His father sat on the edge of the bed.
“So is it, like, fatal?” Charlie asked.
“Don’t be silly. Nothing like that.”
“Do I have to stop running?”
“For now. The blood will go away and soon you’ll be like new. I think so anyway. I’ll give you money for sneakers, but you’ll take a break from running, and once your urine is normal, you can try running in shoes. Your kidneys are no problem; I checked with the doctor in New Bedford. And he will look into the diagnosis to make sure, and so will the chief of urology at Columbia. You’ll need to keep giving samples. Now”—his father made a clucking noise—“get up for the clambake. And put on some shoes. I promised Mummy.”
Charlie burrowed down. “Is Rusty there?”
“Of course.”
“Who else?”
“Everyone.”
Charlie groaned. “That’s too much.”
His father sat on the edge of the bed and reached toward him as he lay inside the sleeping bag, then withdrew his hand. He looked tired; he looked old.
“Everybody has to eat,” his father said.
MAKING THEIR WAY DOWN THE
sandy driveway, they could hear voices at the Yacht Club before they could see people. Charlie followed his father down the hill, past the bicycle rack and peeling changing rooms, onto the deck, which had gotten damaged in a winter storm and was still missing a few slats of wood. There were no yachts at the Yacht Club and never had been; there were no boats at all, the name so familiar that no one gave it any thought, except when a newcomer asked. Every year Gaga hosted the Fourth of July clambake, and each year more and more people came: renters; new girlfriends and boyfriends, new babies; the Pratts, who’d bought land from the Stricklands; plus the regulars. Rusty’s mother was there but not his father; the divorce had been finalized the summer before, but it still felt wrong to Charlie to extract Warren (who’d brought them contraband fireworks, who’d been president of the Point Association for five years) from the Childs clan. Next year I think I’ll limit it to family, Gaga said each year, but she never did.
Charlie went down to the beach for some steamers and a beer, at which point he told Rusty about soldier’s marching disease, thinking that it would make a good story, though Rusty didn’t seem to find the diagnosis particularly funny.
“That’s good you’re okay,” he said instead.
It was five o’clock but the air was warm still and stirred by an even warmer wind. Holly went swimming in a crocheted bikini with her friend from college, who wore a bathing suit out of another time—a pair of navy blue boyish trunks and blue-and-white-striped top. As Charlie watched, the two girls climbed out of the water and started back down the long dock. The roommate was taller than Holly and had cropped blond hair, a long torso and loping gait, and as she came down the dock she stopped and turned to face the sea. Then she raised her arms to shoulder height and extended them straight out, and as she did, a band of pale skin appeared between her bathing trunks and top. Holly, ahead of her friend, turned and said something, breaking the moment (
Don’t
, Charlie thought), and the girl dropped her arms and turned toward shore.
Rusty drew in his breath, then exhaled. “Howdy Doody, check her out. A siren from the sea.”
“So go for her,” Charlie said. The summer before, Rusty and Holly had slept together once when they were drunk. Though they weren’t technically related, it had seemed to Charlie like incest (which he’d told them) and made him wild with jealousy (which he’d not). This girl was a stranger on whom he had no claim, nor any capacity to lure.
“Right.” Rusty shook his head. “She’s like a foot taller than me.”
“So? You make up in charm what you lack in height.”
Rusty cuffed him on the side of his head. “And you make up in height what you lack in charm, Bozo. Has it ever occurred to you that I’ve never been with a girl even an inch taller? Not”—he threw a stone, watched it skip—“once. You go for her,” he added generously. “It could be just what the doctor ordered.”
In his nineteen years, Charlie had made out with exactly three girls—two in high school and one in college—but he’d emerged from the Summer of Love still a virgin and remained, several years later, skittish about the whole thing, though he’d suffered staggering, painful crushes for years and performed inventive sex acts in his mind with a wide range of girls and women, including several of his friends’ mothers, a few of his cousins, and most of his sister’s friends. Still, his deepest love, he liked to maintain, had been for Dolly, a pony Gaga and Grampa got when he was six and who had died a few years later of a perforated ulcer. His love for Dolly was a joke and not a joke; he still remembered draping himself along the solid length of the pony’s back, lowering his face into her coarse mane, cupping her chin to inhale her heated, grassy breath. Everyone had teased him, but Charlie hadn’t cared. When they stood face to face, Dolly’s eyes would look at him with an alert, liquid patience, filled with waiting and (he knew it then and still believed it now) a pointed, particularized love. And because Dolly was a pony, not a
Homo sapiens
, he did not have to look away.
“They’re
coming
,” he said now between gritted teeth, and there they were, Holly in a sweatshirt over her bathing suit, her friend in a flannel shirt, the two of them crouching down—
This is my friend Melanie from college
—and the girl was looking at him closely: Exhibit B, Holly’s Loony Bin Cousin, to go with Exhibit A, Holly’s Loony Bin Mother, who almost never came to Ashaunt anymore but spent her summers traveling in Europe with her husband and, when they could be dragged along, Holly and Phil (who mostly stayed here, with a maid or grandparents or, more and more, alone). And Exhibit C, Rusty, who was not an exhibit at all, just a nice guy asking questions, conversing, honing in; so much for being too short, so much for just what the doctor ordered.
Charlie started down the beach, then pivoted, walking to the Yacht Club porch; somehow he found himself there, next to Gaga, between Gaga and his mother, who were sipping martinis and balancing plates on their knees.
“Charlie.” Gaga smiled. “I’m glad you came. Get some food, why don’t you?”
“I already did.”
“Get some more. I always order too much. I depend on you boys to help me get rid of it.” She looked at his mother. “You’re right—he’s awfully thin. Are you eating enough, Charlie?”
He nodded. They were all thin, his family: his father, his mother, his siblings, straw people (
I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in
). “I eat plenty.”
His mother leaned toward him. “Holly’s friend seems nice. And interesting. She told me she’s studying art history. Why don’t you go talk to her? You don’t have to waste your time with us.”
He gave her a baleful look. “I’m not wasting my time.”
“That’s nice of you to say so.” His mother frowned.
“All she means,” said Gaga, “is that we wouldn’t be insulted if you’d rather spend your time with a pretty college girl.”
Charlie reached to take a littleneck from his mother’s plate.
“You’re not wearing shoes!” she cried. “Didn’t Daddy talk to you? I sent him—”
“Shhh,” Charlie interrupted. “He did. He talked to me. Okay?” The truth was, he’d forgotten to wear shoes, and his father hadn’t noticed. They were alike that way—they didn’t mean to, exactly; they just forgot. “My shoes give me blisters,” he said. In fact, he had no real shoes at the moment, just flip-flops. In Cleveland he’d worn ratty sandals through most of the winter, switching to sneakers only when it was bitingly cold.
“
Blisters?
” said his mother loudly. “For god’s sakes, Charlie. You have bloody urine! You could damage your kidneys!”
Several people turned, and Charlie went hot with shame.
“Helen,” Gaga said. “Not now, dearie. Discuss it later, why don’t you?”
“Later, Mummy? He has blood in his urine from going barefoot, and here he is, barefoot! Of all the asinine things! André was supposed to get him to wear shoes. Where is he? For god’s sake. I am truly
furious
. André!”
She strode off the dock, drink in hand. In the distance, his father was walking with Percy along the curve of shore that led to Windy Point, getting smaller and smaller.
“Go put on shoes, Charlie,” his grandmother told him. “Before she comes back. For the sake of my party. For my sake. Be a good boy.”
“It can’t do any harm unless I’m running. And I’m
nineteen
,” he muttered. “Not a boy.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “You are, aren’t you? I was married at your age. I wish I’d gone to college; I envy you that. Still, I don’t regret one moment of my life.”
“You just said you regretted it. What’s wrong with regretting?”
Gaga stood, her eyes glittering, her color high. She scanned the group. “Why, it’s a colossal waste of time!”
It was her clambake. She would have fun. Everyone would have fun. Charlie had a rare moment of sympathy for his mother, who was a storehouse of conflicting regrets, always considering the path not taken: to have been a historian with a university appointment, to have moved abroad, to have lived in the city or spent all year on Ashaunt. To have sold the Red House (which—minor sticking point—Gaga owned) and bought a house in a summer place where she knew nobody and could reinvent herself. To have had another child (though they all knew she’d had an abortion after Percy). To have been a world traveler, or (her family’s teasing masked the sting they felt) a nun. “I wish I’d never set foot in Switzerland!” she’d once screamed at his father during one of their more toxic fights. And another time, when she was feeling crowded by her parents, “Why didn’t we just stay in Lausanne?” (She had, apparently, refused to.) Her outbursts were followed by either periods of long silence or by compensatory chatter about how lucky she was, how lucky they all were: family was everything, the problem was having too
many
choices, too
much
money, everyone should have such problems, and this would eventually feed her back into another fantasy: of a plain and modest life, stripped bare, like the Amish who had no buttons or zippers, no TV, not even faces on their dolls. She’d visited a community once; the women made quilts, the men made maple syrup, the children seemed happy and were exquisitely well-behaved, but in the most natural way.
His parents were walking back down the beach together. They had almost split up several times over the past decade. There may have been affairs. Their fights—on the occasions that she pushed him past his breaking point—were monumental, loud and fierce, sometimes in French, and had no clear root that Charlie could see except that they seemed largely to be about her
happiness
, her
bonheur
, and his inability to create it for her, or to be what she wanted him to be, a Man of Importance (he was highly respected at work; he’d won more than one award for his research; he published papers; he was nearly always kind, if sometimes distant.
Mais qu’est-ce que tu veux, Helen? Je n’en peux plus!
).
Still, something kept his parents together, just as something made his mother continue to live half an hour from her parents and five minutes from Jane in Bernardsville and return, each and every summer, to Ashaunt. Was it habit, or obligation, or something else—a tugging, chafing, necessary love? His parents had met at the swimming pool in Lausanne when she was a student, he a young doctor. She had challenged him to a race; she had won. It was not hard to imagine—the spark in her eyes; the surprise, and then the spark ignited, in his. The kick-off, the parallel swim, Helen pulling ahead. Did he let her win? She was an excellent swimmer, but he was stronger, bigger. The meeting up again, wet and breathless, at the far end of the pool. Her nearly fluent French. Now, as they came nearer, Charlie could see his mother speak close to his father’s ear. Then she looked up and caught Charlie’s eye.
“
La-voilà, Monsieur Contraire!
” she called, but she was laughing, dropping his father’s arm, heading for the drinks. Charlie turned to watch her go. In her summer skirt she looked suddenly radiant, the late afternoon sun striping her skin, her legs lean and agile on the rocks. She was full of fire; she always had been. As girls, she and Dossy had kidnapped a neighbor’s baby and held her hostage in the attic until Bea thought she heard a cat and found the child. At Parents Day at Brearley, she’d stuffed stockings and shoes with newspaper and set them up in the toilet stalls to make each stall look occupied. She was, for all her faults, rarely boring, never bored. For an instant, it occurred to Charlie that one day—how impossible—she would die.
“You.” His father poked him. “Get with zee program, Cat. Go find your shoes.”
His parents were, Charlie realized, tipsy, maybe even blitzed. “Cat?” He snorted.
“Go,” said his father. “Or she may toss me to the sharks!”
CHARLIE LEFT THE CLAMBAKE, WANDERED
up to the road, found some mildewed huaraches in a closet in the Red House. He stayed away for a while, but wherever he was, he could hear the voices on the shore, and eventually he returned to the beach, sat down again, barefoot, shoes at the base of the rock. By then the sun had set. Someone had started a bonfire. The adults had left with the littlest kids. A keg had appeared, and a guitar. He got another beer, returned to his rock. The beer was cold and malty, and the edges of things, soaked in dusk and alcohol, had turned pleasantly soft. He hadn’t had a drink all summer, and while some piece of him wondered if the alcohol might make him crack again or even return him to himself, he managed, with surprisingly little trouble, to set the thoughts aside. Percy and the younger cousins were gathering driftwood and hauling it back to the fire, along with buoys, lobster traps and washed-up plastic bottles, which they arranged busily, with no apparent logic, on the beach.
Holly made her way over to him. “Why’d you take off like that, Charlie? It was rude. Melanie wanted to meet you, and in the middle of my introducing you, you just bolt!”