Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (22 page)

But Ralph was taking such obvious pleasure in the chopping that he didn’t seem to hear her. He was down on his haunches and had kicked off his flip-flops. I looked at his bare feet; from time to time the hatchet came down awfully close to his toes on the tiles. I looked on as a physician. Just to be safe, I tried to work out what I would have to do first. If kept cool, toes and fingers could be put back on at the hospital. If Ralph planted the hatchet in one or more of his toes, someone would have to keep a level head. There was a doctor in the house. It would be up to the doctor to stanch the flow of blood and wrap the toes in a wet towel with ice cubes. Women and children might faint; the doctor was perhaps the only one who would be able to keep cool.
Judith, ice from the freezer! And a wet towel! Caroline, help me apply a tourniquet to his calf——he’s losing too much blood! Stanley, start the car and fold down the backseat! Julia, Lisa, Alex, Thomas, go inside, you’re only getting in the way. Leave Emmanuelle where she is. Just put a pillow under her head—she’ll come around in a bit …
It would be my opportunity to shine in a leading role, the role for which I was perfectly suited, but the hatchet came down only once within a fraction of an inch of Ralph’s big toe. After that he became more cautious.

“What are you looking at, Marc?” he said. “Ah, starting to get hungry already, are you? Listen, do me a favor and get me another beer.”

Darkness fell. Every now and then the flames under the grill shot up high. We were sitting around the patio, working on the beer and white wine. Judith had laid out plates of olives, anchovies, and spicy little sausages. Chunks of swordfish hissed
on the barbecue. Whenever I looked at Judith, at her face cast in a yellow-golden light by the fire, she lowered her eyes. Caroline stared straight ahead and took little sips of her wine. She also seemed to be doing her best not to look at me.
I’m sitting here
, her body language said.
I’m sitting here, but I’d rather be somewhere else
.

Thomas and Lisa were playing Ping-Pong. Alex and Julia were back in the deck chair by the pool. They each had a white earbud from Julia’s iPod in one ear. In the last few hours I had tried a few times to establish direct contact with my older daughter, but to no avail. Whenever I asked her a question she would shrug and breathe a deep sigh. “Are you looking forward to the beach later on?” I asked, just for the sake of asking something. “To seeing the fireworks?” And she shrugged. And sighed. “Listen, if you guys don’t feel like it, we can stay here,” I said, feeling my face start to flush. “We can play Risk or something … Monopoly …” Julia pulled her hair up onto the top of her head and let it fall again. “We’ll see,” she said, and then turned around and walked away. Without giving me so much as a look. It was as though all the women were making a game out of not looking at me. The only exceptions were Lisa and Judith’s mother. While the meal was being prepared, Vera smiled at me a few times. And while Ralph was whacking away at the swordfish, she had even shaken her head as she smiled at me. And Lisa? Lisa still looked at me the way eleven-year-old daughters look at their fathers. As though looking at the ideal man. The one they want to marry when they grow up.

I had to try to catch Julia’s eye, I told myself. Her eyes couldn’t lie. One glimpse would be enough. In my daughter’s eyes I would be able to read the awful truth. Or not. It was still possible, of course, that I was imagining the whole thing.
Maybe something had happened between her and Alex. Maybe she had gone through a rapid process of “growing up,” as they call it, and no longer felt any desire for the obnoxious presence of a whining father. That was biology. There was no getting around biology.

“I thought that was pretty interesting, what you told us this afternoon, Stanley,” Ralph said as he distributed the first chunks of grilled swordfish. “In the car. I think Marc would be interested, too.”

I looked at Stanley, more out of politeness than interest. If I noticed the slightest disinclination in his expression, I would pursue it no further. He stabbed his fork into the swordfish, producing a puddle of water on his plate, then cut off a good-sized chunk and put it in his mouth.

“Well, yeah,” he said.

At that very moment, in a neighboring yard, a rocket took off. We had seen rockets taking off before, but never from so close by. Everyone held their breath while the projectile drilled its way into the sky with a hiss and a luminous trail of sparks. Then came the explosion. The explosion and the flash. Or actually, the other way around. The light traveled faster than the sound. Directly above our heads the rocket blew apart. Our faces lit up white in the explosion, while the blast took a little more time to reach us. It was a blast like the earlier ones. Heavy and hard. A lightning bolt. A direct hit from a mortar shell. A car bomb. But so close this time that it seemed to fill your whole body. From the inside out. It started in the pit of your stomach, surged like rolling thunder along the inside of your ribs, only to leave the body at last through the jaws and eardrums. Women and children shrieked. Men and boys cursed. A bottle fell over and shattered on the patio.
Somewhere down the street a car alarm went off. “Holy fuck!” said Ralph, who had dropped an entire hunk of swordfish on the tiles. The blast echoed back and forth between the hills a few times. Then faded.

“Wow!” That was Alex. He and Julia had pulled the white buds from their ears and climbed out of the deck chair. Julia was looking around in fright. She looked at her mother. At Ralph. At Judith. Even at Stanley and Emmanuelle. At pretty much everyone except me.

“Dad, Dad! Can we get some of those rockets, too?” Thomas came running up from the Ping-Pong table. “Dad! Are we gonna blast ’em like that, too?”

“This is absolutely abnormal,” Judith said. “What kind of pleasure can anyone get from that?”

I looked at Judith’s face. It radiated sincere indignation. Caroline placed a hand on her chest and breathed in and out deeply a few times. At that moment I thought about the differences between men and women. The
irreconcilable
differences. The differences you can never explain.

Men go for the loudest bang. The louder, the better. In women’s eyes, that makes them more boyish. More childish. So boyish and childish that it makes women smile pityingly.
They never grow up
, they tell one another. And they’re right. I remember how, as a boy of sixteen, I flouted all the rules when setting off fireworks. I never used a punk. Always an open flame. A real flame. The flame from a match or a lighter. Fire was what I wanted to see, not some pussy glowing punk. I didn’t put the rockets in an empty bottle at a safe distance. I lit them in my hand. I wanted to feel the power of the rocket between my fingers. That way, something of that power became your own. The first time I held the rocket so tightly that splinters
from the wooden stick bored into my fingers when the rocket yanked free of my grasp and raced for the sky. Later I learned the right way to do it. To hold it loosely. You had to give the rocket as little resistance as possible. The rocket had a will of its own. It wanted to go up. At moments like that I never thought about the evening’s festive nature. Let alone about the new year that was on its way. I thought about war. About missiles and antiaircraft guns. About rebel movements shooting the helicopters and transport planes of a technologically superior foe out of the air with portable, shoulder-launched, surface-to-air missiles. Often I couldn’t resist the temptation and aimed the rocket at an angle more oblique than might be considered strictly prudent. Then it would explode against the windows of the neighbors across the street. “Sorry!” I would shout when a window opened and a startled neighbor leaned out. “Sorry, it went completely in the wrong direction.” I would adopt my most hypocritical expression. The expression of the soccer player who slides into his opponent with his leg stretched out in front of him and cripples him for life.
Sorry, I guess I kind of slipped …
I aimed the next rocket at a group of partygoers farther down the street. It was war. You’re better off winning a war than losing it. History teaches us that. And biology. You’re better off beating someone to death than being beaten to death. From time immemorial, the man has guarded the entrance to the cave. Intruders are sent packing. People. Animals. A persistent intruder can’t say later that he hasn’t been warned. “A man avoids a fight only when the odds are stacked against him,” Professor Herzl taught us in medical biology. “When the opponent is his equal or weaker, he weighs his chances. He clenches his fists. He weighs the heft of the sword in his hand. Of the pistol. He turns the turret of his tank
just a fraction of a second faster than the enemy. He aims and fires. He survives.”

Ralph bent down, stuck the barbecue fork into the piece of swordfish that had fallen to the ground, and put it back on the grill. A broad grin appeared on his face.

“Go take a look in the shed, buddy,” he said. “That door just past the Ping-Pong table. You, too, Alex.”

As the two boys ran to the back of the house, I felt a sudden emptiness. An emptiness somewhere at the back of my heart. Ralph had bought fireworks. And I hadn’t. Yesterday I had gone past one of the little stalls where they sold them. It was made of corrugated iron and stood at the edge of the village. I’d hesitated. I had slowed down.
Just take a look at what they’ve got
. But there was no place to park, so I drove on.

If I’d had two sons, like Ralph, then I would have parked the car even if I’d had to walk five miles back to the stall, I realized now. But I had two daughters. I remembered a particular New Year’s Eve a few years back. Against my own better judgment I had gone out and bought a packet of rockets and firecrackers. At midnight I set up the first rocket in a wine bottle in front of our door. I tied together the fuses of three firecrackers, lit them, and tossed them in the air. But Julia and Lisa only remained standing in the doorway. At the first explosion they ducked back into the house. Then Caroline appeared in the doorway. The three of them stood there and looked at me. I lit more rockets. I put an empty can on top of a firecracker to make a bigger bang. In the meantime Caroline had given each of the girls a sparkler, but they didn’t really come outside after that. Standing in the doorway, they stretched their arms out as far as possible so the sparks wouldn’t fall on the welcome mat. From there they looked at their father. A father who was, to put
it mildly, acting peculiar.
Like a twelve-year-old boy
. During wartime, the women sew the uniforms. They fill the grenades at the munitions factory. They contribute to the war effort, as they say. But the actual
throwing
of the grenades they leave to the men.

“Dad, Dad! Can we set one off already?”

Alex and Thomas had come back from the shed carrying two bundles of rockets, some of which were longer than the boys were tall. There were almost too many for them to carry. Two or three rockets fell onto the patio.

“Don’t you think we should wait a bit?” Ralph said. “We’re all going to the beach in about an hour.”

“But the people next door lit one already,” Alex said.

“Aw, come on, Dad,” Thomas said. “Please?”

Ralph shook his head. Laughing, he took an empty bottle from the table. “Okay, but just one,” he said.

I looked at the pile of rockets lying between the boys on the patio. Even the smallest ones were a yard long. Stacked up neatly on the tiles now, they reminded me of a captured arms cache. The secret munitions dump of a guerrilla movement or terrorist cell. The technologically superior foe had tanks and planes. The occupying forces had helicopters that could fire laser-guided missiles, but the primitive Qassam rockets fired at random civilian targets caused more psychological damage.

“No, not here,” Ralph said. “Not so close to the other ones. One spark and we’d all be blown to kingdom come, along with the house. Let’s do it down by the pool.”

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Judith asked.

“Better wait till we get to the beach,” said Caroline.

“I’m going inside,” Judith’s mother said.

But Ralph just laughed. “Come on, it’s not that hard to imagine, is it? These guys can’t wait.”

I looked away from the rocket, which Alex and Thomas were now positioning in the bottle at the pool’s edge, toward my daughters. When the fuse flared they put their fingers in their ears. Julia shrieked when the rocket took off out of the bottle with a loud hiss and the bottle fell over and broke. A few shards ended up in the pool.

The bang came much sooner than expected. Loud and deep, louder and deeper than the one the neighbors had launched just a few minutes earlier. It started beneath the soles of your feet and thundered its way up, used the space inside your chest to achieve its full wingspan, then ended up in your head. There was a brief instant when breathing came to a halt. This time a few car alarms started howling. Dogs began barking hysterically. Julia and Lisa screamed.
“Merde!”
a woman’s voice said. When we turned around we saw Emmanuelle, holding only the base and the broken stem of her wineglass. The rest lay in shards at her feet. There were big red stains on her white blouse.

“Well, are you satisfied now?” Judith cried.

“Another one! Another one!” Thomas screamed.

“Fucking A!” Alex said, whistling low through his teeth. “Heavy shit!”

“Okay, one more,” Ralph said.

“Don’t even think about it!” Judith said. “Do me a favor, take that stuff down with you to the beach and have fun! Ralph, I suppose you heard me?”

Ralph raised both hands in a gesture of mollification. “Okay, okay, we’re going to the beach.”

I was overtaken again by a deep sense of regret. Regret
that I hadn’t bought any rockets of my own. I wouldn’t have given in as quickly as Ralph had. I tried to catch Caroline’s eye. My own wife was perhaps no fan of loud explosions, but I didn’t think—in all the years we’d been together—that I’d ever heard her say,
Marc, I suppose you heard me?

And at the same moment we actually did catch each other’s eye. Caroline was standing beside Emmanuelle. She had one hand on Emmanuelle’s shoulder, and with the fingers of her other hand she was brushing at the wine stains on Emmanuelle’s blouse. Then she turned her head and looked at me.