Summerlong

by Dean Bakopoulos

  “I’m very sorry, Charlie,” he says. “I had no idea you were back home. It’s just, Penny and Clark here are on a tight schedule, and this house seems perfect, plus your mother said, you know, if I had a buyer, I could let myself in . . .”

  She hadn’t really said that to Don, of course, but Charlie seems to buy it.

  “Well, I’m back,” Charlie says. “But looks like my bare ass scared off your buyers.”

  Don looks behind him, and sees that Penny and Clark have gone. He excuses himself and goes to the front yard, where Clark stands at the end of the driveway on his phone, and Penny looks up at the house from the sidewalk.

  “He’s trying to call a cab,” Penny says.

  “It’s Grinnell. There are no cabs. I’ll take you back to your hotel.”

  Penny places her hand on her rounded stomach, and Don looks down at her hand, the shimmer of a massive engagement ring and a gold wedding band.

  She starts to cry.

  Clark is looking at his phone now, yelling at it.

  “I’m very sorry,” Don says. “That was probably stressful for you, and I didn’t have any idea someone would be home, let alone two people screwing by the swimming pool.”

  Penny begins to cry. “They weren’t fucking,” she says, with this kind of laugh that crumples into tears. “She was blowing him!”

  Penny screams with laughter.

  “We’ll walk!” Clark bellows at her, and begins storming away down the street. “Fuck off, Don Lowry!”

  Most of the neighborhood will have heard that, and for a moment, Don imagines everyone on Elm Street coming out to their porches to echo the sentiment. “Fuck off, Don Lowry!” they would call over their rosebushes and from the edges of their swept driveways and from the balconies off their second-story master bedrooms and from the workshops in the garage. The whole city gradually coming to realize what an asshole Don Lowry, lifelong Grinnellian, truly was! “Fuck off, Don Lowry.”

  Clark makes it two blocks and then he turns and they lose sight of him. Penny is crying now and Don touches her arm as tentatively as one can touch an arm and says, “I’ll drive you back.”

  “He’s very stressed out,” Penny says.

  “Moving is stressful. New babies are stressful. New jobs are stressful,” Don says. “I’ve done all those things. Sometimes you snap.”

  “It’s not his baby,” Penny says, when they are in the truck, and on the short drive to the Comfort Inn, she tells him everything, about a man she worked with, whom she loved but who did not love her, and how she and Clark had been having trouble conceiving, and how she had conceived the baby with the other man, but had only told this to Clark a week before.

  In the circle drive of that depressing hotel, she says, “I’m a terrible person,” which reminds Don Lowry of something his own father said years ago, to which Don Lowry’s mother had said, “Yes. I think you are.”

  But he says something different to her, because he doesn’t think she is any better or worse than anyone else he knows.

  “We’re all terrible people,” he says. “Eventually, we all become terrible, maybe around the middle of our lives, and then, if we’re lucky, we have time to find a way to be good again.”

  “Do you really believe that?” she asks.

  “I just thought of it,” he says. “But yes. Yes, I think that’s true.”

  He drives around a bit, windows open, the heat of the long day turned to a breezy dusk. He is not sure what to do next. Eventually, Don stops off at the Hy-Vee for beer. He buys a twelve-pack of decent beer, Stella Artois, for Charlie, an apology. He buys a twelve-pack of cheap beer for himself, Miller High Life Light, because he is broke, and a six-pack of root beer for the kids. Next he stops off at the Pizza Hut, and buys two large Hot-N-Ready pizzas. Moving through downtown, he sees Clark, sitting on a park bench, his head in his hands. He pulls over, breaks open the twelve-pack of Miller, and comes out of the truck holding the beer, which he hands to Clark without a word, and then gets back into his truck and drives away toward home.

  Home, he finds his kids watching television in the cool basement, a movie about a soccer-playing dog, and sets down one of the two pizzas in front of them, along with the root beer, a development they cheer.

  “Thanks, Daddy!” Wendy says, and leaps up with a hug so swiftly it nearly knocks him over. He feels as if his bones are made of melting ice, and he starts to cry, so he heads for the stairs before the children notice it. From the stairs he calls out, “Is your mom home yet?” to which Bryan says, “No!” and to which Don says, “Really? Still gone? Well, Bryan, you’re in charge. I have to do one more errand! I’ll be home soon.”

  “What are you doing?” Bryan says. “What’s the errand?”

  “Just a thing.”

  “You and Mom are always coming home and then going back out,” Wendy says.

  “Well, we’re busy,” Don says.

  “It’s stressful,” Wendy says.

  He drives slowly across town, a zigzag pattern around the campus. It is dark now. The remaining pizza is hot, but not as hot as it should be for an apology pizza, and he laughs at the phrase apology pizza and thinks of what a good business that could be, a website that facilitates the ordering of pizza anywhere in the world, to be delivered, paid for, to the address of your choice. Fight with your grown children? Send ’em an apology pizza! Insult a colleague on a different coast? Apology pizza! Awkward Skype session with a former lover? Apology pizza!

  He moves through the backyard, coughing loudly as he hauls the pizza and beer. He doesn’t want to surprise ABC and Charlie again. He has to set down the beer and pizza to unlock the safety gate of the tall cedar fence, and when he opens the gate awkwardly he sees all three of them, ABC and Charlie and Claire, sitting at the table, drinking beer. There is a bottle of tequila on the table, and a bowl of limes, and a shaker of salt.

  Claire is smoking a cigarette with her feet up. You can see right up her dress.

  “Why, Don Lowry,” ABC says, “you brought us pizza, and just in time. I’m ravenous!”

  And then Claire stands up, a feat that requires some effort, it seems, as if the pool deck is spinning and swaying beneath her. She pulls her sundress over her head and hurls herself into the pool.

  That night, when they get home and find the kids asleep in their clothes as an R-rated movie flickers on the television—a woman is being chased by a gun-wielding maniac—half-eaten pizza and empty root beer bottles littering the couch around them, Claire says, “We’re terrible parents.”

  “Touché,” he says.

  Years ago, when the children were small, Wendy barely two, they’d been having a whispered fight—trying to argue without waking the children. Claire had used the word touché, and Don had never known what that word had meant: he thought it meant fuck you in French, some misinformation he’d learned in middle school and had never, somehow, corrected. He raged when she said that until, after some painful conversation, she finally explained to him, with the aid of a dictionary, what touché actually meant. Their fight, that night, had ended in laughter. Actually, she remembers now how it ended: they had gone into the laundry room, which had a lock on the door to keep the kids away from the chemicals they stored there, and they had fucked against the washing machine as it whirred a load of cloth diapers clean. It had been an almost angry fuck, the two of them violent and loud with each other and she had come harder than she’d ever come in her life, feeling him explode inside her. She made him do it again to her, finding newfound freedom in a room with the white noise of a washer and dryer and a bolted-shut door. For a while, they’d find each other in that room almost nightly. She thinks about it now—and misses him.

  Once they have half carried, half nudged the kids up to their beds, she undresses and slides on one of his T-shirts and finds him again on the deck outside. He has cleaned up the pizza and the root beer bottles and has straightened up the pillows on the downstairs couch and is now sitting outside in a deck chair, drinking a b
eer.

  “God,” Claire says. “I was pretty drunk. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. It was a fucked-up day.”

  “Fucked-up summer.”

  “It’s a small world. I didn’t know you knew the Gulliver kid.”

  “Well, I knew Gill. I remember Charlie from some of the plays he did in high school, the year we first moved here. He was in a few things.”

  “And you remembered him?”

  “He was good. Memorable enough, and he was Gill Gulliver’s son, you know, so . . .”

  “I always thought Professor Gulliver wanted to fuck you. I hated him.”

  “He wanted to fuck a lot of people,” Claire says.

  “I fucked him,” Don says. “Still got a B.”

  They both begin to laugh, silent laughs that make them shake and tear up a bit, because it is the kind of laughter one engages in when everything else feels hopeless.

  “We’re broke and we’re smoking pot with twenty-year-olds,” Don says.

  “Like twenty-nine is more accurate,” Claire says. “In Charlie’s case.”

  They laugh some more, but Don gets sullen.

  “They are so young and beautiful,” Claire says. “Do you remember us like that?”

  “Claire, I still see you as young and beautiful. It doesn’t change for me.”

  “You’re sweet. But it changes.”

  “We’re so fucked. I totally didn’t make that sale.”

  “The house isn’t supposed to be shown yet, Don.”

  “How did you end up there?”

  “I was on a walk, Don. I saw your truck. I thought maybe I could help make a sale.”

  “Yes, here is my depressed wife who hates living in Grinnell. Would you like her to help you with this major life decision?”

  She moves closer to him, sitting on his lap.

  “No matter what happens,” Claire says, “I can always forgo underwear to save money. As I am doing right now.”

  “You never have wanted to help me make a sale,” Don says. “Why today?”

  “We need it.”

  “And what do you mean ‘no matter what happens’?” Don says.

  “Don,” she says, “stop talking.”

  She runs her hand along his thigh. He’s gritting his teeth and looking away. She knows the look. They have been in love for a long time, and she can tell when he is resisting without resisting. Don Lowry, like all men, wants to be desired. Nothing is sexier to him than a woman coaxing him gently, begging him. She’s played the role before. She knows the terrain. In fact, Don Lowry’s really the only sexual terrain she knows, a thought which has always comforted her, but, sometimes, if she’s honest about it, also terrifies her.

  “See,” she says, taking his hand and running it up her thigh, under the T-shirt. She leads his fingers to the moistening warmth under the T-shirt, and sighs in his ear. He responds. He begins to touch her. “No underwear, no problem. That’s like sixty bucks a year right there.”

  “The kids,” Don says. “They’re asleep?”

  “Exhausted,” Claire says. “They’ll sleep forever.”

  She lets out a low moan in his ear, moves her hand to the front of his pants, feels him hardening there and moans in his ear again. “What I want is for you to fuck me right here,” she says, “but someone will call the police when I come, because I will scream.”

  “Claire,” Don says.

  She knows he is turned on, can feel and sense that, but she knows he has trouble responding to her dirty talk. She has to keep going forward. It has started, almost, this sex, as an act of pity, of habit, but now she wants him, and maybe it is true that she wants anyone and he’s the only one here. Maybe she wants him to be Charlie. She pushes that thought out of her mind, rubs him through his pants again, and thinks of seeing Charlie naked, swimming toward her.

  “I’m going to go downstairs,” she says. “Join me?”

  “Okay,” he says, finally smiling. He stands and she follows, pressing herself into him as they make their way inside.

  “I know this is all very sudden,” she whispers.

  “What do you mean?” he says.

  She buries her face in his neck. She does not acknowledge, even to herself, that the neck that flashes in her mind is Charlie’s and not Don’s. “I mean, we just met at that party tonight, but I liked watching you swim. Have I told you my name? It’s Claire.”

  “I liked watching you too,” Don says, finally catching on to her game, and having the same flash, too much to acknowledge, of ABC, and her breasts, and how they would have moved when she dropped her towel. “I’ve noticed you at soccer practice before too, actually.”

  “You have kids?”

  “Home sleeping,” he says.

  “You left them home alone! What a terrible father!”

  Don shrugs. “You should meet their mother. She does it all the time. Total slut.”

  Claire laughs. In her private thoughts of late, in the fantasies she has entertained on an almost hourly basis so far this summer, she is insatiable, fucking Charlie Gulliver, and other men too, in showers and pools and on the desk in Charlie’s father’s desolately cluttered office.

  “We’ll go to my place,” she whispers. “So I can be loud. My kids are staying with their father tonight.”

  They go to the basement, locking the old child-safety lock they had put up high on the door years before, when Bryan was still a toddler and Don and Claire had been remodeling the basement and worried he’d get into the power tools and paints. Now they lock it behind them and know they are safe. On the staircase, she undoes his pants. Don kicks aside a pizza crust someone has dropped there, but they both pretend not to notice.

  He takes off her T-shirt. “Sit down, on the steps,” he says and she does as she is told. It’s been a long time since he’s told her what to do. She likes it. He begins to move down her body with his mouth, and she puts her legs up on his shoulders, and when he finally fucks her there on the staircase, silent the whole time, she shudders in a way she has never shuddered before, scratching his back, kicking her legs, and finally biting on his chest so hard she leaves a huge welt.

  Afterward, still entangled on the floor, damp with sweat, torsos twined together, Don says, “Did you? With him?”

  Claire pushes herself up and Don runs his hands down her back, clutches at her hips.

  “No. Did you? With her?”

  “No,” Don says.

  “Isn’t it weird?” she says. “I’m not sure I’d even care.”

  “It might even be hot,” Don says.

  “We’ve been married a long time,” she says. “You never know.”

  She takes his hand and leads him down the rest of the stairs, both of them still naked in the easy way of two people who’ve been together so long it makes no sense to be modest. Everything has already been seen, every circumstance has been played out. Hasn’t it?

  It’s done, Claire thinks as they fall asleep, spooning.

  I’m done.

  In the morning, they shower in the downstairs bathroom, get clean clothes from the dryer in the laundry room, and come up the stairs to find the kids in the kitchen, eating Rice Krispies.

  “Why was the door locked?” Bryan says.

  “Was it?” Claire says. “I don’t know. I must have done it out of habit.”

  “You sleep in the basement now?” Wendy asks.

  “But you never lock doors,” Bryan says. “We almost called 911.”

  “Gotta go, Team Lowry,” Don says, looping around the table once to kiss each kid atop the head. “I’m late.”

  Only Wendy is delighted by this, only Wendy kisses him back, a wet, milky kiss on the cheek. Bryan rolls his eyes.

  Don kisses the side of Claire’s neck before he leaves.

  Already, Claire wonders if it has been a mistake, the erotic abandon of the previous night. It has confused the issue, of course. Don would come home from work and try to get her to stop talking separation, to, as he would proba
bly say, “stop the shenanigans.” He was a big shenanigan stopper. It had become one of his favorite phrases as a father.

  He would think that everything was better, that separation, that divorce, was off the table.

  Now, with her wet hair slicked back, feeling Don still, somehow, on her neck, inside her body, she makes scrambled eggs to supplement the shitty cereal the kids are eating. The kids, groggy, have gotten their own glasses of orange juice and sit at the table in sleepy silence, having stayed up way too late the night before. Now, as they eat breakfast, they’re reading books. Both of them like to read, and Claire does not allow any “screen time” before the sunset during the summer, so they always have books going. They go to the library every week for more books. They can walk there, even, by themselves now, and Claire suddenly, that very morning, is amazed that her domestic life is changing so much, so swiftly. She feels both liberated and adrift.

  By the time the kids have devoured the breakfasts she’s made for them, the kitchen is a disaster, and the brief infusion of liberation dissipates. She misses Don in a way she hadn’t wanted to miss him. How can she even imagine a life without him? She feels guilty for the thoughts she had while falling asleep.

  Years ago, when she and Don first started having sex, she would feel the same way after he would slip out of her dorm room in advance of an arriving roommate or an early class. She would feel alone in a different kind of way than she had ever felt before and it terrified her.

  We can get through this, she thinks.

  No, she thinks. We can’t.

  What’s happened to us? she thinks.

  Whenever she thinks of them as us, thinks of them as a couple, one image stands out in her mind. It is of them at a wedding, about six months after Wendy was born. They are sleep deprived, both a little out of shape: Claire’s still-nursing breasts swelling from a thin-strapped sundress that is too tight across her stomach, and Don is fleshy faced and beer gutted, unused to the slower metabolism of an ex-athlete. They do not look as good as many of their college friends at that wedding—they lack the suntans and new clothes. Broke, they have not been on a summer vacation, nor have they purchased stylish, better-fitting clothes. But they have left the kids with Don’s sister for the night, and they are alone in a hotel reception room in downtown Minneapolis, and they are slow dancing. Claire, barefoot, because her heels were killing her, and Don, covered in sweat from the rowdy shaking he’d done on the dance floor earlier. But now she drapes against him, feeling how strong he is, feeling, as they pressed into each other, all of that history, the bond of all of those years they have spent together, growing up. She leans up to him. She kisses him on the mouth—she is not much for public displays like that, but kisses him long and deep, holding him tight, feeling his heat, his strength, those muscles still present under the new flesh. “Wild Horses” is playing. Don, boozily and off-key, begins to whisper-sing the lyrics in her ear, a bad Mick Jagger singing, “‘Couldn’t drag me a-wa-a-a-a-ay.’”