The Inverted Forest (2 page)

Even so, he marveled at the trespassers’ sense of entitlement, of which he’d seen no sign during the past week of counselor training. Not that he knew what to look for, exactly. In Schuller’s experience each generation of summer camp counselors adopted its own awkward and always veiling brand of etiquette while in the company of the camp director. This group had shown him nothing but a bright and vaguely cloying eagerness.
Carry your satchel, Mr. Kindermann? Will there be a campfire this evening? Oh, good, Mr. Kindermann. And will we be doing “Lights of the City” on the guitar?

Such agreeableness. And yet, here they were, his earnest counselors, ignoring the midnight curfew and wading about the pool like guests at a spa. He stepped up to the fence.

They were pale and chubby, these trespassers and curfew breakers. They had lined up at the diving board, most of them. And in the matter of swimsuits, they seemed to prefer—

He squinted, blinked.

What he’d first thought to be two paunchy and shirtless young men were, on second glance, two bare-breasted young women, naked young women, edging along the length of the board. He knew them by assignment rather than by name: an archery instructor, a petite arts and crafts attendant, her hair cut in a girlish bob. Both young women moved as if they were treading the windblown ledge of a high building, and yet, unmistakably, they were grinning and laughing and pretending to unbalance one another with a sudden push or turn. Upon arriving at the end of the board, the first girl did a brave hop and fell a few short feet onto what looked to be a very narrow plastic raft that someone had floated in her direction. No surprise that the raft buckled and shot out from beneath her. She somersaulted forward and revealed the dark cleft of her ass.

The raft was floated back out in range of the diving board. The second young woman took her leap. Only then did Schuller recognize
the raft for what it was: a large, absurd blow-up hot dog nestled in a fat, inflated bun—a ridiculous pool toy, but also an advertisement for the Oscar Mayer Company. Tonight it was being put to a different use—as a sight gag for the girl counselors of Kindermann Forest.

And the boy counselors? There were several lined up at the board. They, too, walked their naked walk. One difference: the hot dog was held back and an ordinary black inner tube was floated out to the center of the deep end. Each boy leapt toward it. The goal, apparently, was to land dead center and penetrate the tube with a dive or feet-first jump. None of the boys could manage it. But what a scene they made, under- or overshooting their target, then hoisting themselves up naked onto the inner tube, sprawling across it, writhing for control. For this they received whooping cheers of encouragement from an unseen audience treading water in the pool.

Schuller, his fingers curled through the wire diamonds of the pool fence, understood he was seeing an elaborate game or joke acted out: the lurching Oscar Mayer hot dog for the girls, the drifting inner tube for the boys. He wasn’t blind to the implications.

The front gate was open and swinging on its hinges. Schuller passed through it and, having descended the first of eight wide steps, looked out and saw a host of young men and women strutting about the shallow end. For all he knew, his entire staff of counselors had gathered here. They were, without exception, unclothed, naked by consensus.

Of course he’d have to pass along news of what he was seeing to other members of the Kindermann Forest senior staff. There’d be the presumption that Schuller took pleasure in this spectacle. After all, the counselors were young. He was old, seventy-eight years to be precise. Wasn’t it arousing for an old man to look upon a young woman’s naked body? His most honest answer: no, not women’s bodies, nor, for that matter, men’s. Not children’s, either.

He took a step down, this one rushed and uneven, and found himself swaying to the left, not far enough to fall, but enough to get his heart racing and to draw the attention of someone nearby, a young woman standing beside the open shower-house door. Even in his precarious state he recognized her: Wendy Kavanagh, head lifeguard and swimming instructor, an exceedingly tubby girl with large round hips and buttocks, enormous clapping thighs. He’d had reservations about hiring her. But what objections could he offer? Her credentials had been first-rate. And she’d easily outswum the competition. At present she was moving toward the steps, her gaze trained on him, her manner oddly commiserative. A lifeguard’s whistle dangled between her breasts.

Did she think she was beautiful without clothes? Was she not embarrassed? There was a time, not so long ago, when young women of her size and odd shape would not dare appear—even clothed—at a public swimming pool.

She raised her bare arm up to him.

Only then did her intentions become clear. She meant to steady him as he descended the steps. She meant to guard him against falling. As courtesies went, this one was unforgivable.

He managed the last six steps on his own, crossed the deck to the shower house, and flipped on, one by one, the full complement of outdoor pool lights. At once a nimbus of hazy yellow light, a dome of light, materialized over the pool and drew—or were they there already?—a thousand whirring insects.

A naked diver leapt from the board. A dozen or more swimmers began to splash and cry out. “Lights off! Lights off!” they shouted. They raised their hands against the glare and recognized him. “Mr. Kindermann?” There was the proper ring of astonishment in their voices, though not the shamed panic he would have liked. Before long they were scrambling from the water, padding about the deck naked, towel-less, snatching up whatever hastily flung garments they
could find. Somewhere in their ranks a young man laughed. A friend shushed him. Too late though. By then the hilarity had traveled to others, and soon they were all laughing aloud, several of them hysterically so, as they tried to wrestle underwear over their wet limbs. When this failed, they simply held their balled-up clothing to their chests and ran laughing for the gate.

Because there was but one exit, Schuller had time to recognize each counselor as he or she passed, if not by name then by camp assignment. Wrangler, arts and crafts attendant, canoe instructor. Thirteen, no, fourteen counselors in all.

The pool they’d left behind was a ruin of gaudy debris: beer bottles and clothing and side-turned lounge chairs and, in the middle of it all, Wendy Kavanagh, who by now had covered herself, armpit to thigh, with a large beach towel and was stooped over the deck, gathering up stray kickboards and stacking them, as she’d been taught, beneath the lifeguard’s chair.

The sight of her, bent to work, aggravated him. He found his voice. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Wendy. Get back to your cabin.”

She labored on.

“Do you hear me, Wendy?”

She nodded while stacking boards. “I’ll just be a minute, Mr. Kindermann.”

“You will not,” he ordered. “Find your swimsuit and
steer
yourself back to your cabin.”

She stood straight and weighed the instructions given to her. Some element of what he’d spoken, the tone perhaps, appeared to baffle her. “I can let the boards go till morning,” she said. “But the filter’s off and the—”

“LEAVE THEM BE!” he shouted, and she stared back openmouthed, amazed. A June bug alighted on her damp hair. She shook it off, surveyed the cluttered deck, winced in sadness or regret. Then she rummaged beneath a lounge chair, found her flip-flops, though
not her swimsuit, and marched her way up the steps and into the cavernlike blackness of the walkway.

Schuller meant to follow her, yet once he’d tuned off all the lights, he found the boundary between deck and stairs impossible to locate. He stepped back, flipped on the shower-house switch.

The sudden flickering of light caught an unclothed woman stranded halfway between the shower stall and the bay of lockers behind which she’d been hiding.

They both jumped. Schuller’s heart did a queer double thump before settling back into a more sensible rhythm. The woman appeared even more startled, struck dumb, too overwhelmed to catch her breath.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” he insisted.

Her mouth hung open. She raised a hand to her lips and fanned her fingers about, as if she’d just tasted something blazingly hot. An absurd gesture, certainly, and, for Schuller, a familiar one. He had a younger cousin, now twenty years dead, who, when frightened, would fan her mouth in the exact same motion. Odd that this long-forgotten gesture should reveal itself in, of all people, this naked woman, a black woman no less, the first Kindermann Forest Summer Camp had ever employed.

“Really,” he said. “I—”

She found her breath, suddenly, in one deep and rather noisy inhalation. Her shoulders heaved.

“What would your people think of this?” Schuller asked.

She would not look him in the eye. Instead she let her gaze wander the shower room. She reached out, pulled a deflated beach ball from the locker shelf and, after a moment’s consideration, decided to hold it over her lap rather than her chest. “I don’t think they’d be very happy about it,” she said.

“They’d be furious, I’m sure. And your son. What would he think?”

“He’s so young, Mr. Kindermann. I don’t think he’d have an opinion, one way or the other.”

“He’ll grow up fast though, won’t he? Then he’ll have all sorts of opinions.” He squared himself for the task of climbing the pool steps. “After I’m gone,” he said, “you will dress and you will turn off the lights. Do you understand me?”

She nodded.

“I won’t forget this,” he said. “The disappointment. The shock of seeing you.”

It seemed he’d spoken persuasively on the matter. Fortunately, he didn’t undermine his message by teetering on the steps or, once he’d located the brick walkway, losing his way amid the utter darkness.

The meadow, when he reached it, was awash in humid air. Nearby the tree branches raked against one another. The grass beneath his feet felt spongy and alive. From the valley behind him came a soft rumbling thunder and the distant hiss of rain moving in his direction. He picked up his pace. In time he could see the glow of his cottage window. Fifty yards closer and he could make out the crown of soft lamplight shining down on his drafting table.

At worst he would make it back to his cottage with a few thick raindrops puddled in his hair. But what if he didn’t make it back at all?

Sometimes, not often, it made him unaccountably happy to think of the curtain swinging shut on his life. To be taken in an instant. To have a lightning bolt find him and leave for the staff of Kindermann Forest a stirring artifact: his half-charred loafers steaming in the meadow grass.

Nothing of the sort happened. The remaining events of his night were small and ordinary. He brushed his teeth (real teeth, not even a crown
or bridge). He went to bed. Three hours later he woke to a muted gray dawn and a steady drizzling rain against the cottage window.

He had every right to feel groggy and drained. A pleasant surprise then that he should feel such unexpected vigor in exchange for so little rest. He washed and dressed. Then he passed from his cottage into the much larger camp office, where he brewed a pot of coffee and sat behind the director’s desk.

At six-thirty he called Meadowmont Gardens Nursing Home and spoke to Mrs. Davenport, the shift supervisor on Hall 2A, regarding what progress, or lack thereof, had been observed during the previous week. While they talked, a nurse’s aide helped Schuller’s brother, Sandie, shuffle from his room to a lavishly furnished yet sterile parlor, to a leather armchair, to a telephone receiver placed in Sandie’s left hand and guided to a resting place between his neck and chin.

This was a ritual carefully followed each Saturday morning for the past eleven months, since Sandie’s release from the hospital and his admittance to Meadowmont Gardens. Impossible to know whether these phone calls lifted Sandie’s spirits; on the whole they left Schuller feeling glum. And it wasn’t so much Sandie’s disabilities, his pivoting shuffle and withered left side, his grossly slurred and often impenetrable speech, which eleven months of therapy had done little to improve. No, it was a certain dullness that Schuller had detected in his brother several years before the stroke, a slackening of interest in camp activities, in his model railroad sets, in himself. Difficult to share a life and a cottage with someone so annoyingly
mild
. All the more troubling because they were twins. Not identical, but fraternal twins who happened to look a good deal alike.
Not identical,
they’d explained to the unobservant thousands of times during their seventy-eight years as siblings and four decades as codirectors of Kindermann Forest Summer Camp, during their long and unbroken bachelorhood—though, of course, few people would mistake them as identical now.