Summerlong: A Novel Part 29

"There's something I need to tell you," she says.

"Let me guess. You're married," Charlie says. "I f.u.c.king 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, s.h.i.+rtless 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 s.e.x?"

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 gla.s.s 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s, 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 makes.h.i.+ft 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 s.e.x, 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 posto.r.g.a.s.m 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 s.e.x 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 friends.h.i.+p, the dozing in the hammock, the ease she feels with her body around him, knowing he wors.h.i.+ps 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 d.i.c.k smooth and straight up in the water. Some people are born that way-constantly wavering between overwhelming l.u.s.t and deep, inexplicable sorrow. They walk around like that. So beautifully f.u.c.ked up, Philly would say. Some people, she used to say, are only happy when they're f.u.c.king. 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 p.e.c.k.e.r?"

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

"How did this happen to my life?" Don says.

"n.o.body 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 s.e.x 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 c.o.c.k. 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s. 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 . . .

PART VI.

I have loved this life so much.

I was prepared to wait out there forever.

-Charles Baxter, "The Cousins"

Superior!.

It appears on the drive north suddenly, the landscape s.h.i.+fting from scrub pine and dead gra.s.s along the interstate to a vast expanse of water as they round a corner outside Duluth. Both ABC and Charlie gasp, in unison, and when Charlie glances in the rearview he sees Ruth Manetti's face in a kind of rapture, a broad grin squinting into the brilliant blue lake ahead of them.

"It's been too long," she whispers behind them. "Why do we do that to ourselves? Why do we stay away so long from the places that make us whole?"

North of Duluth, each time they see the lake, ABC rolls down her window more and pushes her face into the clear, crisp air. Charlie yells back to Ruth: "Too much wind?"

To which Ruth replies, "No such thing!"

This, Charlie thinks, is the closest thing to joy that I've felt in years.

About a hundred yards down the highway, Don and Claire sit in the front seats of the Suburban: Claire's at the wheel and Don's in the pa.s.senger seat, with a migraine. His sungla.s.ses on, he drinks from a bottle of Smart.w.a.ter. "Buying this water always makes me feel dumb," he jokes after the final gas station stop. The kids find this to be hilarious. They begin to call it Dumbwater. Claire chews fiercely on a wad of gum, which she rarely does, but she's been craving a cigarette, a new secret habit that the children don't know about yet.

The children would probably not notice anyway; they're both zoned out on personal DVD players that Don's mother had bought them at Walmart the week before, and now, the carefully selected library books that Claire had checked out two days earlier sit untouched in a heap on the backseat. Both of the kids wear headphones.

"Why don't you guys look out of the window?" Claire suggests. "Look how beautiful the lake looks."

"How beautiful the lake IS!" Don says.

The kids say nothing in response.

"I've deliberately resisted those machines since the kids were infants," Claire says.

"Everything's changing," Don says. "We'll have to lower our standards. Divorce ain't for sissies."

"Why am I doing this?" Claire says.

"Doesn't matter now," Don says. "You're here. We're here. So, one more time: Charlie will be in the cabin. And ABC and Ruth will take the guesthouse. We'll stay in the lodge with the kids. Don't you think?"

"Sure," Claire says. "That is what we already decided, right?"

"The lodge is big enough for us to have separate bedrooms, if you prefer."

"Since we're separated in Iowa, let's not confuse the issue in Minnesota."

"Yes," Don says. "That's sound."

"For the kids," she says. "They need some consistency in their lives."

"Have you thought any more about my idea?" Don says.

"You mean staying there for the year?"

"Yes. That's my best idea," Don says.

"I said I'd think about it once we were up there. It's hard to picture that place in the winter."

"I know you like the cabin," Don says. "I don't want you to be disappointed, but with the kids"-he glances into the rearview to make sure they still have on their headphones-"it just makes the most sense if we all stay in the same place."

"Don't worry about my disappointment."

"Give us a year, Claire," Don says.

"I can't."

"I'm sure they've figured some things out on their own. But," Don says, "you know. We can spare them this upheaval."