Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (10 page)

“Alex?” she said. “No.”

It seemed as though she was going to say something else, but she bit it back in time. We looked at each other. We were both thinking the same thing.

When Julia and Lisa were little we sometimes went camping. But eventually we stopped doing that. Camping had mostly been Caroline’s idea. She had done a lot of it before we met, and I didn’t want to disappoint her. When your wife loves opera or ballet, you go along to the opera or ballet, it’s that simple. Caroline loved to sleep in a tent. So I tried to sleep in a tent, too. But what I did most of the time was lie awake. It wasn’t so much the idea that you were completely outside—
unprotected
and outside, separated from the world only by a stretch of canvas—that caused me to lie staring into the darkness with eyes wide open. And it wasn’t the rain on the canvas, the thunder that seemed to explode inside your earlobes, or the locker-room smell when you woke up too late and the sun had been burning down on the canvas for hours. No, those weren’t the things that kept me awake. It was
the others:
the humans who were just on the other side of the flimsy tent cloth. I lay awake and I heard things.
Things you don’t
want
to hear coming from other people. It wasn’t the tent that produced my insomnia, but the place where it was pitched: on a campground, amid other tents.

One morning something snapped. I was sitting in my low-slung folding chair in front of the tent, my legs stretched out in front of me on the grass. Julia was pedaling her tricycle back and forth along the path to the restrooms. A few yards away, in the shade of a chestnut tree, Lisa was playing in her foldable playpen. “Daddy, Daddy!” Julia shouted and waved. And I waved back. Caroline had gone to the camping store to buy milk—that morning we had found two fat bluebottle flies floating in the leftover milk from the day before.

A man came walking down the path. He was wearing red shorts. Not normal shorts or Bermudas, but a design that left his white legs bared almost all the way up to his crotch. With every step he took, the wooden clogs he wore slapped with audible pleasure against the undoubtedly snow-white soles of his feet. In his right hand, right out in the open, for all to see, he was carrying a roll of toilet paper.

It was a feeling, nothing more. A loathing. It felt loathsome to me, the fact that this man could be walking only a few steps away from my daughter and her tricycle. I saw Julia stop pedaling for a moment and look up at him. That made it even more loathsome. The idea that my daughter’s barely three-year-old eyes were taking in this far-too-white and exposed human body. It was—I don’t know how else to put it—a
befoulment
. The man was befouling our view with his bare legs, his wooden clogs, and his loathsome white feet. My child’s view.

As I rose from my folding chair, with some difficulty, and followed him toward the restrooms, I had no idea what I was going to do. “Stay on the path, sweetheart,” I said to Julia as
I walked past. I took a quick look at Lisa in her playpen and went into the building. I soon found what I was looking for. All I had to do was follow the noise. The cubicles were the kind that have a large gap between the floor and the bottom of the door. At the top, the cubicles also shared the same public space. They had no ceilings. Anyone climbing up onto the toilet seat could look down into his neighbor’s cubicle. I squatted down, then knelt. The man’s red shorts were down around his ankles. I saw the feet in their wooden sandals, the pale toes large beyond proportion. The nail on one of the big toes had a yellowish tint, like a smoker’s fingertips. A nicotine hue. I took a deep breath. There were treatments for such nail conditions, I knew. There was no reason to walk around like that. On the other hand, sometimes those treatments had no effect. But anyone with even a minimum of decency would spare his fellow humans the sight. Only a stupid shithead, a
loathsome
, stupid shithead with absolutely no fellow feeling, would leave his sick feet uncovered. Anyone who drew further attention to them by wearing clogs that slapped when he walked had lost all right to clemency—to the mercy of anesthesia during an emergency procedure.

I was still down on my knees in front of the cubicle. Now I was looking through the eyes of a doctor. I thought about what I had to do. Toenails like that are not very tough, I knew. They come away easily as soon as you succeed in putting something underneath them—a pair of pincers, a cotton swab, a used Popsicle stick, it makes no difference; you barely have to apply any pressure. I looked at the big toe and its doomed nail. There was no stopping now. I thought about a hammer. Not the hammer Caroline and I had used to drive the tent stakes into the ground. That was a soft hammer. A hammer with
give
. You couldn’t do
much damage with a rounded rubber hammer like that. No, a real hammer was what was needed. An
iron
hammer that would pulverize the brittle toenail with one well-aimed blow. That would make it break into a thousand pieces. There was softer tissue beneath, I knew. There would be a bloodbath. Loose bits of toenail would fly in all directions, against the walls and the low doors of the cubicle, like plaque atomized under a dental hygienist’s drill. Everything went hazy.
I saw red
, people often say, but I was seeing gray: the gray of a gust of rain, or of sudden mist. I could grab the man by his ankles and pull him out under the high door. But I still didn’t have a hammer.

“Goddamn it …”

Everything was still for a moment, and precisely because I was aware of the silence, I realized that I was the one who had just sworn out loud.

“Hello?” the man’s voice sounded. “Is someone there?”

A fellow countryman. A Dutchman. I should have known. But in fact, of course, I had already known it from the start, from the moment he wandered into my line of sight with the roll of toilet paper under his arm.

“Pervert!” I said. I saw the man’s hands reach for his red shorts and start to pull them up. I stood up. “Dirty pig. You should be ashamed. There are children on this campground. They have to look at your filth, too.”

From the other side of the door came only a total silence. He was probably trying to decide whether to come out or not, or whether it might be wiser to just stay put until I went away.

In the end, that was what I did. As I stepped out into full sunlight, I blinked my eyes—and saw right away that something was wrong. I saw our tent, I saw the playpen with Lisa in
it beneath the tree, but Julia and her tricycle were nowhere to be seen.

“Julia?” I shouted. “Julia?”

I knew the feeling. I had lost my older daughter once before. At a carnival. I had pretended to be calm, I had tried to let my voice sound normal, but inside my chest the cold thud of panic was already pounding much louder than the music from the carousel and the shrieks of people on the roller coaster.

“Julia!”

I walked down the path to where it curved and disappeared behind a high hedge. Behind the hedge was another field of tents.

“Julia?”

In front of a little blue tent, two women were squatting as they washed dishes in the bowl before them on the grass. They stopped for a moment and looked at me questioningly, but by then I had already turned away. To the left of the path, a few yards down, I could hear the burbling of the little river, where we often went to swim in the afternoons.

“Julia?”

I twisted my ankle on a big, round stone. A thorny branch tore across my cheek, just below my eye. In three, no more than four, stumbling steps, I reached the riverbank.

The tricycle was standing in a sort of shallow cove, its front wheel in the water.

I started to run through the water, slipped and landed hard on my ass on the stony riverbed, in a fountain of droplets.

There stood Julia. Not in the river but up on the shore. She was tossing pebbles, but when she saw me sitting wide-legged in the water, she began laughing loudly.

“Daddy!” she shouted, raising her arms above her head. “Daddy!”

Within a split second I was back on my feet. Another one and I was standing beside her.

“Goddamn it!” I said, grabbing her roughly by the wrist. “What did I fucking tell you? Stay on the path! Stay on the path, goddamn it!”

For what must have been a full second my daughter looked at me with eyes that seemed to suggest she thought it was all a joke—Daddy fell in the water just to be funny, now Daddy is being angry just to be funny—but then something in her expression broke. Her face twisted in pain as she tugged at her wrist.

“Daddy …”

For years afterward I would think back on that look, and every time I did, tears came to my eyes.

“Marc! Marc! What are you doing?” Caroline was standing up there, in the trees. She was holding a bottle of milk. She looked from me to Julia and back. “Marc!” she shouted again.

“I can’t take it anymore,” I said half an hour later, once Julia had calmed down and was rolling up and down the path again on her tricycle as though nothing had happened.

Caroline looked at me. She took both my hands in hers and said, “You know that little hotel we saw in the village? Close to the market? Shall we go there for a couple of days?”

From that day on we only stayed at hotels. Or we rented a small house somewhere. At the hotels and houses, too, there were sometimes swimming pools where you saw the uncovered parts of other people, but at least you could get away
from them. The looking was able to take a couple of hours off. A couple of hours lying on the bed in your own room, with your eyes closed. The human filth was no longer forced down your throat twenty-four/seven. After a few of those vacations in houses and hotels, we sometimes dawdled around the windows of the real-estate agents. We looked at the pictures and the prices. For Caroline, a second home abroad would have been a consolation prize for having to give up camping. We could afford it. As long as you stayed away from the coast, most of those houses cost almost nothing. But even as we gazed misty-eyed at a photo of an old water mill with its own pear orchard, we also started thinking out loud about the drawbacks. It might be a shame that one only visited during vacation, we told each other. We spent a long time in front of a photo of a renovated farmhouse with a pool. You’d have to have someone for that pool, we said. Someone to take care of it. The yard, too. Otherwise you’d spend your entire vacation cutting grass and weeding nettles.

We kept putting off our dream of a second home abroad, pushing it ahead of us little by little. Occasionally we would let a local real-estate agent show us around. We ducked under low, sagging doorways; we caught the smell of stagnant water from a pool covered in algae and full of croaking frogs; we ducked to avoid spiderwebs in what had once been the pigpen; we saw a bend in the river glistening in the valley far below; we ducked down to inspect an old outdoor oven and watched the swallows flying back and forth from their nests beneath the eaves of the main house.

Too windy—that was often Caroline’s verdict during those viewings. Too hot. Too cold. Not much of a view. Too exposed. Too close to the neighbors. Too remote.

“We’ll call you,” I told the real-estate agent. “My wife and I need to think it over for a few days.”

And so I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw the tent in the trunk of the car the morning before we left for our summer vacation. It was tucked in all the way at the back, maybe so that I wouldn’t see it. But just then Caroline appeared in the doorway, carrying two rolled-up sleeping bags.

“Aha,” I said. “And what is this supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. It’s just that I thought sometimes you find a pretty place where the only possibility is to camp out. Where there’s no hotel, I mean.”

“Aha,” I said again. A lighthearted approach seemed best, to approach the matter as though my wife was really only sort of joking. “And I suppose that means I’ll have to commute from the hotel to the campground every morning?”

Caroline put the sleeping bags in the trunk, up against the tent.

“Marc,” she said, “I know how you feel about camping. I won’t try to force you into anything. But it’s such a waste to stay in a hotel sometimes. I looked around on the Internet. They have campgrounds there with all the trimmings. With restaurants. And you’re only a hundred yards from the beach.”

“Hotels have restaurants, too,” I said, but I knew I was fighting a losing battle. Caroline missed camping. I could come up with arguments. I could say that the tent and sleeping bags took up half the room in the trunk, but then I would be ignoring the simple fact that my wife longed to hammer stakes into the ground, to tighten ropes and wake up in the morning in a sleeping bag covered in dew.

And there was something else I realized. After the garden party at Ralph and Judith Meier’s, I had asked Caroline if she had talked to Ralph. And more specifically, whether he had made a pass at her.

“You were completely right,” she’d said.

“About what?”

“About him being a dirty old man.”

“Really?” We were lying in bed, the reading lamps on, but we weren’t looking at each other. I don’t know what expression I would have had to wear if we had been.