The Color of Water in July (9 page)

“Well, my mother thought the woods was just the place for me. Anyway, I spent so much time out there . . . I used to play this game I called The Last Man on Earth, and after a while, in spite of myself, I did like the woods, and I started watching the birds.”

“Are you in college?” Jess asked.

“Yeah, Ann Arbor. I’m majoring in environmental sciences and art.”

“What are you going to do with it?” Jess asked, hating the question, the one that grown-ups always asked.

He looked hesitant before he answered, raising his eyebrows a little, as though wondering if she really wanted to know. “I take pictures and then . . . write poems about them, and essays too . . . about the outdoors. At least that’s what I really like to do. What about you?”

“Well, my mom is a reporter. She goes to places where all this awful stuff is happening, and then writes about it, without actually . . . doing anything, you know what I mean? I would like to be able to actually do something practical, and . . . you know . . . helpful.” Jess felt her cheeks flush slightly even saying it. That wasn’t the kind of thing you could say around Margaret and her crowd—that you wanted to “help.” The expat crowd her mother hung around with would chuck her under the chin and snicker if they ever heard her say a thing like that. It was okay to want to do things “just for the hell of it.” Seeming sincere though, now that was a cardinal sin.

“So I’m planning to go to medical school.”

They both sat silently for a moment, listening to Joni Mitchell’s voice glide and plunge as she sang “Little Green.”

“Just be careful. Don’t sell out.”

“I won’t.” She looked at Daniel. “I mean, I don’t think I will. Do you think you can really know . . . if you’re gonna sell out, I mean?” She paused again, listening to a saxophone riff through a plangent solo; she was studying the planes and contours of his face.

“I know I won’t,” Daniel said. “Where are you going anyway?”

“University of Texas.”

“Oh,” Daniel said. “Not anywhere near here.”

“No, not anywhere near anywhere, really.”

“Why there then?”

“That’s where Mamie wants me to go.”

“Is that a good reason?”

“She’s paying for it.”

It was the end of an unusual week of unremitting cold weather. Daniel was stoking the fire, trying to warm up the living room in Treetops, which had settled into a bone-rattling chill except right by the hearth. Jess was looking at Daniel as he tended the fire. The stiffness had eased out of her muscles, and she felt a little less raw, less bruised, every day. She watched the careful way he handled the fire tools, the orange flames casting light upon his face.

He turned his head away from the fire, looked at her, and smiled—a crooked smile over even white teeth. Jess had to smile back at him. And she smiled him a smile that was an invitation, and the distance between them melted away.

He was warm sand. He was the smoke from a campfire. He was the soft wool of a Shetland sweater, scented gently of wind and sweat. She was lying back on the sofa, and he knelt beside her on the floor, his rough hand gently stroking the hair off her forehead. Jess looked up at his face, the brown cheeks, the pink at the end of his nose where the skin had peeled off, with pale hints of freckles. She looked at his brown eyes, dark pools in the low light. She slipped her arms along his warm, bare chest, shimmying his flannel shirt off, feeling the buttons popping off as she pulled it over his head. For a moment, she lay her cheek against the warm, firm expanse of his chest, then as she raised her chin to meet his soft lips, her own parted to taste his salty pad of tongue.

Jess did not know how long they lay like that, entangled on the sofa. They were so close to the fire that they were almost scorched on the side nearest the flames, and Jess first took off her shirt, and then unclasped her bra by its front hook, letting it slip off to the sides. She felt her breasts flatten out under the weight of his chest, their chests glued together with slick, hot sweat.

Daniel slipped down on the floor beside the couch and gently, gently reached for the button at the fly of her jeans. But feeling the hands on her jeans, she flashed on Phelps’s face in front of her. Jess felt herself go rigid, and she curled up, knees to her chest, and said, “No. No, I can’t.”

Daniel laid his head, soft with fine brown hair, gently on her sternum between her breasts, then he stood and turned away, banging his forehead rhythmically against the wall, muttering, “Sorry, sorry, sorry . . . ” so softly that Jess could barely hear.

She stood, scooping up her bra and pulling her shirt closed to cover herself, and walked into the bathroom, feeling at the same time weak-kneed with desire, cold with fear, and burning with shame.

When Jess came out of the bathroom, with her hair combed, shirt buttoned, and face damp with cold water, Daniel was in the kitchen making Kraft Macaroni & Cheese out of the box. Jess had never seen cheese made out of powder, and she giggled as he poured in the bright-orange powder and mixed it with butter and milk. “I’ve never seen mac and cheese come out of a box,” she said.

Daniel looked at her. “Seriously? That’s impossible.”

“We mostly eat out,” Jess said. “I’m sure my mom would love mac and cheese in a box,” Jess said. “She hates to cook.”

Outside, the sky was darker than ever, almost purple, and the rain was coming down in sheets, not the usual brief downpour with thunder and lightning, more like a winter storm, cold, steady, and relentless. In no way did it seem like early July.

They sat close together, knees and thighs pressed against each other’s, at the chipped Formica table, forking the small cylindrical noodles into their mouth. They tasted, Jess thought, disgusting—but she was starving and so she shoveled the little orange noodles into her mouth, and then they would lean over the plates and kiss each other, the powdery, salty orangeness mixing up in their mouths. Joni Mitchell’s
Blue
was playing in the background while Jess filled Daniel in on some of the crazy details of her life.

“What’s it like over there anyway? In France. Do you like it?” Daniel asked.

Jess shrugged. “It’s okay,” she said. She thought of their small, messy apartment, her walk to school under gray skies. She and her mother moved around a lot. Michigan always felt more like home.

“We’ll go there sometime,” Daniel said. “You can introduce me to your mom who doesn’t like to cook. I’ll bring her a box of Kraft Mac and Cheese as a present.”

“I would like that,” Jess said.

Daniel kept hopping up every couple of minutes, saying, “I like this part,” thumbing the needle up off the vinyl and letting another Joni Mitchell riff repeat.

“Listen to this!” and he would close his eyes, chin tipped up, legs lightly flexed, and rock back and forth in time with the music.

And then Jess would have to stand up and go over to him, embracing him tightly, and kiss him again, pressing up against him, cheek to cheek, and they would both let the bright risings and fallings of the music pour through them.

Finally, Jess reached down to unbutton her own pants, letting them drop to her ankles, and then she stepped out of them. Without a word, Daniel led her by the hand up the staircase and down a narrow hall. Compared to downstairs near the fire, it was freezing up there, and she felt gooseflesh rise on her naked legs. Then, flannel sheets, dark green, warm, and smelling like the warm earthy woods themselves. She brought him to her, unfolding to him, and they rocked and rocked, deeper and deeper, and then down, down, into a heavy, dark-green sleep.

When they woke up, Jess imagined for a moment that she heard the clubhouse bells, clanging out the first bell, the fifteen minutes to dinner warning. But fully awake, she heard only silence and the sound of Daniel’s even breath. The rain seemed to have stopped. Glancing at the bedside clock, she saw that it was a quarter to six. She sprang out of bed and pulled her jeans on, calling over her shoulder that she had to be home for dinner with Mamie. She ran the quick way, down the path through the woods, and managed to skid into her seat right at six.

“I thought I heard the clubhouse bells,” Jess said, slightly breathless, as she sat down across from Mamie in the kitchen, “the warning bell for dinner. Isn’t that funny?”

“I still hear them too, Jess. After all these years, I still swear I hear them on occasion.”

The next morning, the rain cleared and the sun came out. It was summer again, only now it seemed like a brand-new summer, no problems with Phelps Whitmire, no lonely vigils at the beach.
This
summer, she was with Daniel, and she was in love. He took her out in the canoe across to Hemingway Point so that she could see the tops of the giant white pines. He taught her the names of birds, what their markings looked like, and how to recognize their calls. They spent hours down in the basement, elbow deep in chemicals while he showed her how to process photos, and they kissed under the red darkroom light. They ate ramen noodles and Cup-a-Soup, and listened to Joni Mitchell’s
Blue
over and over and over again, each time the record ending with a
scratch-scritch
and then the automatic arm lifting up, moving over, and setting itself back down with a
scritch
again.

CHAPTER TEN

J
ESS
,
AGE THIRTY-THREE

Poison,
Jess thought.
This is pure poison
.
I quit smoking ages ago.

She sat out on the porch, feet tucked underneath her in one of the wicker rockers, smoking a Marlboro Light; a pile of dusty old novels she’d pulled down from the shelf was sitting on the table in front of her. One was open on her lap, except that she realized she had been reading the same phrase over and over again. Every time Jess let her eyes lift from the page to look out over the lake, she would drift back into her memories of the summer she had spent in love with Daniel Painter. The summer she had learned the names of trees that she had never even distinguished before: tulip poplar, black walnut, blue spruce, paper birch. And she had looked at birds for the first time, looked at birds doing anything besides strutting around dirty in city streets, pecking at bits of garbage.

Enough,
Jess thought. It was like writing and rewriting a paragraph until she couldn’t understand her own words anymore. A long time ago, she had put that summer with Daniel between brackets—big, bold, black brackets; it was one subject that she had thought about enough. She should be honest—thought about way too much.

Jess could hear Russ’s voice inside the cottage, talking with the architect, Paul Banyer, who had arrived late the evening before. They were talking about weight-bearing walls, islands, and peninsulas—it seemed to have something to do with kitchen counters—and Corian and granite. This was Russ’s stuff, and it had always pleased Jess, so concrete and tangible, so unlike the intangibles around which she tried to make her life’s work.

No, she rarely indulged herself in thinking about Daniel Painter. Now, she could recognize the cauldron of emotions that as a young girl she had mistaken for love. She had left her mother, not just for the summer but, in every real sense, forever. She was going to college, and though she had always called herself an American, she was planning to live in America, really, for the first time.

Then, there had been that awful thing with Phelps Whitmire. Oh, she’d been pawed on a time or two since then, and gotten much better at seeing trouble coming and fending it off.

Even now, it pained her to think of what had happened to her after that summer—struggling as a premed at the University of Texas. She had been so distracted, so lost in her thoughts, so chewed up and burned by the flash of experience she had mistaken for love. Still, she had maintained straight As in the premed program, until . . .

Jess reached down and picked out another cigarette from the new pack of Marlboro Lights she had bought last night when they’d picked up Paul at the Traverse City airport. She shrugged slightly and lit up, the unread novel lying open on her lap. The acrid taste in her mouth made her grimace. It was one thing in a bar, with her mouth awash in beer, but here on the front porch with the clean lake smell in the air it made her feel dirty. But—she thought, taking another puff—now that she was started, she might as well keep going. There was a sailboat race going on out on the lake, the boats heading west past Loeb Point. They had their bright-hued spinnakers out, making brilliant dots on the water.

Jess was thinking about how she had decided to be a premed in the first place. There was a famous picture of her mother, Margaret, the kind of picture that kept showing up in photomontages, like the greatest one hundred journalistic photos of this century. Her mother was a young woman then, one of the few women reporters in Vietnam. She looked just like Joan Baez in those days—long, jet-black straight hair, and piercing eyes under dark eyebrows that formed a straight line across her forehead. Margaret was shoving a microphone into the face of a young American soldier who was lying in the dirt, gazing up at Margaret as though she were the Madonna herself. The photograph took in the face of the boy, the microphone, all of Margaret’s intense hippieish beauty, and the pool of blood, dark against the ground, that was forming around the boy’s leg, shot off below the knee.

Jess saw that photo—saw it a million times—but she still remembered the first time she had seen it, the overwhelming
wrongness
that she felt, like she had caught Mommy in the act of doing something private and embarrassing.

“Why didn’t you help him with his leg, Mommy?”

“Because I’m not a doctor, darlin’,” she said. “My job is askin’. Askin’ how does it feel to get your leg blown off, young man? Then the doctor’ll come around later and fix him up. That is, if the poor bastard isn’t dead by then,” Margaret laughed.

So Jess made up her mind that she wanted to be a doctor. She would go with her mother to all the places that she was always leaving for, and follow behind, and after Margaret was done with her asking, Jess would sew them all up and send them on their way in much better shape than she had found them.

And then there was Gary. For a while—Jess must have been about twelve—Margaret had dated a doctor, from Doctors Without Borders. Gary was nothing like most of Margaret’s boyfriends. He had a thick wave of golden hair that flopped into his eyes from time to time, and sapphire-blue eyes that were both penetrating and gentle. Jess had been fascinated by his stories of working in refugee camps on the Thai border, and of going into Biafra during the famine. He didn’t seem like a real grown-up to her; he had a bushy beard and always wore worn-out corduroys with hiking boots. Once, Gary had taken them along to a presentation about Beirut at the American Church in Paris. They sat in one of the cold wooden pews near the front; the stone Gothic building was half-empty, only a smattering of wives here and there, American women with overbright makeup, purses clutched two-fisted in their laps.

Jess remembered that she hadn’t wanted to go; she had brought her homework with her and had planned to do it with her books balancing on her knees. At first, she had squirmed uncomfortably in the wooden pew, not listening, peeking sidewise at Gary, who was both leaning forward listening intently and at the same time fondling her mother’s knee. But then, the words of one speaker had started to captivate her, to draw her in. The speaker was a midwife, British, who described attending to refugee women in labor, in primitive conditions, while the bombs were raining down around them. The woman was stout and rather plain, with gray hair pulled back in a stern knot, but her words were full of compassion as she described her credo: to make the world better “one healthy baby at a time.” Walking out of the building with Margaret and Gary, Jess had shyly spoken of her admiration for the woman.

“Oh, she’s incredible, isn’t she? She’s single-handedly kept the maternity program going in the refugee camps . . . Dropped the infant mortality rate by more than fifty percent,” Gary said.

Jess had felt her blood rise along her hairline and under her ears, a small flush of pride because of his approbation.

“Gawd,” Margaret hooted. “I couldn’t stand her. What was all that ‘one healthy baby at a time’ crap? The world is far too big a place to help people one at a time—let the babies die and storm the barricades. That’s what they ought to do.”

That was a moment when Jess passionately hated her mother. She felt the burn at the pit of her stomach, stared down at her scuffed shoes on the pavement, looked out at the gray water of the Seine as they walked toward the Pont de l’Alma, wishing that she could think of a rejoinder, hoping desperately that Gary would.

But Gary only laughed and yanked on Margaret’s arm, pulling her closer so that he could nuzzle her neck there at the nape where a fine fringe of black hair grew.

“Bravo, darling. Go ahead and storm them,” he said, laughing.

“I’ll help the babies,” Jess whispered, but neither of the grown-ups gave any sign that they had heard.

Gary was gone not long after that. “Off somewhere,” Margaret had said offhandedly. “Saving people,” she had snorted. But Jess had harbored the image of the plain woman in the church, her voice ringing with the clear tones of conviction, and Jess had bided her time, and studied her science and hunkered down to wait, believing that she could do it; believing that it could be done.

Staring at the lake, taking a long searing pull on her cigarette, Jess remembered that it hadn’t exactly turned out that way . . .

She had ended up studying French, a language she had learned growing up in France. After graduation, she had gotten a job in a university library, a job whose quiet, orderly concentration was as far from her life with her mother the foreign correspondent as anyone could possibly imagine.

Sometimes, she regretted that she had never gone on to medical school—it was hard to imagine she was helping anyone now, except the few college professors and graduate students who needed her resources.

But youthful dreams are just that—dreams. Jess scratched at a mosquito bite she had gotten when she and Russ were in the woods. She closed the novel, suppressed a yawn, and turned to face the cottage, telling herself she would dwell on the past no longer.

Russ’s voice, self-assured, businesslike, was audible through the screen door, mingling with the lower, softer voice of the architect. She had always loved to hear Russ talk about business. She listened to his voice, sharp, clipped, and to the point. “I’ll talk to Karla over at Viking—they’re always looking for product placement.”

I love Russ
,
Jess thought. Managing affairs, doing business, tidying up the past, and moving on.
That’s what love feels like.
Not like a hash, a swamp, and a stew. She stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette in the enamel ashtray and stood up to join the men in the cottage. She was eager to see what plans they would have to bring the cottage up to date, to bring some light in, to make it look more like a beach cottage and less like a mournful dirge, an old never-sung tune.

She gathered up the books to carry them inside. She was keeping Daniel’s book wedged between the others, holding it so that she couldn’t see it, so that not even her fingers would touch the shiny edges. Jess could not even bear to look at the cover of the book, much less open it. But this was something that she would not admit, even to herself, and so she carried it in, disarmed, among the other books, which she laid down on Mamie’s table, a tidy, academic-looking pile.

Tonight, Jess, Russ, and Paul were sitting around the Formica table in the breakfast nook, the table littered with empty and half-full takeout containers of Chinese food: moo shu pork, scallion pancakes, and steamed pot stickers, now cold and congealed to the side of the white cardboard box. All the lights were on, and Paul had even dragged in several standing lamps from the other room, saying that he couldn’t bear dark spaces. There was lots of fast, loud talking, and Paul’s beeper kept going off every twenty minutes or so. Sections of the
New York Times
were strewn across the tables, some with grease spots from the Chinese food. Jess was feeling altogether much more like herself, her
real
self, as she thought of it.

“You know, that whole dressing-room area, between the living room and the kitchen, can come down. It’s not a weight-bearing wall. The cost will be minimal. I can get my guy to do it, as a favor. We’ll throw a skylight up here over the work-triangle area, then you won’t believe the place.” Paul’s speech was staccato. He was wearing a denim shirt and thick black horn-rimmed glasses.

Jess was leaning close to Russ, pressing her shoulder into his side. In front of her on the table was a half-empty glass of red wine, a plate with a pot sticker with one bite taken out of it, and some wilting shreds of cabbage. Russ was sitting on a bar stool; she had to tilt her chin up so that she could look at his face as he talked.

“God . . . you know . . . it’ll be so much better . . . so much more light, and a kitchen you can actually do something with.”

Jess saw the enthusiasm in Russ’s eyes. For barely a moment, she let herself slip into thinking that they would keep the cottage, modernizing it. They could spend summers here. Summer in the city was awful, and normally she could barely afford a vacation—much less her own summerhouse.

“You need to go through the stuff in that hallway thing and decide if there’s anything you want in there. Empty it out so we can take out the wall.”

“Sure,” Jess said. “I think I know what’s in there. Sheets. A helluva lot of white sheets.”

“I found some papers in an old trunk marked
Linens
. I was trying to find a towel and I opened it.”

“Papers?” Jess said, surprised. “Mamie wouldn’t have left anything important in a linen closet, I don’t think.”

“Well, you should look through it anyway, just in case . . . ”

Papers in an old storage trunk marked
Linens
? That was not Mamie’s style. The lawyer had told Jess about the perfect order of Mamie’s affairs, the bequests to charity, the trust fund for her cleaning woman, the gift of the cottage to Jess. Curious, she agreed to take a look.