Summerlong: A Novel Part 9

Ruth doesn't say anything, he is not even sure if she is awake, and soon her breathing slows and he knows she is asleep. Was she dreaming? Is she senile? He wonders if he should wait there, for ABC to return from wherever it is she is, but eventually Don Lowry knows he must wander out into the summer's staggering brightness and meet with clients, in hopes of making a desperately needed sale.

For a moment, Don Lowry feels invincible: he can make Claire love him again.

"I'm going to go now. I'm going to sell a house today, Ruth," he says, though he knows she is sleeping, "I'm going to make enough money to save everything, including my marriage."

Ruth doesn't open her eyes. She barely moves, but she answers him: "Most marriages are never saved, Don Lowry. Most marriages are just kept afloat. That's much different."

They leave the bar pleasantly day drunk and with a mission: ABC will take Charlie to see his father. And soon, they stand outside the a.s.sisted living complex at the Mayflower, a sprawling compound of housing for senior citizens settling in for the last breath, some of them hoping it would not come for a long time, and some of them waiting for it, ready to be done with all of this living.

ABC leads him through the door, his hand in hers-it was her idea to come-and she goes to the check-in desk and says, "We're here to see Gill Gulliver."

The nurse, or attendant, or whatever t.i.tle the thick and frowning woman at the desk is given, looks at Charlie.

"We were wondering if you'd come," she says. "You've been back for a while, haven't you?"

The woman looks at a computer screen, clicks and types, clicks and types, clicks and types again. "Your mother called to see if you'd been yet. She says you should call her."

"I lost my phone," Charlie says.

"He's just had his dinner," she says. "He likes to eat early."

"Dinner?" Charlie says. "He never ate dinner early."

"Dinner is what we call the midday meal. At night, there's a light supper."

"Oh," Charlie says.

"You'll smell some wine on his breath, perhaps. The doctor has okayed that-we do it for alcoholics, you know. To prevent withdrawal," the nurse says.

"He's an alcoholic?" Charlie says.

The nurse says nothing.

"Is he, um, recognizing people today?" ABC asks.

"I just heard," the woman says, "that he was talking a lot at lunch."

"You mean dinner," Charlie says. ABC nudges him with her elbow.

"Right," the nurse continues. "I just looked in on him. He's having his coffee and working. He likes to type away on his laptop in there. But don't look at his screen. I think he knows he is typing nonsense but doesn't want anyone to see. He wants everyone to think he's writing a book."

"Well, that makes sense," Charlie says.

"Room 118," says the nurse. "Have a nice time."

Gill Gulliver, Charlie's father, began teaching at Grinnell College in 1982, four years before Charlie was born. The country was rattled by recession and Gill Gulliver, toting a doctorate in English literature from the University of Michigan, arrived in Grinnell driving an old Ford Fairmont wagon that he'd bought used a week before. He was thirty years old and single.

There were so few jobs that year, but Gill had landed a temporary two-year visiting gig out in the prairies of Iowa. He'd known of Grinnell-a reputable and shakily prestigious (in the Midwestern sense of the word) liberal arts college with a lefty bent. The campus, in August, was beautiful enough, as compelling and green as any campus in late summer, but noticeably flat, and his office in an old brick building, tucked away on the third floor between the offices of an ancient Joyce scholar and a maudlin historian, was the kind of place that a young professor might do a great deal of writing. His goal was simple: to spend two quiet years of teaching at Grinnell, working on shaping his Ph.D. thesis-"The Glamorous Tragedy of Unbridled Optimism: The Fall of Jay Gatsby and the Rise of Ronald Reagan"-into a publishable book.

Gill did not buy a house, but lived, instead, in one half of a duplex owned by the college, a short walk from his office. His routine bordered on the monastic. Each morning, he woke at five, exercised-a vigorous run followed by calisthenics and dumbbell work in the duplex's empty second bedroom-then showered, ate a bowl of oatmeal and a piece of fruit, drank black coffee, and left for the office. He always arrived by seven, the first one to show up on the third floor. He would work on his own book, expanding, revising, and annotating it, until ten o'clock, when he would open his office door and s.h.i.+ft into teacher mode. Lines outside his door were long. He was a charismatic teacher, with wild eyes and wavy long hair and a sartorial sense that was often missing in academia. Charlie had seen the pictures and saw them again now, on the walls of his father's study: Gill Gulliver with his first tutorial cla.s.s; Gill Gulliver with his award-winning independent study students; Gill Gulliver accepting the President's Medal; Gill Gulliver speaking at commencement, the wind blowing his hair and his robe and perhaps even his mustache in a way that suggested something epic.

It was Gill Gulliver's desire for stability, for routine, and for stoically Puritanical work habits, that-after one s.e.xually thrilling and ultimately heartbreaking affair-attracted him to the woman who would become Charlie's mother, Kathy Mulligan. Kathy had, on a few occasions, referred to the "woman Gill would never get over," but Charlie had only overheard such talk in late-night, alcohol-fueled arguments, and he didn't know the full story. Gill Gulliver, by all accounts, had been drawn to Kathy instantly: she was raven haired, complicatedly attractive, and desperately bored, a lifelong Iowan who had spent four years commuting to Iowa City because she couldn't afford the college that was literally in her front yard.

When Gill Gulliver's visiting professors.h.i.+p turned into a tenure-track position, he had the brief idea that he might leave Grinnell anyway, head east or west or at least to one of the more prestigious public land-grant schools of the Midwest, but there were still so few jobs available, and besides, he hadn't finished the book yet, and Kathy had her mother to care for (she was an only child), and so, why not, why not accept a position at Grinnell when they offered him one? He did so, thinking that once Kathy's mother had pa.s.sed away (her health seemed to be fading; she'd had Kathy late and was already seventy, suffering from a bad kidney and heart disease) and once he had finished his book, had secured a contract for its publication, they could leave. Someone would hire him. After all, he'd been on ABC News once and National Public Radio twice talking about Ronald Reagan! He was, in academic terms, a rising star.

They did not leave though. Instead, Gill applied for jobs each year, and failed to secure one. Eventually, Charlie's parents took out a home equity loan, using the paid-for house as collateral, and had gradually built, at the rear of the large lot, a building housing Gill's study and a small guest room. A small kitchenette and a full bathroom connected the two rooms, both of which looked out at an inground pool. On weekends and summer evenings, Charlie remembers playing in the yard, or swimming in the pool, constantly aware of his father's omnipresence at that study window, a ma.s.sive desk piled with books and papers.

Charlie can still picture his father in the study, a wonderfully comfortable place to work, but Charlie knows well that Gill Gulliver had never pictured that room, which he loved, which may have been his favorite place in the world, as the kind of place that would stand, decades later, as a kind of sad storage unit: packed with all his books and papers and notes and letters and research, a labyrinth of unfinished ideas and in-progress projects, while Gill Gulliver rotted away, half mad, prematurely mad, in the local nursing home.

They go into the room.

Gill Gulliver is in a chair. He types away on a small laptop computer.

When ABC walks in, Charlie right behind her, Gill stops typing. He looks bewildered for a moment and then clasps his hands to his face and says, "Oh my G.o.d."

Charlie and ABC walk toward the chair; Gill seems to have no idea of how he might slide his rolling tray table away from himself and stand to greet them. It is as if he is in an invisible prison. ABC turns to see Charlie, his eyes drowning.

"Oh G.o.d," Gill Gulliver says again.

ABC stands back while Charlie goes closer to his father. She wonders if she should slip out now. She wonders what Charlie wants. Charlie tries to say something, but the only thing that comes out is a phlegm-crippled hey.

"Oh, oh," Gill Gulliver says. "ABC! ABC, it is good to see you. So good! Come here."

ABC goes toward Gill. "Charlie's here too, Gill."

Gill says nothing about that, just stares at ABC in a kind of rapture. She moves the tray table and the laptop and coffee out of his way.

He reaches out to her and she leans in and hugs him for a long time, and then, when she finally lets go, Gill Gulliver looks right at his only son, Charlie, and smiles and says, "Well, who's this handsome man?"

And then turning to ABC and winking, he says, "Whoever he is, he likes you. I can tell."

In the haze of a dying afternoon, they walk home across the empty campus. In almost every building, from the original chapel to the s.h.i.+ny new fitness center, ABC can locate a memory of Philly, still burning, like the corner library table where she often sat with Philly, where Philly would sleep more than study, her head in ABC's lap.

What do you do when you can still smell her hair?

Charlie and ABC sit at the kitchen island of the Gulliver house on two metal stools, drinking beers, side by side, and ABC finds herself swept up in some inner turmoil of both grief and urgent l.u.s.t. Her whole body is a moistening sponge, sweating, ripening, and she presses her beer to her forehead and she focuses on this feeling so she will not cry or moan.

"I should turn on the AC," Charlie says, and he leaps up and does that.

"It's the humidity," ABC says. "Blah! It's too early in the summer to be this hot."

Charlie comes back to his stool, nodding, and says, "I tend to run cold so, you know, sometimes I don't notice it. Maybe I'm used to the stage lights."

"So, how long will you stay in Grinnell?" ABC says. She feels the urge to ask Charlie something easy and concrete, in an attempt to ground herself. She feels as if she's floating. She needs to be distracted from this wave of grief.

"I don't know."

"What's your next role?"

The small talk is almost too much. She wants to communicate in a different way.

"I told you. I'm done acting! Are you okay, kiddo?"

She wipes her forehead, her hands almost shaking. "I can't believe how much I'm sweating!"

"Well, it's hot."

"Right? But gross! Look at me?"

He smiles at her. She feels the beads forming on her face. Her stomach sinks. She is feeling the intensity of her grief as if it is brand new.

"You look good."

"Do you really think you're done?"

"How are you not done after Hamlet?"

"Sometimes I feel like I am finished too. Like after Philly there isn't anything left."

They say nothing for a minute and ABC sort of paces around the kitchen, looking out the windows at the view. Charlie just stares at her. She moves slowly, fingering the sills, and then she whips around and does a little jazz hand move and says, almost singing, "This is when you tell me I have so much to live for, I think."

Charlie smiles. "I can't do that. I don't know if it's true."

"I knew I liked you!" ABC says. "You're the first honest person I've met in a long time. Let's play a game. Let's make a list." She finds a sc.r.a.p of paper and a pen near the fridge. She notices the sc.r.a.p of paper is a page from a notepad with Don Lowry's picture on the bottom. It's your home, but it's my business! She sees on the fridge that Charlie has already made a list, last item: f.u.c.k Claire.

She thinks of Philly, tries not to shudder. "So, what do you have to live for, Charlie Gulliver?"

"Um, well. I'm going to clean out my dad's study and finish my dad's book, you know, get it so it can be published."

"Do you care if it gets published?"

"Ha! No!" Charlie says. "I guess not. But you heard him-I think he still does. I mean, he didn't know who the f.u.c.k I was, but he talked about his work. And he remembered you!"

"I was one of his favorite students," ABC says. "And that was less than two years ago. You've been away, what? How long?"

"He always preferred his work."

"You know, it's not weird that he didn't recognize you. Dementia, especially this kind, is so unpredictable."

"Please tell me you didn't f.u.c.k him," Charlie says.

"G.o.d! No! I was with Philly in college."

"He probably wanted to f.u.c.k you."

"Well, he probably did. If I am honest about it. Wouldn't you want to f.u.c.k me?"

"Why don't you finish his book for him? Weren't you an English major? He was your adviser, I bet."

"He was."

"There you go! You finish the book!" Charlie says.

"Look, of course it's unfair if his life's work goes unpublished," ABC says, "but it's not a rare thing. How many people die with novels in their drawers? You're under no obligation to finish his unfinished work."

"I'm curious to read it," Charlie says. "For my own sake; I barely knew the guy."

"Why? I don't think you should do it unless you feel it gives you meaning and purpose in the world."

"Oh, s.e.x does that for me. This is just a way to kill time between s.e.xual encounters."

"Funny," ABC says. "Very flirty."

"You think I have nothing to live for," Charlie says. "That's what you're saying."

"I want to be dead by the end of the summer so I can find Philly in the spirit world."

"Seriously?" he asks. "Why do you keep saying s.h.i.+t like that?"

"Because I mean it," she says.

ABC likes the wavering edge in Charlie's voice and the way he pushes his beer bottle back and forth across the kitchen table. She always liked Professor Gulliver a great deal, but had often wondered how strange, perhaps bad, it might be to be his child. She had always been attracted to damaged and wounded souls. s.e.xually, sometimes, but more often she simply enjoyed being near them, talking with them. Eventually, if the soul was wounded enough, if the soul's bearer exposed enough of themselves, she sometimes fell in love. She could perhaps fall in love with Charlie, if she gets bored enough, and she had always been a little in love with his father, a harmless academic crush.

Also, she is about to be sick with grief. She can feel herself shutting down.

They should do something, ABC thinks, because sitting still is going to lead to a maudlin spiral of epic despair. She goes to the fridge and takes down the to-do list. She picks a pen up off the kitchen counter and crosses out the name Claire at item number 6.

She writes someone else.

Charlie smiles. "I was sorta drunk when I wrote that."

"Claire Lowry? She's married. I know her husband. He's incredibly sweet. And sort of sad."