Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (19 page)

“I think he’s just as normal as all the men who go off to countries where the entire tourist trade is based on sex with underage girls. And then I’m talking about … what? Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of men?”

“And do you think Ralph is one of those tens or hundreds of thousands? If you think so, then I want to leave here today. I’m not going to expose my daughter—or
daughters
, who knows how sick he is—to the filthy eyes of a sex tourist any longer. Blecch! Just the thought of it!”

I thought again about Julia’s hands clutching at her bikini bottoms.
No!
she’d shouted.
No!
And after that I thought about the raptor look with which Ralph had undressed my wife that
time in the lobby of the old municipal theater. How he had worked his jaws. How he had ground his teeth, as though he could already taste her on his tongue. Men look at women. Women look at men. But Ralph looked at women as though he were flipping through a copy of
Playboy
. He squeezed his dick as he looked. In his thoughts, or for real. He pulled down the pants of thirteen-year-old girls. Or did he? After all, I hadn’t seen him do that with my own eyes. It was always possible, of course, that my daughter only
thought
he was going to do that. Maybe the four of them, Julia along with Lisa and the boys, had been yanking on one another’s bathing suits in the pool earlier. As part of a game. An
innocent
game. Innocent among children between the ages of nine and fifteen, culpable for men in their late forties.

Perhaps, I thought now, I had accused Ralph prematurely in my mind. Plus there was something else: Caroline had just said that if Ralph posed a threat to our daughters, she wanted “to leave here today.” Maybe that was rushing things a bit.

“And what do you make of this Stanley, actually?” I asked.

“What?”

“Stanley and Emmanuelle. What are we supposed to make of that? How old do you think she is? Nineteen? Eighteen? Seventeen? I mean, technically speaking, she may be of legal age, but is it normal? Is it healthy?”

“But isn’t that the ultimate, childish fantasy of every man over forty? A teenybopper? Then again … not every man. I don’t think, for example, that that’s a problem for you.”

“It’s not about being a problem. Stanley can just do it. He’s a celebrity. The teenyboppers are waiting in line for him. All he has to do is point. Maybe they get something in return. A minor role in one of his movies. But maybe not. He doesn’t
even have to do that. To walk the red carpet with a celebrity, maybe that’s enough for a teenybopper.”

“But is that all it is, Marc? That an ordinary family doctor can’t get the teenage girls? I’ve never had the impression that you were even interested.”

“No, you’re right. It would make me unhappy pretty quickly. I’d be willing to take a girl like that to a playground, but not to the disco, not anymore.”

Caroline started laughing. Then she took my hand.

“You prefer women your own age, right, sweetheart?” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. But I didn’t look at her when I said it; I turned my gaze toward the beach and the sea. “That seems fairer to me.”

After a half-hour wait at the rental agency, we were told that the repairman would try to come by that afternoon to fix the water. The girl behind the counter consulted a calendar.

“Today’s Friday,” she said. “We’ll do our best. But we’re closed over the weekend. That would make it Monday.”

She was an extremely ugly girl. About sixty pounds overweight and with scores of pimples and other irregularities on her puffy face. More than irregularities, they were stretches of no-man’s-land where nothing happened, that didn’t move when she spoke, that remained blank when the rest of her face assumed an expression. Maybe she’d been in an accident, it occurred to me. Maybe, as a child, she had slammed her face against the inside of a windshield.

I leaned a little farther over the counter. Before I opened my mouth, I threw a glance, clearly visible to the girl, toward
Caroline, who was standing by the door, looking at the photos of other holiday rentals.

“Are you doing anything this weekend?” I asked. “Tonight? Tomorrow?”

The girl blinked her eyes. They were pretty eyes, it’s true. Sweet eyes. She blushed. At least the living parts of her face turned red; the blood beneath the dead sections probably met with too much resistance to reach the skin’s surface.

“I have a boyfriend, sir,” she said quietly.

I winked at her. “Your boyfriend is a lucky man. I hope he realizes just how lucky he is.”

She lowered her eyes. “He … he’s very busy. But I’ll ask him to come by this afternoon, anyway, to check the water at your rental.”

I stared at her. The repairman! The little repairman who had clambered up onto the roof with nude Ralph. Apparently he was a jack of all trades, I reflected; apparently he knew how to unblock more than clogged water reservoirs alone. I tried to bring the two images together, but got no further than the repairman and the girl watching TV together on the couch: They were holding hands, and with his free hand he raised the thirty-two-ounce bottle of Coke to his lips; her free arm was up to the elbow in a family-sized bag of potato chips.

“Marc, take a look at this,” Caroline said. “Isn’t this our house?”

I looked where she was pointing. Pasted to a cardboard square were three photos: one of the house, one of part of the yard, and one of the swimming pool.

Beneath the photos was a summary of the number of bedrooms and the square footage of both house and yard. At the bottom was the price, a cell-phone number, and an e-mail address.

“That seems quite reasonable to me,” Caroline said.

“Well, it’s right in the middle of a residential neighborhood and a couple of miles from the beach. If I was going to buy something here, I would want it to be right on the beach.”

Caroline ran her index finger down over the other ads. “Here you go. This one’s
on
the beach.”

This house, too, was being offered as a “summer house with swimming pool.” The difference was that it was perched high on a hillside above one of the bays; from the pool one had a view of the sea far below. The asking price was five times that of the house where we had spent the last few days.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” I said.

Caroline took my hand; her expression was grave.

“What are we going to do?” she asked.

“Buy that house. After that, we’ll see what happens.”

“No, I mean now. When are we going to leave? I really want to get out of that house, Marc.”

I thought about it. Or rather, I pretended to be thinking about it. In fact, I’d already thought about what I’d say when Caroline asked me this.

“Today’s Friday,” I said. “The traffic will be hellish tomorrow. Sunday, too. And it will probably be harder to find a place to stay. At a campground or whatever. So I’d say let’s go on Monday.”

“But then really go, right?”

“Monday we are gone,” I said.

It was that Saturday morning that Lisa found the little bird. It was lying beside our tent and had probably fallen from the olive tree that grew there.

“Daddy!” Lisa tugged on my sleeping bag. “Daddy, come and look. A little bird on the ground.”

The fledgling lay on its side. It shivered and made a fruitless attempt to get to its feet.

“I think it fell out of its nest,” I said, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. I peered up at the branches but couldn’t see a nest.

“I feel sorry for it,” Lisa said. “But you’re a doctor, Daddy. You’ll make him better.”

I picked up the fledgling carefully. It pecked at my hand, but there was almost no force behind its beak. It had no broken legs or other injuries, not from the looks of it. Deep in my heart, I regretted that. A little bird with a broken leg could have been “a project.” I’d done that kind of thing before during
vacations. The cat with the pinched-off tail on that Greek island two years ago. While I was disinfecting the bloody stump, the cat had bitten me so hard on the forearm that I had to get a tetanus injection myself and a whole series of painful rabies shots. But it had been worth it. The cat’s gratitude was limitless. Within three days it was eating raw lamb from our hands. When the bandages came off, there was a period of adjustment. The wound had healed neatly, but the cat now had trouble keeping its balance with only about an inch of tail left. It climbed into an almond tree and couldn’t get back down. When I tried to help by climbing into the tree myself, the cat swiped at my face with its paw and tore open my left eyelid. Then it fell, anyway, with a smack, fifteen feet onto the concrete terrace. But it never went away again. It followed us everywhere. In the house, in the yard, to the village, where it waited patiently outside the baker’s or the butcher’s until we had done our shopping—and it always walked with us the mile to the beach as well.

It was a difficult farewell. Julia and Lisa were in tears. No, we couldn’t take the cat with us. It wouldn’t be allowed on the plane, a cat without the required shots; it would end up spending months in quarantine. And apart from that, Caroline and I tried to convince the girls, wouldn’t the cat be much happier here on its own island? With its family and friends? Where it could hunt mice and lizards? Where the weather was always fine?

“But where is that family of his?” Julia wept. “Why haven’t they ever come by to see how he’s doing?”

Whenever I think back on that last day, my eyes go misty. The cat thought it was supposed to come along; it was getting ready to jump onto the backseat. It trotted along behind the
car as we bounced down the bumpy dirt drive to the road. In the end, the only thing I could do was climb out and throw stones at it. Our daughters refused to look and lay crying on the backseat. Caroline dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. And I cried, too. I cried like a child as I picked up the first stone from the road. For a moment the cat thought it was all a game, but I aimed well, and the stone hit it in the head. Hissing and with the fur standing up on the stump of its tail, it raced off toward the house.

“Sorry, Bert,” I wept—on the second day, Lisa had named the cat Bert, after a stuck-up teacher at her school—“we’ll come back someday to see how you’re doing.”

Now I looked at the fledgling in my hand—and regretted that it was uninjured. It was only little. Too little and too vulnerable to take care of itself.

“Go into the house and be quiet, don’t wake anyone,” I said to Lisa. “A cardboard box, a shoe box or something. And some cotton wool and a flannel washcloth from the bathroom.”

“They have a sort of zoo here,” Judith said. “Before you get to the beach, if you turn left, the road that goes up the hill. We drove past it once. There’s a wall and a fence and a few flags. There’s a sign saying ‘Zoo’ above the gate, and pictures of animals painted on the wall.”

It was breakfast time already. We were on the patio. The fledgling was in a cardboard box that had once contained bottles of wine. The sides of the box were actually too high; when you looked over the edge and saw the little bird down there, snuggled up against the washcloth, you couldn’t help being reminded of a prison yard.

“What do you think?” I asked Lisa. “He’s not sick or injured. He’s just really little. Too little to take care of himself. Shall we take him to the zoo?”

Lisa looked grave. The box with the bird in it sat on the chair beside her. Every twenty seconds she peeked into it. “He’s drinking,” she would say. Or: “He’s shivering again.”

I expected—no, I
hoped
—that Lisa would refuse to take it to the zoo, that she would say she wanted to care for the little bird herself. Until it was big enough to stand on its own legs. Then we would let it go. This was not like with a dog or cat that becomes attached to you. With a bird, all you expect is that it will want to fly, that someday it will want to go away.

It would be a nice moment. A moment I’d be pleased to share with my younger daughter. You hold the little bird carefully in the palm of your hand. You hold up your hand. The bird flutters its wings and takes off, hesitantly at first, clumsily. But then it regains its balance on a low-hanging branch. It sits there for a bit. It fluffs up its feathers and looks around. At us, its rescuers. It’s grateful, we tell ourselves. Then it tilts its head to one side, fixes an eye on the sky, and flies away.