Summerlong (18 page)

“You know what, Charlie,” Kathy Gulliver chirps, literally fucking chirps, “I’d forgotten how awfully hot Iowa can be!”

His mother has come back to town with Lyle Canon. They have been to a wedding in St. Louis and are swinging through Grinnell one last time before heading out to northern California for the fall, where Lyle has a friend who is not using a cabin, or something along those lines.

“It’s a record-breaking summer, Ma,” Charlie says. “It doesn’t reflect reality.”

“Maybe it’s a new reality. No rain, no snow. A dust bowl!”

“Don’t be so excited.”

“Oh, Charlie, you’ve inherited your father’s relentless gloom. It doesn’t suit you though. You have my kind eyes.”

Charlie and his mother walk down Broad Street in the heat on their way to see Gill. His mother is wearing a huge sunhat and a kind of hot pink tank top that ties in the back and a white skirt. She seems to skip a bit as she strolls. She’s lost fifteen pounds from all the hiking and camping and canoeing and her hair is longer than it has been in years, dyed a saucy auburn. She had not given him advance warning. She had simply shown up that morning, rapping on the front door. Of course, Claire had answered, and had to point Kathy to the study out back, where she had been greeted by ABC, emerging from Charlie’s chosen bedroom with wet hair and a sheepish smile.

As she watched ABC walk out of the yard, Kathy had said, “You’ve got quite the little harem going here, don’t you? Like father, like son?”

Charlie had to explain, as best he could, exactly why Claire and her two kids were in the main house, and Charlie was sleeping like some squatter in a cot out by the pool.

“It’s cleaner that way,” Charlie had said, which wasn’t much of an explanation.

“And who was leaving your little love shack when I arrived?”

“Mom. Jesus.”

“What. I’m teasing. Life is for the living! God knows I would have fucked around a lot more when I was your age, if I could do it all over again.”

“Mom!” Charlie had said.

“She looks familiar though, that one,” Kathy had said. “I think she was one of your dad’s groupies.”

Now, only a few hours later, they are heading to the Mayflower to see Gill, and Charlie is still feeling stung by the whole operation, as if he has been ambushed by his mother’s appearance, her newly tanned self, and her snark.

“That’s quite a summery outfit,” Charlie says. He is in jeans and a white T-shirt and canvas sneakers.

“I don’t know how you can wear jeans in the summer,” she says. “You know one thing I learned from Lyle: if you dress for the weather, if you have the right equipment, you don’t ever want to be indoors!”

It is late afternoon and they find Gill sitting in a wheelchair near his window. The vertical blinds are drawn and he squints into the stripes of fuzzy sunlight that manage to get through to his room. Gill’s able to stand, for they both watch him for a long moment before making themselves known to him, and Charlie sees that his father will stand periodically and look out the slats in the blinds, as if he is waiting for someone to come and get him. Charlie walks over to him and says, “Dad? Mom’s here.”

His mother’s eyes are drowning. Her flush face suddenly goes pale.

Gill looks like he’s about to stand again but then he sits back in his chair.

“Oh?” he says. “My mother?”

He doesn’t say Charlie’s name but Charlie senses something different in his face this time, he senses that this man does recognize him, if not as his son, then as somebody who has some import in his life. As somebody he has known for a long time but whose name he cannot recall.

“How’s it going?” Charlie says.

“Are you here with a car for me? To the airport? It’s so much effort to get to the airport from this goddamn town, isn’t it? That’s what makes people go crazy.”

“No. No. Sorry. That’s not me, Dad.”

Charlie motions for his mother to come closer and she does, but she seems hesitant to walk into Gill’s field of vision.

“Well, what do you want?” Gill says. “How’s ABC?”

“Dad, I have been in your study. I’ve been looking through your papers.”

“My papers! My office on campus?”

“Well, it’s all at the house now. All of your things.”

“Kathy took them all there? Did she come home?”

“Dad.”

“She left me, you know,” Gill says. “Don’t blame her really.”

“Kathy is here, Dad. My mother. Your wife.”

The word
dad
seems to surprise him, though he says nothing. He makes a small
O
with his mouth and whistles vaguely through it. Charlie decides not to use the word
dad
again.

Kathy, meanwhile, is trying to turn her crying face into something resembling a smiling one.

“Do you know me, Gill?”

He shakes his head no.

She bends down and kisses him gently on the mouth.

“It’s me,” she says.

“Claire?” Gill asks. “Jordanna? Amy? Meredith?”

Kathy walks out into the hallway.

“I’ll be right back,” Charlie says. Gill says nothing. Charlie finds his mother—this stoic, optimistic, bizarrely carefree lover of Lyle Canon sobbing in a stained orange chair.

“Mom,” Charlie says. “It’s not personal. It’s the disease, he can’t help it.”

His mother looks up at him and laughs through tears. She blows her nose in a tissue and then sets the tissue down on a copy of
Better Homes and Gardens
.

“I know that,” she says.

“Mom,” Charlie says. “Come back inside. It might be the last time . . .”

“All I ever wanted, Charlie, was not to be an afterthought in some man’s life.”

Charlie understands. He was also an afterthought, but he has a task ahead of him and he goes back inside with the word
afterthought
like a staccato beat in his head, a million voices, stomping on bleachers, chanting: af-ter-thought!

Af-ter-thought!

Af-ter-thought!

Af-ter-thought!

Charlie stands near Gill and kneels down so he can be at eye level with him.

“I want to finish your book for you, Professor Gulliver.”

“My book?”

“Yes.” Then, “Dad, it’s me. Your son.”

“What book?” Gill says, his voice breaking with sorrow or confused exasperation. It is hard to tell which, though Charlie wants it to be the former.

“The one on Gatsby. And Reagan.”

“Oh, that.”

“Yes, that one. Only I can’t find the manuscript anywhere. Not on your computer, not on your CDs, not in your files.”

“You can’t?”

“No. Do you have any idea? Is it in a safe or file cabinet or—”

“It’s not easy to find,” Gill says.

“I know. Tell me, Dad. Where is it?”

“In fact, it’s impossible to find it. Tell me who you are again?”

“Charlie. Charlie Gulliver. Your son.”

Gill looks back to the window, as if he is now sure that someone is waiting for him on the other side of those blinds.

“There is no book,” Gill says.

“What?”

“There is no book,” Gill says again. “There never has been.”

Charlie watches as his father’s chapped lips begin to tremble, and his hands, shaking, begin to clutch his forehead as if he is suddenly in the grip of a blinding headache. Softly now, he says, “Son, there is no book. There never was. Tell your mother. Tell her I am so sorry for all of the things.”

A sale! Don Lowry makes a sale, a small fixer-upper ranch on the southwest side of town. After the closing, he has a check and he deposits the check just before the bank closes at five. Not a big commission, but a commission, his first in months. It’s a check for four thousand dollars. He deposits three and takes out twenty fifties for his wallet. He drives out to the Hy-Vee and buys a bottle of champagne and some flowers, and he’s not sure, even as he is buying the champagne, whom it’s for, and the flowers, he has no idea, but he decides, for some reason, that he wants the flowers, and then he drives to the Gulliver place, and he rings the doorbell. Claire answers and invites him inside. He follows her and sees she’s been in the kitchen cooking dinner with Charlie. The kids are outside in the pool.

“Are they out there alone?” Don asks. “Is that okay?”

“Yes,” Claire says. “What are you implying?”

“They’re excellent swimmers,” Charlie says.

Don ignores this and gives Claire a stack of bills, counting them out onto the counter where Charlie is chopping an onion.

“Thanks,” Claire says. “What did you do, rob a bank?”

“Yep,” Don says.

Next, Don goes to the yard and strips down to his BVDs and throws himself into the pool to the delighted cries of his kids and he comes up splashing, roaring like a monster, the volume meant to thrill them like he did when they were toddlers and they run
from him, giddily shrieking, and they do not know how real are his roars.

Later, the champagne is warm, but he sticks it in Ruth’s freezer and he finds ABC in the yard. His khakis are wet from the rushed way he dressed after swimming, his hair still dripping onto his dress shirt. ABC is watering flowers in her cutoffs and a black swimsuit.

He says, “I have champagne,” and she smiles but doesn’t smile.

“I have flowers too,” he says then. “Do you have grass?”

“I don’t,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

She shuts off the water and goes to her room.

Don takes the flowers to Ruth’s room, where she breathes a rattled breath as she dozes. He has arranged the flowers in a vase that he has found under the sink and when he sets them on the shelf across from Ruth’s hospital bed, she sneezes in her sleep.

The champagne he drinks in the hammock alone.

Claire gets a call from dining services that afternoon—there is a reunion at the college, a reunion of the school’s past athletic teams, and they ask if she could help with dinner. They offer to pay double time, since it’s technically the month off for Dining Services employees, and they’re desperate for the help. Three people have called in sick; the sub list, in the summer, is thin.

Claire agrees, asks Charlie to keep an eye on her kids, and walks the few blocks west to campus. At the dining hall, in her visor and black T-shirt, she wonders, if she looks down at the register while she swipes dining hall passes, if people might mistake her for a student.

It is not long after she has that thought that a woman says, “Claire, is that you?”

Claire looks up to see Rachel Pettis and Holiday Furness in front of her, two soccer players from the class of ’97. “Oh my God,” they both say. “Hi!”

Claire says, “Hi.”

“Do you still work here?” Holiday says.

“Not still. Again. I work here again.”

“Oh my God, that is so crazy,” Rachel says. “Are you a professor? Holiday is a professor at Carleton now. Women’s history!”

“They let me help with the soccer team too,” Holiday says. “My husband is the associate dean. I have connections.”

Claire smiles. “I’m not a professor. Professors don’t usually work the dining hall.”

“Ha!” Rachel says, but she doesn’t say much else.

“You should try the vegan bar,” Claire says.

“Are you still with Don?”

Claire looks at the line forming behind Rachel and Holiday. “No,” she says. “But it’s complicated. That’s kind of new. But he still lives here. Yes. We have kids.” She makes a gesture toward the line behind them. “I can’t talk now, I guess.”

“No, totally,” Holiday says, and takes a business card from her wallet and sets it in front of Claire. “My cell is on there. You should call us tonight. We’re having drinks.”

“Okay,” Claire says.

Rachel takes out her own card. Rachel, apparently, is the theater and drama coordinator for the NEA. She takes a pen from Claire’s check-in station and circles a phone number on the card.

“That’s my cell. We’re thinking around nine,” Rachel says. “Will you be done by nine?”

She is speaking in a way that makes Claire feel like Rachel thinks that perhaps she doesn’t understand English anymore.

“Later,” Claire says, and then apologizes to the women who are next in line. She swipes their dining hall passes, too. “Sorry for the wait,” she says. “I used to go here.”

Here is a moment from that summer that, later, one might go back to again and again. Does it change anything for Claire? It’s hard to say. But when she comes home from work, she sees that Charlie has used the relatively cool afternoon as a chance to mow the brown lawn. Claire sees the lawnmower and goes straight to the pool. The door to the bathroom off the study is unlocked, slightly ajar even, and when Charlie finally comes out of the shower, he sees Claire there in the bathroom with him, wrapped in a white towel, naked beneath it. She had gone swimming for a minute, to wash off the
fried food smell of the cafeteria, but is now wringing out a swimsuit in the sink and Charlie is there, and she hands him a towel, a blue one, and says,
I have been standing outside the shower for a few minutes
. The steam in the room is thick, it has nowhere to go.
I have been trying to decide what I would do.

She goes up to Charlie now and begins to dry off his body for him, running the blue towel down each arm, down his back, and finally, as she moves the towel down his chest, down the small trail of hair on his stomach, down to his hips—

And in the yard, Wendy: “Mama, are you here? Mama! Mama are you here?”

Claire struggles to put her wet swimsuit back on as Wendy’s voice comes closer and closer. She slips out of the bathroom just in time, leaving Charlie standing there, and Charlie hears her say, “Yes, baby, yes. I am here.”

Later, in the evening, Claire makes a gin and tonic in the kitchen, drinks half of it in one long pull, and says to Charlie: “This has all been a big mistake.”

“What has?” he asks.

“All of this,” she says. “This pool, this house, your face, my life.”

She puts her hands on his chest and buries her head there, her face between her fists.