Summer People (32 page)

“I want you to dance,” Nathan said. “But I can't dance, so I'm going to watch you for a little while, and then maybe wait for you in the backyard.”

Even in Nathan's boozily optimistic frame of mind, wherein almost anything seemed possible, the dance floor still seemed too crowded to do much more than bump into other people while making your hands flutter in front of you. But Leah was enjoying herself, occasionally smiling over at Nathan where he stood beside the mantel. He watched her until his legs began to grow weary. Then he retired to the back lawn. Ralph and others were still gathered at the edge of the woods and Nathan sat down in the grass beside them, not so much to join the conversation as just to be in their company. He felt a deep love for humanity, and that all those people he'd seen throughout his life carrying signs that said things like “Peace” and “Love Not Hate,” well, maybe he shouldn't be so cynical about them. He lay back and closed his eyes, chuckling at the things he overheard Ralph and the others saying about the way they were in high school. He wanted to share with them how wonderful it felt to lie on this grass beneath a moonlit sky and to be in love with a beautiful person you thought probably loved you. He was thinking of letting them know, whenever they stopped talking about their worst haircuts, but when he cradled his head in his arm that was all sleep needed to overwhelm him.

The Morning After ~ From Ellen's Chamber to Her Carriage ~ An Unfortunate Sighting at Mariner's Rocks

T
he next morning Nathan felt woozily hungover as he squinted out his windows and got dressed. He smelled coffee. He didn't drink coffee himself, but he had brewed a cup in the mornings for Ellen, and smelling it reminded him that this was the last day he would see her in Maine.

In the kitchen, Ralph grunted in greeting. He sat at the table, unshaven, in the same blue shirt he'd worn last night.

Pouring himself a glass of juice, Nathan mumbled, “Glen still upstairs?”

“No, he just left for the hospital.” Ralph lifted his eyes from the newspaper to peer at the digital clock on the coffeemaker. “We're supposed to meet him there in a couple hours.”

Nathan blew his nose, nodding.

“I asked him about you maybe filling in for me after I leave.”

“Yeah?” Nathan asked. He glanced over to see Ralph still reading the newspaper. “What did he say?”

“He seemed cool with it. He said he would think it over.”

Nathan toasted a piece of bread and sat down at the table, sipping his juice. He stared out at the sunlit harbor. “Did you see Leah after I left?”

Ralph glanced up as if surprised to see Nathan sitting there. “Yeah,” he said, finally, as he pushed himself back from the table. He raised his arms above his head and stretched as if being tortured on a medieval rack. “I saw her in the kitchen. I told her you went home and then I didn't see her after that.”

Nathan rubbed the back of his neck as he considered this troubling information. Last night, when Ralph shook his shoulder to tell him he and his new friends were going to dance, Nathan stumbled drunkenly through the house a few times before deciding that Leah had very likely gone home. In his dark jeans and black T-shirt, he thought he must have been difficult to find, sleeping so close to the woods. Now he wondered if he should feel guilty for having left the party without telling her.

On the way to the airport, Ralph confessed—with some pleasure—that he had spent most of the night on Big Beach, feeling up the girl who loved
Forrest Gump.
But now he wondered what it would mean for his relationship with his girlfriend back home.

“Have you ever cheated on her before?” Nathan asked.

“No. Well, once. In the very beginning, when we had just started dating.”

“How do you feel about what happened last night?”

Ralph continued staring out the front windshield and massaged the right side of his face. “I actually feel all right.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I have a theory about this if you want to hear it.”

“All right. Hit me,” Ralph said.

“Well, I think that if you've cheated on your girlfriend and you're sick to death about it and you know it's not going to happen again, you shouldn't tell her. It's making your own burden easier by giving it to her to share, and she shouldn't have to.
But
if you've cheated on her and you feel okay
with it—if you're not wracked with guilt about it—then that suggests you may not feel as strongly about her as you might have imagined, and the odds are you're going to do it again. So you have a moral responsibility to tell her.”

“Hmmm,” Ralph said. “What if I feel okay with it and then guilty about it and then okay with it again?”

Nathan laughed. “Yeah, I don't know what to tell you then.”

As Ralph reached to turn on the radio, Nathan said, “I think that's the problem with most of my theories—they all sound pretty good until I try to apply them to life.”

 

E
llen understood something significant was about to happen. The swelling of her face kept her left eye from opening fully, but she followed with mute suspicion the white-clad figures moving in and out of her room. Glen stood at the foot of the bed, raising his glasses to peer down at the paperwork brought for him to sign, while talking with Nathan about the plan for the next couple of days. Glen asked, “Will it give you enough time to spend today and tomorrow here to wrap things up and then start home on Monday?”

Both men knew that the few things Nathan had to do at the house—packing Ellen's clothes, calling the handyman to tell him they were leaving—would not take two days; and although Nathan would have preferred to stay longer, he was grateful for Glen's thoughtfulness and said he'd leave Monday morning at the latest.

For a few minutes, the bustle of nurses to and fro suggested an on-time departure. But after the flow of paperwork stalled, Nathan and Ralph sat down on either side of Ellen, watching the tennis match on television above them. It seemed inappropriate to talk about things as trivial as tennis while Ellen was about to embark on a journey that might conceivably kill her. But when Glen commented on the match, asking who was supposed to be the better player—Pete Sampras or Andre Agassi—Ralph said he thought Sampras was supposed to be better, although Agassi was more fun to
watch, and for a little while it felt like each word about tennis was another buffer against tragedy. The more they spoke as if nothing could happen to Ellen on that plane, the more likely it was that nothing would. When Sampras and Agassi took a break, the program flashed back to a match featuring Jana Novotná and Martina Hingis. Remembering his initial interview at Ellen's home, Nathan asked, “What do you think of Martina Hingis, Ralph?”

Ralph opened his mouth to answer, but the corner of his lip lifted in a smile. “I think she's good,” he said at last.

Not long afterward, Dr. Sahni entered and supervised two nurses as they prepared Ellen for her ambulance ride to the airport. They hoisted her from the bed to the gurney, one of them rolling the portable pouch that fed the tube leading into Ellen's bruise-blackened arm.

“It's going to be all right, Momma,” Glen assured her. Dr. Sahni continued speaking quietly to him as the nurses guided her out of the room. Two stocky orderlies grabbed either side of the gurney and rolled Ellen down the hallway in silence. Trailing them down the empty corridor, Nathan felt as if they were acting out some ancient procession, liveried
foot-men escorting a frail, aged queen from her bedchamber to her carriage. Then the exit doors swung open into the glar of sun-blasted pavement and the whooshing roar of the nearby highway.

Nathan put a reassuring hand on Ellen's shoulder as the orderlies collapsed the legs of the gurney and slid her through the opened ambulance doors. Staring out from the shaded interior, Ellen clenched and unclenched the white bedsheet tucked beneath her, and shook her head, as if baffled by all the commotion.

Glen put his glasses back on and signed a few forms that one of the nurses from the private plane service handed him. Finally, he shook Nathan's hand, saying, “Ralph said you might be interested in moving into the house with my mother?”

Nathan stammered but said, “Yeah…Ralph was just mentioning it to me as a possibility.”

“Well, think it over.” Glen handed him the keys to the Volkswagen and, glancing at Ralph, who was bumming a cigarette from one of the orderlies, added, “You don't have any pets, do you?”

“No.”

Glen nodded somberly. “Good.” He walked over and shook hands with Ralph, then threw his old army bag into the front of the ambulance and climbed into the back. He held one of his mother's hands and smiled crookedly as a nurse shut the doors. Nathan and Ralph watched without speaking as the ambulance circled and pulled out of the parking lot into the slow-moving flow of traffic. Ralph took a long drag of his cigarette and exhaled with squinting eyes. “So long, monkey,” he said.

 

N
athan was looking forward to driving back in the Volkswagen, away from the stench of Ralph's truck, and where, alone, he could consider all the unanswered questions about Leah that now besieged him. Alcohol had allowed him to speak more freely than he perhaps would have otherwise last evening, but it was also blurring his memory of what they'd said. He remembered that it went well—she had kissed him so soulfully!—but had she still seemed reserved when Nathan spoke of leaving Cleveland? Back at the house, while Ralph slept on the living room couch, Nathan went into the kitchen to phone her.

Eldwin answered and said that Rachel's sister was visiting and had taken the kids to Freeport to do some school shopping, so he'd given Leah the afternoon off. He didn't know where she'd gone. Perhaps noticing the disappointment in Nathan's voice, he added, “I was getting ready to take a walk if you feel like getting out of the house.”

Nathan wanted to walk and look for Leah, but he was afraid Eldwin would slow him down and make any encounter with her awkward. So he said he was too exhausted and planned to nap. For a while after he hung up, he stared out the kitchen window and bit his thumbnail. Then he quietly exited out the back door and squinted up Harbor Avenue.

He saw no sign of Eldwin.

Hurrying up the gravel road, Nathan thought about strategy. He de
cided he would no longer be looking for Leah to say, “Yes, absolutely, come and be with me in New York.” That was a stupid thing for him to have wanted from her anyway. It would put too much pressure on her, and on them. He would simply look for affirmation that she loved him, and then say cautiously, “Well, let's take it slow. I'll go back to Cleveland, wrap things up there, and then, if it seems like a good idea, I'll see if I can find my own place in New York.” If he got there soon enough, he could still probably take the train here a few weekends before the summer was over.

On Big Beach, parents lounged in deck chairs beneath umbrellas as their children scuttled crablike along the farthest reaches of the tide. When he spotted Eldwin, fifty yards or so in front of him—head bent down toward the sand—Nathan slowed and trailed behind him. Every now and then Eldwin would crouch down to pick up a shell, and Nathan would have to stop and pretend to tie his shoes or just stare contemplatively at the ocean. They walked several hundred yards in this way until Eldwin had crouched more than a dozen times and Nathan—too tired of the charade to continue—just kept walking toward him.

Eldwin was wearing dark wraparound shades that made it impossible to see his eyes. Nathan told him he had changed his mind about the nap, and Eldwin nodded as he picked a broken seashell out of the sand. “Meghan's been collecting seashells, so I've been trying to find some good ones for her,” he explained, brushing it off and slipping it into his pocket.

Strolling down the beach, Nathan asked Eldwin's advice about whether to accept Glen's invitation to live with Ellen in Cleveland.

“It sounds like it would be a great place to devote some time to drawing your next graphic novel, or just to read,” Eldwin answered. He said he had a writer friend who was working on the second volume of a memoir while at the same time having to teach at a junior college, and who would relish the gift of time being offered to Nathan. In this comment lay much of why Nathan felt grateful for Eldwin and had begun to see him as a friend. Whereas most people he knew would ask the obvious question—
Why would a twentysomething man want to live with an old woman, even if it is for free?
—Eldwin was like-minded enough to understand why this might
be a great opportunity. He was also generous enough to suggest that Nathan and this writer were men of the same kind. Which was why Nathan struggled to say what he was thinking without diminishing Eldwin's respect for him.

“Yeah, I mean, it could be good, but I also feel like I want to go out and
do
something. It's hard not to feel like being at Ellen's would be part of the holding pattern I feel like I've been in for a while now.”

“What else do you think you might want to do?”

“I don't know,” Nathan said, although what he meant was that he wanted a life with more apparent success. There had to be lots of easier ways to be successful than as a graphic novelist.

“You would be
doing
something at Ellen's, right?”

“Yeah, I would,” Nathan said. He knew Eldwin envisioned him hunkered over his desk, drawing, or poring over the great works of the Western world. But Nathan saw himself sitting in that dimly lit living room, making idle conversation about the tennis on television, or at restaurants, explaining to Ellen that each bearded man who passed by was not Glen. Nathan understood the romance of the notion of living at Ellen's—the artist in his garret, forging out of his private anguish something beautiful—but he felt the part about the private anguish wasn't being given nearly enough consideration. He wanted to tell Eldwin that he had spent almost three years working on a meticulously illustrated book of stories that now embarrassed him and lay yellowing in the backseat of his car.

Near Mariner's Rocks—where the dunes gave way to sandstone boulders that curved east, forming a narrow peninsula—Nathan noticed Thayer on a beach towel roughly fifty yards away. He was wearing a gray-and-blue bathing suit and lay propped up on his elbows, watching a young woman alone in the ocean. Nathan squinted. Dressed in a red bikini, Danielle pushed rippling waves in front of her as she high-stepped toward the shore.

“There's your sparring partner,” Eldwin said. He nodded toward where Thayer lay as Danielle walked over to kneel down beside him. She searched inside a canvas bag then toweled off her wet hair.

“Is it wrong to pray he gets skin cancer?” Nathan asked.

“Yeah, it is,” Eldwin sighed, as if saddened to have to say so. He glanced over at the boardwalk that led back onto Oceanside Avenue. “You want to go up or go back the way we came?”

“Why don't we go up?” Nathan said. It might have been more scenic walking along the beach, but it would have been the same scenery, and also, Nathan was tired of the constant mild anxiety of wondering whether each distant figure might be Leah. At the top of the boardwalk steps, he stopped because Eldwin had turned to look over the coastline. It was a breathtaking view, charming clapboard homes presiding over the leaden blue of the Atlantic. Nathan inhaled the ocean air, then noticed on his right a young woman suddenly sit up on the beach. He hadn't noticed her earlier because she was lying close to the dunes, obscured by the boardwalk. But now he could see her plainly. Even from fifty yards away, he knew it was Leah. On her far side, a young man—Ethan, the host of the previous evening's party—lay in knee-length blue swimming trunks, propped up on one elbow to face her. When the wind blew, Leah turned her head in a familiar gesture, pushing a lock of hair from her brow and holding it above her forehead as she talked.