After a while Jeff stopped asking me to visit other hotels with him and instead took Lester. They would come back late at night, loud and drunk, pounding my bed, wanting me to wake up and share the rest of the wine or vodka or tequila or beer. Once, they both returned with girls. I pulled the covers over my head and waited. Then it started: the rustling of clothes, the sound of zippers, the dropping of change, the giggling, the squeaking of bedsprings, the moaning.
I stayed awake long after everyone became quiet.
Aunt Letty asked me to watch the desk while she went to talk with the chef. A cab stopped outside and instead of a shaky foot and orthopedic shoe touching the ground, out jumped a young girl wearing jeans and a blue workshirt with her hair in a long brown braid.
I opened the screen door for her and asked if I could help. She looked me up and down, at my red vest and black butterfly bow tie and the ruffled white shirts we wore to serve dinner, then at my polished shoes, and said, “You’re Ivan, I bet.”
“How did you know?”
“I’m Maida, Letty’s granddaughter.”
“Oh,” I said. “Nice to meet you.” We shook hands and her fingers curled around mine, kindly, with affection. Her face was open and friendly and I immediately relaxed. I was even able to joke about her suitcase, tied together with twine and taped in the corners. “Did you drag that behind the cab?”
Maida laughed and said she liked it because it had belonged to her father, who had taken it everywhere with him. He had loved to travel.
The logical question would have been, Do you like to travel, too? But for some reason I asked about her father.
“Is your father dead?” I said. I don’t know why. Maybe I’d heard it from my father. My mother had been Maida’s father’s second cousin, which (and I was calculating quickly) made Maida and me distant relations, but close enough to be curious about each other.
What happened, however, in that first moment was one of those glitches of conversation when the unexpected remark or question becomes the truest one and a clumsy bump turns the world right side up. “Yes, he’s dead,” Maida said. “He killed himself.” I nodded and took her hand again. I remembered now I knew this. Then I picked up her father’s battered suitcase and we went to find Letty.
Maida and I began spending all our free time together. We’d swim or take long walks between my serving meals and then, at night, we’d sit on the porch and talk until late. When it was my evening to work the card room, she helped me serve tea and coffee. All the guests fussed over her and said, “Come, Maida, sit with us, darling.” She would kiss the men’s cards for good luck or pretend to know which ones they should throw down. Thursday evening was music night. Nathan the Piano Man, who toured the smaller resorts, would appear promptly at eight. With a dreamy smile, the suggestion of misunderstood genius about his eyes, the faint proudness of a man who could not endanger his hands by changing a tire or touching a hot plate, he would play ancient, moody melodies. Maida would stand with her arm through Letty’s and they would sing “Rosie” together, as Letty used to do with Uncle Bumin.
I wanted to learn everything about Maida, and about her side of the family, which I didn’t know well, my mother’s family. I told Maida about my mother, what a shadowy figure she had been for me and how I didn’t remember her too clearly even though I was already five when she died.
“Maybe it’s too hard to remember,” she said.
We were sitting on the porch steps of the recreation hall and I was picking at the rotten wood. I had a hard time talking about my mother, knowing what to say or what people expected me to say.
“Why didn’t your father remarry?” Maida asked.
“I don’t know why. He was pretty busy with his law firm. He tried with me. We’d go on camping trips in the summer and he’d come home from work to check on me when I got back from school in the afternoon. But I always felt he was as lonely as I was. I was aware we were different from other families, flying on one wing, so to speak.” I paused, then said, “I thought that if I’d had a brother or a sister things would have been easier.”
“Well, you have a cousin,” Maida said.
She put her hand on my knee. I leaned over and kissed her. I felt her mouth open wide and the blood rush to my fingertips touching her cheek. Elise had never kissed me with her mouth open or pushed her tongue inside. I pulled away. “Is this all right?” I asked.
“Of course, silly.”
“I mean about us being cousins. I think we’re third cousins.”
“Who’s counting,” Maida said and cupped my neck, pulling my face back into hers.
Maida would come up behind me in the dining room and put her arms around me, whisper to meet her upstairs (in her room) the minute I finished serving. She’d be waiting for me. But if I showed up unexpectedly, she’d be agitated, upset, as if she didn’t want me there, pacing around the room or telling me she had to finish writing a letter or reading a novel. Any display of passion I initiated was gently but clearly rebuffed. I’d rack my brain as to what I’d done wrong. Finally, one day, I just came out and asked her why she never let me surprise her. We had taken out the sole canoe to the middle of the lake and were drifting slowly back toward the shore, a stem of fat grapes between us that we’d grabbed over the screaming protest of the hotel’s pantry man.
“I don’t know,” Maida said, pulling away from me. She’d been lying against my shoulder. She sat now in the middle of the boat, facing me. Wearing one of my shirts over her bathing suit, so her shoulders wouldn’t burn, she had tied the tails in a bow across her stomach. The down on her arms had turned almost white from the sun. “I just like my privacy.”
“But you come to my room all the time,” I said.
“You told me I could. You said you liked to be surprised.”
“It’s more than that,” I said. “You always have to be in charge, don’t you?”
“What makes you say that?” Maida smiled and pushed a finger against my chest, leaving a white spot in the center. “Can’t we just stop talking about this? It’s so boring, Ivan.”
“You’re not bored with anything else we talk about. Why this?”
“Maybe you should be a lawyer instead of a psychologist.”
“Maybe you should be an evasive witness.”
Maida sighed with great, heaving annoyance. “Okay, so I don’t like surprises. Is that any big deal?”
A fish jumped in the water. The lake was overflowing with rainbow trout but there was no one to fish. Only eighty-six-year-old Mr. Wallach, Hy-Sa-Na Lodge’s oldest guest, came up here occasionally in his chest waders.
Maida scraped her sneaker back and forth against the bottom of the canoe. “Ivan…”
“What?”
“Come over here. I want to tell you something.” I slid over to where Maida was sitting. “Come closer. It’s a secret.” She wrapped her arms around my neck and pulled me into the water. We floated around down there while she held tight to my neck, and for a moment I thought her secret was going to be that we would drown together.
Jeff was a regular topic of conversation between Maida and me. Maida didn’t share my admiration for him, nor find him nearly as charming as I did.
“Oh, look at him, will you, Ivan? He can’t even talk to women without coming on to them.”
“Which women?”
“Me! He’s constantly fluttering his eyelashes—he might as well have a motor behind them. And buzzing in that bee voice of his.”
“I love his voice!”
“It reminds me of runny marmalade.”
“Why do you dislike him so much? What’s he ever done to you?”
“Nothing. He just bothers me. That car he bought.” Jeff had spent his money from the summer so far on a ’63 Triumph, while I carefully deposited mine at a bank in Liberty.
“It’s his choice,” I said. “Why should he have to be practical if he doesn’t want?”
“It’s his attitude, that he’s so clever and cute. What’s he
going to do next year? Is his sporty little car going to save him? I tried to talk to him about going to college, just for a year to buy himself some time. No, he wouldn’t think of it. He’s not going to hide behind some pompous professor’s robes, he told me. I mean, come on, it’s one thing to make a point on principle, but that’s not his reason. He’s just acting out some juvenile rebellion against his father.”
“His father! How do you know this?” Jeff had never mentioned anything to me about his father.
“His dad is a big corporate executive who wants Jeff to follow in his footsteps, go to Stanford like he did.”
“I’m amazed he told you all this.”
“That’s what I mean. He tells me all these things because he thinks I’m just naturally interested in his life—wouldn’t any girl be? It’s his tone. He was actually explaining, in boring detail, how to do the backstroke in the pool.”
“Well, he was on his school’s swim team.”
“So was I.”
“I think you’re too hard on him, Maida.”
“And I think he’s the brother you always wanted. He can’t do much wrong in your eyes.”
“Maybe,” I said, feeling suddenly caught.
Still, Jeff had the only car and it forced the three of us together. Lester was left out, mostly, we told ourselves, because we took the Triumph and there wasn’t room for him. It became embarrassing to sneak away, for that’s what it felt like, a quick goodbye and then we’d hurry down the steps, leaving Lester on the porch squeezing a handgrip and looking after us with a stern military grimace. One evening we came home late and found Lester wearing his cadet uniform, with white-gloved hands behind his back, standing in front of a map of the world he’d mounted on his wall. Besides listening to military marches and famous narrations of great battles, he plotted troop movements, his troops, in the Vietnam war. Tonight the allies (the blue pins) had invaded every communist country except, as far as I could see, Russia. Jeff went straight to bed. Lester and I remained side by side facing his map. “It was a hell of a war,” he said.
“Was?”
He nodded at the map. His face had broken out in hives the last few days but only the left side; the smooth right side was cleanly shaved. The doctor had told him not to shave the other side until the rash cleared up. The smooth profile was toward me. I tried to follow his gaze. “What are you nodding at?”
He pointed at Russia.
“Yes,” I said. “No blue pins. Why?”
Lester turned his full face toward me now—the rashy, hairy, left side and the clean-shaven right. “It doesn’t exist. I’ve eliminated the problem.”
“I’m going to bed,” I said.
“You can run but you can’t hide.”
“Figure it all out, Lester, and let me know in the morning what happens to the world.”
“I feel sorry for you, Ivan Ivanovitch! I had such hope for you when I first came here. You seemed intelligent, if misguided.”
“Give me a break.”
“Give yourself a break and wake up, man!”
“Shut up!” Jeff shouted from his room.
“And him, they’ll break him in two minutes. The bamboo shoots under his fingernails, the leeches on his testicles, the grains of rice soaked in urine and ground into the razor cuts on the bottoms of his feet. He’ll be begging for the bullet through his head.”
“Where do you think of this stuff, Lester?”
“Read Tom Dooley, my friend. Tortures beyond our minds.”
I started to walk away. Lester called after me. “Wait a second, I want to tell you something.”
“What?”
“I’ve conquered sleep.”
“Mazel tov.”
“Fatigue,” Lester said. “Fatigue is the enemy.” He smiled at me. “Why don’t you join me—if you think you can take it. Unless you want to crawl into your bed, a wasted hophead like your fellow traveler in there.”
“Hophead?”
“Go ahead. Smoke yourself into oblivion. Wake up with a bayonet in your soft white gut!”
Jeff appeared in the doorway. He was scratching his crotch and squinting through sleep at us. “Look, man, can you please keep it down? Go outside and talk at least.”
Lester pulled his heels together, thrust out his chest. “Request denied! Recruit Jeffrey Jeffvanovitch will not cross the demarcated line of Captain Malmar’s quarters!”
“You are such a retread,” Jeff said and turned around, shuffling back to his room.
The next day I told Maida.
“He sounds sick. He really gives me the creeps.”
“Should we tell Letty?” I asked.
“I don’t know. He hasn’t done anything wrong. He’s just acting so weird.”
Maida didn’t like to be around Lester and would avoid the recreation hall if she knew he was there. He called her “Ma’am,” as he addressed Letty and anyone in a position of authority; he assumed Maida to be a superior because she was Letty’s granddaughter.
“I catch him staring at me sometimes. But it’s not as though he turns away when I meet his eyes. He keeps looking, Ivan.” I rested my head in Maida’s lap and kissed her smooth belly, her salty skin warm on my mouth. We’d come up to her room after lunch. “He’s really not sleeping anymore?”
“That’s what he says. Maybe he takes naps. How else can he stay awake?”
“Is he serving his guests all right?”
“Seems to be. He’s always there—on both feet. He takes their orders, brings their food, then stands at attention by his coffee service, his chin up, until the last guest has left. He cleans up and goes back to the recreation hall.”
“Maybe he sleeps then.”
“No, that’s when he polishes his shoes and cleans his gun.”
“Gun! What do you mean, gun!”
“He has a pistol. Issued to him at West Point.”
“They don’t give out handguns!”
“How do you know?”
“They just don’t.” Maida got off the bed and went over to her dormer window. She put on a T-shirt and hugged herself. I came over to the window and held her. Her whole body was trembling.
“Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not okay. Do I look okay?”
“Well, don’t get mad at me. I didn’t bring him here.”
Maida looked at me strangely, as if she didn’t know who I was or couldn’t trust me anymore. Later, I learned she had seen her father shoot himself.
I should say I was stoned during much of the summer. But whereas I would want to lie on my back and enjoy the effects of my circumlocution—stringing long words together and watching them spin off protoplasmically toward the stars, Maida wanted to fuck. Sex was what interested her most about grass. My brain’s busy catwalks, which Maida was willing to traverse when we were straight, annoyed and scared her when we were stoned. “Don’t talk like that, Ivan,” she might say, or “Everything’s getting too complicated and chopped up in my head.” She didn’t like me to tease her either, or talk in funny voices or do scary things like hold the flashlight under my chin and roll my eyes back. I reminded her too much of her father when I was stoned.
He’d been diagnosed as manic-depressive. In his manic phase he would stay up all night making phone calls to radio talk shows or friends if they would listen or, when there was no one else, all-night grocery stores to ask if they had a certain cereal or brand of tuna that he thought they should be carrying. In the morning, he’d be waiting at the bottom of the steps for Maida, telling her how to dress for school, which part to try out for in the class play, what to eat for lunch to keep her figure, leaping from one subject to another. He’d have gone over all her homework and commented on the teacher’s comments. In high school, she had taken a course in shorthand; it wasn’t unusual for him suddenly to clap his hands while they were watching TV (he would watch TV standing up) and command, “Maida, take a letter! To William Lensenk, Director, Royal Shakespeare Company. Dear Bill, Recently saw your produc
tion of Richard III on PBS and was ferociously disappointed. In Act I, Scene 3, Richard is not downstage. How can this be? To hide Richard at such a vital moment as this!”
Her father had been an actor and then a director of a reputable theater in New York before the war, where he had met Maida’s mother. But he never achieved the recognition he thought he deserved, and he spent his life working as a salesman for a theater supply store in Manhattan. When he was depressed he couldn’t work and once, refusing to eat or take care of himself in the most basic ways, he had been hospitalized. In the early Sixties he had been put on lithium and this helped him function normally enough to work. But as time passed and he showed no extreme swings of behavior, he claimed he was completely cured and no longer needed the medication. One night he was working at his desk, writing a play, his first attempt in years. Maida, sixteen and talking with a girlfriend in the living room, always with an ear out for her father’s sudden shifts in mood, heard the typing stop, the only time his relentless pecking had ceased all night. She listened to him pull a page from the carriage, heard his sharp laugh and then went to see how he was doing. He pulled the trigger as she walked in the door. No one even knew he had a gun.
One would think (yes, one would think, I have said to myself many times looking back on that summer), knowing all this about Maida I wouldn’t have pressured her into taking LSD. “Aren’t you even curious?” I asked her.
“I’m scared. And, yes, of course I’m curious. You know I’m not a timid person. I just know it’s bad for me.”
This sounded perfectly reasonable, but still I persisted. “My first time I want you to be with me. We could take it Sunday, right after lunch.” We didn’t have to work Sunday evenings.
“I don’t know. Let me think about it, Ivan.” Jeff would get us the LSD and guide us through the trip; he had taken acid several times already and swore by its powers.
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