Late in the Season (13 page)

She did: a little backless stool.

He smiled then, and then began to laugh—a low, quiet, private laugh.

“Look at us,” he said at her puzzled look, the cigarette dangling from his lip. “Here we are again. Me naked and you dressed. It’s almost becoming a habit. Like some distortion of Manet?” As she didn’t get his point immediately, he said, “You know, the
Picnic on the Grass,
with the men dressed to the neck, and the naked woman.’’

“What would Lord Bracknell think?” she said. She realized immediately that she didn’t give a damn what her father would think. Her desire for Jonathan was so intense she began to tremble. She almost reached for a cigarette herself, then remembered she hated the taste of nicotine.

“Who washes you?” she finally asked.

His eyes slid toward hers; the cigarette continued to dangle from his lips. It was getting slowly darker; the sun must have dropped below the horizon. The sky was a deep, velvety blue beyond him. She could hear the boys in the shower, laughing under the stream from the nozzle.

“Want me to play geisha for you?” she asked. She could already feel his firm flesh under her ministering hands: the soft, taut skin, the muscles, the tendons, the little places where he would be soft, at the hips perhaps, his buttocks.

As he still didn’t answer, she went on to say, “I’d like to.”

“Do you wash your boyfriend?” he asked in a quiet voice.

“Lean forward,” she said, getting up. “I’ll scrub your back for you.”

As she stood and then kneeled behind him, and reached for the brush, he suddenly took her arms, and held them by the wrists. He looked at her without saying anything. It was getting darker every moment; she could barely make out his features, yet she knew where his eyes were, his mouth, his nose, almost by rote. In the bathroom, the noise of the shower went off suddenly. She could hear the boys running to another part of the house. Away from here. She almost begged him to let her. But he suddenly let go of her hands, stood up, got out of the hot tub, and strode across the deck, into the bathroom. She wondered if she should follow him, but then she heard the shower turned on again, full force, and she sat back on her heels and felt awful, bereft, humiliated, shamed, rejected.

She had to leave, right now, before he came out of the shower.

She remembered to pick up the two paperbacks, and had even partly regained her composure, when she passed the long corridor and went into the living area. The boys were at the kitchen counter bar, playing with some coloring books. They looked up as she came out.

“Hi!” they said.

“Hi!” she answered back.

“Are you staying for dinner?” Ken asked.

“No.” She looked back toward the bedroom. She was certain the shower was off. She had to get out now, before Jonathan came out and saw her. “No. I just came by to borrow some books.”

They seemed satisfied by that, and went back to their coloring.

She was still blushing when she reached her family’s house.

“Idiot!” she said to herself. “You horny idiot. You almost ruined it!”

“Come on, lazy bones, wake up!”

Both Artie and Ken were on his bed, softly pummeling Jonathan through the sheets.

“What time is it?” Jonathan said, then managed to see the clock. “Eight o’clock. Your father won’t be calling for at least another hour,” he said, rolling over, and trying to avoid the boys’ faces.

They settled onto the bed. Artie poked under the sheets at his chest. He rolled over the other way.

“I told you,” the smaller boy concluded smugly. “Old people need their sleep more than we do.”

That was all Jonathan had to hear. “All right, everyone up! Off the bed!”

In the kitchen coffee was set to brewing. It was another faultlessly clear and sunny day outside. The weather was holding up excellently for the boys’ weekend.

They were in the kitchen too, fixing their own breakfasts with occasional comments from Jonathan, used to it by now from earlier visits to the beach house.

“Why is it you guys take so long to wake up?” Ken wanted to know.

“I can’t believe you’re really going to eat all that food,” Jonathan said instead of answering. The boy had sat down, and placed in front of himself a container of cherry yogurt, a banana, two slices of wheat toast, a bowl of cereal with sliced fresh peaches on top, and a small dish with a rather large homemade fudge brownie. The meal was guarded on either side by tall glasses of liquids—one containing apple juice, the other milk. To Jonathan—who seldom had more than a cup of coffee before noon, no matter when he awakened—it was like facing a ten-course haute cuisine meal at Lutèce.

“Mom never wakes up easy, too,” Artie said. His meal, although as large eventually as Ken’s, was taken piecemeal; he’d arranged it on the kitchen counter, and would bring it to the table in stages, where he would concentrate on each item before getting up to fetch another.

“Either,” Jonathan corrected.

“Mom never wakes up easy either,” Artie good-naturedly repeated. Then, “That doesn’t sound right.”

“Well, it is,” Jonathan said.

“Why?” Ken asked, barely getting the word out through a mouthful of toast.

“I don’t know. Ask your English teacher.”

“No. I mean, why don’t you or Mom get up early?”

“He went out and partied last night,” Artie said. He’d arrived at his third course: fruit.

“I was right here,” Jonathan said.

He hadn’t gone out last night. He’d stayed in and wrestled with that chorus at the end of the first act until he was halfway satisfied with it. In fact, he hadn’t even dreamed of going out with the kids here. If Dan were home too, it would be different. Dan never gave a thought about leaving them alone while he and Jonathan went out to the little bar-disco in the village. Of course, the next question was, what would Jonathan do at the bar in the village? Stand around? Have a drink or two? Look at the dancers: younger and more attractive, gayer and more fashionable every summer? And feel older and out of place? Or was he afraid he’d bump into Stevie Locke there?

“Yeah, Jonathan, why do you sleep so much?” Artie asked.

“I guess when you’re as ancient as I am, you come to realize that sleep is essentially far less threatening than being awake all the time. So, I’m naturally reluctant to leave off sleeping.”

“Huh?” Artie said.

“Never mind,” Jonathan said. The coffee tasted like old nailheads this morning.

“I get it,” Ken said, smirking. And Jonathan indeed believed Ken did understand his point. Ken seemed to understand a great deal, whether or not he let on he did. He’d laid waste to his All-Bran, sailed into the yogurt, sipped the juice, eaten both pieces of toast, demolished the banana. He now held the fudge brownie in one hand and wielded the glass of milk in the other, taking turns with them, bite and sip.

Jonathan continued to sip at his coffee, unable to tear his eyes away from Ken’s feasting, and at the same time slightly queasy about the possible consequences of such gorging.

“We saw Stevie again,” Artie suddenly offered. “She’s pretty!”

“She was borrowing some books,” Ken explained. “While you were in the shower. That was okay, wasn’t it?”

“Sure,” Jonathan said. Stevie again. That had been a chancy moment at the hot tub last night. One of the closest in years. Had she seen his erection as he stood up and walked away? Probably not. Otherwise she would have followed him into the shower. Or would she have? Was she really coming on to him, anyway? Or just playing with him? Who knew?

“How come she has a boy’s name?” Artie asked.

“It’s short for Stephanie,” Ken said. And when Jonathan wondered how he knew this, the boy asked, “Isn’t it?”

“She’s pretty,” Artie repeated. “Prettier than Ken’s girl friend.”

“I don’t have a girl friend,” Ken said, mumbling through the brownie.

“Pete says you do,” Artie countered.

“Pete’s so afraid I’ll grow up gay, he’ll do anything and say anything to prove I’m not. Patricia is just a friend,” he concluded firmly.

“But she is a girl,” Artie said.

“So?”

“So, she’s your girl friend.”

“Phooey,” Ken said. “Mom is Pete’s girl friend. It’s different. You have to love a girl friend. I don’t love Patricia.”

Jonathan marveled at how patient children could sometimes be explaining things to each other.

“But you like her, right?” Artie insisted. “Otherwise you wouldn’t do things together, right?”

“Sure I like her. Her father has all these neat books on differential calculus he showed me,” Ken said to Jonathan. “Filled with all sorts of shortcuts and proofs and things you can’t find in regular textbooks. Patricia knows most of them already. She’s showing me how to do them.” His eyes almost glittered as he spoke.

“Is that true, what you said about Pete?” Jonathan asked Ken. He’d begun to feel his stomach tighten up during the conversation and it wasn’t from the caffeine.

“You mean about him calling Patricia my girl friend? I guess. Who cares.”

“What about what you said?” Jonathan insisted. “About Pete being afraid you’ll be gay when you get older?”

“I don’t know.” Evasively said, head lowered, by Ken. Then, “Don’t worry. I can handle Pete.”

Damn it! Jonathan thought. Pete is pressuring the kid. Janet must be in on it, or at least know about it, otherwise she wouldn’t have prefaced the whole thing the way she did on the telephone, or demanded to know what Ken said. Wait till Dan found out; he’d go over to Janet’s and start a real scene.

“If you find you can’t handle Pete,” Jonathan said as emotionlessly as he could, “make certain you let me or Dan know about it. Do you hear? You don’t have to take any of that reactionary crap from Pete just because he happens to be sleeping with your mother.”

“I know,” Ken said brightly, secretively. “I know. I marched last year. Remember?”

The boy’s eyes were suddenly very grown-up. He looked and spoke to Jonathan as an equal now, not as a child. For an instant Jonathan wondered why the boy mentioned this…to help allay his fears, to say he was on their side—Jonathan and Dan’s—forever? Was he…? Could he know that already? At eleven?

The phone rang, bursting in on his thoughts.

Artie was off his chair to get it in a flash, and was already accepting the call, when Jonathan arrived. Ken continued to eat, wiped his mouth, and slowly came to the phone last.

When the ten-minute operator cut in, Jonathan got on the line to have her extend the call to a half hour. She said there weren’t too many Sunday calls, and she could keep this trunk line open for them.

“Hi, babe,” Daniel said hesitantly to Jonathan. “How do the kids look? Okay?”

Jonathan heard a slight, unfamiliar hissing, as though another long distance line were still open: the operator’s snooping in, Jonathan guessed.

“The kids look fine,” he said. “But I look like hell. Damn you, Dan. I’m pregnant again.”

There was an audible click. The hissing and the operator were gone. Took care of you, Jonathan thought.

“Here’s Ken again,” Jonathan said into the receiver. The irate operator returned to cut them off exactly at the half hour, so Jonathan couldn’t say anything more than hello to Dan and then good-bye. Daniel sounded relaxed. He’d taken Jonathan’s joke on the operator as forgiveness: which it wasn’t. Took it rather prematurely, Jonathan thought. Took it as the easy way out for not bothering to mention the boys’ visit. It annoyed him.

He sent the boys out picking beach plums, one of the few remaining bush fruits that grew at Sea Mist this late in the year. He showered and even got some exercise done in the time before they returned.

Then it was time for the beach, and another hike along the surf and into the wilder dunes distant from the community, and even inland a bit. They encountered a family of wild deer—three does, a multi-antlered buck big as a stallion, and two small fawns—who didn’t seem at all shy, but merely stared at the three humans as though they were interlopers. The boys were thrilled. It was an accidental meeting, one that caused them to drop their voices to whispers. Ken and Artie talked about the deer all the way home and all through lunch.

The afternoon was spent on the bedroom deck. The boys bathed in the hot tub, while Jonathan brought out a table and chair and worked on his score. The wild deer had so excited the boys that after the bath they were unusually subdued, which suited him fine. In an hour and a half or so he managed to get a great deal of work done on the second act trio between Gentile, Farnace, and Carlo—the three suitors—and felt as though he were finally back on the road to getting the score in shape.

Ken was on the chaise longue, cream smeared over his cheeks and forehead, much reddened yesterday and today, a long yellow shirt of Dan’s covering him almost down to his knees, a green plastic visor over his eyes casting a lurid and ghoulish glow on his features, a tall glass of lemonade on the side table. He was reading
Astronomy
magazine. Artie was still in his bathing suit, sitting on the deck, quietly playing with some driftwood boats Dan had made several years back, kept in the summer house. Once, when Ken looked up from his magazine, he caught Jonathan staring at him, and smiled.