Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (36 page)

Listless
, Judith had said.
Ralph was sort of listless, those last few weeks of the vacation
.

“It’s good you came in,” I said. “Usually these things turn out to be a storm in a teacup, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. What are the symptoms exactly? What do you feel?”

“For starters, I’m tired all the time. Ever since the summer actually. And I don’t feel like doing anything. I’ve never had that before. But okay, I figured maybe I’ve taken on too much work lately. But about two weeks ago I got this …” He stood up and without further warning unclasped his belt and dropped his pants down around his knees. “This …” He pointed, but even if he hadn’t, it would have been impossible to miss. “Three days ago it was half the size. It’s hard as a rock and when I press against it it hurts.”

I looked. I know my business. At a single glance, in fact, I knew there was only one possibility.

Ralph Meier needed to go to the hospital that week. Preferably that afternoon. Maybe it was too late already, but the earlier you dealt with it, the better your chances were.

I got up out of my chair.

“Let’s go into the other room,” I said.

“What is it, Marc? Is it what I think it is?”

“Come with me. I want to take a better look.”

He pulled up his pants halfway, to just below his buttocks, and shuffled into the examination room beside my office. I asked him to lie down on the table.

Laying a fingertip carefully against the bump, I pressed
gently. It didn’t give; it was indeed just as he’d said: hard as a rock.

“Does this hurt?” I asked.

“Not when you press that way, but if you squeeze it I see stars.”

“Then we won’t do that. And there’s no reason to. In ninety-nine percent of all cases, these are just nodes. A sort of growth under the skin. Unpleasant, to be sure, but nothing to get worried about.”

“So it’s not … Not what I thought?”

“Listen, Ralph. We can never be a hundred percent sure. But we want to rule out that one percent, too.”

“What are you going to do?”

He was no longer looking at me. He was looking at my hands, which were pulling on the rubber gloves. At the scalpel I had placed in readiness on a clump of cotton wool, beside his bare thigh on the exam table.

“I’m going to remove a tiny piece of it,” I said. “And we’ll send that to the hospital. In a couple of weeks we should know more.”

I disinfected the area a couple of inches around the bump. Then I stuck the scalpel into it. I cut. First superficially, then deeper. Ralph made a noise; he gasped for air.

“This might hurt a little,” I said. “But it will be over in a second.”

There was almost no blood. That confirmed my initial diagnosis. I pushed the scalpel in until I reached healthy tissue. By cutting into the healthy tissue I established the connection. The cells from the bump would get into the bloodstream and be disseminated all over the body.
Disseminate …
I’ve always
found that a nice word. A word that covers all the bases, as they say. At this moment, I was sowing something. Planting something. Within the foreseeable future, the seeds would germinate. In other parts of the body. Parts where they couldn’t be seen with the naked eye.

For the sake of appearances I scraped off a little tissue onto the edge of a glass jar and used the tip of the scalpel to push it in. For the sake of appearances I wrote something on the label, which I then stuck to the jar. I applied a gauze square to the wound and fixed it with two bandages.

“You can put your pants back on,” I said. “I’ll write you a prescription. For more of those pills you had before. We all have trouble sometimes getting back into the swing of things after a long vacation.”

At the door of my office, I held out my hand.

“Oh yeah,” Ralph said. “I almost forgot. Your tent. Judith gave me your tent to give to you. It’s in the car. Can you come out and get it?”

We stood beside the open trunk. I was holding our tent in my arms.

“I have to go out on a shoot soon,” Ralph said. “You know, that series Stanley was talking about?
Augustus
? They’re about to start filming.”

“How is Stanley?”

He didn’t seem to hear my question. Right above his nose, between his eyebrows, a wrinkle had formed. He gave his head a little shake.

“Do you think it’s safe for me to go?” he asked. “It’s a two-month shoot. If I have to stop halfway through, it would be a disaster for everyone.”

“Of course,” I said. “Don’t worry about a thing. It’s usually nothing at all. We’ll just wait for the tests to come back. There will be enough time after that.”

I waited until his car disappeared around the corner. Halfway down the street there was a Dumpster. I dropped our tent into it and walked back to my office.

The waiting room was empty. In the examination room I held the little jar up to the light. I squinted, studied the contents for a few seconds, then tossed it into the trash can beside the examining table.

I’d thought it would all go quickly, but it didn’t. Ralph left for Italy to shoot
Augustus
and two months later he came back. Only then did he call me to ask about the test results.

“I never heard anything back from the hospital,” I said, “so I assume they didn’t find anything.”

“But then they usually say something anyway, don’t they?”

“Usually. I’ll call tomorrow, just to be sure. How are you feeling otherwise?”

“Good. I still get tired easily, but then I take one of your miracle pills. That works fine.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow, Ralph.”

I was relieved to hear that he was still tired. I had prescribed Benzedrine to repress the symptoms of fatigue and give the disease time to spread through his body. But it was taking longer than normal. I started doubting myself. My skills as a doctor. Maybe I had seen it all wrong.

The next day I called him back but got Judith on the line.

“Is it about the test results?” she asked right away.

For a minute there, I didn’t know what to say. “I thought …” I started.

“Yeah, Ralph told you not to tell me anything if it was serious. But you left him feeling so reassured that he told me about it right away. That you said that it wasn’t anything. That’s right, isn’t it, Marc?”

“I told him it
probably
wasn’t anything. But to be completely sure, I also sent a sample to the hospital.”

“And?”

I closed my eyes. “I called today to ask about the results. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“Really? I mean, if there really
is
something, I want to know, Marc.”

“No, there’s nothing wrong. Is there something that makes you suspect there’s more to it than that?”

“He’s still tired all the time. And he’s lost weight, even though he still eats just as much. And drinks just as much.”

“I took a bit out of his leg. Can you still see that? That spot?”

“No, the bump’s still there, but it’s not getting any bigger. I don’t
look
at it every day, of course. But sometimes I feel it. Sort of offhand, if you know what I mean. So that he doesn’t notice. Or at least I hope he doesn’t notice.”

The bit about Ralph losing weight was good news. And also the fact that the bump wasn’t getting any bigger made sense in terms of the clinical picture. The hostile army had established a beachhead. The attacks were being coordinated from there. Only limited commando forays to start with. Clandestine operations behind the lines. Hit-and-run actions. The terrain was
being reconnoitered. Brought into readiness. Later the main forces would meet with no resistance worth mentioning.

“It’s probably just a fat node,” I said. “It can’t really do any harm in that spot, as long as it doesn’t bother him. But if he wants, I can remove it for him.”

“Isn’t that something they usually do at the hospital?”

“At the hospital you end up on a waiting list. This kind of thing can be done really quickly. He can come by anytime. As far as I’m concerned, he doesn’t even have to make an appointment.”

Lisa asked about Thomas sometimes. Julia never asked about Alex.

“Of course you can call him,” we told Lisa. “You can ask him to come over and play.”

But as the school year progressed, she asked less often. Her school friends crowded her summer romance into the background.

Things were different with Julia. We had the feeling that, for the time being, she wanted nothing whatsoever to do with boys. And especially not with the boy who would remind her of this last summer vacation. In that context, the word
remind
was not entirely accurate. Julia remembered things about the summer, but not everything. So she probably remembered Alex, too. But up to what point? To what moment? We didn’t ask her about it. It seemed best to leave things as they were.

Ralph didn’t drop by again. Apparently he was sufficiently reassured and had indefinitely put off having the “fat node” removed. That, in fact, was a favorable sign. Maybe the disease simply needed more time.

Early in the new year we received another invitation to an opening night. This time it was Chekhov’s
The Seagull
. We didn’t go. We had adopted a policy of passive deterrence. We were trying to establish as much distance as possible between ourselves and the Meiers. I emphatically say “we” here—Caroline felt exactly the same way.

It was while we were having dinner out. A few days after the invitation to
The Seagull
arrived. Just the two of us out for dinner, for the first time in a long time. When the second bottle of wine arrived, I made my move.

“Do you know why I didn’t want to go to that opening night?” I asked Caroline.

“Because plays make you hyperventilate,” my wife laughed, clinking her glass against mine.

“No, this is different. I didn’t want to tell you at first. I thought it would stop by itself. But it didn’t. It’s still going on.”

It was the truth. Judith had tried to call me again a couple of times, but every time I saw her name on the display of my cell phone, I didn’t answer. When she left a message on my voice mail, I didn’t call back. I had instructed my assistant not to pass her calls along if she tried to call me at the office. Which indeed she did a few times. My assistant told her I was seeing a patient. That I would call back later. Which I then did not do.

A couple of times she tried our private number. Both times she got Caroline on the line. I could tell from my wife’s replies that it was Judith. No, we’re getting by … a little better lately … 
I’m not here!
I signaled to Caroline and kept as quiet as possible till the conversation was over.

“Besides that, I didn’t want to go to the premiere because I didn’t feel like running into Judith there,” I said. “I don’t know
whether you’ve noticed, but that woman wants something from me. Even then, at the summer house. She tried something … It was obvious, she thought I was nice. Nicer than normal nice, I mean.”

I looked at my wife. She didn’t seem shocked by this revelation. On the contrary, she seemed more amused than anything else. A smile played on her lips.

“What are you grinning at?” I said. “Did you notice, or not? That Judith was chasing me, I swear.”

“Marc … I just had to laugh. About you. Don’t be angry, I didn’t mean to laugh at you, but I think you have the tendency to make assumptions pretty quickly: that a woman is after you when she acts a bit flirty or does her best for you. I noticed it at the summer house, too, but if you ask me, Judith is the kind who does that with all the men. A little uncertain of herself, the type who tries to appeal to every male.”

I had to admit that, on the whole, I was disappointed with Caroline’s reaction. She’d viewed it all as an innocent flirtation. She really hadn’t caught on. That’s how easy it was, I thought.

“She calls me on my cell all the time, Caroline. She says she misses me. That she wants to see me again.”

Caroline shook her head laughingly and took a big slug of her wine.

“Oh, Marc, she’s just one of those women who wants a bit of attention. I’d probably be the same way if I had to live with a big boor like Ralph. That’s what it’s about. Attention. The doctor’s attention. Maybe that’s what she wants. Maybe she wants you to
examine
her.”

“Caroline …”

“I hate to have to disillusion you, but you brought it up. Judith acts like that with all men. I saw how she acted toward
Stanley. A little giggly, a little running her hands through her hair, sitting on the diving board, supposedly lost in thought, dangling her feet in the water, all those tedious old female tricks. In fact, I’m surprised that you would fall for it so easily. And by the way, she had more success with him than she did with you.”

I stared at her.

“What are you staring at? Oh, Marc, are you really so naive? You think the women are swooning over you, but a woman like Judith knows exactly what she’s doing. I was going to tell you about it, but I forgot. Until you started in about her just now. Whatever, it was one afternoon by the pool. You’d all gone to the village—Ralph, you, the kids. Emmanuelle wasn’t feeling well—she was lying down inside with the curtains closed. There had been something in the air for a long time, a sort of charged tension between those two. At a certain point I went upstairs to get something to drink, and when I looked out the kitchen window I saw them. Judith was lying in her deck chair and Stanley was leaning over her. He started with her face and then he licked her down completely, Marc. And I mean completely. I made sure the glasses rattled loudly enough when I came down the steps. And when I got there they were both lying neatly in their own deck chairs. But I saw what I saw. I could tell from Stanley’s swimming trunks. I probably don’t have to explain what I saw. And the next moment, there he went, right, splash, into the water.”