Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (15 page)

And there was my younger daughter. She paused for a moment at the edge, but then tipped over into the water.

“Lisa,” Caroline said. “Lisa, where is Julia?”

Lisa had climbed up onto the crocodile, but Thomas pulled her down right away. “What did you say, Mom?” she asked after she surfaced.

“Where’s Julia?”

“I don’t know. They’re inside, I think.”

After the sardines came the skate. The skate was so big that it almost covered the entire grill. Smoke billowed up. On a little iron table beside the barbecue, Ralph had laid out a platter with even more marine creatures. Mostly squid, from the looks of it. All possible variations on squid: squid with round, white bodies and tentacles on the front, squid with mushroom-shaped bodies from which the legs hung down in a clump, and the more octopus-shaped squid with the familiar suction cups on long tentacles that dangled over the edge of the platter.

“We buy all our fish here from a shop in the village that gets them right off the boat,” Ralph said, fanning the smoke away from his eyes with one hand. “From the outside you can’t even see that it’s a shop. It’s got those rolling steel shutters,
you know, that they only open when the catch comes in. You can’t get it any fresher than that.”

As discreetly as I could, I was busy trying to extract a sardine bone that had drilled its way into the roof of my mouth at an impossible spot, behind my front teeth. I only growled to indicate that I had heard him. Sitting closest to the barbecue, I got most of the smoke in my face. The smoke from the skate stank less than that from the sardines, but I’d lost my appetite, anyway. I filled my glass again with white wine and took a big swig. As I swilled the wine around in my mouth, I tried at the same time to use the tip of my tongue to dislodge the sardine bone; the only result was that my tongue was skewered painfully a few times.

“Apparently there will be thirteen episodes,” Ralph was telling Caroline. “Thirteen times fifty minutes. It’s probably going to be the most expensive production in the history of television.”

Caroline and I were sitting beside each other, across from Stanley and Emmanuelle. Emmanuelle had lit a long filter cigarette and tapped the ash onto her plate with the remains of the sardines. Even though darkness had almost fallen, she was still wearing her sunglasses. Their disproportionately large lenses made it impossible to see where she was looking.

“Have you seen
The Sopranos
?” Stanley asked Caroline. “Or
The Wire
?”

“We have almost all the seasons of
The Sopranos
on DVD,” Caroline said. “I think it’s fantastic. Great acting, too. And a lot of people have told me that
The Wire
is very good. But we haven’t gotten around to that yet. But
Desperate Housewives
? You know
Desperate Housewives
? We have a couple of DVD sets of that, too.”

“
The Wire
is really the best. You have to see it—you’ll be addicted right away. Most of the actors are black. That’s why the ratings are so much lower than
The Sopranos
. But
Desperate Housewives
 … I’m sorry, but I usually find that a little too far-fetched. A little too ha-ha funny, too. But maybe it’s more of a series for women. Emmanuelle here, for example, thinks it’s great. Don’t you? Emmanuelle? You like
Desperate Housewives
a lot, right?”

He had to tap her forearm before she realized that he was talking to her. And then he had to repeat the question.

“
Desperate Housewives
 … is nice,” she said at last, to no one in particular.

“Okay, so we’ve got that straight,” Stanley said. He grinned at Caroline. “Anyway, so this series is being produced by HBO, the ones who did
The Sopranos
and
The Wire
. The most expensive series ever. Or did I already say that?”

“Yes, you did,” Caroline said. “But that’s okay.”

“It covers the rise of the Roman Empire. The entire golden age, if you know what I mean. From Julius Caesar up to and including Emperor Nero. That’s the only thing that hasn’t been decided yet. What to call it. They can’t decide between
Rome
and
Augustus
. But since seven of the thirteen episodes will take place during the reign of Caesar Augustus, I think it’s going to be
Augustus
.”

“And what about Ralph?” I asked.

“Ralph is going to be the emperor,” Stanley said. “Caesar Augustus.”

“Yeah, I know that. That’s not what I meant. I was wondering how you ended up with Ralph. How you hit on Ralph for the part.”

“I worked with Ralph years ago, when I was still living in Holland. I don’t know, but did you ever see
Sweet Darlings
?”

I had to think about it. Then I remembered. As far as I could recall, I hadn’t seen it at the theater at the time, but much later, on TV.
Sweet Darlings
 … something about kids hanging around on motor scooters, fairly explicit sex for that day, and equally explicit violence. It had one of those scenes that people keep talking about for years. The kind of scene that can immortalize even a bad movie. A couple of boys string a wire across the road. At neck height. A scooter comes along, racing at high speed. And then the head, rolling across the tarmac. The head that ends up in a drain. No, in a ditch. The head barely rises above the water. You see an amazed-looking eye amid the duckweed. An eye that blinks. Then the point of view changes. We see what the eye was looking at. At a frog sitting on the bank. A shocked frog. A frog that looks at the head in as much amazement as the head does at him. Then the frog croaks and the screen goes blurry, then black. The suggestion was clear. The head severed by the wire was still
alive
when it landed in the ditch.

“My parents wouldn’t let me see that,” Caroline said.

“Oh, really?” Stanley said, looking amused. “Were you that young?”

“Was Ralph in that?” I asked. “In
Sweet Darlings
? I don’t remember that at all.”

“My neck
still
hurts from that scene!” cried Ralph, who had clearly been eavesdropping. “Ha ha ha!”

“Was that him?” I asked Stanley. I turned to Ralph. “Were you the one in that ditch? I never realized that.”

“Good to know that you’re up on your classics, Marc,”
Ralph said. “So what do you think, Stanley? Great to hear, isn’t it, that people still remember a scene like that?”

“Oh God, yuck, now I remember!” Caroline said. “That severed head in the ditch! Oh, I was too afraid to look. I realized later on that my parents were right, not to let me go.”

Ralph’s booming laugh rang out. Stanley laughed, too. Emmanuelle raised her head for a moment. A dreamy smile appeared on her face, but she didn’t ask what everyone was laughing at. I couldn’t help thinking about the films Stanley Forbes directed later. The ones he made in Hollywood. I hadn’t seen them all, but in those films, too, the director had relied heavily on explicitness. They were movies that
showed everything
, as people liked to say. On one hand the severed limbs and bleeding stumps and on the other the sex organs with blue veins standing out on the sides. You forgot what the films were about soon after they were over, but the explicit scenes had become his trademark.

“Where’s Judith?” Ralph said. “I’m dying of thirst.”

And indeed, where was Judith? A few minutes earlier she had stood up from the table to get some more white wine, and she still hadn’t come back. Judith’s mother, who was sitting at the far end of the table, held her hand in front of her mouth and began yawning. “Oh my,” she said. They were the only words she’d spoken in the last half hour.

I leaned back in my chair and looked around. First at the stone steps up to the second floor. Then to the roofed area at the side of the house, where Lisa and Thomas were playing Ping-Pong under the yellowish fluorescent lighting. Their first portion of sardines was enough and they had been allowed to leave the table. As were Julia and Alex. But where those two had got to was beyond me. I looked at the pool, where the
underwater lighting was now on. The evening was without even a breath of wind. The green inflatable crocodile lay motionless on its side. While I was fussing around with the sardines, I hadn’t dared to look at Judith. And she, too, seemed to do little to try to establish eye contact with me. On one occasion she had laughed too loudly at a remark Caroline made that wasn’t all that funny, and laid her hand on Caroline’s forearm. I wondered whether I’d missed something. A glance. A gesture. Something that should have told me that I should wait a minute and then follow her into the house.
Shall I go see what Judith’s up to?
I rehearsed the sentence a few times in my mind, but it remained a line from a bad movie.

Then suddenly there was movement at the top of the steps. First I saw Alex and then Julia coming down, with Judith a few steps behind. Julia’s hair was mussed, I saw when she came closer, and her cheeks were flushed. I hadn’t known Alex long enough to tell if his hair was mussed too.

“Daddy?” said Julia. She had come up and was now standing behind me. She laid her hands on both sides of my neck and gently kneaded my shoulders. That’s what she always did when she wanted something from me: a bonus on her allowance for an expensive sweater she’d seen in town; the “poor little” hamster in the pet shop window that she wanted with all her might to bring home; the school party where “everyone” was going to stay until midnight. “Hmmm?” I replied. I took her left hand in my right and gave it a little squeeze. I also looked over at Caroline. Julia never asked Caroline anything first. She knew that I was a softer touch.
Wishy-washier
, Caroline always said.
You never dare to say no
.

“Can we stay here?” Julia asked.

“Stay here?” I said. “What do you mean, stay here?” I tried
to make eye contact with Judith, but she had just put two bottles of white wine on the table and was handing the corkscrew to Stanley. I felt my face grow warm. My heart began to pound. “Do you mean you want to stay over here? I don’t think there’s enough space.”

“No, I mean all of us,” Julia said, and she squeezed my shoulders a little harder. “That all of us stay over here. And not at that stupid campground anymore.”

Judith stepped aside, away from the table, to just behind my wife. She looked at me.

“We invited you on the evening of the party,” she said. “But then Stanley and Emmanuelle dropped in from America and now there’s really no more space in the house. But I figured, you have a tent. Why don’t you pitch it here in the yard?”

I looked back. The way she stood there, her face just out of range of the candlelight, I couldn’t see her eyes clearly.

“Please?”
Julia said quietly in my ear. “Please?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Where would we do that? I mean, it seems like way too much bother for you. You already have guests. That would be an awful lot of people all of a sudden.”

“Nonsense!” That was Ralph. “Many hands make the merrier …” He laughed loudly. “Or however it goes. There’s enough room here.”

“I was thinking of over there, at the side of the house,” Judith said. “Where the Ping-Pong table is. There’s enough room there for a tent. And you can all shower inside and everything.”

There was a loud pop. We all looked at Stanley, who had pulled the cork out of the bottle. “Sorry,” he said. “No, I also mean sorry that we got here before you did. We didn’t know you’d been invited.”

“It doesn’t seem like a good idea to me,” Caroline said. “The ground back there is hard as a rock. You can’t pitch a tent there. We’ll just go back to the campground later on.” She looked at me, then spoke to Julia. “You two can come over here whenever you like. And we can meet up at the beach. But at the campground we have more room. It’s more relaxed for everyone.”

“I think that campground is dumb,” Julia said.

“Listen, the ground isn’t much of a problem,” Judith said. “And you’re out of the wind there. There’s a pile of bricks in the garage—you wouldn’t even have to use tent pegs. Not much danger of getting blown away here.”

“Can we, Daddy?” Julia said. She squeezed my shoulders so hard now that it almost hurt. “Can we, please?”

It was almost midnight by the time we drove back to the campground. Caroline didn’t say a word the whole way, but after we’d said good night to the girls, she announced that she was going to sit outside the tent and smoke a cigarette.

I was tired. I’d had too much white wine. What I felt like doing was crawling into my own sleeping bag, beside my two daughters. But Caroline had stopped smoking two years ago. She hadn’t answered me earlier in the evening, when I’d asked what she thought about moving our tent to the yard at the summer house. She had simply tapped a cigarette out of Emmanuelle’s pack and lit it in silence. Later, she had smoked a few more. I didn’t count them. More than five, I reckoned. When we said good-bye, Emmanuelle had handed her the almost-empty pack.

It seemed to me like a good idea, in other words, to join my wife outside the tent for a while.

“So tell me, what was I supposed to say?” she asked, only moments after I had sunk down into my folding chair. She tried to whisper, but it sounded louder than a whisper. She spat the words out. I thought I even felt saliva hit my cheek. “If you just sit there and say that it sounds good to you, to camp out in those people’s yard? And then,
only after that
, do you ask what I think about it?! With the kids standing there? What was I supposed to say? The only thing I can do is ruin it for Lisa and Julia. Which makes me the nagging mother who always ruins things again. And it makes you the fun daddy who always thinks everything is okay. Damn it, Marc, I could have curled up in a ball and died!”