Summerlong (14 page)

The next letter was printed on a laser printer and had the words
MY COPY
penciled in blue at the top right-hand corner.

And then there are two more notes, handwritten, blue pen on yellow lined paper, ripped, untidily, from a legal pad. One reads:
Professor Gulliver, I am so sorry but there is no way, no way at all I am ever going to get this paper done, even with the generous extension you have given me. I really don’t know what to say except that I am sorry to disappoint you. With much respect, yours truly, ABC.

The second note is handwritten as well, but had been copied on a photocopier and is in the strange manic scrawl that Charlie recognizes instantly as his father’s handwriting.

Again, in blue ink on the top, the words
MY COPY
.

The note read:

“Why didn’t you tell me this?” Charlie says. “Why wouldn’t this be like the first thing you told a person? Nice to meet you! I was fucking your dad before he went insane!”

“Charlie!” ABC says. “I wasn’t fucking him! He had a crush on me, or something, something delusional and strange, and I was kind to him. I liked his attention. But nothing ever happened.”

Had Charlie not already read through over a hundred communications like these, he might not believe ABC. But he has seen so many of these notes already. His father couldn’t possibly have had legitimate affairs with all of these women.

“Your father was addicted to the feeling of being in love. He told me once—probably inappropriately—that the great love of his life, before he met your mother, was someone he couldn’t have.”

“He told you that?”

“I think he became addicted to pursuing women he could never have. It was a thing for him, but he never left your mother. He never would.”

“He should’ve.”

ABC leans in and gives Charlie a hug. “You are lucky, Chuck. Because I am in the mood to get stoned and then go over to the city pool and ride the waterslide. Maybe my bikini top will come off again! Won’t that be fun!”

Charlie flops down on the couch.

“Why the fuck did I agree to do this?”

ABC straddles Charlie. “Hey, hey, slugger. You are way hotter than your old man. That feels good, don’t it?”

“I, um . . .”

“He never got a chance to be fucked by me, and you, you will have multiple chances.”

“I thought you said this was nothing,” Charlie says. “A onetime thing.”

“It is nothing. But who counts nothing? Two times zero is still zero.”

“Right! Of course! I’m not good with math.”

She is grinding herself on him, kissing his mouth, and then the phone in the study begins to ring.

“I don’t hear that,” she says. She pulls off her shirt, and as she does, he reaches over to the table and picks up the old-fashioned desk phone.

“Hello?” he says. “Gullivers’.”

ABC puts her shirt back on when she sees Charlie’s face fall. Stands up, smooths out her clothes.

Then Charlie says, “Yes, I’ll come. Don’t worry, I’ll help you.”

“What is it?” ABC asks, but Charlie ignores the question, distracted.

He hangs up the phone, finds his keys and wallet, and says, “I’m sorry. I have to go.”

“Where?” ABC asks.

“It’s really complicated. It’s Claire.”

“Why is she so fucking complicated? I know two men in this town and they’re both very wrapped up in her complexity.”

“It’s just—right now, she needs me.”

“Is that why you like her?”

“I don’t know,” Charlie says. “I’ve never been needed before.”

Perhaps the most profound crack in a shattering marriage is how often one spouse ignores the calls of another spouse. That Saturday, as he works on the stack of neglected paperwork—tax documents, state regulation forms, MLS listings—Don Lowry ignores three calls from his wife as well as two text messages that say
Hello???!!!????

Why does he do this?

One explanation, which is the one he gives himself, is that he is simply busy—no, not simply busy, but awfully busy, and whatever dramatic thought has popped up in Claire’s head, whatever possible misdeed or trespass she is so eager to talk about, would simply distract him from what he’s really trying to do: get shit done. Since his friendship with ABC began, along with its attendant recreational weed smoking, he’s been about as productive as a pill-popping starlet at the Chateau Marmont, at a time when he needs nothing more than to work and work hard.

It’s time to get shit done.

Another possible and perhaps more plausible explanation for his refusal to answer his phone, or even listen to the message she left on her third call, is harder to admit. He is hoping ABC will call. She had mentioned to him something about a day off, and how she usually spent Saturdays getting stoned and wandering around Rock Creek State Park or some other outpost, and she wondered if he wanted to come along.

He is working on an Excel file that is itemizing his expenses for
the year, so that he might somehow estimate the quarterly taxes he will certainly not be able to pay, when his phone rings again.

This time, he answers, because it is not Claire. It is exactly whom he wanted it to be.

“Yo,” ABC says.

“Yo,” Don says back, though he probably hasn’t said
yo
in decades.

“I was hanging out with Charlie,” ABC says. “But he ditched me. Come by the pool and hang out.”

Don Lowry’s heart floats up to the drop ceiling and explodes in the fluorescent light. Pieces of his heart fall down on his head when he says, “Sure. Cool.”

If she’s ever been happier in her life to see someone, she can’t remember it. Charlie, smiling but bewildered, coming toward her as she leans on the Suburban next to a female police officer.

“Is this your friend?” the cop asks her and she nods, and starts crying, which embarrasses her to no end, as does the hug, more awkward than she expected it to be, and she cries, more and more, as Charlie talks to the officer, explains that he’ll drive Claire’s car home and leave his own car there.

Eventually, the officer seems satisfied and she even gives Claire a hug, tighter than Charlie’s hug, and Claire feels the ridiculous shame of being the kind of woman sobbing in a parking lot, hugged by a cop.

“We have to pick up my kids,” Claire says, once they are in the car. She explains that her mother-in-law has a migraine.

“Of course,” Charlie says.

“I am sorry to take you away from your work,” Claire says. “I couldn’t reach Don, or anybody.” (This is kind of a lie. She had called Don, had texted him, but was secretly glad when he had not responded.)

“Claire, it’s okay. I had nothing to do today.”

“You’re a savior.”

“You’re an angel, Claire. You don’t deserve this.”

“What?”

“This life. This foreclosure. This upheaval.”

“What do I deserve?” she says, laughing a snotty, post-cry laugh.

“You deserve to be happy,” Charlie says and starts the car.

“Don Lowry!” ABC says as she throws open the door. She is wearing nothing but a towel. The skin on her shoulders seems to be steaming and her wet hair drips onto her neck and the tops of her shoulders, beading down her collarbone and her clavicle. Don Lowry looks like he wants to bite her, like he wants to suck her hair dry. It is an evening in which impulse and drama are winning and she feels herself not exactly in control of her own behavior, as if the steady parade of grief that has been her life for the last year is finally unraveling into something more permanent: a breakdown, a crack-up, a collapse, a departure.

So there she is in a towel, greeting a sad and likely horny realtor of thirty-eight.

It’s as if she feels Philly watching her cracking up. She feels as if Philly is her audience that night and she is putting on a hell of a show. This is her swan song on earth, before, as her dream perhaps predicted, she will meet Philly in the spirit world and leave all of this insanity behind.

“Are you okay?” Don says. “You look like you might faint.”

The night air is humid. It seems to shroud ABC’s body in steam.

“Is it okay with Charlie that I am here?”

“Yes,” she says, leading Don into the foyer. “Sure it’s okay with Charlie. Why wouldn’t it be?”

“I didn’t know you were spending time with Charlie, I mean,
not this much time,” Don says, his face oddly fallen, as if he’d been slapped by something much larger than himself.

“I’m helping him go through his father’s papers,” ABC says. “Turns out they are mostly love letters to people other than his wife!”

Don nods. Then says, “Hey, can I borrow your towel? My car just hit a water buffalo.”

“The towel?” ABC says. “What? A water buffalo?”

“It’s an old joke. Never mind. From a movie called
Fletch
. Have you seen it?”

“Can’t say I have,” ABC says.

“You haven’t seen
Fletch
!”

“Why do older guys always do that? Make some obscure movie reference and then act all shocked because a woman fifteen years younger doesn’t get the reference? Is that supposed to be flirting?”

“Never mind. But why are you in a towel?”

“I’ve been swimming, dipshit.”

“Right.”

“So,” she says. “How’s Don?”

“Fine,” Don says. “You were Gill Gulliver’s student, right?”

“I was.”

“Frankly, he was always kind of a dick to me,” Don says.

“He preferred female students, I’m pretty sure,” ABC says. “Based on the letters we are finding.”

“He was always incredibly nice to Claire.”

“When we went to see him at the nursing home, he recognized me, but not Charlie.”

“Jesus,” Don says. “Where is Charlie?”

“He had to go. Some kind of emergency,” ABC says. “You wanna go sit outside?”

“It’s too hot. Plus it’s still daylight. People will see us smoking.”

“Wimp.”

“Well, the neighbors, you know. They know me. They might see. They’ve probably already witnessed the skinny-dipping party. I am sure there are rumors.”

“I suppose,” ABC says. “There’ll always be rumors. Let’s go upstairs where there’s a window air conditioner in the master bedroom. Give it ten minutes to kick in and then it’ll be nice and cool and dark.”

Don nods.

“Who knew?” she says, smiling at him, and turns with the skip of a dancer toward the steps. “Don Lowry is a total stoner!”

Don feels his mouth go dry already, before he’s even had one hit. But he is too terrified to ask for a drink because with ABC in the towel, with her wet hair still dripping, he feels as if he’s in a dream and anything he might say or do could break him from that dream.

They go from the foyer straight up the staircase.

Don follows ABC up the stairs, which grow progressively darker, since ABC turned on no lights. Of course, he looks at her legs, bare and damp, as they go up. He feels himself needing to moan but instead he lets out a kind of shivering sigh through his nostrils. He is aroused. He has read articles, while killing the insomniac hours with the inanity of Yahoo news, about ABC’s generation. They hook up. They do not date. Sex is physical, not emotional. They have all kinds of sex. Oral sex is just a thing they do; they take pictures of it. They say stuff like,
We hooked up. Whatevs.
It is hard not to feel like a dirty old man imagining all of it, and he feels like one now. Is that what she has in mind? Is she about to hook up with an older man, just for the experience of it?

In the bedroom, ABC keeps the lights off, but there is just enough light coming from the windows and the bathroom down the hall for them to see. She ushers Don Lowry in and directs him to the only chair in the room. It’s in a corner, an old futon chair. ABC goes down the hall, to the bathroom, and comes back wearing clothes, cutoffs and a man’s tight white undershirt, through which he can see a dark bra.

“Shut the door,” Don says. She shrugs and shuts the door and pushes in the button on the knob.

“Okay,” ABC says. “All secret now!”

Don frowns. “No, no,” he says. “Whatever.”

“You’re already paranoid and you haven’t even had one toke, Don Lowry.”

At that moment, he wants to be nowhere else. Nothing seems real in this small room. There is no urgency in the universe, no failure, no unhappy circumstances one couldn’t overcome with joy.

ABC is holding a small purse from which she retrieves a joint that has been hidden with a mess of joints tucked into a small Altoids tin. She cranks up the ancient window AC unit and kneels on the floor in front of it and lets the cold air blow on her face. The machine hums and buzzes and rattles, but it works, and then it stops working for a moment, and then it kicks on again.

“I put on some clothes,” ABC says. “It seems more appropriate than a towel. Anyway, it’s hot in here but will cool off soon.”

After one hit, he feels clarity: he doesn’t want to cheat on Claire. He is on the precipice of cheating, maybe, which in itself is a kind of thrill for him, and yet, if he thinks about it too much he knows it is the same thing. On the precipice or over the precipice, once you’re there, you’re there. But for now, he pretends he is discovering something innocently, has heard some distant music and has simply gone toward it, naive and open to the universe.

“Just relax,” ABC says. She sits cross-legged on the floor on some pillows she’d found in another room. She is sitting right in front of him, at his feet, and she has to reach up toward him where he sits in that comfortable chair to hand him the joint.

“Remember, you have to be funny. That’s our deal.”

When she reaches up to him, he looks down her shirt.

She doesn’t acknowledge this in any way, no coy smile or annoyed adjustment of her neckline. Her tits are big. This is the extent of the clarity he is now having. Wow. She has great tits. Claire has small tits, also great. The number of tits that Don has touched in his life is an incredibly low number.

“What are you thinking about?” ABC asks.

“Nothing,” he says.

“Good.”

Don Lowry is beside himself. He exhales and closes his eyes. ABC takes the joint back, takes one more hit, and then curls up against the sad stranger next to her and hushes him to sleep. She places a pillow behind his head.

“There’s something in this pillow,” he says, and reaching into the case, he pulls out a small white tank top, like his wife wears over her sports bra when she runs. He holds it up to his face and smells it. It smells like Claire.

“Let’s sleep next to each other,” ABC says. She stands up and asks Don to stand up and then collapses the futon chair into a large twin bed.

“Lie down, Don Lowry,” she says. When he does this, she gets down and cuddles against his side.

“I won’t sleep,” he says. “I’m not someone who can just fall asleep like that.”

“You fall asleep with me all the time. Maybe I’m your sleeping charm,” ABC says.

“What were you and Ruth talking about this morning?”

“What do you mean?”

“She kept telling you to tell me something. To stop hiding it from me?”

“Just try,” ABC says, “try to sleep.”

“That was amazing shit,” Don Lowry says. “Or is all stuff this amazing now? Should I be smoking pot every day?”

“Yep” is all ABC could stand to say. She wants him to stop talking now. She wants her dream of Philly to come back. “Please sleep next to me now.”

“God, I’m so thirsty. I want to know what Ruth was talking about.”

“Charlie has beer in the fridge downstairs. And some juice, I think. I can’t move,” ABC says.

“I’ll go get us two beers,” Don says, but doesn’t move.

“What do you think she was talking about?” ABC asks. “Ruth.”

“I think maybe you’re in love with me,” Don says. “I think maybe she was telling you to tell me you’re in love with me.”

“Don,” ABC says. She lifts her head and kisses him lightly on the cheek. “Don’t be dumb.”

Sometime later, in the darkness, ABC is at the shore of the vast lake again, and Philly is walking toward her, emerging naked out of the soft but frigid white surf.