Summerlong (22 page)

He is somewhere else. He is, at that moment, breaking into his foreclosed house, which is three blocks from the heat wave party. Holding on to his hips as he shimmies open the side door is ABC. They are drunk, having done shots for each round on the slip and slide, and then they discovered that Charlie and Claire were nowhere to be found. They’d looked everywhere, finding at least three copulating couples in their exhaustive search. They left when the cops arrived.

They are also pretty fucking stoned, having smoked a joint with Jean-Claude in the iced-down kiddie pool. Their clothes are soaked. ABC’s strapless dress is a problem. It keeps coming off under the weight of the water. She holds an arm pressed over her breasts to keep them covered.

Inside, they keep the lights off and she holds his hand as he leads her through the dark and up the stairs.

“I loved this house,” he says.

Inside the house, the detritus of a domestic life. Things they left behind. Some old bottles of sauces in the pantry, newspapers and magazines on the floor, bottle caps and rolls of paper towels and cleaning supplies. An old towel on the floor in the hallway.

“We didn’t leave the place spotless,” Don says as he kicks a shoe box out of the way. Finally, they come to the master bedroom, empty, and then they go to the bathroom. The door is shut and
then, since that room has no windows, Don flips on the light and the exhaust fan whirs to life.

“Ha!” Don says. “They haven’t cut the power!”

“I have to pee,” ABC says, and ducks into the small water closet. There’s a half roll of toilet paper and some air freshener on the toilet, a half-burned scented candle on the floor. As she pees, she calls from it, “Isn’t this really breaking and entering?”

“I don’t care,” Don says. “It’s my house. If the cops come, tell them I lied to you.”

Out of the water closet now, in the yellow bathroom light, ABC sees the two of them in the mirror. They look horrible. She looks away from it. Her makeup is smudged and her hair is wet and frizzed and the dress is a limp raggedy secondhand garment from the eighties. She remembers how Don Lowry had found her under the sycamore and how it is, in the strangest of ways, that Don Lowry has led her to Philly in the spirit world, that Don Lowry will somehow be the one to help her earthly suffering, and set her free in some strange realm. Don Lowry is a good man; he doesn’t deserve what is happening to him. He found her when she needed to be found. She wants to tell him this. She feels unhinged, she feels insane. She wants to cry and laugh and scream all at once.

What was in that joint?

Don turns on the water in the massive Jacuzzi. “Ha!” he says. “Ha! They haven’t cut the water yet! Ha!”

And then he adds, “I loved this fucking Jacuzzi. I loved this fucking bathroom.”

“I bet!” she says.

“I loved fucking in this fucking bathroom,” Don says.

As the tub fills, Don begins to undress. ABC lights the scented candle she’s found and then finds another on the sink. She finds the discarded bath towel in the hallway. She watches him hang his shirt on a hook, and then watches him slide off his pants and hang those too, as if he still lives here. As if tomorrow
morning he will wake up and get ready for work. His boxers, red plaid, he hangs on the empty towel rack, and the shoes and socks he neatly places beneath the rack. He looks good. He looks like a man who has some fight left in him, a lot of fight. ABC thinks that Don Lowry must have done this a million times. He stands there watching the water, thickening, already getting hard. How do you not notice that, no matter what your intentions are?

“We don’t really have any more towels,” he says. “On account of the foreclosure.”

And then he starts to laugh.

“Claire never understood the Jacuzzi,” he says. And then, “I tried to talk to her tonight. She gave me the silent treatment. My idea had been to break in here with her. To tell her about the money I have from Ruth, about how we could start over, but . . . How do you just decide you don’t want to be married anymore? How do you fall out of love like that? That fast?”

ABC reaches behind her, unzips her soaked dress, and drops it to the floor with a thwack. She puts her hands on her breasts.

Don locks the door of the bathroom.

“Just in case,” he says.

She bends down and picks up her dress, knowing he is watching her body, looking at her ass in the thong she is wearing. She hangs the dress on a hook. She turns and faces him. She goes toward him.

Looking in his eyes, she grazes the tip of his penis lightly with her fingertips. It is pointing up now, right toward her breasts. He shudders at her touch. She drops her arm. “Let’s get in,” she whispers in his ear.

They enter the tub at opposite ends. Don sits down immediately.

ABC steps in, wetting her body first with her hands, deliberately, slowly, torturing him like she was some
Maxim
model in a shitty photo shoot, playing all the cheesy slow-motion breast-washing
cards. She thinks of Philly laughing, but then forces that out of her brain.

And then she lowers herself fully into the water.

Don Lowry feels like he might be sick or have a small stroke.

He feels her foot move up his leg and touch him under the surface of the water.

When she resurfaces, she says, “Do you want to smoke up some more first?”

“No. No, I’m good,” he says.

But Don Lowry is lying. He is not good. He has never once cheated on Claire, not since their first kiss on Mac field when he was a freshman in college. He’s come close before: there was a woman at a real estate convention in Baltimore, a woman who leaned into him at the bar, who kissed him in the hotel elevator, followed him back to his room, had even started to undress. And then he had told her no, that he couldn’t, and the woman stayed in his room until three in the morning, drinking nine-dollar beers from the honor bar, sitting in her black panties and white bra, and telling him that he should leave his wife.

But he hasn’t cheated. Has Claire? He doesn’t actually know.

He doesn’t want to know. He wants to know. If the marriage was really done, did it even matter?

He is so aroused, it is hard to think about Claire anymore, but yet he does, even now, even after ABC has pressed herself up to the edge of the tub and sits naked across from him. The water is still filling the tub. It is too low to turn on the obscuring foam bubbles of the jets. He leans back in the enormous tub and lets his hips float upward, his erection breaking the surface of the water.

“Thar she blows!” ABC says, and splashes the water at him with her toe. She rubs water on her legs. “You’re so serious all of a sudden, Don Lowry! This is supposed to be fun.”

She is very drunk and stoned and still feels a ripped kind of
sadness at the center of her being that she has to push back down over and over. Seeing Don Lowry naked in front of her makes her miss Philly more than she ever has in her life.

“Has my wife fucked Charlie Gulliver?” Don says.

ABC looks at him.

“What?”

“Has Claire . . . Have she and Charlie . . .”

“Not yet,” ABC says. “Not to my knowledge. Don’t think about that.”

ABC flips her legs, splashing him, and lowers herself down into the water, wetting her hair, her breasts submerged by the bubbles that rise to the surface when Don Lowry finally turns on the jets.

“Don’t think about anything,” she says as Don Lowry closes his eyes.

They go upstairs to the master bedroom, where Claire usually sleeps on a double sleeping bag that rests atop an inflatable bed. It is the first time she’s had Charlie up there with her; it is the first time they have been without children inside this house.

She has all the windows open and all the lights in the house are off and they don’t turn any of them on. She turns the ceiling fan to high and the air whips around them. They barely speak to each other. The beers are empty again and Charlie gets down on the sleeping bag, puts his hands behind his head, and looks up at Claire and then up at the skylight.

“This should be the perfect view,” Charlie says. “My parents’ bed used to be right here. I remember they liked to watch summer storms from here and I used to lie between them and my father would smell of beer and my mother of wine and I would feel them falling asleep, and I know now, they were drunk, of course, but I can remember that they also held me; it’s as if we all, the three of us, couldn’t be close enough no matter what.”

Claire gets on the sleeping bag next to Charlie.

They lie in silence for a moment.

“Were we just waiting for this? A night when the children were gone? Is this what we want? Or is this just an impulse?”

“I don’t see a difference,” Charlie says. “You can want an impulse.”

In silence, they look at the skylight. Heat lightning flickers in the distance, but there will be no storm. The rain never comes. It refuses.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” she says.

“Let me guess. You’re married,” Charlie says. “I fucking knew it!”

She laughs, but only for a second. “Shut up and listen. Look, I recognize you. I didn’t think I did, but I do. You were in
Uncle Vanya
, at the high school, weren’t you? Years ago?”

“Yeah,” he says. “It was awful. Terrible production. High-schoolers shouldn’t do Chekhov.”

“I was so impressed by the ambition. We had just moved back to Grinnell, a few months before that. And I remember thinking, ‘Wow, what a big stretch for a rural high school play.’”

“I got the role because I was forty pounds overweight, and in the right waistcoat I looked like a middle-aged Russian doctor.”

“I remember, Charlie. You did look different. And I remember that Don stayed with the kids—Bryan and Wendy were little then, Wendy only a baby—so I could go see it. I was so curious. I thought I would hate it.”

“You liked it?”

“So much. I liked you. I was like, who is this kid? Who is this kid who already knows how to play a role so heavy with bitterness, with regret?”

“I had on that gray wig. It was a terrible wig.”

“You were good, Charlie. I was moved by it.”

“You know what line I remember? What still stays with me?”

“I can’t imagine,” she says.

He clears his throat and, shirtless still, springs to his feet, and bellows in the overemphatic manner he’d had as a teenage thespian: “‘Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he’s been given. But up to now, he hasn’t been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wildlife’s become extinct, and the climate’s ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.’”

“Bravo!” Claire says. She claps wildly.

“Chekhov had global warming figured out a century before the rest of us,” Charlie says. “Jesus. Poor Vanya. You know?”

Claire nods. “I haven’t spoken to anybody about Chekhov in a long time,” she says. “I loved Chekhov, in college. So did Don. Don and I read all of Chekhov. He’d read the stories aloud to me, in bed. We had a teacher who got us obsessed with Chekhov. Here at Grinnell. Jesus, I can’t even remember her name.”

It’s hard to picture Don and Claire so young, lying in bed, half dressed, reading to each other.

“So you remember me!” Charlie says. “Hallelujah! So I was here? My life isn’t some dream. Do you know a lot of people in this town act like they’ve never seen me before in their life?”

“Like
Newhart
?” she says, laughing. “‘It was all a dream!’”

“What?”

“The TV show. In the last episode he wakes up and it was all a dream—oh, Christ, you’re too young, aren’t you?”

“I guess so. I’ve never seen it. It’s called
Newhart
?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I used to watch it. My parents were friends with some of the actors.”

“Why are we talking about Bob Newhart?” Charlie says, and goes to touch her hip. “Weren’t we about to have sex?”

But Claire stands up and goes over to the window that looks out toward the yard. The room is dark but not so dark. When she turns around she sees that Charlie is standing perfectly still in the middle of the room, staring at her. There is enough light from the moon and the lights of campus that she can make eye contact with him. Then she turns and looks out the window again. If anyone is in the yard, will they see her?

“Come here,” she says.

He comes up behind her and she presses against the glass of the window. She pushes back into him, feels him through his trunks again, pressing into the small of her back, and then she takes his hands and puts them on her breasts.

She stops then, turns around. “Slide the straps from my shoulders,” she says. “Don’t talk.”

He does as he is told.

She lifts his hands to her breasts, which feels electrifyingly odd, to feel how another man’s hands fit onto her body like that, different, completely different from Don’s hands though really so similar somehow. It’s all just hands and mouths and hips, in the end. Thickening flesh, hardening, softening. All biology. This she must believe if she is to keep going.

He begins to untie his trunks, but she stops him. “Not yet,” she says. “Pull this off,” she says. “Pull off my suit first.”

He slowly begins to unroll the damp, white fabric.

“Faster. Rip it down.”

He does, and he is on his knees then, his face in front of her, she feels his breath on her, and then her own hand slides between her legs and she feels her body opening to him, almost liquefying at her own touch. His mouth on her for a moment.

“Stand up,” she says.

Charlie stands and he moves his hands down her sides, down her hips, and when she feels him try to go lower, she says, “No.”

She pulls down his trunks, then turns her back to him and puts her hands against the window.

“Like this,” she says.

Soon, she is moaning louder than she has moaned in many years, free from children in another room or the unsaid expectations of a longtime lover, free in a way she’s never quite been able to imagine, but now she won’t stop it, can’t, and his hands on her, bigger, more clumsy than she imagined, and it is in this way that she shudders and climaxes while pounding a fist against the drywall and grabbing at him with the other hand.

Charlie collapses to the makeshift bed after this. She wraps herself in a towel, leaves the room, and hears him call her name but ignores it. She goes outside, across the yard, to the study, alone. Sometimes, after sex, she has this terrible need to be alone. It always hurt Don’s feelings, but, as she had told him, it wasn’t him, it was her, and now she has that feeling again, with a different man.

She drinks a shot of whiskey from the bottle of Maker’s Mark
Charlie keeps on his desk, and then comes out to the pool deck. She waves up to the bedroom window, and for a brief moment, the light goes on, and she sees Charlie there, naked. He waves her up, motioning for her to come back upstairs. Youth, she thinks. She thought he’d be asleep

He flips the light back off. She drops her towel and walks across the deck. The privacy fence will probably hide her from the neighbors, but in her euphoric drunken postorgasm haze, she doesn’t really care. She dives into the pool even though the pool lights are on and swims. Floating on her back, she looks up to the bedroom window. The light is on again, and she sees Charlie, watching her from the upstairs window, working his own hand on himself. Somebody is going to call the cops if they see him, she thinks. He stops and motions for her to come back inside.

Youth, she thinks.

She swims to the bottom of the deep end and she screams.

ABC doesn’t really want to have sex with Don Lowry. She wants to make love to Philly, but she is drunk and mad and aching. She trusts Don and she also likes him, likes being near him, likes the physicality of their friendship, the dozing in the hammock, the ease she feels with her body around him, knowing he worships it. Did she really believe he would lead her to Philly? Does she really believe that now? It seems so impossible and yet, well—how random a joke is that? Why would Philly say that Don Lowry would come for her?

And now he is here in the bathtub, a sad man, and empty, and she understands his woundedness. And he’s hard too, his dick smooth and straight up in the water. Some people are born that way—constantly wavering between overwhelming lust and deep, inexplicable sorrow. They walk around like that. So beautifully fucked up, Philly would say. Some people, she used to say, are only happy when they’re fucking. The rest of their lives they walk
around missing it. She would appreciate Don. Maybe she’s really there, inside him?

Or maybe Philly would say, “Oh, how can you get turned on by some old guy’s pecker?”

ABC thinks of Philly and feels her desire for Don deflating.

“How did this happen to my life?” Don says.

“Nobody ever knows the answer to that kind of question,” ABC says.

Don looks surprised.

She goes toward him so that she is sitting next to him.

“I have been faithful to her my whole life. And she is the only woman I’ve ever—”

“Seriously?” ABC says, suddenly, almost too fast. “The only woman you’ve had sex with?”

“I met her my freshman year in college,” Don says.

She reaches under the water and finds him, already softening, but she grips him and in a moment he is hard again.

“I didn’t come to that party tonight for this,” he says. “In fact, I had planned to break in here with Claire.”

“It’s okay. It’s all okay.”

“I mean I think about you. All the time, some days. But I never expected this. I loved being near you in a way that has never made any sense.”

“Stop talking, Don,” she says.

“I need to tell you something,” he says.

“Shh. No talking. Let’s just do something instead of talking, Don.”

She takes his hand and pulls it up over the surface of the water, and she reaches over to the abandoned bath caddy and pulls a bottle of almond oil from it, nearly empty, but there’s enough. She pours some in his hand, and she tells him to sit on the edge of the bathtub. He does. She leads his oiled hand to his cock. He holds it up, smooth and straight and pulsing a bit. She grazes it with her mouth and he moans. Then she moves across the tub, to
the other side. She slowly gets out of the tub. She begins to rub oil on her legs, up over her belly, on her arms and breasts. Don moves his hand up and down and she only watches him from the corner of her eye. She does not look at him directly. But it is not long before she knows he is done, she hears him sputter into the water, nearly choking on a stifled moan. Then Don Lowry sinks back into the tub.

She shuts the light off in the bathroom and opens the door and goes out into the plush carpet of the bedroom and lies down there in the dark, exhausted, her head spinning, her mouth hot and dry. And soon, she hears the tub draining, the substantial gurgle of it, and before she knows where Don is or what he is doing, she is in a dream, and then she sees in the distance what she has long wanted to see: Philly, emerging from a lake again, and the lake was . . .