Summer Lies (3 page)

She propped herself up and laughed at him. “Thank goodness I smiled at you in the restaurant when you didn’t know what to do. At first I didn’t think it was necessary. I thought you’d come to me as directly and quickly as you could.”

He happily echoed her laugh. It didn’t occur to them to take the clumsy, grating aspects of their meeting in the restaurant as any kind of warning. They took it as an awkwardness that laughter could dispel.

They stayed in bed until evening. Then they opened the garage and took Susan’s car, a well-maintained elderly BMW, to drive through rain and darkness to a supermarket. The light was harsh, it smelled of cleaning fluids, the music was synthetic, and the handful of customers were wearily pushing their carts through the empty aisles. “We should have stayed in bed,” she whispered to him, and he was glad that she was as disturbed by the light and the smell and the music as he was. She sighed, laughed, started shopping, and soon had filled up her cart. From time to time he added something, apples, pancake mix, wine. At the checkout, he paid with his credit card and knew that next month, for the first time, he wouldn’t be able to pay in full. It made him uncomfortable, but more than that, it irritated him that on a day like today something as trivial as an overdrawn credit account could upset him. So in the wine and liquor section he bought three bottles of champagne for good measure.

On the way home she asked, “Shall we get your things?”

“Maybe Linda and John are already asleep. I don’t want to wake them.”

Susan nodded. She drove fast and with assurance, and by the way she took the many curves, he could tell that she knew the car and the route well. “Did you drive the car here from Los Angeles?”

“No, the car belongs here. Clark takes care of the house and the garden and the car as well.”

“You only stay in the big house when you have guests?”

“Shall we move up there tomorrow?”

“I don’t know. It’s …”

“It’s too big for me. But with you there it would be fun. We’d read in the library, play billiards in the billiards room, you could practice the flute in the music room, and I’d have breakfast served in the little salon and dinner in the big one.” She talked more and more happily, more and more firmly. “We’ll sleep in the big bedroom where my grandparents and parents slept. Or we’ll sleep in my room in the bed where I dreamed of my prince when I was a girl.”

He saw her smiling face in the dull glow of the dashboard. Susan was lost in her memories. For the first time since they’d met, she was somewhere else. Richard wanted to ask which actor or singer she’d dreamed of back then, wanted to know everything about the men in her life, wanted to hear that they’d all been mere prophets while he was the Messiah. But then he thought that his worries about the other men were as petty as the excessive charge on his credit account. He was tired and laid his head on Susan’s shoulder. She reached over and stroked his head with her left hand, pressed his head to her shoulder, and he fell asleep.

Over the next few days he learned everything about the men in Susan’s life. He also learned about her longing for children, at least two, preferably four. At first with her husband there was no success, then she no longer loved him and she got divorced.
He learned she’d studied art history at college, then had gone to business school, and had reorganized a toy train manufacturer which she’d inherited from her father and then sold along with the other firms she’d inherited. He learned that she had an apartment in Manhattan that she was in the process of having renovated because she wanted to move from Los Angeles to New York. He also learned that she was forty-one, two years older than he was.

Again and again, whatever Susan told him about her life until now ended in plans for their future together. She described her apartment in New York: the wide staircase in the duplex that led up from the sixth floor to the seventh, the wide corridors, the large high rooms, the kitchen with the dumbwaiter, the view of the park. She had grown up in the apartment until her aunt fetched her to Santa Barbara after her parents’ death. “I used to slide down the banisters and roller-skate in the corridors, I could get into the dumbwaiter till I was six, and when I was in bed I could watch the tops of the trees waving from out of my window. You have to go see the apartment!” She couldn’t show it to him herself because she was flying back from the Cape to Los Angeles to organize both the foundation’s move and her own. “Will you meet with the architect? We can still change everything.”

Her grandfather had acquired not only the duplex but the entire building on Fifth Avenue at a very favorable price during the Depression. Along with the estate on the Cape and another in the Adirondacks. “I have to renovate that again too. Do you enjoy architecture? Building and renovating and decorating? I got the plans and brought them with me—shall we look at them together?”

She talked about a couple, old friends of hers, who had been trying in vain to have children for years, and had just spent
their vacation at a fertility farm. She described the diet and the program, which laid out when the two of them were to sleep, exercise, eat, even have sex. She found it funny, but was also a little anxious. “You Europeans don’t know about this kind of thing, or so I read. You see life as fate that cannot be changed.”

“Yes,” he said, “and if we’re destined to kill our fathers and sleep with our mothers, there’s nothing we can do about it.”

She laughed. “Then you really can’t hold anything against the fertility farm. If it doesn’t help your destiny, it can’t do any harm, either.” She shrugged apologetically. “It’s just because things didn’t work with Robert back then. Perhaps it wasn’t my fault, perhaps he was the one with the problem, we didn’t have any tests done. But all the same, I’ve been afraid ever since.”

He nodded. He was feeling afraid too. About the minimum two, maximum four children. And beforehand, about having to follow a set diet and have sex at set times with Susan at the fertility farm. About the loud ticking of the biological clock until the fourth child arrived or no more children were possible. About the possibility that Susan’s abandon and passion when she made love to him weren’t about him at all.

“Don’t be afraid. I just say what’s on my mind. That doesn’t mean it’s my last word on anything. You censor what you say.

“Again, that’s European.”

He didn’t want a conversation about his fear. She was right: he censored what he said, while she said directly whatever she was thinking or feeling. No, she didn’t want to plan a visit with him to the fertility farm. But she did want to plan the future with him, and although he too wanted it more with every day that passed, he had so much less to bring to the relationship than she did: no apartment, no houses, no money. If he and the woman at the first desk of the second violin section had fallen in love, then they would have looked for an apartment
together and decided together which of his furniture and which of her furniture would go into the new apartment and what they would have to find at a thrift store. Susan was certainly ready to fill a room or two with his furniture. But he knew it wouldn’t fit in.

He’d be able to bring his flute and his sheet music, and practice at the music stand that would certainly exist among all her furniture. He could put his books in her bookcases, order his papers in her father’s filing cabinet, and write his letters at her father’s desk. He would best leave his clothes in the closet here in the country; in the city, he wouldn’t look so good in them when he was with her. She would be delighted to use her sense of fashion to buy him new ones.

He practiced a lot. Most of the time “dry,” as he called it, when he simply curled and stretched his little finger. But more and more frequently on the flute itself. It was becoming a part of him in a way it never had before. It belonged to him, it was worth a lot, with it he created music and made money, he could take it wherever he went, he was at home with it anywhere. And when he played, he offered Susan something that no one else could offer her. When he improvised, he made melodies that fit her moods.

The corner room in the big house was their favorite. The many windows reached down to the floor and could be slid aside in good weather and protected with shutters when it was bad. When rain prevented them from walking on the beach, this was where they could still feel in touch with the ocean, the waves, the seagulls, and the occasional passing ship. Sometimes
when they were out on the sand, the cold rain lashed their faces so sharply that it hurt.

The room was furnished with cane recliners, big chairs and tables, with soft cushions against the hard-woven surfaces. “Pity,” he said when she led him through the house and he saw the recliners, which were only wide enough for one person. Two days later, as they were having breakfast in the little salon, a truck pulled up and two men in blue coveralls carried a double recliner into the house. It matched the other furniture, and the cushions had the same flower pattern as the other cushions.

The weather made every day like every other. It rained day after day, sometimes rising to the level of a storm, sometimes stopping for hours or sometimes mere minutes, and sometimes the skies cleared for a moment and the rooftops made sheets of light. When the weather allowed, Susan and Richard walked on the beach; if they ran out of supplies they drove to the supermarket, otherwise they stayed in the big house. When they switched from the little house to the big one, Susan had called Clark’s wife, Mita, who came for a few hours every day to take care of cleaning and washing and cooking. She was so discreet that it was several days before Richard met her.

One evening they invited Linda and John to dinner. Susan and Richard cooked, having no idea how, so that they even found it difficult to follow the cookbook. But they finally managed to serve steaks with potatoes and salad and felt good about being able to cope in a crisis together. Apart from this they invited no one, nor did they visit other people. “There’ll still be time for our friends.”

When dusk came, they made love. The evening light sufficed them until it was totally dark, when they lit a candle. They made love so peacefully that Richard sometimes wondered if he’d make Susan happier by ripping off the clothes of both of
them, throwing himself on her, and surrendering himself to her. He didn’t manage to try, and she didn’t seem to miss it. We’re not feral cats, he thought, we’re house cats.

Until they had their big fight, the first and the only one. They were going to go to the supermarket, and Susan kept Richard waiting in the car because she had to take a sudden phone call, which went on forever. That she let him wait without any explanation, that she had forgotten him or could simply neglect him, made him so angry that he got out, went into the house, and attacked her just as she put down the receiver. “Is this what I have to expect? What you do is important and what I do isn’t? Your time is precious and mine doesn’t count?”

At first she didn’t understand. “Los Angeles called. The chairman …”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why do you always …”

“I’m sorry I kept you waiting for a few minutes. I thought a European man sees …”

“The Europeans—I’ve had it up to here with your Europeans. I was waiting out there for half an hour …”

Now she got angry too. “Half an hour? It was a minute or two. If that’s too long for you, go into the house and read the newspaper. You prima donna, you …”

“Prima donna? Me? Which of us …”

She accused him of making an incomprehensible, exaggerated to-do. He didn’t understand what was supposed to be incomprehensible and exaggerated about wanting to count as much as she did, when he had nothing and she had everything. She didn’t understand how he could be so absurd as to think that he didn’t count. By the end they were yelling at each other in fury and despair.

“I hate you!” She advanced on him, he moved back, she kept coming, and when he was against the wall and could move no
further, she beat his chest with her fists till he took her in his arms and held her tight. At first she fumbled at the buttons of his shirt, then tore it open, he tried to pull off her jeans and she his, but it was too cumbersome and went too slowly, so they each did their own, yanking off jeans and underpants and socks in a single motion. They had sex on the floor in the hall, fast, urgent, passionate.

Afterward he lay on his back with her half in the curve of his arm and half against his chest. “Well,” he said, and laughed aloud. She made a slight movement, a shake of the head, a tiny shrug of the shoulders, and pressed herself closer to him. He sensed that unlike him, she hadn’t made the transition from passionate fighting into passionate sex. She hadn’t torn open his shirt because she wanted to feel his chest, she’d torn it open because she wanted to find his heart. The object of passion had been a return to the peace she had lost during their fight.

They drove to the supermarket and Susan filled up the cart as if they were staying for weeks. On the way home the sun broke through the clouds and they took the next road to the sea, not the open ocean but the bay. The water was unruffled and the sky clear; they could see the tip of the Cape and the other side of the bay.

“I like it before a storm when you can see so far and the contours are so sharp.”

“Storm?”

“Yes. I don’t know whether it’s the humidity or the electricity that makes the air so clear, but it’s the kind of air you get before a storm. Treacherous air: it promises you good weather and what you get is a storm.”

“Please forgive me for attacking you before. And I didn’t just attack you, I yelled at you too. I’m truly sorry.”

He waited for her to say something. Then he saw that she
was crying and stood still, shocked. She lifted her tearstained face and put her arms around his neck. “No one has ever said anything as nice to me before. That he’s sorry for what he said to me. I’m sorry too. I yelled too, I cursed you, and I hit you. We’re never going to do that again, do you hear me? Never.”

Then it was the last day. She was flying at four thirty, and he was flying at five thirty, and they ate a quiet breakfast on the terrace for the first time. The sun was so hot that it was as if the rain and the cold had just been an infection from which the summer had recovered again. Then they took a walk on the beach.