Summer People (22 page)

“Anybody home?” His blue oxford shirt looked freshly ironed, and he was smiling inscrutably. As Nathan allowed him inside, Mr. McAlister said, “I hope I'm not barging in on you; I was just down on the beach, and thought I'd come up and see if you two were still alive.”

Ellen had leaned forward in her recliner to see him better, and remained perched on its edge. “Oh, Bill, you're not barging in at all.”

Nathan turned off the television. “Would you like anything to drink?”

When he finished clearing the dishes and poured Mr. McAlister a glass of wine, Nathan returned to find him on the couch, his right hand resting on Ellen's. The older man let go of her hand to take the glass, his
face uncharacteristically open and inquisitive. “I was just telling Ellen about what happened the other night. I…that didn't happen to you during the fire, did it?”

Nathan shook his head and stopped himself from touching his bruise. “Thayer and his friends attacked me last night.”

Mr. McAlister licked his lower lip, saying, “I heard about that. I'm sorry that happened. I had a long talk with him about it, and I think he feels sorry too. I think he and his friends had been drinking, unfortunately. He said you threw some gravel at him?”

Nathan stared at Mr. McAlister with eyes that dared him to continue this line of questioning. “Yeah, I did.”

Mr. McAlister looked away and sipped his merlot. “Well. You didn't get a lot of smoke in you during the fire, did you?”

“I think I'm fine.”

As Mr. McAlister talked more about the plans for his home, Nathan quietly refilled Ellen's sherry glass and returned to the kitchen. He washed their lunch and dinner dishes, then retreated up the back stairs to his room.

Stretched out on his bed, he watched the dying twilight leach the blues and yellows from the unmanned sailboats on his wallpaper. The evening's darkness weighed heavily, and to slide out from beneath it Nathan stood, turned on his desk lamp, and flipped to an empty page in his sketchbook. He drew several rough sketches of the scene that afternoon at Gilman's. But the more he thought about his conversation with Leah, the more he stared out the window. In the hours after their encounter, why had he felt so relieved? Sure, she may not have known about the fight until after her tennis lesson, but hadn't he seen her flirting with Thayer?

In his sketchbook, Nathan had not yet drawn the moment when Leah came into the store, and now the idea of depicting his conversation with her exhausted him. With a sigh he returned to his bed and thumbed through some of the comics he had brought from home.

From downstairs he could occasionally hear the low rise and fall of Mr.
McAlister's voice. There was eventually an exchange of good-byes, and then the front door rattled closed. The stairs moaned as Ellen climbed them, and Nathan was struck with sudden dread that seeing his light on in the bedroom, she might visit, when what he wanted was for her to sleep. It was too late for him to scramble under the covers, but with only a minor whimpering from the bedsprings, he leaned over to turn off the lamp.

The stairs stopped their moaning. He waited, listening for the sound of her bedroom door creaking open, but heard the macramé brick doorstop of his own room slowly sliding across the hardwood floor. As the beam of hallway light widened across his room, Nathan closed his eyes. He waited for Ellen to draw the door shut, but the light remained, and a moment later he could hear her shuffling, and the gentle thud of her cane on the floor. Nathan kept his eyes closed, lying fetally on top of his white comforter. When she halted, her labored, whistling breath close enough that he knew she could reach out and caress him, she turned and eased herself onto the bed, sinking Nathan a few inches in her direction so he was almost spooning against her. He wondered if she could hear his throbbing heart. He twitched and made a grunting
I'm deep in REM sleep
kind of noise and turned away from her. For what seemed a long time, he felt his backside against hers and waited for the tremulous sound of her voice or the gentle stroke of her hand. But when she finally pulled herself up to leave, and Nathan no longer worried about her touching him, the shuffling of her white sneakers seemed like the loneliest sound in the world.

 

I
n the shadowy living room light—where he hoped his bruise would not be so noticeable—Nathan read on the couch, wishing he knew what time Leah planned to come over. It was too late to call her now. He read for another half hour and felt relief as much as surprise when she tapped on the window behind him. She apologized for being late and explained that Eliot had drunk two glasses of soda during dinner and could not keep his hypercaffeinated self in bed. Glancing up at the ceiling, she whispered, “Is Ellen asleep?”

On the outer edge of the soft lamplight, Leah's face reminded Nathan of an old master's painting, and he might have leaned over to kiss her if she hadn't been looking at his bruise.

“Yeah, I think she's probably asleep by now.” He told her about Ellen's visit to his bedroom, and Leah's dark eyes grew wide. “Whoa, that's cuckoo. What do you think she was thinking?”

“I have no idea.”

“Maybe she thought you were her husband, or Mr. McAlister.”

“I think she probably just wanted to talk or something.”

“What if she does it again and tries to kiss you?”

“With tongue or without?”

Leah cinched her mouth to the right and shook her head. Nathan maintained his innocently inquisitive expression, but she ignored him. “So what were you drawing when she interrupted you?”

Something about the way she elongated the word “draw-ing” made Nathan sense that she half-expected him to say, You. So he shrugged and told her that he'd just been doing some sketches of Albans Bay.

“Can I see them?”

Taking a seat on the couch, Nathan left enough room for her to sit comfortably between him and the armrest. “Ah, I'm just starting on them, plus they're upstairs.”

“I want to see them.”

“Well, I'm flattered.”

“They're in your bedroom?” Leah looked at him with a child's hopeful expression. She was wearing a long-sleeved black T-shirt pulled up to her forearms and a black and tan headband to keep her hair out of her eyes.

“Yeah, they are, which is right next door to Ellen's bedroom, so it's probably not a good idea to go in there now.”

“I'll be quiet,” she whispered, raising her fingers to her lips as she ascended the first few steps of the staircase. Once she saw he was following, she laughed, covering her mouth with her hand. She was stepping in the dead center of the stairs—making them groan more than necessary—but they made it into the bedroom. Nathan shut the warped door as far as it
would go, then pushed the macramé doorstop against it to keep it closed. Leah sat down on the bed with so little restraint that the springs virtually screamed. Nathan gave her a stern look, raised his hand, then put his ear to the crack in the door.

On his way to the bed, he whispered, “We have to be super quiet.”

“What about moaning?”

“No, no moaning.”

“You moan.”

“I do not.”

“Yes, you do. You moan every time we kiss,” Leah said, kicking off her sandals and pulling one foot up to rest against the inside of her thigh. “Now come here and let me see your forehead.”

Nathan did not want her to see his bruise in the harsh light of the bedside lamp, so he sat a few feet away from her. She edged closer and put a hand on his forehead to inspect his injury. “You poor baby. Okay, so tell me how this happened. You were on your way to visit Eldwin?”

“We were going to go kayaking,” Nathan said. He was grateful for the manly sound of that statement before he gave an account of the attack, which inevitably became a blend of what actually had happened and what Nathan wished and sometimes came to believe had happened: an account in which his hesitancy was not a coward's paralysis, but a mature man's desire for peace, and where, once peace was no longer an option, he struck back with shocking force and ability.

Still, the part about whipping gravel at Thayer's face had to be handled delicately. Nathan might have omitted it altogether, but he was sure she would hear about it sometime. So he said he only threw the gravel when it appeared that he was going to have to fight the juggernaut, too.

“Was his name Brett?” Leah asked. She provided a physical description that matched the juggernaut, but failed to give his densely muscled features their due.

“I don't know.” Nathan lay down on his side with his head propped on his hand. “You didn't see any marks on Thayer, like on his face, where the gravel hit him?”

“No, but I wasn't looking for it, either. Would it make you feel better if he had marks on him?”

“Fuck, yes.”

“Well, I'll look closer next time I see him.”

“Has he asked you to do something else with him?”

“No, but I think Danielle goes back to New York a lot and that's who he signed up for lessons with, so I don't know. Do you care if I take lessons with him?”

It took a moment for Nathan to see she was being serious. Then he said, “No. I mean, that's up to you.”

“I just think he was upset with you because he thought you were trying to hurt his grandmother. Plus, he was drunk. And I kind of have to stay friends with him so that his grandfather might help me get a job.”

“Hmm.”

“I'm sorry you got hurt.”

“I'm not hurt. The motherfucker just sucker-punched me where it looks bad.”

Silence filled the room. Leah reached for Nathan's hand. “Will you show me what you've been drawing?” She looked at him with such innocent eyes that Nathan couldn't determine if she was being ironic or sincere.

He retrieved his sketch pad from the desk and laid it in front of them on the bed. He sat close enough to her that their bodies often brushed against each other. For the most part, his sketches were done in more of a cross-hatching style than he often employed in his graphic novel. He tried to flip through some of the earlier ones he'd done of his parents, and the library where he'd worked, and the other renters in the house where he'd lived, but she slowed him down. “Is that your mom?” she asked.

The sketch was of his mother in the middle of his parents' backyard garden. She was dressed in jeans and an old sweatshirt and had her arm propped on top of a freestanding birdhouse. Her face was already thin and
jaundiced due to her monthly chemotherapy treatments but she was still smiling in the broad, life-filled way that often made Nathan wonder if such happiness could be had without religion. “Yeah, that was her.”

“That's a good drawing.”

Nathan continued flipping the pages—identifying different people from his past and attempting to skip over occasionally vulgar illustrations, which Leah inevitably fought to see. She looked for a long time at a woman with a gigantic vagina that contained a small, scruffy man. He was leaning against a vaginal wall, crying,
I just want to go home.

“I think I was drunk when I did that,” Nathan lied.

He turned the pages to find more illustrations of himself and Ellen on her front porch, overlooking Albans Bay, and of Mr. McAlister racing out of his burning house, beads of perspiration jumping from his forehead, teeth clamped on a lit cigar. Then Nathan turned to a more intricately detailed, cross-hatched illustration of Leah sitting in her bathing suit on Parson's Beach, smiling at the viewer through windswept hair.

“Is that me?” Leah whispered.

“Well, it's going to be. I'm kind of still working on it.”

“It's beautiful.”

“Lord, you're vain.”

“I think your
drawing
is beautiful, stupid.”

Nathan was about to lean over and kiss her without moaning, but she asked if he would do a sketch of her so she could watch.

“Draw one right now?”

“Yeah, I want to see how you do it. I want to see the artist at work.”

“But I don't have my beret with me.”

“Your beret?”

“Yeah, I usually wear it at a rakish angle while I'm creating beautiful works of art.”

Leah leveled her gaze at him. “Just tell me where I'm supposed to sit.”

“This isn't going to be very good. It takes time to do a good drawing.”

“I have time,” Leah said, affecting a regal air as she sat down in the
desk chair. “How's this?”

“Quit posing like the queen of England, and sit in a way that's going to be comfortable for a while,” Nathan instructed. While he turned the pages of his sketchbook, he asked about her trip to New York. She said she had fun, hanging out with her sister Lindsey and their mom, looking over Lindsey's dress and helping decide what the bridesmaids were going to wear. But it was also kind of crazy, because one night when their mother had gone to bed and they'd stayed up late talking, Lindsey confessed to Leah about having cheated on her fiancé. It was not the first time she had cheated on him, but it was the first time she had cheated on him since they'd been engaged. Her fiancé, Justin, worked as a—well, Leah didn't know what you called him, but he worked on TV show sets arranging outdoor scenes and mostly moving equipment around. Last month while she was visiting the set of
NYPD Blue
(which normally filmed in L.A. but was being shot in New York for a few weeks), Lindsey had been talking to an actor named Ryan Parker, and when he'd invited her inside an empty trailer, they'd made out like teenagers for half an hour.

Nathan looked up from the first rough lines he'd drawn to try and center the portrait around her warm eyes. “So what is she thinking now?”

“Oh, she's still getting married. I think she just thinks of it as a bump in the road.”

“You sure it wasn't a hump?”