Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (14 page)

The summer house was on a hillside amid other summer houses, a little less than three miles from the beach. Less than two from our campground. Too far to walk, though, so we took the car.

“Huh, I was expecting something different,” Caroline said. We had the windows rolled down and were trying to read the house numbers, which wasn’t easy because most were either missing or completely covered by ivy or other climbers.

“First it was fifty-three, then fifty-five, but now the numbers are going down again,” I said. I touched the brakes and stuck my head out the window. “Thirty-two, damn it! What do you mean, something different?”

“I don’t know. Something a little more arty, perhaps?”

When we got to the top of the dead-end street, I turned the car around. From here you could see a blue strip of sea and the road as it zigzagged its way to the beach. I looked over at my wife. Years ago, she, too, had been about to marry a boring prick. The first time I saw her was at a party. Just a friend’s birthday party. Caroline and the birthday boy’s wife had been friends since childhood. The boring prick had no friends. The boring prick was with her. “I don’t know anyone else here,” he told me. We were standing by the hors d’oeuvres. He put
down his glass of Coke and pulled out a pipe. “I came with my girlfriend.” I looked at his fingers as he filled the pipe with tobacco. What kind of woman would want a man who smoked a pipe? I wondered. The next moment, Caroline showed up at his side. “Shall we get going?” she asked the boring prick. “I don’t feel so great.” Sometimes the contrast between a man and woman is so huge that you start wondering whether there might be other factors at play. Financial factors, for example. Or factors of status and fame. The twenty-year-old fashion model with the sixty-year-old millionaire. The devastating beauty with the ugliest soccer player you could imagine. Not a third-division player, not even a third-division player with the looks of David Beckham. No, an international star. An international star with thin, greasy hair and a smile that shows more gum than teeth. It’s an agreement. The model looks good in the spotlights. She can shop till she drops in Milan and New York. The ugly soccer player and the old millionaire can let everyone know that they have snagged the most beautiful women in the world. But sometimes the agreement isn’t immediately obvious. How can this be, for Christ’s sake? you think. What does she see in this boring prick?

“Oh, excuse me,” Caroline said, and held out her hand.

“Marc,” I said, taking her hand. At first I had to fight back the urge to hold that hand a little longer than might be considered respectable. After that I suppressed the urge to say something “charming.” I glanced over at the boring prick, who had meanwhile stoked up his pipe and exhaled a couple of thick clouds of smoke. It was pure intuition. I didn’t have to say anything “charming.” I
was
charming. In any case, I was a lot more charming than this boring prick.

I’ve already mentioned my looks. What I should add is
that, at a first glance, I don’t look like a doctor. At least not at birthday parties. Is there a doctor in the house? people shout when someone has fainted or cut his hand on a broken glass. They always look right past me, or over my head. A man wearing sneakers that are none too new, jeans that are none too clean, and a T-shirt hanging over his belt. His hair carefully mussed. I have the kind of hair you can do that with. Before a birthday party, I stand in front of the mirror. I lay my fingers alongside my head and move them briefly up and down. Then it looks just the way it should.

I looked at the woman who had introduced herself as Caroline. I suddenly realized why she was with the boring prick. The biological clock. She had looked at the clock and decided time was running out. But it would be such a waste. I glanced at the boring prick again. I saw weak genes. Perhaps even ugly children. Ugly children whose pipe-smoking father would pick them up from school. She’d said she wasn’t feeling “too great,” and my heart suddenly started pounding. What if I was too late? The thought was so horrendous that I skipped all the formalities and cut right to the crux.

To me, as a man, a pregnant woman would no longer be interesting. With a pregnant woman I would exchange a few pleasantries and then leave her to the boring prick. The child would grow up in a house where the stench of pipe smoke clung to clothing, furniture, and curtains.

“Some women think they’re not allowed to drink alcohol when they’re pregnant,” I said, “but one glass of red wine really can’t hurt. In fact, it’s better. For the nerves, but also for the unborn child.”

Caroline blushed. For a moment I was afraid that I had guessed right, then she looked over at the prick and back at me.

“I … we … we’re trying,” she said. “To get pregnant. But it hasn’t worked out yet.”

I breathed a deep sigh. It was a sigh of relief.

“Forgive me,” I said. “You’re probably wondering why I think it’s any of my business. It’s sort of a professional quirk. When women say that they’re nauseous, I immediately think … well, I think that.”

She peered at me through her eyelashes.
Professional quirk?
those eyes asked.
What profession is that?

“I’m a general physician,” I said.

Without taking my eyes off her, I ran my fingers through my hair and brushed it back nonchalantly, mussing it even more. Meanwhile, I had stopped looking at the boring prick altogether. I pretended he wasn’t there. That we were alone, just the two of us. Looking back on it, I think that was true, too.

“A general physician,” Caroline said. She smiled. She also did nothing to disguise the brief, assaying glance she gave the rest of my body. Apparently she liked what she saw, for her smile broadened, showing her lovely white teeth.

What were you thinking then? I asked her later. Not just once, but about twice a year. Long after our first kiss, we both still enjoyed reconstructing our first encounter.

I thought, That’s the last thing I would have guessed, Caroline always replied. A general physician! What a cute general physician, I thought. With his tousled hair and his shabby clothes. And you? What did you think?

I thought, What the hell is she doing with that boring prick? What a waste of a beautiful woman. A sweet young thing like that, sitting around breathing pipe smoke.

“If you really don’t feel well, Caroline,” we heard the voice
of the pipe-smoking prick say somewhere off-camera, “we should probably go now.”

“I think I’ll stay for a bit,” she replied. “I think I’ll have another glass of red.”

“Look, Daddy! There!” Lisa shouted from the backseat.

“What?” I said, hitting the brakes. “Where?”

“There! That boy walking over there. That’s Alex.”

“More sardines, anyone? There’s plenty.”

Ralph wiped his fingers on his T-shirt and looked at us beseechingly, one by one. “You, Caroline? Emmanuelle, you want some more? You can have it. No, wait, how do you say that in English?” He turned to Stanley with a wink. “She can have it. We’d have to be careful. Marc, you ready for more? Come on, you’re the doctor. Sardines are good for you. Good fats, am I right?”

“Yeah, absolutely,” I said. I rubbed my stomach. “But I’m completely full, Ralph. Thanks.”

We were all sitting on the patio, at two white plastic tables set end to end. The patio was surrounded by a circular, waist-high wall of fake rock, with shells and the fossils of marine animals mortared into it. The barbecue was built into a niche in the wall; it even had a chimney decorated with red roofing tiles. Despite the chimney, however, the odor of grilled
sardines hung greasy and thick between us, like smoke from a fire. It was a smell that clung to everything: to our clothes, our hair, to the vines and palm fronds above our heads. I had been hoping for meat. For lamb or pork. Even drumsticks, if need be. I have a total aversion to sardines. Not to tinned sardines, where all the little bones dissolved in the vinegar, but to fresh ones, where the mucking around takes longer than the eating itself. You think you’ve removed all the bones, but with every mouthful about twenty of them seem to slip through. Little bones that then jab cruelly into your gums or the roof of your mouth, or else find a way to stick in your throat. And then there’s the smell. Or should I say, the stench. The stench that warns me, at least, that I’d be better off steering clear of this kind of food. It’s on your fingers for days. Under your nails. Your clothes can go in the laundry right away. And you have to wash your hair. But even when all that has been taken care of, it’s the burps that go on reminding you all night and the next morning of what you had for dinner last night.

“Vera?” Ralph turned now to Judith’s mother. “You’re not going to let me down, I hope?”

It was the first time I’d heard anyone call her by name. She had short gray hair. Practical hair.
Vera
. I repeated the name to myself. Her hair looked more like a Thea or a Ria. She had a sweet but vacant face, with very few wrinkles for her age. A practical, healthy woman who had, in all probability, lived a cautious life without much in the way of major excesses, and who began to nod off after the first glass of white wine. I expected her to leave the table at any moment, to excuse herself and go up to her room.

Shortly after we arrived, Judith had given us a tour of the summer house. The second and largest floor housed the living
and dining rooms, the kitchen, and three bedrooms. Even without Judith’s guided tour, it wouldn’t have been hard to guess whose bedroom was whose. The one with the double bed and the piles of books and magazines on the bedside tables belonged to her and Ralph; the slightly smaller room with two single beds, the floor of which was littered with clothes, shoes, tennis balls, and swimming goggles, was for Alex and Thomas, and the smallest room with one single bed was the mother’s. I don’t know why, but it was in the doorway of that last room that I lingered for a while, after Judith and Caroline had already gone back to the living room. The bedroom was virtually empty, almost like a nun’s cell. Hanging over the back of the only chair was a brown sweater; beneath the chair, neatly side by side, lay a pair of bedroom slippers. On the wall above the bed hung a charcoal drawing of a fishing boat pulled up onto a beach. There was a framed photograph, or at least I assumed it was a photograph—the frame was turned with its back to me—on the bedside table. I listened to the voices of Judith and my wife. I could have done it. I could have taken two steps to see who (or what) was in the photograph, but I refrained.
Later
, I told myself.
Later there’s plenty of time
. At the front of the house was a big picture window running across the full length of the living room. It looked out over the hills that marked the coastline in these parts, but you couldn’t actually see the sea. The living-room furniture was mostly ugly. A green couch and two green easy chairs, upholstered in either plastic or leatherette, it was hard to tell. A low rattan table with a smoked-glass top. The dining table was made of heavy, dark wood; the backs of the matching chairs were covered in red velveteen. “The owners are British,” Judith said.

On the ground floor was a garage and a separate apartment with its own entrance. That was where Stanley and Emmanuelle were staying. I vaguely hoped that we would get a tour of the apartment as well, but Judith only opened the door slightly and shouted something, upon which Stanley appeared in the doorway. Around his waist was a white bath towel that reached to just below his knees. “Emmanuelle is taking a shower,” he said. I looked at the naked part of his body. For his age, his belly was tight. Tight and tanned. But the skin itself was dull. The hair on his chest and beneath his navel was almost white. “Are you two coming up for a drink?” Judith asked.

Finally we got a tour of the yard. Beside the house was a roofed-in area with a Ping-Pong table. Above the garage door hung a basketball net. The soil in the parts of the yard that were not covered in paving stones was dry and brown, almost red. From the patio, a tiled flight of steps led down to the pool.

“Or maybe you’d like to go for a dip first?” Judith said. Caroline and I looked at each other. “Well, maybe later,” Caroline said.

The swimming pool was in the shape of a figure eight. In the middle was an island of stone a few feet wide; a thin jet of water sprayed up from it. Air mattresses, rubber tubes, and a green inflatable crocodile with handles on both sides of its head floated in the water. At the far end, the wider circle of the figure eight, was a diving board.

“This is where we spend most of our time,” Judith said. “Getting them to go to the beach is a real ordeal.”

Just then, Lisa and Thomas came running out of the house. Judith’s younger son didn’t even slow down when he reached the edge of the pool. At the last moment it looked as though
he couldn’t quite decide between a dive or a cannonball. Half falling, half slipping over the wet tiles, he landed in the pool with a huge splash.

“Thomas!” Judith shouted.

“Come on, Lisa! Come on!” he yelled. He flailed his arms and we had to step back to keep from getting wet. “Lisa! Lisa! Come on!”