Summer People (5 page)

“Hey, Nathan, it's good to see you. I was wondering if you were going to come.”

She paused to grab the railing, but as Nathan came down the stairs, she started walking again.

“Yeah, no, I wouldn't miss it. Is everybody else here?”

“Almost everybody. Do you mind walking to the car with me? I just need to get a few more life jackets out of the back.” She looked purposeful and radiant, dressed in khaki shorts and a white blouse that allowed Nathan to see the faint outlines of her bra. As she glanced down at her watch, a roll of flesh appeared beneath her chin, making her look momentarily older than Nathan remembered, and he felt an erotic tenderness for her. As they walked, Kendra said, “It's supposed to be beautiful all day, thank God, and a decent wind, finally, too. Have you been sailing much this summer?”

“No, I haven't. This is actually going to be my first time on a sailboat.”

Kendra glanced at him, and said, “Oh, you're kidding.”

“Nope. It's been a lean life.”

After a pause, Kendra said, “Well, I think you're going to love it. You know, Lucien and I were just talking about how it's too bad that your parents weren't able to come up this summer; we would have loved to have taken them out with us.”

“My parents?”

Kendra tilted her head and peered over the tops of her sunglasses. “Don't tell me they didn't mention going sailing with us last summer.”

“No,” Nathan said, laughing through an uncertain smile.

Kendra laughed also. “Well, maybe they didn't, but we had such a good time with them. Your father is hilarious.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh, God, yes. You'll have to ask Lucien about the night your father tried cooking swordfish.”

“I'm not so sure my father was up here last summer.”

Kendra tucked in her chin and frowned, “No, I think you're mixed up. I know they were here because the Carlisles were with us, and they had just gotten back from their trip to Ireland with your parents.”

Nathan said, “My mother passed away a few years ago, so she wouldn't have been here last summer.”

“Regina?”

“No, her name was Carol.”

By now they'd stopped walking and Kendra's pale cheeks were flushed a warm, mottled pink. “So who's your father?”

“My father is Ben Empson.”

Kendra lifted her sunglasses until they rested in her hair. “Then why did you…Well, who are
you
?” she asked, her eyes darting back and forth from each of his pupils.

“You don't know my father?”

“No!”

Nathan smiled uneasily. He explained to her who his father was, and
how he'd gotten the job taking care of Ellen for the summer, and as he talked, he waited for the softening of her face: for the recognition that it was all a simple misunderstanding and that they could laugh about it and go sailing and maybe even refer to it jokingly, every once in a while, for the rest of the summer. But Kendra only stared at him until she glanced back at the gathering of people beside the clubhouse and shook her head.

“I thought you were Ben Darrow's son.”

“Well, I'm not.” Nathan smiled, not knowing what else to say.

“Will you excuse me for just a minute?” Kendra said, moving through a few rows of cars to where a light blue Volvo station wagon was parked. She opened the hatchback and pulled out several life jackets, draping them over her arm without glancing back. After locking the car, she stayed two rows of cars apart from Nathan as she walked back toward the clubhouse. Maybe she was planning to talk with her friends about the confusion, to make sure that they were comfortable with the situation before inviting Nathan onto the boat, but Nathan was embarrassed by that idea, and couldn't help calling her name. Kendra stopped and raised her eyebrows as if surprised to see him still standing there.

Nathan took a few steps closer to her and said, “Listen, I'm sorry if there's been a mix-up. If you invited me thinking that I was someone else, and now want to…you know…if you don't feel comfortable having me on your boat, I guess I can understand that.”

Despite squinting into the sun, Kendra's face softened. Nathan thought she looked disarmed by his maturity, and she tilted her head, almost smiling. “Well, thank you, Nathan,” she said. “I think that is the case.”

 

W
alking home, Nathan entertained visions of a rogue wave that would wrench the yacht to the ocean floor, but allow Kendra to escape and flail for hours before being torn apart by a shark. In the end, he was relieved not to be on the yacht with people who did not want his company, but replaying the humiliating episode in his head led to depressing thoughts about his father, who was, at that moment, most likely at his desk at the office, sifting through papers, taking off his glasses to wipe his
eyes. Soon he would be home and then…what? Eating his takeout alone in the fading light of the living room, watching some sitcom? Lumbering out into the yard with his little hand shovel to inspect for weeds among his landscaped shrubs? Nathan felt imprisoned by his father's suffering, and a dark coil of hostility compressed within him as he considered the older man's lonely routine.

The front porch of Eldwin's rented two-story house was surrounded by a waist-high, loosely latticed railing, and Nathan was so preoccupied with thoughts of his father that he almost didn't notice Leah. She was on the other side of the railing, in a low, canvas beach chair, dressed in a black bikini, reading a book. Nathan hesitated, wondering if he could handle the possibility of two humiliations in one day, but he was wearing his favorite gray T-shirt, and he could not stand waiting any longer.

“Hey there,” she said, squinting up at him. “Are you taking a walk?”

Nathan glanced back up the road and shrugged. “Yeah, more or less.” He smiled, but she just smiled back at him. So he said, “I stopped by last night to see if you might want to take a walk with me, but I think I just missed you. The pastor's wife said you had taken the kids into Brightonfield to see a movie.”

“Oh, she didn't tell me.” Leah glanced back at the house and leaned forward, whispering, “You can't trust her to give me messages; she doesn't even tell me when my mom calls.”

“All right,” Nathan whispered. He enjoyed the intimacy of whispering with her and continued to speak quietly. “So, how did you end up here for the summer, anyway?”

“Oh, my mom goes to the same church where Eldwin is the pastor—or co-pastor, or whatever—in Cambridge,” Leah said, resuming a normal conversational tone. “I graduated from college in June and didn't have a job lined up, so my mom heard they were looking for somebody to come up here for the summer, and they were willing to pay pretty well. So, here I am.” She laid the book on her stomach and sipped from the straw in her Coke bottle. “How about you?”

With an air of resignation, Nathan explained how his father had hooked
him up with the job without telling him about Ellen's accident, and how he'd awakened on Sunday morning to find her waiting for him in the car.

Leah said, “Nobody told you she was like this?”

“No.”

“Well, what are you going to do?”

“I think I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing, for the time being,” Nathan said. “I mean, I can't be with her every minute we're up here, and she seems all right most of the time, but I'm just going to try and keep more of a watch over her.”

“Where is she now?”

“She's napping, and she usually sleeps pretty soundly for like an hour or two.” Nathan glanced down at Ellen's house and then back at Leah. “Do you have some time off?”

Leah shook her head. “No, I'm lucky I was able to come out here for a few hours. Meghan's upstairs taking a nap, so I can't go anywhere.”

Nathan nodded. “What are you reading?”

The hardback resting on Leah's stomach looked like the kind of book restaurants placed on mantels to lend the place an air of sophistication.

“Well, I was reading
Cosmo,
” she said, gesturing beneath her beach chair to the glossy, opened pages of the magazine. Nathan saw a photograph of a slender woman on her back, legs raised above her in a V. “But I got tired of reading about exercises that would make me a better lover, so I picked this up in the house.” She held the book open in front of her. Nathan glanced at the faded spine, distracted by the smoothness of Leah's stomach and her now half-opened legs.

“What do you think of this?” she asked, flipping through a few pages then raising the book to read aloud: “‘I came to realize that when you are in love, then in all your judgments about love you should start from something higher and more important than happiness or unhappiness, virtue and sin in all their accepted meanings, or you should make no judgments at all.'”

“Who wrote it?”

“It's Chekhov—why?”

“It just kind of sounded like a man.”

Leah ran her tongue behind her upper lip. “Why do you say that?”

“I don't know,” Nathan said. His nervousness had faded briefly, while they were talking about their jobs, but all of her talk about sexual exercises and love had made his breath quicken. Turning his head to hide his discomfort, he stammered, “I think he sounds haunted…and a lot of guys I know are haunted in a way I don't think women are as easily.”

“Are you haunted?”

“No,” Nathan said, though he couldn't help thinking of Sophie. “Are you?”

“No, but I think that's because women are much better at
processing
the things that happen to them.”

“Processing,” Nathan said.

“Yes, we cry and talk to our friends about what's happened until we've gone through it—
processed
—and can move on. Do you know what time it is?”

Nathan said, “I think it's probably a little after one o'clock.”

“Yikes,” Leah said, frowning, as she stood up from the chair. “I have to go. I'm supposed to take Meghan to go sailing.”

“You're going down to the yacht club?”

Pulling the navy blue towel from the beach chair, Leah said, “Yeah, and I think I have to watch the kids tonight, but do you want to try and do something this weekend?”

“Yeah, sure,” Nathan said.

“So you agree with the quote then?”

“Read it to me again.”

Leah held the towel and bottle, but she reopened the book, reading so that he could see her full lips shaping themselves around words that were no longer making any sense to him. He knew only that the words were romantic and that he wanted romantic things to be true.

“I've felt that way,” he said.

“Do you feel that way now?”

“I do.”

“I don't.” Leah sighed, shutting the book. “He writes like someone who's never had his heart broken.”

As she crouched to grab her
Cosmo
from beneath her chair, there was plenty of time to respond, but Nathan had no idea what to say. He thought it troubling that she would say such a thing about someone who was supposed to be as great a writer as Chekhov, but Nathan had not read anything by him.

“I'll have to think more about that,” he said lamely.

Reaching for the front door, Leah smirked and said, “Do.”

“All right,” Nathan said, pulling his hand from his pocket to wave good-bye. “I'll talk to you soon.”

I'll talk to you soon?
For God's sake, it had taken two days to have one brief conversation with her—and this had happened purely by accident. The magnitude of the lost opportunity seemed to compound with each step away from her. Why hadn't he made a definite plan to meet up with her on Friday, or Saturday even? He glanced back to see if perhaps she had returned to the porch, but she was gone.

Reflections on a Dead Husband ~ An Invitation and a Rejection ~ Ellen Wakes in the Night ~ Nathan Interrupts Ralph's Party

A
t dinner that evening, Ellen didn't ask a single question about his experience on the yacht, and Nathan felt in no hurry to talk about what had happened. After clearing their plates, he poured drinks and carried them onto the porch. Ellen brought with her a dog-eared novel, a multigenerational saga about the rise and fall of an aristocratic New England family, and Nathan was pleasantly surprised to see her peering down through bifocals, reading. He brought his pencils and sketchbook from his room and sat down in a chair as Ellen rocked gently beside him on the swing. Normally, sketching worked as a kind of meditation, forcing Nathan to focus on the drawing of a line, forming the lines into an illustration, and forging the sequence of illustrations into a coherent story. It was a way out of the disorder of his life and the riot of memory. That evening he worked on a drawing of himself and Ellen on the porch, staring out over the rocky shoreline of Parson's Beach, the small islands, and the glassy tranquility of the harbor. After an hour had passed, however, he
grew impatient with what he'd drawn. Above the illustration of himself he hastily sketched a thought balloon that contained the image of Leah, open armed, gazing down at him with pietà eyes. Nathan sighed and looked up from the drawing at a small sailboat tacking across the sun-streaked water. After a few minutes, he asked, “Did you and your husband used to sit out here a lot?”

Ellen squinted over her bifocals at Nathan before gazing out at the ocean. “No, not a lot.”

“He didn't like the porch that much?”

“He and his friends liked to go yachting, so he wasn't here that much in the summer.”

“That's no fun.”

“I think he was having fun.”

“Well, I mean for you.”

Ellen pulled a strand of hair back from her face in a gesture that made her seem younger. “Oh, it wasn't fun for a while, but then I decided I would try to have my fun, too.”

Nathan nodded and pretended to focus on his illustration. “What would you be doing if I wasn't here?” he asked. He wondered if it was an insensitive question—accentuating the fact that she now needed a caretaker—but he was curious about the life Ellen had led and about the lives of other people in the community. Kendra's invitation had awakened him to the fact that not everyone in Brightonfield Cove stayed at home, watching television, with occasional trips to the Alnombak club and St. Michael's. These were affluent people, certainly the most affluent people Nathan had ever known, and he couldn't help wondering about the fun and interesting things they must be doing without him.

Ellen said, “Maybe going to a cocktail party, but I'd probably be right here.”

“I'm going to walk down to the beach,” Nathan said, made more restless by the possibility that there was a party going on somewhere without them. But after setting down his sketchbook, he walked only down into the yard. He didn't know what he wanted to do, so he poked around in
the tall grass, searching for Carl's wineglass. Bored after a while, he tramped back up the hill to the porch. He tried sketching again for a few minutes and then stared out at the bay a long while before announcing he was headed inside to watch TV. When the sky turned the pinkish purple of a clamshell, Ellen stepped inside and told him she was going to bed. Nathan said good night without getting up from the couch. In the flickering light of the room, he was bothered by a nagging resentment that they had not been invited to any parties. He hoped it had more to do with Ellen's condition than the possibility that he would tag along with her. On television a woman was on her front porch, talking with an old, smiling postman, and the scene was like sunlight breaking through the stratus clouds of Nathan's thoughts. He had not been doing his job. He had not picked up Ellen's mail.

 

T
en minutes later, Ellen's post office box revealed what looked like three invitations. Two had sealed envelopes, but a third, from Bill McAlister, was not sealed, and was for a party the following evening. On the back side of the cream-colored invitation, the man had written a short note:

Sifting through the other mail—including advertisements and flyers for Fourth of July parades and craft fairs—Nathan saw an envelope that stopped him. It was light pink, with his name written in large, cursive
letters, so that even without a return address, he knew who it was from. He read it once while in the post office, and then, back at home, he read it again with a stiff drink while seated in Ellen's living room chair.

In the dimly lit living room, Nathan crumpled the letter into his fist, and held it beneath his chin. Then he peeled it open again and flattened it across the wooden end table.
Now it doesn't matter.
When Nathan could finally take his eyes from her beautiful handwriting, he stared into the empty fireplace. The handyman who had prepared the house for their arrival—turning on the water, making sure the stove was functional—had also left a stack of wood in a metal container outside the front door. Nathan got up and retrieved a few of the logs. He found some old newspaper, opened the flue, and while sitting Indian style, started a fire. He listened to the crackling of the logs and the melancholy whisper of wind across the top of the chimney. In a little while, a door creaked open on the second floor. The ceiling groaned above him and he saw Ellen at the top of the stairs, wearing her aged blue bathrobe, her hair hanging in loose strands around her shoulders.

“What's going on, Ellen?” Nathan asked.

“Well, I can't sleep.”

“You got a lot on your mind?”

Ellen wrinkled her nose and shrugged. “I suppose so.”

She shuffled downstairs through the living room and into the dining room, where Nathan turned on the light. As she grabbed the tops of chairs and the side of the table for balance, Nathan ran upstairs to her room to get her cane. When he returned, she was sitting at the kitchen table in a narrow wedge of light from the hallway.

Nathan flicked on the kitchen light and asked if she wanted anything to eat.

“Not especially.”

“Is there anything I can get for you?”

“Oh, I don't think so,” she said.

An old
New York Times
lay on the table, and she pulled it toward her, narrowing her eyes at the print.

“Well, all right. I'll be in the living room,” Nathan said.

Returning to the tile in front of the fireplace, he poked the logs and blew, making the flames leap and flutter higher. After a few minutes, he sat back on the couch, his mind searching for things to stave off depression, and thought about the invitation for tomorrow's cocktail party. He wondered why the name Bill McAlister sounded so familiar. He wasn't sure if it was the name of someone he knew in Cleveland or maybe a character in a book he'd once read. His drink needed refreshing, but he didn't want to go back into the kitchen with Ellen there, so he stared out the French doors at the glittering lights of the coastline. In a little while he heard her push her chair back from the table, the legs scraping across the linoleum floor, then the
whshh, whshh
of slippers across the hardwood toward him.

Propping herself up with one arm in the doorway, she smiled and asked, “What's going on in here?”

“Not a lot,” Nathan said. He raised his nearly empty glass to finish it off and gestured at the badly wrinkled letter on the end table. “Just reading some mail.”

“Anything interesting?” Ellen used her cane for support as she moved to sit in the old recliner.

Nathan stood and gathered her invitations. As he was handing them to her, however, he noticed that the one on the bottom—from Mr. McAlister—still had the envelope open. Ellen withdrew that invitation first and held the opened envelope in her hand. She looked up at Nathan as if awaiting an explanation, then glanced down to turn the invitation over. Nathan's face flushed with prickling shame. In his uncertain role as chauffeur/ caregiver, he had crossed a line by reading her mail. She continued to stare at the card while Nathan returned to the couch and sat down.

“Were those invitations?” he asked.

“Mmm.”

Nathan raised his empty glass to his lips, swallowed dryly, and then let it rest between his legs. He waited until she'd opened the other two envelopes, and then said, “I noticed one of the letters was from Bill McAlister. Do you know him very well?”

Ellen looked up from the invitation she was holding. After a moment's hesitation, she shrugged, sighing, and stared into the fire. “Oh, yes, we've spent a lot of time together.”

Something about the sad tilt of Ellen's head and the way she sighed made Nathan realize where he had heard the man's name. On the night Carl hurled his wineglass at the ocean, he'd mentioned that a man named McAlister had possibly saved Ellen's life by discovering her the morning she'd driven her car into the rock. Nathan wanted to ask Ellen about the incident, but she had already demonstrated that she did not want to tell him the story. Looking down into his glass, Nathan asked, “Do you think you'll want to go to the parties?”

“Two of the invitations are old,” Ellen said, resting her head on the back of the chair.

“Do you think you'll want to go to the one that isn't?”

“Oh, I might like to.”

Nathan waited for what seemed a long time, then cleared his throat. “Do you think you might like me to go with you?”

He felt as if he was asking for her forgiveness. But Ellen allowed only a trace of a smile and did not turn to face him. She grunted indecipherably. Her blue bathrobe looked gray in the flickering shadows of the fire, and with one hand resting regally on her cane, she reminded Nathan of a dying queen.

 

H
e wanted to know how many of her brain cells had burned out. Or rather: How much did she understand, and how much was pretending? His father had suggested he call Ellen's grandnephew Ralph. But Nathan half-suspected Ralph suffered from something like Tourette's syndrome. Last Wednesday, during Nathan's informal interview at Ellen's mansion in Cleveland, Ralph had acted as master of ceremonies and had done most of the talking. He wore cut-off khaki shorts and a faded Social Distortion concert T-shirt, sported a frizzy tangle of dark, rust-colored hair, and looked like he hadn't shaven in days. He said he was a student at Case Western and wanted to be a professional photographer. Did Nathan know Walker Evans? Henri Cartier-Bresson? Ralph admired their work and thought that cropping your photographs was cheating. Roaming downtown streets for scenes to shoot, he often carried one of the guns he kept upstairs. On the old Zenith television in front of them, Venus Williams and Martina Hingis hustled from side to side across a tennis court, and Ralph occasionally halted his monologue to comment on Hingis's supposed ability to give great blow jobs. Enough that Ellen eventually turned, confused, and asked, “You think she smokes a pipe?”

Now Nathan wondered if it was too late to ask the questions he should have asked during that meeting. Pouring himself another drink, he watched a TV movie about the blossoming friendship between a deadbeat grandpa and his retarded grandson. But his interest in the movie was overwhelmed by thoughts of Ellen. He walked onto the porch and stared at the boulder a long time before he walked back into the kitchen. Opening his address book, he finished the last half of his drink and dialed.

“Chateau Hassett,” a man answered. His voice was barely distinguishable over the roar of music and people talking.

For an instant, Nathan wondered if he had dialed the wrong number. “Ralph? This is Nathan—”

“Heeey, Nathan!” Ralph shouted, sounding like Nathan was an old friend he hadn't heard from in years. “How's the monkey?”

“Monkey? Ellen?”

Ralph ignored him to tell someone at the party that people who had parked their cars in the yard should move them to the church parking lot down the street.

“Actually, that's what I wanted to ask you about,” Nathan said. He took a deep breath and explained about his conversation with Carl.

Ralph said he didn't know much more about the accident than Nathan, although he seemed to remember that Ellen and a couple of other people had gone out to eat, then back to the house for drinks. Eventually everyone went home, and the next time anyone saw Ellen was when what's his name found her lying on the ground beside her car.

“How do you know about all this?”

“Glen told me, I guess,” Ralph said, moving into a quieter room where he no longer had to shout into the phone. “But I think my mom told me, too.”

“Do you know why she did it?”

Ralph laughed. “I don't know. Why does anybody drive their car into a rock? Her brain just farted or something.”

Nathan waited a moment, wondering if Ralph was drunk. “Have you asked her?”