Guests of August

by Gloria Goldreich

  Smiling, she leads Wendy to a far corner of the room where a secluded booth for two is unoccupied. Wendy smiles gratefully and leans forward to smell the fragrance of the cluster of amber-colored rose buds in a slender green glass vase.

  ‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’ Ellen says. ‘And just a little sad. The very last roses of summer. What will you have, Wendy?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll wait to order until my friend gets here,’ Wendy demurs.

  ‘Your friend. That lean, dark-haired guy who was with you last time?’

  ‘Yup, that lean, dark-haired guy,’ Wendy agrees. It is an apt enough description of Daniel – one she has no trouble repeating. ‘I’m surprised you remember him.’

  ‘But I always remember men with deep eyes and sharp features,’ Ellen counters easily. Wendy wonders how she could have forgotten that Ellen has the portraitist’s gift for memorizing intriguing faces and, of course, Daniel Goldner’s angular features, his brooding heavy-browed eyes, are indeed intriguing.

  The crowded room is abuzz with conversations in a blend of languages. The students laugh easily, their faces animated. They clap as a waitress sets down a tray of drinks and pastries. They feed each other cream puffs and pluck sprigs of mint from tall golden glasses of iced tea and fashion them into mock moustaches. Two slender dark-haired girls flit from table to table, their hands outstretched. They collect bills and coins from their friends, curtsy gratefully and hand the money they gather to Ellen who thrusts it into her pocket without bothering to count it.

  Wendy feels a pang of envy. They are all so daring and carefree, these visitors from other countries, geared for adventure, paying their way with laughter and charm. This was the kind of student life she might have known if she had not gone to a Cambridge party where Adam Templeton had accidentally spilled beer all over her brand-new blue sweater and then so very gently washed her face and claimed her love. She shakes her head vigorously, angered by her own foolishness, her pointless yearning for what might have been. She has Donny, she has her work, she is gaining recognition among galleries and collectors, and soon, very soon, she will have independence. This annual August charade with Andrea and Mark is coming to an end.

  ‘Hey, why the head shaking? Why the frown?’

  Daniel slides into the seat opposite her and smiles broadly.

  ‘We’re here to have fun. We’re here to toast me for finally getting rid of that damn manuscript, the novel from hell. So what’s with the mood?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. Random thoughts.’

  ‘The most dangerous kind.’

  He leans back and glances around the café. He is, after all, a novelist, who automatically studies every new scene, registering nuances of atmosphere, oddities of furnishings, gestures and expressions that will mysteriously surface in narratives as yet unwritten. Suddenly, he sits up straighter, trains his gaze on a booth across the room where a man and woman sit very close to each other.

  The woman is very young, blonde and fair-skinned. She wears tight jeans and a pale-blue turtleneck shirt. He cannot see her eyes but he is certain that the shirt was chosen to match them. She speaks earnestly to the man seated beside her, his hand holding hers, his thigh pressed close against her knee. He wears the student uniform of the Ivy League, the careless pale-green cotton crew-necked sweater, the well pressed khaki pants, his Jansport backpack leaning against the table. But he is not young. He is, clearly, too old to be a student, too old to be in such intimate contact with this slender golden-haired girl. His earth-colored hair is thick and brushed with strands of gray. Laugh lines curl about his eyes. He is Evan Abbot, Louise’s husband who has been absent from the inn for so many days, a man masquerading as a boy, an aging husband who is the lover – or perhaps the would-be lover – of the sweet-faced girl newly emerging from adolescence.

  Daniel is suffused with anger at Evan Abbot. He remembers Louise, whom he knew when he was a boy and she the unsophisticated, hardworking teenager who always found time to be kind to him – more than kind. She had always managed to wait on his family’s table, always brought him extra bowls of ice cream and spoke pleasantly to his parents who admired her work ethic and her energy. His mother had helped her fill out the application form to the business school in Boston. His father had given her books to read and tipped her very generously at the season’s end. Her ambition had been modest and attainable. An independent life in Boston at a remove from rural New Hampshire and her family’s indifference and poverty of mind and manner. He knows why that dream remained unrealized. He knows that she was betrayed by her own innocence and Evan Abbot’s carelessness. She is fettered to Mount Haven Inn, fettered to Evan Abbot, damn him.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Wendy asks.

  She senses the change in his mood, the narrowing of his eyes, the angry purse of his lips.

  ‘Across the room. That table in the corner. It’s Evan Abbot.’

  She follows his gaze and, as they both covertly watch, Evan Abbot leans even closer to his companion, encases her in an embrace and presses his lips to hers. She laughs. They kiss again. And then together they leave the café, his arm about her shoulder, his backpack carelessly swinging.

  ‘The bastard,’ Daniel says.

  ‘It happens,’ Wendy replies calmly.

  She herself is unsurprised but Daniel, she knows, is new to the singles scene of mature adults where odd partnerships are briefly formed – older men with younger women, older women with younger men, the unhappily married seducing the unhappily single, naïve young girls in a foreign country experimenting with clandestine romance.

  ‘It shouldn’t happen to Louise,’ he says. ‘She’s so damn good, so hardworking. Simon and I knew her when she was just a kid waitressing at the inn, saving up for a business course, planning to get an office job in Boston, planning to break free of her good-for-nothing parents. She wanted to live in her own apartment, wear suits to work, go to museums and concerts. A doable ambition. And then Evan Abbot got her pregnant and it was all over. She’s stuck at Mount Haven Inn for the rest of her life and he has a free pass to be the perennial student, one advanced degree after another while she works her ass off.’

  Ellen sets their coffees down. She has known without asking that Wendy would be having her usual cappuccino and biscotti and assumed that Daniel would have the same. They smile gratefully at her.

  ‘Look,’ Wendy says softly, ‘I’m sorry for Louise. But that’s her life and she’s chosen to stay with Evan.’

  ‘But a choice doesn’t have to be forever.’

  ‘That’s true,’ she agrees.

  He has repeated the very words she spoke to Adam’s mother that morning. Nothing is forever. Changes can be made. Choices can be reversed.

  They relax then and sip their coffee, nibble their biscotti, venture amusing conjectures about the students who are slowly drifting out of the café. Was that couple French? Were those girls Italian? And are that tall blonde youth and that short, almond-skinned girl lovers? They laugh softly, pleased with their idle scenarios. Daniel’s anger melts. Wendy’s mood lifts. Against all odds, they are enjoying themselves.

  On the ride back to the inn, Daniel decides that he will speak to Louise. He owes it to her to make sure she knows what Evan is up to. He wishes now that someone had told him about Laura, that it had not come as a shock to him, a shock that shattered any hope that his marriage might survive.

  Once again, in the pre-dinner hour, Simon and Nessa carry their wicker basket out to the lawn and set a redwood table with their replenished stock of cheeses and olives, a chilled carafe of white wine, bottles of gin, vodka and tonic water. The lawn chairs are arranged in a semi-circle, the conversations are easy. They are all relaxed with each other, soothed into the luxurious lethargy that comes at the end of a sun-swept vacation day. Jokes are told, memories traded.

  ‘Do you remember the year we hid the dinner bell?’ Simon asks Daniel. ‘I thought old man Abbot would go nuts.’

  ‘I remember.’

  They all smi
le, knowing that this year’s adventure will feed the memory mill for years to come.

  Paul wonders if Annette will remember the softness of his lips upon her own. He himself, he knows, will never forget it.

  The juice runs out and Daniel volunteers to fetch another bottle from the kitchen. The wide-windowed room is a bustle of activity. Dinner preparations are underway, the cook furiously slicing and stirring, Polly and the other wait staff scurrying in and out of the dining room, their arms laden with table linen and cutlery. Louise is arranging flowers.

  She turns to him and he sees that there are dark circles beneath her eyes. Her light-brown hair is damp and lank from her late-afternoon shower. Her navy-blue dress hangs loosely about her narrow frame. She has clearly lost weight. His heart turns as he remembers the young Louise, that pretty girl, light of step, bright-eyed and eager. She had been so like pink-cheeked Polly, who circles the dining room now, a small-town girl dancing toward her future, dreaming her way into another life. He hopes that Polly’s luck will be better than Louise’s.

  ‘Can I help you, Daniel?’ Louise asks, her voice as always soft, almost maternal when she speaks to him.

  ‘The kids want some apple juice,’ he says.

  ‘In the pantry.’

  He follows her into the small room stocked with kitchen provisions. Impulsively, he closes the door. She looks at him quizzically.

  ‘What is it, Daniel?’

  ‘I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Oh?’ She stands very straight as though braced for an assault of bad news.

  ‘I was in the village this afternoon. At the Windermere Café. I saw Evan there.’

  ‘He goes there sometimes. People from the university often go there.’

  ‘He wasn’t alone.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He was with a girl. They were very much together. I thought you should know about it, Louise.’

  ‘But I do know about it,’ she replies, her tone steady. ‘I’ve always known about it.

  ‘This is a small town. Kids go off to the university. Adults take extension courses. They see Evan. They know what he’s up to. They talk and eventually the talk comes back to me. So you’re not telling me anything new. Of course there was a girl and of course they were very much together. There is always some girl, some woman, graduate, undergraduate. Summer session. Fall session. Sometimes a foreign student on an exchange program. I think Evan prefers foreign students because they leave. They go home to Copenhagen or Croatia and there’s no trouble, no entanglements. Occasionally they write to him. I don’t open the letters. I toss them out and after one or two tries they stop writing to him. The inn is of little interest to Evan. It is simply the home he has always known, the economic base that allows him to linger in libraries and seminar rooms, meeting new young women and garnering meaningless degrees and useless certifications which, nevertheless, fully satisfy him.’

  ‘But, Louise, why don’t you do something about it? You shouldn’t have to live like this, working your ass off while Evan relaxes in a café with his latest squeeze.’

  Daniel is angry, seriously angry. Evan and Laura, unfaithful spouses both, meld in the febrile outrage that causes him to raise his voice.

  ‘And what do you think I should do about it, Daniel?’ Louise asks wearily. ‘What options do I have? I’m a high-school graduate. No skills. No family. I don’t even know where my parents are. Not that they’d help me. Not that they could help me. The only thing that I know how to do is run this inn, to make sure we can survive year after year. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last eighteen years. And just for the record, the inn was left to Evan and myself jointly. I could never afford to buy him out and he surely could not afford to buy me out. So I am stuck. I don’t have the choices that you have. I don’t know what happened between you and Laura, but you were able to cut loose and so was she. You both had careers, education. Simon divorced Charlotte, but they could go on to new lives. Divorce is a luxury. It’s expensive. People in this town don’t split. They shout, they slam doors, they drink, they cry but they don’t divorce, or at least most of them don’t. They can’t afford to. And even if I could I’m not sure I’d want to divorce Evan. This sounds crazy, I know, but after all those miscarriages, those stillbirths, I realized that the only child I’d ever have would be Evan. We’re not really husband and wife, haven’t been for a long time. We’re more like mother and son. I take care of him. I see that he’s well dressed, well fed. I give him an allowance. I make sure he has enough money for his tuition, for his schoolbooks. I worry when it rains that he forgot his boots and his slicker even though I know he’s probably dry enough in some girl’s bed. I nurse him when he’s sick. I get mad at him when he doesn’t do his chores, the same chores he did when he was a high-school kid, and I say the same things his mother used to say. “Evan, why didn’t you bring in the lawn furniture? Evan, please pick up the guests who went to Portsmouth for dinner.” He brings me his transcripts the way kids bring their mothers their report cards and I congratulate him on an A in urban planning even though he’ll never be an urban planner, a B-plus in Latin although I’m thinking where the hell is he ever going to use Latin? So that’s where we are and that’s where we’ll be. Have I shocked you, Daniel? Do you think I’m some kind of an idiot for living this kind of life?’

  He stares at her, startled by her honesty, astounded by her stoicism. But he is persistent.

  ‘Have you and Evan ever talked openly about what he was doing, about what you felt? Because, Louise, you must have felt betrayed.’

  He realizes how effortlessly he has projected his own feelings on to her, how much he wants her to respond as he did to Laura’s betrayal. He would have her shout out her sorrow and her fury as he had done on that night in the Hamptons when the truth of his marriage at last became clear to him.

  She nods. ‘In the beginning. When it first began. One of my waitresses worked at a motel in Durham and saw him checking in with a graduate student. I was angry. I spoke to him. I cried. He cried. He said all the things small boys say when they want to be forgiven for something. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. Forgive me. So I did what all good mothers do. I hugged him, I let him hug me. I forgave him. And, of course, it happened again and again and again. And it will go on happening. But I don’t accuse any more and he doesn’t cry.’

  Sadness muffles her voice but she stands erect, her eyes scanning the shelves so neatly stacked with cans and bottles, cartons and containers. A can of beans is out of place among cans of tomato sauce and she restores it to the proper shelf.

  He is silent, defeated.

  ‘But, Daniel,’ she continues, ‘I want to thank you for telling me. I know you thought you were doing the right thing.’

  ‘I’ve always cared about you, Louise,’ he says gently, his tone matching hers. ‘I’ve always hoped that you would be happy.’

  ‘And I cared about you. And more than that. You were my window into another world.’

  She does not tell him that she has not abandoned that world – that it survives in her nocturnal fantasies. She will not reveal to him how often she lies half awake and mentally furnishes the apartment that will never be hers, how she welcomes guests to the parties that she will never give.

  He sees that her eyes are bright with tears. He puts his hand on her shoulder and because he, the wordsmith, has exhausted all words, he leaves the pantry. She follows him a few minutes later and hands him two bottles of apple juice which he carries out to the party still in progress on the lawn.

  The dining room is subdued that evening. The guests, by tacit agreement, ignore Louise’s carefully programmed seating arrangements and settle into new configurations. They are sufficiently at ease with each other, after all the lazy days spent together, to select their own seats at will. Nessa and Simon join Susan and Jeff. It is Nessa’s decision.

  ‘I think maybe we can make them a little less tense. They seem really unhappy,’ she told her husband, who offered no prot
est.

  Simon is proud of Nessa’s kindness. He likes the Edwards couple and he too has noticed the strain between them. As, of course, he supposes, so have all the other guests. There is little room for emotional privacy in their small vacation community. Everyone, after all, was assembled on the lawn, unwilling witnesses to Susan’s angry accusations as Jeff and Polly made their way up the path.

  Helene and Greg sit with Liane and Michael. Helene acknowledges that she is relieved to be sitting apart from her sister, that for this meal at least she will not have to jump-start conversations and fill in the awkward silences that are so upsetting to Matt. It troubles her to see her nephew dart anxious glances from one parent to another. She knows what it is like to be an unhappy child in an unhappy home.

  Liane, still intrigued by their visit to the antique shop, wonders about the source of Maria’s inventory.

  ‘Where does all that junk come from?’ she asks. ‘Not that the stuff that we bought is junk,’ she adds swiftly.

  ‘A lot of it is junk. The shards of other people’s lives, the remnants of death and divorce,’ Greg says. The words come easily to him and he wonders if he can weave them into the lyrics of a song.

  ‘Divorce,’ Helene repeats, as though she can neutralize the word.

  She glances over to the table where Jeff and Susan sit side by side, Jeff speaking to Simon, Susan speaking to Nessa, their eyes averted from each other. She visualizes her sister’s beautiful home, so tastefully decorated during the glory days of their marriage. She imagines it empty, the furnishings divided and scattered, the golden oak rocking chair on which Susan had nursed the twins, Jeremy at one breast, Annette on the other, banished to the attic of an antique store. She thrusts the image away. Her sister is not getting divorced. Susan and Jeff will be all right. This is just a bad patch. They will get through it.

  There is amused disapproval of the meal. Mark and Andrea Templeton glance at the tuna casserole and the salad of wilted greens and announce that they will drive into Portsmouth for dinner. Wendy declines their invitation to join them. Donny and his friends have arranged a game of darts with Greg and Liane offering instruction.