Summer People (15 page)

Ellen shrugged as she stared out at the ocean, suggesting—as Nathan understood the gesture—that notifying the owners was something they could do in a moment. From this height, they could see on the left the jutting nub of peninsula that rose to the Point, and on the right, the rocky shore that curved deeply inland then straightened out to become the sandy stretch of Big Beach. This was where Leah took the children and—Nathan had learned—where she often talked with Thayer and his friends. Nathan squinted to see distant figures in colorful bathing suits scattered along the tide's edge.

“Who came up with the name Big Beach?” he asked.

Ellen shook her head without looking at him, and Nathan had the sense that he was interrupting a moment of contemplation. A lock turned behind them with a clunk, and a woman with short, spiky gray hair stepped into the doorway, her eyes adjusting to the light. Nathan recognized her as one of the women who had been standing near Mr. McAlister at the funeral.

“Can I help you?” the woman asked.

Ellen looked expectantly at Nathan, and after a moment's hesitation, he let out a nervous laugh. “Ellen and I were just driving around and she
thought maybe we'd stop by and say hello. I'm Nathan Empson, a friend of hers from back in Cleveland.”

The woman let Nathan shake her hand. Then she took off her reading glasses to stare at Ellen.

“Is that why you're here, Ellen?” the woman asked, sliding the glasses into her pants pocket and folding her arms across her pink blouse. A slender woman with a narrow, high-cheekboned face, she had traces of a softer beauty now more wizened and severe.

“I suppose so,” Ellen said, smiling abashedly, already shuffling in the direction of the car.

“All right, well, nice to meet you,” Nathan said. He raised his palm to say good-bye. He offered Ellen his arm and they walked, listening to the sound of the woman's bare feet padding across the wooden floorboards as she followed behind them. “It's a beautiful view,” Nathan said. He glanced back with an expression of confused helplessness, to help explain the intrusion, but the woman only glared and shook her head.

At the car, after helping Ellen into her seat, Nathan felt the need to say something to make the situation seem normal. “Thanks!” he said, smiling as he waved good-bye.

“I didn't invite you here,” the woman said.

“I know. Sorry,” Nathan said.

“Bill doesn't live here anymore.”

“Oh. All right.”

“So why did you bring her?”

“I don't know.” Nathan shook his head. “Fuck it,” he murmured, climbing back into the car. He wanted to get out of there as soon as possible, but the driveway was so narrow that it was difficult to turn around. He worked the car's gearshift into drive, then reverse, then drive, then reverse, glimpsing out of the corner of his eye the whitish blur of Ellen's head lunging back and forth beside him. He finally backed the car up enough to wrench the wheel to the right one last time, then pushed hard on the gas. He passed closer to the walkway than he'd intended, and the woman took a few hurried steps back, but the car was finally pointing down the
long driveway. Glancing in the rearview mirror to make sure the woman was all right, Nathan saw not one figure but two. The woman was hugging a young man whose face was obscured, but whose dark hair and muscled arms Nathan thought he recognized well enough.

 

“T
wo months of doing nothing” was how his father had described this summer job, and Nathan was looking forward to disabusing him of this notion. Nathan was simply not emotionally, intellectually, or even physically capable of handling the responsibility of watching over a mentally unstable woman twenty-four hours a day for eight weeks. To pretend otherwise was to invite more painfully awkward episodes like the one that morning, and perhaps even to court disaster. With Ellen upstairs taking her nap, Nathan fixed himself two drinks and then dialed his father's office number on the rotary phone. When the receptionist answered, saying that Nathan's father had been out sick since last Thursday, Nathan tried him at home. The older man sounded tired when he answered but grew slightly more animated at the sound of Nathan's voice. They talked about what was wrong with him—the flu, maybe? He felt incredibly tired and had slept the previous evening for fourteen hours.

“Have you been working late at the office?” Nathan asked. Growing up, his father had often left the house before Nathan awoke for school, and didn't return home until after he and his mother had eaten supper.

“Nah, not so much. I think they're learning how to get along better without me.”

“Yeah?”

“They're bringing in a lot of new people, young people.”

Nathan did not know how to answer, but he was afraid that if his father ever had to retire from his job, he would most likely retreat even further into his already cloistered existence.

“How are things going up there?” his father asked.

Nathan sighed as he told him that things were not going at all as he'd hoped. He'd already told his father about Ellen sitting in the car that first morning, for how long?—minutes? hours?—waiting for an escort to
church. Since then she had encouraged him to accompany her on a hike to the Point, even though the shortest path there was still clearly more than she could handle (Nathan omitted the part about her nearly falling off the cliff), and conscripted him into the afternoon's absurd adventure at the home of Mr. McAlister's wife.

Nathan said, “It's hard for me to see how—I don't know, maybe you haven't seen much of her lately—but it's hard for me to see how you and Glen could have sent me up here with her alone.”

In the heavy silence that followed, he could hear his father sinking back into whatever dark bog of the mind he had been slogging through before Nathan had pulled him out with his call.

His father said, “I thought she was okay. But I'm sorry that things are turning out this way. If you want, I can call Glen this evening and we can make arrangements for bringing her home.”

Even before his father finished speaking, Nathan's face prickled with the flushed recognition that he did not want to return to Cleveland. He had simply wanted to establish himself as a kind of martyr—but dammit! Ending his arrangement with Ellen would mean no more thousand dollars a week, no Leah, and a return to the drudgery of his life back home. His heart fluttering in his chest, he said, “I don't know if that's necessary…yet.”

“I know you'll watch over her when you're together, Nathan, but are you thinking she might hurt herself again when you're not around?”

“I'm not sure. I mean, how can you ever be sure of something like that, you know? Everybody knew that she hurt herself with the car and they still sent me up here!” His father did not respond immediately, and Nathan took a moment to figure out what he was trying to say. “I don't think she's acting purposefully self-destructive, not totally,” he said, cradling his forehead with his palm. “It's just…frustrating…she's just not all there all the time.”

“I'm not all here all the time.”

Nathan laughed despite himself. “That's true.”

“Well, just let me know if anything changes, if it seems too much to
handle, and we'll make arrangements,” his father said. When the conversation moved on, they talked for a while about his father's plans to plant a tall hedgerow in the yard for privacy from a neighbor's aboveground pool. The call didn't end badly—Nathan wished his father a swift recovery and promised to check up on him soon—but he still hung up feeling aggrieved. If something had happened to Ellen in the past, Nathan could have shared the blame with his father and Glen. But now he had just told his father, quite explicitly, that he thought it was fine for him to take care of Ellen all by himself.

An hour passed, during which Nathan fixed himself three more drinks and watched TV, often cursing as he changed the channels, wondering what kind of summer home did not have a fucking remote. Feeling sufficiently inebriated, he checked to see if Ellen was still asleep, then crept out of the house. He ambled down Oceanside Avenue to Big Beach and made a mental note to himself that he needed to purchase a portable container to carry a drink with him next time he walked. From the glimmering, moon-gray sand of the beach, Nathan stared at the ocean with arms folded across his chest—hoping that some attractive woman somewhere was watching him stare contemplatively at the ocean—then moved back up the landing and into town, all the way along Shore Road to the Point. He pushed his way through the hedgerow surrounding the entrance and stumbled up the moonlit trail. From the rock where Ellen had nearly fallen, he was squinting down at the lamplit windows of Mr. McAlister's wife's house when it occurred to him why Ellen may have wanted to hike here. Nathan had not paid much attention to the house on the day of their hike and he wondered what, if anything, she had been able to see of Mr. McAlister or his wife. Maybe Ellen had just wanted to see the home that no doubt held pleasant memories for her. For a misguided instant, Nathan wanted to share with her what he thought he might be learning this summer—a lesson in love about the virtues of letting go and starting over. But almost immediately, he understood that starting over was a luxury of the young. Ellen's powers were failing, and when she'd hobbled and scraped her way up here that afternoon, nearly killing herself in the process, she had probably done so to
see the house, but also because it was a view she'd seen all her life, with different companions, and she understood—if not at the beginning, then halfway up, certainly—that this would probably be the last time.

Nathan felt ashamed for not being more attentive to such things when they'd been hiking together, and he tried to distract himself with activity. He turned and rambled over the golf course, past St. Michael's, then under the heavy boughs of Admirals Way. He gazed at the imperious homes set back from the street and was surprised to see the silhouette of Mr. McAlister, standing in the middle of his front lawn. His cigar ember burned in the darkness while his wiener dog wandered in front of him between the thick trunks of old oak trees. When he suspected that Mr. McAlister was peering at him, Nathan raised his palm and said, “Evening.”

“Who is that?”

“Nathan. Ellen's…friend.”

“Oh,” Mr. McAlister said, sounding vaguely disappointed. “I was going to call you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You got a minute to come inside?”

Nathan hesitated, but said, “Sure.”

As he walked onto the yard, he could see that in the cool evening air the older man was not wearing a sweater, only a short-sleeved, navy shirt, his bare arms pale in the dark. Mr. McAlister called for Peewee a few times, saying, “Hurry up now, piss,” but the dog continued to sniff around different tree trunks.

“Ah, he'll come in through the flap in the laundry room,” Mr. McAlister mumbled. In the house, he flipped on a few lights and led Nathan through the sunken living room into the dimly lit library Nathan had so much admired. A lamp burned softly between the two couches and a fire in the marble fireplace cast shadows over the bookshelves surrounding them.

“Have a seat. I'm going to get something to drink. You want anything?”

“Do you have Coke?”

“I can get you one.”

Nathan looked over the bookshelves, glancing at
Don Quixote,
but he felt too uncertain about himself this evening to want to look at the illustrations again. When Mr. McAlister returned, they both sat in front of the fire with their drinks. Mr. McAlister's drink looked like a gin and tonic and Nathan wondered if it was too late to ask for a shot of rum in his Coke.

“Let me know if the cigar smoke gets too much for you and I'll open another window,” Mr. McAlister said. “Do you make many fires at the house?”

“Not a lot. Sometimes, when it's really cold. I've been surprised by how cold it can get up here at night, even though it's the summer.”

“When you get older, your bones get colder a lot quicker. With Ellen as slender as she is.”

Nathan nodded at the implicit suggestion. “Yeah, maybe I should ask her if she wants me to make more fires.”

As Mr. McAlister puffed on his cigar, tendrils of smoke billowed out of his mouth and dissipated into the flickering shadows around them. “In Boston I lived for a long time in an old brownstone without a working fireplace, so I like to make fires here in the evening sometimes even when it's not so cold.”

“Huh,” Nathan said. “You know, I don't remember where the kitchen is, but is there any way I could put some rum in this?”

An instant later—still pointing sideways at his glass—it occurred to Nathan that to have asked the question meant he probably still had a good deal of rum in him. Mr. McAlister's smile faltered and he slid his cigar into the ashtray, his long face slackening into an expression of gloomy fatigue. Reaching for his own glass, he said, “Why don't you tell me what happened today first?”

“What, you mean at your wife's place?” Nathan asked, his heart quickening at the question even as he pushed himself back on the couch to make himself more comfortable. “There's not a whole lot to tell. Ellen and I were driving around and she said she wanted me to pull into this friend's
driveway, so I pulled in, and about the same time we got on the porch, your wife came out. I didn't know she was your wife, but she wasn't particularly happy to see Ellen, so we left.”

“What did Jean say?”

Nathan recounted the conversation as best as he could remember, and the older man ran a hand over his thinning widow's peak in what seemed a gesture of impatience. Mr. McAlister said, “Then what?”

“Then—like I said—I helped Ellen to the car, and we left.”

Mr. McAlister sipped his drink and worked his tongue around the inside of his mouth as if searching for something. “Jean says that you told her to fuck off. Or to go fuck herself.”