At our dinner party, David had talked about the creative impulse that brought us here. Joe and Esther would have understood that idea, I think. Esther hadn’t left me Alder on a whim.
My instinct, when faced with all the old snapshots in the house, old papers and fading purple mimeographs in the administrative office at the lodge, the wall of yearbooks, was archaeological. I would never have thought to toss these artifacts. Or to let them go unnoticed. I wanted to unearth them, examine them, glean something from them. They were like clues that suggested a mystery. The point wasn’t to solve the mystery, only to recognize it was there. I knew there was a chance I might discover something I didn’t want to know about Esther, about Joe. But I never did. Which isn’t to say they didn’t have secrets—everyone does, even or especially from themselves. Only that I believed in the belief they had in each other. I never found anything that made me doubt it.
GOING UNDER
The lake had a different cast to it. A new stillness and clarity, the water like a mirror. The trees darkened, even in full sun. Stella sat out on a towel in the sand, in her black bikini, and didn’t get up when she saw me coming toward the low wall, but she waved.
“Hi,” she said.
“How are you?” I asked.
“I’m fine, I guess.” She was leaning back on her hands, her long legs stretched out and crossed in front of her. I laid my own towel down and sat beside her.
“I wasn’t sure if you’d be at work or—”
“I have today off. They didn’t fire me, at the coffee shop.” Her words sounded less like relief and more like regret. She hadn’t lost her job; instead, she had to do it forever now.
“That’s good,” I said, wanting to say something better, something more reflective of her tone, of some understanding between us. “I mean . . .”
“No, it is good, to have a place to go, to have to show up and be somewhere.”
And she pulled back a little, as if she, in turn, had said the wrong thing, remembering that I still didn’t have a place to be. Aside from this place, which wouldn’t be for much longer. I decided to tell her at that moment—there would never be a right time—that I’d spoken to a real estate agent over the weekend. That David and I were looking for someone with experience in this kind of process, who would hopefully help us secure a worthy buyer who could do what we couldn’t: bring this place to life again. Though, it occurred to me, my eyes landing on her blue painted nails, fanned out behind her, we did bring it to life, in a way.
I told Stella she could stay here, as long as she wanted, until a sale went through. She appeared to take the news pretty stoically. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, after all. And what more did I want from her? For her to be distressed by this development, for her to need comforting? From me?
“You want to go for a last swim, then?” She pointed to the water.
“It’s not like it’s happening tomorrow.”
“No, but—” She didn’t finish the thought. She stood up and headed onto the dock and I followed her to the two inflatable plastic donuts sitting out there and we tossed them in before diving in their direction. The water was the warmest it had been all summer and we floated. We floated until the sky was full of low steel-gray clouds, and our fingers, dangling in the water, had wrinkled.
We gathered our things and walked in the drizzling rain, past the old infirmary, the steps where we’d kissed, an experience that had already become part of the past—like Stella sitting in the infirmary the day she came to work with her mother, or me lying inside there years before that as a feverish girl in a hot-pink T-shirt—the way everything here became part of the past, how it all seemed to get subsumed. To become a buried ruin that might never be excavated.
Inside the house, we changed into dry clothes. I took the towels to the wash and then found her in the living room, by the cabinet with the TV.
“What is this?”
“It’s a VCR.”
“I know, I was kidding.”
She crouched and started going through a cardboard box on the floor, marked “videos”—a box I’d kept long after my own VCR broke and despite the fact that I never bought another machine. But Aunt Esther had one in working order, of course. So I’d brought the box out when we’d arrived and had been making my way through them once again. Stella picked up a copy of Summer, what Rohmer’s Le Rayon Vert was called when it was released in America.
“This looks appropriate,” she said.
“I haven’t seen that one in a long time. It was going to be next.”
“Well then.”
She pushed the cartridge in and we were back on the couch, in our places from before, but neither of us said a word about what had happened then, her looking up my shirtdress, me looking back at her, whether she thought I’d refused her or she’d refused me.
On screen appeared Delphine: young, single, lonely, brunette, French, working as a secretary, restless and dislocated one summer. She’s a downer. Her friends don’t want to vacation with her. She doesn’t fit. In her own skin, even. She talks to a table full of incredulous meat-eaters about being a vegetarian, how lettuce is like a friend. Her self-consciousness makes you cringe, for her, for yourself—the cringing is a kind of recognition of all the mistakes and all the necessary self-deceptions of a certain age. Of any age, maybe. People like to think it disappears along with youth, but I’m not sure it really ever does. I kept wondering if Stella was finding the movie insufferable, slow, arty, but she just watched it and watched it. By the end, when Delphine, at the edge of the ocean, with, finally, a sportif, understanding young man, witnesses the rare green flash above the setting sun and gasps, it seems like everything has led up to that gasp. Delphine is a romantic, holding out for something that exists but is as uncommon, as extraordinary as that solar phenomenon, and if you discount or deride her romantic nature, her longings, you do so out of some smallness in yourself, you do so at your own risk. Stella was pulled into herself, knees to her chin, biting the pad of her thumb. She wasn’t teary but something was welling up, something she tried to hold back with her teeth.
Minor-key strings, credits.
“What did you think?” I asked dumbly.
She was half in the world of the movie, half on the couch in the room with me.
“I don’t want to be that guy,” she said, out loud but almost to herself. I wasn’t sure who she meant. The sportif young Frenchman?
“What guy?”
“The guy in the liquor store, behind the counter, when we were buying the whiskey. I don’t want to be some version of him someday. The guy who grew up around here and never leaves. I know that sounds snobby, but I just don’t want that and I’m not sure how I get out of it.”
Alice had gotten her out of it, for a time, but Alice was gone. Whatever door Alice opened had now closed. I wanted to say to Stella: Come with us, and I wanted to mean it. I wanted impossible things. I wanted to say to her You’ll get out of it but I didn’t know how to make those words not sound empty.
“Look,” I said, “I don’t know that guy. You don’t really know that guy, what his story is. But I do know you’re not that guy. You’re already not that guy and you never were that guy.”
Her eyelids fluttered as they closed, as if anesthesia were kicking in, and when she opened them again, her stoicism from before was back.
“David will be home soon,” she said. Asked.
“Probably.”
“I should get going.”
I wanted to say: No, you don’t have to. But I couldn’t and she did, have to.
OPPORTUNITY
I didn’t immediately recognize the name, Denise Taylor. Who was she and why did I have an email from her? Was she a real estate agent? A paralegal? But then it occurred to me that she was replying to an email I’d sent her. Denise Taylor, the executive director of the film foundation I’d worked at so many summers ago. Denise Taylor! Whom I’d contacted out of the blue, in the hush of the house, after that dazed afternoon with Ali
ce and Stella, in the pickup truck, at the Thai restaurant, at the lake. I’d written to her but it had felt more like I was using semaphore or Morse code with an unknown communicant, trying to convey a message to someone who may not have known how to read it or, more likely, wasn’t even there. Not entirely pointless, but not particularly productive either. But Denise had picked up on what I’d put out. And she’d responded, with a long block of text that brought her back to me in a way her short bio and poorly lit picture on the foundation’s website never did. Denise, you were a filmmaker, you knew about light, so why the shitty photo? Because you were no longer a filmmaker? You started out as a documentarian; you made a prizewinning feature in the late ’80s about women and AIDS. But you stopped for some reason, and your work, for the larger part of your life, had become mostly administrative and organizational.
Denise from Queens. Richmond Hill. You came to Boston for school and surprised yourself by never returning to New York, not to live, anyway. “You can take the girl out of Queens,” you once said. “But you can’t take Queens out of the girl,” Nick had finished, in the voice of a two-bit comedian. To which you drily replied, “No, Nick. Just the first part. I’m no longer in Queens.” And you looked at me, the intern, and your eyes said: This guy. Guys in general. Fucking men. And I probably thought, But he gave me his shirt! If you’d known what I thought, you would have shaken your head and gently smiled. He gave you his shirt. Big fucking deal.
Denise: your limp black hair, flat face, olive complexion, brass bracelets accentuating the lean, ropey muscularity of your arms, always in oversized button-down shirts, sleeves rolled, or black bodysuits, mascara. But that was nearly twenty years ago. In the shitty picture your skin was sallow, your torso thicker, your hair wiry, silver, your eyes disappeared into the flat plane of your face.
I think Denise came back to me so clearly just then because I could see myself becoming her, the ways in which I already had.
How nice to hear from you! she wrote. Yes, of course she remembered me, after all this time. How could she forget the girl who lugged that sack of bulk mail when “that asshole Nick couldn’t be bothered to do it himself.” She continued: “God, what a dick.” As I might have been aware, the organization had experienced its share of ups and downs—“as we all do, right?”—but they seemed to have found a good, stable home, in somewhat different form, within their current academic setting. In some bittersweet news, she noted, she’d be leaving, retiring at the end of the year. There would be some reshuffling of their small staff and they’d need an administrative assistant, a very entry-level position to start, but with a lot of potential. “And I promise, no heavy lifting, haha!” Perhaps I knew someone who might be interested?
IN TIME
David pulls the collar up on his coat as we walk, along the path of a city park not too far from our apartment. George, our dog, doesn’t strain the leash—the volunteer who cared for him at the shelter called him a “mellow fellow”—but he sets our pace. It’s December, late afternoon on a Saturday, and a chilly mist clings to the trees, to the classical stone statuary by the pond, our faces. The days get dark early but the evenings glow with holiday lights. Yeah, seasons, I think, as Alice once said, and it makes me laugh. Because seasons, as she would have had it, are a marketing concept but they also exist, here, at least for now, and I haven’t forgotten Alice. David asks what’s funny and I don’t know where to begin, how to tell a private joke you have with your own past. And I don’t even really know what’s funny about it anyway.
“Just something that happened at work,” I say. But then I can’t come up with anything that happened at work quick enough and the pretense collapses. I clumsily unravel the whole thought process to David until we’re talking about how you can’t really talk to someone else about private jokes with your own past. The setup is so long and convoluted, the punch line so paltry and unsatisfying. But as we talk, as Alice, Stella, our old house, and that summer come up into conversation, they seem like allusions to a past that we, and only we, shared.
It makes me think of something Liz told me, while she and Felix were separated. That it was so weird, fraught, difficult to speak to each other, at first especially, but they had to speak in order to talk about their kids, and when they talked about their kids, they spoke a language exclusive to themselves.
“No one else cares about your kids in the same way,” she said. I took that to mean that while other people cared about her children’s well-being, empathetically or ethically, nobody else delighted so completely in Valeria learning to raise her eyebrows, using her whole face, practically, to do it. Or Abigail, in pants that were now too short for her, concluding that she must be going through a “life burst” when she meant “growth spurt.” Nobody else felt their own heart trampled when a group of kids refused to let Valeria join their playground game. Or when Abigail found out she hadn’t been invited to a sleepover at her “best” friend’s house and she didn’t cry, she only grew quiet and withdrawn.
“You can bore me with the details,” I’d said. “If you can’t talk to Felix.”
“That’s just it,” she’d replied. “I’d be boring you. I’m bored by other people’s kids. It’s pretty boring when they’re not yours. Felix is the only other person who will always want to know these things about the girls and will never be bored by hearing them.”
I’m not Felix, but I like that Liz tiptoes around me less and less when it comes to talking about her children, about parenthood. I like that she doesn’t have to. That, somehow, I’m no longer baring a wound she can’t care for.
George lets out a low, groaning warble, his “I’m done here, let’s go home” sound. A mostly greyhound mutt, he’s generally quiet, though he howls or roos sometimes in response to other dogs in the park or on the street, sometimes if we sing to him. We’d never had a pet before George, though David had grown up with retrievers. When we first brought George home, we’d set out a dog bed for him, but he spent every night curled up by David, until he eventually switched to the foot of our bed, between the both of us. At the shelter, he’d looked bedraggled, like he’d seen a lot, and beseeching: Please take me with you. So we did.
There’s no equivalency—a dog is not a child. I don’t mean to suggest we even thought about George in those terms, as an antidote to an absence. But George looks at me with such intelligence, such comprehension, and I look at him with so much love, and if I tried to tell anyone but David much more about it, I’d bore them so fast.
The next day, Sunday, I go with Liz and her children to see The Nutcracker. Liz has thoughts, from a professional, critical standpoint, about the ballet, the dancers, the staging, and the limitations of tradition. “But, fuck it,” she says, and we mill about with a crowd of all ages in the opulent lobby of the theater, removing our gloves and hats and scarves by a marble column, beneath a chandelier. The lights flicker and Valeria, seven, grabs her mother’s hand while Abigail, nine, takes mine, as if she’s doing it, kindly, for my benefit. The kind of nine-year-old who reads books with young heroines and seeks out acts of compassion wherever she can. We head into the performance hall, which was built to be a palace of sorts: gold leaf and ornate plasterwork, row upon row of deep red seats from which you might lift your gaze heavenward toward the celestial murals on the ceiling. The music begins, the curtain comes up on a beautiful party, a giant mouse does battle with a militarized kitchen gadget, essentially, and a girl and a prince travel through the Realm of Snow to the Land of Sweets. I hadn’t seen it in full since I was around Abigail’s age. As a child, I might have understood on some level that the ordinary reality, the point of departure for this imaginary adventure, is a bourgeois family of four: mother, father, two children. But it strikes me now, thinking of Liz’s bourgeois family of four, that this reality is itself a fantasy, made real enough. Felix is back at home, he and Liz are still married, but when they separated for a while and Felix moved out, Liz slept with a carpenter, a professor, and a pharmacist. I don’t know w
ho Felix slept with. Nobody, ultimately, who could infiltrate his marriage and the life it predicated. I look at Abigail and Valeria and wonder how they will remember that time when things weren’t as they ordinarily are. If it will come back to them, vivid but half-understood, like condensation on the windows of a room with pink walls and pink carpeting, porcelain plates hung as decoration, and a woman in a housecoat. They’ll ask Liz or Felix what was happening but their parents won’t remember or they’ll remember it on their own terms, which don’t include a room or a woman like that, and the girls will begin to confuse what was real with what they dreamed.
Outside the theater it’s already night, black and clear. A glow from the street lamps, the marquee. It’s not late, not even five, but that Sunday feeling is setting in. Today has been an excursion, a trip to the city for Valeria and Abigail, who live in a modest house in a near-suburb. Valeria wore brightly striped leggings, Abigail her favorite purple corduroys. They say—Abigail says and Valeria seconds—they don’t want to go home yet, they want to get on the T, come home with me. A slumber party is a great idea, I tell them, but we need to plan for it. Not tonight, but soon, I say. In a week, they’ll be on school vacation, right? Maybe then. And I mean it. Valeria doesn’t yet have a real sense of time, of its passing, but Abigail does. She already understands herself, in some incipient way, as moving through it. Wanting to remember. She saves her program from the performance, while Valeria’s lies forgotten somewhere under a seat, probably, in the theater. Abigail is the protagonist of her own story. (And maybe this is why Liz is ultimately half-right: Valeria, as someone else’s child, bores me after a while. Abigail, as her own person, does not.) I suppose I’m a supporting character in Abigail’s story. She doesn’t call me “Aunt Emily” but I think of my relationship with Aunt Esther. And I can imagine that, when the time comes, if I have something to leave, I could leave it to her.
The Summer Demands Page 16