Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (6 page)

He turned to Caroline. “And is this your wife? Well, well, you certainly did not exaggerate.” He took her hand, bowed, and kissed it. Then he turned to one side and laid his hand on the shoulder of a woman whose presence I hadn’t noticed, because she was entirely blocked from view by his huge frame. Now she moved, almost literally, out of his shadow and held out her hand.

“Judith,” she said. She shook Caroline’s hand first, then mine.

Only much later, when I saw her for the first time by herself, did I realize that Judith Meier was not really a small person. She was only small when standing beside her husband, like a village at the foot of a mountain. But that evening in the lobby of the old municipal theater I looked from Ralph to Judith and then from Judith back to Ralph, and I thought the
things I often think when seeing couples together for the first time.

“So, did the two of you enjoy it?” Judith asked, talking more to Caroline than to me.

“I thought it was fantastic,” Caroline said. “A fantastic experience.”

“Maybe I should leave for a bit,” Ralph said. “Then you can say what you really thought.” He laughed his thunderous laugh; a few people turned their heads and laughed along with him.

As I said earlier, in the line of duty I sometimes have to ask patients to get undressed. When all other alternatives have been exhausted. With only a few exceptions, most of my patients are husbands and wives. I observe their naked bodies. I superimpose the images. I see how the one body approaches the other. I see a mouth, lips pressed against other lips, hands, fingers that search, fingernails across a stretch of bare skin. Sometimes the room is dark, but often it isn’t. Some people have no qualms about leaving the lights on. I have seen their bodies; I know that, in most cases, it would be better to turn the lights off. I look at their feet, their ankles, their knees, their thighs, and then farther up, the area around the navel, the chest or breasts, the neck. The actual sex organs I usually skip over. I look, but the way you might look at a dead animal in the road. My gaze is usually only held for a moment, like a hangnail on a loose thread of clothing—no more than that. And I haven’t even got to the back sides yet. The back sides of bodies are a different story altogether. Buttocks, depending on their shape or shapelessness, can summon up tenderness or blind rage. The nameless spot where the crack between them merges into the lower back. The spine. The shoulder blades.
The hairline at the back of the neck. The back side of a human body contains more no-man’s-land than the front does. On the back side of the moon, both capsule and lunar lander lose all radio contact with ground control. I put on my interested expression. Does it also hurt when you lie on your side? I ask, thinking the whole time about couples with the lights on or the lights off, groping at each other’s backsides. All I really want, in fact, is for it to be over quickly. For them to get dressed again. For me to be able to look only at their talking heads. But I never forget the bodies. I connect one face to another. I connect the bodies. I let them become intertwined. Breathing heavily, one head approaches the other. Tongues are stuck into mouths and poke around probingly inside. In big cities there are streets lined with skyscrapers where the sun rarely shines. Between the paving stones grows moss or grass that is almost dead. It is cold and clammy there. Or sometimes even warm and clammy. Little flies everywhere. Or clouds of mosquitoes. You can get dressed. I’ve seen enough. How is your husband doing? Your wife?

I looked at Ralph Meier, and then at Judith. As I said, she wasn’t so small in and of herself. She was too small for
him
. I thought about the things. The things people do with each other in the dark. I looked at Ralph’s hand clutching a champagne glass. All things considered, it was a wonder that the glass didn’t break.

And then, suddenly, there was that moment. The moment I would think back on often, later on—the moment that should have been a warning to me.

Judith had taken Caroline by the elbow and was introducing her to someone. A woman whose face seemed vaguely familiar, probably one of the actresses in
Richard II
. That was
how Caroline happened to be standing half turned away from us, with her back to Ralph and me.

“In any case, I was never bored for a moment,” I told Ralph. “It was a unique experience for me, too.”

It took a couple of seconds before I realized that Ralph Meier was no longer listening to me. He was no longer even looking at me. And, without following his gaze, I knew immediately what he was looking at.

Now something was happening to the gaze itself. To the eyes. As he examined the back of Caroline’s body from head to foot, a film slid down over his eyes. In nature films, you see that sometimes with birds of prey. A raptor that has located, from somewhere far up, high in the air, or from a tree branch, a mouse or some other tasty morsel. That was how Ralph Meier was regarding my wife’s body: as if it were something edible, something that made his mouth water. Now there was also some movement around his mouth. The lips parted, his jaws churned, I even thought I heard the grinding of teeth—and he breathed a sigh. Ralph Meier was seeing something delicious. His mouth was already anticipating the tasty morsel that he would, if given the chance, wolf down in a few bites.

The most remarkable thing perhaps was that he did all this without the slightest embarrassment. As though I weren’t even there. He might as well have unzipped his pants and stood there pissing on me. It would have made no real difference.

Then, from one moment to the next, he was back again. As though someone had snapped their fingers: a hypnotist releasing him from his trance.

“Marc,” he said. He looked at me as though seeing me for the first time. Then he looked at the empty glass in his hand. “What do you say? Shall we go for one more?”

Later that evening, in bed, I told Caroline about it. Caroline had just removed the elastic band from her hair and shaken it loose. She seemed more amused than shocked. “Oh really?” she said. “What kind of look was that, exactly? Tell me again …”

“Like he was looking at a tasty morsel,” I said.

“Really? So? But I
am
a tasty morsel, aren’t I? Or don’t you think so?”

“Caroline, please! I don’t know how to put it any more clearly … I … I thought it was
dirty
.”

“Oh, sweetheart. It isn’t dirty, is it, the way men look at women? Or women at men, for that matter? I mean, that Ralph Meier is a real ladies’ man, everything about him. It’s probably not very nice for his wife, but okay, it was her choice. A woman can tell that right away, the kind of man she’s with.”

“I was standing right beside him. He didn’t give a shit.”

Now Caroline turned to face me. She slid up a little until she was lying against me and placed a hand on my chest.

“You’re not jealous, are you? It sort of sounds like it, like a jealous husband.”

“I’m not jealous! I know exactly how men look at women. But this wasn’t normal. This was … this was
dirty
. I don’t know how else to put it.”

“My sweet, jealous little man,” Caroline said.

In a practice like mine, the key is not to worry too much about medical standards. About what is, strictly speaking, medically responsible. In the “creative” professions, excess is more the rule than the exception. Collectively, my patients account for ten well-filled bottle banks a week. I could tell them the truth. The truth is somewhere around two or three glasses a day. Two glasses for women, three for men. No one really wants to hear that truth. I press my fingertips against the liver. I test it for hardening. How many glasses of alcohol do you drink in the course of a day? I ask. They can’t fool me. Alcohol comes out through the skin. A beer before dinner and after that no more than half a bottle of wine, they say. Alcohol seeps out through the pores and evaporates right off the skin. I have a good nose. I can smell what they drank the night before. Painters and sculptors stink of old gin or eau-de-vie. Writers and actors of beer and vodka. Female writers and actresses, when they breathe,
give off the sourish smell of cheap Chardonnay on ice. They might hold up a hand to cover their mouths, but the eructations can’t be stopped. Of course, I could say something. I could try to get to the bottom of things, as they say. A beer or half a bottle of wine: Don’t make me laugh! The patients would leave. The same way they left to escape their previous family doctor. A doctor who, like me, pressed his finger against their livers and felt the same thing I did—but who then went on to tell them the truth. If you go on like this, your liver will rupture within a year. The end is an extremely painful one. The liver can no longer process the waste. It spreads out through the rest of the body. It piles up in the ankles, the ventricles, the whites of the eyes. The whites of the eyes first turn yellow, then gray. Parts of the liver die off. The actual rupture is the final stage. So the patients leave and come to me. So-and-so—a good friend, male or female, a colleague—told them about a physician who doesn’t worry too much about how much alcohol you knock back in the course of a day. Well, listen, that maximum-number-of-glasses-a-day stuff is all pretty relative, I say. You only live once. Clean living is one of the major inducers of stress. Just look around. Has it ever occurred to you how many artists live to be eighty or more, even though they’ve always lived a life of riot? I see my new patient starting to relax already. A smile appears on his or her face. I name names. Pablo Picasso, I say. Pablo Picasso knew how to bend an elbow. Mentioning the name serves a twin purpose. Because I refer to my patients in the same breath as a world-famous artist, they feel like Pablo Picasso himself, even if only for a moment. I could put it differently. You’re a much bigger lush than Pablo Picasso ever was, I could say. The only thing is, you don’t possess a tenth of his talent. When you look
at things clearly, it’s simply a waste. A waste of alcohol, that is. But I don’t say that. And the other names I don’t mention. The names of the geniuses who drank themselves to death. At the end of the afternoon on the last day of his life, Dylan Thomas returned to his room at New York’s Chelsea Hotel. “I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that is a record,” he told his wife. Then he lost consciousness. At the autopsy it turned out that his liver was four times the normal size. I say nothing about Charles Bukowski, about Paul Gauguin, about Janis Joplin. The important thing is
how
you live, I say. People who can enjoy life last longer than the sourpusses who eat only plants and slurp organic yogurt. I tell them about the vegetarians with terminal intestinal disorders, the teetotalers who die in their late twenties after a cardiac arrest, the militant nonsmokers whose lung cancer is detected too late. Look at the Mediterranean countries, I say. People there have been drinking wine for centuries, but they tend to be healthier than people here. There are certain countries and peoples I omit on purpose. I don’t talk about the average life expectancy of the vodka-swilling Russian. If you don’t live, you’ll never get old, I say. Do you know why the Scots never come down with the flu? You don’t? Let me tell you … Having reached this point, I have a new patient almost in the bag. By heart, I reel off a list of the whisky distilleries: Glenfiddich, Glencairn, Glencadam—and here I reach the crucial moment in our first appointment: I hint at the fact that I enjoy the occasional drink myself. That I’m just like them. One of them. Not completely, of course. I know my place. I’m not an artist. I’m only a simple family doctor. But a family doctor who happens to value quality of life more than a one-hundred-percent healthy body.

My patients include a former secretary of state who weighs well over three hundred pounds. A former secretary of state for culture with whom I swap recipes. Though I shouldn’t be swapping anything with her at all. Sometimes I almost can’t breathe, Doctor, she says, after sinking down panting in the chair. I ask her to unbutton her blouse, just to bare her upper back, and I raise my stethoscope. The sounds from inside a body that’s too fat are not like those from a body with enough room for all the vital organs. It all has to work a lot harder in there. There’s a struggle for space going on. A struggle that is lost before it’s even started. The fat is everywhere. The organs are hemmed in on all sides. I pick up my stethoscope and listen. I hear the lungs, which have to push the fat aside with every breath. Breathe out very slowly, I say. And I hear the way the fat moves back in to resume its place. The heart doesn’t beat, it pounds. The heart is working overtime. The blood has to be pumped in time to the farthest points of the body. But the arteries are surrounded by fat, too. Now breathe in slowly, I say. The fat braces itself. It moves aside a little when the lungs try to fill with air, but it never fully surrenders its ground. It’s a fight for thousandths of an inch. Invisible to the naked eye, the fat is readying for the final offensive. I move the stethoscope around to the front of the body. Between the former secretary of state’s breasts there glistens a little runnel of sweat, like a waterfall viewed from a distance, a waterfall somewhere far up a mountainside. I try to avoid looking at the breasts themselves. As always, I think the wrong kinds of thoughts. I can’t help it. I think about the former secretary of state’s husband, a “dramaturge” who spends most of each year out of work. About who’s on top or who lies underneath. First he’s on top. But he can’t get a grip anywhere. He slides off her
body the way you might slide off a half-filled waterbed, or a carelessly inflated raft. Or he actually sinks into it too far. His hands clutch at the flesh. What he needs, in fact, are ropes and grappling hooks. This isn’t working, his wife says, panting, and pushes him off. Now he’s on the bottom. I imagine the breasts above his face, how they descend slowly. First there is a total eclipse. The light goes out. Then there is no room to breathe. The “dramaturge” shouts something, but all sound is muffled by the breasts. Now they’re covering his entire face. They’re too warm, and not completely dry anymore, either. A purple nipple the size of a saucer seals off his mouth and nostrils. Then, with a dry pop, the first rib breaks beneath the weight of his wife’s three-hundred-pound body. She doesn’t notice a thing. She gropes around for his dick and stuffs it inside her. Everything down there is too fat as well, so it takes a while before she’s sure he’s really inside her. Meanwhile, more ribs give way. It’s like a ten-story building: The contractor didn’t pay much attention to the drawings, and the builders start pulling down a load-bearing wall on the ground floor. At first there are only a few deep fissures, then the whole construction begins to sway. At last the building collapses. She starts licking his ear. That’s the last thing he feels. And hears. A Saint Bernard’s tongue filling his auricle. Exhale, one more time, I say. How is your husband? Is he working again? I could tell her that things can’t go on like this any longer. It’s not just that the vital organs have too little space. The joints, too, are overtaxed. Everything is being destroyed. The kneecaps, the ligaments in her ankles, the hips. Like an overloaded tractor-trailer. On a downhill run the brakes overheat, the truck jackknifes and then shoots through the guardrail into a ravine. But I open my desk drawer and pull out a recipe. An oven dish of
pork loin, with plums and red wine. It’s a recipe I cut out of a magazine. The former secretary of state likes to cook. Cooking is her only hobby; nothing else interests her. Sooner or later she’ll cook herself to death. She’ll die facedown in a saucepan.