Lapham Rising (12 page)

“Is it you?” she shrieks, then points to the toy turtle still in my grip. “Oh my God!” She rolls on.

Reflexively, I go to fling the thing into a trash can, but the woman from the Endangered Turtles Ball, still chatting in the lobby, catches me in the act. “Well!” She glowers at me, then rushes to retrieve the discarded mascot, wipes it off, and pats its tam. The turtle bleats, “Save me.”

Out on the street at last, I signal for a taxi. Hector jumps in, and I crawl in behind him, using my forearms for leverage. Like all Hamptons taxi drivers, this one weighs four hundred pounds and appears to be permanently wedged into his vehicle. His belly tapers up to a pair of boy-size shoulders, like a Buddha’s. I tell him we’re going to Quogue.

“Is it you?” he asks. “You know, I’m doing a book that might interest you, about the secret roads and byways of the
Hamptons. It’ll be a real time-saver for motorists. I’m calling it
The Road Less Traveled
. What do you think?”

“Me too,” Hector says softly. “I’m writing a book called
The Cat in the Manger
. It’s a religious book about a bruiser of a Persian who refuses to let the Wise Men near the baby Jesus. I’ve already sold it to the movies. Mary is going to be played by Glenn Close, Joseph by Anthony Hopkins, Jesus by the latest Culkin boy, and the cat by Garfield. And for Peter the Apostle, I’d like to get that handsome young British actor who starred in
Four Weddings and a Funeral
and so many other sprightly comedies. You know who I mean—Grant. Fabulous actor. Grant. Can’t think of his first name. Is it Hugh?”

T
he only sensible thing for me to do now is chop down the walls of my house. So, upon returning home, I am bound to do just that. No time to hesitate, no time for anything but action. Odd, is it not? Whoever invented time did not want things to happen all at once, and yet they do. At this moment, as the Chautauquans are whipping themselves into a frenzy of anticipation of my visit, at the same time, in the same world, Lapham is addressing himself in a full-length mirror in an effort to determine whether he looks senatorial, Hector is scratching the back of his head with his left hind paw, and I, checking the time, note that it is not on my side.

Yet barely have I placed my Oedipal foot on my beach when a young female voice cries to me out of the mist. “I need to sell you a swimming pool.” A girl in a kayak swoops inside the
L
of the dock, like a gull.

“What are you talking about?” I attempt to shoo her away.

“A swimming pool,” she chirps. She ties up to my rowboat, strides toward me, and eases herself into the Adirondack chair. Naturally, Hector sidles up to her, his tail as agitated as his useless penis.

“He loves me,” says the girl.

“He loves everyone but me,” I tell her.

“He’s precious.”

She is twenty, I suppose, though these days I can barely tell a twenty-year-old girl from a fifty-year-old woman. This one has an Irish look, her longish black hair parted on the left side, the way Gene Tierney’s was in
Laura
. Her body is longish too, slim and neat in a yellow one-piece bathing suit that contrasts attractively with the forest green of the chair. Her skin is pearly. She smells of biscuits.

“I’ll give you two minutes.” I slump into the chaise and face her.

And all at once I realize that I was wrong about Pam, the waitress who brought me blueberry pancakes topped with vanilla ice cream at the Hampton Bays Diner last month; wrong about the girl in Bookhampton whose neck showed seashell white as she bent over a volume of Terence; wrong about the redhead in the Miata, and about the one in the shampoo ad on TV during
Murder She Wrote. This
is the girl. This is the girl I ought to be with forever. The one with whom I should live out my remaining years, playing Chopin on the
pianoforte while making exquisite puns at tea. Then she opens her mouth.

“Mr. March, everyone around here says I could never sell you one of my dad’s pools. My dad says so too. Everyone says you’re mean and crazy as all get-out.”

“They’re right. So get out.”

The time is six o’clock on the dot. I really am up against it.

She backhands the air as if scattering gnats. “But I said, No, that old man is just waiting for a little brightness in his life.”

“In the form of a swimming pool?”

“You said it!” She reaches toward the chaise and clasps my hand in both of hers, as if we were at a political convention. “What you need to cheer up your cranky and miserable life is a new Gunite pool with a Stanford-Cox filtration system, a Kolbell pump—they last forever—a Levinthal heater, which makes even the coldest December day feel toasty, and Newman stone and tile landscaping, all installed with expert craftsmanship and tender loving care by the czar of Hamptons pool makers and servicers, Tony Alvarez.”

“Your father.” I find myself looking for her baby teeth.

“My father.” She reaches into the top of her bathing suit and pulls out a business card, as if conjuring a magic trick. “Anthony’s Aqua Heaven. Pools and Service. Night and Day.”

“‘You are the one,’” I mutter.

“‘Only you beneath the moon or under the sun.’” She
sings the line rather well and extends her long legs toward me. Her toenails are fire-engine red.

“Good going, señor!” comes the cry across the creek from Little Mexico. “We see that you took our advice!” They whistle, clap, and cheer. “But she looks a leetle old for you!”

“She’s trying to sell me a swimming pool,” I call to José.

“A girl like that could sell me the moon!” She gives him a friendly wave. “Buy it, señor! I would if I had the money—if I had the money to buy anything.” He laughs. Dave orders his men back to work.

I turn back to her. “Miss, I have important things to do. I have no need of or any desire for a swimming pool. I have no one to impress. If I want to swim, I do it off my dock. If I want the water warm, I take a bath.”

“Good for you! But I must tell you, I don’t think you’re seeing this issue clearly.” She taps my knee like a schoolmarm. “You are thinking of a swimming pool narrowly, as a place to exercise or loll about. And speaking of exercise, if you don’t mind my saying so, you could use some.”

“I
do
mind. Your two minutes are up.”

She settles deeper into the Adirondack chair. “Think of a swimming pool instead as another notable room of your house.” She glances at my house and mutely ascertains that it has no notable rooms. She should see it after I go at it with my ax. “Think of it as your indoor body of water, your pond, your
lake, your estuary. What, may I ask, is more beautiful than a body of water? The light dance of the ripples, the shadows on the waves, the brooding darkness underneath?”

I consider giving her a mini-sermon on the effect of swimming pools on the American soul, a history that begins with the public’s first glimpses of the things in the private duchies of Hollywood actors and their scrawny nymphets; winds through the turquoise oases of streamlined motels, with inflated pink sea serpents squashed beneath the asses of Finnair hostesses and discontented mothers of five; reaches its zenith in the bright and lurid satires of David Hockney; and culminates in the oblong “inground” holes of every community with a marina or a links. Fly over the Republic, I could urge her, and take stock of the pockmarked map of languid blue rectangles and kidneys that outnumber the fields of corn and wheat and malting barley. And then tell me again how everyone needs a pool. But I refrain.

For a different perspective, I could also relate the story of the drunken American Studies professor who, one night a few summers back, hoped to re-create Cheever’s “The Swimmer” by doing a medley of strokes in a series of private pools in East Hampton. He made it safely into and out of three estates but was shot in midbutterfly attempting the fourth. In a way, though, I have to admit, that anecdote only reinforces her sales pitch.

The girl may be overdoing it, but she is no dope. I tell her so in guarded terms and ask why she is wasting what is obviously a first-class mind on selling swimming pools, filial piety aside.

“But it never is ‘aside.’ My dad is having a hard time of it this summer. I mean, moneywise.”

“Moneywise’?” I clamp my hands over my ears, reviving the pain in one of them. “Please! Is this your full-time occupation?”

“Summerwise,” she says, with just enough of a smile to signal that she realizes she has milked the joke dry and will not try it again. “Then it’s back to St. John’s in Annapolis.”

“The Great Books curriculum!” I say too enthusiastically. “I thought so! You’re an anachronism.”

“Just like you.”

“Yes, but I’ve earned that status. You’re much too young.”

“Maybe. But it looks better on me.” She shoots me an are-you-smiling? look. “When I was in high school, I had a clear choice of extracurricular activities: be an anachronism—spend time at old movies, listen to jazz, live in the library—or give blow jobs to the doped-up future actuaries of America.”

I laugh out loud.

“So I went to classes most of the day and lived at the town library most of the night.” She sees that I am interested.
“Sure you don’t want to buy a swimming pool? It’s a great investment. Well,” she continues, “I got fixated on Samuel Johnson.” My gasp is audible. “First I read Boswell. Then I read the great doctor himself:
Lives of the Poets
. The dictionary. The poems. The best of which is…”

“The Vanity of Human Wishes,”
we say in unison. This is a very strange moment, even in a day filled with strange moments. I find myself, against all odds and inclinations, pleased to be engaged in conversation, even with time running out. And a conversation with whom? A girl barely out of her teens. But she knows
The Vanity of Human Wishes
. She knows how good it is. And she got there by herself. My wicked nature smells a Southern rat. Did the conniving Polite send over a Lorelei who is pretending to know Dr. Johnson and his works in order to set me up? I decide to test her. In the middle of whatever she is saying, I interrupt. “‘When a man is tired of London…’”

“‘…he is tired of life,’” she finishes the quotation.

I trot out my favorite: “‘Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water…’”

“‘…and when he has reached the ground encumbers him with help?’”

Hector grumbles, “Brilliant!”

She frowns. “Either make them difficult or don’t play at all.”

Sink me, as the Scarlet Pimpernel used to say, I’m floored. She’s the genuine article. “What brought you to Dr. Johnson?” I ask.

She looks out over the creek. “First it was his devotion to the power of reason: ‘How rare reason guides the stubborn choice.’ But what sealed it was the lovely sweetness of the man. I wish I’d been Boswell. I would have recorded more of the sweetness and fewer of the wisecracks.” She adds, “And he was always right.”

“You are more than an anachronism, young lady. You show real value.” From the far shore erupts another volley of bangs.
Bang bang bang
. “Not like that monster over there,” I add.

“Lapham?”

“You know him? You’ve seen him?”

“No. I don’t know anyone who’s seen him. ‘He is one of the many…’”

I cannot believe she knows this quotation. I complete it: “‘…one of the many who have made themselves public without making themselves known.’” She merely
hmmm
s. Then she turns to me and says earnestly, “I wouldn’t worry about him if I were you. I’d look to thyself.”

“What do you know about me?” I ask.

“What I see. What others say. But mainly what I see. A man
who has whittled his life to too fine a point. Too brittle. A man who used to do good work when he opened up, when he wasn’t playing it safe. But that was a long time ago. Now he doesn’t write anymore. Now he is reduced to the stupidity of a sage.”

“‘Towering in the confidence of twenty-one,’” I quote again.

A sulk flits across the lower half of her face, then gives way to aggression. “An answer for everything,” she says with a note of disgust. But now she softens her gaze. “I don’t want to fight with you. Besides, there’s something morally wrong about quarreling when we’re speaking of a man we both love.” No argument from me. Just when I was adamantly certain that I had condemned the race accurately, justifiably, and universally, an exception to the rule paddles up in a kayak.

“It’s the selflessness of the poem,” she is saying of
The Vanity
. That’s what gets to me. It’s what thrills me about all of Dr. Johnson. The certain knowledge of how weak and puny we are, all of us struggling little creatures. And yet beautiful too, for the very fact of our struggling. Because life is so hard, you know?” I do know, but how does she?

We sit saying nothing for a while. I feel the urge to confide something to her—anything at all—but I resist, because con
fidences invariably lead to trouble. She looks at her watch. “Well,” she says finally, the tone of her voice rising. “How about it?” From her bathing suit she extracts a contract and a ballpoint pen. As she hands them to me, she grazes the tips of my fingers with her own. Her eyes claim mine.
Bang bang bang bang bang
. Now I too am awakened from the trance, and my eyes scan the terms of the contract. “Three installments,” she says. Gaah. At least she did not say “easy installments.”

“Do you remember this from the opening of
The Vanity?
” I ask her. “‘Wealth heaped on wealth, nor truth nor safety buys, / The dangers gather as the treasures rise.’”

She nods. “And the import of that?” she asks.

“A swimming pool is a luxury. I do not want luxury. ‘Life is a progress from want to want,’” I quote again, “‘not from enjoyment to enjoyment.’”

“That’s just Dr. Johnson being moody,” she says. “Nobody believes that. The trouble with you is that you don’t really understand him at all. You think he was simply a font of wisdom and not a man. Dr. Johnson was
poor
, dirt-poor. He thought like a poor man, like my father. He thought like Tony Alvarez.”

“He would not have rowed around the Thames selling swimming pools,” I tell her. “He would have sold dictionaries.”

She stands and brushes the sand from her bathing suit.
“You never know what poor people will do,” she says coldly, and walks toward her kayak, kicking and splashing.

“Are you coming back?” Why do I ask? Soon there may be no
back
for her to come to.

“Are you buying a pool?” She does not expect an answer. I watch her climb in, push off, and slice into the creek, where she disappears part by part into the lowering white fog.

“She is wrong,” I say aloud. Johnson would never have contaminated his principles for a few pennies. I could go after her. That’s the way it’s done, is it not? I could go after her, catch up, leap from my rowboat into her kayak, make an endearing remark about our being in the same boat, and hold her to me forever—against all propriety, against common sense and logic, against all the forces of the material world, except, of course, swimming pools.

And then she does turn, violently, to face me. Her expression is a verdict—severe, and dissolving any advantage I might have enjoyed for being so much older and in the right. “You are not an eighteenth-century man, by the way,” she calls to me. “I thought you’d like to know.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“You’re a Romantic,” she says. She might as well have chucked a spear through my body. “You live on an island,” she goes on. “You create your own ideal world. You despise or
ignore the real world. You belittle life as it is. And you feel superior to others. What do you suppose that makes you?”