Late in the Season

by Felice Picano

  She had to leave, right now, before he came out of the shower.

  She remembered to pick up the two paperbacks, and had even partly regained her composure, when she passed the long corridor and went into the living area. The boys were at the kitchen counter bar, playing with some coloring books. They looked up as she came out.

  “Hi!” they said.

  “Hi!” she answered back.

  “Are you staying for dinner?” Ken asked.

  “No.” She looked back toward the bedroom. She was certain the shower was off. She had to get out now, before Jonathan came out and saw her. “No. I just came by to borrow some books.”

  They seemed satisfied by that, and went back to their coloring.

  She was still blushing when she reached her family’s house.

  “Idiot!” she said to herself. “You horny idiot. You almost ruined it!”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Come on, lazy bones, wake up!”

  Both Artie and Ken were on his bed, softly pummeling Jonathan through the sheets.

  “What time is it?” Jonathan said, then managed to see the clock. “Eight o’clock. Your father won’t be calling for at least another hour,” he said, rolling over, and trying to avoid the boys’ faces.

  They settled onto the bed. Artie poked under the sheets at his chest. He rolled over the other way.

  “I told you,” the smaller boy concluded smugly. “Old people need their sleep more than we do.”

  That was all Jonathan had to hear. “All right, everyone up! Off the bed!”

  In the kitchen coffee was set to brewing. It was another faultlessly clear and sunny day outside. The weather was holding up excellently for the boys’ weekend.

  They were in the kitchen too, fixing their own breakfasts with occasional comments from Jonathan, used to it by now from earlier visits to the beach house.

  “Why is it you guys take so long to wake up?” Ken wanted to know.

  “I can’t believe you’re really going to eat all that food,” Jonathan said instead of answering. The boy had sat down, and placed in front of himself a container of cherry yogurt, a banana, two slices of wheat toast, a bowl of cereal with sliced fresh peaches on top, and a small dish with a rather large homemade fudge brownie. The meal was guarded on either side by tall glasses of liquids—one containing apple juice, the other milk. To Jonathan—who seldom had more than a cup of coffee before noon, no matter when he awakened—it was like facing a ten-course haute cuisine meal at Lutèce.

  “Mom never wakes up easy, too,” Artie said. His meal, although as large eventually as Ken’s, was taken piecemeal; he’d arranged it on the kitchen counter, and would bring it to the table in stages, where he would concentrate on each item before getting up to fetch another.

  “Either,” Jonathan corrected.

  “Mom never wakes up easy either,” Artie good-naturedly repeated. Then, “That doesn’t sound right.”

  “Well, it is,” Jonathan said.

  “Why?” Ken asked, barely getting the word out through a mouthful of toast.

  “I don’t know. Ask your English teacher.”

  “No. I mean, why don’t you or Mom get up early?”

  “He went out and partied last night,” Artie said. He’d arrived at his third course: fruit.

  “I was right here,” Jonathan said.

  He hadn’t gone out last night. He’d stayed in and wrestled with that chorus at the end of the first act until he was halfway satisfied with it. In fact, he hadn’t even dreamed of going out with the kids here. If Dan were home too, it would be different. Dan never gave a thought about leaving them alone while he and Jonathan went out to the little bar-disco in the village. Of course, the next question was, what would Jonathan do at the bar in the village? Stand around? Have a drink or two? Look at the dancers: younger and more attractive, gayer and more fashionable every summer? And feel older and out of place? Or was he afraid he’d bump into Stevie Locke there?

  “Yeah, Jonathan, why do you sleep so much?” Artie asked.

  “I guess when you’re as ancient as I am, you come to realize that sleep is essentially far less threatening than being awake all the time. So, I’m naturally reluctant to leave off sleeping.”

  “Huh?” Artie said.

  “Never mind,” Jonathan said. The coffee tasted like old nailheads this morning.

  “I get it,” Ken said, smirking. And Jonathan indeed believed Ken did understand his point. Ken seemed to understand a great deal, whether or not he let on he did. He’d laid waste to his All-Bran, sailed into the yogurt, sipped the juice, eaten both pieces of toast, demolished the banana. He now held the fudge brownie in one hand and wielded the glass of milk in the other, taking turns with them, bite and sip.

  Jonathan continued to sip at his coffee, unable to tear his eyes away from Ken’s feasting, and at the same time slightly queasy about the possible consequences of such gorging.

  “We saw Stevie again,” Artie suddenly offered. “She’s pretty!”

  “She was borrowing some books,” Ken explained. “While you were in the shower. That was okay, wasn’t it?”

  “Sure,” Jonathan said. Stevie again. That had been a chancy moment at the hot tub last night. One of the closest in years. Had she seen his erection as he stood up and walked away? Probably not. Otherwise she would have followed him into the shower. Or would she have? Was she really coming on to him, anyway? Or just playing with him? Who knew?

  “How come she has a boy’s name?” Artie asked.

  “It’s short for Stephanie,” Ken said. And when Jonathan wondered how he knew this, the boy asked, “Isn’t it?”

  “She’s pretty,” Artie repeated. “Prettier than Ken’s girl friend.”

  “I don’t have a girl friend,” Ken said, mumbling through the brownie.

  “Pete says you do,” Artie countered.

  “Pete’s so afraid I’ll grow up gay, he’ll do anything and say anything to prove I’m not. Patricia is just a friend,” he concluded firmly.

  “But she is a girl,” Artie said.

  “So?”

  “So, she’s your girl friend.”

  “Phooey,” Ken said. “Mom is Pete’s girl friend. It’s different. You have to love a girl friend. I don’t love Patricia.”

  Jonathan marveled at how patient children could sometimes be explaining things to each other.

  “But you like her, right?” Artie insisted. “Otherwise you wouldn’t do things together, right?”

  “Sure I like her. Her father has all these neat books on differential calculus he showed me,” Ken said to Jonathan. “Filled with all sorts of shortcuts and proofs and things you can’t find in regular textbooks. Patricia knows most of them already. She’s showing me how to do them.” His eyes almost glittered as he spoke.

  “Is that true, what you said about Pete?” Jonathan asked Ken. He’d begun to feel his stomach tighten up during the conversation and it wasn’t from the caffeine.

  “You mean about him calling Patricia my girl friend? I guess. Who cares.”

  “What about what you said?” Jonathan insisted. “About Pete being afraid you’ll be gay when you get older?”

  “I don’t know.” Evasively said, head lowered, by Ken. Then, “Don’t worry. I can handle Pete.”

  Damn it! Jonathan thought. Pete is pressuring the kid. Janet must be in on it, or at least know about it, otherwise she wouldn’t have prefaced the whole thing the way she did on the telephone, or demanded to know what Ken said. Wait till Dan found out; he’d go over to Janet’s and start a real scene.

  “If you find you can’t handle Pete,” Jonathan said as emotionlessly as he could, “make certain you let me or Dan know about it. Do you hear? You don’t have to take any of that reactionary crap from Pete just because he happens to be sleeping with your mother.”

  “I know,” Ken said brightly, secretively. “I know. I marched last year. Remember?”

  The boy’s eyes were suddenly very grown-up. He looked
and spoke to Jonathan as an equal now, not as a child. For an instant Jonathan wondered why the boy mentioned this…to help allay his fears, to say he was on their side—Jonathan and Dan’s—forever? Was he…? Could he know that already? At eleven?

  The phone rang, bursting in on his thoughts.

  Artie was off his chair to get it in a flash, and was already accepting the call, when Jonathan arrived. Ken continued to eat, wiped his mouth, and slowly came to the phone last.

  When the ten-minute operator cut in, Jonathan got on the line to have her extend the call to a half hour. She said there weren’t too many Sunday calls, and she could keep this trunk line open for them.

  “Hi, babe,” Daniel said hesitantly to Jonathan. “How do the kids look? Okay?”

  Jonathan heard a slight, unfamiliar hissing, as though another long distance line were still open: the operator’s snooping in, Jonathan guessed.

  “The kids look fine,” he said. “But I look like hell. Damn you, Dan. I’m pregnant again.”

  There was an audible click. The hissing and the operator were gone. Took care of you, Jonathan thought.

  “Here’s Ken again,” Jonathan said into the receiver. The irate operator returned to cut them off exactly at the half hour, so Jonathan couldn’t say anything more than hello to Dan and then good-bye. Daniel sounded relaxed. He’d taken Jonathan’s joke on the operator as forgiveness: which it wasn’t. Took it rather prematurely, Jonathan thought. Took it as the easy way out for not bothering to mention the boys’ visit. It annoyed him.

  He sent the boys out picking beach plums, one of the few remaining bush fruits that grew at Sea Mist this late in the year. He showered and even got some exercise done in the time before they returned.

  Then it was time for the beach, and another hike along the surf and into the wilder dunes distant from the community, and even inland a bit. They encountered a family of wild deer—three does, a multi-antlered buck big as a stallion, and two small fawns—who didn’t seem at all shy, but merely stared at the three humans as though they were interlopers. The boys were thrilled. It was an accidental meeting, one that caused them to drop their voices to whispers. Ken and Artie talked about the deer all the way home and all through lunch.

  The afternoon was spent on the bedroom deck. The boys bathed in the hot tub, while Jonathan brought out a table and chair and worked on his score. The wild deer had so excited the boys that after the bath they were unusually subdued, which suited him fine. In an hour and a half or so he managed to get a great deal of work done on the second act trio between Gentile, Farnace, and Carlo—the three suitors—and felt as though he were finally back on the road to getting the score in shape.

  Ken was on the chaise longue, cream smeared over his cheeks and forehead, much reddened yesterday and today, a long yellow shirt of Dan’s covering him almost down to his knees, a green plastic visor over his eyes casting a lurid and ghoulish glow on his features, a tall glass of lemonade on the side table. He was reading Astronomy magazine. Artie was still in his bathing suit, sitting on the deck, quietly playing with some driftwood boats Dan had made several years back, kept in the summer house. Once, when Ken looked up from his magazine, he caught Jonathan staring at him, and smiled.

  “Why are you staring?” he asked.

  “I’m not,” Jonathan said. “I’m staring out into space, thinking. We composers do it all the time.”

  “He’s staring because you look funny,” Artie said, not even lifting his head from his playing.

  “I do?” Ken said, and was amused. “How?”

  “Just funny,” Artie said.

  “Like what?”

  Like an underage Hollywood girl trying to play movie star, Jonathan thought. “Like an Egyptian,” Artie said, finally looking up.

  “You mean a mummy?” Ken asked.

  “No. A real Egyptian. I once saw a picture of an Egyptian king at the beach,” Artie explained.

  “Must have been King Farouk,” Jonathan said.

  “Well, I don’t feel like a king,” Ken said, huffily. “Unless they get sunburned too.”

  The last seaplane back to the city was at sunset, and Jonathan managed to get the boys packed and down to the dock in time. He sat on the pier, watching the seaplane sail out into a huge, orange, gibbous sun over a glittering blue bay. A mild prevailing easterly blew at the back of his neck, and he had to lift his jacket collar, feeling his hair—too long since his last haircut—rippled by the breeze.

  What kind of life was this, he wondered, with everyone he loved always going away from him, leaving him here, on this little jetty, watching them fly off?

  Don’t get into that, Jonathan, he warned himself. Not now. Go back and finish that chorus.

  Is that why? Just to write a few songs?

  As good a reason as any other. Go home. Why feel bad? The boys had been here all weekend. Dan’s boys. Your boys too, by default. If only Janet would give them up to him and Dan for the next few years, until they were safely through adolescence. Her life—especially her emotional life—was far too unstable to raise children. Alan, Hugh, and now Pete: the worst. He didn’t even have a job. Ran around on motorcycles, parachute jumping, drinking beer, in general acting like a seventeen-year-old himself. Was that any way to gain someone like Ken’s respect? They’d be better off here, even at the apartment on Central Park West. Anything was better than being with Pete. Or would their presence drive Jonathan and Dan apart, instead of bringing them closer?

  Go home. Start working.

  The day was settling around him with a soft pink glow as he stood up from the dock and began walking home. For the first time so far this summer, his sockless ankles were chilled. At home, he began to shut all the glass doors, and even a few windows, and checked the fireplace. More than enough logs. He hadn’t built a fire since the night of the storm. Stevie Locke. What did she want?

  The cup of tea he brewed made him sleepy. Why was that? It had as much caffeine as coffee, which always woke him up. Perhaps it was associative. Whenever he was ill as a child, his mother would bring him big mugs of tea, laced with sugar and lemon, and he would soon go to sleep after drinking it. Had she laced something else into the tea? He also remembered her feeding him bowls of fluffy-looking creamed soups when he was sick: cream of mushroom, cream of celery. He wondered if he would feel sleepy if he ate a bowl of creamed soup. In some ways, childhood was better, wasn’t it? All but for the utter dependence a child had, or his parents insisted he have. Jonathan had always hated and rebelled against that dependence. He tried to instill that same rebellion in Dan’s boys.

  He finally gave in to the drowsiness, and napped on the living room sofa. Awakened, more than two hours later, he felt out of time, off schedule, uncertain of what he really wanted to do. He turned on the radio, and quite by accident just managed to tune in the opening bars of Mozart’s autumnally beautiful last Piano Concerto in F. The originality and the subtlety of the interwoven piano and orchestra impressed him as Mozart’s work always did. But this time he began contemplating other, nonmusical matters: how at the time of this work, one of Mozart’s last, the composer was the same age as Jonathan now, at the end of his career, with so much behind him, operas, concerti by the dozen, string quartets, piano sonatas, choral works, symphonies. Of course he’d begun earlier. But that wasn’t the entire answer. Composing must have meant more to Mozart than The Lady and the Falcon meant to Jonathan, for him to have worked so indefatigably. Or had Mozart more energy—more will even? Was the current race of men really degenerate in the truest sense of the word?

  Thinking of Mozart led him to want to listen to more of the composer’s music. He found a cassette of highlights from The Marriage of Figaro, and listened to the by now familiar but unendingly lovely arias, trios, and duets. When he came to “Non sono pus,” he immediately imagined Cherubino—Mozart’s mezzo-soprano as a love-struck boy—as Stevie Locke.

  What was he going to do about her? It was becoming increasingly clear she was someone he
would have to deal with. Already he felt some kind of tenuous presence linking her parents’ house to this one—a link that had never been there before, which must mean that they had already forged some kind of relationship.

  After the aria was over, he stood up, and walked to the west window and looked out. She hadn’t returned to the city yet; two windows showed lights on in what he remembered to be the living room of the old, clapboard house. Hadn’t she said she would only remain out here a week?

  That was disturbing. Perhaps he ought not jump to any conclusions, but simply look hard at the facts of the situation. She had come out here alone, she said, to work on various crises in her young life. Understandable. Objectively speaking—and who could be more objective than Jonathan, who would soon be auditioning scores of young girls for the role of Fiammetta?—Stevie Locke was beautiful: slender, lithe, with attractive and well-sized breasts, a waist you could put two hands around easily, a scrumptious ass, long golden legs, smooth, tight skin, lips that were designed for kissing and uttering soft pleas and obscenities, and… Large, gray eyes, slightly speckled with other colors. Her brother Jerry’s mischievous smile. Barry Meade would cream in his shorts just looking at Stevie. Marge would divorce Barry if she ever saw them together. That was fact number one. Objective. Indisputable.

  That was fact. Now for the speculation. It seemed clear from what happened around the hot tub that Stevie Locke wanted him. Him, not her boyfriend Bill, not the two Halley boys she’d seen on the beach, in the surf. Him. But was that true? He would have to review the progress of events from the beginning to check it out. After all, it was still only speculation.