Late in the Season

by Felice Picano

  A seaplane buzzed overhead. When Stevie turned her head to watch it, it curved in a wide arc, descending into the Great South Bay, preparing to land. She could just make out Jonathan’s distant figure, standing up and waving to someone inside. Then he walked over to where its passengers would disembark.

  Damn. It looked like he had company. She ought to have stopped him on the beach.

  “Will you make those lists, Stevie?”

  “I will, Rose. I think it’s a terrific idea. Will you call me when you’re planning to come to the city?”

  “Not for a few weeks.”

  “We’ll lunch at Schrafft’s,” Stevie said. “We’ll both wear little hats with veils, and eat cucumber sandwiches.”

  “If we can still find a Schrafft’s,” Rose said. “They’re probably all Taco Ricos by now. Stevie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Promise me you’ll do something foolish.”

  “Thanks for being no bullshit, Rose. I promise.” She’d barely hung up the phone when Stevie spotted Jonathan coming toward her alongside the harbor’s edge. On either side of him were two little boys with flight bags slung over their shoulders. They each held one of his hands, and were talking animatedly. Jonathan had taken off his shirt, and it was pushed through the strap of another, larger canvas bag he carried over his shoulder. As they approached, she saw him in a new light—as a possible husband and father—a role unthinkable until that moment. She got shivers up her spine at the thought. All three of them stopped and turned slightly away from her. One little boy pointed to the seaplane, taking off now, gliding away on the water. Jonathan’s profile was lovely; the way his chest sloped and drew in and sloped again drew her eyes; his thighs in their worn shorts; his beard curling in the sunlight. And he could be a husband and a father!

  They turned, and saw her.

  “Hi!” she said, a picture of spontaneity.

  “Hey! Look who’s here,” Jonathan said, and smiled. He was clearly pleased to see her. “Stevie Locke. These are two of my best friends. Artie. And Ken.”

  The children wore short pants, sandals, and T-shirts with comic book characters stenciled on them. They didn’t look like Jonathan: neither did they really look alike. They shook hands with her politely, however, looked at her with that typically childlike mixture of curiosity and disdain, then moved slowly away.

  “Shopping?” Jonathan asked.

  “On the phone. The one at the house is already shut off for the winter.”

  “You could use ours.”

  “Thanks. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “And you still haven’t come to check our bookshelves.”

  “I was going to. Mind if I walk along with you?”

  The boys had already moved on along the boardwalk, and were talking to the sheepdog with the red handkerchief tied around its neck that Stevie had seen waiting at the dock the day of her arrival. When the dog bored them, they began a walking race along the main boardwalk, using a certain yellow fireplug they’d spotted ahead as their destination. Evidently they knew the direction of his house.

  “The offer is still open,” Jonathan said. Then, “Thanks for dinner. You’re a good cook.”

  He looked rested, content.

  “They’re Dan’s boys,” he explained to her. She ought to have known. She remembered her mother and father talking about the children visiting the summer house. Lord Bracknell thought it a scandal, of course: having impressionable youths around such flaunting inverts; who knew what they might turn out to be? For once, Stevie’s mother had disagreed. And Stevie herself had jumped into the argument, making certain her father knew she thought he was living in the twelfth century so far as manners and morals were concerned. It had been a delightful argument, she recalled. At the end of it, he’d gone off to his workshop muttering, and she to her bedroom, humming a tune, feeling a bit like Margaret Mead and Joan of Arc combined. Now, however, the boys’ presence at Jonathan’s beach house disturbed her. She knew their presence meant that he would be giving all his attention to them; and not to her. But it signified something set and settled about his relationship to Dan that made her own vague plans for herself and Jonathan more difficult to contemplate. She hid her thoughts, however, as they walked.

  “They’re real beach babies,” Jonathan said. “Can’t keep them away from here. They stayed all July.”

  “If you need any help with them…” she offered lamely.

  “No problem at all. I sort of like having them here. We do things I wouldn’t ordinarily do. We have cookouts on the barbecue. Have scavenger hunts along the beach. They’re no trouble at all. And”—he smiled—“they’re asleep by ten.”

  She wondered if that was a hint to her that he would have time to see her at night. She had to be careful she wasn’t deluding herself about his interest in her because of her own intense desire for him; but it would be equally foolish to let such hints slide away without noting them.

  “Hey! Look, Jonathan!” the smaller of the boys called out, pointing up to the telephone wires, where two doves were sitting next to each other. “What are they?”

  “House doves,” Jonathan said.

  “Love birds!” the boy said. “Ick!”

  “Ick!” Stevie repeated, and Jonathan laughed.

  Somehow that seemed the signal for her to leave them. She would go to the beach, off this other path, get away now while she could still restrain herself from looking stupidly at Jonathan’s face like a love-stricken creature herself.

  Strangely, the boys both said good-bye to her. She’d assumed they’d forgotten about her. What polite, well-brought-up boys, she thought. A good point for her to use should the lovers and their children ever come up again in an argument with her father.

  Later that evening, she saw Jonathan and the boys out on the oceanside deck barbecuing hamburgers and frankfurters. The boys were very active: all over the deck, doing a multitude of chores. They seemed very at home at the house, and that dispirited her, making her feel even more like an outcast there and in Jonathan’s life. He waved to her, however, at one point, and invited her over to join them. Much as she wanted to, she shook her head no. Perhaps she’d go over later on, when the boys were sleeping.

  After her own thrown-together dinner, Stevie sat down to make those lists Rose Heywood had persuaded her to try. The idea of not going back to school, but instead finding work, was both inspiring and disconcerting with all its possibilities. Carefully, rigorously—for this would count, wouldn’t it?—she drew up three lists. Oddly, she discovered she’d like to do many things in life. She would like to be the administrator of a large company—say a fashion or interior design firm; she’d like to be a lawyer, an airplane pilot, a literary agent, a diplomat appointed to a foreign nation. Just picturing herself in the roles and regalia of such glamorous professions helped her to become interested in the list-making. She also made a fourth list, which she titled “What I could not ever endure.” Heading that page was “a housewife, like my sister Liz.” But the list went on to include nursing and social work. On the other hand, lay psychotherapy seemed to be exempt from this list, and indeed was placed on each of the three other ones, and finally surrounded with a penciled box on list number one. She finally put it first on her most glamorous list, even though she knew she would still have to return to school for it.

  Such taking stock of her life and desires—with the aid of a brandy and tonic like the ones Jonathan had made—exhausted her. She had one moment when she thought, yes, he was inviting me, and she thought she’d go visit him. But when she stepped out onto the deck, she heard the sound of his piano, muffled and wandering, and she supposed he was working. So she went to bed instead.

  She continued to procrastinate the next day too, until almost sunset. She’d seen Jonathan out on the beach with the boys part of the morning and almost all afternoon. They seemed to be so much a unit, and to be having such a good time together, she’d deliberately stayed away from them, not going out onto the sand until the
y’d returned home.

  However, and quite terribly for her, in the light of day, the four lists she’d written up the night before seemed ridiculous. She wondered if Rose had been making fun of her in suggesting them. They now looked utterly juvenile and completely, depressingly impossible. Except of course, list four: the unendurable. At sunset, when she couldn’t stand looking at them, or being by herself another moment, she left the deck chair, went indoors, showered, changed into a blouse and slacks, and strolled over to the lovers’ house.

  The big living area was empty, although all the glass doors were open. So, after a fast glance down the hallway toward the bedrooms, she found the library bookshelves, and began to inspect them, telling herself Jonathan and the boys had gone to the village, and would be back soon.

  Within minutes, she almost forgot about them. Their library was only a single bookcase about four feet wide, that extended from the floor almost to the ceiling, but it was fascinating to her. She wasn’t the kind of person who immediately turned to a bookshelf or record collection to see what kind of life or personality someone possessed; yet knowing something, even as little as she knew about Jonathan, and then looking at his bookshelves was like suddenly having a map to guide you through only vaguely apprehended terrain.

  She’d expected to see books on music and the theater, so the large bottom shelf, half-filled with oversize volumes, was no surprise, richly stocked as it was. Then, too, there were several shelves of paperbacks, fiction and nonfiction, classics and popular books alike. That was also no surprise—Jonathan said both he and Dan were great readers. What stopped her, however, gave her pause, were two other sections, one of medieval and Renaissance history, and the other filled with books on astronomy and physics: titles such as Power and Imagination in Fourteenth-Century Italy, The Universe: Its Beginning and End, Elementary Relativity, and The Court of Mantua. Whose books were these: Dan’s or Jonathan’s? Did Jonathan’s interest in the stars, which she had thought romantic and even a bit woodsmanlike on her deck that evening they’d had dinner, really signify that he had a genuine interest in and knowledge of astrophysics? That was strange in a musician, wasn’t it? Or did it somehow relate to music? As in the harmony of the spheres? She’d recalled an ancient woodcut illustrating such a concept. And these books of very detailed and even pedantic historicity, did they show that he’d read a great deal before writing his show about thirteenth-century Florence? Or had he written about it because he’d read about them? What if they were Dan’s books, anyway? Had his interest then become Jonathan’s? How close were their interests, anyway? That might be the worst she would have to overcome: their total agreement. It would mean anything she did—even just to sleep with Jonathan once—would be perceived by them as an invasion, a sundering of their relationship.

  That line of thought was far too depressing to continue. So she stood up and began inspecting the other shelves, and immediately spotted editions of a half dozen classics she’d always meant to read, books assigned to her in class that she’d never gotten around to, books that had been recommended to her, titles that had always intrigued her. She finally selected two, Balzac’s Fatal Skin, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

  That was when she heard them outside.

  She looked out on the front deck, then, not finding them, walked around it to the back. No, the noises came from the ocean side. There, however, she realized why she didn’t see them. They must be on the smaller private deck that opened out from Jonathan’s bedroom, hidden from her by a stand of burly pines and a wooden fence. Should she call from here, or simply go in through the bedroom?

  She decided on the second course. Just stepping into his bedroom and seeing the bed made her stop for a second with the memory of that morning. Then she walked to the double glass doors.

  Jonathan and the two boys were at the far end of the deck, all three in the large, half-sunken hot tub built into one side of the deck, where it dropped a level to the lower terrace. He was less immersed than they, sitting on a little ledge, she supposed. He was washing the back of the smaller boy with a sponge and a bar of greenish soap. He would soap him up, sponge him off, all the while turning him this way and that, talking to the boy, then splashing water onto the sturdy little torso, then begin soaping and sponging the front of the boy. When he was done, he reached for a hose hanging on the side of the tub, and hosed off the boy to much shrieking.

  “My turn,” the older boy said, and went into Jonathan’s arms, and allowed himself to be held and lathered up.

  “What’s this I hear about you and Pete fighting,” she heard Jonathan say to the boy.

  “Nothing.”

  “I don’t care,” Jonathan said. “Don’t tell me.”

  “It wasn’t a fight,” the boy said.

  “Ken hit him,” the smaller boy offered. He was playing with a rubber model of what looked like a nuclear submarine.

  “I apologized,” Ken said quietly, pouting. “Pete’s weird, you know. He’s always trying something with us. Right, Artie?”

  “He’s okay sometimes,” Artie said. He was diving the submarine in and out of the water, admiring the splashes that resulted.

  “I think he has an inferiority complex,” Ken said very seriously to Jonathan.

  “Lift your arm,” Jonathan instructed, lathering it up, then, “Why should Pete feel inferior to you? He’s bigger than you. Bigger than both of you.”

  “I think he’s afraid Mom doesn’t love him as much as she does us,” Ken said.

  “He’s jealous of Daddy too,” Artie said, never stopping diving with the boat.

  “Is that true?” Jonathan asked Ken.

  “I don’t know. Yes. I think so.”

  “Well, if it is true, then maybe Pete needs friends and not enemies to help him feel loved. No?”

  “I love Pete,” Artie said, then modified that after some thought. “Well, sometimes.”

  “I don’t know,” Ken repeated, then turned around for his back to be lathered.

  “I know,” Jonathan said. “I think it would be a very mature thing to do, if you talked to Pete the way you do with me and Dan.”

  “Maybe.” Ken sounded doubtful. “You don’t have to live with him, you know. That makes it different.”

  “Why shouldn’t he feel as loved as we do?” Artie suddenly asked. “He gets to sleep with Mom. We don’t.”

  “That’s different,” Ken explained. “That’s sex and stuff. It doesn’t always mean anything. Right, Jonathan?”

  “Not always,” Jonathan admitted.

  “I think Mom loves Pete,” Artie said, convincing himself. “And he does have a neat bike, too.”

  “That’s all you ever think about,” Ken said. “Pete’s bike.”

  ‘‘It is not.’’

  “Is too.”

  “Is not!” Artie said, and made this point by splashing water on Ken with his submarine.

  Ken retaliated in kind, and soon they were shouting and splashing Jonathan, who also began shouting himself, and finally half stood up in the tub and began splashing the two of them together, with much larger waves of water. They joined sides against him, with much shouting and laughter, but soon found themselves swamped. Climbing out of the hot tub, they ran past Stevie in the bedroom doorway, into the bathroom.

  “Rinse off good,” he shouted after them, sitting down in the tub again. “Ken! Make sure Artie rinses. And leave some hot water for me.”

  He spotted her standing there.

  “Hi!”

  She was completely startled. She’d somehow or other felt she was invisible where she was. Now she began to blush.

  “You finally came for the books,” he said, sounding pleased.

  She caught herself, looked down to the two paperbacks in her hand, and managed to say, “Finally. Yes.” She showed him the covers and titles. He seemed to approve her choices.

  “I thought no one was in the house,” she explained.

  “Bring me that pack of cigarettes, will you?
” He pointed to a table right near her legs. She put the books down, brought the cigarettes and a lighter to him.

  He opened his mouth for the cigarette, and she shook one out and placed it between his lips and lighted it. He inhaled, sighed the smoke out, and leaned back.

  “That’s heaven,” he said.

  “Tired?” she asked.

  “A little. This is relaxing, though. Sit down. Go on. Pull up a chair.”

  She did: a little backless stool.

  He smiled then, and then began to laugh—a low, quiet, private laugh.

  “Look at us,” he said at her puzzled look, the cigarette dangling from his lip. “Here we are again. Me naked and you dressed. It’s almost becoming a habit. Like some distortion of Manet?” As she didn’t get his point immediately, he said, “You know, the Picnic on the Grass, with the men dressed to the neck, and the naked woman.’’

  “What would Lord Bracknell think?” she said. She realized immediately that she didn’t give a damn what her father would think. Her desire for Jonathan was so intense she began to tremble. She almost reached for a cigarette herself, then remembered she hated the taste of nicotine.

  “Who washes you?” she finally asked.

  His eyes slid toward hers; the cigarette continued to dangle from his lips. It was getting slowly darker; the sun must have dropped below the horizon. The sky was a deep, velvety blue beyond him. She could hear the boys in the shower, laughing under the stream from the nozzle.

  “Want me to play geisha for you?” she asked. She could already feel his firm flesh under her ministering hands: the soft, taut skin, the muscles, the tendons, the little places where he would be soft, at the hips perhaps, his buttocks.

  As he still didn’t answer, she went on to say, “I’d like to.”

  “Do you wash your boyfriend?” he asked in a quiet voice.

  “Lean forward,” she said, getting up. “I’ll scrub your back for you.”

  As she stood and then kneeled behind him, and reached for the brush, he suddenly took her arms, and held them by the wrists. He looked at her without saying anything. It was getting darker every moment; she could barely make out his features, yet she knew where his eyes were, his mouth, his nose, almost by rote. In the bathroom, the noise of the shower went off suddenly. She could hear the boys running to another part of the house. Away from here. She almost begged him to let her. But he suddenly let go of her hands, stood up, got out of the hot tub, and strode across the deck, into the bathroom. She wondered if she should follow him, but then she heard the shower turned on again, full force, and she sat back on her heels and felt awful, bereft, humiliated, shamed, rejected.