by David Gates
She’s in Connecticut, house-sitting for the Hagertys the first three weeks of August, with the use of their second car, and sleeping in their dead daughter’s bedroom. This is their weekend-and-summer getaway, but Marian Hagerty hates the look of air conditioners in the windows, so in August they fly to Main-à-Dieu, on the easternmost coast of Cape Breton, in a chartered seaplane, to watch the fishing-boat races. Joe Hagerty had hired Lily’s father straight out of Harvard Law—a charity case, he liked to say. This got a laugh at her father’s memorial. Everyone there knew Skip Kiernan had turned down Harry Blackmun’s offer of a clerkship.
The Hagertys’ daughter, Elena, had gone to Dalton while Lily was at Brearley, but the summer Lily turned nine, the Kiernans rented a house near Joe and Marian’s—they hadn’t yet bought their own getaway—and her father drove her over one day to play tennis with Elena on the Hagertys’ clay court. (Portia, who was twelve, chose to go to the lake with their mother.) Elena, long hair flying, had Lily panting and sweating in the first few volleys. Lily remembers, years later, doing coke with her in the bathroom at Portia’s wedding, and Elena, now with boy-length hair, possibly coming on to her. A kiss on the lips? With just the most petite dart of the tip of Elena’s tongue? She had on an electric blue dress with spaghetti straps, and when she leaned forward over the countertop, Lily saw the nipples of her small breasts. Elena’s been dead for five years now, and Lily’s found not a trace of her in her old room: nothing in the dresser drawers but flowered paper lining the bottoms, nothing in the closet but satin-padded hangers. Are the Hagertys really so sure the dead don’t mind?
In these three weeks, she will swim every day; the Hagertys’ Subaru Forester has a sticker for the recreation area at the lake. She will eat better, keep her cellphone off, go online only once a day—just in case anybody responds to the résumés she sent out—and not smoke the weed she’s brought. She will read The Custom of the Country (the others were so good), reread Mansfield Park (the only one that’s still not too girly), try again to push beyond the beginning of Adam Bede, and leaven all this with whatever she may choose, on a whim, from the Hagertys’ shelves. Won’t that be something, to have a whim. As distinct from an impulse. And every night, eleven o’clock sharp, in bed, lights out, with a movie on her laptop and a glass of something. She’s brought only a half dozen of the old usuals along, since Marian told her the video store in town was owned by “film buffs.” This got Lily picturing gay boys with toned bodies, whom she could go look at every day in their tight T-shirts. Who says the pastoral is dead?
Portia had tried to talk her out of coming here—a bad time to isolate, she’d said. She’s also confided that when she’s alone she sometimes hears their father speaking to her. But Lily needed to get away from her one-bedroom in Brooklyn Heights, which she’d rented on the now-exploded theory that neighborhood trumps space. And also, let’s admit it, to get away from Dagon, whom she’d lately been feeding Rice Krispies, and whose litter box she’d been finding herself unable to clean and refill. Renaldo, the intern she’s kept in touch with since being laid off, agreed to stay with him in return for the three weeks of air-conditioning and a shorter subway ride. On the morning she gave Renaldo her keys, she finally bought cat food and changed the litter, which proved that she could do it.
And then there was this. On the Fourth of July, after a party where the revelers got high to watch the fireworks from a roof garden in Tribeca, she’d shared a taxi back to Brooklyn with Portia’s married boyfriend—Portia being otherwise occupied—and kissed him when he dropped her off at her building, tongues involved, then hands under the clothes. He’s been emailing her ever since, and while she’s been emailing back, she’s managed to avoid seeing him again. So really, doesn’t this speak well of her?
—
It’s after midnight when she gets here: a bus to Torrington, then a taxi along miles of dark country roads. Inside, the house is hot and stuffy; she sets her bags down in the kitchen and goes around opening windows. On the counter, under the keys to the Subaru, she finds a note from Marian Hagerty that goes to the tune of You may go down the lane, whatever whatever, but don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden. Lily is not to drink the wines in the cellar, each laid down by Joe to be opened at such and such a time. (“Not that you would, of course.”) She is not to have parties—“a friend or two is perfectly fine”—or overnight guests. If she uses the court, she is to wear only tennis shoes: i.e., bare-assed and breasts bouncing? Oh well, poor Marian. The once-scandalous second wife, suddenly in her sixties, bereft of her child and having to deal with Joe, now eighty-four and still playing doubles, with neighbors’ young wives as his partners.
Up in Elena’s bedroom, thank God, there’s a big floor fan; Lily puts it on the highest speed, opens a window and goes back downstairs for her duffel and her wheeled suitcase. She takes her orange plastic box of weed out of the zippered compartment and puts it in the freezer, between a pint of Häagen-Dazs vanilla and a bottle of Stoli. Any one of these three things could lead to the other two. But she goes to bed without. Isn’t that what she’s been doing?
In the morning, she makes coffee in the Hagertys’ French press and takes it out to the shady porch (“Please do not leave food on the veranda—we get the occasional raccoon”) along with a bowl of the muesli she found in the cupboard. The box says both “no sugar added” and “not a low-calorie food”: mixed signals, as if from a man!
Driving into town along the shore of the lake, she spots a farm stand: a rustic wagon that holds an array of tomatoes, squashes, ears of corn. Then a bar called Tony’s, with a green canvas awning. The town is a two-block main street without parking meters; she finds the video store, the organic market and the wine shop, where she is to ask for Victor. A tiny hair salon, so wittily called Delilah’s. In the wine shop, she buys a seventy-five-dollar bottle of sherry—yes! inspired!—for movie time. The younger, more handsome of the two men, the one with the curly hair, must be Victor. Oh, just a guess.
On the way back, she slows down for a better look at this Tony’s, although bars are not in the plan, then stops at the farm stand and buys zucchini, yellow summer squash and a fat tomato. It’s when she opens the kitchen door that she makes her discovery: she’d closed the downstairs windows so nobody could get in, and now it’s actually cool in here. Not a word of this in Marian Hagerty’s note!
She puts on her black bikini and checks herself: today is a good day. She and Portia had been issued the wrong bodies, back in the antecedent life. Lily has the ectomorphic mind—even the ectomorphic name—while portly sounding Portia stole the show, slinky-limbed, in the one ballet recital they did together. After that, Lily begged to take tap instead—all those old musicals their father made them watch—then refused to go when she learned the students had to wear tights: you could see the flesh shaking even on Ruby Keeler’s thighs, for Pete’s sake, when she tapped in 42nd Street.
At the lake, she spreads one of the Hagertys’ towels on the grass and takes her sweet time unbuttoning her shirt, sliding her jeans off, arching her back. From behind her sunglasses, she looks around her: all moms and kids, which is just as well. No, truly. The water’s warm at the surface, icy when you dive down. When she comes out, her body feels cool at the core, and lying down in the sun she’s so calmed it’s disturbing.
She eats a dinner of brown rice with zucchini and garlic, sliced tomato on the side. Then she goes up to Elena’s room, pulls down the shade, slips panties off one leg and thinks up Garrett in the taxi, her hand down the front of his jeans, her other hand down the back, then thinks up reaching into Elena’s blue dress—it’s vacation!—and touches her own breast with her free hand, then brings Garrett back in to play with her and Elena: even alone, you can’t know who’s watching. She makes herself come, twice, in Elena’s bed. Outside it’s still daylight.
—
When they went through her father’s things, Lily took a white shirt with a Brooks Brothers label and his razor, with which she now sha
ves her legs. In the back of his closet, she found the framed photo of the Shelley Memorial at Oxford that used to hang above the desk in his study; when he got sober, he’d replaced it with a photo of their cottage in Dennis Port. (“What’s your favorite sport?” her father would ask them, turning his head to the backseat, and they would shout back, “Dennis Port!”) When she was little, she would go into the study to look at it: a statue of a beautiful naked drowned man lying on his side; you could sort of see his junk. Neither her mother nor Portia had wanted the thing, so Lily hung it over her nonworking fireplace in Brooklyn. Sometimes she thinks it’s bringing her bad luck. But didn’t she already have that?
Except during the couple of years before he went to Silver Hill, Skip Kiernan had continually reread Shakespeare, Johnson and Wordsworth; their subliminally channeled cadences, he believed, had saved some corporate criminals from doing serious time. He used to pay both his daughters ten cents a line to memorize poems and recite them while he sat in his leather armchair with his drink. Portia stopped because it was babyish, but one night Lily made five dollars on Emily Dickinson. When Lily finally found a full-time job, copyediting at an upmarket bridal magazine, her father offered her ten thousand dollars, on top of her tuition, to quit and go get what he called “your Ph.D.” Behind Matt’s back. So now Matt’s out of the picture, she’s lost the job anyway and she’s just turned thirty-three. Should it be “Woe is me” or “Woe am I”?
Lily was in Amsterdam with Matt when Elena was shot by bandits in Malaysia, where she’d gone to work with Catholic Charities. “They had all that trouble with her,” Lily’s father said, “finally she gets her act together, and now this. Don’t you go doing good in the world.”
“Yeah,” Lily said, “what are the odds.”
—
The next morning she goes into the video store on the chance they might have Gold Diggers of 1933, which she was stupid not to have brought.
“I knew it,” the man at the counter says. “No. I’m sorry, we should.” His short blond hair’s just starting to go gray, and he’s got lines at the corners of his eyes and the beginnings of man breasts under the knit shirt.
“Oh, it was just a whim,” she says. “I’m afraid if I start browsing, I’ll never get out of here.” Already she’s spotted Carnival of Souls.
“That wouldn’t break my heart,” he says. Straight for sure, just unappealing. “If you find yourself jonesing for something, here’s the number.” He hands her a card. “Ask for Evan.”
Well, it’s a day for whims, isn’t it? Walking past the hair salon, she sees that both chairs are empty—and there’s your gay boy. Maybe. He’s got a shaved head, and he’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt. “Don’t be bashful,” he says when she sticks her head in. “Come. Sit.” A boom box on the glass shelf is playing the Robert Plant–Alison Krauss CD that everybody’s sick of back in the city. “First let me get a look at the lay of the land, and then we’ll shampoo you.”
He’s got strong fingers—she can feel her scalp move on her skull—and he’s rough with the towel. She’s still not sure about him. “So,” he says, walking her back to the chair, “what are we doing today?”
“Something we may end up regretting,” she says.
—
On the drive home—why not call it that?—she keeps pulling down the visor to check herself in the makeup mirror. The sky’s getting dark to the west; when she gets out of the car she hears faraway thunder. Excuse enough to bag the swim. She allows herself a few minutes in the bathroom to turn her head from side to side in front of the mirror; she hadn’t realized her ears were so big. She takes a shower, puts on her father’s big white shirt, then goes out to the porch, lies in the hammock and tries to stop touching her hair and get serious about Mansfield Park. Maria has fled with Henry Crawford—and Mary Crawford has proved so deficient in moral sense that she merely calls it “folly”! When the storm hits, she closes the book to watch: hailstones bouncing off the lawn, big trees waving like feather dusters—isn’t that good? Better write that one down.
After eating dinner she turns her cellphone on and finds a new message, from Garrett. You’re not answering your email. Call me. Contact me. What time is it, eight o’clock? A couple of hits now and it’ll wear off by movie time. She goes to the freezer and pinches just that much off a bud. It’s cool in the living room, where the original wood paneling has been cured in a couple of centuries of smoke from the original walk-in fireplace. She presses her nose into the wall, wishing to exchange molecules with that aroma, then lies back on the long leather sofa with her head propped up and starts her iPod—a mix Renaldo made for her, which sounds cold and clattery. The second song takes a much longer time to go by than the first, and when she’s somewhere in the middle of the next one she can’t remember back to the first song—oh, good, this is good. If you could be like this all the time, you’d never worry about the years flying by, because even an hour is just so full. Too full, actually.
She wakes up on the sofa in full morning light. She’d considered going up to the bedroom, but it would’ve been hot and she would’ve had to deal with the fan and, let’s admit it, she’d been afraid Elena might be up there. One of the big buds is gone, and half the bottle of sherry. She starts coffee; that should take care of the headache, though Satan’s whispering, How’s about a little drinkie? She eats a handful of raisins and—though it’s way off schedule—goes upstairs to get into her bikini.
The lake water feels so cold she just stands there up to her knees, hugging herself. She looks around: at this time of morning there’s nobody here to see her punk out. Just a thin little girl whose fat mommy is yelling, “That doesn’t work for me!” What has the little girl done?
Back at the house, she finds rackets and some cans of balls in the mudroom and goes out to the tennis court. She hits a half-dozen balls over the net, then walks over, barefoot on the hot clay, and hits them back. Okay, clearly, she can’t put this off any longer. She goes back inside and turns on her cell.
“Hey, I was about to give up on you,” Garrett says. “Listen, some friends of mine invited me up to Kent this weekend. That’s not too far from you, right?”
“Don’t you get enough action with my sister?” she says. “And your wife?”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but somehow I got the idea that you and I both sort of take things on a case-by-case basis.”
“You’re making me wet,” she says.
“Okay, you’re pissed at me. I’ll give you a call when I get up there tomorrow night.”
“You really like yourself, don’t you?”
“I’ll pass on that one,” he says. “How about you?”
—
Lily and Matt had broken up a year before Portia’s marriage ended—which was counterintuitive, because shouldn’t the less traditional couple be revealed to have the stronger foundation, or was this counter-counterintuitive? She’d moved into Matt’s low-tide-smelling factory loft in Greenpoint, where he used to live with Melanie, his previous girlfriend. One night the bass player in his band said, “Thanks, Mel,” as Lily passed him a platter of couscous and lamb; when she brought it up later, Matt said it wasn’t his fault. That was when she got the idea to fuck the bass player.
He was a tall, lanky specimen, like all bass players, named Rob. Called Rob, strictly speaking. This would be a one-shot deal, off in its own space: wear a halter top to a gig, brush the girls against his arm, email him to consult about a gift for Matt’s birthday, meet him at Sam Ash, go for a drink afterward. Portia herself couldn’t have done it more efficiently.
When Lily refused to go to his place a second time, Rob quit the band and moved back to Chapel Hill, which wasn’t at all the spirit of the thing. And then she began to email him—not only men were allowed to send mixed signals!—and of course Matt got into her email, and so on.
By the time Portia found out about her husband’s girlfriend in Bilbao, Lily was able to give her refuge in Brooklyn Heights, on the foldout she’
d been so prescient to buy. Every night they drank a bottle of Sancerre apiece and watched one of the old movies their father had loved; Portia always sobbed at the happy endings, then kept sobbing, even after Lily had clicked over to CNN.
“I felt like Daddy was watching with us,” she said one night, when Swing Time was over and Larry King had Ed Asner on, talking about his autistic son.
“I’m curious,” Lily said. “What kind of stuff does he say? You know, when he’s speaking to you?”
“He just says—I don’t want to say.” She began to cry again. “He says, ‘I’m taking care of you now.’ ”
“I wish he’d spread it around a little,” Lily said.
“I don’t know,” Portia said. “He’s not doing that good of a job.”
Portia had never liked getting high when they were teenagers, but Lily asked around and found some weed sneaky enough not to panic her at first. But they overdid anyway, and after vomiting (Lily used the sink and let Portia have the toilet) they lay spooned on the bathroom floor the rest of the night. “Don’t take this the wrong way, okay?” Portia said in the morning, when they finally felt okay to go to bed. “But that was the most fun I’ve ever had with you.”
Portia had met Garrett when some of her friends brought some of their friends to the housewarming at her new apartment. Lily had disliked him—the leather jacket plus the soul patch plus the wedding ring. She overheard him telling Portia that he’d rather read Edith Wharton than Henry James—clever fellow—and then he whispered something and flicked her earlobe with his tongue.
“But what’s in it for you?” Lily asked her a couple of weeks later.