Danny could see the water winking through the trees. The plastic bag in his hand, empty and twisted, was like a rope. He imagined it was a wet towel. He turned back toward the house. The pool, he thought, could only be restored in his memory, a memory that wasn’t even his own.
Libby’s words started to filter through the trees. She must have been calling for a while.
“Jesus, Dan,” she called from somewhere near the house, “you’re off the hook. Now stop hiding in the woods. We’ve got to go get Melissa.”
FOUR
TOM
July 2
That night Tom found Melissa because she couldn’t stop giggling. Like a child, he thought, she can’t play the game right. The closet was tucked under a balcony in the corner of the great room by a seldom-used side door. A forgotten place. Melissa was sitting at the bottom of the closet full of tennis rackets and foul-weather gear.
After dinner, once the sun went down, they had decided to play Sardines, one of Danny’s favorite games, and Melissa agreed to be It. The goal was to find her and hide with her. The last person still looking had to be It in the next round. This usually ended up with six people standing in a bathtub shushing each other behind a moldy shower curtain. But she had chosen a good spot. He couldn’t even see her when he first opened the door, though he could hear the soft nasal rumblings of suppressed laughter.
“You’re worse than Kerry,” Tom said. “How old are you?” He quietly moved a pile of tennis rackets and some ancient snowshoes. He sat down beside her, cross-legged. She was cursing herself for giving away such an excellent location. He told her in a whisper where the rest had headed—Danny upstairs, the girls down the back hall—it would be a while before they circled back. He was catching her giggles.
“Don’t you start,” Melissa gave him a shove. He pushed her back, and she pulled him close, slung her legs across his lap in an effort to move them both farther into the corner. They were nestled behind a few yellow slickers hanging from pegs, and Melissa lined up boots in front of them to try to hide their feet.
“Smart thinking,” he said.
“Not my first time,” she said.
On their third date, both of them just barely out of college, Tom and Melissa had sat in the dark. Bare legged on an itchy blanket, they had watched a movie at the Hatch Shell. Notorious. Cary Grant punched Ingrid Bergman in the face in the first ten minutes of the movie; the audience roared at the inappropriateness, at the absurdity of a man seeming to take care of a woman too drunk to drive by knocking her out in one punch, KO.
“She’ll have to fall in love with him now,” Melissa had whispered.
“Once she punches him back we’ll know they’re soul mates,” said Tom.
“The worst thing I’ve ever done in a car is puke,” said Melissa. Someone a few blankets ahead shushed them.
Tom whispered, “I killed a cat with a car. Not on purpose.”
She wrapped both of her arms around one of his and put her chin on his shoulder.
“It was a driving lesson, and the neighbor’s cat was asleep under our car.” Tom had had to stop talking for a second. “It made a sound.” He had watched his father get out of the car and look underneath. His face pale, he opened Tom’s door. He had said, “Why don’t you head back to the house.” He hadn’t wanted Tom to see, to even know.
“My dad tried to hide it from me, but I wouldn’t leave. He said it was a cat. Was a cat. He didn’t say, it’s Pickles. The neighbor’s cat I fed sometimes. The cat who preferred to sleep on our front steps. I couldn’t bring myself to look under the car. I just started to cry. It was a few weeks before my seventeenth birthday. He told me, it’s not your fault. Then he got a towel and pulled out Pickles and wrapped her up.”
They were whispering so close it was as if they were alone in the dark. The screen was the moon rising. Melissa pushed a tear off his face with her thumb.
“I never wanted to drive again,” said Tom. “He had the bundle in his arms. I asked to hold it, and I unwrapped the towel by her head, kissed her. She was so soft. My father said he’d take the cat home to the neighbors. I said I wanted to. She was still warm. He walked beside me with his hand on my back. I couldn’t even talk when they opened the door. He told them he had been the one driving.” Sometimes Tom forgot that he had ever loved his father. Tom kissed Melissa’s forehead. “I’ve never told anyone that.”
“Once at a summer camp, when I was four, I killed all the class pets,” Melissa had said. “I thought I was helping them.”
Tom laughed and what had begun to fall apart in him came together again.
“I just thought the turtle should be free so I shoved it under a gate into a field.” Melissa pushed both hands forward close to their blanket.
“Where it probably died of thirst?” Tom patted her knee.
She grimaced and shrugged. “Then there was a hamster that seemed really hot, and the kiddy pool was right there. And then the goldfish was just gluttonous. That one was barely my fault.”
“Karmically speaking, we’re not in good shape.” Tom hugged her to him.
“We should get a cat, to redeem ourselves,” she had said. They’d adopted their dog two weeks later. Melissa had named her Mukti, meaning freedom from the cycle of birth and death.
Now, in the dark of the closet he reached for her, grasping gently up her arm to find her face. He let his hands frame her face, pulled gently at her earlobes, kissed her. She moved into his lap, kissed back, led his hand underneath her shirt. He wrapped his mouth around the tendon between her shoulder and neck, the soft slope that dipped into the hollow above her collarbone. He bit her slow and hard, and she sighed, pressed herself deeper into his lap. They kept kissing, moving, hands and arms, turning their heads, first this way, then that. She turned in his lap to face him, wrapping her legs around him. His hands went under her shirt up her back. Her skin like water. She leaned back and then forward, pressing her forehead to his, both of them breathing hard.
“Why can’t it be like this at home?” she whispered.
He exhaled sharply out of his nose. She’s so quick to kill the moment. Whatever had been building went flat, and they were just playing a stupid game.
“That’s why,” he said and slid her off his lap.
She always wanted to pull it all apart, dissect it, put pins in it, put it under glass. She wanted to bring someone else in, a team, even. She talked about therapists, doctors, even third-party participants, like some kind of porno. She said she’d try anything. He believed it, too, all those ex-boyfriends, the one girl at boarding school. She still talked to some of those people. There was the filmmaker with the huge cock, Gigantor; the white boy with dreadlocks, who discussed the motion of the ocean (the voiced cliché hurt him to think about); the heroin addict with the Rottweiler; the alcoholic bed wetter, known as the Elf (an admitted low point for her); the Irishman whose name was either Ronan or Roland, she could never quite tell; the tattoo artist (she still talked to him); and the writer (the occasional e-mail).
And then him. Him in a long line of strange, deranged freaks who’d defiled his pretty wife in ways that he wished he didn’t know. Christ, she’d tried things that he had never thought of. At first all her experience was thrilling. Dating a slut is great, he told himself: no inhibitions, no judgments, his mundane fantasies happily tried, refined, perfected, bolstered by her own ideas, her flair for the risqué. He wanted to believe that.
But after their children were born there was a lull in things. While she healed, while they adjusted to being parents, to no sleep and no energy for each other, something happened. It was so small. The turning of a page, the whisper of paper, the hush of a finger down a fresh sentence. It was imperceptible at first. And things seemed fine, fine for years. Until she started to complain. And then he saw that it was not fine. That she was changing, or his response to her, as she claimed, was changing.
He saw her in two ways, both as a woman who’d spent years fucking other men, and then as a
woman somehow separate from her sex appeal, purely maternal, a woman who spelled words out for children, who strangely had started baking her own bread, whose hair had gone coarse and dull like she lacked vitamins. Her breasts hung from her chest, joggling lasciviously when she brushed her teeth. How many men had grasped and kissed and chewed and sucked on those beautiful, ruined breasts? Not ruined, exactly, but tainted. You were supposed to fuck sluts, not marry them, he realized. He was tired of trying to blot out all those other men, his own just another flag, and hardly the biggest, planted on a littered mountaintop.
There in the dark he was sweating. His clothes felt too tight. His knees hurt. She was always demanding that he talk. “Just tell me,” she would say. “Whatever it is, just say it out loud.” Where to even start? I resent your past. They’ve invited me to take a leave of absence from work. I caught Buster jerking off to cartoon porn. Who invented cartoon porn? You aren’t mine anymore. We are too broken. All of us.
He still loved her, her thoughts, her jokes, her voice, her lips. There were days when her body seemed unchanged from their first night together, and that was almost worse. Her body lying to him like that. They still found each other under the blankets, across the dark plain of their king-size bed. But less and less. When she asked why, he couldn’t exactly tell her. He couldn’t say “because you have ruined your breasts twice, first with men and then with babies, because there’s no space for me, your past is full, your future planned.” I will stay in my cold corner of our too-large bed, he told himself. This will not change, this mattress, this torn spot of wallpaper by the table; this will stay, and I will forever be able to satisfy my pillow, desperate only for my sleeping head.
Tom cried there in the dark closet. He couldn’t satisfy her. Someone else had to. If he could fuck her mind with his mind and leave their bodies out of it. That was what he always wanted, pure mind fucking. The body makes it all base, all so rife with potential betrayal. She knows this, ask the Elf, she lied to him. She said she loved him as she backed away from the bed with plastic sheets. “You’re wonderful, I’ll be right back.” She tells this story, laughing, a cautionary tale, a commiseration with their single friends. She has been there. And he? He was only in the closet with his wife, who wouldn’t be his wife much longer.
Melissa had her arm around him, her forehead on his shoulder.
“We haven’t told the kids. Nothing’s set in stone,” she said. But they had been over this too much to turn back. He couldn’t find his footing; he was being pulled away by the force of this current. He loved her still. But he had already consulted a lawyer, three actually, informational interviews, screening them as he had the prospective nannies for their children and prospective specialists for his mother. The first was too bloodthirsty, used to shouts and refusals exchanged across a conference table. His watch seemed to have rates instead of hours. The second’s office smelled of canned minestrone and instant coffee; Tom almost expected to find carbon copies and electric typewriters on the lone receptionist’s desk. The last, somber and straightforward, like a funeral director for the royal family, was the obvious choice. As Tom left the office, the lawyer said to just leave the retainer with his assistant. Suddenly it was done, before he had even meant to do it. The current was taking him out. But Melissa wanted to keep trying. Which, to her, meant therapy. She wants them to go, together, separately, everything. She keeps talking about outlets and support.
“Things could change,” she whispered, “if we work at it, if we get some help.”
“We’re out of options,” Tom said. “People go to therapy to get divorced.”
“Well, then, if we’re getting divorced, why can’t we go to therapy?” asked Melissa.
“Because the job is done; you don’t go to a doctor for an appendectomy if you’ve already taken it out yourself.”
“This does kind of feel like amateur surgery.”
“Which one of us is the amateur?” Tom whispered. They were still trying to keep their voices down.
“I’m just kidding. It’s all awful; nothing about this feels good. I just thought we could use support.” They couldn’t see each other in the dark of the closet; she put a hand on his knee. He moved it away.
“Say what you mean. You really want me in therapy.”
“We need both. Together and separately. We need to figure out what is our shit together and what is our individual shit.” Melissa slid closer to him. He could smell the suntan lotion on her skin.
“So it’s all shit.” What did she even want to save then?
“Maybe getting a diagnosis would be helpful.” Her hand was back on his knee.
“Is there a medical term for slut?”
He felt Melissa twitch and then shift deeper into the closet, away from him.
“There’s one for depression”—she stopped whispering—“clearly professional help is in order.”
“That’s what lawyers are for,” he said.
“Jeez, just kill me now.”
“Look, I’m doing the best I can.” Tom’s whisper was growing louder, more raspy.
“Really? Because it feels like you’re not even trying.” She sounded tall and bright, even in the darkness.
“You think if we fuck more everything will be fine.”
She leaned close to him; he could feel her hair brush his arm.
“I think,” she whispered, “if we fuck at all we might have a chance in hell.” She said this into his ear, her breath burned.
There were footfalls in the great room. They stopped talking. Someone was coming. The door opened and a hand pushed the slickers out of the way.
“Ah!” said Libby before flinging a hand over her mouth and craning her neck to see if anyone was on the balcony above. She then stepped quickly into the closet and squeezed between the two of them.
“I can’t believe we all forgot to check this closet. Nice choice, Melissa.”
“Thanks.” She looked past Libby at Tom, who reached forward to pull the door shut, putting them all in darkness.
“Where are Danny and Gwen?” asked Melissa.
Now that Libby was hiding with them, now that he couldn’t have her, Tom wanted Melissa alone, back on his lap, her face between his hands. He wanted to answer her questions.
It’s not like this at home because I am afraid. Because if I don’t leave now, you will beat me to it, because if I fuck you the way I want to, I will disgust myself, you, the memory of my mother. I’ll be no better than he was.
He could smell the wine from dinner on Libby’s breath. She elbowed Tom to move over, giggling at the clatter of a tennis racket to the floor. Footsteps on the main staircase. Ten bucks says it’s Gwen. And there she was, opening the door and pushing past the raincoats, not even reacting to them, as if she knew they were in there all along.
“Shhhh,” she said. “Dan’s in the rug room; he heard me coming down the stairs.”
They were silent, holding their breath, pressed together, hot skin and the cold rubber of raincoats. There was nothing. Nothing. And then the sharp tap of a Ping-Pong ball on the paddle, fast, tap tap tap. The door yanked open. There he stood, paddle in hand. “Alright, everybody out of the closet. Libby, you first.”
“Very funny, loser,” said Libby, stepping over the boots and fallen rackets.
“Poor Danny Boy, always last,” said Gwen, patting his cheek as she stepped from the closet. Tom gestured for Melissa to go ahead. She moved to the doorway and reached back for his hand. He took it. I’m sorry, he mouthed. The others had gone toward the bay window, out of sight. He pulled her back into the closet. Kissed her.
“I don’t know why,” he said. “I wish I did.” She made a fist around a lock of his hair, shook it gently, and rested her other hand on his side. Then she let go, went to join the game. They were already counting.
FIVE
ANOTHER SUMMER
From the porch, the Willoughby children can hear the water. The tide turned now, coming in, slapping and gulping at the drum
s of the float, a sloshing in its belly, and a soft kissing of the rocks down on the beach. The wind is slack now. Not like this morning, when the blue twilight, the birds’ usual hour, was overtaken by wind funneling the oak leaves white and flattening the long grass of the meadow. So loud it woke them, lying in their beds, the nursery facing east away from the water, and still too loud in the trees. Now the wind is slow, the flag hangs loose on its pole, a handkerchief about to be dropped. Out in the thoroughfare the jammers are floating in on a breeze. Five sails and a streamer off the bow mast.
“Cattle boats,” their father says. So full of tourists, they line the deck. Their motor is on too, maybe the sails are just for show, but that’s fine. It’s a good show.
The pine has overtaken the smell of seaweed as the tide covers the rocks’ slippery skirt. When the wind is gone, they hear the white-throated sparrow calling, Sam Peabody Peabody Peabody. All sleepy and melancholy in his minor key, summer is short, he sings, it is already fading, even as fireworks bloom and motors buzz and lobsters head to warmer waters. Honeysuckle snakes up the steps, making them think their mother is wearing perfume.
The thunder of the jammer loosing its anchor to the harbor floor comes across the water fast and jumbled.
“Must rattle the ice in the tourists’ cocktails,” says their father.
Then there are big motorboats, all tinted windows and gleaming plastic, white and black like office buildings or getaway cars.
“Fornicatoriums,” their father says. The children laugh, though they don’t know what he means. They watch him scratch his back on the porch posts, like a bear, a bear with a beer in his paw. To them he is as strong, as furry. They wonder when they will have summertime lunchtime beers. Their mother shoos it away.
“Will put me to sleep,” she says.
“Exactly,” their father says.
He lays low in the Adirondack chair, feet on the wide rail, a crumb-strewn plate at his heels. He pulls his hat down to his nose, holds his beer on his belly, listens to the jammer’s anchor tumble up, done with their lunch too.
North Haven Page 5