“Fine,” said Alice. “It’s personal. If it wasn’t personal, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Thanks for honoring me with your presence,” said Stella.
“Come on. This is getting tedious. Can we go out somewhere? You’ll get dressed and we’ll get lunch? My treat, obviously, because I’m so fucking rich I’ve never had to have an actual job.” I remembered Stella and David talking about their exes, how cheap they were, how Alice rarely paid for much of anything, always wanted free drinks. Alice stood by Stella’s dresser now, picking up objects—the bottles of nail polish—and placing them back down. Stella rose, steered her away, and it was as though they only just then remembered I was still there. Without a word, Stella took her clothes and headed back to the bathroom, not wanting to dress in front of Alice now, or in front of me. “I’ll pay for you, too, Emily,” Alice said, and I imagined it was hardly the first time she relied on her money this way, as if it could smooth over an awkward situation and make her untouchable, unfazed. “Maybe you could drive us someplace?”
Alice had arrived here by commuter rail and a ride-share app. Stella only had her bike. David had taken our Honda to work that morning but we also had a camp vehicle, an old, manual transmission pickup truck here in the garage when we’d arrived and which we’d never driven off the property. “But why not?” I said. “I wouldn’t trust it to make it to Boston, but it should be fine if we don’t go too far.”
In the boxy vehicle, Alice sat beside me, and Stella next to her. The three of us in a row behind the windshield. I had to keep reaching between Alice’s knees for the gear shift. There was no air-conditioning, and if our skin touched, it stuck a little. Her legs were fixed in place, adhering to the tan vinyl interior. At first, we were silent. Then Alice started to make exaggerated sex noises every time my hand went for the mechanism. It was slapstick again—any eroticism was left back in the bunk—but this time, I wasn’t the hapless one. I’d pulled them into it. Silence, moan, silence, rattled breath, silence, high-pitched cry. It went on like this until Alice had had enough and turned on the radio, which still worked along a dial. She tuned it to a soul song from the ’70s, and danced in her seat. To the extent that I could see without taking my eyes off the road, Stella was nodding her head, staring out the passenger side window.
When we entered the Thai restaurant, an older couple was coming out, and they didn’t hold the plate glass door for us. The man, wearing camo-patterned plastic shoes and belted khaki shorts, already had his aerodynamic sunglasses on, the lenses so dark I couldn’t tell where he was looking. But the woman, blond in a fitted coral button-down, more than glanced at Alice—who still had her top revealingly twisted up—with contempt. I could see a little fear, too, in her eyes, but mostly contempt, and I wasn’t sure the contempt was entirely for Alice. It was directed at me, as well. The kind of look that Liz had told me about, the judgmental parent at the playground.
“Puritan bitch,” I said, under my breath. The woman didn’t hear me but Alice and Stella did and I’m sure their cackles reached her before the door completely closed. I had read this man and woman as an older couple but we could very well have been around the same age. I wondered why they made themselves look the way they did, but I assume they wondered the same about me.
Alice and Stella faced me across a four-top. I couldn’t tell whether I was their tribunal or they were mine. But neither turned out to be the case. The dish of noodles that Alice ordered resembled her: overflowing, profuse. A soft heap that could bury you. Dominant Alice who couldn’t quite be contained by clothing. Gorgeous, slovenly Alice, slurping up strands through her glistening lips. Stella and I ate our curries but we also watched each other watching Alice and so there were two currents coursing: one between Alice and her noodles and one between Stella and me. Despite the fact that Alice had presumably come for Stella, that they were still lovers, nothing powerful seemed to be surging from one to the other. The stronger current, the more significant one, was mine and Stella’s.
The last time I was here in this restaurant, with David, was the evening of the day I took out Stella’s splinter before she biked away. When I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about her because she was so new and unexpected but not entirely so that I hadn’t even known what to say. All I could do was excitedly order the kind of iced coffee I thought I no longer had a taste for.
When Alice excused herself and headed to the restroom, it was the first moment I’d had alone with Stella that day.
“Alice seems nice.” I channeled David’s deadpan.
Stella put her head in her hands and shook it right and left.
“She just showed up yesterday, with her sleeping bag.”
“Out of the blue? You weren’t in touch at all?”
“I don’t know. No. We’ve been texting.”
I think she expected me to scold her, for backsliding with her ex, possibly. But that wasn’t my inclination. Alice’s presence uncomplicated the situation—my situation—to an extent. Or complicated it in a way that relieved me of something—the weight of responsibility, maybe.
“Do you mind if she stays?” Stella asked. I hadn’t even thought to exercise that say-so, that it was up to me, as an authority figure or a sort of landlord.
“How long do you think she’ll be here for?”
“She wanted to get away for a few days before classes start up again.”
That’s what it was: Alice had resituated us in forward-moving time. She would go back to school. The summer would end. I would have watched all the movies I could. I would get a job. We would leave this place. David and I would move to Boston. And Stella . . . where would Stella go?
“That sounds fine,” I said, just as Alice came back.
“Do you ever get stuck on the toilet?” Alice asked. “I mean, not literally, but like you’re sitting there and you lose track? There’s a painted-over graffito in there I was trying to make out. It looked like it said ‘LIK ME.’ Lick me? Like me?”
I laughed, and I liked Alice’s use of the singular graffito.
“One of life’s great mysteries,” Stella said.
“You know it,” said Alice.
When our bill came, Alice made no move to pick it up. Even when Stella offered me cash that I waved away as I placed my credit card in the check holder.
You see? Stella asked me silently.
I see. Alice, who had been to Bangkok and Phuket, was chatting with the co-owner, Mae, about a certain chili used in Thai cuisine, and their talk animated them both—elastic faces, involved hands—so that it was hard to interrupt them and also hard to fault Alice. There was something undeniable, unstanchable about her.
In the truck once again, our configuration repeated itself: me in the driver’s seat, Alice in the middle, Stella in the outer passenger seat. I didn’t know how intentional it was, or whose intention was at work exactly, but I was grateful for it, that I didn’t have to reach between Stella’s legs whenever I changed gears. And Alice didn’t make a comedy out of it this time. It was just a momentary discomfort we adjusted for.
“Let’s go to the lake when we get back,” Alice suggested to Stella.
“Okay,” said Stella. “Emily, do you want to?”
“Sure,” I said. Wanting or not wanting to, as categories, didn’t seem to matter in this instance. It was what I would be doing.
“Great!” said Alice, with an enthusiasm that almost passed for sincerity. Almost.
We split up to get our swimsuits and towels and I paused, considered my options, decided on a black two-piece and an old blue oxford shirt of David’s as a cover-up. Stella and Alice weren’t at the lake when I got there, and when they showed up, if they showed up, they’d find a blue shirt crumpled in the sand along with a bikini top. I swam out, out, out. To the darkest, coolest part of the lake, and when the water rippled in the depths beneath me, I kept still, I minded nothing, I floated.
I didn’t immediately hear Alice calling me, standing on the green aluminum dock, l
ike a bar of light in her white one-piece. Her hair a wet rope down her back. When I reached her and climbed up, I could see Stella, lying on the beach, sunbathing, and Alice was now doing her best not to look at me, at my almost naked body.
It wasn’t retribution, this reversal of our first meeting. But Alice spoke first and when she did, she deferred. Thanking me for letting her be here, with Stella.
You’re welcome? My pleasure? Neither of those statements seemed true. “Sure,” I said. We lay down against the hot metal sheeting, eyes closed, wordless, until after a while, there was Alice’s voice again.
“Stella thinks you’re great.”
“She does?” I wondered if I sounded too flattered, too pleased.
“Yeah. And she doesn’t like everyone, you know.”
“I know. I like that about her.”
“I don’t know you as well as she does, obviously, but I’ve been thinking and I really don’t think you should take that job.”
“Well, it’s not mine to take. They haven’t made an offer.”
“Yeah, but they will. And I think you’d be better off embracing this mistress-of-the-manor, lady-of-leisure thing you’ve got going on.”
“Even if I could, that’s not what this is.”
“No?”
“I don’t know. You’re the one working on theories about labor and leisure and love, so maybe you’re right.”
“Oh, I just say that when people ask, but I don’t really know what I’m working on.”
You’re working on yourself, Alice. That careless, cunning, beautiful thing.
“You’ve got time, I guess, to figure it out.”
“Sometimes it seems that way to me, but sometimes I can already feel it slipping past me. Time, I mean. Life.”
I couldn’t help it, I laughed. In your wet white bathing suit, nothing has slipped past you. Not yet.
“I was being serious.”
“I know.”
I’m giving you a lesson, Alice. You don’t know it, and you won’t get it for a while, but that’s what I’m doing. Female education.
I stood up and dived off the dock, leaving Alice behind, swimming straight back to shore, and when I reached the sand, where Stella was sitting a few feet away on a towel, reading a book, I bent over to shake out my hair and then looked up to see her eyes, meeting mine. A look both frank and deciphering—it illuminated a door you didn’t see before and still the door had yet to be opened. Not unlike a look I remembered from so many summers ago, at the film foundation. When I was wearing Nick’s T-shirt with nothing on underneath, and his girlfriend, with the sooty hair and the long black tank top, was talking about Fassbinder, and he looked at me like he was arriving at something just out of reach.
I returned her gaze until it became something of a challenge: who would look away first. Stella did. And there was something defeated in it—you win—that gave me no satisfaction. That made me feel a little monstrous, even. Get a hold of yourself, Emily. Dial it down. I put my shirt on—David’s shirt—and sat on my towel next to her.
“I feel like I’m supposed to say something about the other night,” I said. “When I kissed you. But I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything. I was there. I kissed you, too.”
“But it upset you.”
Stella looked toward the water, where Alice swam.
“I don’t know if upset is right. I just didn’t know what to do with it.”
“Did you go home after and text Alice?”
“No. Yes. I mean, I did, but we’d already been texting again.”
She didn’t ask me what I did after and I didn’t tell her, how I politely waited for Liz and Felix to leave, how red my mouth was, how I kissed David with it, kissed him until we forgot who was who.
“Are you and Alice back together?”
“I don’t know what we are. But she’s here. You know?” Stella had been making channels again in the sand with her heels but she stopped. A sense of defeat seemed to come over her a second time, she shrank into herself, and I wanted to do what I could to relieve her of it.
“Oh, Alice is definitely here,” I said.
“It’s a fact.” She looked up and met my smile.
“More than a fact. She’s like a universal truth. But of what, I’m not sure.”
As if on cue, Alice emerged from the water, wrung out the coil of her hair, and walked up the beach toward us like she’d walk right past us before she stopped, standing over Stella.
“You’re coming with me,” she said.
“Where?” Stella asked.
Alice pointed to a beached canoe. Stella didn’t say no. They went to the boathouse for paddles, dragged the canoe into the water, and, Alice in the bow seat, Stella at the stern, they glided out to a point where I could no longer see them. To the crop circle island, maybe. The convenience store by the other side of the lake. I imagined Alice walking across the tar parking lot and heading inside, dripping wet in her white suit, barefoot, and the young man by the cash register not even asking her what she wants. He hands over everything.
Or maybe they were just floating out there, beyond my view, in a tangle of lily pads, Alice turned to face Stella. What was the look they would give each other? Alice slowly edging over the canoe’s ribs toward Stella until they’re no longer looking at each other, at least not eye to eye.
I walked home, a little dazed. In my bikini bottom and David’s shirt, my skin taut, as if pulled by the water as it dried. I headed straight for the desk with the computer—still no word from Samira—and did something I’d never done before. I searched for Nick, who’d given me his shirt all those years ago. I didn’t remember his last name but I put what remained of my journalism skills to use and got a hit that brought it back. I’d never really wanted to know, until now, where he was or what he was doing—I wanted to keep us in that room with industrial carpeting and the chugging air-conditioning unit in the old windows, me in his shirt with nothing underneath. He no longer lived in Boston. He’d moved to Los Angeles, some time ago, it seemed. In the pictures that came up now, he was still wearing black. The woman with him in a couple of photos wasn’t the woman I remembered. I didn’t expect her to be, all these years later. But this woman in the pictures online had eyes like Anne Frank. Something did happen that hot afternoon when nothing happened between us.
I proceeded to look up the film foundation. It was no longer around. Or it was, but in a different form. From what I could tell, when they ran out of funding for their operating costs, the staff were absorbed into a university as a kind of satellite program for continuing education, youth mentorship, and coordination of an annual film festival. I didn’t recognize the names of any of the current staff, except for the executive director. I wrote to her. I wasn’t expecting a response. I was beaming a message into outer space.
RESPONSIBLE ADULTS
I showered and fell asleep, and when David gently woke me up I had no idea what time it was. But there was still a little light through the window, so it must have been evening. Late dusk.
“You’re here,” I said, as if I’d been wishing for him. As if, just when I’d stopped thinking it would happen, he’d shown up.
“How long have you been out?” he asked.
“A few hours. Did you just get home?”
Yes, he said. He was late because of the time-sensitive project. He’d eaten dinner at the office. He asked if I felt all right. Just sort of sun-struck, I answered. And then, as it came back to me, I told him about the day. I started with the shrubbery, naked Alice, how I took the truck out and we went for Thai food—me, Stella, Alice, and Alice’s breasts—and then we all went down to the lake. I left out many things: the stick-shift sex sounds, the Puritan bitch, the graffito, my dive off the dock, Stella’s lowered eyes, his blue oxford cloth shirt.
“So, Alice is here now? Alice and her breasts?”
“Just for a few days. Is that . . .” and I didn’t finish the question.
“I don’t know. I don’t know much about her except for what Stella told me during the storm. Are we starting a home for wayward girls now?”
David wasn’t stoic, he wasn’t a martyr, wasn’t uncomplaining. But we would have been lost without his equanimity. And sometimes I forgot that though his equanimity was deep, it was not boundless. I did the dishes so he wouldn’t resent me but I hadn’t done enough dishes—there weren’t enough dishes—to offset the weight of all these women: me, Stella, Liz, and now Alice.
“You may not even run into her,” I said.
“Are they back together?” he asked.
“Unclear.”
“She sounds like bad news,” he said, and bad news had the same shifting effect as his fuck no. The air changed and it reconfigured us. We were no longer facing each other; at that moment we were facing in the same direction, together, examining something or someone else.
We talked about Stella and Alice in retrospective tones. As if we remembered that kind of bad news in our own lives but had put it behind us. As if Alice could interest us, in an almost clinical way, but she wouldn’t obsess us, as she might have if we were Stella’s age.
“Do you think you were ever bad news for someone?” I asked.
“No,” he said quickly. And then slowly: “But maybe I was, and if I don’t even know it, that makes me the worst news.”
I found it hard to believe he would have been such bad news that he wouldn’t even have known it, and at the same time, he used to say he was glad he met me when he did. That I wouldn’t have liked him much before then and he wouldn’t have liked me. Not in the necessary way. I knew what he meant and I knew that he was right, even as I said that I would never have not liked him.
The Summer Demands Page 11