Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (11 page)

It was a complex calculation that saw her all the way to sleep.

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Riley woke early the next morning. When she thought of the beach, she thought not so much about what she'd seen but why

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she'd been there in the first place. She'd left her bag, and it had her pills in it, her penicillin.

She put on her suit and sweat clothes over it. She turned inland and jogged along Main Walk to the big beach entrance. It was early and still deserted. She headed immediately to the chair, but the bag was not where she had left it. She had an uneasy feeling as she looked at the texture of the sand. The winds had been strong overnight, and the sand had shifted. The tide had come in unusu ally high.

She sat down on the sand. She thought fleetingly of the shadow shape made by Alice and Paul. She thought of her bag, thrown around on the waves, drawn out to deeper water. She thought of it growing waterlogged and heavy, sinking to the bottom. She pic tured her towel, her extra suit, her goggles, her pills. Had the bag been zipped, or was each of her belongings finding a separate place underwater?

It was easily possible that it hadn't been swept out by the tide. Somebody might have found it. It could have washed in farther down the beach. She'd check the lost and found. She always wrote her name in permanent marker on her suits. Maybe somebody would find it and call.

That could easily happen, she told herself, several times over the course of the day. But every time she thought of her bag, she pictured it at the bottom of the ocean.

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The Kind of Person to Be

S o, how is it being back?"

Paul sat on a picnic table outside the market early in the morning, drinking coffee and waiting for Riley. He got Ethan instead.

"It's all right," Paul said. He looked into his coffee cup.

"It's been a while, hasn't it?" Ethan sat on the end of the table, in spite of the fact that Paul offered no welcome. He was tanned and confident, but just underneath his tan, he wasn't.

"A few years."

"Makes a big difference at your age."

What was Ethan trying to say? "It does and it doesn't," Paul said evasively.

Ethan was the first grown-up Paul had ever been purposefully rude to, and now it was habitual. It had been strange, when he

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was ten, starting to uncover the weaknesses and mistakes of the grown-ups in his life. Riley understood them, too, but she was quick to forget, whereas Paul always remembered. As a child he'd liked the feeling of power and he'd also hated it. He abused it, but he didn't want it.

"Riley said you two were going to fish for blues this morning."

Paul nodded. It occurred to him that Ethan was probably hop ing to be invited.

Ethan was handsome, and he was funny. He did accents and im pressions. He would speak for a whole day in his Russian accent and another day in his Scottish burr. Riley and Paul and Alice screamed and yelled in protest, but they really loved it. Ethan cooked badly, but he prided himself on it nonetheless. He cried easily and forgot things. He gave them third scoops of ice cream when Judy wasn't home. He taught his daughters to skateboard, fish, and windsurf.

There was a time when Paul used to look at himself in the mir ror and wonder if his hair would look like Ethan's when he grew up. He practiced his accents in a room by himself. When he thought of being a man, he tried to picture his own father, but he usually thought of Ethan.

Ethan did know how to be happy, but over the long haul he wasn't the guy to pin your ideals on. He wanted to be more than he was. That's what Paul came to understand about him. Dead men made better idols than living ones.

And yet, in spite of Paul's principles, he found it hard not to love Ethan. While in the case of Paul's mother, it was the opposite.

Paul thought of the beach the previous night. He thought of Alice, and then he felt ashamed. He didn't want to think like that. It

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was a weakness that could make him too able to understand a desire- driven man like Ethan, and he did not feel like understanding Ethan.

Ethan looked at him hopefully. He wanted to be man-to-man, now. He thought they could be friends.

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There was something about his bedroom that made Alice do it. That's what Alice told herself the following afternoon. Not the bed itself, though that was something. Maybe it was the unfamil iarity of it; neither of them had spent time there in past summers. It was on the island, but it had a sort of embassy quality. It stood in one country but belonged to another.

A part of her, a big part, just wanted to know. It didn't matter so much what the answer was, she just needed to know one way or the other.

It took a moment of righteousness to get her in the door. When had he ever knocked at her house or waited to be let in?

"Paul?"

"Up here."

She pushed her hair back with clammy fingers. Her legs had a goose-bumpy feel, though it was easily eighty degrees. She climbed the back stairs slowly.

"Hi," she said, feeling suddenly shy in his doorway.

He turned from his desk. Not his whole body, only his head.

"How's it going?" she asked.

He leaned back in his chair. "I'm trying to write about Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. I'm focusing on a section that's about a

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page and a half long. I think I understand it about as well as my mother's dog understands The New York Times."

She laughed cautiously. His self-deprecation used to charm her senseless, but she'd begun to realize it was also a form of self- acceptance. He enjoyed the qualities in himself that he complained about. The truly tender things he didn't bring up.

"So, are you writing or erasing?" she asked.

"Writing. I erase by night."

She looked at him carefully. He indicated no knowledge of what had gone on at the beach the night before. "I think you erase by day, too," she said.

His face had a cautious look. He liked to break the barriers between them, but he had to be the one to do it. She was supposed to go along with him unquestioningly, to explore when he wanted to explore and forget when he wanted to forget. "You can't erase what isn't there," he said.

She felt tremulous. She should have kept her mouth closed. "Is there nothing there?" she asked.

He considered his computer screen. He shook his head slowly, turning to look at her. "Nothing new."

She glared at him, feeling the old frustration. Sometimes in his presence she felt the deepest connection to him, and other times she felt completely alone--as though any bond to him was her own bitter imagining.

"You'll just have to live with your incomplete, then, won't you?"

His forehead wrinkled toward the middle. "Maybe so."

"Anyway, college degrees are for the little people."

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"Alice, stop."

She was going to stop. She was going to leave and get away from him and avoid him for the rest of her life if she could. But she couldn't make herself go yet. "What did it mean?"

His back was stiff. He looked uncertain. What a joke that she had come here with the thought of seducing him. "What did what mean?"

"You don't know?"

"Why don't you tell me?" His expression said the opposite of his words. He didn't want her to tell him anything at all.

Was the torture intentional? Did he despise her? And if so, for what?

She felt desperate enough to raise the ante. She needed to see where it would go. "Was it me and you on the beach last night? Or was it just me?"

He was uncomfortable. He would have left, clearly, but it was his own house. She was beginning to see the trick of staging your scenes at someone else's house.

He shrugged. "I drank too much wine. I was wrong if I gave you any ideas."

"Any ideas?"

"Yes."

She felt like throwing his computer at him. The angrier she got, the worse it would be. She knew that perfectly well. But sometimes what you knew made no difference to what you did.

"You are an asshole, Paul. Either that or stupid, and I don't believe you're stupid." She slammed the door behind her, remem bering that it had been open when she walked in.

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When Paul heard the noise downstairs the next evening, his heart leapt and sprang open with the dazzle of a firework. He'd been working on his paper, hating his paper, wishing and wishing that Alice would reappear. He wished that she would appear at his door in those cutoff shorts she sometimes wore. He wished she would stretch out like a cat on his bedspread like she had days before. Even if she just looked out the window the whole time. Even if she asked questions, he wouldn't mind. He would answer all of them--and honestly this time. Even if she said nothing at all, he wouldn't mind. He wished they could go back to how they were.

If she would just come to him, he would feel all right. Whatever she said, he would respond differently this time, he thought, if she would only come. And then he heard the door open and the wind blow into his house.

"Paulo?"

And still like a firework, his heart fell back to earth as a spent gray ember. She always arrived with little warning. That was one of the reasons he distrusted this house; trouble always arrived with very little warning.

He saw when he walked downstairs that she came alone. That was the best that could be said of it.

"Paulo." She kissed him twice on one cheek and three times on the other.

"How are you?" he said, hoping the strain didn't sound as clear to her as it did to him.

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"The traffic was awful. The LIE doesn't move, you know. The water taxi stopped in Fair Harbor first and then Saltaire before it came here. You pay them a fortune and they don't take you where you say to go."

"Right."

"Look at you." She managed to get in a sixth kiss. She was pleased. The last time she 'd seen him was in Fresno, California, and his hair and beard had been in full bloom. "You are so handsome, caro."

He heard her cellular appliances buzzing and dinging as he car ried her bags upstairs. He tried to think of what her hair would be like if she left it alone. He pictured it dark and curly from a long time ago. It was long and wild and probably one of the many things her parents-in-law hated about her. If they could see her now, wouldn't they be surprised. She was as blond and bobbed as any Park Avenue lady. She could easily be a lady lunching among his grandmother's circle. If only they'd had faith. But it was too late for that. They hated her now more than they ever had then. And by now she had given them reason.

How long would she stay? That was the single question that interested him. She didn't like the beach. She no longer liked this town or virtually any of the people in it. She didn't like the sea smell or the mold or the corrosive salt in the air. She was never quiet about it. There was nowhere to get a good meal. There was no place to buy a pair of shoes. All the things he loved were the things she hated. He knew that. And still, he couldn't help but feel responsible for her pleasures.

"Come sono le regazzi?" she asked, looking out the window at Riley and Alice's house. "They are here still?"

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"Yes. They're here."

"La madre? Il padre?"

Paul cast his eyes to the window, where majestic waves flattened themselves into a framed seascape on the wall, like a thing you could buy. "They're fine. Still the same."

"You've seen them?"

"Of course. They're right there."

"I would like to see how your little one comes out," she said. "La bella." His mother had a personal and vested interest in beauty. She would not be disappointed in Alice, he thought with sorrow and pride at the same time.

He watched his mother clank around in search of something on a kitchen shelf.

She was admirably turned out, he recognized. She had things stuck or hung on almost every part of her person. Necklaces, pins, bracelets, scarves, elaborate earrings, large gems on her fingers. But it struck him how weighted down she was by them. All of her privilege, her self-gratification, she wore conspicuously on and about her.

And yet nothing much went inside her. Her thinness was a tri umph to her, but it looked to him like deprivation. She would bedeck herself, but she wouldn't feed herself. Whatever self-care she had stayed on the outside.

"Paulo, the telephone directory? Do we still have it?"

He knew she wanted the number for the market, and more specifically the annex of the market that sold the spirits.

"You want the store number?" he asked.

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"How did you know?" she asked coyly, rhetorically.

"Don't worry about it. I'll go pick up some things for you. I need to go there anyway." He didn't need to, but it was a good excuse to get away for a while.

She jotted down her list, but he could have shopped for her without it.

"And also the water taxi number. I need to call them again about picking me up."

"You could take the ferry."

"Tomorrow is Saturday. It's too crowded on Saturday."

"You are going tomorrow?"

He was happy with this news but vaguely outraged as well. She was planning her exit before she'd even unzipped her suitcase. But this was how she was. She went to great effort to find him any where on the globe. And as soon as she'd succeeded in reaching him, she turned her attention to leaving.

He walked down the boardwalk, his back to the ocean, longing to see Alice. It had been more than a day. He could survive years without her on the other side of the country, but here he couldn't survive a day. Not, certainly, when his mother was in the house.

His mother did not fit here anymore. It was hard to picture her here, even when she was standing right in front of him. She had fit once, hadn't she? She'd made an effort once.

She spent little time in New York now. She'd gotten an apart ment in Rome, but she complained of the noise. She went many places, and spent less time in each of them. Only the places she hadn't yet visited met her expectations.