Summerlong (17 page)

It is sweltering and Don and ABC are on the porch when a letter arrives by certified mail. They’ve taken to sitting in the heat, drinking cold beer, and then going into the house, blasting the AC, and getting stoned. It is a way to pass the day.

Don knows the mailman, Ron, who usually will stop and chat a bit with Don and then continue on his way. ABC has seen it happen a few times, and has always found it pleasant—the small talk of a small community going about simple business. But today Ron delivers a certified letter and as soon as Don signs the letter, Ron brisk-walks back to his truck. He has not even so much as smiled or nodded at ABC.

“What is it?” ABC says and Don already knows as he opens it. The return address is from a family law firm in Iowa City, the envelope marked confidential and urgent.

Don takes the letter from the envelope, a thick sheaf of pages.

“She filed for divorce,” Don says. “I’ve just been served.”

ABC breathes deep, puts a hand on Don’s shoulder. She feels as if there is the vibration of shattering plates coming from inside his body.

“Don Lowry,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”

He doesn’t want to talk about it until they are inside, in the hazy smoke, and then all he says is this: “I want to kill myself too.”

“No, you don’t. You have a lot to live for,” she says.

“And you don’t?”

“It’s different for me, Don,” she says. “You have kids.”

“I’m like my father, ABC. People are better off without me now that I’ve hit this point.”

“That’s so not true,” ABC says. She knows he’s feeling bad about himself, and that he is scared, and she wants to let him vent.

“You don’t believe me,” Don says. “But I do. I can’t do this anymore.”

“Do what?”

“Watch Claire leave me for someone else? Watch my kids live with someone else? Watch my kids realize what a loser their father really is?”

“A loser father is better than a dead father, Don Lowry,” ABC says. “And you’re not a loser.”

“I want to be dead. Just like you.”

“Don Lowry.”

“Let’s make a pact. We’ll pick a date. We’ll find a place. We’ll go down together, make it look like an accident. That way the kids will get my life insurance.”

ABC doesn’t want to tell him yes, but she does. They shake on it. She wants him to wait for her to be ready, and before then, she’s sure, she can talk him out of it. Maybe she can save him. Maybe she can save his marriage. Maybe that is how she will find Philly again. Maybe if she saves Don Lowry’s life, Philly will come back to hers.

Charlie finds, in a cabinet beneath the bookshelves of his father’s study, nine manuscript boxes hidden behind hundreds of back issues of
The New Yorker.

He’d been browsing through the magazines, thinking he might try to sell them on eBay or maybe just keep them. He had the idea that he might read each one of them, cover to cover, and keep a journal about the experience. It would be one of those self-imposed regimens he’d been longing for and when he finished he imagined he would emerge smarter and less ignorant and better disciplined. But it is after he removes the first stack of magazines that he discovers the boxes, each one labeled with the word
BOOK
, in all capital letters and black marker. In smaller letters beneath the word
BOOK
,
there are numbers, each box labeled with a digit one through nine. Nine boxes.

He opens the first one.

The top page reads: “Novel, Draft One
.
”

He takes out the manuscript, which has been typed, not printed, and is beginning to yellow somewhat with age. The manuscript is bound with a spiral, obviously a professional job, something his father had deliberately organized and collated and preserved and he opens the book at random and reads this line:

It’s a good line. A hell of a good line, and his heart rises a moment, thinking that he has found, perhaps, the manuscript that his father had worked on for decades.

He flips to another page and reads:

He’s found the manuscript! His father had, in fact, written a book and Charlie already wonders how he might go about finding a publisher to look at it. It appears to be a novel. Excited, he randomly grabs the fifth box, sees the “Untitled by Gill Gulliver” on the cover page and opens the manuscript randomly again.

And then, as swiftly as his enthusiasm rose, his doubts come rushing into his mind: what does it matter? What if his father had written a decent book, had not wasted those long hours in the study, weekend upon weekend. What does it change? Charlie doesn’t know. It will change something, he believes that. Maybe it will even change his financial position in the world. Maybe his father’s story will be one of those stories you heard about on public radio, the story of an eccentric man, now dead, or gravely ill, who had been crafting a masterpiece, the Great American Novel he was too afraid to show anyone.

Charlie grabs the ninth box; it must be the final, or at least the latest draft, he thinks, the one he will have to work to get published. He begins to think of the afterword he might pen. He’d recently read the journals of John Cheever and found his son’s introduction to be one of the most fascinating things about the book. What if Charlie’s father had been a tortured genius like Cheever? What if there are journals? What if he can publish even the letters eventually? He thinks for a moment that he may even make a career of it, of bringing meaning to his father’s life, which is not parasitic but clarifying, an endeavor to provide context for a complicated life.

For the first time in a long time, he’s excited about something that has nothing to do with sex.

He opens the ninth box. This manuscript is printed on a laser printer, clearly newer than the papers in the first box. This is a more recent draft. It reads on the title page: “Unfinished Project, Ninth Draft, February 2010.”

This will be it. This will be the manuscript. He will go and see his father again. He will take a copy to his father and ask him about it. His father might remember something and he might weep with gratitude. His mind will flicker with magnificent recognition and he will thank Charlie for caring, for finding the life’s work that Gill Gulliver’s mind, at the end, was too cloudy to finish. Gill Gulliver’s career had been one of endlessly obsessive revision, but Charlie will put the final punctuation on it. He will bring it clarity. Gill Gulliver will look at Charlie and understand that he has squandered his time with his son, that he has not been present enough, and he will feel unworthy of the gesture that Charlie is about to make: Charlie will finish his father’s work, will secure his legacy so that even after Gill Gulliver has forgotten everything, the world will not forget him. What a perfect son. Charlie is fundamentally wonderful; this will be Gill’s bittersweet, final moment of clarity, his last grounded thought.

Charlie opens the ninth draft to the first page and reads:

Charlie begins flipping through the pages frantically, reading more and more, not wanting to believe that the names of the characters in this book, upon further perusal, are undeniably familiar: Nick. Tom. Daisy. Jordan.

Gatsby
.

This is the day during which Don Lowry sends Tom Merrick a lengthy pleading e-mail from his office and begs him, really, truly begs him: Could we—Claire and the kids and I—stay there for the whole winter? We need somewhere to be, away from everything, and I have nowhere else to turn.

After Don hits Send, he finds himself almost choking on a sob.

When Don hears from Merrick a simple,
Okay with me. You’ll pay utilities?
Don goes over to see Claire. She is poolside typing on her laptop, wearing her tiniest black bikini, a stringed affair she had bought almost seven years ago, when they had gone away to Jamaica for a week, without the kids. Don finds it absurdly sexy. He tells her so, and says, “Is that
the
bikini?”

Claire says, “It’s hot, Don. Do you want me to wear a sweater?”

“It’s not so bad today. Not even ninety. Where are the kids?” he says.

“At the city pool. Charlie took them over so I could write.”

“What a hero.”

“If it’s unclear to you that Charlie’s generosity has saved us a great deal of heartache, it’s not unclear to me.”

“Can I go swimming?” Don says.

“Go for it,” she says.

“God, I remember that,” Don says. “By the way, I have good news. Merrick says we can stay all winter. At his lodge. It has
heat and I can plow us out with the snowblower; there’s one in the garage. All four of us, together round the fireplace.”

She blinks at him. He is undressing. Stripping down to his black BVDs. His body is tan and looks good, though he is gaining some weight. She can see it in his sides and his chest.

“Will you spend the winter in Minnesota? Will you do it? Say yes?”

He says it with the earnestness he had years ago. She closes her laptop. She tells him to leave.

“It’s a great plan!”

“It’s not, Don. For one, school. Our kids are in school.”

“We can homeschool.”

“Oh, they’d love that.”

“They might. We could snowshoe and ice-fish and ski! It’s not like they like school all that much here. The school’s not even that great, you always say that yourself.”

“A valid point,” Claire says.

“I’d chop wood all winter. I’d get buff again. I’d grow a beard.”

She likes him with a beard but he thinks it’s bad for business.

“I want you to start living in reality,” Claire says.

“Before I do that,” he says. “When I see you in your bikini, I can remember every detail of that trip.”

“I was younger then,” she says. “Good-bye, Don.”

She tries to go back to her writing then, but Don hurls himself into the pool, swimming across it, getting out, jogging back over to her side, and hurling himself in again. He whoops and hollers as he does this, which at first sounds exuberantly joyful, and then quickly sounds painful, like an unwanted compulsion has seized control of his body.

Claire finds herself smiling though—she knows
this
Don,
this
Don she loves—and she resists the impulse to hurl herself into the water alongside him. He is still, on some level, irresistible to her, but resist him she does.

But when Charlie comes home, she finds herself sunning on
the pool deck, in that tiniest of tiny bikinis. She’s given up writing for the day by then. For him, she almost goes to the small diving platform and dives in the water, a show, a seductive show, but then she sees that Wendy is with him, sobbing.

Charlie shrugs as he comes near Claire. “Sorry,” he says.

“She puked!” Bryan says, appearing suddenly in the yard as well. “In the pool, Mama. She puked in the pool! Will I get sick now? I don’t want to puke.”

“I couldn’t help it,” Wendy sobs. “I swallowed so much water!”

Claire wraps herself in a towel and says, as soothingly as her shaky voice can say it, “Okay, okay, everyone. Let’s all fucking settle down.”

This is not the word she means to say, but it is what she says.

“Mom!” Bryan says. “Mom!”

ABC is bereft of dreams—such vivid dreams, all of June, and now they are gone. Now that Don Lowry has moved in, for some reason, lying next to him no longer makes her dream.

She is in the hammock on the sleeping porch—where she spends almost all of her down time now—and hears Don Lowry coming up the steps. It is late afternoon. Maybe he is drunk; his footsteps seem heavy and unsure, the clomping plod of a drunk man trying to walk soberly.

ABC stands up and smooths down her sundress and is surprised to find Ruth standing there.

“How did you get up the stairs?” she says.

“I walked!”

“You did?” ABC says.

“I feel good. It’s four twenty, ABC. It’s after four twenty. Do you want to smoke?”

“Okay,” she says. “Is Don home?”

“No. No, he is going to go tell Claire some idea he has, then take the kids out for tacos.”

“I see,” ABC says. “Are they getting back together?”

“Would you care?” Ruth says, with a sideways glance and a smile.

Ruth sits in the large armchair next to the hammock. ABC reaches into her pocket, pulls out an Altoids tin, and lights a pre-rolled joint, and they smoke there, together.

“I wouldn’t care at all,” ABC says.

“Close your eyes,” Ruth says, and ABC does.

“Think of her,” she says. “Think of Philly.”

ABC shuts her eyes and feels the hammock gently swaying as Ruth says, “Do you see anything?”

“What am I supposed to see?”

“My mother’s mother, my Finnish grandmother, used to say that if you closed your eyes and saw fireflies, you know you’re entering the spirit world.”

“Do you see them?” ABC asks. “Because I don’t see one firefly!”

“Oh,” Ruth says, closing her eyes just as ABC opens her own. “Oh, yes, they are here! Happy to be here, aren’t they?”

ABC closes her eyes again. “Seriously?” she says. “You just shut your eyes and boom—just like that? Spirit world?”

Ruth falls asleep marveling at whatever it is she sees, whatever show that’s playing out on the back of her eyelids.

Looking out the window, ABC sees real fireflies all over the backyard, just floating around under the canopy of the trees. She goes out to the yard with a mason jar, catches, easily, twenty or thirty fireflies, and then begins walking. She wanders across campus, and strolls into Charlie’s backyard.

She finds the study unlocked and goes inside, where she finds Charlie in a robe. He looks as if he’s been swimming and has now dozed off on his cot while reading. A copy of
The Stranger
is on the floor next to him. ABC clears her throat. Charlie sits up with a start.

“Jesus, come on in, why don’t you?” he says.

She locks the door behind her.

“I’ve been wanting to tell you something,” he says. “I found something weird in my dad’s things.”

ABC slips her sundress over her head and hangs it on a hook near the door. He takes off his robe. He looks good, his body tan, his shoulders muscled and his waist lean. He is already aroused. She likes how easy it is to tell with a man.

She kneels down on the rug in front of him. She will make him forget all about Don Lowry’s wife.

“First this,” she says. And then, as Ruth Manetti might say: Reader, she blows him.