Summerlong (10 page)

Just at that moment, inside the Gulliver guesthouse, Charlie still hovers over ABC, whose back is flat on Professor Gill Gulliver’s desk and whose damp, twitching thighs are still wrapped around Charlie’s midsection. At Charlie’s feet, on the wide-planked wood flooring of the study, there is a mess of papers, pens, knickknacks, books, and files, which they had swept from the desk in their hurry.

“That’s one way to clear off a desk,” Charlie says.

ABC, her heavy breathing starting to slow, disentangles herself from Charlie and sits up on the desk. Charlie reaches down and picks up a pair of charcoal gray underwear from the floor. They’d been thrown off onto a couple of manila folders and a copy of Fitzgerald’s
The Crack-Up.

“Jesus,” ABC says, dabbing at herself with a tissue and then slipping on her underwear and looking around for her bra.

“Jesus,” Charlie says.

“You look worried,” ABC says.

“No,” Charlie says. “I don’t.”

“Just, well, I don’t expect anything else,” ABC says.

“Can we get dressed first?” Charlie says. “Before we do the postgame wrap-up?”

“Gotcha,” she says. She seems in no hurry to find the rest of her clothes.

“How about a beer?” Charlie says, and goes to his father’s mini-fridge, which his mother had stocked with beers when she’d hired a crew to clean the pool. His mother was always giving cold beers
to laborers. This is something he remembers from his childhood, his mother offering a house painter or plumber a beer at the end of a job, and it occurs to him, my God, she must have been so lonely. He cracks the bottles open on the built-in metal opener nailed to a support pole on the guesthouse patio, and comes back with two bottles of his father’s favorite beer.

“So, you’re done acting,” she says. “Tell me more about that.”

He hands her a beer and she drinks.

“Wow,” she says. “It’s like college again. A hookup, a beer from the mini-fridge. You wanna burn a joint?”

“Totally,” he says, grinning. She goes to her purse, which is by her discarded dress, and he looks at her body as she does this—it’s what you might call a slamming body, in fact, and he finds himself already aroused again.

“Can we smoke in here?” she says.

“Yeah,” Charlie says.

“Isn’t this fucking awkward?” ABC says and laughs again as she walks over to him, joint in mouth, lighter in hand, and then Charlie gives her a swift sucking kiss on the side of her neck.

“I like you,” he says. “You taste a little like chives.”

“Is that good?” ABC says.

Charlie sucks her neck again. “Mmm-hmm.”

“I cook a lot. And I worked in the garden this morning. So maybe it’s that.”

They both take two long swigs of beer.

“Tell me the story,” she says.

“Which one?”

“So, you played Hamlet and . . .”

She starts to light the joint and he starts to talk.

“I was onstage, and I was thinking here I am, playing the role I’ve always wanted to play, about an indecisive, overbrained twenty-something who can’t trust his mother and can’t communicate with his father, and I thought, this is me. I am playing myself.”

He accepts the joint from ABC and takes a long drag.

“I love being stoned,” she says, after a few more silent tokes between them. She extinguishes what’s left with her moistened fingers.

He tells her about Ophelia, about his love for something he could never have, and then Charlie’s hands go to her breasts, and he fondles them, and her hands go to his boxers and reach inside.

“Back already?” she says. “By the way, for the record, sadness isn’t really a turn-on for women. Could you give that memo to all the arty bastards you know? So stop sulking about Ophelia. Fuck Ophelia.”

ABC slides off his boxers. “Maybe you’ll help me want to stay alive? What’s the line? ‘
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay’
?”

“Impressive,” Charlie says.

“You’re a melodious lay.”

“But doesn’t that line end with the words ‘
to muddy death’
?”

“We’ll see.” She pulls on his neck and kisses him as hard as she has ever kissed anyone, gnawing playfully on his lower lip. “Stay away from Claire Lowry,” she growls.

“So you’re not a lesbian, I guess?” he says.

“I’m a human being. I have only truly loved one person in my life, and that was a woman. But here’s something: man or woman, I don’t ever want to fall in love like that again.”

Now he is on top of her.

“Don’t worry about that,” he says. “I’m wholly unlovable.”

Claire, happily without Don, cracks open one of his cans of Miller, and drinks it down—so light, so cold—in less than a minute. She does not like to think about her parents at all, and when she does, she drinks. After the beer is gone, she opens a bottle of wine, a peppery Zinfandel she buys by the case from the grocery downtown, and suddenly it all feels oddly celebratory. It feels like something she wouldn’t have done had Don stayed home, slamming a beer and then opening some wine. She’d have done the chores, put away the schlepped bags from the pool outing. She’d have done the dinner prep, and the bedtime baths and showers, before allowing herself a drink. Wine in hand, she goes downstairs to check on the kids in the basement rec room, watching a stupid movie they probably shouldn’t be watching. Nothing terrible, she notes, and what harm does it do, really, to let them watch the movie, a high school special on the Disney Channel with smart-ass teasing of teachers and heavily veiled sexual innuendos between students. When she was Wendy’s age, she’d watched
Porky’s
at a sleepover. Wendy has heard worse things on the playground, and Bryan is, well, twelve. Already, she’d found a
Maxim
magazine stuffed under Bryan’s desk in his bedroom; her Victoria’s Secret catalog had been pilfered from the recycling bin the week before. A few weeks ago, she had ordered fifteen pairs of panties because there had been a panty sale advertised on the catalog’s cover. She had thrown all her old underwear away, some of which she’d had for over a decade. When the package arrived from Victoria’s Secret, Bryan had blushed a shade
of crimson that made Claire feel his forehead before she realized what was happening.

She feels too guilty to allow the kids to pass out on the couch, filthy and stuffed with junk food like most American children—she does not have a parenting philosophy per se, God help those who do, but she knows that the average American child would grow up to be a brainless idiot and she wants to fight that with all her being; it’s her contribution to the larger project of social justice, she figures.

But when she goes to turn off the television, in a fit of parental moral conviction that will ultimately make her night less pleasant, she feels incapable, suddenly, of enduring the protesting whines.

“You guys okay down here?” she says.

They barely nod in response.

“Okay,” she says. “You can stay up late. Just don’t bother me or ask me for anything.”

Her mother used to say that very phrase when Claire would stay up too late at night.

“Whatever,” Bryan says.

“I’m just very tired. And my back hurts. I’m going to have a glass of wine and take a walk. You put yourself to bed tonight.”

“No!” Wendy protests. “I’m afraid of aliens.”

“Fine,” Claire says. “Then go to bed now and I will tuck you in.”

“Baby,” Bryan says.

“Never mind,” Wendy says. “I’ll stay awake.”

Alone, back in the kitchen, Claire pours a glass of wine and walks around the first floor of the house, surveying the evening cleanup ahead of her. She’s fuzzy-minded, her cheeks numb. She steps over piles of laundry and through explosions of Legos; she ignores the tower of pool toys she needs to put away in the foyer and she ignores the plates from breakfast, still stacked in the sink, and beneath those, plates from dinner the night before.

She goes outside, wineglass in hand, and begins her walk. The night has exploded in birdsong and the croaking of spring peepers
and the chirp of crickets and drone of cicadas. The light is going out—her marriage, her life, suddenly at a precipice, and the effect of it is dizzying, so dizzying she almost falls, but instead, she straightens up, drops her now-empty wineglass on a neighbor’s lawn, and heads toward Elm Street.

“I like the house,” Clark says. “But it’s an odd layout. Many small rooms. No big ones.”

“It’s from a time before big-screen televisions and sectional sofas,” Don says.

“I know that,” Clark says.

Fuck this guy, Don thinks.

He turns to Penny. “Are you an artist?”

She shakes hear head no. “God, I wish.”

“Well, in the back—you guys will love this—there is an office that could make a great guest suite or an art studio. It has a full bath, a small kitchen, and it’s right by the pool. A great guest place for your parents or whoever. They could come and help you with the new baby and have their own place.”

“Oh, that’s perfect! My mother might stay for the fall, to help.”

Clark grunts and goes out the back door into the yard again. Don and Penny follow him and that is when they see Claire, walking barefoot through the grass.

“Oh hi,” Claire says as Clark goes to the high fence that surrounds the pool deck.

“Pools cost a ton of money to operate!” Clark says. “Is it in here?”

“Yeah!” Don calls and ushers Penny toward Claire, who is going through the gate. “Penny, this is my wife, Claire.”

They shake warmly and Don gives Claire a look that says, quite clearly, WTF, but Claire focuses on Penny and they make small talk.

Perhaps Don Lowry feels the walls of his life collapsing, but he is a professional and he carries on, calmly.

“I have estimates on the cost of removal, as well as estimates on average annual expenses,” Don says to Clark, calling ahead of him.

Penny whispers to him, “It’s not you, or the house. Clark is under a significant amount of pressure.”

Don nods. “It’s a challenging time,” Claire says.

Don looks at her again. WTF? Claire? Why are you here? They’ve been married so long he can communicate this without words, with simple gestures.

Claire smiles. “My hubby,” she says, employing a word she has never ever used, “is the best at steering people through the stress of relocation.”

“Still, my hubby’s being a dick,” Penny says, as the three of them stand there on the pool deck. Clark makes his way to the office and they all follow.

“You don’t deserve to be treated this way,” Penny says to Don, though she looks at Claire and then Don feels warmth from his heart, from the deep doubt that is inside him. This is where he got his charisma from, he knows, from the energy it takes to mask all of his self-loathing and doubt. He wants to kiss the greatly pregnant Penny on the mouth. He wants to rub her back and her feet and coach her through her coming labor.

“What the fuck?” Clark says, and then there is someone else saying, “Get the fuck out of here,” and then the scream of a woman and they all rush to the door, to find ABC on her knees, scrambling for her clothes, Charlie, covering his bare crotch with his hands the best he can, and Clark staring, mouth ajar, as Penny averts her eyes and Claire looks as if she might pass out.

Once things calm down, once towels are secured for both Charlie and ABC, Don Lowry extends his hand to the younger man in front of him, a tanned and lean man with six-pack abs and a mess
of dark curls atop his head. He is about Don’s height, and wrapped in his white towel, he almost looks like a version of Don’s former self, after a football game, freshly showered, smiling with the kind of clueless invincibility and vitality that begins to leave everyone, slowly, after the age of thirty.

“Don Lowry,” he says. “Jewel of the Prairie Real Estate.”

“Of course,” Charlie says, shaking his hand back. “Charlie Gulliver.”

“Your mom said you’d be here soon,” Don says. “But I am sorry, I had no idea you already were here.”

ABC, wrapped too in a white towel, says, “Hello, Don.”

Don says nothing.

“Who is this?” Claire says, and both Charlie and Don say, “This is ABC.”

ABC adjusts her towel so that it hangs lower on her body, covering more of her upper thighs, but less, Don notices, of her breasts, which he cannot stop looking at, which makes him feel incredibly foolish, and then he looks at Claire who is not looking at him, but at Charlie, maybe with the same kind of lust in her heart, he can’t be sure, and he says, “Claire, this is Charlie,” and Claire says, “Of course,” and reaches out her hand to shake just as Charlie looks at Don with a smirk—could the fucker really be smirking?—and says, “We’ve met.”

“You have?” Don says.

“You have?” ABC says.

“We have,” Claire says.

“I’m ABC,” ABC says, and extends a hand to Claire.

Claire shakes it, silently, and looks at Don.

“Hi,” Don says, to ABC, but looking at Claire, and so they sit, and Don Lowry feels a kind of agony flare within him, and his chest pulses with it.

But Don Lowry is a professional, and Don has just committed a professional faux pas.

“I’m very sorry, Charlie,” he says. “I had no idea you were back
home. It’s just, Penny and Clark here are on a tight schedule, and this house seems perfect, plus your mother said, you know, if I had a buyer, I could let myself in . . .”

She hadn’t really said that to Don, of course, but Charlie seems to buy it.

“Well, I’m back,” Charlie says. “But looks like my bare ass scared off your buyers.”

Don looks behind him, and sees that Penny and Clark have gone. He excuses himself and goes to the front yard, where Clark stands at the end of the driveway on his phone, and Penny looks up at the house from the sidewalk.

“He’s trying to call a cab,” Penny says.

“It’s Grinnell. There are no cabs. I’ll take you back to your hotel.”

Penny places her hand on her rounded stomach, and Don looks down at her hand, the shimmer of a massive engagement ring and a gold wedding band.

She starts to cry.

Clark is looking at his phone now, yelling at it.

“I’m very sorry,” Don says. “That was probably stressful for you, and I didn’t have any idea someone would be home, let alone two people screwing by the swimming pool.”

Penny begins to cry. “They weren’t fucking,” she says, with this kind of laugh that crumples into tears. “She was blowing him!”

Penny screams with laughter.

“We’ll walk!” Clark bellows at her, and begins storming away down the street. “Fuck off, Don Lowry!”

Most of the neighborhood will have heard that, and for a moment, Don imagines everyone on Elm Street coming out to their porches to echo the sentiment. “Fuck off, Don Lowry!” they would call over their rosebushes and from the edges of their swept driveways and from the balconies off their second-story master bedrooms and from the workshops in the garage. The whole city
gradually coming to realize what an asshole Don Lowry, lifelong Grinnellian, truly was! “Fuck off, Don Lowry.”

Clark makes it two blocks and then he turns and they lose sight of him. Penny is crying now and Don touches her arm as tentatively as one can touch an arm and says, “I’ll drive you back.”

“He’s very stressed out,” Penny says.

“Moving is stressful. New babies are stressful. New jobs are stressful,” Don says. “I’ve done all those things. Sometimes you snap.”

“It’s not his baby,” Penny says, when they are in the truck, and on the short drive to the Comfort Inn, she tells him everything, about a man she worked with, whom she loved but who did not love her, and how she and Clark had been having trouble conceiving, and how she had conceived the baby with the other man, but had only told this to Clark a week before.

In the circle drive of that depressing hotel, she says, “I’m a terrible person,” which reminds Don Lowry of something his own father said years ago, to which Don Lowry’s mother had said, “Yes. I think you are.”

But he says something different to her, because he doesn’t think she is any better or worse than anyone else he knows.

“We’re all terrible people,” he says. “Eventually, we all become terrible, maybe around the middle of our lives, and then, if we’re lucky, we have time to find a way to be good again.”

“Do you really believe that?” she asks.

“I just thought of it,” he says. “But yes. Yes, I think that’s true.”

He drives around a bit, windows open, the heat of the long day turned to a breezy dusk. He is not sure what to do next. Eventually, Don stops off at the Hy-Vee for beer. He buys a twelve-pack of decent beer, Stella Artois, for Charlie, an apology. He buys a twelve-pack of cheap beer for himself, Miller High Life Light, because he is broke, and a six-pack of root beer for the kids. Next he stops off at the Pizza Hut, and buys two large Hot-N-Ready
pizzas. Moving through downtown, he sees Clark, sitting on a park bench, his head in his hands. He pulls over, breaks open the twelve-pack of Miller, and comes out of the truck holding the beer, which he hands to Clark without a word, and then gets back into his truck and drives away toward home.

Home, he finds his kids watching television in the cool basement, a movie about a soccer-playing dog, and sets down one of the two pizzas in front of them, along with the root beer, a development they cheer.

“Thanks, Daddy!” Wendy says, and leaps up with a hug so swiftly it nearly knocks him over. He feels as if his bones are made of melting ice, and he starts to cry, so he heads for the stairs before the children notice it. From the stairs he calls out, “Is your mom home yet?” to which Bryan says, “No!” and to which Don says, “Really? Still gone? Well, Bryan, you’re in charge. I have to do one more errand! I’ll be home soon.”

“What are you doing?” Bryan says. “What’s the errand?”

“Just a thing.”

“You and Mom are always coming home and then going back out,” Wendy says.

“Well, we’re busy,” Don says.

“It’s stressful,” Wendy says.

He drives slowly across town, a zigzag pattern around the campus. It is dark now. The remaining pizza is hot, but not as hot as it should be for an apology pizza, and he laughs at the phrase
apology pizza
and thinks of what a good business that could be, a website that facilitates the ordering of pizza anywhere in the world, to be delivered, paid for, to the address of your choice. Fight with your grown children? Send ’em an apology pizza! Insult a colleague on a different coast? Apology pizza! Awkward Skype session with a former lover? Apology pizza!

He moves through the backyard, coughing loudly as he hauls the pizza and beer. He doesn’t want to surprise ABC and Charlie
again. He has to set down the beer and pizza to unlock the safety gate of the tall cedar fence, and when he opens the gate awkwardly he sees all three of them, ABC and Charlie and Claire, sitting at the table, drinking beer. There is a bottle of tequila on the table, and a bowl of limes, and a shaker of salt.

Claire is smoking a cigarette with her feet up. You can see right up her dress.

“Why, Don Lowry,” ABC says, “you brought us pizza, and just in time. I’m ravenous!”

And then Claire stands up, a feat that requires some effort, it seems, as if the pool deck is spinning and swaying beneath her. She pulls her sundress over her head and hurls herself into the pool.

That night, when they get home and find the kids asleep in their clothes as an R-rated movie flickers on the television—a woman is being chased by a gun-wielding maniac—half-eaten pizza and empty root beer bottles littering the couch around them, Claire says, “We’re terrible parents.”

“Touché,” he says.

Years ago, when the children were small, Wendy barely two, they’d been having a whispered fight—trying to argue without waking the children. Claire had used the word
touché
, and Don had never known what that word had meant: he thought it meant fuck you in French, some misinformation he’d learned in middle school and had never, somehow, corrected. He raged when she said that until, after some painful conversation, she finally explained to him, with the aid of a dictionary, what
touché
actually meant. Their fight, that night, had ended in laughter. Actually, she remembers now how it ended: they had gone into the laundry room, which had a lock on the door to keep the kids away from the chemicals they stored there, and they had fucked against the washing machine as it whirred a load of cloth diapers clean. It had been
an almost angry fuck, the two of them violent and loud with each other and she had come harder than she’d ever come in her life, feeling him explode inside her. She made him do it again to her, finding newfound freedom in a room with the white noise of a washer and dryer and a bolted-shut door. For a while, they’d find each other in that room almost nightly. She thinks about it now—and misses him.

Once they have half carried, half nudged the kids up to their beds, she undresses and slides on one of his T-shirts and finds him again on the deck outside. He has cleaned up the pizza and the root beer bottles and has straightened up the pillows on the downstairs couch and is now sitting outside in a deck chair, drinking a beer.

“God,” Claire says. “I was pretty drunk. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. It was a fucked-up day.”

“Fucked-up summer.”

“It’s a small world. I didn’t know you knew the Gulliver kid.”

“Well, I knew Gill. I remember Charlie from some of the plays he did in high school, the year we first moved here. He was in a few things.”

“And you remembered him?”

“He was good. Memorable enough, and he was Gill Gulliver’s son, you know, so . . .”

“I always thought Professor Gulliver wanted to fuck you. I hated him.”

“He wanted to fuck a lot of people,” Claire says.

“I fucked him,” Don says. “Still got a B.”

They both begin to laugh, silent laughs that make them shake and tear up a bit, because it is the kind of laughter one engages in when everything else feels hopeless.

“We’re broke and we’re smoking pot with twenty-year-olds,” Don says.

“Like twenty-nine is more accurate,” Claire says. “In Charlie’s case.”

They laugh some more, but Don gets sullen.

“They are so young and beautiful,” Claire says. “Do you remember us like that?”

“Claire, I still see you as young and beautiful. It doesn’t change for me.”

“You’re sweet. But it changes.”

“We’re so fucked. I totally didn’t make that sale.”