Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (27 page)

The crowd parted when I made for the restaurant, my left eye still closed tight. A few people along the way patted me on the shoulder. Someone gave me the thumbs-up and winked. Words of praise were murmured in various languages. But what I felt most was a gnawing sense of discomfort. Maybe I had taken it all far too lightly, I realized now: the fact that my thirteen-year-old daughter had gone off to a beach club a mile away with a fifteen-year-old boy. I hadn’t wanted to be petty. True enough, I was irritated that Ralph hadn’t waited for me but simply given Alex and Julia permission. But I forgot about it again, right away. I’d had—and it was only with difficulty that I admitted this to myself—
other things
on my mind. Those other things had pushed into the background the fact that a thirteen-year-old girl had walked across a darkened stretch of beach to a club farther along. I tried not to let my imagination get the best of me. I did my utmost to make my imagination stop right there.
Take care of this eye first
, I told myself. With a painful, pounding, and swollen-shut eye, I was nothing but a semi-invalid. But once I had gone into that restroom and made a first attempt to look in the mirror, there was no stopping it. I thought the things every father thinks sooner or later. Every father with a daughter, that is. The dark stretch of beach. The dark stretch of park between school and home after the school party. There were a lot of drunken men walking around tonight. I thought about Alex. My daughter probably didn’t have much to worry about on that score. Alex was a sweet, rather sluggish boy who liked to hold her hand—and who knows: maybe more than that. But much too sweet and sluggish to be of much use when the drunken, nasty men tried to force themselves on my
daughter. Somewhere along that dark stretch of beach or at the other club. I didn’t think about anything else. It didn’t seem likely to me that Julia would let herself go like the Latvian vodka girl. When we were on vacation and went to a restaurant, she was allowed to take a sip of our wine or beer. But it didn’t really interest her much. She would raise the glass to her lips and make a face, almost as though she was doing it more to please us than to please herself. No, I was thinking mostly of drunken, nasty men who would see a thirteen-year-old girl as easy prey. Dirty men. Like Ralph, it flashed through my mind.

And I also thought about something else. I thought about Caroline. I’ve already talked about how I often play the role of the pushover father, the father with whom everything is allowed—well, maybe not everything, but in any case more than by the always-much-too-worried mother. That role suits me very well, as long as Caroline and I are both there. As soon as I’m on my own, though, panic descends. At an outdoor restaurant or in a department store,
at a beach!
—wherever there are lots of people, or perhaps even too few, or places that are too dimly lit, I keep looking around to make sure I haven’t lost them. A bit less often these days than when the girls were little, but still … That panic had two faces. The first face was the straightforward fear that something might happen at any moment: a ball rolling out onto a busy street, a child molester, a big wave that drags them out to sea. The second was Caroline’s face. Or rather, her voice.
Why didn’t you take better care of them?
the voice said.
How could you leave them alone there with all that traffic?
On occasion I’ve wondered whether I would be so panicky if I’d had to do it all alone. Really alone, I mean. A single father. A
widower
. But whenever that word
popped up, the whole newsreel ground to a halt. My imagination would simply balk.
Mustn’t think about that
, I’d tell myself—and the fantasy fizzled and died.

This time, too, I heard Caroline’s voice.
How could you have let her go off alone with that boy to that beach club?
I looked in the restroom mirror. Into my eye full of blood.
I couldn’t do anything about it
—that was how I formulated my answer in my thoughts.
They were gone when I got there. Ralph and Judith said they could …

It was way too spineless an answer, I knew that. A flimsy excuse for an answer.

And even before Caroline’s voice had a chance to pronounce the next sentence—
If I’d been there, none of this would have happened
—I had made up my mind.

The first thing I did, of course, was try her cell phone. When she’d started secondary school a year ago, we gave Julia a cell phone. For safety’s sake, we told ourselves. So she can always call us. And we can call her—we thought. But from the very start Julia showed great skill in turning her phone on only when it suited her. It was in my purse—I guess that’s why I didn’t hear it, she would say. Or: My battery was run down.

So it didn’t surprise me at all when her phone, after ringing three times, switched directly to voice mail. Leaving a message was useless, I knew. She never, ever listened to her voice mail. It didn’t surprise me at all, but on the other hand, it didn’t really worry me, either. It was entirely possible that she hadn’t brought her cell phone with her, that she’d left it behind at the summer house. And if she did happen to have it with her, well then, this was the evening of all evenings not to turn it on. Out with a cute boy on the beach beneath the stars … 
What thirteen-year-old girl would want to be called by chronically nagging parents on a night like this?

“Have you seen Judith?” I asked Lisa after I’d finally caught her attention and she came walking over to me with a sigh.

“Who?” She wasn’t really listening; she never took her eyes off the boys playing soccer.

“Judith. Thomas’s mother.”

There was no reply. Her face was sweaty. She brushed a few strands of hair from in front of her eyes.

“Lisa …”

“What?”

“I asked you something.”

“Sorry, what was it?” Now she looked at me for the first time. “What’s with your eye, Dad?”

I pinched my eye shut, then tried to open it. But it was no use. It started watering right away.

“Nothing,” I said. “I have a … a thingamabob flew into it, a bug or something …”

“Thomas’s mother is over there,” Lisa said, pointing across the stretch of beach they were using as a soccer field. There, where the beach sloped up right off the shoreline, Judith was sitting in the sand with her knees pulled up to her chest. She didn’t see me at first when I waved, but then she waved back.

Go back to your game
, I was about to say to Lisa, but she had already run off. I walked through the swarm of players to the other side.

“Well, well,” she said. “Did you get to shoot off a lot of rockets?”

She was smoking a cigarette. I put my hand in my pocket
and fished out my own pack. I leaned down so she could give me a light.

“I’m going over to the other club for a look,” I said. “See where Alex and Julia are.”

I tried to adopt the most lighthearted tone possible, but maybe there was still a little anxiety in my voice.

“Do you want me to come, too?” Judith asked.

I took a drag of my cigarette. Less than five yards away from us the waves were pounding against the sand. Fine drops of seawater were atomized in my face. “I don’t know …” I nodded back over my shoulder, to where our younger two were playing soccer.

“Oh, they’re not really paying any attention to us. There are so many people around. As long as they stay put …” She stood up. “I’ll go tell Thomas we’ll be right back. What’s with your eye?”

The dark stretch of beach was less dark than I had imagined. Here and there, behind and on top of the dunes, were summer houses, their patios lit. After about ten minutes the drumbeats behind us faded and the sound of the beach club ahead grew louder. Different music: salsa, or in any case something South American. Judith had taken off her flip-flops and was carrying them in one hand.

My fretfulness of a few minutes earlier had vanished just like that. I’d been worrying again for no reason, I told myself. What could happen here, for God’s sake? Little groups of people came past us every now and then, walking in the other direction; young people mostly, teenagers in bikinis and
knee-length swimming trunks, the occasional closely intertwined couple who stopped to kiss every five yards or so.

“Sorry I just walked away like that,” Judith said. “But I can’t stand it when Ralph acts that way. He’s like a big baby. Sometimes he forgets that he has children of his own. It makes me so angry when he acts that way around them.”

I said nothing. I walked a little closer to her, so that our forearms brushed. I smelled something vague: sea air mixed with a hint of perfume or deodorant. It was only a matter of time, I knew. Or rather, a matter of timing. To grab her around the waist already would be taking things too fast. I estimated the distance to the lights of the other beach club. Ten minutes. Within ten minutes she would be all mine. But then I would have to be subtle about it. Not really subtle, of course: only subtle in her eyes.

“I can’t help laughing sometimes, actually,” I said. “The way Ralph can completely lose himself in things. Whether he’s snorkeling or chopping a swordfish into pieces, he does it with the same kind of enthusiasm. The same kind of energy. Sometimes it almost makes me jealous. I don’t have that kind of energy.”

Women complain about their men. All women. Sometimes they just need to air their grievances. But you should never join them in that. Never. You mustn’t make them feel that they made the wrong choice. On the contrary. You have to defend the man who’s being criticized. By defending the man who is being criticized, you indirectly compliment the woman on her good taste.

“Do you really feel that way?” Judith said. “Sometimes I find it so tiring. All that energy.”

On the beach a little while back, after blasting the copper
pan into the air, Ralph had called his wife a bellyacher. If you asked me, he was absolutely right. Judith was a bellyacher. Even back when they shot off the rockets in the yard at the summer house she had nagged and bitched
about nothing
. But she was pretty and she smelled nice. It wasn’t a good idea to marry a woman like Judith. If you did, you’d have to take your feet off the table every time she came in the house. You’d have to mow the lawn on time and not drink beer in bed. When you burped or farted she would adopt the same serious expression she’d worn when the pan was launched. But I wasn’t married to her. Fortunately. I had her only for this evening. Or at most for a few times after this, when we were all back from vacation.

It was hard to admit it, even to myself—it may even have been half unconscious—but something about her bellyaching excited me. A woman who can’t laugh when men fart. Who, if she had the chance, would send those men
out of the classroom
. We would have to wait in the hall until we were called back in again. I could feel my cock in my shorts searching for space at this fantasy. I fought back the urge to grab her right then and there and toss her onto the sand without further ado. To take the initiative. A half rape—women always like that. All women.

“I can imagine you might get tired of it,” I said. “On the other hand, you probably don’t get bored often with a husband like Ralph. I mean, he’s always coming up with something new.”

I myself would become bored to death with that, I knew. After a single day. But I wasn’t a woman. I wasn’t a woman like Judith. I wasn’t a bellyacher. A prim bitch. A prim and horny bitch, true enough, but it was rather like all male fantasies
about women in positions of authority (stewardesses, schoolmarms, whores), it was above all so terribly
transparent
. It was this transparency, I knew, that excited me most. Women who complain about everything. About rockets, about making too much noise for the neighbors and making soup pans fly hundreds of yards through the air, about their own husbands acting like little boys, but meanwhile … Meanwhile, they whip it right out of your pants and want you to stuff it in all the way—right up to the hilt.

“It’s just that he treats me with no respect, a lot of the time,” Judith said. “When other people are around, that’s when it annoys me most. He always succeeds in making me look like someone who gripes about everything. And because it makes me so mad, in front of other people, I just go away.”

“Okay,” I said.

Okay
, that was the new vogue word. At first I’d objected weakly when I heard my daughters using it so often, but as is often the case with vogue words, it was above all contagious. Its double meaning was precisely what made it so very useful: You were both saying
yes
and indicating that you understood exactly what the other person meant.

“I started paying attention,” Judith went on. “He doesn’t just do it with me. He does it with all women. I mean, on the one hand he’s extremely charming, but he also just sees women as naturally dumber than men. I don’t know, something in his tone, the way he looks at them …”

“Okay,” I said once again.

“Don’t get me wrong: Ralph is a real ladies’ man. That’s why I fell for him. The way he looks at you, the way he looked at
me
—as a woman, it just makes you feel attractive. Desirable. That’s wonderful for a woman, to see a man look at you
like that. But it takes a while before you realize that a ladies’ man doesn’t just look at
you
that way, but at all women.”