Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (24 page)

“And what’s that going to be?”

“Like I said, I can’t talk about it. But it’s different from that cannon. It’s not a single thing. It’s a number of things, all at the same time.”

I couldn’t help it; Stanley’s story had interested me only mildly at first, but now I’d become curious in spite of myself.

“But you can tell me
one
thing, can’t you?” I said. “Honest, I swear I’ll never tell anyone.”

As though to underline my words, I took one hand off the wheel, stuck two fingers in my mouth, and then held them up like I was taking a pledge, looking at him as I did. “Cross my heart,” I said.

“Watch out!”

A car suddenly appeared from the right and shot onto the sandy road. Out of the blue. I hit the brakes and swung the wheel to the left. Maybe too slowly, who can say. We tell ourselves that we’re still able to drive. But braking distance is a function of perception-reaction time. There was a scraping sound when the two cars made contact. To call it a crash would be an exaggeration. But there was contact. Metal to metal. Then we came to a halt, diagonally across the road. Or at least
we
came to a halt. The other car just drove on. In the wink of an eye his red taillights had disappeared around the next curve.

“The fucker!” Stanley yelled. “Did you see that? Jesus Christ! Fuck him! Fuck this motherfucker!”

I took one hand off the wheel and wiped my forehead. Hand and forehead were wet with sweat. “Damn it,” I said. “Damn.”

“That shit didn’t even have his lights on! Did you see that? He just came tearing onto the road with no lights.”

“But I saw his taillights. Just now, when he braked.”

“Yeah, exactly! He tapped the brakes. But he didn’t have his lights on. Really, he didn’t.”

I noticed only then that my engine had stalled. Everything had suddenly gone quiet. Two dry ticks sounded from under the hood. Now, far below, you could clearly hear the waves rolling over the beach. Along with the whiff of pine needles and salt, I now smelled burnt rubber.

“Come on, Marc. We’re going to teach this motherfucker a lesson! Yes!” Stanley clenched his fist and slammed it against the glove compartment. I exhaled deeply. I squeezed the wheel with both hands. The wheel was wet, too. “What are you waiting for?” he said. “Come on, start your engines!”

“Stanley. This is not a good idea. I’ve had too much to drink. We should be glad that bastard didn’t stop. I would have gotten the blame, anyway, with this much alcohol in my bloodstream.”

Stanley didn’t say a word. He opened the door and got out. “What are you doing?” I asked, but before I knew it he had come around the car and was opening the door on my side.

“Slide over,” he said.

“Stanley, this just isn’t a good idea. I mean, you’ve been drinking, too. Maybe even more than I have. In any case, no less.”

“Three glasses. It might look like I’m drinking as much as everyone else, but I take a long time over each glass.”

“Stanley …”

“Come on, Marc. Slide over, would you? We have to hurry. If that prick gets to the beach before we do, we won’t be able to do anything.”

As I was struggling to crawl past the gearshift and sink into the passenger seat, I became aware for the first time of the heaviness in my head. The weight that pulls you down when the booze starts to wear off. I knew how it worked. The body demands moisture. Water. But in fact, by the time you feel that, it’s already too late. All you do then is go on. Straight on. I thought about a glass of beer. A big one. With beer you attack the heaviness from the rear, where it least expects it.

Stanley started the engine and hit the accelerator. Sand flew up from beneath the tires. “Yes!” he said when we shot forward at last. “Hold on, Marc.”

At the first bend I heard the bottom of the car scrape across the rocks that lay in the road. At the second bend he just missed a tree. “Stanley,” I said. “Stanley!”

“There he is!”

Barely thirty yards in front of us I saw the red taillights braking for the next curve. Stanley clicked back and forth between the headlights and the high beam. “We’re going to blind him,” he said. “We’ve got him, Marc, we’ve got him.”

He downshifted and punched it. The engine wailed. “Ever see
Speed Demons
?” he asked, without waiting for an answer. “That was my first more-or-less hit in America. A shit story, frankly, but it was the only script I could get back then. About NASCAR races. A driver with cancer who wants to shine one last time. But they run him off the track and he dies in flames.”

“Stanley, please …”

“There’s a bit part in it for his brother, the brother of the sick driver. I played the part myself. And that was the only fun thing about the whole shoot, that I was able to tear around in one of those stock cars the whole time. A hundred and eighty, two hundred miles an hour. And then giving the car in front of you a little tap so that it goes into a spin.”

We were now close behind the other car, an old Renault 4, I saw. Stanley hit the horn and kept hitting it. “He has to keep going, otherwise it won’t work. Come on, you fucker! Step on it!”

He yanked on the wheel and aimed for the right side of the rear bumper. Again there was the sound of metal on metal, louder than the first time. And I heard glass shatter. “Got him!” The Renault slipped in the sand and spun on its axis. For a moment it looked as though it was going to roll over. The wheels on one side were easily three feet off the ground, and for a second it hung suspended in the air, but then it fell back onto all fours. I thought Stanley would keep going, but he threw the car into reverse and maneuvered back beside the Renault.

“Asshole!” he shouted at the driver, who had his window open, too, and was looking at us, his eyes wide with fear. “I hope the tumor in your brain explodes today, you fuck!”

Then Stanley raced off. Roaring with laughter, he steered the car through the last few bends before the beach. “Jesus, Marc! Did you see his face? Oh, beautiful, these are the moments worth living for. And he got a free English lesson in the bargain.”

I didn’t say a word. When the driver had turned and stared at us, I pulled my head back so it would be behind Stanley’s as much as possible. The other driver’s hair was pretty mussed up. A bit mussier, in fact, than the first time I saw him. But
I recognized him immediately as the owner of the “green” campground who took such bad care of his farm animals.

Stanley was still dying with laughter. He turned to me and raised his arm. It took a moment before I realized that he wanted me to give him a high five.

“Two bottles,” he said.

“What?”

“I had two bottles of wine. And I’m not counting the couple of beers before dinner or the three brandies with the coffee. You have to admit, when you take all that into account, I’m not such a bad driver!”

The beach was crowded. So crowded that we couldn’t find the others at first. We started off by looking in the open-air bars festooned with lanterns, then went farther, past the bonfires, toward the sea. Rockets shot into the air to our left and right. In the pauses between the bangs you could hear a leaden disco beat rolling across the sand.

“Over there,” Stanley said.

Ralph and Judith were down close to the waterline, and almost right away I saw Lisa being chased by Thomas. Lisa screamed and fell onto the sand, and Thomas jumped on top of her.

“You guys are just in time,” Ralph said.

Ralph had buried a cardboard tube filled with explosives in the sand. It was about the size of a stick of dynamite, and now he was putting a pan over it. It was a heavy copper pan
with a round bottom. Apparently he had brought it along from the summer house—an antique soup pan, I guessed, the kind you see hanging on a chain above a fire.

“Get back,” Ralph said.

For a moment there was nothing. A split second later, thunder rang out and the pan was gone. We didn’t see it fly into the air—no, it was simply gone. Where it had just been there was now a gaping crater about a foot across, with smoke curling up from it.

“Look!” Ralph yelled. “There!”

He pointed. Against the night sky, lit by the glare of exploding rockets, we saw the pan. It was hard to tell how high up it was. A hundred yards? Two hundred? It tumbled as it rose, a tumbling dot, still rising. Just before we almost lost sight of it again, it began its descent. The pan’s trajectory was fairly flat and now it came hurtling down over the sea. For a moment we lost sight of it altogether, then it showed up for the last time about thirty feet above the waves.

“There goes our deposit,” Judith said as the pan disappeared for the last time.

“Jesus Christ!” Ralph said. “Did you see that? Did you guys see that? What a boom. Here, look at this, this crater. Shit, man. I felt the pieces of seashell in my eyes.”

“And how are we going to explain this to the rental agency?” Judith said.

“Oh, stop bellyaching, would you? I found that pan out in the shed; they won’t even know it’s gone.”

I glanced over at Judith. A little wrinkle had appeared on her forehead, just above her nose. On her cheeks and in her eyes flickered the golden glow from the bonfires.

I could do it, I thought. I could just do it. This woman. This very evening.

The next moment I thought about what had happened in the kitchen earlier that day. I felt a pang in my chest. And the heaviness in my head, which had gone away after Stanley ran the campground owner off the road, came back. I thought about my older daughter, about Julia, who must have seen us. Who else could it have been, if not Julia? Judith’s mother? Maybe. It was possible. Thomas or Alex? Lisa? I dropped Lisa from the list right away. After all, Lisa was acting normally toward me. In fact, she was almost the only one. I now tried to picture
what
the person behind the kitchen door could have seen, exactly. Or heard. Maybe almost nothing, I told myself for one brief second. Maybe almost everything, I realized the next.

I thought about what I had to do. Julia. The best thing would be to be honest. Well, not quite honest: direct.
I don’t know exactly what you saw, but Alex’s mother was very, very sad about something. And I was trying to comfort her. She was sad because she … because of something grown-up women are sometimes sad about. I’ll explain it some other time
.

“Judith?” Ralph called out. “Judith, where are you going?”

Judith had turned on her heel and was taking big, angry steps through the sand toward the beachside restaurant. She didn’t look back. Ralph grinned and shrugged.

“Don’t mind her, Marc,” he said. “When she’s in one of those moods, it’s better to just keep out of her way.”

For a moment I thought about following Judith up to the restaurant, but decided against it. That would be too much. An overly obvious signal. Later. A suitable opportunity would present itself. I could try to make Judith think that I was more
sensitive than Ralph. What was I saying? I
was
more sensitive than Ralph. That’s why I answered his grin with a gesture that was supposed to mean something like,
Women, one of life’s great mysteries
.

“What is this, all this bitching about some old pan?” Ralph said. “I mean, go figure.”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “Caroline has those moods, too. And then
we’re
supposed to feel guilty and try to figure out what we’ve done wrong.”

Ralph stepped up to me and put an arm around my shoulders. “Sounds like you know what’s what, Marc. When it comes to women. But then you have them coming into your office every day.”

From up close, I could smell something on Ralph’s breath. Swordfish … Halfway through dinner I had covered my own portion with a napkin and after that took only a few pieces of French bread. Now I could feel the emptiness in my stomach. I needed to eat something first. Eat something, and then have a beer to get rid of that leaden feeling.

“Everyone get back!” It was Stanley. He had taken off his shoes and was standing up to his knees in the surf. In each hand he held a rocket that he now pointed at us laughingly. I could see the sparks glittering at the fuses.

“Get away!” Ralph yelled. “Away with that, you idiot!”

Only at the very last moment did Stanley turn a hundred and eighty degrees and point the rockets out to sea. Not at an angle, no, horizontally. At almost the same moment, the rockets flew out of his hands. One of them disappeared into a roller only about five yards from the beach. The other one skimmed just above the water’s surface. There were people swimming out there, I saw now. Not a lot of them, maybe five,
but still … The rocket drilled its way between the heads bobbing on the waves. For a few seconds nothing happened, nothing at all. Then there was a dull explosion and a fountain of water sprayed into the air. The swimmers started shouting and waving their arms, but Stanley only waved back and laughed.

“Apocalypse now! Apocalypse now!” he shouted, holding his hands up to his mouth like a megaphone. “Ralph, Ralph,” he said. “Give me another one of those. We’ll blow them out of the water!”

It wasn’t as if we’d forgotten about the first rocket. We’d just stopped thinking about it. There was an explosion. A deep thud. A sound as though an anchor had been dropped. An anchor slamming against a big rock underwater. Seawater and sand and little stones came flying up. Something landed in my left eye. Stanley, who was standing closest to the explosion, lost his balance and fell facedown into a wave. For a moment he went all the way under, then came back up, coughing and gagging. “Fuck!” he shouted, picking an imaginary strand of seaweed from his tongue. “Friendly fire! Friendly fire!” He laughed—the only thing you can do in a situation like that—just as Ralph had laughed at himself earlier when he’d landed on his knee beside the Ping-Pong table. Ralph and I laughed loudly, too, as Stanley clambered up onto the beach in his dripping shorts and T-shirt.