Summer People (14 page)

“Yeah, I think I heard they were together.”

“Well, Thayer thinks Mr. McAlister must have told her no, and then she tried to kill herself in a way where she probably knew she wasn't going to die.”

There was a coldness in these words that cooled Nathan's libido.

Leah asked, “What do you think?”

“I think that sounds kind of soap operaish.”

Taking his hand, Leah said, “Yeah, but lots of soap operaish stuff happens in life, don't you think?”

“That's true. Maybe the evil identical twin sister you don't know about is planning to kill you right now.”

Leah gave him one of her frowning-through-a-grin looks and leaned back so that she and Nathan faced one another, propping their heads on their hands. They talked for a while about people they'd known who had killed themselves, and Nathan asked, “Have you ever thought about doing it?”

Leah pushed out her lower lip and frowned. “No. If I did, my mom would probably dig me up and kill me again.” She pushed her finger over the rock through a few granules of sand. “Have you?”

“No, not really,” Nathan sighed, although after his mother died, and Sophie dumped him, and his father continued to collapse even further into himself, Nathan
had
thought about it. He'd thought about it on dark mornings when he felt beyond crying, beyond grief. It was impossible to calculate the distance between thought and action, but Nathan remembered that the act—which had seemed baffling to him when he'd first learned of it, as a child—had begun to make a certain cold sense.

“Well, what keeps you from thinking about it?” Leah asked, reaching over to take his hand again.

Nathan shrugged. “Lots of reasons. I guess I always thought about the stuff I'd be missing if I did. Like I'd never have had the opportunity to
take care of a deranged old woman for an entire summer, or watch lots of geriatric tennis, or lie on this cold, uncomfortable rock…”

“Or kiss me.”

“Or kiss you.”

 

O
n the way home, Nathan felt invigorated by the experience of kissing Leah, her hair draped over his face, his hand on the small of her back. At a red light, he leaned over to kiss her again, and she laughed and told him the light was green. He drove out of Kennebunkport and onto the winding country roads, the moon turning the surrounding forest shades of silvery gray. The wind through his opened window smelled of the earth, and glancing at the young woman beside him, her feet pulled up beneath her, it was easy for him to wonder if he might be falling in love.

“It feels like we're in a Volkswagen commercial,” Leah said.

Nathan smiled wanly. He'd experienced a similar
this feels like we're in a movie
moment too, but he'd been careful not to say so. He knew the commercial she was referring to: several friends in a convertible Volkswagen, driving along a lushly moonlit country road. Nathan didn't mind the commercial. But Leah's comment made him wonder how much of his enjoyment of the drive was because it reminded him of an experience he'd seen advertised on television. It made the romantic, almost nostalgic feeling he'd been having seem tainted and inauthentic.

“It's better than a Volkswagen commercial,” he said, although the words sounded silly to him and he wasn't even sure what he meant. Leah smiled—admiringly or indulgently, Nathan couldn't determine—but she ran her hand through the back of his hair, and by the time he kissed her again, outside her house, he had almost forgotten his disappointment.

 

B
ack at Ellen's, Nathan walked up the stairs with his feet far apart to reduce the moaning of the wood. The hallway lamplight shone through the slender opening of her door, and Nathan could see her head on her pillow, her mouth partially open. He paused long enough to observe that she would probably look much the same when she died.

In his bedroom, he glanced at the lacy white drapes billowing like sails from the window. Knowing they would do very little to keep out the approaching sun, he pulled off his clothes, then draped his shirt over the curtain rod. Usually the sounds of Ellen's grating bedroom door and her coughs were enough to wake him in the morning, but because he felt so bleary, he set the alarm for 8:30 a.m. Pulling the sheets over himself, he worried that he would not be able to stop imagining what it would be like to make love to Leah, but not long afterward, he fell asleep.

When he awoke to the creaking of Ellen's door, Nathan rolled over and squinted at the blazing numbers of the alarm clock: 6:27 a.m. He did not move. He listened to his own breathing, and the gulls already squawking outside his window. He suggested to himself that perhaps he'd mistaken a gull's squawk for the grinding of an unoiled door hinge. He closed his eyes and had almost drifted back to sleep when he heard the sound of Ellen's pink slippers shuffling down the carpeted hallway.

Nathan stared at the wall with angry hope—that she was merely en route to the bathroom, and that in a few minutes they'd both be back asleep—but then he heard her on the stairs. He struggled out of the bed, wrapped a towel around his boxers, then flung open the door.

“Ellen!” he said, loudly enough that her head snapped in his direction, eyes wide. She was in her blue bathrobe. One hand clutched the railing, while the other was braced against the far wall, as if the staircase were a highwire she was attempting to cross.

“Where are you going?”

“I'm going to eat breakfast,” she said. But Ellen had not prepared her own breakfast since they'd arrived. Nathan knew she did not have the strength to twist the cap off the applesauce, or the technical know-how to operate the Mr. Coffee. His muscles were tense with lust for sleep, and after taking a deep breath, he felt a lot like a father talking to his wandering child.

“It's very early, Ellen,” he said.

“What time is it?”

“It's six thirty in the morning.”

Ellen turned to look down the stairs at the sunlight pouring in the front window. “That is early,” she said, although her voice revealed no surprise.

“So why don't we go back to bed for a while? That way we'll be rested for the day.”

Ellen glanced down at her feet, perhaps calculating the maneuvers required to reverse direction on a staircase, then looked back at Nathan with an embarrassed smile. “All right.”

Nathan waited to see her make the first tiny, turning steps. “I'll see you in a couple hours, then?”

“Fine.”

Back in his room, Nathan slid a macramé-covered brick against the warped door and eased back into the little nest he'd made for himself with the bedsheets and extra pillows. Eyes closed, he lay listening to the distant groaning of the stairs. Then he flung the covers back, cursing. The groaning was not growing louder but more faint.

“Ellen!” Nathan called, this time not bothering with the towel as he strode into the hall. She stood at the base of the stairs and seemed to hesitate, as if uncertain whether to stay or make a run for it. But she stared up at Nathan with a befuddled innocence in her eyes.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“The kitchen.”

“I thought you were going back to sleep.”

Ellen nodded and surveyed the drab living room furniture. “Well, I'm hungry.”

Nathan glared at her, suppressing the ugly violence he felt, then nodded, defeated. He went back to his room. After dressing again—thrusting each leg into his pants as if to punish them—Nathan fixed Ellen her cereal, toast, applesauce, juice, and coffee, then sat across from her at the kitchen table. Outside, seagulls seemed to laugh at him over the gleaming
surface of the water. Nathan rested his head in his right hand, facing the window, ostensibly fascinated by the languorous swooping of the gulls, and closed his eyes. He hadn't slept in a sitting position since high school, but he slept, awakened only occasionally by the clinking of Ellen's mug upon its saucer or her shallow, early morning coughs.

When she pushed her chair back from the table, Nathan stood and cleared the dishes, then followed her back through the living room, toward the stairs.

“Do you feel like getting some more sleep?” Nathan asked, hopefully.

Ellen wrinkled her nose and said, “I'm going to change clothes.”

“Okay, well, maybe we'll hang around here this morning and then go to the funeral this afternoon?”

Ellen nodded as she climbed the stairs, and Nathan congratulated himself for not mentioning that it was Sunday. He liked Eldwin's sermons well enough, but he didn't want to spend the whole day at St. Michael's. By the time she came downstairs—dressed in a funereal blue dress and pearls—Nathan was drifting in and out of consciousness on the couch. With half-open eyes, he watched her ease down in her recliner and pick up her book. Nathan closed his eyes and contemplated going upstairs to his bed where he could set the alarm, but he was already too comfortable amid the old pillows of the sagging couch, and this way he could keep tabs on Ellen. He would just enjoy a brief rest, then get up with enough time to take a shower before the funeral.

When the clanging phone woke him, Nathan scrambled over to the other side of the couch and picked it up. “Hello?”

“Hello, Nathan. This is Bill McAlister. I was just calling to remind you about the funeral this afternoon.”

“Yep, one o'clock,” Nathan said, struggling to sound relaxed and in control. Ellen was no longer in her recliner. He glanced at the clock on the mantel: 11:53 a.m. “We were just about to have lunch and head over.”

Nathan stood with the heavy black rotary phone in his hand, yanking it around the living room, head swiveling in search of Ellen. He finally found her sitting with her back to him, on the porch swing. When he hung up the
phone, he sat back down on the couch to wait for his heart to resume its normal rhythm. He felt an angry desire to explain that he wouldn't have overslept if Ellen hadn't acted like such a freak this morning. On his way up the stairs, he glanced through the French doors to where she sat with her book at her side, staring out at the glassy ocean, serene.

Carl Buchanan's Funeral ~ Nathan Kisses Leah Good-bye ~ Ellen's Remembrance of Things Past ~ A Symbol of the Comedy in Life's Absurdity Dies a Horrible Death ~ The Battle Royal

I
t surprised Nathan to see Carl again, but there he was—dressed in a navy blue suit with a blue-and-white-striped tie, surrounded by a semicircle of mourners lingering around the open casket in which he lay. Nathan led Ellen through the crowd and overheard an old woman murmuring what someone always murmurs at funerals: how the dead person looked so peaceful. And Carl did look peaceful, of course, in the same way that a mannequin can look peaceful. But he bore little resemblance to the person Nathan had encountered a few nights ago on Ellen's porch. His broad, blotchy face had been uniformly dusted with makeup, and his lips were now fixed in a position of dull imperturbability.

Ellen stared at the corpse but soon moved over to peer at the photographs on a nearby table. There was one of an almost unrecognizably young Carl, dressed in a crisp army uniform, and another where he was middle-aged, standing with his arm around a pigtailed girl in horn-rimmed glasses—his daughter?—in front of an old, two-story clapboard
home. Nathan stared longest at the photograph of Carl and Franny on Big Beach, hugging, a Labrador celebrating their happiness by bounding through the ocean behind them. A few people spoke with Ellen to affirm how much Carl would be missed, and she agreed, smiling feebly, then let Nathan escort her into a pew.

Dust particles drifted in and out of shafts of light from stained-glass windows, and the church smelled of damp stone and perfume. Eldwin read a few verses of scripture and made general comments about the qualities that apparently made Carl such a great friend and neighbor. But it was mostly others who assumed the pulpit, honoring Carl's memory in a way that turned out to be much more generous and heartfelt than Carl perhaps would have expected. One man talked of how impressed he had been by Carl's appreciation of art and art history when walking with him through a museum, and another spoke of how Carl had driven to Massachusetts General Hospital to stay with the man's son, who had just been in a car accident, until he and his wife could get home from where they'd been on vacation. Whether or not Carl had ever come to see himself as one of them, many of these summer people seemed to have loved him. He was, by all accounts, somewhat excitable and reckless, but also deeply kindhearted, and he and his wife had often traveled (by car, rail, or sail) with many sitting tearfully in the pews.

Nathan hadn't felt especially fond of Carl's wife in his brief encounter with her at Ellen's house, but it was hard to maintain such feelings at the funeral. She did not speak, and her makeup and glasses did little to hide her sagging grief. When the pews emptied and people passed once more by the casket to say their final good-byes, she put a hand on her husband's stomach, inadvertently emptying his chest of air. His fat head tilted back on his silken pillow, sighing through the dark stitching intended to have sewn his mouth shut. Franny pulled her hand to her own mouth, sobbing, as a lanky gentleman put his arm around her shoulder and led her a few steps away.

Before they exited, Nathan glanced back into the nave of the church to see Mr. McAlister, arms folded across his gray suit, talking with a group
of people near the altar. Nathan had not noticed him earlier, so he doubted Ellen had either. But outside on the stone walkway, she stepped off into the grass to join Eldwin and the others lingering out front, and said, “Maybe we can wait a moment for Bill.”

A thin-faced man with jug ears approached and shook his head at Carl's death, then told them a story about Carl getting roaringly drunk on the plane that he took to attend his father's funeral. It was a funny story (Carl had apparently attempted to disembark in midair), but it lasted a long time. Mr. McAlister still had not left the church when it was over. The jug-eared gentleman and two others excused themselves, leaving Eldwin, Nathan, and Ellen to simply stare at the dispersing crowd. When there seemed nothing else they could say about Carl, Nathan and Eldwin made vague plans to kayak again sometime soon. Then Eldwin thanked them for coming and walked back through the front door of the church.

Nathan said to Ellen, “I guess Mr. McAlister's still talking with some people. Do you want me to let him know you're waiting for him?”

“No,” Ellen said, quietly, shaking her head.

“Do you want to head home and maybe try and meet up with him later?”

Ellen smiled weakly, then shrugged in an effort to demonstrate that it made no difference to her. She took Nathan's arm and walked with him out of the lengthening shadow of the church.

 

N
athan sat in the living room watching
Shadowlands,
a movie about the late-blooming romance between the English novelist C. S. Lewis and an American woman who died of cancer soon after they were married. In a lecture Lewis gives in the movie before his wife dies, he wonders why a loving God would allow for human suffering, and he comes up with this answer: Suffering is God's instrument. As a sculptor wields his chisel, so too does God wield the instrument of suffering to forge us into better selves.

This was only modest consolation to Nathan as he suffered Ellen's
nervous pacing around the house, which she'd been doing for the past half an hour, including in front of the TV. Craning his neck to see around her, Nathan asked, “What are you thinking about, Ellen?”

Ellen stopped and frowned at the harbor before looking over at Nathan. “Well, I was thinking that perhaps we should go and see Bill.”

Nathan nodded and pursed his lips as if genuinely considering the idea. “Well, he may still be at the church right now. Do you want to give him a call a little later in the afternoon?”

It had been more than an hour since the funeral, so Nathan doubted Mr. McAlister was still at St. Michael's. But the man had made no effort to find Ellen while she was there, and Nathan did not want to help her chase him down if he was not interested in talking with her.

When she finally went upstairs to take her nap, Nathan glanced at the clock on the mantel and picked up the phone. He had tried to reach Leah immediately after the funeral, but no one answered. He was afraid she had already left for New York. The phone rang a few times, but then she answered, sounding rushed, and asked if he could come over to say good-bye.

Eldwin's son, Eliot, answered the doorbell, carrying a wooden block like a weapon, and screaming for Leah with a ferocity disproportionate to his frame. When she stepped out the screen door, she led Nathan off the porch, into the yard, where they could talk away from the opened windows of the house.

“You look handsome,” she said. She was wearing jeans and an old gray T-shirt, while Nathan was wearing the same pants and sport coat he'd worn to Mr. McAlister's cocktail party.

Nathan said, “I wear this for parties and funerals.”

“How was it?”

“Sad.”

“Did Eldwin talk about Aristotle?”

“Not this time. When are you leaving?”

“Soon, like in a couple of minutes. But hey, listen to this! You know how I was saying that Thayer's grandfather is the publisher at Epoch?
Well, Thayer asked him if he would meet with me when I'm there, and he said he could probably meet me on Wednesday!”

“That's great,” Nathan said, smiling briefly. “But aren't you supposed to come back here on Wednesday?”

“Well, I can come back a day later. Isn't that exciting, though?” She pushed herself up on her toes and stared at Nathan with eyes that encouraged him to share her enthusiasm.

“Yeah, absolutely,” Nathan said, furrowing his brow with renewed conviction. “Hell, yeah. Is it going to be an interview kind of thing?”

“I think it's going to be more informational, like I'm just asking him for advice on how to get into the business. But he's the freaking head of Epoch, so who knows? If he likes me, maybe he'll hire me, or maybe he knows somebody who would hire me.”

“That's great that you're going to meet him.”

Leah grinned as she absently pointed her toe at the gravel that was mixed up in the grass at the edge of the yard. “So, wish me luck. What are you going to do while I'm gone?”

Nathan shrugged and glanced back at the house. “I don't know. Work on some sketches, try and figure out what the hell I'm doing when I leave here this summer.”

“I thought you have this job at the library and this graphic novel that you're finishing.”

For a moment, Nathan considered telling her the truth—that there was no job waiting for him and that he hadn't worked on the graphic novel in months. But he said, “Yeah, I do. I am. I've just been thinking that maybe I need a change.”

Leah stared at him with expectant, sympathetic eyes, and Nathan shook his head as if he'd been caught talking nonsense. “I didn't get a hell of a lot of sleep last night.” He told her how Ellen had awakened him at 6:27 that morning, and Leah laughed in the easy, lighthearted way of people with reasonably optimistic plans for their future.

With only semi-ironic desperation, Nathan asked, “What the hell am I going to do without you here?”

“Well, you have Ellen and Eldwin to keep you company.”

“But they can't kiss like you do.”

Leah said, “Maybe they just need practice.” She laughed a little at her own joke, then pouted, “Hey, that was a pretty good one.”

Nathan grunted his approval.

Moving forward to kiss him, Leah briefly balanced on his shoes, then stepped back. “Okay—I should probably finish getting ready. Eldwin's driving me to the train station and I think he wants to go soon.”

“I'll miss you.”

Leah leaped toward him again, embracing him longer this time, but it was still a painfully short,
someone might see us
kind of kiss. Watching her skip excitedly toward the house, and toward New York, he resisted the urge to hurry after her so he could hold her again.

 

T
he rain fell in gray torrents that evening and continued into the next morning. Nathan turned on the lamps in the living room to fight off the weight of the leaden clouds, but the old house with its old furniture seemed to deepen his listlessness. Ellen sat in her recliner, watching golf on television, while Nathan lay on the couch, drifting in and out of sleep. When the downpour finally stopped, he yawned and asked Ellen if she felt like taking a drive.

They drove inland for half an hour, down winding, country roads, through forests and one-church towns, stopping at a little gas station with a general store. Nathan bought them both ice cream and they sat in the car, eating, staring across the street at a few horses in a pasture on the other side of a wooden fence. On the mantel at Ellen's house there was a photograph of her on horseback, and when he mentioned it to her, she said, “Oh, yes, I used to love to ride. My father put me on a cow when I was a year old so I could learn.”

Nathan noticed an uncommon lucidity in Ellen's eyes, and he asked the kind of specific question he had for the most part stopped asking. “Was that your horse in the photo?”

“Harold bought me that horse not long after we were married.”

“Your husband looked like a handsome guy in that home movie.”

Ellen licked the chocolate ice cream off her upper lip, nodding. “Yes, he was. I don't think I'm the only one who thought so, either.”

Nathan continued to stare out at the pasture in front of them as he asked, “Other women thought he was handsome, too?”

He felt Ellen glance at him, frowning, as if perhaps he did not understand, but then she made a low sound of acknowledgment and looked back at the horses. “Yes, that's right,” she whispered, before taking another bite from her cone.

On the way home they didn't talk much, and Nathan turned on the radio with the volume low. They cruised along the coastline until they were on Oceanside Avenue, the narrow strip of road between the Atlantic and the cove, and very near the town proper. Because Nathan had no plans, and because driving around a little longer seemed preferable to watching TV, he turned right onto Birch Hill Boulevard, in the opposite direction from home. He turned right again on Haley, driving until the street became Shore Road and he could gaze out Ellen's window at the whitecapped waves of the ocean. When Shore Road circled back onto Birch Hill Boulevard—near the main entrance to the Point—Ellen asked him to slow down.

Nathan eased his foot off the gas, but remembering Ellen's near-death experience last week, when she had nearly fallen from the cliff, he said, “You don't feel like hiking again, do you?”

“No, turn in here.”

Nathan turned right and drove between two stone pillars, up a sloping cement driveway. As the incline leveled off, he could see over the tops of pine trees the turreted stone house he'd seen before from the Point. Towering over a deep green half-acre lawn that dropped precipitously toward the ocean, the house looked as if it should have been obliterated by tall waves long ago. Yet there it was—looking steadfast and permanent. Judging from the absence of a garage and the apparent age of the stones, Nathan wouldn't have been surprised if it had been there for more than a century.

“Who lives here?” Nathan asked, parking the car in the narrow driveway.

Ellen tilted her head to stare up at the house. “Oh, just an old friend.”

Nathan helped Ellen out of the car and up a stone path leading to a wooden wraparound porch. It was the only porch Nathan had seen in Brightonfield Cove with a view that rivaled the one from Ellen's house. Ellen seemed uninterested in the heavy-looking front door, and instead led Nathan to the railing overlooking the glinting waves of the ocean.

“Do you want me to knock?” Nathan asked. Through the drapery-bordered windows behind them, the interior of the house, with its hardwood floors and antique furniture, looked shadowy and vacant, but Nathan still thought it odd to be standing there without attempting to notify the owners.