Summerlong (21 page)

“Of course,” he says. “Thank you so much for this. For the money.”

“Thank Ruth,” she says. “She insisted. I tried to talk her out of it.”

She grins at him, a puzzling grin he cannot begin to understand.

After making a deposit at the bank with a teller he thankfully does not recognize, some young college kid working a summer job, Don goes back to the office. The last thing he wants out in town is that he’s taking charity from Mrs. Manetti. Because it is a cashier’s check, there is no waiting period, and he takes a thousand dollars out right away, putting the cash in his wallet.

He is ready for a winter away—Claire will come around. He is sure of it. Up in Minnesota, they could make that money last almost two years. They’ll sell one of the cars. They’ll have to figure out health insurance. They’ll have some expenses, but not many. Don has never before gone on unemployment or Medicaid or food stamps, it is not in his nature. But maybe he is dumb about that. Maybe it is time to simply swallow his pride and take whatever he can get. It is survival time now. Bankruptcy. Going off the grid. Don Lowry: going, going, gone!

ABC goes out onto the front porch. Charlie is sitting out there with Ruth, watching the darkness set in, and smoking a joint. Ruth counts the fireflies. Then ABC enters this quiet space, twirls about, and shows off a flouncy black dress, short and strapless, that does nothing to hide anything about her body. She wears no shoes and her legs are shiny and bronzed from a day in the sun.

“You are about the sexiest woman who has ever set foot in Grinnell,” Ruth says.

“I’m overdressed, aren’t I?” she says. “I found this at Goodwill!”

“It’s a heat wave party, ABC. You look great!” Ruth says. “I love the idea. A heat wave party. It sounds sexy.”

“It sounds cheesy,” Charlie says.

“Cheesy?” Ruth says. “I’d say it sounds more boozy than cheesy. If I remember such parties correctly, people will get powerfully and famously drunk. Just don’t talk to any professors and you won’t be bored.”

She winks at ABC.

“You sure you don’t want to come?” Charlie asks Ruth. She is toking up on the last of the joint.

She laughs. “No, no, no,” she says, and she stands and lets ABC lead her inside. About ten minutes later, ABC comes back to the porch.

“She’s asleep,” ABC says. “This is a powerful batch.”

“You’re really something,” Charlie says.

“You too,” she says to Charlie, who is dressed in red swim trunks, a sleeveless white undershirt, red canvas sneakers with no socks, and mirrored aviator shades. “You also are really something.”

“I wanted to look like Burt Lancaster in
The Swimmer
, but I think I feel more like Slater when he worked as a lifeguard on
Saved by the Bell
.”

“There have been many adolescent fantasies about A. C. Slater as a lifeguard. I can say that with authority,” ABC says. “Is that show still on?”

“It was already on in reruns when we were kids. I don’t know if it translates well into 2012. It already seemed strange to me when I was young. I didn’t understand the hair or the clothes. I thought I was missing some joke. And then one day I saw, what’s her name, Tiffani-Amber something, and I got it. Like overnight, I thought, whoa. Whoa. Whoa!”

“You lucky duck, you get to have sex with me at the end of the night,” she says.

“That beats wanking it to a syndicated high school sitcom star in my father’s study,” Charlie says.

A little later, when they walk into the party, the sun of early evening still bright, they see that the dominant theme is flesh, that everyone has tried to look sultry and hot, and together, unspoken, ABC and Charlie feel the full power of their youth, in a way young people often fail to recognize. They are the sexiest couple there. They can both feel it. Everyone is staring at them.

Charlie takes off his shirt and hangs it on the fence.

Don is working at his desk, answering e-mails, filling out paperwork, trying to figure out if he should or could pay any quarterly taxes, when Claire walks into his office, in a manner so stunning he involuntarily stands up from his chair.

She wears white sandals with a heel, a white two-piece swimsuit, and over it a sheer white shirtdress that’s cinched a bit at the waist, comes down to the middle of her thighs, and buttons down the front. Her hair is slicked back and wet and she wears huge gold hoop earrings.

“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 sex 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 fuck each other as many times as possible before passing 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 sexy. 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 shirts or tank tops and sandals, though there is one man in a seersucker suit, which ABC says is much sexier 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. Nobody, 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
album, probably the only Beach Boys album the hosts have, one that hasn’t been listened to in a long time. It’s an album on which even the ocean-groove love songs carry an impossibly melancholic subtext:
God 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.

“Damn,” Charlie says. “Holy fucking sexy.”

“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 shirtless 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 shirt and tie. She undoes his tie and slides it off, tosses it on a chair. She unbuttons three buttons 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 fucks 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, pushing 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 glass.

“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 fucked.

Everyone asks after Charlie’s father, and Charlie nods soberly and says his father is doing as well as one could expect. Almost nobody 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 sex 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 undershirt 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 glass brick half wall that surrounds the toilet in the massive 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 sex,” 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 coke?”

“Or a blow job?” 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 fuck 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 shirt 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 fuck aren’t you in New York? Both of you. This place, kids, this place is a prison.”

“I know!” Charlie bellows. “Why the fuck?”

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-FUCKING-WHERE.”

“I happen to like it here,” ABC says.

“Total bullshit!” 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 Coke, 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. “Fuck you!”

Don obediently cracks open the can of Coke 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 fucking 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.

“Live in the moment, Don. Tonight, I am here. So are you.”

“So is he!” Don says, slapping Charlie on the back with an overzealousness that borders on violent.

“I’m just saying, you know, we’re happy to have you kids here,” Don says. “But don’t remain in Grinnell, Iowa, simply because you
have a place to stay
.”

“What do you think, Don?” Charlie says, grinning, loudly hissing the words. “Better to ignore a year’s worth of foreclosure notices and not tell your wife?”

A few people near Charlie and Don and ABC stop and stare. Charlie has raised his voice.

Nobody says anything in response.

“Let’s use that fucking slip and slide, eh?” Don says, devilishly, and leads ABC by the hand. She turns to Charlie and offers him a middle finger as a farewell.

Charlie is happy to see Claire then, out on the patio. She is
in only her swimsuit now. In one hand, she holds her dress, in the other her shoes. She’s been swimming in the kiddie pool or using the slip and slide. He goes up to her, downing his beer as he approaches. Maybe she’s also snorted a line of coke upstairs. She looks wired, as if she might burst into sparks and flames.

“I’m leaving,” Charlie says. “Also, you look amazing.”

“I hope no one takes a picture of me, because I am sure my mental image of myself is not what the rest of the world is seeing. I bought this dress for a trip we took, long ago. I bought it for Don. But now we’re pretty much three bricks shy of done.”

“You mean a load,” Charlie says.

“What?”

“The saying. It’s ‘three bricks shy of a load
.
’ Also, I just did a line of coke upstairs with some professors.”

“What?” Claire says. “Seriously? You did?”

“I know,” he says. “It was insane.”

“Okay, now I want to do something insane,” she says.

She steps closer to him.

“You what?”

“Do you want to do something insane with me?” she whispers, in his ear, her hand on his chest.

“What?”

“I didn’t do it,” she says.

“Do what, Claire?”

“I didn’t do it. I did what you said. I didn’t talk to Don after you told me not to talk to him.”

“What?”

“I haven’t talked to Don all night. Earlier, he tried to tell me something, and I walked away. I obeyed you. And now, you are going to obey me.”

She walks over to a cooler, pulls out two Coronas, opens them with a church key, and hands one to Charlie. She whispers in his ear, “I’m leaving,” she says.

The last thing Charlie sees is the crowd that forms as Don
Lowry and ABC careen down the two side-by-side slip and slides, shouting
fuck
at the top of their lungs.

On the walk home, they cut through the park and atop a hill, under a massive oak, they stop and Charlie is behind Claire and she feels his hardness through the thin, slippery trunks. She presses her ass against him. She will let him fuck her there if he tries. She is that drunk; so is he.

She leads him down the hill to her house, to his house, to their house. In the yard, she comes up behind him and reaches into his trunks and he turns and runs his hands down her body, reaching under the fabric of her suit, grabbing her ass and pressing her against him again.

“Put your hands behind your back,” she says.

He does.

She grabs his hips, turns around, and pushes her ass up against his groin.

“Wait here.”

In a few minutes, she comes to the front door and motions for him to follow. He keeps his hands behind his back.

They go inside without turning on any lights. She goes to the kitchen and he follows her. Somewhere they have dropped their empty beer bottles—at the park, perhaps—and now she gets two more from the fridge. She puts her hand on his hip and hands him another beer. She rubs her hand against the trunks again, feeling how ready he is.

“I love the way you feel,” she says in his ear and she goes down his belly, onto her knees, and blows on him, nibbling him playfully through the swim trunks. The gesture of this, of being down in front of him, of giving him a love bite on his hard cock, freezes her slightly. She has flashbacked to the time she and Don had worked as lifeguards in college and she had gone down on him; it had begun in much the same way. It had been at a lifeguard party. She
had handed him a beer, had felt his hard-on, had teased him with her mouth in the shadows behind the filter shed. She doesn’t want to be thinking of Don, but she is.

“Are you okay?” Charlie says. She has stopped moving and she looks up at him.

“You’re not allowed to speak,” she says.

And now she is wondering if Don is still sliding across the slip and slide in his underwear, making a drunken spectacle of himself, or if he is somewhere else.

A small part of her hopes he is somewhere else, doing the same things that she thinks perhaps she is about to finally do.