Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (9 page)

“Yeah,” Julia said. “What was it?”

My wife sighed. “I asked if you would like it if we went by to visit them during the summer vacation.”

“Whatever,” Julia said.

“Oh … I thought you sort of liked that boy of theirs. We didn’t see you for most of the afternoon and evening.”

“Mom …”

“Okay, I’m sorry. I just thought maybe you’d like to see him again. During the vacation.”

“Whatever,” Julia said.

“What about you, Lisa?” my wife asked. She almost had to shout to get Lisa to remove her earbuds. “How would you like that, to drop by and see them during the vacation? They’re renting a house near the beach. A house with a pool.”

Lisa had gone with Alex’s younger brother and a few other kids to a corner of the living room, where they had watched DVDs and played with the PlayStation on a huge plasma screen on the wall. Thomas! Extraordinary that I could remember his name right away. Thomas. Alex and Thomas. Thomas seemed to me to be about Lisa’s age, but Alex was probably a year or so older than Julia. Fourteen or fifteen. He was a fairly good-looking boy with curly blond hair and a voice that was quite deep for his age. In all his movements, both in the way he walked and the way he turned his head to look at you, there was a kind of studied languor, as though he were trying to play a more sluggish, slow-motion version of himself. Thomas was more the ADHD type: boisterous, loud. Glasses and bowls of potato chips were knocked over regularly in the corner by the plasma screen, and the other children roared with laughter at his jokes.

“Yeah, a pool!” Lisa said.

I had spent the first few minutes after our arrival wandering aimlessly around the living room and kitchen, then I strolled out into the yard. There were lots of people I recognized vaguely, without knowing why. A few of my patients were there, too. Most of them were seeing me for the first time in my natural state, probably, in normal clothes and with my hair mussed up, which explained why they looked at me as though they recognized
me
vaguely, too, but couldn’t quite put a name to the face. I made no effort to help them out. I simply nodded and walked on.

Ralph was standing at the barbecue, wearing an apron that
said
I LOVE NY
. He was poking at sausages, flipping hamburgers, and ladling chicken wings onto a platter. “Marc!” He bent down, stuck his arm into a blue cool box, and pulled out a sixteen-ounce can of Jupiler. “And your wife? You did bring your ravishing wife along, I hope?”

He handed me the ice-cold can of beer. I looked at him. I couldn’t help myself: I had to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” he asked. “You’re not going to tell me that you had the bloody gall to come here all alone?”

I looked around the yard, as though trying to find Caroline. But I was looking for someone else. And I found her almost right away. She was standing beside the sliding glass doors I’d come through just a few minutes earlier.

She saw me, too. She waved.

“I’ll go see what she’s up to,” I said.

Before going on, I need to say something about my own looks. I’m no George Clooney. My face would not make me eligible for a supporting role in a hospital series. But I do have the air, or more accurately, the look. The look common to all doctors, high or low. A look—I don’t know how else to put it—that
undresses
. A look that sees the human body for what it is.
That body of yours holds no secrets for us
, our look says.
You can put clothes on it, but underneath them you’re naked
. That’s how we look at people. Not even so much as patients, but as the temporary inhabitants of a body that, without periodic maintenance, could simply break down.

I was standing with Judith in front of the sliding glass doors. Music from the house murmured its way into the yard.
Something South American: salsa. But no one was dancing. Little groups stood around talking. We weren’t conspicuous, Judith and I. We were a little group, too.

“Have you two been living here for long?” I asked.

We were both holding plastic plates, which we had just filled at the buffet in the living room. I had taken mostly cold cuts, French cheese, and things with mayonnaise on them; she had more tomatoes, tuna, and something grayish-green that looked like artichoke leaves but probably wasn’t.

“It used to be my parents’,” Judith said. “Ralph and I lived on a houseboat for a few years. That was fun, romantic, whatever you want to call it, but when the boys came along, it was only small and cramped. Plus all that water around with two little children … We were so ready for something else. We were completely tired of bobbing up and down on that houseboat.”

Strictly speaking, she hadn’t said anything funny, but I laughed anyway. I knew from experience that this was how it worked: The sooner you laugh during a conversation with a woman, the better. They’re not used to it, women, to making people laugh. They think they’re not funny. They’re right, usually.

“And your parents …?” I allowed the question to hang in the air, at the same time describing a little circle above my plate with my plastic fork.
Within the plate:
It could only mean that I was asking if her parents were still among us. Among the living.

“My father died a few years ago. My mother felt like the house was too big for her, so she moved to an apartment downtown. I have a brother who lives in Canada. He didn’t mind us getting the house.”

“And does that feel strange?” I asked, gesturing with the
fork more broadly.
Outside
the plate. “Is it strange, living in the house where you grew up? I mean, it must be like going back in time. To when you were a girl.”

When I said the word
girl
, I lowered my gaze a bit. To look at her mouth. Her mouth, chewing on a lettuce leaf. I gazed unambiguously, the way a man might look at a woman’s mouth. But also the way a doctor does. With the look.
Don’t tell me about mouths
, the look said.
Mouths hold no secrets for us, either
.

“It was, at first,” Judith said. “At first it was kind of weird. It was like my parents still lived here. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find them around somewhere—in the bathroom, in the kitchen, here in the yard. My father more than my mother, actually. I mean, my mother comes here all the time, of course, so it’s different. But we had the place redone pretty quickly. Knocked down a few walls, joined a few rooms, put in a new kitchen, that kind of thing. Then that feeling disappeared. Never completely, but still.”

A mouth is a mechanism. An instrument. A mouth inhales oxygen. It chews food and swallows it. It tastes, it senses whether something is too hot or too cold. By now I was looking Judith straight in the eye again. And I kept looking at her while I thought those things about her mouth. A look says more than words alone. That’s a cliché, of course. But a cliché also says more than words alone.

“And your own room?” I said. “I mean, your old bedroom, back when you were a girl? Did you knock down a wall there, too?”

When I said the words “your own room,” I squinted and raised my eyes, as though looking up at the upper floors of the house. It was an invitation. An invitation to have her show
me her old bedroom. Right now, or later in the afternoon. In her old bedroom we would look at pictures together. Old pictures, stuck into a photo album. Sitting on the edge of the single bed that had been hers when she was a girl. Judith on the swings. In a swimming pool. Posing for the school photographer on the playground with her classmates. At the right moment I would take the photo album out of her hands and press her gently back onto the bed. She would resist, but only for appearance’s sake. Giggling, she would place both hands against my chest and try to push me away. But the fantasy would win out. It was an old fantasy, as old as the girl’s bedroom itself. The doctor pays a house call. The doctor takes your temperature. The doctor places a hand on your forehead. The doctor sends the worried parents away and remains sitting for a moment on the edge of your bed.

“No,” Judith said. “My old room is Thomas’s room now. He painted the walls himself. Red and black. And, well, if you really want to know, the walls used to be purple and pink.”

“And you had a bed with lots of pink and purple pillows and furry stuffed animals,” I said. “And a poster of”—I was taking a gamble; a rock star or movie idol was too risky, too dated—“a baby seal,” I said. “A cute little baby seal.”

In addition to my looks, I should now also say something about my character. I’m more charming than most men. On those lists of crucial male characteristics you see in the women’s magazines, the majority of women vote for “good sense of humor.” I used to think that was a lie. A lie to cover up the fact that when it comes right down to it, they would always go for George Clooney or Brad Pitt first. Now, though, I know better. By “good sense of humor,” women don’t mean that they want
to be bent over double with laughter all the time at the jokes of some cretin. They mean something else. They mean that a man should be “charming.” Not funny. Charming. Deep in their hearts, all women are afraid that in the long run they will get bored with the overly handsome men of this world. That such men spend so much time in front of the mirror that they know how good they look. That they don’t need to make any real effort. Women on tap. But not long after the honeymoon, they run out of things to talk about. Boredom yawns. And it
is
tiring, spending all day around a man who only admires himself in the mirror. Day in, day out. Time becomes a long, straight road through a beautiful but tedious landscape. An unchanging landscape.

“You’re warm,” said Judith.

“A horse. No, a pony. You read horse books.”

“Yes, sometimes I read horse books. But there wasn’t a horse on that poster. Not a pony, either.”

“Daddy …” I felt a hand on my elbow and turned to look. There stood Julia with the languid boy who had shaken my hand earlier but who I had already forgotten was named Alex. Standing slightly behind them were two other boys and two girls. “Can we go get ice cream?” she asked. “It’s really close.”

In terms of timing it was both a good and a bad moment. There was a chance that the slight sultry edge to our—on the surface—innocent conversation about teenage bedrooms, baby seal posters, and horse books might be lost for good. On the other hand, here I stood with my thirteen-year-old daughter, living proof that this charming man—me—was capable of siring a child. And not just any child, but a dreamy-eyed blonde who threw fifteen-year-old boys’ hormones into overdrive the
moment they saw her. I won’t try to deny it: I take pleasure in being with my daughters in places where everyone can see us together. At a sidewalk café, in a department store, on the beach. People look. I
see
them looking. I also see what they’re thinking. Holy Christ, didn’t those children turn out well! they all think. What a
lovely
pair of girls! The next instant they’re thinking about their own children. Their children who didn’t turn out quite as well. They become jealous. I feel their begrudging looks. They start searching for defects: teeth that aren’t completely straight, a skin disorder, a shrill voice. But they can’t find any. Then they get angry. They become angry with the father who has had better luck. Biology is a force to be reckoned with. An ugly child is a child you love with all your heart and soul, too. But it’s different. You’re pleased with your third-floor walk-up, also, until someone invites you over to dinner at a house with a pool in the garden.

“Where?” I ask as calmly as possible. “Where are you going to get ice cream?”

I look at the slow boy the way all fathers look at boys who want to go to buy ice cream with their daughters. If you so much as lay a finger on her, you’re dead. On the other hand, there is also a voice that whispers that you need to let her go. There is a point at which the protective father needs to step back, in the interests of the propagation of the species. That, too, is biology.

“It’s really close,” Judith said. “They only have to cross one busy street to get there, but there are lights.”

I looked at her. I fought back the urge to say “My daughter is thirteen, love, she already cycles to school on her own.” I pretended to think about it. To relent. A nice, worried father. But above all a charming father.

“Okay,” I said, turning to the boy. “Just be sure to bring her back in one piece.”

Then we were alone again, Judith and I. But indeed, the moment was over. It would have been a mistake to try to lead the conversation back to seal posters and horse books. To the teenage bedroom. As a man, it would give me away immediately. Apparently he’s run out of things to talk about, the woman thinks, and she comes up with an excuse to walk away. “Oh, sorry, I’ve got a cake in the oven.”

I looked at her. I held her gaze; that’s more like it. I had seen how Judith had looked at my daughter. Her look, too, was as old as the world itself.
A good match
, her eyes said.
A good match for my son
. And now we were looking at each other. I searched for the right words, but my eyes told her already. Judith had no need to be jealous or angry with me. Her son, too, had turned out well. He, too, was a good match. By letting Julia go with him so easily, I had only confirmed what everyone could see with their own eyes. Ninety percent of all women find a married man more attractive than a single man, my professor of medical biology, Aaron Herzl, had taught us back then. A man who already has someone. A man who is married, preferably with children, has already delivered proof. That he can do it. Free-ranging single men are like a house that has been empty too long. There must be something fishy about that house, the woman thinks. Up for sale for six months and it’s still vacant.

That’s the way Judith looked at me now. As a married man. The message was clear. Our children had turned out well. We had, independently, enhanced the species by bringing into the world well-turned-out children who represented solid market value. Our children would never remain vacant.

“Does he already have a girlfriend?” I asked.

Suddenly there was a blush on Judith’s cheeks. She didn’t turn a bright red, but it was unmistakably a blush.