Body Surfing (2 page)

"So you answered the ad?"

"I did."

Sydney wraps herself in the bubble-gum-pink towel. In the distance, she can see another man rising from a chair on the porch. He puts his hands on the railing.

"Are you a teacher?"

"No. I'm not much of anything at the moment."

"Really."

Sydney cannot read the really. Dismissive? Disappointed? Intrigued?

Sydney has an impression of lighter hair, a slighter body. The man who is Jeff shuffles down the first set of stairs from the porch to the boardwalk, and, for a few seconds, he is out of sight. When he emerges onto the deck, she can see that he has on bathing trunks and a navy polo shirt.

Jeff waits for them at the head of the stairs. Sydney greets his feet first (in weathered boat shoes), his legs next (lightly tanned with golden hairs), and, finally, the faded bathing trunks (grayish with purple blotches; she guesses navy originally, an unfortunate wash with bleach). He steps back to make way for the two of them, and there's an awkward introduction in a small space. Sydney's nose begins to run with salt water. She shakes Jeff's hand. Hers, she knows, must feel icy.

"We've heard a lot about you," Jeff says.

Sydney is dismayed. She expected more.

Jeff's face is loose and open, the green eyes guileless. Sydney thinks it is probably not possible to be his age and guileless, but there it is. The family dog, Tullus (short for Catullus?), trots down the boardwalk and plants himself directly below Jeff's hands. This confirms her impression. Animals can always tell.

"Hey," Jeff says, bending to the golden retriever and ruffling him affectionately.

Mr. and Mrs. Edwards and Julie come out onto the porch, a nucleus intact. Ben wraps his arms around Julie and rocks his sister from side to side. Six glasses of iced tea have been set upon a teak table. Jeff picks up a glass and hands it to Sydney, smiling as he does so. She notices that he, like his brother and sister, has remarkably even teeth, and she imagines many thousands in orthodontia. Sydney, whose mother could barely remember to schedule regular checkups, has an imperfect smile, a slightly misaligned eyetooth its distinctive feature.

Ben has brown eyes like his mother. Jeff, Sydney can see, takes after his father.

Sydney leans against the railing and tugs the towel tighter. Her hair, she guesses, must be a horror of Gorgonlike dreads from the salt water.

Mrs. Edwards, who has previously seemed cold, is animated with her sons. On the porch, she is possessive, never still, touching them often, making it easy for them to touch her. She wants to be seen as the perfect mother. No, Sydney decides, she wants Sydney to understand that her sons love their mother best.

Sydney knows these facts about the brothers. Ben, who is thirty-five, works in corporate real estate in Boston. Jeff, thirty-one, is a professor of political science at MIT. Sydney half expects this information to be repeated on the porch, but Mrs. Edwards exercises unusual restraint in front of her sons.

Mrs. Edwards wears khaki culottes and a white polo shirt that reveals an intractable swell between her midriff and her waist. Sydney would advise tailored white shirts left untucked over longer pants--but it is not for her to say. Mr. Edwards dresses like a man who never thinks about his clothes: baggy khakis and even looser golf shirts that droop from his shoulders. Sometimes he puts his hands flat against the stomach that hangs like an adjunct on his tall frame as he lightly bemoans the doughnut he had at breakfast or the piece of coconut pie he gave into at dinner. One senses, however, that he enjoyed these treats, that he is not a man to forgo a fleeting pleasure in favor of vanity. Unlike Mrs. Edwards, who counts her carbs religiously and seems to be hastening herself to an early death with the eggs and meats and cheeses she eats in quantity. Even the low-carb ice-cream bars she snacks on at night seem, with their slick, viscous shine, to be depositing cholesterol molecules directly into her bloodstream.

Mrs. Edwards wears her blond hair below her chin line and often pulls it back in a banana clip that ought to be pretty but instead accentuates the square shape of her head and the half inch of gray roots at the scalp. Sydney would advise a haircut in the same way she might mention the tailored white shirts, but then again, it is not within her job description.

Jeff leans against the porch railing a few feet from Sydney. His slighter frame and its concavities suggest exposure, whereas Ben's body, comfortably on display, seems fully covered.

There is talk about the backup at the Hampton tolls, idle joking about resorting to civil disobedience to get the state to adopt an E-ZPass system: of finding seven guys to drive into the tollbooths, park their cars, and walk away. Ben releases Julie and picks up a glass of iced tea. He drains it in one go, the ice cubes slamming against his upper lip. His engine operates at higher revolutions than his brother's: he seems anxious to be on the move. He laces his fingers behind his neck and flexes his elbows. He asks his father about his golf game.

"Worse and worser," Mr. Edwards replies, though no one believes the man. One expects self-deprecation from the gentle patriarch.

Mrs. Edwards is queried about the guests, who have gone off to Portsmouth in search of antiques. A fourth for golf is promised for the morning.

The brothers mention dinner. Sydney guesses lobster, steamers, triple-berry pie. This is the first visit Jeff and Ben have made to the cottage since she arrived in early July. It is, in fact, their first visit since mid-June, work and other commitments having kept them from the summerhouse--a situation that will soon be rectified, Ben promises. When they come next, it will be for a week. Mrs. Edwards's eyes focus and unfocus. One can see her planning dinners, counting linens.

Jeff laughs easily, but Sydney notices that he stands with his arms crossed over his chest. She wonders what he thinks about when he is not actively listening. Cost-benefit analyses of regime changes in Sudan? Complex algorithms involving terrorists and the relative price of oil?

Sydney can easily picture Ben at his job. In his shirtsleeves and tie, he would make a stolid, handsome presence, the dark eyes suggesting gravity, the smile a light touch. Perhaps he makes the same gestures at work as he does at home: lacing the fingers behind his neck, flexing the elbows.

The nucleus drinks its tea, clinking the ice cubes. The Stewarts and a couple named Morrison are mentioned. There is talk about a sail to Gloucester and back. Sydney has a sense of trying to put together an accurate history of the family with half the relevant sentences in the text blacked out, the accessible sentences referring to a chapter she hasn't yet read. A woman named Victoria is coming Saturday. There are to be, Sydney gradually comes to understand, a number of people present for the weekend.

A strange couple approach the house from the beach and point. Perhaps they have walked from the public parking lot at the crescent's other end. Sydney knows precisely what they are saying. Remember the Vision crash? The one in Ireland?

Sydney wonders if Mr. and Mrs. Edwards mind the mild celebrity of having bought the house from the culpable pilot's widow. She wonders if they got it for a song.

Ben rubs his hands together. "Have you had the grand tour?" he asks.

Sydney is confused. "Of?"

"We'll leave the harbor, swing around the point. I'm told you haven't been on the boat yet."

"No, I haven't."

Ben addresses his sister, who is standing close to her father. "Julie, want to come with us?"

But no one is surprised when the girl says no. It is a well-known fact that she is afraid of the water.

"Julie's going to help me with the roses," Mr. Edwards says.

A sweatshirt and a fresh towel are produced. Sydney finds her sneakers by the back door. The two brothers and she climb up into Ben's Land Rover. Sydney sits in front. Jeff asks her questions, easy enough to answer.

"What were you studying at Brandeis?"

"The emotional and sexual development of adolescent girls."

"Not a moment too soon," Ben says and chuckles to himself.

Neither brother, surely briefed, mentions the aviator or the doctor.

Ben drives along a sandy road to the center of the beach community, too small to be called a village. There's a lobster pound and a general store. Carrying life preservers, the three make their way down a gravel drive to the end of a wooden pier. Jeff speaks to a young man in shorts and T-shirt who shakes his hand and smiles. Sydney, the brothers, and the young man ride in a small boat through the harbor. They are deposited at a Boston Whaler.

Once inside the Whaler, Sydney sits on a small bait box. Ben takes the wheel, while Jeff stands near Sydney, one hand on the console railing. There is a low-throated rumble of an engine and an instant breeze. She puts on the sweatshirt, which covers her tank suit but leaves her legs bare. She feels more naked than she did with just the suit on.

The Whaler fights the incoming tide, and for a time the boat seems to stand motionless in the water. Ben says they've timed it exactly wrong. But Sydney likes the sensation of suspension: the motor straining, the water insistent. She thinks of gulls just outside her window. Of the aviator in a deliberate stall.

Close quarters in the boat produce a kind of intimacy. For moments, Sydney's face is inches from Jeff's bare thigh. Were they lovers, she would lean forward and kiss it. It would be expected.

This is simply an observation Sydney makes and not a desire. But it occurs to her that it is an observation she might not have made a month ago.

As they cross the harbor, Ben obligingly points out the massive cottages along the shore and tells an anecdote with each. The Whaler rounds the point and runs parallel to the long beach. Jeff indicates the family cottage at its end. Sydney contemplates the drive in the car, the walk to the dock, the ferry out to the boat, the struggle against the tide, the rounding of the point, and the motoring along the beach. She thinks it a long way to go a short distance.

"Whose girlfriend is coming for the weekend?" she asks as they idle in the gentle swells.

"Mine," Jeff says.

That night, they are eight at dinner, Mr. and Mrs. Edwards anchoring a walnut table Mr. Edwards made, the oval surface polished to a high gloss, the beveled lip uneven, as if the router had occasionally got away from him. Sydney makes a point of sitting near Julie, a point that wasn't as necessary when there were only four or five of them in the dining room. But with the brothers and the guests who have returned from Portsmouth triumphant--not to mention all the paraphernalia and detritus that accompany a lobster dinner, bibs and all--Julie seems, as the guests near their seats, a bit lost and unsure of herself.

"I did the math," Julie confides.

Forget the math, Sydney wants to say. "Good," she says instead in what she has come to understand is her encouraging teacher voice. "Very good, Julie."

"I won't have to do any homework tonight," the girl says and then pauses. "Well, I mean, I could. . ."

"No," Sydney says. "Not tonight. Tonight is special."

"It is?"

"Your brothers are home."

Julie smiles, looking first at Ben and then at Jeff. She beams, but not possessively.

When Sydney arrived at the house, she intuited immediately that she might be expected (for all that money) to spend more time with Julie than was strictly necessary for tutoring. Sydney doesn't mind. She and Julie walk the beach together, the girl collecting sea glass and sand dollars, her eyes remarkably sharp, more so than Sydney's, who often doesn't spot the piece until Julie has bent to pick it up. Earlier in the day, Julie found a thick amethyst chunk on which Sydney could see two faint circles, and, at the apex of the inner circle, a glass blower's mark.

The guests, Wendy and Art, are overdressed for lobster, and already Sydney can see small squiggles of white flesh on Art's pink oxford cuff.

Ben attacks his lobster with relish. Jeff breaks the soft-shell claws with his fingers and eats the sweet meat without butter. Mrs. Edwards drenches even the smallest shreds in the yellow liquid. No carbs in butter.

Neither Wendy nor Art addresses Sydney during dinner, having ascertained when they arrived the day before that she was there for Julie, much like an upper servant might have been a century earlier. Wendy has on a chocolate-brown Armani sweater wrapped casually around her shoulders, the tied arms dangerously in the way. Sydney knows it's Armani because the label, flipped up and visible behind her neck, says so.

Through the open door, the surf hammers the shore, oddly boisterous on such a hot night. The dining room is airless, even with all the windows open. Sydney wants to be out on the beach. She wants to be in the water, swimming.

Three or four times in her life, Sydney has truly relished a lobster dinner, regarding it as a celebration rather than just a meal. Tonight, however, she eats perfunctorily, breaking the claws, drawing the meat out with a pick. The heat has stolen her appetite.

Sydney notes, throughout the dinner, that Ben is always present, while Jeff seems elsewhere. Ben is clearly a gourmand; Jeff appears to be indifferent to his meal. Ben has perfect manners vis a vis the guests who are going on at exhaustive length about a lamp made from an antique car horn they got for a steal in Portsmouth. Jeff leans into his father for a private conversation. Sydney hears the words shutters and help you with that.