Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (37 page)

About a month after the premiere of
The Seagull
, I came across a little item in the art pages of the newspaper:

The article was no more than ten lines long. “… Ralph Meier … canceled until further notice.” It didn’t say anything about what kind of illness it was. I was already standing there, phone in hand, then I decided it was better to wait a bit.

Judith called the next day.

“He was admitted to the hospital last week,” she said. She mentioned the name of the hospital. It was the same one to which I’d sent the sample—to which I
hadn’t
sent the sample.

I pressed my cell phone against my ear. I was sitting at the desk in my office. The next patient—in fact, the last patient of the day—wouldn’t be coming in for another hour. This time I had been sure to answer as soon as I saw her name come up on the display.

I asked a few general questions. About the symptoms. The probable therapy. Her answers confirmed my earlier diagnosis. Ralph’s body had put up a fight for a long time—longer than normal—but now there was no stemming the tide. The disease had already skipped a few stages. The stages at which treatment might have had some chance of success. I was reminded of trenches. Entire networks of interconnected trenches being overrun one by one. Because Judith didn’t ask about the tissue sample, I brought it up myself.

“It’s strange,” I said. “They really didn’t find anything at the time.”

“Marc?”

“Yeah?”

“How are you doing?”

I glanced at the clock across from my desk. Another fifty-nine minutes separated me from my next patient. “I’m getting by,” I said.

I heard her sigh at the other end. “You didn’t call me again. You don’t call me back when I leave messages for you.”

I was silent for a moment. During that silence I thought about the tissue sample, about the glass jar with the bloody piece of flesh from Ralph’s thigh, which I had tossed into the trash can.

“I’ve been pretty damn busy,” I said. “And then that trouble with Julia, of course. We’re trying to get our lives back on track, but it’s not that easy.”

Was it really me who was threading all those words together into sentences? It was all made easier by the fact that I was alone in my office and that Judith couldn’t see my face—in order to concentrate, I even kept my eyes shut tight.

“It would be nice to see you again,” I said.

That was how our renewed contact began. I simply told Caroline the truth. I’m going to have coffee with Judith Meier, I said. She’s pretty upset about Ralph’s illness. At first we met at sidewalk cafés, later more and more often at her place. I didn’t have many patients left; it was no problem for me to pop out for an hour or longer. And otherwise I just waited until my appointments for the day were over. Alex and Thomas were still at school around that time, I’m not trying to justify anything. It often went quickly—usually we didn’t even make it to the bedroom. Sometimes, afterward, we would go and visit Ralph in the hospital. The first operation didn’t have the desired results, and a second one “offered little prospect of improvement,”
according to the specialist in attendance. Alternative treatments were suggested. More radical treatments. He could decide for himself whether he wanted to stay in the hospital for those, or commute back and forth from home each day.

“Maybe you’d rather be at home,” Judith said. “I could drive you here every day.”

She didn’t look at me when she said this. She was sitting in a chair beside the bed, her hand on the blanket, close to her husband’s.

“It can be more pleasant to be at home,” I said. “But it can also be very taxing. Especially at night. Here in the hospital they have everything you need within reach.”

A decision was made to try for the best of both worlds, a compromise whereby Ralph would come home on weekends and sleep at the hospital during the week. I continued to go to Judith’s for coffee once or twice a week.

I don’t know whether it was Ralph’s generally dazed state, or the operation, the medication, and the often highly unpleasant treatments, but he never mentioned the first time I had examined him that last October. During one of our visits, when Judith left the room to buy some magazines for him at the newsstand on the ground floor, I seized the opportunity.

“It’s strange how things can go with an illness like this,” I said. “One moment you have a node examined and there’s nothing wrong, and a few months later it goes wrong, anyway.”

I had slid my chair up closer to Ralph’s bed, but I still didn’t have the impression that he understood me.

“I had a patient once who thought he’d had a heart attack,” I said. “He came in to see me, he was in a panic. With all the symptoms. Chest pain, dry mouth, sweaty palms. I took his pulse; it was over two hundred. I listened to his
heart. ‘Did you eat cheese fondue yesterday, by any chance?’ I asked him. The patient looked at me with big, round eyes. ‘How did you know that, Doctor?’ he asked. ‘And I suppose you knocked back quite a bit of white wine along with it,’ I said. Then I explained it to him. The molten cheese, the ice-cold white wine. At the bottom of the stomach it all clumps together to form a huge clot that can’t go anywhere. When that happens, people usually show up at the emergency room in the middle of the night, but this case was waiting for me when I came in at nine.”

Ralph had closed his eyes, but now he opened them again.

“But here’s the zinger,” I said. “I send the patient home. Completely reassured, of course. And two weeks later he actually dies of a heart attack. A complete fluke. If you used that story in a book or a movie, no one would believe it. But this was real. The fondue and the heart attack were totally unrelated.”

“That’s what you call tough luck,” Ralph said, and he smiled feebly.

I looked at the shape his body made under the blankets. It was still the same body, but it looked as though it had collapsed a bit here and there—in fact, he looked like a party balloon the day after a birthday party: a balloon that has lost half its air.

“Exactly,” I said. “Tough luck.”

With Julia, meanwhile, things were going a bit better. That was our impression at least. She began bringing her girlfriends home more often, at the table she sometimes told us about things that had happened at school, without our having to ask first, and she had started laughing again. A hesitant little
laugh, to be sure, but still: a laugh. On other days, however, she spent most of her time alone in her room.

“It’s probably the age she’s at,” I said.

“That’s the worst thing, as far as I’m concerned,” Caroline said. “That we’ll never really know anymore. Whether it’s just part of the age she’s at or whether it’s because of … because of that other thing.”

Sometimes I studied Julia’s face, when I thought she wasn’t looking. Her eyes. Her expression. That was
different
from the way it had been less than a year ago. Not so much sadder, but more serious. More inward-looking, as they say. Caroline was right. I had no idea, either, whether it should be attributed to her growing up or to the—unremembered—events on the beach.

That next summer vacation we went to the States.
A change of scenery
, that was the idea. A change of scenery from the usual vacation at the beach (or poolside). More of a trip than a holiday. A trip with lots of distractions, new impressions, and little time to ponder—to fret, to lie awake at night.

A trip might not “heal” Julia, but it could have a healing effect, we reasoned. Cathartic. Purging. Maybe, after a trip like that, we could start with a clean slate.

We flew to Chicago. We rode the elevator to the top of the Sears Tower and looked out over the city and Lake Michigan. We took a downtown tour in an open double-decker bus. We had breakfast at a Starbucks. At night we ate at restaurants where they served Julia’s favorite food. Italian. Pasta. But even at the table she kept the white pods of her iPod in. It wasn’t that she shut herself off completely: She smiled gratefully when the plate of ravioli was put down in front of her and
the waiter sprinkled grated cheese over it. She laid her head on Caroline’s shoulder and stroked her mother’s arm. The only thing was, she barely spoke. Sometimes she hummed along with a song on her iPod. Normally speaking, we would have said something. “We’re at the table now, Julia. You can listen to music later.” But we didn’t. She should do whatever she feels like, we thought. Apparently it’s still too early for that clean slate.

We drove west in our rental car, a white Chevrolet Malibu. We saw the countryside grow barer and emptier. In the backseat, Lisa shrieked in excitement when we saw our first cowboy and our first bison. But Julia kept her earbuds in. To make contact, we had to shout. “Look, Julia!” we shouted. “Up on that rock. A vulture.” Then she would pull one bud out of her ear. “What did you say?” “A vulture. Over there. Oh, no, he flew away.” At Badlands National Park we saw signs warning about rattlesnakes. At Mount Rushmore we took pictures of the sculpted heads of the four American presidents. That is to say, Lisa took the pictures. She was the one with the camera. I’ve never had the patience to take pictures, Caroline took photos when the kids were little, but stopped after that. Lisa enjoyed it. She started taking photographs when she was about nine. At first mostly vacation snapshots of butterflies and flowers, but later our family began appearing more often in her pictures.

Julia did her best. She summoned up a smile for each photo. But it was as though she was doing it for us. As though she felt guilty about her own gloominess. At Custer State Park, where we rented a log cabin for a few days, she actually apologized. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m probably not the best company.” We were sitting outside the log cabin, at a picnic table beside the barbecue, where the steaks and hamburgers were hissing
and steaming. “Don’t be silly, Julia,” Caroline said. “You’re the sweetest, nicest daughter we have. All you have to do is what you really feel like doing. Come on, we’re on vacation.”

Lisa was standing at the barbecue, flipping the meat. “And what about me?” she shouted. “Am I the sweetest and the nicest, too?”

“Of course,” Caroline said. “You, too. Both of you. Together you’re the loveliest thing I’ve got.”

I looked at my wife. She bit her lower lip and rubbed her eyes. After a few moments she stood up. “I’ll go see whether there’s any more wine,” she said.

“There’s wine here, Mom!” Lisa shouted. “It’s right here on the table!”

In Deadwood we ate at Jakes, Kevin Costner’s restaurant. All through the meal a pianist played loudly on the grand piano, making a normal conversation almost impossible. Julia kept her earbuds in, took two bites, then pushed her plate away. In Cody we went to a rodeo. At Yellowstone National Park we saw even more bison, as well as moose and different types of deer. We climbed out at a spot where a lot of cars had parked along the side of the narrow road. People with binoculars were pointing at the hill on the far side of a stream. “A bear,” a man said. “But he just disappeared behind those trees.” We parked at Old Faithful, the geyser that blows its white, foamy plume into the air every fifty minutes. “Ooooh!” Lisa cried when the geyser blew. Julia smiled and swayed her head to the music from her iPod.

We headed south. We saw our first Indians. We drove through Monument Valley and stopped at an almost-deserted parking lot where there was an American flag and a silvery trailer where they sold Indian bric-a-brac. “Don’t you want to come
out and take a look?” Caroline asked Julia, who had remained in the backseat. But Julia just shook her head and rubbed her eyes. “Shall I come and sit with you?” Caroline asked.

At Kayenta we were told that the entire Navajo Indian reservation was dry; you couldn’t get a drop of alcohol anywhere. Not with dinner, but also not at the supermarket. “It’s like Iran,” Caroline said, taking a sip of her Coke. “But right in the middle of America.”

At the first lookout point along the Grand Canyon, Julia began crying. I was alone with her just then. Caroline and Lisa had disappeared into a brick restroom. We were standing at the edge, on a little, unfenced promontory, far away from the larger groups of tourists. “Look at that,” I said, pointing to a bird of prey, an eagle probably, that had come soaring by within five yards of us, silently, on motionless wings. “Do you want to go back to the car?” I asked. I looked over, and only then did I see that Julia had taken out her earbuds. She wasn’t making a sound, the tears were simply running down her cheeks.

“I can’t even see how beautiful it is anymore,” she said.

I felt a cold shiver down my spine. I stepped toward her and held out my hand. I did it very carefully—I tried to get hold of only her wrist. Ever since the last time I’d examined her, about eight months before, she had done her best to avoid all physical contact with me. I thought it would go away by itself after a while, but it didn’t. Whenever I held out my hand to her, she turned away immediately—during this trip, we hadn’t touched each other even once. “That’s okay, you don’t have to,” I said. “You don’t have to think it’s beautiful now.”