Night Swimming (17 page)

She bit the inside of her cheek to feel something stronger than her loathing. She didn’t want to be jealous or angry or sad. She had been given what she had been given, and it was time to find the good in it.

Skip and Blossom settled at a table beneath a yellow beer umbrella. Vinny settled, too, cooling his belly against the shaded sidewalk. No one even knew he was there.

“So he wasn’t underdressed?” Skip inquired, looking at Vinny’s red bandanna handsomely tied around his neck.

“Absolutely not. There were two or three dogs that had nothing on. We hid our eyes in shame,” Blossom teased back. “And that patch over Vinny’s eye is very distinctive. I told everyone he was the Van Heusen man.”

“Know what you want?” he asked Blossom.

“Ahhhh...”
Get something thin. Don’t go stuffing cheeseburgers into your mouth like Jughead.
“The shrimp salad looks good. You?”

“The pizza, I guess. Very unexciting.”

“Hey, Skip,” two voices called out from beyond the sidewalk. A man and a woman approached. He was tall and handsome and muscular, and she looked like Jeannie’s clone. This city was relentless in spitting out beautiful people.

“Hey,” Skip said back. “What are you doing here?” He turned to Blossom. “Blossom, this is Jeff and Summer Cross. Jeff... Summer, this is a friend of mine, Blossom McBeal.”
Summer. Who’s named “Summer”? She sounds like a bottle of room spray.

“Hello,” Blossom said.

“What are you up to?” Summer asked, looking at Blossom with a sideways glance that said
judgment.

“Just getting something to eat. And you? I thought you were skiing or sailing or doing something exotic.”

“We just got back,” Jeff confirmed. “But you’re right. We were at Summer’s family house back east in Connecticut for a couple of weeks, and from there went to Zermatt.”

“You must stop over, Skip,” Summer chimed in ebulliently. “We’ve relandscaped the back forty when we were away. It’s absolutely fabulous now.”

God. She’s Joan Collins in a
Dallas
rerun.

“Yeah, the pool has fountains, for Christ’s sake,” Jeff laughed. Summer laughed. Skip laughed, too. Blossom didn’t laugh.

“Hey, you get the ten-year reunion notice?” Jeff inquired, as though he’d just remembered why they’d bumped into each other after all.

“Yeah.”

“You gonna go?”

“No... I’m too busy, and to tell you the truth, I’m just not that interested right now. Got other things on my mind.”

“How are you and Jeannie, by the way?”

Very nice. Very considerate. It’s like I’m not even here. I hate Summer.

“All right... still working it out. Saw her a couple of days ago. She’s good.”

A look of sympathy crossed Summer’s face like a passing cloud. Blossom looked down toward Vinny, anxious for a place to rest her eyes.

“Well, Skipper,” Summer continued, changing the subject, “gotta run. Tag said if I came over right now, he would give me an emergency haircut. He’s such a queen, but I love him, and he’s got me over a barrel. Look at this,” she said, pointing to her perfectly coiffed do. “Call us some time,” she chirped, turning toward the street with Jeff in tow.

All Blossom could think about was Yul Brynner’s comment: “Girls have an unfair advantage over men. If they can’t get what they want by being smart, they get what they want by being dumb.” That was Summer to a tee.

“Call,” Jeff yelled back, “and if I decide to go to the reunion, I’ll give you a full report on what all those dot-com dropouts are doing now. Take care, Bud.” And he was off, a beat behind the scurry of his wonderfully wispy wife.

“Friends from college,” Skip explained before Blossom had a chance to ask. “At least Jeff was. We were at Yale together. Both of us ended up coming out here when we graduated. He was coming home to go into his father’s business. I was going to law school... which I did before I quit the fancy job it got me and took the job at the pool.”

All this was news to Blossom. Her view of Skip was changing like a Rubik’s Cube. He was suddenly all new angles.

“You were a lawyer?”

“For about six years. An entertainment lawyer, but I hated it. I didn’t like ‘making the deals’—negotiating with people, who, in my mind, were oilier than the stains my pickup leaves on the asphalt. It just wasn’t my thing.”

An entertainment lawyer.
Blossom was dying to ask who he’d met, if he ever had any dealings with Tom Selleck. But she knew this wasn’t the time, not after he’d said he hated it.

“So you quit?”

“Yeah, I quit. And it was kind of funny how I actually got the pool job. I saw the ad in the paper and stopped by Mr. Birnbaum’s office. Sidney Birnbaum. He manages many properties like this. Well, when he saw my résumé, he nearly fell on the floor. ‘Why do you want this job again?’ he asked me.

“So I told him I was tired of entertainment law, that I was looking to do something that would use my hands, my back—something where I could be outside and breathe the air. And he said, ‘You’re willing to give up a six-figure job just to breathe the air? And it’s not even air. It’s smog.’ ”

Skip smiled. “ ‘Well, it’s not that simple,’ I told him. ‘But in short, yes.’ This utterly perplexed Mr. Birnbaum. He said my qualifications were ridiculous, overkill. He said it would be like shooting a fly with a shotgun. But then he figured I might be an asset. Maybe I could help him with his books or legal matters, if they came up.

“He said what concerned him was that I was going to get tired of using my hands and breathing the air and leave him high and dry. He didn’t want to have to start trying again to find someone new to fill the position. So I reassured him I’d be here for a while—not forever, but a while.

“After that, I started immediately. But the funniest thing happened when I was leaving his office. He stopped me one last time with the question of the hour. ‘Just let me get this straight,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t find yourself for four hundred thousand dollars a year plus bonuses?’

“‘In a nutshell, no,’ I said, and he said, ‘That’s the word I’d use.’

“I left the office smiling, knowing exactly how confusing all this must have been to him. Hell, it leaves me confused at times, too.”

“Wow,” Blossom said, barely able to grasp the breadth of Skip’s story. “You must have really wanted out.”

“I did. But the strange thing is, I never thought I’d be doing the lawyer thing for that long. My heart just wasn’t in it. This pool thing was suppose to be strictly transitional. And it is, I suppose. But the transition is taking longer than I thought. Certainly longer than Jeannie thought. Jeannie’s pissed that I’m not doing something that, quote, ‘taps into my true potential, makes money, and isn’t embarrassing.’ She married a lawyer, not a pool guy. This pool thing was perfect. A simple managerial job, where I could be outside. I needed a respite, a little time, someplace simple to clear my head and genuinely decide what I really wanted to do. Figure out my

future.”

“Find your destiny,” Blossom interjected.

“So to speak,” Skip continued. “Jeff’s destiny was set in stone. Wealthy family and all—he always knew he’d be back here. In spite of our different backgrounds, we were good friends in college.”

“What was so different?”

“Well, for one, I was what you’d call a Southie. I came from South Boston, blue-collar territory. My education was possible because of grants and scholarships and whatever I had worked for and whatever my father had put aside for me. Jeff’s education was possible because Jeff’s father gave Yale enough money to build a science center.

“My dad and my grandfather all came from a background of hard workers who had to put their backs into it. Construction. I remember going to the sites they were working on when I was a kid and being absolutely awed by the buildings they were putting up.”

“What stopped you from going into that business?”

“At the time, my father said, ‘Over my dead body.’ He’d worked hard all his life so that he could see me go off to a good school. Yale for him was like getting knighted by the queen. My grades were good, my SATs were good, so when I was accepted, I simply followed his wishes. The road of least resistance, as I look at it now. On one level I could see his logic—‘local boy makes good’—but on the other hand, the route I took didn’t make me happy. And law school made me even more unhappy. And then practicing law made me miserable. My fate seemed to continually tumble into the wrong place, and I couldn’t redirect it.”

“And your dad?”

“Oh, he was happy all right. I was the big success in the family, in the neighborhood, in the universe for chrissakes.”

“So now what?”

“Now I’m trying to figure it out. Something I should have done when I was eighteen. But who knows what they want when they’re eighteen? Did you?”

Yeah, I wanted to be a game show contestant and marry Tom Selleck.

“No idea.”

“So that’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it.”

Blossom was letting it all sink in. “I had no idea,” was all she could mutter with so many variables going through her head.

“Yeah, well, there was no reason you would. I don’t like talking about it much. I feel like a guy in a Dominick Dunne novel. The one who had so much going for him and then suddenly can’t quite find himself. It’s even too cliché for me. Sometimes I feel my life is like bad summer reading... and worse, that Jeannie might be right: I should just bite the bullet and go back to being a lawyer. But then...I know there’s something out there I was destined to do.”

“I really believe that everyone has a destiny, Skip. Sometimes we find it when all other routes have been closed to us. When we don’t have a choice. That’s when we forge a new route. Sometimes we get so squeezed down from the pressure of life, the world just collapses in, and when that happens, all that pressure has nowhere to go but out.”

“BANG,” Skip said, “and that’s how the universe was created.”

Blossom smiled. “I know from my own experience that when everything feels like it’s tightening around me, something bursts— like a frozen pipe. But when it bursts—and believe me, it does—the first thing you feel is relief.”

Blossom recalled how horrible she felt when she’d gotten the news she was dying, and then how good she felt when she took some action—illegal though it was. She couldn’t tell Skip the details, but she could tell him it was the start to something much better.

“Sometimes when life backs you against the wall, you’ve gotta pull the wall down.”

“What happened to you?” Skip asked. It was a question in waiting. “You know...when you pulled the wall down?”

Blossom closed her eyes. She couldn’t tell Skip about her prognosis or how she had stolen money from a bank and left town, or how she had taken on someone else’s identity. She couldn’t tell him how, for the first time, she was beginning to feel alive. She couldn’t tell him any of that. But there were other tiny revelations that had been born from her actions. Maybe she could talk about them. And so she began.

“I had a friend,” she confided. “Her name was MaryAnn.”

CHAPTER 29

B
LOSSOM SLIPPED INTO
the blinking water and began her laps with the precision of a palace guard marching back and forth on sentry duty. Her arms sliced across the pool like sharp blades, and the rhythm brought her back to childhood, of teeter-totters and trampolines, of MaryAnn and herself sitting on the same swing, each of them pumping hard with tiny knee-socked legs. That was back when Blossom was Charlotte Clapp.

“Throw your head back so you can see the world upside down,” exclaimed Charlotte.

“I’m afraid to,” said MaryAnn.

“Don’t worry. I’ll hold you.”

And up they went, so high that the swing chain went slack before grabbing itself and becoming taut again.

They put on their own talent shows in the finished basements where together they mouthed the words to “Soldier Boy” and pretended they were waiting for their boyfriends to return from the war. They nursed wounded birds caught by Charlotte’s cat and held continual vigil over each shoebox. They sat together and watched
Magnum, PI
reruns, swooning over Tom Selleck. They learned how to make cinnamon toast in Mrs. Paley’s home economics class, which was, Mrs. Paley said, the first important step in preparing them for marriage. And while they weren’t particularly interested in marriage at that point, they most definitely preferred the cinnamon toast to the paste they’d eat in art class. The paste always sent them to the infirmary.

They would sign up for skating lessons at the local ice rink and practice their three turns and waltz jumps together. They would buy their matching sequined skirts and silvery capes and slide across the kitchen floor for hours, getting ready for their Olympic debut. They would meet the boys of summer at the roller rink and spend half their time at the snack bar waiting for these infallible champions to extinguish their thirst and then slyly corral them into the kissing corner. They would steal eggs from the refrigerator to throw against rocks up in the woods. Charlotte still pondered what motivated this rebellious phase.

More than twenty years of confidences and friendship, many of them standing in the chill September air, waiting for the bus to take them to their first day of school.

But after school, freedom rang like the bells of Saint Mary’s, and they would run through the red double doors at three o’clock sharp and into life again.

They’d laugh down the high winter hill behind the Mobil station until Saturday slipped into Sunday, always finding their way to warmth in the form of hot chocolate and cider donuts at the 7-Eleven. There were so many years of tumbling into autumn and hiding themselves for hours under these colorful heaps of happiness. A time so faraway now, it was long lost like those fallen leaves that had blown away with the transient winds of childhood. To this day Charlotte could not smell the cold fires of late October without thinking of MaryAnn and endings. Endings. After all this time, Charlotte had not reconciled hers with MaryAnn.

Their friendship disintegrated in their senior year over a boy named T. J.—Trevor James. Young, handsome Trevor James. Charlotte was thin and pretty and barely had a sense of who she was and what she looked like, but Trevor James knew what she looked like, and liked what he saw.