Summerlong: A Novel Part 27

"Wow," he says.

"Too much?" she says.

"No, it's amazing."

"Come to the party with me. I don't want to walk in alone."

Don doesn't feel like the party anymore, but a chance to be with Claire for the evening seems just the ticket. It's his night to win her back-Charlie will be with ABC, and they'll be drunk, in a crowd, and in the sultry heat of late July. They always had the best s.e.x after parties, boozy and flirty affairs that gradually made them more and more aroused as the night wore on and on. If the kids were gone-as they would be tonight-it was not uncommon for Don and Claire to keep drinking when they got home, and f.u.c.k each other as many times as possible before pa.s.sing out in a naked, sweaty heap. Of course, they no longer have their own house, and as soon as Don thinks this thought, he has a sudden plan for the evening.

"My clothes," Don says. "Are they okay?"

He touches his khaki pants and feels the thick wallet in his pocket, and he feels, momentarily, as if everything is finally returning to normal. There even seems to be a flirtatious hint in Claire's eyes. "They're not very heat wave."

"Don't worry about it," Claire says. "You look s.e.xy. You always do."

He doesn't want to admit how high this makes his heart soar.

ZeeZee comes at Charlie and ABC, laughing uproariously as she does so, touching Charlie's chest and saying, "Oh, good, a lifeguard, just in case."

She is quite drunk already. She had been friends with Charlie's parents and had invited him to the party when she'd run into him at the coffee shop. Now, she wears a loose cotton top, white, in a vaguely Mexican style that falls from each bare shoulder, and her freckled neck is exposed, as is the top third of each breast. She wears impossibly high-heeled white sandals and pink-and-white-striped bikini bottoms. She looks like a half-finished wedding cake that has been left in the sun too long.

"You two are hotter than the weather," she says. "Go get yourself a cool drink."

Around the yard, there are tiki torches of smoking citronella, cans of bug spray, and a large bug zapper in the far corner of the yard, where bats zoom in and feed. There's a large kiddie pool, filled with ice and water, but no kids are anywhere near it, and there is a sprinkler gently misting half the yard, and a slip and slide set up along the fence at the yard's rear, though it isn't on yet, but it is clear already, from the forced laughter that echoes from each small pocket of adult conversation, that it soon will be.

Charlie and ABC help themselves to mojitos, which are being served by a young man in a Speedo. They have no idea who it is, though Jean-Claude himself, a barrel-chested hairy fellow, also wears a Speedo suit and cowboy boots, his own trunks decorated with the American flag. A straw cowboy hat is on his head.

"Do you think he stuffed his suit?" ABC says.

"A great idea," Charlie says. "Next time."

Most of the group is dressed in some variant of the same costume: men wear swim trunks and summer s.h.i.+rts or tank tops and sandals, though there is one man in a seersucker suit, which ABC says is much s.e.xier than a lot of the male flesh she is seeing. Lots of paunches and pale skinny legs. Most of the women are in thin dresses, though a few are in bathing suits-bikini tops with wraps around their bottoms and some of the women follow ZeeZee's lead and drop the sarongs and wraps and wear only their swimsuits after a few drinks make them bold enough to do so. n.o.body, thinks ABC, looks as good as she and Charlie look. Everyone is watching them. She knows already that Charlie will go home with her, and maybe, if Don can play it right, Claire will go home with him.

The Beach Boys play from a stereo somewhere, though it isn't quite tonally appropriate. It is the Pet Sounds alb.u.m, probably the only Beach Boys alb.u.m the hosts have, one that hasn't been listened to in a long time. It's an alb.u.m on which even the ocean-groove love songs carry an impossibly melancholic subtext: G.o.d only knows what I'd be without you.

ABC downs her drink and quickly gets another. "Personality drinks," ABC says. "The first two drinks don't count."

It's then that they see Claire and it's as if ABC can feel Charlie drop a bit further away from her as he waves Claire over.

"A lot of flowers in the hair, a lot of body glitter borrowed from the dressers of teenage girls," Claire says to them as she walks up, sipping her drink. "Women over thirty should not sparkle. Don't you think?"

ABC and Charlie laugh, a polite party laugh, a little overzealous appreciativeness in their tone. They are all drinking fast, in order to move the evening from awkward to bearable and maybe, possibly, if they drink enough, to fun.

"Well, you look great," ABC says, although she has a rule against complimenting women on their appearance as a means of opening up a conversation. But Claire does look great. It is clear to ABC that Claire is trying to look great. This worries her.

"You too!" Claire says back.

"d.a.m.n," Charlie says. "Holy f.u.c.king s.e.xy."

"Jesus," Claire says. "That means I'm trying too hard."

"Which is fine if it works," ABC says. "You look amazing! Where's Don?"

"I don't know," she says. "He's here somewhere. We came together."

"Um, I need a drink," ABC says. "I'll be right back."

ABC wants to get back to Charlie and Claire, but she also wants to find Don Lowry. She also wants a drink and it's taking forever to get one. She finally orders a mojito from the s.h.i.+rtless buff bartender, who's been mobbed all night by the quickly drunken professors, and then hears a voice behind her.

"Make that two," Don says.

She turns around.

"Don Lowry!" she says. "You came."

He is wearing a s.h.i.+rt and tie. She undoes his tie and slides it off, tosses it on a chair. She unb.u.t.tons three b.u.t.tons of his white oxford, then rolls up his sleeves. She touches his chest.

"That's better," she says. "Now go flirt with your wife before someone else does."

They see at that moment, across the crowded yard, Charlie talking up close with Claire, looking very much like two lovers in the gloaming.

"Too late?" Don says.

"Never," ABC says. "Not ever."

"I don't want you talking to him tonight," Charlie says to Claire, pressing in close, ending the small talk they had been making up to that moment.

"Pardon me?" Claire says.

"I don't like it. Don f.u.c.ks with your head."

"Charlie!" Claire says. "Jesus."

"Don't. Talk. To. Him. Talk. To. Me," Charlie says, slowly, deliberately, and with some extra breath in his voice, leaning in to Claire, pus.h.i.+ng air onto the side of her neck.

"What if I do?" Claire says.

"I'll be jealous."

"What if I want to make you jealous?"

"That'd be very naughty. I wouldn't be pleased."

Claire's eyes open wide. It takes her a minute to smile. Gooseflesh, even in the humid evening, manages to rise up and down her arms.

"I'm gonna get some more ice," Claire says.

"Don't forget," Charlie says. "Don't make me punish you."

He presses against her then and she can feel all of him, his flesh, his heat, his strength, his reckless and total availability.

"Do you want anything?" she says, shaking the ice in her gla.s.s.

"Yes," he says.

Ten o'clock and it still must be in the mid-nineties. The air so still. Most of the partygoers have fled the humidity and the mosquitoes by gathering in the misty spray of the sprinklers, and the laughter escalates as they do so. Some people have gone inside the house, an old house that doesn't have central air-conditioning, though people gather near the window unit in the living room and you can see them through the window, a gaggle of scantily clad academics, pressed together in absurd conversations.

Charlie has been making his way through the crowd, bouncing from one awkward stage of small talk to another. He is drunk though, deeply drunk, and although both ABC and Claire seem to be avoiding him, he also hasn't yet seen Don Lowry. Still, Charlie does know a lot of the people at the party, knows them as his father's former colleagues; he knows who they are, but he knows nothing about them, beyond, in some cases, what they teach at the college. He wonders how many of the women at the party his father has written letters to, or f.u.c.ked.

Everyone asks after Charlie's father, and Charlie nods soberly and says his father is doing as well as one could expect. Almost n.o.body asks about his mother, though one woman, an art history professor, says she's been seeing his mother's travels on Facebook and it looks like she is having a great summer.

Charlie nods. He says that this is probably true.

The novelty of near nakedness is wearing off for anybody who is still sober, and some of the crowd has begun trickling out. There are babysitters to pay and quiet, married s.e.x to have back home, fueled by the muted and managed sultriness of the affair. At the party are college professors and local business owners and schoolteachers and even the Lutheran minister, a tall woman wearing cutoffs and a halter top, and all of them eating and drinking and drinking and drinking and talking in the backyard and drinking, wearing as little as they possibly can without feeling mortified, most of them wet from the sprinklers and the kiddie pools, and all of them, it seems to Charlie, have known Gill Gulliver.

One couple, a philosopher and a biologist, two men, are snorting cocaine in the upstairs bathroom, one in tasteful Bermudas and a ribbed white unders.h.i.+rt and one in the seersucker suit, and they begin laughing hysterically when they realize who Charlie is. He's only been trying to pee but when he knocks on the bathroom door, they answer it and usher him in and begin praising the legacy of Gill Gulliver.

"That man could party!" the philosopher says.

"Amen," echoes the biologist. "Women loved your father."

Now Charlie is even more deeply drunk and has decided he needs to pee badly enough that the gla.s.s brick half wall that surrounds the toilet in the ma.s.sive master bathroom is sufficient for privacy. For a moment, as he is peeing, it feels as if the stupidity of drunkenness is leaving him, and he wonders if he should find Claire and apologize for what he said, which he had meant to be hot, but which may have come off as insane. The two men are still sitting on the edge of a huge palatial bathtub, watching him pee.

"Oh, your father!" the philosopher says. "Your father would have been amazed by this party! Amazed!"

"Your father loved s.e.x," says the biologist in seersucker, and then places his hand over his mouth. "Oops!" he says. He breaks into a fit of giggles.

"He was fun at parties," the philosopher says. "He would have loved this! You want some c.o.ke?"

"Or a b.l.o.w. .j.o.b?" the biologist asks.

Charlie snorts a line off the mirror as if it is something he does every day, though he's only tried cocaine once in his life, right after college at a cast party in New York. What the f.u.c.k is he thinking? He knows, of course, what he is thinking. He knows, deep down, the one legacy he has inherited from Gill Gulliver, and that is this: He likes to be the center of attention. He likes to feel people fall in love with him. The cocaine blows a hole through his brain that seems to light this truth up in dazzling pink letters.

"Once they love you," he tells the biologist, "it's not very fun."

As Charlie leaves, the giggles intensify. Two junior professors come into the bathroom as Charlie is leaving and there are more shrieks of delight.

Charlie is standing by the cooler of beer now, drinking a bottle of Negra Modelo, when ABC and Don Lowry come over to him. His heart is racing and his head feels as if it's full of helium. Don has a small wooden bowl of lime wedges in his hand and he thrusts it at Charlie. "You should have a lime in that," he says, and shoves one into Charlie's beer aggressively.

ABC gets a beer from the cooler and opens it and takes one of Don's limes too. She is leaning on Don. She is drunk. She keeps finding reasons to run her hand through his chest hair, the considerable mat of it visible under the oxford s.h.i.+rt Don wears, which is damp with sweat under the arms and on the back. Charlie is flying. He can barely think.

Don's eyes are bloodshot and he looks sunburned and stoned, like most of the other adults at the party. There are a lot of joints going around. ABC holds up her bottle to toast Charlie and he offers her his bottle, knocking them together with a clink.

"You guys are quite the pair," Don says.

Charlie and ABC both smile at Don then turn toward each other.

"We hate each other," ABC says.

Charlie raises his beer bottle as if responding to some unspoken toast and has a drink.

He bellows into the night, "Wooooohoooo!"

"Jesus," ABC says. "Come on!"

"What are you guys even doing here?" Don asks in a loud, drunken shout. He looks as if he's gone off the rails somehow. He looks dazed, as if he's survived a plane crash. ABC's never seen him this drunk. Mostly she's seen him stoned. He is angrier drunk, sweatier.

"ZeeZee invited us," Charlie says.

"Not here!" Don shouts. "Why are you in Iowa? Why the f.u.c.k aren't you in New York? Both of you. This place, kids, this place is a prison."

"I know!" Charlie bellows. "Why the f.u.c.k?"

People are watching them.

"No, no, I'm joking," Don says. "Grinnell is lovely. It is. It's just-I mean, why? You can be ANY-f.u.c.kING-WHERE."

"I happen to like it here," ABC says.

"Total bulls.h.i.+t!" Don barks, and for a moment Charlie worries Don might get violent, but he exhales a bit of drunken laughter. Someone, a guy about Don's age who looks vaguely familiar, brings Don a can of c.o.ke, unbidden, and says, "Drink this, Donny, okay? Let's keep it down. It's getting late."

The guy raises an eyebrow as he walks away, as if he's blaming Charlie for Don's condition.

"Not my fault!" Charlie says. "f.u.c.k you!"

Don obediently cracks open the can of c.o.ke and has a drink, sufficiently chastened by whoever that was. Don lowers his voice. This, to Charlie, has always been the mark of a decent man. Even drunk, he understands when he has crossed a line and can quickly regain his dignity. For a moment, Charlie almost feels affection for Don, a pang of sympathy that, inexplicably, makes the idea of f.u.c.king Don's wife even hotter.

"Guys," Don says. "Guys. This is what I mean, kids. Why not, what's stopping you from just going to New York and starting a life that is different, a life that means something?"

Charlie wants to swim.

"Go to New York," Don says.

"Kind of a problem with going to New York," ABC says. "No place to stay."

"Place to stay?" Don says, spitting incredulously. "I hate that phrase. I need a place to stay. Right? A place to exist in paralysis, right, a place to stay static. You don't need a place to stay at your age. The world is your place to stay. What? Will you cease to exist if you spend one night wandering around Manhattan because you don't have a bed? Kids, here's something I shouldn't tell you, because I am a real estate agent. But places to stay are overrated. Places to live. You want to find places to live!"

"So we should move to New York and be homeless?" ABC says. "Sorry. I'm not interested. I happen to like it here. For now."

"You want to leave the whole world behind, right? Huh?" Don says, really slurring now, spitting at them.