nathan thought he might cry. He exhaled in sharp, staggered breaths through his nose, but he knew almost immediately that he wouldn't weep, and he felt sick of himself for having tried.

Caffeine might be beneficial for his dazed sluggishness, he thought, and in the kitchen he poured some more Coke into his almost empty
glass. More rum was not a good idea, but seeing the bottle on the counter, he thought, A little hair of the dog, et cetera, et cetera, and couldn't resist pouring some in. He sat at the table, paging through his sketchbook and staring out the window. Then he reached for the phone. He dialed Leah's number, but when Eldwin answered, he hung up, his heartbeat loud in his ears.

Holding his head in his hands, he noticed that his skin felt flushed and tender, as if he might have a fever. In the bathroom, while looking for a thermometer, he looked in the mirror and discovered that his face was a mottled pinkish red. He pressed two fingers against his right cheekbone and watched the skin go white, then deep pink again. He had fallen asleep in the sun. In the living room, Nathan contemplated his good fortune in Leah's not having answered the phone. She might have agreed to come over and would have seen his face, which, as if in response to the afternoon's humiliation, was now as red as a crying child's. The sunburn, no doubt, would have made it more difficult to take him seriously.

Shaking the ice cubes in his glass, he wondered if she had ever taken him seriously. It was possible that, when talking about his love of comics or how he felt for her, she'd thought him charming or endearing without really respecting him. Sophie had screamed at him, cursed his name, even told him about her test for STDs and ordered him to leave her apartment, but Nathan never doubted that she respected him. He stared out the window, massaging his forehead, then once more picked up the phone.

When a woman answered, he said, “Hi, Mrs. Hurst. Is Sophie there?”

“No, she isn't. May I ask who's calling?”

The friendly question twisted in his gut because although he was hoping not to have to talk with Sophie's mother, he also thought they enjoyed a special bond. Around the time he and Sophie had broken up, Nathan had run into her mother at a local video store. They had talked for a while about what had happened, and when they hugged, her faintly smoky-smelling hair reminded Nathan of the smell of her house. “I'm sure I'll be seeing you again soon,” she'd said, lifting her chin op
timistically. And Nathan had thought he knew what she meant: that her daughter loved him too much for them not to get back together, and that soon he would be visiting at their house just as he had in the past.

“It's Nathan.”

“Oh, Nathan, I thought it sounded like you. How are you doing?”

“I'm doing okay, how about you?”

“Well, I'm just about to put dinner on the table. Sophie's not here, but I can give you her number.”

Nathan hesitated, but said, “Okay.”

When she finished giving him the number, Nathan said, “I just got a letter from her a little while ago that said she had moved back home.”

“Well, she and Derek had had some sort of fight, so she was here for a little while, but now she's back at their apartment.”

Nathan paused, then asked, “Do you know what happened? From what she wrote, it just seemed like she was planning to live at home for a while.”

“Well, I don't know all of it. But I guess they're working it out now.”

“Hmm,” Nathan said. “I guess that's good.”

“I'm sorry things didn't turn out better for you two.”

“No. Don't be. I'm doing all right. I'm just glad things are turning out well for her. In the letter she sounded distressed, so I was just kind of calling to check up on her.”

“Oh, that's very sweet of you, Nathan.”

“Well.”

She asked, “Do you have their address, in case you think it might be better to write her?”

Nathan closed his eyes as she read the address to him. He listened to the echo of Sophie's voice within her mother's, but did not move, holding his sunburned head in his hand.

That night he poured several more drinks and watched more television in a single sitting than he had in a long time. He searched for programs with beautiful women, and stumbled over to the couch to lie
down, tucking one of the pillows beneath his head. The television's soothing radiance filled the room, and long after midnight—when he'd muted the volume—Nathan watched a gorgeous brunette deliver bad news to a man with eyes so full of pathos you could almost see his heart trembling inside him.

“Fuck you,” Nathan mumbled. He shook his head and soon fell asleep.

Hope Springs a Little While Longer ~ Final Voyage of the Little Red Hen ~ We Are Not Dead

L
iving room draperies billowed gently over the couch, and behind them Nathan saw the blue and cloudless morning sky. His spirits lifted for an instant. Then he remembered everything that had happened. He suffered a dull, sinus kind of headache that radiated from the front of his head. But only one bottle of aspirin remained in the bathroom cabinets, with an expiration date of December 1992. Nathan opened it to peer inside, then decided to make do without. In the kitchen, he prepared a few pieces of toast and chewed them slowly, paging through yesterday's newspaper. On the far side of the table was his sketchbook, and after a while he pulled it over to look at his unfinished portrait of Leah. The hair wasn't bad—a few dark locks falling down the right side of her face, waiting to be tucked back behind her ear. But her eyes were still too narrow. He puzzled over them a few minutes, then let his attention drift out the window.

A mother and her three children in bathing suits and flip-flops were walking through the yard to Parson's Beach. Nathan watched them for
a few moments and then gazed out at Stone Island. He could see the dandelion-speckled grass where he and Leah had enjoyed their late-evening picnic and once made love. Absently caressing the sunburned skin beneath his right eye, Nathan considered drawing a picture for Leah that would be different from the one he'd been laboring over. A picture that would remind her of the evening they had spent together on the island. He wasn't thinking of drawing the two of them on the blanket. That would be too sentimental, and besides, he was tired of trying to draw her accurately. Instead he envisioned drawing the island's view of Brightonfield Cove. From the clearing, he and Leah had been able to see most of the town's coastline, including Ellen's house and the narrow gravel road leading up to where Leah lived. Once she saw the drawing, Leah would recognize the vantage point and remember what significance the place held for them. She might roll it back up and put it away, but Nathan hoped for a night when she would come home from some pretentious party in New York, unroll the drawing, and then, choking back sobs, contact him through the phone number or address he planned to write in small, modest print on the back.

By the time Nathan had gathered his sketchbook and pencils, sunscreen, a blanket, two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a bottle of water, a plastic cup, rum, and two cans of Coke, it was already midafternoon. He stuffed his supplies in his canvas backpack and headed out to the shed.

The
Little Red Hen
was as heavy as Nathan remembered, and he half-carried, half-dragged it out onto the grass. Away from the shade, the sun began further branding his already sunburned face. Nathan grabbed a straw hat from the shed before easing the boat onto his back, then staggered halfway down the sloping lawn. When a phone rang, he set the boat down with a hurried thud and ran a few yards toward the house before he realized the sound was coming from a neighbor's window. Bending over beneath the boat again, like a turtle lumbering toward water, Nathan felt the seat dig into the base of his neck. He set the boat down and returned to the shed to pick up the backpack and oars. Laying them on the floor of the boat, he decided to just drag the thing. The din
ghy made a few dull, scraping sounds as Nathan pulled it through the tall grass. But when he inspected the bottom, near the shoreline, it appeared no worse for the wear.

A hundred yards or so down the coastline, the blond mother Nathan had seen earlier was now reading in a beach chair while her children labored with colored buckets along the tide's edge. Glancing up at Ellen's house, Nathan hoped to see Leah walking along the porch, searching for him. But except for the drift of draperies, the house was still. He kicked off his tennis shoes and placed them beneath the seat. Then, wincing at the chill of the water, he pushed the boat out a few yards and quickly tumbled aboard.

 

B
ecause Ellen's straw hat had a plastic sunflower attached to the front, Nathan waited until he was a couple hundred yards out to put it on, and by that time he was already having second thoughts about the trip. The sun pressed hot against his back and reflected off the shimmering water into his sunburned face and eyes. As he rowed, he thought about the intense heat he would be stewing under while sitting on his blanket on the island. There were no trees where he needed to sit, only the lighthouse, and the thought of following a column of lighthouse shade for most of the day did little to relieve his throbbing headache.

Why had he wanted to draw this picture, anyway? In the cool air of Ellen's kitchen, he'd thought it might help make Leah want him, but out in the wobbling boat, already exhausted from the rowing, Nathan began to wonder if there wasn't something pathetic about this quest. It would mean spending the rest of the day beneath a merciless sun while Leah was probably taking tennis lessons with Thayer, or frolicking on the beach with the children and Ethan. If she didn't want to be with Nathan now—while he was living just two doors away—what were the odds that she would pine for him while he was living in Cleveland and she was living it up in New York City? Even if she didn't continue seeing Ethan, there were lots of smart, successful, good-looking young men who would want to date her in New York. Thinking about them made Nathan jealous as
well as tired of his jealousy. Squinting, he glanced back and forth between Ellen's house and Stone Island, and his brooding thoughts distracted him from the water seeping through the boat's floor.

At first it was just a small pool near the stern, but when it touched the sides of Nathan's feet he stopped rowing to peer behind him. Yanking his already damp-bottomed backpack to the front, he felt around with his hands in the cold and brackish water, but soon gave up the hope of trying to find the source. He cupped a few handfuls of water over the side, then grabbed the oars. The leak was slow but steady, and by the time Nathan turned the boat around, the water was already lapping against his bare ankles.

He rowed like a skinny, coked-up Viking for several minutes, then pulled the oars inside the boat. Unzipping his backpack, he snatched out the plastic cup and used it to scoop out several gallons of water. The ocean leaked into the boat at about the same rate that Nathan was able to throw it out, and although it might have been possible for him to stay afloat indefinitely in this way, screaming for help until someone rescued him, he was also mortified by the idea that Leah and her friends would learn what had happened. Nathan had suffered enough indignities in this town. He jabbed the oars into the bay and continued rowing against the tide, even as the cold, murky water began to creep up his shins.

He did not want to stop rowing, but the bottom of his backpack was turning dark brown, and he couldn't bear to watch months of sketches—including those of Leah—become soaked. So he brought in an oar and slung the backpack onto his back. For several frantic minutes Nathan hoped—perhaps even believed—that he would be able to row the
Little Red Hen
back to shore. He rowed even after every muscle in his arms screamed for rest. But with each inch the boat sank, the less progress he made. Each labored stroke propelled him only a few feet, and he was still several hundred yards from the beach. As the frigid water inched up his calves, Nathan's concerns about dignity drowned in a rising level of panic.

Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the flapping blue umbrella and the children building something in the sand with their buckets.

“Hey!” Nathan shouted. “Help! My boat is sinking!” The words rang in his ears like the lines of a joke and he was stricken to see neither the woman nor her children stand or even look at him. A quarter-mile to his left, a few yachts were anchored, including Bill McAlister's
Daydreamer,
but Nathan saw nobody on deck.

“Help! Fucking help me!” Nathan screamed. The oars slapped chilled, briny water against his body as he lurched back and forth, half standing, trying to pull the boat through the harbor. He knew he might have to try and swim to shore, but the water sloshing around his legs felt as cold as the water from a refrigerator. If he submerged his body in it, he had no idea what effect it would have on him. He yanked the oars into the boat and frantically cupped water over the side while he continued screaming for help. When the water was more than halfway up his calves, Nathan turned to see the woman crouched down beside her children. He stood and screamed at her again, waving his backpack above his head like a shipwrecked sailor waving a flag. The woman stood but made no sign of having heard him. So Nathan carefully laid the backpack on the seat, then leapt into the harbor.

The biting cold swallowed him, then pushed him up, his muscles suddenly hard and jerky in their movements. He felt a great weight against his chest and took shallow, trembling breaths as he treaded water. His plan was to turn the
Little Red Hen
over, then either climb back into the emptied boat or—if that proved impossible—to use the overturned boat for flotation as he kicked and yelled his way back to shore.

Nathan pulled down on the boat's rim—far enough for it to take on more water, but that was all. He snatched his backpack from the boat and watched with dread as the boat sank beneath the surface of the bay.

On shore, the blue umbrella still rippled in the wind, but there was no one nearby. The woman and her children were moseying up Ellen's lawn. Propelling himself higher out of the water, Nathan screamed. He thought he saw the woman turn, but she only ushered her children in front of her and carried on up the hill.

Nathan shrieked at her to come back, and he flung the already satu
rated backpack a few yards in her direction, where it sank. There was no time to brood about what he had lost. He had never swum the breaststroke more than the length of a high school pool, but he was encouraged to discover he was making more progress than he had during those last few minutes on the boat. His neck began to hurt from craning it out of the water, but he swam for roughly forty yards. When he paused to rest, he realized that the tide was carrying him almost back to where he had started. Nathan resumed swimming. But the water seemed to grow denser and denser, until its consistency was like a dark paste he had to pull his arms harder and harder to pass through. He rested, then resumed swimming again, but he did not seem to be moving much farther. He noticed that if he minimized his movements, the water warmed around him a little and he didn't feel quite as cold. The current moved unrelentingly against him, wanting to drag him backward through the harbor and into the deeper emptiness of the Atlantic. Nathan shouted once again for help. But after several more minutes of swimming, it occurred to him that he was probably not going to make it to shore.

Dark thoughts moved slothfully through the shadows of his brain. His mother, already earth cold and worm-eaten, would not suffer by losing him. Nor would Sophie or Leah. The latter two might shed a few obligatory tears, but his death would soon be a footnote in their histories. Eldwin? Nathan did not know how he would respond to his death, but Eldwin would probably think it nobler for him to swim. Nathan swam a few more yards, but he quickly tired, and it was so much warmer just to float. He treaded water and floated while thoughts about his mother and father seemed to pull at him from below. He could see his father receiving the phone call from the police and sitting down at the empty dining room table, sobbing, then overturning the table and hurling his dead wife's miniatures and bric-a-brac into the glass of the antique china cabinet. But was that right? Wouldn't he just lean over the table and bury his bleary face in his hands? Nathan could see him more clearly later, with the blinds closed, weeks of dirty dishes in the kitchen, staring at his bedroom television on Sunday in the same T-shirt and underwear he'd been wearing
since Friday morning. But what use was Nathan to him? His father needed something—some lightness of being or inspiration—Nathan did not think it in his dark heart to give.

The water formed a warm cocoon around him. Once in a while he would persuade himself that he had energy enough to swim; but each time, he made so little progress, and he wanted so much to be warm again, that he would stop and tilt his head back, kicking occasionally to stay afloat. The brim of Ellen's hat rubbed against the back of his neck, and he flung it away. His shoes were heavy, and he kicked them off, then immediately wished that he hadn't. They had kept a layer of warmer water around his feet, which soon felt as if they were falling asleep. The tide was carrying him toward the mouth of the harbor, and Nathan slowly digested the fact that there was nothing he could do to fight the current. Bill McAlister's property extended into the mouth of the bay, and it was possible the tide would carry Nathan close enough there to swim to shore. But such thoughts were internal gadfly murmurings he was not really listening to anymore. He just wanted to stay where he was, within the somnolent warmth of his cocoon.

He saw a large, dark-haired man in khaki shorts and white T-shirt appear on Ellen's lawn. Nathan raised his hands and tried to yell. His voice sounded less forceful than it had earlier, but the man hurried down toward the beach anyway, a dark Labrador trotting behind him. It was Eldwin. He lumbered down the lawn with arms raised and flapping, a fat man trying to fly.

So the woman did see me, Nathan thought. She saw me and clambered up the hill with her children and told Eldwin, who was probably out walking his dog. Now she was on the phone with the authorities, who would soon be arranging for a motorboat to speed away from the yacht club and pluck him out of the ocean. The thought of being safe and truly warm again seemed to make him warmer already.

Eldwin hurled himself along the shoreline, stumbling over rocks and washed-up logs while waving one hand excitedly above his head. Nathan waved back and tried to shout that it was okay, it wasn't necessary to run.
Nathan knew they were coming soon to pick him up with the speedboat from the yacht club. But Eldwin did not seem to understand. He sprinted the whole length of the beach—like a lineman struggling to return a fumble—but then stopped near the little dock at the bottom of Mr. McAlister's yard. He pulled off his shirt, which made sense, because then he could wave to the speedboat and maybe point to where Nathan was. But then he did a little mincing motion with his feet in order to take off his shoes.