Summer People

by Marge Piercy

  ‘Not formally, Daddy. I have been seeing less of him. I didn’t even tell him I was going to the city today.’

  ‘There’s no reason for a formal ending to what began casually enough. Why not simply let it wither on the vine? I know you’re too sensible to consider bringing him to the city with you this fall, the way when you were a girl you sometimes insisted on bringing home turtles, who promptly crawled under a bed or cupboard and died.’

  ‘I’m sure he has no desire to move to New York.’ That she did know to be true, although she had hoped to talk him into going. She had been plotting exactly how to do that. She was dismayed at Tyrone’s seamless opposition.

  ‘He’s a sensible lad. If I need more renovations at the Cape, I’ll surely use him. He’s a good workman, a rare virtue nowadays.’ Tyrone beamed at her. ‘I know you’re far too mature to let any occasion arise for a quarrel. Let things attenuate. Keep it civilized and gentle. I can’t provide that kind of termination with Candida, unfortunately, because of the mess of the drowning.’

  That meant to her that she could continue to see Jimmy at the pond, and that he could visit her in the city once she had her own apartment. Sally had turned up some possibilities and Donald was supposed to be working on the problem also. She hoped she would not have to take a large part in the search. It was tedious and unpleasant to have to call strangers and beg for favours and ask what felt like too intimate questions about rooms and prices. Talking about money always felt sticky.

  Fortunately the next day Donald turned up a perfect condominium in a new building just finishing. She would not be able to move in before October, but she could stay in the country (with Jimmy) until then, or she could live with Tyrone in the city. She still had a room in his apartment. She signed the papers at ten the next morning and then rushed off to LaGuardia to fly into Hyannis, where Sally met her to take her to the funeral. Tyrone would come Thursday night, so that he would be there when Sean arrived on Friday.

  The service was held on the Great Beach, just over the dunes from their house where the path that led from the end of the pond road came out. Most of the people had parked at the nearest public beach and walked the half mile. She felt nervous about seeing Jimmy for the first time since his mother had died. He was wearing black jeans and a black linen jacket, which she thought rather informal attire; however half the mourners sported sundresses, short-sleeved shirts, even shorts. The day was hot and dry, the sky cloudless and much higher than it usually looked over the Cape. The wind was smart and from the northwest.

  Sally wore a navy linen suit that looked even more incongruous than her own navy and white dress against the backdrop of dunes. She was glad they hadn’t had to walk past the sunbathers and splashing infants, past the lifeguard and the muscle boys at the public beach, but simply trotted over the dune, both carrying their shoes by the straps. It seemed a tacky funeral. Even Tom’s service had been better than this, in spite of the shame. It was bizarre. She would miss Susan; she knew she would. It was hard to imagine summers without Susan to take care, to fuss over her, to arrange everything. What would they do without her? It would be bleak to arrive with no Susan to make everything warm and nice. She felt a sense of privation and a sadness that felt overwhelming at first; it made her remember that long ago divorce, and that first summer she had come here without her mother, with Tyrone and the new wife, Janette. Susan had made that summer bearable.

  ‘Susan found churches boring. I think it’s daring and sweet of Willie to do it the way she would have wanted, don’t you?’ Burt said softly as he stood beside her. ‘I’ve become a connoisseur of funerals the past few years.’

  ‘Well, they held a regular lying in state at the funeral parlour,’ Leroy murmured. ‘So there was something for the straight friends, and now the kinky part for us.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Burt said. ‘The kinky part is when Johnny throws the ashes out of an airplane.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ Laurie whispered.

  ‘No we aren’t,’ Burt said. ‘Ask your boyfriend. That was Susan’s request. Willie’s doing it exactly the way she wanted it. I find that moving. So often you get some minister who never saw the poor soul making up a eulogy that could have been read over their dog.’

  Tyrone was absolutely right, she thought, Susan had simply gone off the deep end. She had exploded parts of herself all over the landscape. It was like a weird hippie tea party on the sand, with everyone sitting in a circle and people rising one at a time to say something about Susan, to read a poem, to sing a song or play a melody on a guitar. Mary Lou, the woman who ran a real estate office in town, recited the Twenty-third Psalm with her voice quavering. Willie talked about how long they had been together and all the things they had loved to do, all the little pleasures they had shared. When he talked about their life together with their friends and living in harmony with the land, giving and taking with it in the round of seasons, he almost broke down. For a moment Laurie thought he was about to cry. She had a strong sense of being violated by his emotions. At normal funerals, everything was controlled, muted. The widow or widower didn’t stand up and tell you how ghastly they were feeling. She imagined herself rising at Tom’s service and screaming how nasty it all was. People would really have loved that. Enough pain, enough scandal, enough ugliness! Had they no shame?

  Jimmy read a poem she recognized halfway through as Mark Edelmann’s. Dinah, dressed in a long lavender coat without sleeves, stood and played the flute, first alone and then with her boyfriend Itzak. It was eerily beautiful, the two flutes weaving in and out like streamers in the air.

  Johnny had built a strange object she said was intended as an honorary funeral pyre for her mother, because, Johnny asked rhetorically, why should Buddhists have all the pretty funerals? It was erected by Willie and Johnny together, while people were passing around wine and bread and fruit and cheese. Now it felt like a mad picnic. Finally the tower was finished, twenty feet tall and with a precarious grandeur to it, white and gilt and black and lavender, hung with streamers that the wind whipped toward the sea. Willie, Dinah, Jimmy and Johnny were walking around it chanting something she preferred not to hear. She felt partly moved, because Johnny did have talent and she had made this strikingly grotesquely pretty thing on the beach. Laurie wondered if she should relinquish her annoyance at Johnny. It would look great in a gallery. It would be highly saleable. She could imagine it in a commercial context, perhaps in the lobby of a restaurant or a resort hotel. It was that festive.

  But Johnny stopped and held a match and Willie, Dinah and Jimmy did the same. Soon streamers of flame were blowing out from the house of paper and plywood, and it was blazing away. Even on fire it was pretty, but it flared up very fast. In twenty minutes it had burned down to the sand. Jimmy and Willie brought buckets of seawater to douse the coals. Then everybody began to pick up and go home.

  It was a good thing Tyrone had not come, she thought. He would have considered it a waste of time, for as it turned out, it wasn’t a real service, not an event anybody could be expected to attend solemnly. Is this all that Susan would have for a funeral? She drifted uncertainly over to Jimmy. ‘Burt says that Johnny is going up in a plane to scatter the ashes?’ She wanted to beg him to deny the rumour.

  ‘Toby can fly. He’s borrowing a plane.’

  ‘Does he have a licence?’

  Jimmy shrugged. ‘I didn’t ask.’ He had not smiled at her, but she could not tell if that was because of the occasion or because he was irked. She had a couple of days before Tyrone arrived. She touched his arm, asking, ‘Do you want to come over tonight? We can have supper together.’

  ‘I’m eating with my family.’ He walked beside her however as she padded barefoot to Sally, who was sitting on the dune holding their shoes by the straps. They had never put them on.

  Sally did not look pleased to see Jimmy going back with them. Laurie tried to make conversation but nobody wanted to chat. She would be alone with Jimmy in a few minutes and make up with him then. Ind
eed he followed her into her little house without invitation or comment. She headed for the bathroom to put in her diaphragm and use the toilet. Then she sprayed on Rive Gauche.

  When she came out of the bathroom, the room was empty. She assumed he had gone outside to sit on the deck, but he was not there. Then she caught sight of him halfway along the pond, walking rapidly on the path toward his house. She wanted to fly after him. She started to call out, but realized her voice would be audible to everyone on the pond. She felt foolish standing there with the diaphragm inserted. Why had he left? He could not have felt insulted she had gone into the bathroom. He must have changed his mind. Perhaps he thought that making love after even such a silly ceremony was improper.

  Sally gave her a little smile as she drifted up on the deck of the big house. ‘Don’t be upset. It’s all for the best. Your father would like it out of the way before Labor Day anyhow.’

  For a moment she missed Susan, because she would have run to Susan with her quandary; except that she couldn’t have anyhow. She wondered for a moment, as she followed Sally’s narrow navy-clad back into the livingroom, if she could confide in Sally. But she did not think Sally would appreciate such an attempt. Sally knew everything about them, but kept it all cool and controlled and neat. Actually as Laurie got older and stronger and more confident, she had less need for someone warm to console her and share her troubles. Adults did not need that. Tyrone didn’t. Nor did Sally herself. She would be strong and she would not miss Susan. If she did, anyhow, she would not say anything to Tyrone. She had the feeling he would find any display of emotion about Susan in bad taste. It had been such a tacky and disruptive event, Susan coming upon Tyrone and Candida, really, and then drowning. It embarrassed her to think about it. How could they all have continued together after all, gone on picnics or out to dinner? Susan had tried to take advantage of Tyrone, that was the secret hinge of the shameful mess. She was proud how they had all pulled together, Tyrone, Sally, Donald, herself, in efficient damage control. That she could say to Tyrone when he arrived. He would say how strong she was. He would be proud of her again.

  What she had to do was to get herself together before Sean came. Perhaps she would even finish that painting she had been working on back in May and hang it where he might just happen to notice it. She wouldn’t say anything about it, of course. She only had three days. Forget the painting. She would be seeing any amount of Sean in New York with them being partners.

  No, it would be better to get her hair cut again, shorter. She had noticed how the girls around SoHo were wearing their hair. Back to the hairdresser’s, fast. Rafael had been on vacation, so she would have to find someone on the Cape. In New York, she had bought a new outfit, but now she wasn’t sure about it. She wondered if she could sneak over and try it on for Candida, if Tyrone wouldn’t find out. Too bad about Candida. She would not have made a bad wife for Tyrone. Laurie would have preferred her to what she would probably get.

  She must also have a serious talk with Celeste about the meals for Friday. They had to be perfect and extraordinary, while suggesting a minimum of fuss. As soon as Tyrone returned to the city, she would stay on for a while and get Jimmy back.

  Actually she missed him strongly, especially in the evenings and at night. He was the only man she had ever really enjoyed making love with, not once or twice in the beginning, when everybody was trying hard and infatuated, but regularly. Jimmy made her feel attractive and generous. Surely it would not do any harm to continue with him once Tyrone had left her on her own.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  DINAH

  Dinah flipped back and forth twice in each hour while they were in Edinburgh over whether it was a good or a completely lousy idea that she had come with Itzak. She was with him only two days of the festival followed by a five-day vacation. She would then fly home from Prestwick, while he went on to Birmingham, Bristol, Brussels and finally London before returning. She disappeared in his radiance when he was the star. That made her itchily recall her own performer’s days with the Wholey Terrors, not her recent concert in Hartford. That had been a small audience who had responded well enough. No great high, no torrent of emotion. But she remembered igniting audiences as their arousal beat back at her in waves of sound and energy, feeling the room throb and the air sizzle. She remembered that hot fuss frothing about her. People adored performers and paid them and flocked to them the way they never did composers.

  In a way she was jealous. He would be richly paid and receive more adulation for half an hour performing a piece she had written for him than she would receive for having spent six months writing it. On the other hand, he was generous with the money he had. He wanted her to come, so he paid for the tickets, lodging, car rental, food. Since to her money was time for working, she could not have afforded a vacation. Still the festival stimulated her. With him, she was surrounded by music and musicians. Plunging into a provocative atmosphere did her good. But when she felt properly stimulated, what she needed was home, the quiet space that was hers alone.

  They went off to Galloway, to a country hotel where a five-minute walk brought them onto a moor where grey sheep raised their heads to watch them warily, where the fog caught on the rocks like tufts of wool. Their room was large and light and looked out on a surprisingly subtropical walled garden, with a couple of scrubby palms among the box, the azaleas and huge old gnarled clematis vines. The chatty waitress explained it was the Gulf Stream that brought mildness this far north. Their room was rather formally furnished, with deep velvet chairs and high mahogany dressers, a kingsized bed and a bath as large as many hotel rooms she had been put up in.

  The food was excellent and plentiful, lamb, salmon, trout, coarse oatmeal bread at breakfast. They walked and they ate and they made love and they talked. This was not an area that drew hoards of tourists. The hotel was full of professional men and their families come for the salmon or trout fishing. The villages were red brick or whitewashed stucco with neat shutters, the fields divided into quilts by drywall stone fences subtly coloured with lichens. Part of each day they both played the flute. He practised two hours daily regardless of where he was, and she worked at the same time. What she was getting on with was a series of short pieces for solo flute or two flutes, or flute and taped flute, intended to explore the limits of the instrument’s capacities and tentatively called, What Manner of Bird is This? She was enjoying the work, but she also was amused to realize rather cynically that probably this would be a success in publication, since the pieces would be attractive to students seriously engaged in learning the flute, an obvious stratagem for teachers. Well done, this series would get a lot of use.

  It was hard to call Willie, because doing so from the hotel room would put an additional strain on her relationship with Itzak, and because of the time difference. Most days when she had an opportunity to phone, it was the middle of the night in Massachusetts, or she did try and got no one. Finally she reached him. ‘Are you bearing up?’ she asked.

  He said something unintelligible. The connection was echoey. When they had made more noises at each other, she understood he was saying that he was depressed, that he could not work. ‘Jimmy and me are busting our humps on the Victorian in town, turning it into condos.’

  ‘I thought you’d lost that job when Tyrone sold the buildings?’

  ‘Are you having a good time in Scotland?’

  It was a conversation of non sequiturs. Obviously he blamed her for not being with him; but he too had gone away for a week. When she spoke to him, she wondered what she was doing in Scotland, indeed. Being happy with Itzak seemed unfeeling, almost gross. She was letting Willie down. He was not going to see much of her until she had been back a couple of days anyhow, because she was returning just in time for Rosh Hashonah and had promised Zee way back at Pesach that she would go to services both days with her, which meant a long drive. But Willie did have Jimmy, who had moved back into his house. It wasn’t as if he were alone.

  ‘How much lo
nger are you going to be hanging around over there?’ Willie asked, his voice quavering.

  ‘I leave in two days. Come on, Willie, I’m not taking any longer than you did in Minneapolis.’

  ‘Did you think I shouldn’t have gone?’

  ‘No, no! I was delighted. I mean, I thought it was good. We both needed to get away.’

  ‘You could have come with me.’

  ‘Willie, I’ll be back home soon. Good-bye. See you.’ She leaned against the wall of the hallway off the diningroom. She felt weak, guilty. Then she saw Itzak trapped halfway down the broad front stairs by a fan from London, and trotted off to his rescue.

  ‘At least you’re not a violinist or a pianist,’ she said as they walked that midmorning on the Mull of Galloway. It was a peninsula that rolled along to a rocky tip, cliff tops devoid of trees hundreds of feet above the crashing sea, sandstone cliffs tinged bronze and grey and mauve, splashed with white guano, seething with kittiwakes, razorbills and guillemots. It reminded her a little of Northern California, up near Mendocino, where the band had based itself the first summer – the way the rocky pastures would roll lushly along until suddenly they left off in midair and the sea burst against the rocks far below. But the sky hung low here, like the Cape. ‘The hierarchy of instruments means that you aren’t canonized, just overly adored.’

  ‘I don’t feel overly adored,’ he said. ‘Not in any useful way. You know how it is with an audience.’ He gave a sort of wince of the body, not quite a shudder, more a ripple. It was a physical reaction on an animal level, like a movement of the powerful muscles of a horse under the shiny coat. It made her want to touch him. They both came from peasant stock, survivors in the larger sense, strong, stocky, vital. ‘What you experience is the music. They just amplify it.’ He grimaced. ‘Not a completely honest statement. Every performer needs applause.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of the concerts themselves. I was thinking of the fans.’