Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (34 page)

“So what do we do now?” she asked.

In the car we had barely spoken. Julia had slept almost the whole way. Lisa had listened to music on Julia’s iPod. I’d had time enough to think.

“For the time being, nothing,” I said. “That seems best to me.”

“But shouldn’t we take her to a hospital, now that we’re here? Or at least to a specialist?”

Caroline pronounced the last word without emphasis and as casually as possible. She knew how I felt about “specialists.” She also knew how sensitive I could be when aspersions were cast on my own, limited medical knowledge, especially by my own wife.

“You know what it is?” I said. “I don’t think that a more thorough examination is going to help her at this point. I’ve looked, and you’ll have to trust me on this: There’s damage, but no lasting damage. As far as the psychological damage goes, it’s too early to say. She doesn’t remember anything. If she goes to a hospital, they’ll start asking questions. A specialist will want to know everything. Here she’s with us. With you and me. With her little sister. I really think complete rest is the best thing right now. Just let time do its work.”

“But is it normal that she can’t remember anything? I mean, maybe it would be painful if she remembered it all, but ultimately, wouldn’t it be better? How healthy can it be when something stays buried in your unconscious mind forever?”

“We don’t know. No one knows. There have been cases of people who have gone through something horrible, but repressed it so thoroughly that they were able to lead a normal life. On the other hand, there have been cases of people under hypnosis who dredged up all kinds of misery they couldn’t deal with afterwards.”

“But we want to know, don’t we? Maybe not right away, but in the end we want to know, right?”

“Know what?” I held up my empty glass and she filled it.

“Who it was. Oh, I don’t want to think about it, but I get
so furious when I do! About the kind of bastard who would do something like that! They ought to arrest him. They ought to take him off the street for the rest of his life. He should be … he should be …”

“Of course we want to know. I do, just as much as you. All I’m saying is that we have to be careful not to do more damage. If we try to force everything to the surface, she might experience more damage from that than from leaving things for a while. For the moment.”

During our hike along the stream I had walked beside Julia for a while. I had brought up the afternoon by the pool as casually as possible. The fashion show on the diving board and getting sprayed by Alex and Thomas: the Miss Wet T-shirt contest. “I was standing at the kitchen window,” I’d said. “I saw you guys. I laughed so hard.” And Julia had frowned, deep in thought. As though she was hearing about this for the first time. “When was that?” she asked.

“Marc …” Caroline put her glass on the bedside table and grabbed my wrist.

“Yeah?”

“Do you think …? Do you think that …? I mean, we talked about it when we went to the beach. Do you think that Ralph could do something like that?”

I didn’t answer right away. I acted as though I was thinking about it. I breathed a deep sigh and rubbed my knuckles against my left eye. The eye that didn’t hurt anymore, only itched.

“I’ve thought about that, too,” I said. “But it doesn’t add up. I was with him most of the time. And when I finally lost sight of him, he went home almost right away. So at one point I sat down and did the arithmetic. Ralph could never have
walked to that other beach and back in such a short time. And he was limping, too.”

“Yeah, I noticed that,” Caroline said. “How did that happen?”

“We were messing around with those rockets. One of them went off in the waves. Close by. It startled the hell out of him and he fell. Landed badly.”

I closed both eyes. I heard the edge of the wineglass tick against Caroline’s teeth.

“But what I asked was whether he could do something like that,” she said. “Whether he’s capable of it.”

I said nothing.

“Marc?”

“Yeah?”

“I asked you something.”

“Sorry. What was it?”

“Whether he’s capable of it. Ralph. Of doing something like that.”

This time I answered right away.

“Oh, absolutely,” I said.

A few days later, Judith called. On my cell phone. She asked how we were doing. And how Julia was doing in particular. I was sitting on the couch in the living room. Julia was lying on the floor, reading a magazine. Lisa was at a girlfriend’s house. Caroline was shopping. I stood up and walked into the kitchen. I said it was going reasonably well, under the circumstances.

“I keep thinking about the four of you,” Judith said. “Oh, Marc, it’s so horrible for all of you. For Julia. And that it had to happen here. Ralph is completely devastated, too. He sends
you all his best. Stanley and Emmanuelle, too. They’re going back to the States tomorrow.”

In the silence that followed I heard something: a familiar sound.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“I’m sitting by the pool. With my feet in the water.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. Then I walked over to the kitchen door and looked around the corner. Julia was still lying on her stomach on the floor, immersed in her magazine. I closed the door almost all the way and went back into the kitchen.

“Thomas keeps asking about Lisa,” Judith said. “He misses her a lot.”

“Yeah.”

“I have the same thing. That missing feeling.”

I said nothing. I turned on the faucet, took a glass from the counter and filled it.

“I miss you, too, Marc.”

A week before the end of the school vacation I opened the office again. But the inspiration was gone. Maybe the inspiration was never really there, anyway, but now, in any case, it was gone. Despite my distaste for the human body, I had always done my work well. I almost never had complaints. The serious cases I referred on in plenty of time. The less serious ones received the right prescription. This in contrast to the vast majority of cases: the people who had nothing wrong with them whatsoever. Before the summer vacation, I had listened patiently. For twenty minutes I would wear my most understanding expression. Now I couldn’t even make it through the twenty minutes anymore. After about five, cracks must have started appearing in that understanding expression: Patients would suddenly stop talking after those five minutes—sometimes even in midsentence. “What’s wrong, Doctor?”

“Nothing. What could be wrong?” “I don’t know, you look as though you don’t believe me.”

I used to let the patients talk for the full twenty minutes. After that they would go home feeling relieved. The doctor had given them a prescription and urged them to take things a little easier. “See my assistant for a new appointment on the way out,” I said. “In three weeks we’ll see whether there’s been any improvement.”

I couldn’t bring myself to do that anymore. I lost my patience. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” I told a patient who had come in for the third time to whine about dizzy spells. “Absolutely nothing. Be glad you’re so healthy.”

“But, Doctor, when I suddenly get up out of a chair—”

“Did you hear what I said? Apparently not. Otherwise you would have heard me say that there is nothing wrong with you. Nothing! So do me a favor and just go home.”

A number of patients changed doctors. We would get a letter or an e-mail saying that they had found another general physician “closer to home.” I knew where they lived. I knew they were lying. But I let it go. The appointments stopped arriving back-to-back. A twenty- or forty-minute gap between patients became much more common. I could have gone out during those breaks. To take a walk around the neighborhood. Pick up an espresso or a cheese sandwich at the café around the corner. But I always stayed in, in my office with the door closed. I would lean back in my chair and close my eyes. I tried to work out how many months it would take before I had no more patients at all. It should have been an alarming thought, but it wasn’t. I thought about the natural course of things. People were born. People died. They moved from the country to the big city. The villages emptied out. First the
butcher would throw in the towel, then the baker would close up shop. Wild dogs would take over the deserted, darkened streets. Then the last inhabitants died. The wind had free play. Sagging barn doors creaked on their hinges. The sun rose and set, but its rays no longer illuminated and warmed anything.

Occasionally, during a moment of clarity, I thought about the financial consequences. Not for too long, because the solution was obvious. A successful medical practice in a good area was worth a lot of money. Young family doctors just out of medical school would give their eyeteeth for a practice like mine. Astronomical sums were paid for them, usually by private contract, as they put it. A down payment on the barrelhead, so to speak. Officially it wasn’t allowed, but everyone knew that’s how it went. I could place an ad. Purely for show, the young whippersnapper fresh out of medical school would adopt a doubtful expression when I mentioned the astronomical sum I was asking. But his eyes would be unable to lie. His slobbering look would speak volumes. “You’ll have to decide quickly,” I would say. “You’d never believe how keen everybody is to get started here.”

I myself shouldn’t wait too long, either, I realized during moments of clarity. A practice with a number of patients was a gold mine. A practice with no patients at all was not. I added it up. The four of us should be able to live three or four years on the proceeds. After that, we’d see what came up. Maybe some cushy job. As a company medical officer. Or even something completely different. A radical change. Hotel doctor on one of the Canary Islands. Tourists who had stepped on sea urchins. Been burned by the sun. Had their intestines thrown for a loop by olive oil heated up once too often. Maybe the radical change would be good for Julia, too. Taking her away
from her familiar surroundings. A new start. That was what I thought about during my moments of clarity. Sometimes one of those clear moments wasn’t quite over when the next patient came into my office.

“Why do you think that?” I asked the homosexual TV comedian who thought he’d contracted AIDS. Then came the stories, descriptions of parties I didn’t want to hear about. I tried to think about a beach instead. A golden-yellow beach with a clear blue sea. After my office hours at the hotel I would walk across that beach to the sea. “Did he come in your mouth?” I asked the comedian in the meantime. “And have you been to a dental hygienist recently?” When the gums are inflamed, the infection can go by way of the semen into the bloodstream. By then I was up to my waist in the blue sea. The moment right before the plunge. The lower part of the body is already cold, the torso is still warm. I looked at the comedian’s mouth and tried to imagine his lips wrapped around a dick. For some reason it was a pale dick, a dick like a winter leek, and it was all the way in: in that mouth. The comedian sucked on the leek, nibbled on it teasingly. “Oh Jesus, I’m coming!” the dick’s owner moaned. The floodgates were opened. The first wave of semen hit the roof of the comedian’s mouth. The waves that followed landed on his inflamed gums. It was more effective than a lethal injection. For a brief moment there is the cold when your head disappears beneath a wave. The rush of water in your face. But then you resurface. Your hair hanging in wet strands around your head. Salt stings your eyes. You lick at the snot on your upper lip: the taste of algae and of oysters. You look back at the beach where you just were.
Cleansing
, that’s the first word that pops into your mind. The comedian was rather tubby, but in another
month or so no one would recognize him.
Emaciated
. There is no better word for it. AIDS destroys the body from the inside out. It presses a jackhammer against a load-bearing wall. The kind of jackhammer road workers use to pry streetcar rails out of the tarmac. The structure begins to creak. Three stories up, fractures appear in the supporting walls. Bits of paint and plaster come raining down from the ceiling. It’s like with an earthquake. Huge buildings sometimes fall before clay huts do. The comedian didn’t stand a ghost of a chance. He should have brushed more thoroughly. He should have gone to the dental hygienist on time. Now the wave of semen against his gums had sounded the death knell.

I still pretended to be listening, I pretended to take notes on my prescription pad, but meanwhile I was looking at the clock on the wall behind the comedian’s head. How long was this going to take? Barely four minutes had passed. Even so, I didn’t want to hear any more. No more details. I wanted the comedian to leave my office. To die quickly. Preferably without darkening my door again. Animals go looking for a quiet spot to die. A cat hides behind the bottles of cleaning fluid under the sink. In eight months or so I would read the obituaries in the paper. An
entire page of
obituaries, most likely. A funeral with more than a thousand attendees, at the cemetery on the bend in the river. Speeches. Music. A posthumous tribute on TV. A special rerun of his best show. Another couple of half-baked anecdotes on a talk show—then, after that, the inevitable silence would settle.