Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (25 page)

Someone grabbed me by the wrist. “Daddy?” Lisa said. “Daddy, can Thomas and I get ice cream?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. I used the fingers of the other hand to rub my left eye, and blinked. The tears started flowing right away and I felt a sharp pain. There was something in my eye. A piece of seashell or a grain of sand. “Where’s Julia?” I asked Lisa.

At that point Thomas came running up from behind and crashed into her, throwing her forward onto the sand. “Thomas! Screw you!”

“Lisa!” I said. “I don’t want you to … you shouldn’t talk …” Thomas pounded his chest with both fists and gave a kind of Tarzan yell. “Where’s Julia?” I asked again.

“How should I know?” Lisa said. She scrambled to her feet and smacked Thomas across the face with the flat of her hand—way too hard. Harder, in any case, than she could have meant to.

“Fuck!” Thomas shouted. “Slimy bitch!” He tried to grab her, but Lisa was already sprinting away across the sand.

“What do you think, shall we grab a beer?” Stanley said. He was soaked from head to toe, his wet gray hair was plastered down on his head, and you could see the white scalp shining through here and there.

Ralph was still hiccuping with laughter. “That was a take, Stanley! You should have filmed that one!”

“Where’s Julia?” I asked Ralph.

Stanley felt around in his pockets. “Fuck! I think all my money … Oh no, there we go …” He pulled a few banknotes from his pocket. Soaked banknotes, stuck together. “A blow-dryer!” he shouted. “My kingdom for a blow-dryer!”

“Where are Julia and Alex?” I asked.

“They went to that other beach club,” Ralph said. “There …” He pointed. “You can see the lights, up past the bend.”

“Alone?” I asked. “Just the two of them?”

I saw the lights Ralph meant. It was hard to tell how far away they were. Half a mile at least, I thought. Maybe a mile. Between this section of beach with its lit restaurants and
bonfires and that other club across the bay, there was nothing. Just a long and empty and darkened stretch of beach.

“Marc, you can’t keep the kids on a leash. The last thing those two want is to hang around here with their parents.”

“No, I was just wondering … Julia could at least have waited till I got here.”

I tried to hide my annoyance at how Ralph had given my daughter permission to go to the other beach. Without bothering to ask himself whether I would mind.
Was I being childish?
I asked myself. Or would I have had less of a problem with it if he’d said, “It’s okay with me, but first we have to wait for your father to see what he says”?

“What’s with your eye?” Ralph asked.

“Nothing. Well, there’s something in it. Sand or something.”

“Beer all around?” Stanley said, holding the wet banknotes aloft.

Because all the tables were taken, we drank leaning on a bar that had been set up right out on the beach, probably just for this occasion. Judith was gone. Ralph didn’t seem to worry much about losing track of his wife. At least he made no attempt to find her.

“Goddamn! Is a man supposed to take that lying down?” he said, slapping his beer mug down onto the bar. I followed his gaze and saw three girls in bikinis among the café tables, about five yards away. They had their backs to us and were trying to find an empty table. Ralph shook his head. “Well, Marc, out of sight, out of mind. Oh, I’d be willing to commit a crime to get a little of that. Just a little.” He ran his tongue across his upper lip. He moaned and fiddled with the button on his shorts; his fingers slid down over his zipper. Suddenly I saw the raptor look again—the same look with which he had once undressed Caroline in the theater’s lobby. And this time, too,
a film slid down over his eyes as he examined the girls from head to toe, his gaze finally coming to rest on their buttocks.

“Hey!” Stanley shouted.

We turned and saw Stanley waving the girls over. “Hey! Come on! Come here!”

Ralph shook his head, stared into his beer, and then grinned at me. “We think about it, but he does it,” he said.

The girls seemed to be talking about what they were going to do. They had their heads together. They were giggling. I tried to picture what they saw: three middle-aged men in shorts, holding mugs of beer—the oldest of the three had taken the lead. If I were them, I would have turned and walked away.

But to my great amazement, after a moment’s hesitation, I saw them coming toward us. Sometimes you misjudge women when you see them from behind. You see long hair falling over bare shoulders, but when they turn to face you, you discover they’re fifteen years older than you’d expected. Here, however, that wasn’t the case: All three of them could have stepped right off the cover of
Vogue
or
Glamour
. I tried to guess how old they were. Nineteen? Twenty? No more than twenty-five, in any case, and in fact more girls than young women. I glanced over at Ralph, who took a quick sip from his mug, smacked his lips, and ran his hand over his belly. As though he were hungry. That’s how he looked at the three girls, as though he were at a party where the waiters come by with trays of croquettes, satay, and liverwurst. A tasty morsel was heading his way, and he had already started licking his chops.

“No flies on them,” he said. “Holy shit, they’re real beauties.”

“Good evening, ladies. Drinks? What’ll it be? White wine? Margaritas? Cocktails?” Stanley flagged down a waiter and
looked at us mischievously. He was a fast worker. Even as he was still checking off the list of possible beverages, he had laid his hand lightly on the bare shoulder of the girl closest to him. They giggled again but didn’t walk away. One by one they held out a hand and introduced themselves. They told us their names and Stanley asked where they were from. Two of them were from Norway, we understood, and the third was Latvian. Then Stanley asked whether they were here on business or on vacation. No, he didn’t use the word
vacation. Pleasure
, that was the word he used.
Business or pleasure?
He asked it in a suggestive tone of voice, as though the difference between business and pleasure was of piddling importance. It seemed to me like a last opportunity for the girls to walk away from us. But they just stood there giggling. By now, the two Norwegian ones were sucking on the straws that stuck out of their margaritas. The Latvian girl knocked back her double vodka with ice in one go.

“So, Marc,” Ralph said out of the girls’ earshot. “You’re the lucky one, with your better half safe at home. And so’s he.” He pointed at Stanley. “But I have to be very careful. Judith would have a fit.” He looked around, and I looked with him. “The short one is completely wrecked,” he said. “Yours for the taking, Marc.”

He nodded toward the Latvian vodka girl. Then he turned his own gaze back to the legs of the Norwegian girls and smacked his lips again. Meanwhile, Stanley had his arm all the way around the shoulders of the girl closest to him. He acted as though he was trying to wrap his lips around the straw of her margarita, then pretended to stumble and buried his nose in her neck. The girl pushed him away laughingly and
said something in Norwegian to her girlfriend, who then took Ralph by the wrist and pulled him toward her.

“Whoa, whoa,” Ralph said. “Wait a minute! Jesus, they’re hot to trot, Marc. What did we do to deserve this?”

I saw him glance around quickly once again, then he threw his arm around the girl’s waist and pulled her toward him. Or no, not around her waist: lower, just above the elastic band of her bikini bottoms. Within seconds his fingers were under the elastic. I looked at his hand. At his wrist. It was all completely out of proportion. Ralph’s wrist looked thicker than the girl’s waistline. I saw how he slid his thick fingers down between her buttocks, and I thought about other body parts. Body parts that were also out of proportion. But I didn’t have time to develop this fantasy any further. The girl tried to push Ralph away, not half jokingly the way her girlfriend had just done with Stanley—no, in dead earnest. Ralph couldn’t see her face. I could. Her mouth was twisted, as though she had tasted something filthy or felt a sudden pain, but because Ralph couldn’t see this, he only pulled her up even tighter, trying at the same time to plant his lips on her neck.

I heard a cry, a curse or term of abuse most probably. A term of abuse in Norwegian that sounded like
Varkensfetter!
Then she said something else, this time in English with a heavy accent. “Fok of!” she said, and almost simultaneously brought her knee up hard into the crotch of Ralph’s shorts.

Ralph’s mouth fell open. He gasped for air and clutched at the front of his shorts (with the same hand that had just been under the elastic of the bikini bottoms), the better to cradle his genitals.

“Aw, fug!” was all he could say.

Now the girl threw the rest of her margarita, ice cubes and all, in his face. It wasn’t clear whether she really meant to do it or whether she’d just had too much to drink and wasn’t completely steady. In any case, the edge of her glass hit Ralph in the upper lip. Against his teeth. There was the sound of something breaking. A piece of tooth or a piece of glass, it wasn’t clear which. Ralph raised his hand to his mouth. He ran his tongue over his front teeth, then looked at his bloodied fingers.

“You fucking shit whore!” he howled.

Before Stanley or I could stop him, he swung. He tried to punch the girl right in the face. But the knee in his crotch had thrown him and the punch narrowly missed its mark.

“Ralph!” Stanley yelled. “Calm down, man!”

“Dirty whores!” Ralph screamed. “First you’re the big cock-teasers and then suddenly it’s Mother Teresa in the fucking flesh. Bah! I shit on sluts like you!”

Now he had the girl by the wrist. He pulled her arm down hard, so that she lost her balance and fell onto the sand. She screamed. I saw Ralph swing his leg back. As though he was about to take a penalty. Just in time, I realized that he was going to kick the girl in the stomach.

“Ralph!” I shouted. I leaned into him, shoulder to shoulder. At the same time, I kicked him in the knee. As hard as I could. He was at a disadvantage. He was standing on one leg. If he’d been standing on both, I never could have thrown him, but now he stood wobbling in place for a full second. Then he collapsed slowly, like a building demolished by charges in the basement. The back of his head hit the bar with a loud crack. I couldn’t tell whether the crack came from his skull or from the wooden bar top.

People were coming at us now from all directions. Men, mostly. Men who grabbed Stanley and me. Men who bent to help the Norwegian girl, who was halfway back on her feet. “Hey, take it easy!” I heard Stanley shout, but I couldn’t see him anymore. He was no longer standing at the bar where he had been just a moment before.

“Stanley!” I shouted. Meanwhile, two men had forced me down onto the sand. A third one was sitting on my chest, letting his full weight rest on my ribs. I could feel the air being pressed out of my lungs. “Calm down!” I peeped now. “Calm down, please …” But I couldn’t get enough air to say it very loudly.

Out of one corner of my eye I saw the Norwegian girl sitting on top of Ralph. She punched him a few times full in the face, until two strong men came and pulled her off him.

I was in the men’s room of the restaurant where we had eaten that first evening, looking into the little mirror above the sink. I tried to keep my left eye open and look into it at the same time. I couldn’t get a very clear picture, but what I saw I saw well enough: More than a third of my eyeball was red with blood. An extravasation. Something—a grain of sand, a piece of seashell, a tiny stone—had flown into my eye and hit the cornea. Or who knows, I thought as my breathing quickened and my heart began pounding more laboriously, who knows, maybe the grain of sand or tiny stone had actually
punctured
the cornea and was now stuck in the fluid substance inside the eyeball itself.

I’ve got this thing about eyes. I can look at anything—open wounds and fractures, a circular saw applied to a worn-out hip, complete with blood flying against the operating room ceiling, a trapdoor sawn in a skull, exposed brains, a heart pounding
on a chrome tray, bloody rolls of gauze propped into a chest cut open from collarbone to navel—I can handle anything, except for things that have to do with eyes. Particularly things that don’t belong in eyes: glass splinters, sand, dust, contact lenses that have slipped halfway behind an eyeball … Because of my oath as a physician, I refer as few patients as possible to a specialist, but patients who sit in my waiting room spastically blinking their eyes don’t even make it into my office. See that man holding the bloodied napkin to his eye? I say to my assistant. Get him out of here. Right away. Send him to emergency. Or write a referral to the ophthalmologist. I haven’t had breakfast yet, I can’t handle that right now.