Summerlong: A Novel Part 10

"Not my problem if she wants to sleep with me."

"You're sure she does?"

"That's one unhappy woman," Charlie says. "I knew it the moment I met her. I can make her happy."

"Is that how you felt about Ophelia?"

"Is it weird that I like to make sad women happy?"

"Is it weird that nothing else makes you happy?" ABC says.

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to say it."

"You're the strangest woman I've ever met."

"That's a good line. How often do you use that?" ABC says.

He smiles. The man is pretty, she thinks. He can get away with anything he wants. She imagines that Ophelia was the first woman he couldn't make fall in love with him and that it nearly destroyed him.

"Can I see the study?" ABC says.

"I haven't looked through anything yet," he says. "I can't make myself."

"I'll do it with you then," she says. "I can help you get started."

He shows her to the back door and then leads her through the yard to the small structure. They open the door, where the AC is running and a cool blast of air comes at them from amid the stacks and the boxes and the books. The ma.s.s of printed matter, wobbly and foreboding, heaps of intellectual detritus, a silo of sundry papers which may or may not be of any interest to anyone.

She looks at Charlie, who has been picking at a mosquito bite on his arm. ABC notes a small speck of blood there and she says, "Look, I was one of your dad's best students. I can help. Do you want to get started tonight?"

"My arms feel so heavy," Charlie says. "My hands feel like stone. I can't explain it. Every time I walk in here, I feel so weak."

"You can sit on the desk and watch me read the files," she says. "Drink beer and I'll guide you through it, okay?"

"I feel like my f.u.c.king arms are going to fall off," he says.

Without knowing exactly why she is doing it, without knowing why she suddenly so badly wants to do it, she goes up behind Charlie and leans into his back, puts her arms around his waist. An embrace. She moves her hands down his stomach, then moves her hands to his belt and undoes it.

"Has it been a long time for you?" she says.

"Mmm-hmm."

"Me too," ABC says. She undoes his fly.

"We just need to do something today," she says. "That doesn't involve talking or thinking or crying."

She leads him, by his belt, to the desk, and she knocks all of the stacks of papers and books and even the pencil holder and sharpener to the floor. "We just need to keep busy."

Then she leans back on the desk and reaches behind her neck, almost as if she is posing for a painting, and then, after a long minute, she says, "There's a knot in my strap," and Charlie comes up above her, presses himself against her, puts his arms around her neck, and with a tug, he undoes the stuck string and pulls down her dress.

She's flooded with desire now, the unmistakable aching rush of someone who hasn't been physical for a long time. She's ready to lose herself in this, and, just as she unzips Charlie, she thinks too that maybe she is doing this for Don Lowry.

Claire decides, late that lingering afternoon, that whoever had come up with the expression "a day at the beach" to signify relaxation and ease had not been a parent. They had not had to shout at a sulking twelve-year-old boy about the reason he could not walk home by himself, nor had they tended to a panicked ten-year-old girl who shrieked whenever a wasp was spotted in the general vicinity. Don had had a good time, in the one hour he was present: he was the man to call on for things like waterslides, snack bar runs, games of water basketball with twenty neighborhood kids screaming at him and leaping at him as he groaned like a monster. If it has to do with fun, particularly with fun that required some kind of specialized equipment or horseplay, he can do it. He could always rise (briefly-an hour or two at most) to such occasions no matter how stressed out he was, how sullen his mood. Guilt fueled his enthusiasm; like most fathers of a certain age, he forced himself into joy for the sake of his children.

In fact, Claire has always admired Don's ability to have fun, his capacity to be enthusiastic about life, or at least about the pleasures of recreation. In college, he was the guy playing Frisbee during finals week, or the guy renting a bounce castle for the "All-Campus Welcome Back Ice Cream Social."

But Claire is in charge of the logistics of fun these days, the overall management of it: nutritious snacks to prevent sugar meltdowns, plenty of water to prevent dehydration and heat stroke, bathroom breaks. She breaks up the fights, she forces the children into the shade for more sunscreen, she makes them use the sanitizing wipes before they delve into the trail mix she'd made. She isn't a control freak-her checklist of appropriate safety guidelines is small and insignificant compared to most mothers'. But the children simply fight her on each one of her requests and Don is no help. Every time a child would tell her no, or worse, roll their eyes, Don would look out at the pool as if some phantom sea monster, or perhaps the college students in their small bikinis, had captured his attention.

She'd brought Tolstoy to the pool. Ha! Ha! f.u.c.king ha! She'd brought Tolstoy! Again! Every summer for the past five years, she had planned to read Anna Karenina, which her old college roommate, Leslie Mendelsohn, had insisted she read. She'd sent her the copy, the new translation Oprah had picked for her book club. Leslie was active on a Website called Goodreads and Claire received weekly updates on Leslie's voracious reading habits. But Leslie was childless; she lived with a man who owned a summer house on the Cape!

The Cape!

Leslie would often text her: You should totally come to the Cape soon!

Claire had never been to the Cape and if she ever did go to the Cape, she'd not enjoy it. She'd be managing the logistics of a trip to the Cape the whole time. She'd fall asleep each evening around nine, in the guesthouse with the children, exhausted, missing even the after-dinner drinks on somebody's deck.

The house is a mess again, and the kids are hungry, and all she wants is a drink and a hammock and a ma.s.sage. She is sunburned. Her feet are dirty; she also wants a shower. Her hair smells of chlorine and there is sunscreen sticky on her back and grit between her toes and a rawness on the skin near the elastic of her new bikini bottoms. But she can still rock a f.u.c.king bikini and she knows it; Leslie cannot.

f.u.c.k Leslie.

Why has she suddenly become so petty? Why does she have such pride in her ability to rock a bikini?

Is it because she does not love Don anymore? Does she secretly want to attract someone new?

She has never had the thought before, or at least she has never allowed the thought to rise into her mind before, and now she stands in the kitchen and thinks: I don't love my husband.

Don comes home from his showings and unloads the truck, sullenly, which means he has not sold a house. His way of helping to unload the truck: he has dropped the swimming bags and wet towels and half-filled cooler in the foyer for her to deal with alone. She stands there regarding his handiwork, half mad at the incompetent attempt he's made at putting things away, but even more mad at herself for becoming the kind of woman who looks at her husband and wishes he was better at putting stuff away. Where did this angry woman come from? How did she emerge, so quietly and swiftly, from some deep, disregarded corner of Claire's personality? Her mother, she knows, years ago had gotten this angry and begun to f.u.c.k her way across Manhattan starting on her fortieth birthday. Was there a gene in her family, a switch that blew at forty that made you hate your husband? She knows that one of her mother's lovers had been a millionaire, a day trader who kept Claire's mother in gorgeous clothes, designer shoes, and weekend trysts in great hotels just a few blocks from their home.

Don comes up behind her.

"What are you thinking about?" he says, though he always says this and never really wants to know.

"My mother," Claire says.

"Why?" Don asks.

"How did the showings go?"

"Not great," Don says. "But I'm gonna go and show them one more and I think it's perfect. It won't be on the market until next week, but it's vacant."

"Now?" Claire says.

"Yeah, I know, it's late, but they have a flight back east in the morning. They'd love to find a house on this trip. The guy is starting a job here August first, and the wife is due to have a baby a few weeks after that. So they'll have to buy something."

"I suppose."

"Why were you thinking about your mother?"

"I don't remember," Claire says, and gets to work on the mess at her feet. She makes a pile of clean laundry and a pile of dirty laundry as Don laces up his shoes and looks for his wallet.

"Are you mad?" Don asks her. "Because I have to work tonight?"

"One doesn't get to be Grinnell, Iowa's, top-selling real estate agent five years running without putting in some hours," Claire says.

"That sounds sarcastic."

"Well, I didn't mean it to be. If you feel guilty about going to work, that's not my problem."

"I won't be long."

"Just don't go to your office and drink beer and f.u.c.k around online. Just come home when you can. We have to talk."

"Pardon me, but I haven't been Grinnell's top agent since 2008 by drinking beer and 'f.u.c.king around' online, Claire. Have you seen my wallet?"

She goes to the table near the foyer, picks up the wallet, and hands it to him.

"I have to do this on my clients' schedule, not on mine. Look, when the kids are in bed, we can talk."

"We have some decisions to make."

"And I think they'll be a h.e.l.l of a lot easier if I can nab us a twenty-thousand-dollar commission this month."

"Of course," Claire says. "I understand. You are the worker bee. You come and go as you please."

And despite the sarcasm, which feels almost inevitable of late, she does understand. Don works a lot. Long hours, weekends and evenings. And now that he is going out of the house and she will be home alone unpacking the day, trying to put back the chaos, even while Bryan creates towers out of Legos-an obsession he's had since was a toddler-about the house as she does so, she has no idea why she has been so cold to Don about the fact that he is working. She is not working, obviously. She is not writing or earning a f.u.c.king dime or even working toward the earning of f.u.c.king dimes.

Already, scrubbing out her own winegla.s.s, Claire knows what she will do after dinner. She will take a walk and she knows where the walk will lead her.

A few minutes after leaving the house, and a few minutes before picking up his clients at the Comfort Inn near the interstate, Don Lowry texts Claire and says, Do you want me to pick us up some wine on the way home? Or ice cream or anything? which is his way of seeing if his wife is still angry with him. She texts back, Fine. Whatever. And he texts back: I'll be home ASAP. Promise. And Claire texts this: Good. As I said: whatever. And to be funny, to try his hand at humor, Don texts, Whatevs. #YOLO, to which Claire does not respond.

Don isn't sure if texting has helped his marriage. The tone between them has grown more clipped, punctuated by abbreviations and sentence fragments-though his own parents always talked in fragments, even without the aid of technology. Still, they were at a point where their communications were so swift that Don could not interpret their tone. Is Claire mad that he is working so late? Or does she really not care? Is that rage or nonchalance in her whatever? Has she found the humor in his whatevs?

What else can he do? He has potential buyers and, in this market, any potential buyers have to be coddled. These buyers have no realtor of their own either, so there will be n.o.body to split a commission with, and that means over $15,000 if he makes the sale-the house he is about to show will be listed at $280,000. There'd be an actual profit to take home, to catch up on his own mortgage, to pay some of his own back taxes, and to buy the kids some new clothes and shoes and backpacks for the fall.

Don Lowry can do this!

Claire texts back: Take your time. Even when you're here, you're not here.

He does not respond to that last text.

In 2005, Don Lowry flipped his first house. And then he flipped three more, and soon he was buying up houses across central Iowa, hiring crews of cheap laborers to give them curb appeal, to fix the most necessary fixes, and then selling them for a tidy profit. In the fall of 2008, as the small town in Iowa was awash in the optimism of Obama's seemingly certain victory, Don Lowry was working on flipping seven different homes. And when the market crashed, when the downward spiral of everything, including the once infallible investment of real estate happened, Don Lowry worked harder. He could still make it, cut his losses. He borrowed some more. He used his credit cards to keep his business afloat. The commissions dried up. A restless nation of movers had suddenly become a terrified nation of stayers.

How much do they owe now? If he doesn't count the house, which is heading toward foreclosure and, barring a late-breaking miracle, a flurry of sudden sales, will soon be the bank's and not theirs, the Lowrys are still firmly up s.h.i.+t's creek. Up s.h.i.+t's creek in a leaky boat, with chronic leg cramps. And dumbbells tied to their feet.

Total debt? It is a figure he has added up in his own mind a hundred times: even if, somehow, he can stave off the foreclosure, they still have a battle ahead of them: six thousand dollars left on her student loans, four grand on his. Twenty thousand on the MasterCard (ER visits and car repairs and dental bills and a serious plumbing emergency and a hundred pizzas and one trip to New York so the kids could see it, but why had they done that?), four thousand on the Visa (a balance transfer meant to tide them over until a commission came through but which somehow never got paid off), five grand on American Express (business expenses, a total creeping up each month), and eleven hundred on the Best Buy card he should never have used, since the interest rate is 20 percent, but how can he work without a laptop and a printer? They owe fifteen grand on each car, though neither car is worth that anymore, not with the wear and tear the Suburban has on it, or the hundreds of thousands of miles he has on his pickup. They'll have to file for bankruptcy after the foreclosure and then, he guesses, divorce: could any couple survive such a terrible financial free fall? If he were a bankruptcy lawyer, he'd find a way to double-specialize in divorce law. How often the two go hand in hand, he imagines.

Even Claire, who really doesn't seem to care about money, will be crushed by such a huge setback as foreclosure and bankruptcy. They are almost forty. Shouldn't they have something to show for two decades of work? Somehow they would be lucky to come up with a security deposit and first month's rent to start over. But maybe they could move anywhere, elsewhere, out of Iowa (though the kids would not like that). It could be a real clean slate. They have to think about the kids though. They could stay in Iowa. Lots of people do that. Millions of them, like four million of them, stay in Iowa, year after year.

There is no shame in it. Why has Claire always resented it?

The prospective buyers, coming now through the lobby of the Comfort Inn & Suites, are a young couple moving to Grinnell. The man has gotten a job at the college in some kind of administrative post. The woman is incredibly pregnant. They are moving from Brooklyn-not the small town just down Highway 6, they joked! The real Brooklyn! Brooklyn, New York. Penny and Clark.

"It's a great place to raise kids," Don reminds them as they get into his truck and buckle up.

"The house or the town?" the man says. He is a man incapable of smiling. He generally has the expression of a mole squinting into the light. A mole that has just sucked on a lemon wedge covered in rat s.h.i.+t. He'd scowled at all eleven showings that day, even when his wife seemed to think a house would work for them.

"Both!" Don says. "Just a great place for kids."

"Well, I hope so," the woman says. She is pleasant and attractive-a short woman with a smile that seems warm and genuine. She speaks with a slight accent Don cannot trace, and when he asks her where she'd grown up, she says Vancouver. She has the sort of smile you might encounter on a road trip, Don thinks, and then a few years later you'd be married to it. A smile that, once directed at you, could own you.

Don wonders how this couple-seemingly opposites-has ended up together. His grimace and her smile seem incompatible to Don. But then, he is sure, there have always been people who think such things about Claire: How did she end up with him? How had he gotten so lucky?

"We're in a bit of a hurry to find a place," Penny says. "Can the sellers close immediately?"

Don nods. "Yep. This is a great house. And it's a great college. Congrats on the job. I'm an alum. Cla.s.s of ninety-five."

"Really?" Clark says. "You never left?"

"I did leave, briefly," Don says, "but Iowa has its charms. I'll probably be here forever."

Clark turns to his wife and says, "Please don't let me die in Iowa."

"How wonderful!" Penny says, doing that thing Don notices that wives sometimes do. She's being extra enthusiastic on account of a d.i.c.kish husband. Don knows that drill. He is sometimes the d.i.c.k.

"We couldn't find a listing of this house online," Clark says. "We looked."

"It's not for sale yet. It belonged to a very famous professor here, Gill Gulliver. Beloved, dedicated man. It's a great house."

When they pull up to the house, Don hopes the front door might be unlocked, because he has not yet been given a key. A lot of doors in Grinnell are unlocked. Kathy Gulliver had planned to list the house in early July, after her son had cleaned out the rest of Gill Gulliver's study and gone away from Iowa, but she has not listed it yet.

But Don Lowry needs a win.