Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (13 page)

I said nothing. I toyed with my glass, then took a quick sip. But the glass was empty. We were sitting in our low folding chairs, our legs stretched out across a bed of pine needles. Every once in a while I felt something tickling my ankles. An ant. A spider. But I didn’t move.

“I thought you wanted to keep Ralph as far away from me as possible,” Caroline said. “I even told you that myself. That I didn’t want to go. And then you choose a campground that’s a stone’s throw away from their summer house.”

Caroline had hung a candle holder on the pole that stuck
out from the front of the tent. One of those candle holders with little glass windows. But the candle had died and we were sitting in darkness. Above our heads, thousands of stars sparkled among the treetops. Far below you could hear the soft booming of the surf.

“Yes, I knew,” I said. “But I didn’t think it was any reason not to come to this particular place. Like it was off-limits or something, just because you might run into people you don’t really want to see.”

“But, Marc! There are hundreds of places like this along the coast. Hundreds of other beaches where the Meiers haven’t rented a summer house.”

“I talked to Ralph about it again, later on. Right after the garden party. He told me how beautiful it was here. Still fairly unspoiled. I was sort of curious.”

Caroline sighed deeply. “So what now? What are we going to do? Now we have to go over there tomorrow. It would be really weird if we didn’t.”

“It’s just a dinner. They’ll probably have a barbecue again. If you want, we can leave right after that. Go to some other beach. Some other campground. But if you really don’t want to go to dinner there, we won’t. We’ll make up an excuse. That you weren’t feeling well. Or that I wasn’t. And then we’ll go away, the day after tomorrow.”

Neither of us said a word. I ran the tip of my tongue over my upper lip, which felt dry and hard.

“Is that what you want?” I asked. “Like I said, I don’t mind at all. We’ll come up with some excuse.”

I heard my wife sigh a few times. I heard her swat at something on her bare leg. An insect. A pine needle, fallen from a tree. Or maybe, in fact, nothing at all.

“Oh, well. It doesn’t really matter. It was just that I was looking forward to a couple of days or a week with just the four of us. If it had happened later in the vacation, I wouldn’t have minded nearly as much. Meeting up with other people. But this is so sudden. I don’t feel at all like being around a bunch of people. Like long conversations on the patio with lots of wine.”

I reached out and laid my hand on her thigh.

“I don’t either, really,” I said. “I didn’t feel like being around other people yet, either. I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”

“That’s right, it’s your fault,” she said. “So you can call them and say we’re not coming.”

I closed my eyes. I gulped, but my throat was empty. Except for the surf in the distance, all I could hear was a faint buzzing in my ears. “Okay,” I said.

“I’m only kidding,” Caroline said. “No, it would be ridiculous to cancel now. To be honest, I’m kind of curious. About that house of theirs. And it will be fun for the girls. The boys, I mean. And that pool.”

Earlier that evening on the beach, this is how it went: Julia brought Alex over to our table, followed closely by Lisa and the younger brother, Thomas. Then the rest of the Meier family came strolling up. Ralph and Judith, and the woman in her seventies I had seen at the garden party: Judith’s mother. And two other people. A man in his late fifties with longish gray hair, streaked with a few black locks—a face that seemed familiar, but I couldn’t figure out why, not right away. And a woman. A woman I assumed was with the man, although she was at least twenty years younger.

“What a surprise!” Ralph said. He grabbed Caroline, who was already halfway out of her chair, by the shoulders and kissed her three times on the cheeks.

“Hi,” Judith said. We kissed each other, too. Then we looked at each other.
That’s right, I really showed up
, I told her with my eyes.
Yes, so I see
, she looked back.

“Why didn’t you two call to say you were coming?” Ralph said. “We could have had dinner together. We bought a whole suckling pig at the market today. That’s the real thing, suckling pig on a spit!”

Caroline shrugged and looked at me.

“Really, we only just got here,” I said. “We weren’t planning to … we’re staying at the campground.”

“At the campground!” Ralph roared, as though this was the funniest thing he’d heard in days. At that point, the gray-haired man stepped forward. “Oh, excuse me,” Ralph said. “I forgot to introduce you. Stanley, this is Marc. He’s my doctor. And this is his delectable wife, Caroline.”

The man Ralph had introduced as “Stanley” shook Caroline’s hand first. “Stanley Forbes,” he said. “Stanley,” he repeated, only his first name, as he shook mine. I suddenly knew why his face looked familiar. Stanley Forbes wasn’t his real name. He’d had a different one when he left Holland for America about twenty-five years ago. Jan? Hans? Hans Jansen? One of those basic Dutch names, in any case; I just couldn’t remember it right away. For the first few years you heard very little about him, but then the Dutch film director who by then called himself Stanley Forbes suddenly made a name for himself in Hollywood.

“And this is Stanley’s girlfriend,” Ralph said. “Emmanuelle.” He rested his hand lightly on the young woman’s
shoulder. “Emmanuelle, these are some friends of ours from Holland. Marc and Caroline.”

It would be an understatement to say that Emmanuelle was a real beauty. She shook Caroline’s hand, then mine—it was like having someone reach out to you from the cover of
Vogue
. A small, fragile hand, almost that of a child. From close up I now saw that she couldn’t be much more than five years older than Julia. Seventeen? Eighteen? Not a day older than twenty, for sure. I looked from her face to that of the gray-haired man. I had been wrong about their ages. She wasn’t twenty years younger than Stanley Forbes, she was
forty
years younger. Had she secured a role in his next film by accommodating him between the sheets? I looked at the director’s face, forty years older than hers. At his forty-year-older body, draped in a pair of white, almost transparent linen drawstring pants and a shirt of the same material. Luxurious gray chest hair curled up from his open collar.

For a few seconds I visualized how he forced that old body on her. How he crawled up beside her and let his hand slide down over her belly. Till it reached her navel. How he would run his index finger in a circle around her navel, then go lower. The smell of old man beneath the sheets. The flaking skin. About how she had to think about other things while it happened. About the role she’d been promised, that above all. Was this what Hans (?) Jansen (?) had dreamed of when he left Holland? Of young girls who, out of admiration for his talent or in exchange for a role in one of his movies, were willing to play with his dick?

Now, last in line, Judith’s mother stepped forward. As I shook her hand I took a good look at her face, but I didn’t get the impression that she made a direct connection between me
and the conversation I’d had with her a few weeks earlier on the phone.

“Mr. Schlosser,” she repeated, after her daughter had introduced us.

“Marc,” I said.

I looked around to see whether a table had become available while we were talking, but there were only a few empty chairs. At that same moment, the boy in jeans came back with our order.

“Ah, you folks still have to eat,” Ralph said.

“We could …” I said. “Maybe there will be a table in a while. Or a couple of chairs.”

“Let’s leave these people to eat in peace,” Judith said. “Besides, Mama is tired. If you three want to stay,” she said to Ralph and Stanley Forbes, repeating everything in English for Emmanuelle. “I think it’s better for my mother to go home now. She’s very tired.”

What followed was a brief moment of indecision. Ralph looked around now, too, in search of vacant tables or chairs. Caroline glanced over at me, then lowered her eyes. Julia leaned over to Alex, who was sitting across from her in Lisa’s chair, and whispered something in his ear. Thomas ran after Lisa down the beach. Stanley Forbes had his arm around Emmanuelle’s waist and pulled her up against him. Judith’s mother stood between the tables as though none of it had anything to do with her.

“You’ll be staying a few days, won’t you?” Judith asked. “Why don’t you come to dinner tomorrow?”

It was Professor Aaron Herzl who first explained to us why a man’s biological clock works differently from a woman’s. About how the hands of the clock show the same time, but that it means something different. “It’s just like with real time,” he lectured. “Sometimes a quarter to seven can be early. And sometimes six-twenty is already rather late.”

Every week we had two hours of medical biology, which in those days was still an elective. There were usually more women in the auditorium than there were male students. Aaron Herzl was approaching sixty, but the girls always began to giggle and blush when he addressed them directly. In that respect, he was the living proof of his own theories. The same theories for which, a few years later, he would be run out of town on a rail.

“What I’m going to tell you now is probably not very pleasant for my female students,” he said, peering into the lecture
hall. “On the other hand, it’s simply the way it is. Nothing can be done about it. It is perhaps unfair, but a long and happy life lies in store for those women who are able to accept this injustice rather than resist it.”

A little muffled giggling could already be heard coming from around the hall. We, the male students, had feelings of our own concerning our professor of medical biology. Mixed feelings, that above all. The fact that most of the girls found this bald old man attractive threw certain biological principles for a loop. We were young. We had young sperm. The chance of having a healthy child was eight hundred times greater when sperm was young—we had already learned that during the lectures on gynecology. But we
recognized
it nonetheless. We recognized Professor Aaron Herzl as a serious rival. Whenever the girls were around, we tried to ridicule the professor by alluding to his undoubtedly wrinkled and age-spotted genitals, but there was something about him—an aura, or better yet, a charismatic vibe—that put the girls’ hormone receptors on red alert. At our expense.

Professor Herzl coughed a few times and cleared his throat. He was wearing jeans and a gray turtleneck sweater. No jacket. Before moving to the lectern, he rolled up his sleeves. Then he ran his hands through the gray hair that now grew only at the sides of his head.

“First of all, we have to accept that everything is oriented toward preserving the human race. Or at least keeping it from extinction. And when I say everything, I mean
everything
. The attraction between the sexes, infatuation, horniness, whatever you choose to call it. Pleasure. The orgasm. Taken together, all this is what sees to it that we are attracted to the other. That we like to touch that other. That we want to merge with that other.
Creation is much, much more perfect than some progressive thinkers these days would like us to believe. Food smells nice. Shit stinks. The stench serves as a warning to us not to eat our own feces. Piss stinks, too, but less so, because in an extreme emergency—a shipwreck, a crash landing in the desert—we have to be able to drink our own urine. Nine percent of the population is homosexual, nine percent is left-handed. Throughout the course of fifty thousand years of evolution, those percentages have never changed. Why? Because that’s what’s tolerable. Higher percentages would endanger the continuation of the species. As a matter of fact, a homosexual is nothing more than a walking contraceptive. To say nothing of left-handed homosexuals, a category not included in the statistics.” Laughter in the auditorium, this time perhaps more from the boys than from the girls. “The continuation of the species. That is what it is all about. I’m not talking now about
why
the species should continue to exist. Bacteria, too, struggle to survive. Cancer cells reproduce to their hearts’ content. Survival is the single motor behind creation. But why should that be so? In other words, what value judgment should we attach to this? Humans have already landed on the moon. Nothing grows there. No life has ever been detected there. But what’s wrong with a barren moon? A moon without plants and animals and traffic jams? And what would be wrong with a barren earth? Or, once again, what
value judgment
would one attach to a barren earth like that?” Here Professor Herzl paused to take a sip of water from the glass on the lectern. “Anyone wishing to reflect on the purpose of creation, the purpose of life, if you will, should first pause to consider the dinosaur,” he went on. “The dinosaurs inhabited our planet for one hundred and sixty million years. Then they died out quite suddenly. A few million
years later, humans came on the scene. I’ve always wondered why. What was the purpose of that one hundred and sixty million years? What a waste of time! No direct evolutionary link has ever been shown between the dinosaur and the human species. If humanity and the continuation of the human race were really so important, what was the point of those dinosaurs? And why did they stay around so long? Not a thousand years, or a million, no:
one hundred and sixty million years!
Why not the other way around? Why not the humans first? Why didn’t things start with the evolution of fish to mammals and on to bipedal humans? And then, in a few tens of thousands of years, from the cave dweller to the inventor of the wheel, of movable type, of the transistor radio and the hydrogen bomb? And then have that go on for a few thousand years, or even a few million, as far as I’m concerned, until suddenly, as suddenly as he arrived, mankind dies out. Because of a meteorite, a solar eruption, or a nuclear winter, whatever. The human race dies out. Its bones are buried beneath a thick layer of dust, along with its cities, its cars, its thoughts, its memories, its hopes and desires. Everything gone. And then, after another twenty million years, the dinosaurs come along. They have all the time they need. It no longer matters, we’re not around anymore. They are given a hundred and sixty million years. Dinosaurs are not excavators, they’re not interested in the past. They were never awarded a degree in archaeology. They don’t go out to investigate that layer of dust, not the way we would. And so they find no vanished cities. No four-lane highways, television sets, typewriters. No mint-condition, ready-to-drive Mercedes buried beneath the dust. They find, at most, by accident, a human skull. A skull they sniff at and then, because it no longer contains anything edible, toss away as far as they can. Dinosaurs
are not curious about who roamed the earth before they did. They live in the present. That’s something we might do well to learn from the dinosaurs. To live in the present. Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it, we’re told ad nauseam. But isn’t the essence of existence found precisely in repetition? Birth and death. The sun that comes up each morning and goes down each evening. Summer, fall, winter, spring. A new spring, we say. But there’s nothing new about it. We talk about the first snow, but it’s the same snow that fell a year ago. The men go out hunting. The women keep the cave warm. In one day, a man can impregnate several women. But for nine whole months, a pregnant woman is no longer available to perpetuate the human race. These days we can calculate how many times a woman can give birth before she is worn out. The answer is: twenty. After that the risks become too great. The woman becomes less attractive. In this way, the man is warned not to impregnate the woman again. Soon afterwards, fertility comes to a halt. That’s how intelligently the world is put together. A man’s sperm remains viable for much longer. The health risks for a child born to an old father are negligible. These days we tend to laugh at a seventy-five-year-old man siring a child with a twenty-year-old woman. But in fact, there’s nothing funny about it. A child is a child. One more child. A child that otherwise would not have been there. A man ages, but his attractiveness barely declines. That, too, is the ingenuity of nature. Fresh food smells good. Rotten food stinks. We sniff at a carton of milk to determine whether the sell-by date has been exceeded. That’s the way we view one another as well. Not that one, we say. That one’s too old. God, not in a thousand years. A woman who is past her sell-by date is no longer desirable to us, because there is no reason for her to be. She does
nothing to promote the continuation of the species. I’d like to stop for a moment to consider the injustice. I sympathize with those women who feel that this is all unfair. Women are the soccer stars of creation. At thirty-five, they’re ready for retirement. They have to make sure they’re home and dry before then. A roof over their head, a husband, children. Women are quicker to bind themselves to a man. Any man at all. You see this with women who are approaching the dangerous age. Beautiful women, who could have any man they like, suddenly opt for an ugly, boring prick. Instinct is stronger. The continuation of the species. An ugly, boring prick with a car and a fixed-term mortgage. The roof over one’s head. Not even so much for themselves, but for the child. The cradle must be in a dry, easily heated space. The boring prick provides a better guarantee that the mortgage will be paid each month than the handsome man who knows that he can pick and choose. The handsome, tomcatting man may suddenly pack up his bags and leave. Instinct is so powerful that the woman isn’t even acting out of self-interest. She, too, would prefer to cuddle up to that handsome man each night. But the handsome man has different plans. To impregnate as many women as possible and so pass on his powerful and healthy genes, that is item number one on his agenda. It’s the biological clock. The hands of the clock tell the same time. For the woman, it’s time to settle down. The man feels that it’s still too early for that. And then, by way of conclusion: There are cultures that provide for women who are left high and dry. We tend to look down on those cultures. Here, in the West, an abandoned woman pines away in loneliness. Yet we consider ourselves superior. Those same cultures I’m talking about also make sure that girls are set up with a husband while they are still very young. You might think it’s unfair that a
man cannot get pregnant. But you’ll never hear a man complain about that. We’re all too relieved not to have to walk around for nine months with a huge belly. A belly that would only get in the way of what our instinct tells us we should be doing. You people are young. Do what you want to do. And do it as much and as often as you like. Don’t think about the future. Make sure you have something to look back on. And let injustice stew in its own juices. That will be all for today.”