Summer Accommodations: A Novel (32 page)

Then, Ron said, “You're afraid that that's what's happening with your Sarah now, aren't you. That she'll be carried away, someone else will take her away from you. Don't let that happen, Mel. Don't let it happen.”

Sick with helplessness I said, “It was just a story, Ron, just a story about Abe. It could never really happen.” But we both knew it very well could.

4.

In mid-August the late afternoon sun, more than halfway along its course of return to the autumn equinox, illuminates the landscape with a precision that makes each tree beckon you to scrutinize its every leaf. You look up from the field of wild asters and suddenly nature seems to say to you “Presenting the Sugar Maple,” a patch of red and orange-yellow smeared on its upper leaves like a shock of white in a head of black hair reminding you that there is a change of season approaching. The leaves, a dark lustreless green, hang heavy and weary from their branches fatigued by the long season in the sun, waiting. It is my favorite time of day in my favorite time of year. How I so envied the members of the band, the camp counselors, the tennis pros and lifeguards who could relax and celebrate that special, peaceful stillness of the late summer afternoons. Being a bus-boy one rarely got to luxuriate in it for more than an hour before having to return to the kitchen. Still, at that enchanted hour on the Saturday of Sarah's return from the city and her meeting with Hank I did nothing to distract myself from the glory of the landscape. Whatever was awaiting me at our reunion, whatever changes and uncertainties might be revealed, the beauty of the hills and their turning trees and the gurgling of the water in the lake would still provide me with solace.

I had expected Sarah back around three o'clock so after a shower I went down to the lake and sat on the dock, my bare feet dangling over the water. It was four p.m. The day camp had already had its turn with the rowboats and now some hotel guests drifted around in them rowing only to keep from running aground at the shore or from colliding with one another. They bobbed idly in the late afternoon sun, the men sprawled out and asleep, one of the women tentatively dipping her fingers in the cool water, cautious and timorous, as though a school of piranha lurked in the darkness waiting to devour any flesh she bared to them. I didn't know if Sarah would come looking for me there but were she to seek me out this was the place I'd most likely be.

We had declared the lake to be ours alone only the week before. We'd come to the dock in the evening and looked over the untroubled, slowly rolling waters to the cottages on the other side and, like officious landlords, complained about the obtuse tenants' lack of appreciation for the amenities provided by the setting. There were no campfires with marshmallows toasting, no telescopes trained at the sky, no sounds of laughter or raucous conviviality. And that night, while we were pretending to be the landowners, Sarah admitted to me she had lied about Sandy Koufax being her cousin.

“I guess I was a little insecure. I thought you'd be more interested in me if I added that story about Sandy Koufax.” I told her that it hadn't mattered enough to me even to bring it up again. She was perfect just as she was, with or without him, though I have to admit to some disappointment at the news. I was already imagining good seats at the World Series if the Dodgers and Yankees had another October match.

I said, “You know, in some ways I'm even more impressed with you now that you've told me Sandy isn't your cousin. You've got a hell of an arm.” We laughed and cuddled and what had started out as a takeaway ended up bringing us even closer together. That's why this Hank business was so confusing and disorienting; I'd thought we were both in love. It was while I wandered in this reverie that Sarah quietly sat down next to me on the dock.

“Hi,” she said softly. I felt a strong adrenaline rush rampage through me and batter at my insides.

“You're back,” I said, without looking at her. All my imagined dialogues, all of the ‘I say and then she says and then I say' fantastically scripted exchanges came apart and scattered like a stack of loose pages in a violent wind. I sat there feigning a stolid demeanor but inside myself the desire to plead and beg her not to leave me battled with a ferocious passion to berate her for what I took to be her betrayal and deceit.

“I'm back,” she echoed in a small voice. Was this the voice of shame and remorse or the voice of the bad news to come? “Are you Okay?” she asked, her voice now registering concern. Not as stolid as I'd wished to be, I thought, but then said the words that had come to me just that morning while in the shower, words intended for lighthearted use at a hoped for more relaxed and intimate time of reunion.

“I'm fine. It only hurts when I love.”

“Ohhh,” she wailed softly. “I'm so sorry. I did a terrible thing to you.”

“Don't tell me!” I shot back in a panic.

“No, no nothing like what you're thinking. You couldn't possibly know what I'm referring to.” She put her hand on mine. “I put you through hell for no reason, well, there was a reason but I should have known better than to tell you.”

“You mean you should have lied.”

“Yes. No! Well, I just shouldn't have told you about Hank. I should have said I was going home and left him out of it.”

“Does this mean that he's not as important to you as you were thinking he was?”

“It means you are important to me.” She was writing her own script. She was avoiding my questions and giving me answers that should have made me feel reassured. But they didn't. Instead I felt mistrustful of her in the same way that I had come to feel mistrustful of Harlan. It was as though words no longer had meaning, as though the words didn't mean what they were intended to mean.

“How come what you say doesn't make me feel reassured, huh? How come?”

“I don't know. I think I'm being pretty clear. Would this make it clearer?” And she turned me around and gave me a French kiss.

“Well, that says something but I'm not sure I got all of it. Could you repeat that for me?” She kissed me again, putting her arms around me and squeezing me to her while her tongue worked its way inside and around my mouth. There was a whoop from one of the boaters on the lake, then a loud whistle and some hand clapping. We both ignored the voyeurs. But wonderful as her kiss was, delightful as her hugs and remarkable tongue work, there was still a dark climate of doubt lurking inside me, still the dank air of suspicion and mistrust. And though I wished to shake myself free of it, wished for her love to feel as it had felt only days before, I could not let go of my distrust. With just a little more than a week left to us, sadly, something precious had been lost.

“So, the usual time tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“You don't seem like yourself, Mel, still mad at me about going to New York?”

“No, just a little confused, that's all.” She put her arm over my shoulder and gave me a sideways hug.

“It will be all right, don't worry.”

5.

The Saturday night roast beef dinner was meant to set up the guests for the big Sunday lunch steak dinner send off. Sammy was busy telling stories so once again I had to do most of the work. After dessert he pulled me aside.

“Ben wants to know if you've started to do what he wants. I don't know what he wants but you do, so have you started?”

“You mean he didn't tell you about his plan to trap Harlan?”

“Don't tell me anything, I don't want to hear it.” he said, his hands raised, palms facing me as though I was a stick up man. “I'm just giving you the message. Ben knows that as headwaiter I don't want any part of anything that makes my boys trust me less. I have a reputation to protect.”

“Christ. He just sent me his plan the other night, I haven't had time yet, tell him. Or just say I'll do it. I'll do it.” I'd been so preoccupied with Sarah I hadn't decided what to do about Harlan.

After cleaning my station and washing up I met Sarah on the side porch of the hotel. We usually met there. After her dinner she spent time with Heidi until Harlan and I finished work. The two girls would busy themselves trying on each other's clothes and exchanging lipsticks, makeup and, I was fairly certain, intimate confidences. The waiters were done before the busboys so he and I arrived separately and Harlan and Heidi would just go off, never waiting for the double date I had tried to arrange. I also suspected that Sarah had told Heidi she'd prefer not to do that. The wariness Sarah had fostered in me, first for Harlan but then, unwittingly, for herself as well, did not alter our meeting place. When she saw me she waved but remained leaning against the railing that rimmed the porch. It was still thrilling for me to look at her, to imagine touching her, but I perceived something was wrong. At first I wondered if it was about me. The change that had occurred had made me more chary and cautious with her, but then I could see it was something coming from her. She didn't smile her little puckered smile and she began to talk as soon as I stood next to her, no greeting, no embrace, no kiss. I dreaded that she was about to tell me she'd decided to stay with Hank and was here to say good-bye.

“I know you won't like what I did but please believe me, it was for your own good.” Sarah wouldn't even look at me. She fidgeted with her cuticles, pushing at them with her thumbnail. I waited anxiously for her to go on. “Harlan flirted with me tonight after he came for Heidi. We'd been playing some music while we waited for him to come and by the time he showed up Heidi was in the bathroom so we were alone. The music that was playing was a slow song and I could tell by the way he looked at me that if I were to encourage him he would make a pass at me. So, this time, because he's done it to me before, when he smiled and winked at me in a way that could be understood to mean only one thing, I smiled back. It was as though you were irrelevant, you didn't exist, your name never even came up. There was no sense that you were his friend and that I was your girlfriend. He would have met me later, gone anywhere I asked, done anything I allowed. You didn't count.”

“All this from the way that he looked at you?” I said numbly.

“No, damn it. Do you want me to give you all the gory details, Mel, is that what you need?” If a painful sense of shame was hiding behind her protest I was too much on guard to notice.

“Yes, that's what I need!” Harlan's suggestion that Sarah was criticizing him to deflect attention from her own doings had remained in my thoughts. I had raised my voice and was loud enough to disturb some men who were playing pinochle at a nearby table. A gruff, “Hey!” silenced me. “Sorry,” I called out. “Let's take a walk,” I said softly, but inside I was in turmoil. We left the porch and walked down the hill to the area of the swimming pool. It was too cold to swim and most of the hotel's guests were at Show Night. We sat down on deck chairs, the lights inside the pool casting an eerie, rippling aquamarine light across Sarah's face.

“Give me the details, exactly what happened.” Her shoulders slumped as she began.

“I didn't have to say anything to him. I moved a little closer to him and then I looked down and away from him. He put his hand on my shoulder. I shivered, not from excitement but from disgust and revulsion. Heidi was just in the next room, Mel, and Harlan, Harlan had no concerns, no scruples.” I could see that she was shivering again but I feared that if I were to touch her the feelings of disgust would spill over on to me. “Heidi called out she'd be right in and Harlan put his lips near my ear and said ‘midnight at my car, and you won't be sorry'.”

“What did you say?”

“Go fuck yourself. Can you believe that? I never curse, but I was so furious and ashamed I said ‘go fuck yourself' to him. And I knew when I brought this back to you you'd try to find some way to make it not be what it really was.” The episode with Harlan now out in the open she was calmer; her arms were folded across her breasts and her hands caressed the curves of her shoulders with light, soothing strokes. I felt the same sense of sickness I'd experienced reading the rejection letter from college, a sense of terrible disappointment and loss, not the impotent rage of helplessness. I didn't know if I had any control of what was happening with Sarah and me, and part of me could not believe Harlan had actually proposed a tryst with her, but then which one was I to believe? Maybe Sarah was trying to provoke him to make a scene in front of Heidi. Neither Sarah nor Harlan was proving to be particularly monogamous or loyal. My head was spinning and I couldn't think straight. Though I had wanted to see Sarah, be with Sarah, hold Sarah, right then I didn't want her near me. In an almost preternatural way, sensing my withdrawal, she got up and walked to the edge of the pool, her arms still folded across her breasts. “I think I'd like to go back to my room now. I don't feel very well.”

When we were walking back to her building she said, “You don't believe me, do you.”

“Sarah, of course I believe you, it's just that, well, possibly there was some kind of misunderstanding, a tease, a joke, I don't know. I'd like to think he didn't mean to be serious.”

She stopped, turned, looked intently at me and, shaking her head, she said, “You don't believe me, it's written all over your face. My God, you don't believe me. You believe that insane story about judge Crater but you don't believe me!” She hurried away towards her room and when I caught up with her she held her hand up to stop my approach and said, “Good night, Mel.” and marched into her dormitory leaving me standing at the door.

No matter how I tried to excuse the behavior Sarah had described, how I weighed possible alternative explanations, not that I could come up with any, it began to be clear to me there was no way I should ever trust Harlan again. Was he capable of trying to seduce my girlfriend? Of course he was and I became sick to my stomach considering it a likelihood not just a possibility. A cold sweat broke out all over my body and the same faintness that had overwhelmed me the night with Diana overtook me. I sat down on the stairs of Heidi's porch and lowered my head to my knees. Sarah would not make up such a story; that kind of deceitfulness and maliciousness just were not in her. He must have said something, done something to make her feel so disgusted by his very presence. And as I struggled with my confusion and injured disbelief the doubts Sarah had introduced became a swinging wrecking ball aimed directly at the already shrunken remains of my idealized creation of Harlan, one that shattered the foundation supporting the once colossal image I had erected. The entire summer it was as if I had hypnotized myself into an uncritical idolatry of Harlan and I'd behaved like a worshipful attendant who saw in him only the good. To acknowledge this now was totally humiliating. At last I asked myself why it was that Harlan had no friends. Was it because he really was so self-contained and independent or was he, like Abe Melman, hiding something from the rest of us? And when Sarah told me about his attempt to put the make on her, then what would he expect me to do? Ignore it? Make excuses for him again? It was almost ten o'clock and in a tormented and angry state I returned to the waiter's quarters, tears of sadness and rage spilling from my eyes, feelings of loss and thoughts of betrayal twisting around each other inside me. I had hoped to model myself after Harlan, to learn from him, to become something like his replica. How ridiculous and pathetic that now seemed.