The Goodbye Summer

by Patricia Gaffney

  His apartment wasn’t what she’d expected. She’d imagined him living in a messy, all-male sort of place furnished with thrift-shop furniture, everything a little shabby and run-down because he had more important things on his mind than housekeeping. She’d actually fantasized about cleaning the place for him, adding subtly warm, womanly touches he wouldn’t notice right away, but when he did they’d make him smile.

  Instead, everything was spare and tidy as a monk’s cell, much, much neater than her house, and the style he’d chosen was modern. Never would she have guessed that. He liked metal and glass furniture, everything angular and either black and white or gray, and rush mats for rugs on the gleaming bare wood floors. Abstract art on the walls! He took her into the kitchen to open a bottle of wine, and he had a little machine for it, a stainless steel stand; he put the bottle on it and pushed down on a lever to uncork it. He hung his wineglasses upside down from a wooden rack under one of the cabinets. He had a bread machine. He had a set of those heavy gray pots and pans she had given up looking at in kitchen catalogs because she would never be able to afford them.

  “Christopher, this place is amazing! Did you do it all yourself?”

  He chuckled as he poured wine into two huge, bulblike glasses. “Do you like it?”

  “It’s just—I never thought—yes, I like it, it’s just not what I expected! It’s so…” Grown-up or something. But she was readjusting fast, deciding it suited him perfectly, mentally slapping herself for assuming he’d live in some grungy, grad student’s garret kind of place. He had too much self…self-regard, no, self-esteem…the word wouldn’t come to her.

  He gave her a glass, and they toasted. “To us,” he said, looking into her eyes. She was too shy to say it back, or too superstitious, but she clinked glasses with hope and enthusiasm.

  In the living room, she was about to sit down on the white leather couch when he took her wineglass from her and set it on the glass-topped coffee table. She’d never cared for that gesture in the movies—what if the woman wanted her drink, she’d think—but when Christopher did it, it made her heart pound in anticipation. He put his arms around her. He was the best kisser she had ever known, he brought out skills of her own she’d never even suspected. He ran his hands up and down her sides and pressed his leg between hers, backing her up against the couch. He got his hand under her short skirt and pulled her up close against him. She started to lose her breath. Would they—would they make love right here, like this? She’d never done it standing up. Her knees started to quake. Christopher broke away and took her by the hand.

  Oh, the bedroom—that was better anyway, she wasn’t disappointed—

  “Let’s take a shower.” He flicked on the bright fluorescent light and pulled her into the bathroom.

  “Okay.” She stood motionless, too startled to do anything but watch him pull the clear plastic curtain back and turn on the water, fiddle with the temperature until he had it to his liking, take down fresh towels and washcloths from a shelf over the toilet, open a new bar of soap. When he pulled his shirt over his head, she blushed and slipped her sandals off and started to unbutton her blouse.

  Was this romantic? She couldn’t tell. Maybe this wasn’t foreplay at all, just practicality. Like two guys in a locker room. They were sweaty from the game and smoky from the bar, and that must matter to Christopher. Of course, he’d want them to be clean and fresh for their first time together—who wouldn’t? This was natural, not odd, she felt sure, although it still seemed wrong to strip in front of him without touching. Something as scary as nakedness ought to be accomplished, at least the first time, with as much affection and reassurance as you could manage, shouldn’t it? Maybe not, though, if you had a perfect body. And Christopher did.

  It was hard to look at him. Impossible not to—he took up the whole room, or that was how it seemed, with his long thigh muscles and his chest and his hard abdomen and his body hair and his testicles. His feet. “Wow,” Caddie said sincerely, proud of herself for not giggling.

  He noticed she’d gotten stuck, or else he read her mind and knew she wanted help, support—he picked up her hand and kissed it very sweetly. He kissed the top of her shoulder, then reached around and unhooked her bra. She stole a glance at his face. He didn’t say “Wow,” but he did flare his nostrils a little; that was a good sign. He stuck his finger in the waist of her skirt and tugged gently. “Hurry,” he said, gave her a peck on the lips, and stepped into the shower.

  Okay. She was starting to get his romantic rhythm. It was every man for himself, no mollycoddling. She got out of the rest of her clothes, folded them in a neat pile opposite Christopher’s neat pile on the sink counter, and got into the shower with him.

  Where they just washed themselves, separately, taking turns under the spray. They didn’t even talk much. He was all business. He did look at her with what she hoped was friendliness and admiration while he lathered his hair with shampoo, but by then she was so unsure, all she could think about was whether she ought to wash her hair.

  But then, thank God, he finished with his hair, wringing it out till it squeaked, and he kissed her. As soon as he did, everything was fine. She forgot what she’d been worried about. Forgot everything, in fact, except that it was a miracle she was here, naked in the shower with the most exciting man she’d ever met. “This is so nice,” she murmured against his mouth, stroking his slippery skin, curving her hands over the muscular bulge of his buttocks.

  “Mmm,” he agreed. “Let’s get out.”

  Maybe he just liked keeping her off balance. As soon as she got used to one thing, he started doing another. She watched him blow-dry his hair while she dried herself off with one of his thick, soft towels and then wrapped it around herself. What now? Would they brush their teeth? He pulled up the toilet seat, and she left the room.

  King, who had been lying in the hall in front of the closed door, got up and followed her to the bedroom. She patted his noble head, but she had the sensation he was monitoring her movements more than keeping her company. “Hi, big dog,” she said in a cozy voice, trying to win him over. “This is a great room, isn’t it?” She liked it better than the living room; the textures were softer, wood and cloth instead of chrome and leather. She heard water running and located a miniature fountain on the windowsill, one of those electric stone-and-copper deals she’d seen in Nana’s yoga catalogs. Why, it was charming, what a pleasant, restful sound. Zenlike.

  She went to the dresser to look at the pictures—it was covered with framed photos of Christopher and King, Christopher and other dogs, Christopher and a ferret. Here was one of Christopher and three women; they looked so much like him, she knew they were his sisters. They’d spoiled him, he joked. If so, Caddie couldn’t blame them. What a lucky life he’d led, being the youngest in a family who adored him, looking the way he looked, loving and being good at satisfying work that truly helped others. She could’ve envied, might even have resented someone who led a life that charmed. But for some reason he was inviting her to share it with him, and resentment was the furthest thing from her mind.

  She almost didn’t hear him until he was behind her, sliding his arms around her waist. They smiled at each other in the mirror. “We look good,” he said, pressing his cheek to her temple. “Don’t we?”

  He looked good. Her hair was damp and straggly and she’d lost most of her makeup in the shower. Maybe he liked that, though, the wholesome look. He was from the Midwest.

  “Let’s get in bed,” he whispered in her ear.

  She nodded, shivering.

  But first he lit candles, a fat, fragrant one on each bedside table, a row of white ones beside the gurgling fountain on the windowsill. They turned the heavy bedspread down together. He took off his bathrobe, she took off her towel.

  It had been a long time since she’d been with a man, even longer with one she cared much about. She couldn’t relax. She felt overwhelmed, overstimulated by all Christopher’s skin, the warm and the cool places, hairy p
laces, indescribably soft places. And all hers for the taking, which made her shy and inept. “You okay?” he murmured between kisses. The candlelight shadowed his cheeks and gleamed on his broad forehead. “Anything wrong?”

  “No. It’s—this is great, it’s just—you know, the first time…”

  He drew back, horrified.

  “For us—the first time for us!”

  He dropped his forehead on her chest and sighed out his breath. “Oh, thank God.”

  She started to laugh, helpless giggling, and after a few seconds he joined in. That felt so good, like the most intimate thing they’d done together yet, it almost cured her of her nerves.

  “You scared the hell out of me.” He started all over, taking little bites of her jaw, her neck, moving down to her breasts. She slipped her fingers into his hair and let herself drift. He was a wonderful lover. He made her feel masterful and natural, as if she knew what she was doing. He found condoms in his bedside drawer. She wanted to preserve the moment when he came inside her, commemorate it, make it last, because nothing she’d done with a man had ever felt this important. She made him stop so they could kiss—but then it was over, time moved on. She forgot about preserving things in the heat of her gathering excitement. Christopher was a groaner. She was shocked, then thrilled by his guttural, free, heartfelt grunts of pleasure. He buried his face in her hair. She held tight, and in the instant before she might have approached an edge, might have gotten close to a place to jump off from, she saw King.

  He was standing next to the bed, his head inches from hers, peering at her with alert brown eyes and a judicial expression. Wagging his tail very slowly.

  She wanted to tell on him, Look what your dog is doing!—but it wasn’t the right time. And just then Christopher ground his teeth and let go, driving into her with enough force to push her shoulders against the head-board. Such a release! She felt complimented and proud.

  “That was incredible,” he sighed, collapsed on her. He turned her, holding her from behind, his warm breath on the back of her neck. “Are you good?”

  She smiled. “I’m good.”

  He sighed, relieved. “Yes, you are. You are damn good.” He kissed her behind the ear.

  Her heart swelled. She wanted to tell him what it had meant to her. “Your dog was looking at us,” she said instead.

  “Hmm?”

  “Not like this. He was closer.” King had curled up across the room in front of a wicker and bentwood rocker, and he was blinking his avid eyes with exaggerated sleepiness. “Much closer. I mean, he was really watching.”

  “Hmm.”

  He fell asleep while she and King stared at each other. It ought to be easy to stare a dog down, but King won. Caddie shut her eyes first and didn’t open them again. She felt like Rebecca, and King was Mrs. Danvers.

  When she woke up, the clock on the bedside table said twelve-thirty. Yikes! Finney! Oh, but she didn’t want to get up yet. Christopher was all warm and golden, lying on his side in a loose, sexy sprawl. What fun it would be to kiss him awake and see what happened. No, she had to go home. She would look at him for a minute, and if he woke up because of mental telepathy, her mind calling to his, it would be fate. She peered at him between his eyebrows, which might’ve twitched. She stared hard at his temple. Wake up, Christopher.

  She sighed and got out of bed. So much for mental telepathy.

  Dressing, she stared at herself in the bathroom mirror, the same way she’d stared at herself in the ladies’ room at Hennessey’s, this time trying to reconcile the kind of woman a man like Christopher would want to be with and the kind of woman she looked like right now. What was confusing was that she looked exactly like herself; she looked the way she looked when she got up in the middle of the night to pee or something. She had stupid hair. Her teeth were crooked, her lips were too thick, and her smile was asymmetrical. She disliked the whole lower half of her face. Nana used to say a man would sleep with any girl who had two legs and a vagina, and the two legs were negotiable. But that couldn’t be it, because Christopher wasn’t that kind of man.

  What did he see in her, then? She liked animals. He liked music. He was in a new town; he had friends, but probably not too many. Maybe he was lonely?

  Those were possibilities, but deep down she had a better hunch. There was something real between them. There, it was out—she’d been too superstitious to put it in words before. It was just starting for him, but she’d felt it from the start, a true chance at connection, a genuine relationship. Love.

  She made a face in the mirror, like knocking on wood. She’d almost given up on it ever happening to her, she’d seen herself as marked, excluded because of circumstances from the community of lucky ones who met other normal, ordinary people and made it work. If I’d had a regular family, she would think. If I’d had a mother who stayed, if I’d had a father, if I’d lived in a regular house. If Nana hadn’t been so crazy. But look—Christopher didn’t care about any of that, he liked her the way she was. It was enough to make her think better of herself.

  “Are you leaving?”

  She turned, startled. He filled up the doorway, sleepy and tousled. “I have to. I have to let Finney out,” she said virtuously, “he’s been in all night.”

  He yawned and rubbed his eyes, rubbed his bare chest under his bathrobe. “I’ll miss you.” He put his arm around her as he walked her to the front door. She felt let down and realized she’d been hoping he would come home with her. But that was silly, he’d have to get dressed, they’d have two cars again, not to mention the problem of King.

  “Let’s do something tomorrow. Supposed to be nice. How about a picnic?”

  “I can’t. Saturdays are my busiest,” she reminded him. Tomorrow, though—he wanted to see her tomorrow.

  “How about tomorrow night?” he said. “It can be late. Come over and I’ll make you dinner.”

  “Oh, lovely. But you come to my house, I’ll make you dinner.” What would she make? Something romantic and sophisticated. She’d have to get a magazine.

  “No, you come here, it’s better. Besides, you’ll be tired, and this way you won’t have to do anything.”

  “You talked me into it.” She hugged him, touched and grateful. They kissed good night. He made it so sweet, she pulled back to look into his eyes, see if the same tenderness she felt was in them. It was…she thought it was. She framed his face with her hands. “I had the most…I had a very nice time.” If she said what she was really thinking, she might scare him off.

  “Me, too, Caddie. I’ll call you in the morning.”

  She went out briskly, striding down the walk with her arms swinging, to show she wasn’t a clingy sort of person. She couldn’t resist a look back from the sidewalk, though. His dark silhouette looked tall and straight in the doorway, and handsome even from here. King stood at his side with his ears cocked, watching her go.

  10

  Mr. Lorton told Caddie she’d better hurry up and write down his life story before anybody else’s, winking at her to make sure she got the joke. So they set up a time and a place, right after breakfast one morning in the Blue Room. He sat in the big easy chair with his cane between his knees, his feet barely touching the floor. His two flesh-colored hearing aids made his ears stick out on either side of his bald, freckled head. “What I’d like is for you to write it but make it sound like me. Put it down just like I’m saying it to you, not fancy or anything, but fix up the grammar and whatnot. Can you do that?”

  “I’ll try. If you don’t go too fast.”

  He gave a wheezy laugh, twinkling his eyes at her. “Too fast is not a problem, believe you me. Well, you ready?”

  “Ready.”

  My name’s Charles Micheaux Lorton and I was born in Fairfield, Pennsylvania, so long ago it doesn’t make any difference. I get tired talking about my age. After you hit ninety, it’s about the only claim to fame you’ve got, and people run it into the ground. Oh, well, I’m ninety-seven, but let that be the end of it.
And don’t ask me the secret to my longevity. Which I’d say is moderation, but nobody wants to hear that. They either want some peculiar regime like yogurt and deep knee bends three times a day, or else they want to hear how you smoke a big fat cigar and drink two martinis every night. I’ve just lived like a regular fella, tried not to get arrested, offend anybody, or draw too much attention to myself. That approach appears to be working.

  My father was a blacksmith, a horse trainer, a mechanic, an amateur boxer, and a bartender. My mother was the church organist at Otterbein Macedonia Lutheran Church. They had two babies before me who both died, and after me they had my sister, Alice, and my brother, Floyd. We lived in various towns in southern Pennsylvania, which is still pretty country, and then in 1917, when I was nine, my father got shot trying to bust up a fight between two drunks in a tavern. He died eight days later of blood poisoning. After that, we moved to Frederick, Maryland, because my mother had family there, and that’s where I finished growing up.

  I had a wild streak when I was a young fella. Nothing like now, of course. We were innocent babes compared to what goes on these days. I won a car in a card game, a 1920 Ford Depot Hack, which was a kind of a station wagon fitted on a Model T chassis to haul passengers and luggage to train stations. This one had seen about all the depot hacking it was ever going to, but it had enough life left that I got plenty of speeding tickets tooling around Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and D.C. Course, back then speeding meant you were going thirty-five instead of thirty. I remember one time I got in a race with my best friend, Buster Flanagan, on what used to be the two-lane road to Gettysburg but is now U.S. Route 15. Buster had an old Oldsmobile, I believe it was a 1915 Model 42 Roadster, that had also seen better days, but he thought the world of it, was always challenging me and my Ford to the point where I got fed up and said okay, let’s go. Of course, this was an illegal enterprise, and we had to have it during the day on account of Buster’s car’s headlights had gotten smashed in a previous accident and he didn’t have the money for new ones. Well, we get to going side by side up what’s now the turnoff to Libertytown but back then was nothing but woods and cow fields, and we come to that leftward curve, which to this day is too sharp, they need to iron it out. We’re pushing forty, neither one giving ground, we’re neck and neck all the way when all of a sudden Buster can’t turn his Olds any sharper, and instead of rounding that curve he sideswipes my Ford and runs us both off the road. I flipped over and landed in the ditch, his car kept going and slammed into a tree, and neither one of us got a scratch. But about two minutes after Buster climbed out of his wreck and came over to see if I was alive or dead, that Oldsmobile caught on fire and blew up. Boom! You never saw anything like it. Except us trying to tell the police about how a herd of deer ran out on the road in front of us and we oversteered—both of us, mind you—oversteered and ended up in the rough. They didn’t believe a word of it, but they couldn’t prove otherwise so we got off scot-free. Except Buster, whose heart was broke; he’d still be mourning that old Oldsmobile today if he was alive. He died in 1959 of cirrhosis of the liver.