Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (43 page)

“You said you couldn’t have me around, Marc!” Judith wailed. “That we shouldn’t see each other anymore. Those were your exact words. ‘Too much has happened. I just can’t have you around.’ I couldn’t believe my ears! How could you be so cold? Ralph had been dead for less than half an hour!”

I stared at her. Was I hearing things? I had always prided myself on being able to figure out what was wrong with someone within sixty seconds, but I wouldn’t have believed this was possible, not in a million years. I looked at her face. Besides being covered in tears, it was above all marked by dissatisfaction. Deep-lying dissatisfaction, the kind a person is born with. Nothing helps to drive out that dissatisfaction. Expensive espresso machines, attention, a new wing on the house—for a fleeting moment the dissatisfaction disappears into the background, but it’s like a leak coming through the wallpaper: You can cover it with new wallpaper, but after a while the brown spots soak through, anyway.

There’s not much you can do about it. You can muffle it for a bit with medication, with what they call “mother’s little helpers,” but in the end it only comes back with renewed strength.

Only an injection, I knew, would help to wipe the dissatisfaction off Judith’s face. Once and for all.

I thought about her reaction on the beach when Ralph had blown that soup pan into the air. Her whining about loud bangs in general. Her bellyaching about the security deposit she might not get back from the rental agency. And then I thought about what Caroline had told me. About Stanley and Judith beside the pool.
He licked her down completely
, Caroline had said.
And I mean completely
.

I knew what I had to do. I got up out of my chair and came
around from behind my desk. I laid my hands on Judith’s shoulders. Then I leaned down, until my face touched hers.

I had expected heat. A wet but hot face—but her tears were cold.

“My sweet, lovely Judith,” I said.

We were sitting by the pool. Just Julia and me. Caroline and Lisa had gone into Santa Barbara to do some shopping. Stanley had a meeting somewhere in Hollywood about a new project. Emmanuelle was upstairs taking her afternoon nap.

Julia was lying on her stomach on an air mattress, in the shadow of a palm tree. I was sitting in a deck chair, leafing through some magazines I’d brought out from the house. The latest
Vogue
and
Vanity Fair
and
Ocean Drive
. In the distance you could indeed hear the ocean, just as Stanley had said. And the occasional train whistle. Between Stanley’s house and the beach was an unguarded, single-track crossing. The train whistles sounded different from a year ago, in the hotel in Williams—but it was also very possible that I was listening to them differently.

I looked at Julia. Maybe she was asleep. Maybe not. Her
iPod lay beside the pillow section of the air mattress, but she didn’t have the earbuds in. In Holland this was autumn. Here you had to sit in the shade, because it was too hot in the sun. I had expected a call from the Board of Medical Examiners, asking why I hadn’t shown up that Tuesday. But no call came. During the next few days there was no news, either. On Friday I called at last and spoke to a secretary who told me that all current cases had been “put off until after the fall vacation.” She asked me to repeat my name. “Dr. Schlosser,” I said. “Oh yes, here it is. Your name is marked with a red arrow on my computer. That means your case will be given priority treatment. But the ruling will only come during the week after the fall break. You’ll be informed by the end of that week, at the latest.”

The fall break started the next day and the four of us flew to Los Angeles. Stanley had offered to pick us up at the airport, but I’d told him that it wouldn’t be necessary. The drive in our rental car along Highway 1 to Santa Barbara took less than two hours.

The first few days we did pretty much nothing at all. We hung around the pool and sauntered down shopping streets. We ate crab on the pier again.

“I have a theory,” Stanley said on the third day. “I’ve thought about it for a long time. But then again … not really even that long.”

We were at a fish restaurant on the beach. The sun had just gone down. Caroline, Emmanuelle, Julia, and Lisa had gone for a walk along the surf. Stanley took the bottle of white wine from the cooler and refilled our glasses.

“The midsummer night party,” he went on. “Last year. We were on the beach with those girls. Ralph tried to kick
that Norwegian girl. Then we lost sight of each other for a few hours. In the meantime, your daughter was … well, what happened happened.
You
do the addition, you figure one plus one is two. Not long after the summer vacation Ralph becomes ill. Deathly ill. One year later he’s dead. I’m no doctor. I don’t know, technically speaking, how it works, but maybe you could explain that to me.”

I said nothing. I only smiled and took another sip of my wine.

“I’m going to tell you something else, Marc. Last year, as you probably remember, we shot
Augustus
. I gave Emmanuelle a minor role, too. As one of the emperor’s illegitimate daughters. But one day Emmanuelle comes to me and says she doesn’t want to be in the series anymore. She couldn’t stand it anymore, she said, the way Ralph behaved toward her. The way he looked at her. On the set and off. So I went and had a talk with Ralph. I warned him, in no uncertain terms, to stop what he was doing. He acted as though it was all a big joke, as though Emmanuelle was
exaggerating
, but he stopped. I had to promise Emmanuelle that she would never have to see him again, once the series was finished.”

It was tempting. It was tempting to tell Stanley, if not everything, then at least something. I’d had almost a whole bottle of white wine. A good story, I thought. I could make a good story out of it.

“That Ralph was completely mental,” Stanley said. “The way he acted with women. But both of us were there, we saw it. I don’t really mind that much that he’s not around anymore. I’m just curious. Purely from a technical point of view. Technically speaking, by the way, it seems to me pretty improbable that he got to Julia … He could barely walk after you kicked
him in the knee like that, remember? But that’s not the point. The point is that you
thought
he was a possible culprit. So you did something. Maybe that very same evening …”

Close, but no cigar
, I felt like saying. But I said something else instead.

“Come up with something yourself,” I said.

For one whole second, Stanley stared at me. Then his eyes began to twinkle. The next moment he burst out laughing.

“Very good, Marc! No, really, very good. Say no more. I think you’ve answered my question sufficiently. More than sufficiently.”

That afternoon we looked at the photos Stanley had taken last year, during the vacation at the summer house. I had asked about them as casually as I could. Whether he had other photos besides the ones I’d already seen on his website.

We sat around Stanley’s desk. He had closed the venetian blinds to keep out the bright sunlight as he clicked through the pictures on his monitor.

Caroline and Emmanuelle were out beside the pool. Lisa and Julia were standing to Stanley’s right, leaning against his desk. I was sitting on a stool to his left.

There weren’t all that many new ones, in fact. I looked at Julia out of the corner of my eye as the pictures of the repairman came by. There was one new photo: Julia and the repairman standing across from each other, with Julia holding out her arm, palm down, to indicate the difference in height between them. They were both laughing.

I was waiting for the moment when Julia would look over. At me. Weeks ago already I had decided to wait for the right
moment. But as time went by, I began having more and more doubts about that right moment.

If she had looked over right then, we would both have known what the other knew. As far as I was concerned, that would have been enough.

But she didn’t look over. She only giggled and urged Stanley to click on through to the next photo.

“Look!” Lisa shouted suddenly. “It’s that donkey!”

All three of us looked at her.

“That donkey from the campground!” Lisa said. “That poor little donkey, Dad!”

I leaned over a little closer to the screen. Indeed, you could see a donkey, sticking its head over a wooden fence.

“Do you recognize that donkey, Lisa?” Stanley laughed. “Maybe you saw it at the zoo. That’s where I took the picture. They have a kind of zoo there, you know, just a normal-animal sort of zoo. By the time I went there, you guys had already been gone for a while … Wait, what am I saying? Of course you knew about it! That’s where you took that little bird. You and your dad.”

“But that donkey wasn’t there then,” Lisa said.

“How can you be so sure it’s
that
donkey?” I said quickly.

“I can just tell,” Lisa said. “There was a llama, too. Did you take pictures of the llama, too, Stanley?”

Stanley sank back in his chair and put one arm around my younger daughter.

“I didn’t photograph a llama there, sweetheart,” he said. “But I believe you one hundred percent. I think there was a llama there, too.”

“Hey, Dad, are you coming in?”

I’d had my eyes closed, now I opened them again. There stood Julia, with one foot up on the diving board. The sun was so bright it made me squint; I couldn’t see her face clearly.

“Okay,” I said.

Stanley had already taken a whole series of photos of her. Here in the yard. On the beach. Tomorrow there was going to be an official shoot. With a dressing assistant and a cosmetician. Nothing was certain yet, Stanley had said, but there really was a lot of interest. He mentioned the name of a few big fashion and style magazines. He took a few photos of Lisa, too.

“How old are you now?” he asked her. “Twelve? That’s great. Maybe you’ll have to wait a little while, but you never know, there could always be some magazine. You might be exactly what they’re looking for.”

I hadn’t thought about the repairman again, not since our arrival in America. At most, I’d thought of him as an organism. An organism that breathed. A heart that beat. I looked at Julia, who was halfway along the diving board by now. I tried again not to think about him. And I succeeded. I smiled at my daughter.

“Dad, come on …”

I started to get up but then sank back in my chair. I waited until she got to the end of the board.

She turned her face toward me. The right moment had passed forever, I’d decided by then. The right moment belonged to the past. My daughter on the diving board was the future.

We looked at each other. First I looked at her as a girl. Then I looked at her as a woman. Then she took off.

H
ERMAN
K
OCH
is the author of eight novels and three collections of short stories.
The Dinner
, his sixth novel, has been published in twenty-five countries and was an international bestseller. He currently lives in Amsterdam.