Just to show her who’s who, he will stay out here for another five or ten minutes, before packing his camera and crossing the field and its scattered dandelion patches and slender, prickly grass to find her in the kitchen, where she has likely sat down at the dinette to wait with folded arms. He points his lenses at the gap between the shed’s rotted boards where he might see an animal’s pointy orange snout poke through, and he waits.
In this place, it’s easy for him to become a patient man, and not just in matters involving Betty. Time passes here in a way that makes him feel like he can never run out of it. If he has to, say, fix a broken latch on a window shutter or rake the beach sand flat after a day of trampling and digging by guests’ children, he can lavish exorbitant attention on each task. And there’s certainly more than enough to do. Five years ago, when he sat with the Portsmiths at the lodge’s patio to sign papers for the sale, they warned him, the good people that they are. “It’s so much work, for someone our age, and it’ll probably be no less for you,” said Mr. Portsmith. Unlike their son, who didn’t want to take his parents’ place at the lodge, Sammy was undeterred. He had spent the greater part of that year searching for some kind of new footing, and when he saw the sales posting for the lodge online, he flew across the country and made the six-hour drive from New York City the very week. Within the next month, the lodge was his.
He likes to think that Betty came with the place. Without her, he’d never have made it past the first year. For years she had worked for the Portsmiths, cleaning the rooms and bungalows, laundering all the sheets and towels, and amassing know-how essential to the lodge’s operation, like which switches to jiggle on the circuit breaker and how to prevent bears from getting into the dumpster. Sometimes, it feels to him like the place is more hers than his. She grew up a town away and later came back to the area, having dropped out of college after a few semesters of youthful excess. As contrition, he guesses, she attends nearly every meeting of the town library’s book club and has been making her way through a respectable magazine’s list of purported top one hundred books. Read this, she’ll tell him, despite the likelihood that he won’t. In her late thirties, she’s more than twenty years his junior and doesn’t tire easily, he likes to joke to his faraway friends.
He finds her in the game room, sweeping Ping-Pong balls from under the sofa. She looks up, then takes a pen out of her pocket and tosses it to him. After catching it, he finds that it’s not a pen at all but some kind of plastic gizmo that ends in a blue dot.
“I’m pregnant,” she tells him, and then leans on the broom, her signal that she’s done speaking. He tries to gauge, by the angle of her pinched brows, the implications.
“Ha ha,” is all he could say right off.
“I’m not kidding. I tested with two kits from two different pharmacies, one yesterday and another this morning.”
“When did it happen? How far along?”
“Maybe six weeks.”
In emergencies, he likes to trace back his steps. He does it when he loses things and when he doesn’t know where he is, as if by figuring out the course of what has happened, he’ll have readied himself for what’s due.
“Suite five.”
“The laundry room.”
He returns to quieted grunts and flesh clumsily grappled in the dark. Two bodies heaving on a hill of unwashed sheets. He remembers again how he had thrust with the “1812 Overture” in his head. The imagination of his little men reaching her verdant spaces thrilled him more than the act itself.
“You sure it’s not Wayne’s?”
“Better chance it’s Zeus’s.” She has been reading the classics.
Sammy can’t deny the awfulness of this situation for Wayne, but he can honestly say that he hasn’t schemed to undo what Wayne has with Betty. He certainly wasn’t there when Wayne and Betty first met and dated in high school. He had no part in how they settled on each other again after her return to the township. Wayne had taken some nebulous heroic part in the liberation of Kuwait, and she decided she could do worse than someone the townspeople called “Sarge” who received a check from the US government every month in recompense for mysterious bodily symptoms: that barely controllable right arm, nausea, headaches, sudden night tremors, and, as the coup de grâce, terminally sluggish sperm motility.
And yet, Sammy knows, he certainly isn’t blameless. If she had been any less pretty, he would have hired someone else for cheaper.
“Praise this modern divine miracle.”
“You know what? You’re an asshole.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, what do you want to do?” Betty asks.
He won’t make a smart-ass joke now. He knows that look: the result of profound exasperation preparing to leap to contempt, but then the anger that spurred her question extinguishes, as if it has run out of something to burn.
He remembers another pair of eyes demanding an answer from him like that. He sees a face he hasn’t seen in years. Unexpected things bring her back.
It might be the exacting way the cashier always answers the phone while he’s standing in line at the general store. Or it could be the sight of a guest wading into the waters of the lake—some woman with similar shoulder-length dark hair and sharp, clifflike shoulders—that would make him think of Nee in the pool, goading children to finish another lap. Those sudden reminders jar him from whatever he has been doing—buying eggs or drying canoes—so that he needs to take a moment to regain his present facts and bearings, as if he’s been away from them for a very long time.
He reminds himself that Betty’s waiting for him to answer. He wonders if she even knows what she wants to do. Maybe she’s asking him so that she’ll have something to feed her own reaction, or it might be that she doesn’t want to be the first to make her position known. It’s a standoff not at all unfamiliar. Their arguments—over menial things like how the guest beds should be made or whether she should wash the better plates by hand—have never ended quickly. He believes it was one of their acts of reconciliation that led them to the current predicament.
“Don’t worry. I already know what I’m going to do.”
“Then why are you asking me?”
“I’m curious to see what you want.”
In the silence, he gauges how much time he has to respond. He has rolled around in his head the question of children, but only until he’s reminded of the his age and the unlikelihood of having any. He thinks of his father and his phantom ancestors before him, all plotted along a line in which he’s the pointed tip racing toward oblivion.
“If you want to end it, I trust you to make that decision, but I would be fine if you’ve decided to do whatever else.”
“Goddammit, just say it. Do you want me to have the kid or not?”
Too often, he’s been quick to second-guess the choices he’s made. He wishes he had taken another county road to get to I-91. He can’t say how often he’s reversed his steps, after having locked his front door and gotten his car keys out, to change his pants.
“I wouldn’t mind it. You having the kid, I mean.”
“Good. This one’s the surprise I’m keeping. The doctors didn’t think I’d ever have one, but here we are.”
He nods, relieved, as if he’s lucked on the right answer. He remembers to smile, ostensibly at the prospect of his genetic perpetuation but largely to ensure some momentary calm.
Of course, her pregnancy will change everything between them. What scant authority he’s held as her employer will crumble against the fact of this future child.
And what is this thing that they have, anyway? Their affair is not the result of unquenchable passion but of a joint impulsiveness that has swept them up and again and again deposited them behind the same closed doors, to satisfy a mutual need for distraction. Is there more to them than that, enough to share the responsibilities of a child? He feels familiar tremo
rs of dread, like when he suddenly realizes that he has swum too far out on the lake.
He walks over to her, and for a long minute, they hug. If they were a real couple who had tried for a baby, he might be feeling overwhelming joy—a prompt for a kiss, perhaps. All they manage to do is lean against each other in this room, among stacks of disintegrating board games and piled tennis rackets—the beginning and end of someone else’s youth.
He halfway hopes that a guest will walk in on them and ask for more brewed coffee or for directions to the boathouse. None do. He hears Betty draw long, deep breaths, as if she is getting ready for a sprint.
“Now what?” he asks.
“When I get home this evening,” she says, “I’m going to have to tell Wayne.”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
A younger Sammy would have wished to avoid the evening, the next few hours, the arriving minutes. He would try to hold on to each moment, as if he could slow down time. This Sammy knows that it will always slip from him.
If he’s to surrender to the currents and let himself gaze at what’s due, he’ll see the vague shape of Betty in the near distance, the paper towels and gallon jug of lemon-scented disinfectant that he must buy for the lodge, and a little farther from that, the lake and its shore, gray and hazy, as if he’s looking at the view through rain. Beyond that, he can’t see much at all. Nothing of him persists, he’s afraid, except perhaps, possibly, this child.
He is still, and only time moves. He can feel it dash against him, scraping off grains of his substance; soon nothing will be left.
The future used to be his haven. He escaped to its large open country when he felt his present life constrict around him. It was where he could live out the stories that seemed to happen only to other people.
In England, when he was young, he looked ahead to school breaks, when there would be freedom from the masters and the other boys, and there would be, he was positive, girls. In the futures he dreamed then, his camera and made-up press credentials would broker his way into one-room clubs in Soho where everyone wanted to be photographed. At some point, a woman would pull him into some secret nook and let him touch her in places he’d only seen in the magazines passed, boy to boy, between schoolbooks. And when he did become a professional photographer, the future he saw for himself brimmed with wide admiration for his eye. There would be exhibits and openings, retrospectives and treasured monographs. In interviews, he would regale the public with tales of near misses in war zones and the welcome intrusion of grace and beauty amid unimaginable despair.
When he was no longer able to furnish a future for himself in this way, he found women who did so for him. He could be accused of falling in love just so that new futures would appear, and he would counterclaim to have loved them all: Anja, Matilde, Isma, Nee, and the rest, even as the historical record of his decisions and actions would discredit his assertion.
What is his future now? It appears less and less expansive: no more than a strip narrowing into a corner bordered by the endless dark.
It’s the past that now pulls at his imagination. He used to try to flee from it, but still it managed to follow him. It trails him, heavy with decided consequences, wider than the lay of whatever’s ahead. It calls out to him and demands that he look back. He feels this monster that has been his life reach out and grab him, and he can do nothing but give in to its strengthening, formidable gravity.
He keeps his old photographs in the shed, having converted the part of it that isn’t used to store tools into a small winterized room where, shielded from the elements by plastic sleeves, the photos lie flat in file cabinets he bought at a yard sale, arranged sometimes by year, some by place. He calls this his archives, as a joke to himself. Only he has any use for the photos.
Some inevitable time, not so far off, a stranger will perhaps riffle through them. He has tried to imagine himself as someone else who has shown up to survey what’s left of a man. Will they even wonder who these people in the photos are? Where they were? Most likely, this stranger will only try to discern which might fetch a price and which should be discarded. To abet a liquidation sale, they might sort the photos by subject: landscapes, city streets, a few series that look like photojournalism, assorted consumer products.
Some of the photos are of women: a fine-boned blonde shopping for flowers in what looks like a Scandinavian street; and probably in Rome, judging from shop signs, a cat-eyed brunette who looks up from a watercolor landscape she’s been painting in a sketchbook; another blonde is captured in a perpetual, cross-legged wait for the train at a graffitied New York subway station; and a small-shouldered Asian woman grins to the camera high on a tall building’s balcony.
A few of the photos have been labeled on the backs. If this unknown person were inquisitive enough, they might look up the names online. They’d find nothing at all on Isma and Matilde. Anja’s obituary would briefly announce the passing of a beloved wife and respected colleague at the Kulturdepartementet. Nee’s face looks out from the website of a condo’s management office.
From a manila envelope, the unknown person pulls out photos of an old house. The first few are wide-angle exterior shots. They show a pale, two-story house circumscribed by a roofed terrace and made airy by tall fanlighted windows with low balustrades. The palm trees on either side of the main entrance and the stark light visibly hot on the skin makes it clear that this photo isn’t of Vermont. A dull-colored canal flows past a wooden dock. A small school of arm-sized fish gasps for pellets in a garden pond. Inside the house, a wrought-iron staircase curves down one wall of the foyer to land on a floor of inlaid diamond-shaped marble. Ornate tiles adorn the ceiling with blooming flowers. Gray cloth drapes over the shape of an upright piano. Inside the wooden frame of what looks to be a large rectangular mirror, an unsmiling young man with a boxy camera aims from his waist.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
It’s almost evening, and he’s driving back from Kreissler’s with replenished supplies in the back of the van. He knows the way as if he’s driven these roads his whole life. His hands turn the wheel seemingly without his intervention, pointing the car down nameless country roads.
He contemplates stopping for a bite. He hasn’t had much to eat all day and probably should have wolfed down a biscuit before he left the lodge. He keeps driving, because he thinks it’s more habit than actual hunger that’s troubling his stomach, and he should at least get himself somewhere where Betty can find him.
He thinks of Betty in the rec room telling him, “I can’t pretend to Wayne this hasn’t happened, not for a minute.” That makes him picture Wayne in his living room, where she’ll likely have found him. He sees him wearing a gray T-shirt with the faded name of a made-up sports club printed across the chest. Wayne has the bulky frame of someone once athletic, but now he sits wrecked on a couch cushion, with an overheating laptop balanced on his knees. If Betty’s to be believed, this is how he spends his days. Sarge, people say to Wayne out of respect, but it can sound like taunting.
Five miles past the town’s meager Main Street, Sammy turns down a two-lane road to the land that’s his.
He sees Wayne smoking in the parking lot. He’s not alone. Betty’s sitting in the truck, and he recognizes Little Head and Billy Dave leaning against a guest’s Subaru. From what Betty tells him, they’ve been friends with Wayne since high school. He knows they do contracting work on out-of-towners’ vacation homes. They’re lean and sinewy and lizardlike and remind him of his sun-darkened countrymen whose skinny frames belie their feats—hauling cement buckets up twenty floors at construction sites or, in a ring, swinging knees at one another for the entertainment of thousands.
He squeezes into the spot across from them. When Betty sees him, she gets out of the truck. He looks her over and asks, “Are you all right?” She nods. He sees from her reddened eyes that she’s been crying.
“Sammy!”
With the gimp hand, Wayne whips out a plastic wand that ends with a radiant blue dot and points it at him.
He should feel more fear at the sight of these hostile young men.
He’s outlived that simple breed of terror, he guesses. He thinks little of pain that would only counterbalance the excessive sum of his lifelong leisures. He doesn’t tremble anymore at the thought of some terrible thing that could happen to him. He can stand back and watch, as if regarding someone else’s life. He used to require a camera for this; his own eyes are all he needs now to step a world away.
Wayne stands there for what must be half a minute, without saying another word. Then he flings the test stick on the ground.
“What?” Wayne yells with the fat jug that’s his head. “What the fuck is this?”
Sammy can only let out a sigh as Wayne turns toward Betty, unfurling a finger in his direction.
“Really? Him?” Wayne squints at Sammy as if this were the hardest question he’s ever asked of anyone. “Him? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“So messed up,” says Billy Dave. Little Head shakes his eponymous knob.
“Wayne, stop,” Betty says. “You guys need to all leave right now. This is ridiculous.”
Wayne borrows the expression of someone who’s seeing, at the same time, the summed horrors of human violence and the sublime beauty of a mountain storm.
“But we just got here, Betty. I brought us all to see the great fucking choice you’ve made, choosing to betray me with this old piece of dog shit,” he says with a smirk.
Sammy stays quiet as Wayne looks him up and down. He feels Wayne’s eyes undress him, no doubt comparing his old man’s body and its parts with his own and basking in the deepening shame that Betty has chosen to occupy herself with any of it.
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