Summer People (9 page)

“I don't know,” Nathan answered.

Eliot knocked his ball into a row of tall grass and flowers between the trees, and after guiding him in another direction, Leah returned to stand beside Nathan. “Did he know you were coming?”

“Eldwin? I don't think so. I told him Ellen might come, but that if she did, I was probably just going to drop her off.”

“Hmmm,” Leah said.

Nathan said, “Maybe he wanted to hook you up with one of these old dudes.”

“Maybe,” Leah said, lengthening the last vowel while her eyebrows rose with mock interest.

“There was a guy in there emptying out his catheter tube who I think might be single.”

“You're gross,” Leah said, shaking her head. But she grinned and her eyes glinted warmly in a way that gave Nathan hope. Twilight was falling over them when Eldwin approached from the far side of the house. Eliot and Meghan grabbed their father's hands, screeching passionate accounts of how the other sibling had cheated during the match.

“I want to go home,” Meghan cried.

“I'm with you,” Eldwin said, freeing his hands to light a cigarette.

Nathan helped Eldwin and Leah pull out the stakes and wickets, then carry them, along with the rest of the equipment, to where the
station wagon was parked along the curb. Seeing Eldwin's rusted white Ford Fairmont made Nathan feel relieved. He had been so nervous around Leah, and consequently said so many foolish things, that he was looking forward to seeing her humbled by climbing into this dilapidated car.

Nathan turned to Eldwin. “Ellen holding up in there?”

“Yeah, pretty well. What are you doing on Friday night?”

Nathan glanced sidelong at Leah, but she was encouraging Eliot to hurry up and follow them. “I'm not sure, why?”

“We should go kayaking.”

“Yeah.” Nathan had enjoyed his conversations with Eldwin, but on Friday night, he was hoping to do something with Leah. “That sounds great. The only problem is, I've just got an hour or so free during the day and Ellen doesn't really go to bed until nine o'clock.”

“That's not a problem. I was thinking that we'd get started around nine, anyway, after Meghan and Eliot go to bed.”

Nathan said, “I've never done it before, though, so I should probably learn how to do it in daylight first, don't you think?”

Eldwin exhaled smoke through his nostrils. “Not necessarily. We'll be on the bay, so there's not much chance we're going to roll. I'll teach you a few things before we head out, but it's a tandem kayak, so we'll be together. And you can swim, right?”

Not very well, Nathan thought. He might have admitted this if he had been walking with Eldwin alone, but with Leah and the children listening, Nathan answered, “Yeah, of course.”

“Then we'll be fine,” Eldwin said, opening the driver's side of the station wagon. Leah smiled as she waved good-bye, and Nathan felt a moment of longing for a wife, children, and the comfortableness with oneself that driving a rusting station wagon implied. Stepping back from the street, he turned toward the house. Near the front steps, he glanced back to see the station wagon slow to a stop near the first bend in the road, the brake lights burning a brighter crimson until the car shifted into park. After a moment, Eldwin and Leah climbed out from the front seats. Leah's movements
seemed quick and purposeful compared to Eldwin's lumbering shuffle. They switched places, closed the doors, then started once more toward home.

 

W
arm coastal wind passed gently through the moonlit bedroom as Nathan lay staring at the ceiling. Reviewing his memories of Leah at the party that evening, he searched for aspects of her personality that might eventually disappoint him. He always felt more comfortable around women who, for one reason or another, he was confident he would never marry.

He had found enough disappointing things about Sophie—including her tremendous need for attention and the way she pressured him to be more appreciative of certain films—that he could feel comfortable even when they were fighting, even when it seemed they were on the verge of breaking up. The fact was, Nathan had broken up with her many times during the roughly two years they'd been dating. But he'd felt such a rush of arousal near her that such breakups lasted only a few days, and usually ended at her apartment with him quickly undressing her. Their relationship had depended on these hot, tear-filled reunions to give it life. But after a while, even the reunions began to seem banal and exhausting. Nathan had started flirting with a Norwegian exchange student he often saw at the library, and began mulling over gentle ways to tell Sophie that perhaps they needed to spend more time apart. He had still been searching for the best way to tell her that this would be a
real
breakup—not like the others—when she invited him to her apartment to announce that she was really breaking up with him for someone else: a burly, mouth-breathing friend of hers named Derek who managed the music store near the floral shop.

Nathan had cried. She'd cried.

A few days later, Nathan had returned to her apartment with a ring made of tinfoil—a pitiable thing with which he hoped to win her sympathy—and lied to her while proposing. His voice broke as he told her he'd never found anything about her to make him second-guess his hope that they would marry. Sophie laughed at this, understand
ably, and Nathan eventually chuckled, too. They'd waged war after war over everything from her resentment about the lack of time they spent together to her love of Truffaut. So Nathan finally told her the truth: that although there had been moments of second-guessing, he didn't know of anything about their relationship that they couldn't work through, and that he loved her desperately, desperately, more than he had ever loved anyone, and that if she were to agree to marry him, please marry him, he would consider it the greatest stroke of luck in his life.

Sophie's face softened, and raising that fragile piece of tinfoil to her finger, Nathan almost didn't expect the fear and sorrow that suddenly surged and twisted inside him. Did he somehow reveal it to her, too? He must have. She'd clenched her extended fingers into a fist and whispered that it was time for him to go.

Nathan turned over in his groaning bed and stared out at the moonlit sky until leaden memories of heartache were replaced by lighter thoughts of Leah, and a little of his grief lifted when he considered he could be a better person for her.

Late in the night, an ambulance wailed in the distance, rousing Nathan from sleep. For a moment, the siren seemed to fade, but then plunged toward him, again, warbling louder and louder. Dread that the ambulance was somehow for Ellen propelled Nathan from under his blanket and into the hall. He pressed his head to her door and peered through the opening into the milky shadows of her room. When the siren stopped, somewhere still a few streets away, Ellen mumbled in her sleep and Nathan sagged with relief. He wondered for whom the siren had wailed, and in his tired, fretful frame of mind, he hoped it had wailed for Mr. McAlister. Crawling back into bed, Nathan's muscles tightened again when he remembered Glen's request and how flirtatious Mr. McAlister had acted that evening with Ellen. In the soft yellow light of his front porch, the old Lothario had bid good-bye to her with a warmly clasped hand, a lingering kiss planted nearer her lips than her cheek, and a low-spoken promise to stop by soon.

Thayer Woodbridge Shows His Muscles ~ Nathan Kisses Leah ~ Mr. McAlister Regrets to Inform Them of a Death

W
hen the doorbell rang the following morning, Nathan left his breakfast to greet a dark-haired young man whose heavy-lidded eyes seemed to watch him with vague disdain. “Are you Nathan?” he asked.

As Nathan opened the door to shake his hand, the young man said his name was Thayer Woodbridge. “Bill said Mrs. Broderick had a dinghy that I could probably borrow for a couple of hours to row out to our yacht.”

“Bill?”

“McAlister. He's my step-grandfather.”

“Oh, we were just at his party last night.”

“That's what I heard.”

Both young men nodded and stared at each other. Then Nathan said, “So, do you want to come in and I'll ask Ellen about the dinghy?”

“I think it's in there,” Thayer said, pointing toward the white shed that sat near the end of the driveway on the west side of the house.

A padlock kept the shed doors closed, so Nathan said, “All right, well, come on in and I'll ask Ellen if she knows where to find the key.”

Thayer sniffed. “I can wait out here.”

When Nathan explained the situation to Ellen, she suggested looking inside the living room desk. Nathan sifted through drawers of loose paper, old party invitations, coupons, and rubber bands, but after a few minutes he gave up. He went outside to break the news to Thayer but found the shed doors already opened.

The near door creaked back and forth in the wind, and Nathan grabbed hold of it as he peered inside. Thayer stood in rays of sunlight that slashed through the wooden sideboards to illuminate a wheelbarrow, assorted gardening tools, fishing poles, three car tires, and a red-and-black dinghy resting on its stern against the rear wall. He tilted the dinghy backward onto his shoulders to carry it out of the shed.

“How'd you get in here?” Nathan asked.

“The key was under that rock,” Thayer said, gesturing down at a doorstop-size stone that lay by the grassy corner of the shed. “No one really locks anything around here.”

Scabs of paint flaked off the boat as Thayer eased it down on the lawn. In black cursive letters on the rear were the words
Little Red Hen.

“I don't know, man,” Nathan said, remembering the video of Ellen's son in the dinghy when he was just a small boy. “I think this thing is over forty years old. You may not want to take it out.”

Squatting in his shorts and T-shirt, Thayer ran his hand along the interior of the boat, saying, “I think she'll be all right.”

But Nathan worried about what would happen if Thayer damaged or sank the boat when it was likely it had some sentimental value for Ellen's family. Also, the young man's air of entitlement made Nathan want to deprive him.

“Why don't you just use one of the dinghies down at the yacht club?”

“Bill doesn't belong to the club,” Thayer answered. “He just ties his boat up at the bottom of his yard, and all the people I know at the club have taken their boats out to go sailing.”

“What happened to the boat you usually use?”

“My friend Crispin took it out with his girlfriend so that they could spend the night on the
Daydreamer.
But they haven't come back.”

“You think something happened to them?”

Thayer laughed. “Yeah, I think they got drunk and naked and now they don't want to leave.” He grabbed both sides of the
Little Red Hen
and hoisted it up on his broad shoulders. Turning slowly, he asked, “Hey, would you mind bringing the oars from the shed?”

By the time Nathan made it down to the beach, Thayer had already eased the boat down in the shallows of the incoming tide. Nathan stared out across the water, and asked, “Which one's the
Daydreamer
?”

Thayer directed Nathan's eyes toward a roughly forty-foot yacht resting among a flock of other yachts several hundred yards out from shore. A few of the other yachts were larger, or grander, but Nathan admired the handsome sleekness of the
Daydreamer
's navy blue hull and wood trim. Imagining it out on the open sea with sails billowing made him yearn for the kind of experiences he imagined Thayer and his friends must have enjoyed all the time: shuttling from their exciting, culturally rich lives in New York to their summer homes, unfettered by financial concerns, getting naked on yachts with their sexy girlfriends. He wanted their freedom—to not have to work, to travel, to hang out with the smart, charming women their money would eventually help them to marry.

No one was on the
Daydreamer
's deck, but a matching blue dinghy drifted behind the yacht's stern. Thayer grabbed the two oars Nathan had been holding and placed them into their fittings. Once inside the boat he promised he would soon return it to the shed. “You're helping Mrs. Broderick out for the summer?”

“More or less,” Nathan answered.

“I'm having some people over to Bill's house on Saturday night, if you want to come. Like around nine o'clock. Have you met that girl who's staying a couple houses up from you?”

“Leah?”

“I don't know, she's got dark hair?”

“Yeah, you're probably thinking of Leah.”

Thayer pulled off his blue T-shirt to reveal a V-shaped upper body. His sculpted abdomen was like a rock wall beneath the precipice of his bulging pectorals. “Cool,” he said, grabbing the oars. “If you see her, tell her she's invited, too.”

 

N
athan had no intention of telling Leah about the party. But after lunch, while Ellen napped, he walked over to see if she was home. Opening the front door, she silently mouthed, “Hey,” and waved him into the living room. She was cradling a phone to her ear, and held up a finger, signaling that the conversation was almost over.

The house smelled faintly of damp towels, even though most of the windows were open and sunlight shone in lengthening rectangles across the floors. In the living room, children's books and wood blocks lay on the rug beside a half-completed puzzle of a sailboat plunging through a whitecapped ocean. With Leah still on the phone, Nathan crouched beside the puzzle, searching for missing pieces while glancing through the open doorways into other rooms. The dining room appeared orderly in that “no one really goes in here” sort of way, but the kitchen looked as if it hadn't been cleaned in many days. Plates and crumpled napkins were scattered across the kitchen table, while underneath lay an abandoned village of toy cars, plastic movie figures, and a blond, blue-eyed doll. Near the sink, towers of more plates, bowls, and drinking glasses leaned perilously over torn frozen food boxes and empty grocery bags. When Nathan sensed Leah watching him, he stared down at the sailboat puzzle still in need of a sail.

“I will. You too, though, okay? Okay. Love you,” Leah said, pressing a button on the phone to end the call and collapsing onto her back on the couch. She rested her arm over her eyes in a gesture of great weariness.

“How's your mom?” Nathan asked.

“She's fine—but not fine. She's…she took a long time to get over her divorce from my dad,” Leah sighed, pausing, apparently contemplating whether to say more. “So she's been dating this guy for a while now and
she really likes him, but now he's in the hospital and they don't know why he's having these horrible pains in his side.”

“She's pretty upset?”

“Yeah, but she's not showing it—or she's trying not to show it.”

A moment later, Leah turned onto her side and brought her arm under her head to look at Nathan. “Why am I telling you all this?”

Nathan smiled. He found a piece of the sail and fit it into the puzzle, then cast his eyes up at the ceiling. “Where is everybody?”

“Eldwin took Meghan and Eliot to play putt-putt and Rachel is sleeping…or at least lying in her bed.” Leah's words tapered into a whisper as she picked at the frayed edge of beach towel that hung over the armrest of the couch. She wore jeans and a blue spaghetti-string tank top whose bottom had bunched up a few inches above her waistline. Glancing at the luminous tan of her stomach, Nathan asked, “So do you think you might have time to take a walk?”

When they were strolling beneath the shady trees of Birch Hill Boulevard, he told her he'd been thinking about the Chekhov quote. He asked her if she had ever had her heart broken and she explained that she and her first real boyfriend, Andy, had started dating when each was sixteen, when he was a half-hearted punk-rock skateboarder and she a half-hearted skater chick. They'd thought they were in real, fated-for-one-another kind of love, the way that maybe you can only believe when you're in high school, and they'd believed it so much that, despite all advice to the contrary—including a threat by her mother to not pay her tuition—they'd both enrolled at Haverford, outside Philadelphia.

Andy had had vague plans to be an actor, then a sculptor, and by the winter of junior year he was spending more and more time in the studio with his art friends, purportedly working on their art. Trailing him one afternoon, Leah watched him leave the studio with a pimply, bird-faced girl Leah recognized from her class on Irish literature. Leah thought the girl was not Andy's type, but after discovering them again the next day, eating bagels together in the bookstore, Leah broke into Andy's e-mail.
After finally guessing his password (Rodin), a roaring filled her ears as she read the flurry of erotic missives that he and the bird-faced girl had been sending almost since the beginning of fall term.

Later, it would be rumored that Leah had chased Andy into his apartment, tearing it apart in a crazy, Shiva-esque tantrum, but it hadn't happened like that at all. She
had
followed him to his apartment and forcefully cleared his desk of some clutter so she could sit down, but all she wanted were answers. She told him what she'd discovered, and he tearfully confessed. He said he'd loved Leah when they arrived freshman year, but,
God,
he was a different person now, and he wasn't so sure anymore. “Well, you better get sure, because I still love
you
!” she had cried, but this did not make him stay.

“But now you're not haunted by him?” Nathan asked.

Leah tilted her chin down and laughed. “No, because I've
processed,
” she said, folding and unfolding her arms as if releasing a captured bird into the air. “I spent almost my entire senior year processing.”

“Ah.”

“How about you? Have you had your heart broken?”

Nathan saw it as a badge of honor to be able to nod. “Yeah, I have.”

He told her a little about his breakup with Sophie, including the story of the last night he had gone over to her apartment. “At the time, I hadn't figured out what her new boyfriend's truck looked like, so I go up to her apartment, and when she opens the door, he's there,” Nathan said. “I can see him at the kitchen counter with a bottle of champagne that he's working to open. His back is to me, but he turns around and sees me, so Sophie steps into the hallway and kind of closes the door behind her so we can talk, and somehow it comes out that they're celebrating…but when I asked her what they were celebrating, she wouldn't tell me. She said she would call me tomorrow, and started to go back inside the apartment, but I asked her to wait a second and said, ‘Just tell me what you're celebrating.'”

“Oh my God, why?” Leah cried.

“Why what?”

“Why did you want to know so badly? You know it was going to be bad news.”

“
You
know it's going to be bad news, because we're talking about bad breakups and I'm telling you a story, but do you think that in that moment I should have known?”

“Yes!”

Nathan threw his head back, laughing. “All right, so I shouldn't have asked that question.”

“So what did she say?”

“Well, she wouldn't tell me for a long time.”

“
Then
what did she say?

“Then she told me bad news.”

Leah grabbed Nathan's arm and fixed him with a mock-baleful stare that indicated she was not going to tolerate any further delays in the story.

“Whoa, she gave me that same look, actually,” Nathan said. “Right before she told me that they were celebrating the fact that they'd both just tested negative for STDs.”

Frowning, Leah said, “Ugh. God. That's horrible.”

“Yeah, I don't think it was a knowledge-for-knowledge's-sake kind of thing,” Nathan laughed, although he felt idiotically disingenuous for laughing. He wished he had not offered Leah this humiliating snapshot of himself. He'd never told the story to anyone.

“But now you're over it?”

Nathan nodded. “I think I've processed.”

Near a sharp bend in the road, where they could see the grayish blue of the Atlantic on the other side of densely rocky shore, Nathan pointed out a gap in the hedgerow on their left. A narrow footpath led up the hill to a grassy plateau overlooking the ocean. On their way up the trail, Leah said that when the summer was over, she was moving into a friend's apartment in New York City. “I think I'm going to try and get into publishing,” she said. “Figure out how to sell people the books I like to read.”

“That sounds like it would be gratifying,” Nathan said. He was a few
years older than she was—without a college degree—and he had no idea what he was going to do when he got back home. Even if they gave him his old job back at the library, the idea of shelving books beneath those yellowing neon lights was like a weight on his heart.

At the top of the hill, the trail dipped then leveled out for a quarter of a mile as it circled the rim of a steep peninsula roughly fifty feet above the ocean. When they reached the part of the loop extending farthest out above the exploding waves, Nathan told Leah how, a few days earlier, he and Ellen had taken a shorter route here from a path just off the golf course. It was still a foolish thing for them to have attempted. Once the path grew rocky and uneven, Ellen became increasingly unsteady, and when she sat down to rest on a rock, she had very nearly fallen off the side of the cliff. The vision of her grasping at air as she tumbled over, her wide blue eyes upon him as she fluttered, heavy and wailing, onto the rocks, made Nathan shudder even now.