Pure Hollywood

by Christine Schutt

  But that was why they were here now, so early, at the pool. The familiar woman from last night’s dinner said oh, yes, indeed, she could certainly understand, the boy was … well, just look at the boy, so alive, the way he reached for his mother!

  Lolly said to the boy, “Daddy will take you.”

  Sadly, the pool was not as blue as it was in the brochures. On her uncle’s island the water was so bright Lolly didn’t dare look at it directly.

  “Dick,” she called out to her husband, “don’t you want sunglasses?”

  Dick and Jonathan were sitting on the steps into the pool; no one was swimming. Lolly, just behind them on a long chair, was getting sleepy. The whiteness of things—the canvas umbrellas and cabanas, the pool’s paved edge—stunned the plants still. The boy and his father were silent. The boy sat in water to his waist and floated his arm on the surface of the water; the father’s face was water in a glass, without expression. He said nothing to Lolly’s voice, so his wife shut her eyes and woke alone in the shade.

  When had they left?

  “A long time ago,” the nearest guest said.

  Itchy, sunburned—Lolly walked unsteadily toward the white glare beyond the palm trees, but when she saw Dick, she turned back for her room before he saw her.

  (Later, after the accident, a guest remembered seeing Lolly walking up the hill toward the cabana. She was crying. She was crying and unsteady and tripped on a step. The guest said he would have helped but that Lolly was too far away from him, and she was in a hurry and didn’t seem to want help. The way her body swiped past staff and guests, he could see her disdain for them.

  “The young woman could be supercilious,” said the woman who swam with Lolly some mornings.)

  Jonathan, on the beach, gouged the sand with a shovel he held like a lance. His father fell asleep. No one saw the little boy walk off, although even Lolly claimed she heard him, and knew he was lost. What crying!

  “But I am,” Lolly said. “We are,” she insisted. She was standing in the buffet line at dinner. Her pert dress had bow-tied string straps and matched the flowers on her sandals. Washed hair, lipstick. Her pale skin was mesmeric and slick under the light of netted globes. Jonathan was not with them. He had been found, bathed, pajamaed: he was asleep. “Lucky us,” Lolly said, and then the Hedges ate in silence.

  Sometime in the night when the tree frogs had ceased to sing, a cry, followed by another, sounded on the hillside. It might have been a sound of pleasure or pained pleasure or something else; the cry was ambiguous. One of the guests thought it might have been the little boy, the only little boy—the only child—at the resort, but the little boy seemed better the next morning. He could walk; no one carried him into the breakfast room. Jonathan held his mother’s hand, and he was subdued, even serene at the table. He sucked on a wedge of toast.

  Dick and Lolly looked tired, but after breakfast they took off in a taxi to tour the island. They returned hours later, just after noon. Lolly hoisted herself from the taxi and walked off with her arms held out; she smelled of vomit. She walked quickly to her cabana. No lunch, no tea, no sunset cocktail for her—not even dinner.

  “I hope your wife is not unwell,” from someone who noticed Dick alone with Jonathan at a dark corner table. Dick said, no, Lolly was asleep, a long day with the baby. Dick said that if they were at home, Jonathan would be in bed.

  And where was home?

  In the middle of the country.

  Nothing to be embarrassed about, the man said and looked on as Dick worried the boy’s fingers apart to get hold of something speared and plastic. Jonathan fought for it, but once it was lost, he looked around and was distracted, expectant, hopeful as a dog for the next toy, and he got it: a slice of orange from Father’s drink to suck on.

  Again, in the night, there was a noise, but this time it did sound like a baby.

  Lolly was a princess by her own admission; the noisiness of snowscapes, of snow falling or newly fallen, gave her headaches, so that island vacations were best. This was Jonathan’s first such vacation, but Lolly confessed she had not considered the meaninglessness of travel for a two-year-old. Soft fruit with Cheerios was breakfast anywhere for Jonathan, and he smeared banana into his mouth and gooed his arms and the bib of his shirt. Cereal stuck to him as it would to anything that oozed, and Lolly said she did not want to get near the boy. “Stay away from me,” she said in a serious voice, but she smiled at the boy, so it seemed she was joking, and he reached for her again and she screamed. Hardly what had been heard on the hillside last night. Last night’s screams had sounded astonished.

  Did Lolly like her baby?

  Lolly often fell asleep on the job so that whoever was still awake had to care for the little boy, but where was he, Jonathan?

  Asleep, asleep.

  After that day on the beach when the boy wandered away and discovered he liked the water, for a time at least liked it, on his own, after that day when the boy could have drowned, Dick and Lolly kept Jonathan on the terrace that trembled in the light through the split-leaf fans and flapping foliage. Jonathan played on the terrace with a local girl who saw to it that he was fed.

  So Jonathan had a local nanny. How else to explain how blissfully empty-handed Lolly was. “Look at me,” and she shut her eyes in mid-sentence and fell asleep on the beach.

  When she woke, she waved at her husband. “Good luck chasing fish!” she called out to him. Dick was on the ocean for so long—all afternoon—that Lolly went to the dock in search of him, not worried, but curious: and there he was on the boat. There was Dick on the big and tipsy vessel that slowed to the dock. They did not have a camera between them, but the resort took a picture of Dick as he stood next to his fish.

  Had Lolly ever heard of a wahoo? For that was what Dick had caught and ordered grilled for dinner.

  The dinner could have been photographed, too, but they didn’t have a camera. Lolly had seen this scenery before, and Jonathan was sick. She didn’t want a picture of a sick little boy. No, when Jonathan was well, then they would buy a camera. For now, for Lolly, it was nice, a treat, a real pleasure to sleep in the sun without worry. It was enough. Shells, shell jewelry, decorated mirrors and flowerpots and smoky perfumes, coconut creams and coconut heads and apothecary jars of sea glass and colored sand were so much village junk. She liked to be empty-handed.

  Another night Dick sat at dinner alone.

  “I hope the family is okay,” said the concierge when Dick asked for a doctor he might call in case. But yes, they were okay. His wife was only tired, and the little boy was happiest eating toast with his mother. The little boy was fine, yes. Dick had nothing more to talk about. He wandered into a daze and ate alone and silently, and after dinner he walked the beach. Dick Hedge, a young man with a tired face, sipping a foamy cocktail. He had another cocktail at the bar and still another when the dancing began. He swiveled in his seat to watch everyone partnered. Later when he weaved his way through the dancers, the music was louder but some of his words—don’t … why … can’t—carried and a dancer looked after him: why was the young man so often alone?

  After the second day at the resort they penned the little boy in the terrace of their cabana. Lolly said Jonathan just loved Cecilia. Cecilia was courtesy of the resort. Her mother was on the staff. Heavy, brown, robustly pretty, Cecilia looked alert enough for a girl, but she was twelve, so was it any wonder? Cecilia and Jonathan were on the terrace every day. She kept the sliding windows open so he could crawl from the terrace to the bedroom and around the bathroom and into the closets. Most of the cabanas on the hill were not large; the Hedges did not have the version with the pool.

  The little boy was restless and one day he climbed onto the bed, then onto the tippy dresser chair, then onto the dresser. Cecilia laughed to tell Lolly how she had found Jonathan on the dresser, bumping against the reflection of himself in the dresser mirror, making faces.

  Cecilia said, “He sure look like he feel something then.”

&nbs
p; The next day Lolly reported as much to the woman she called the Swimmer. Yes, Jonathan was better. Only one more day on the pink medicine, and wouldn’t that be a relief. Then Jonathan might play freely in full sun. Then they could be like a family again. But no more golf! No, Dick would have to squeeze in the holes during naptime, and there would be no more mornings like this one for her. Lolly laughed and the familiar flowered cap nodded back. This woman, the Swimmer, was Lolly’s clock. There before anyone else and swimming back and forth and back and forth, this woman held on to the edge of the pool and tried to kick, but her heavy lower body stayed below. She strained to kick and listened to Lolly.

  “That’s my morning,” Lolly said to Dick on the patio at lunch when she was describing the Swimmer. At lunch on the patio, Lolly described the Swimmer’s struggle in the water, the small splashes that were kicks. Lolly made a comparison between her life and the woman’s swimming, the struggle to break the surface.

  “Jesus,” Dick said. He was not in the mood for Lolly’s tireless, tiredly lyrical self-analysis. He was flushed; he had played poorly; he wanted a beer. “If that’s how you feel,” he said.

  “My father told me …”

  “Your father, your father … give me a break.”

  “I am finding it hard, Dick.”

  “Hard? What’s hard, Lolly?” Dick called over the waiter and ordered his beer. “I know what you could make hard.”

  Someone at a nearby table overheard this last remark—or maybe all of the remarks—and coughed.

  Lolly loudly pushed away from the table and stood up. “I hate this fucking place,” she said to the cougher, and then she walked off in the direction of the beach.

  (Later, after the accident, this squabble on the patio would be remembered by more than one other guest, and it wasn’t the sound of Lolly’s voice this time that made the impression. There were others, not just the cougher, who wondered why these two, so lovely and young and clearly comfortable if not rich, why they, with their pouty, pretty son, were so unhappy.

  Why did Lolly frown so much?

  Why was it Dick drank and drank alone?

  Was it their little boy? Was it that they did not know what to do with their little boy? Why had they brought him if they meant to keep him out of sight and in the care of a girl who was clearly unequipped? Why had they selected this resort and not one geared for younger couples and their children?

  These were some of the questions some people asked after the accident.)

  What was no accident but bad luck was the direction Lolly walked in after the incident on the patio because after she left Dick at the table she walked away from the resort, down the strip of beach that came to rock, and then over the rock—she scraped her legs climbing—to the wilder beach growth that scratched. She walked through this brittle, scratchy, wild stuff to the road and continued to walk toward what might become a village. But she never discovered a village, because after more than an hour, Dick came up behind her in a taxi. He opened the door and beckoned her inside. “Please,” he said. “Something has happened.”

  Lolly knew enough to get in and that was when he told her.

  If she had walked to the cabana instead of toward nothing, the boy might have been saved.

  But who could blame the girl Cecilia? Cecilia was a girl, and Jonathan was a restless, fully mended little boy. One minute he was in the bedroom watching TV with Cecilia, and the next, he was gone to the terrace.

  Jonathan, the climber, climbed onto the terrace chair and then onto the table and then over the railing. Jonathan fell more than twenty feet to the rock path below the terrace. He fell and on the instant died. He fell over the railing and cracked his skull and many other bones that gave him shape.

  (Later, the resort guest chorus ooohed but stayed away and mostly quiet. “We’re on vacation,” the guests said. Only Lolly’s morning friend, the Swimmer, came forward and saw the couple off. The Swimmer, a woman acquainted with loss, saw the Hedges’ sad departure and thought now Lolly Hedge had more than a musical voice; now she had a story, for which in time she might say she was thankful.)

  Species of Special Concern

  On the subject of plant names Bob Cork was indifferent: the common names for things were commonly changing. “Call her what you like,” Bob Cork said, so Dan looked into the orange-yolk bell of a quaintly named daylily—”Button Box”—and considered its strong, heavy stem.

  “Let’s call her ‘Nancy Cork,’” he said.

  “There’s an idea!”

  “Which direction did she go in, your wife?”

  Bob Cork pointed toward the north meadow and a view of not so much land as sky—all promise for the lepidopterist. “She’s got the ATV now,” he said, “an off-road vehicle. Four-wheel,” he said. The ATV meant she could drive over any terrain and add to her life list. Nancy Cork, famous as a sighter for species of special concern. “Spicebush swallowtail,” Bob Cork said. “Not seen since 1934. She saw him last year and she hopes to see him again.” Bob Cork, a lean, hempen, homiletic man, worn as his old jeans—duct-taped sandals, corkscew ponytail—told Dan that the “Grisley”-model ATV he had recently bought his wife, despite her protests at the expense, was top of the line. “I told her I want a bank full of memories, not a bank full of money.”

  Bob Cork used the same line to describe how he had talked Nancy Cork into a spring vacation in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Only the flying was hard. They hadn’t expected a pat-down at security and tried to explain what was inside Nancy that made the machines bleep, but those TSA folks, man, they’d gone ahead and made her cry. Nancy’s arm was swollen to the size of a ham to begin with. Worst part of the trip, really.

  Bob Cork, in a ditch again in one of his stories, worried his mouth like a toothless man.

  Dan wondered at him. Why hadn’t Bob Cork bundled his wife in pillows and throws and kept her comfortable through the winter? But he wanted to sozzle tropical drinks while he stood in water to his waist.

  Bluest water they’d ever seen. “Like blue diamonds,” Bob Cork said.

  And every part of Nancy Cork smarting in it, no doubt.

  Dan looked out at the tired nursery: slugs on the ligularia and mildewed phlox; hostas exhausted and bee balm ruffed as fighting cocks.

  “My phlox is mildewed, too,” he said.

  Bob Cork said, “Nursery’s always been Nancy’s, you know. And I’ve got the twin grandkids now and the little horses to take care of.” Bob Cork held up a daylily, set it down, and said: “Nancy’s stopped treatment.” Then he lifted up another “Nancy Cork,” many-stemmed and hardy, and set it in the wagon at Dan’s nodding assent.

  “Great,” Dan said, meaning the plant, of course, but he saw Bob Cork’s eyes wobble, and he looked away at the daylily in the wagon and for a time was respectfully silent. Dan said, “If you could find me one more like this one.”

  Dan was sure Nancy Cork prized, above all, her privacy in pain. Howling was something to be done in the wilderness. They had a shared love of plants, which translated into a view of nature as brutal and final—few plants die well, most go out grotesque. Best cut them down. Dan knew that if Nancy Cork were here she would hide her blown-up parts and carry on—she was carrying on. Over twenty acres of fields and woods for her to track the everyday as much as the rare and endangered, the cabbage whites and mustards, orange sulphurs, clouded sulphurs, little sulphurs or little yellows. Nancy Cork was adding to her life list. She was impressing new paths on the meadows and the scruffier places with her Grisley ATV four-wheeler.

  “Yes,” Dan said, “that daylily, and one more like it.”

  Bob Cork had a good eye for vigorous plants but no genuine interest in them. He was a birder, a retired high school biology teacher, a breaker of little horses, and—most important of all—a grandpa to twin grandkids. “It’s a lot of work and with Nancy’s plants,” Bob Cork said.

  Dan had never seen the grandkids, but he had seen the little horses in the barn, dull stubby ponies, furred like
buffalo, rough bangs, tiny eyes—unpettable. Our grandkids can’t stop loving on them! Bob Cork’s refrain was hard to credit. Dan was sure Nancy Cork didn’t like pets. She expressed no affection for the cats sprung out from under plants in ghost attacks and feints. She said nothing about dogs. Wolflike dogs made piteous sounds down the road, but at Nancy Cork’s Hidden Gardens, all was butterflies and plants and birds. Such interests fitted neatly into the story Dan had in his head while other hobbies of hers still surprised him, threw him off, made him think he knew nothing about her. Ballroom dancing, for one. Envision Bob and Nancy Cork, lean and fat, a Jack Sprat from the rhyme with his nuggety wife doing the lindy hop, fox-trot, rumba, and waltz. Admittedly, the Cajun-style rhythm two-step, newer to the repertoire, was a challenge, but Bob Cork liked to say, “It ain’t whatcha do, it’s the way that you do it,” a platitude that left him a lot of room on the dance floor.

  Had Nancy Cork ever made a face—even a small one—then or at any time when she and Dan and Bob Cork were a threesome in the driveway, and Bob Cork was droning on while she totted up the bill and Dan packed the plants in his car? Bob Cork on tax codes and piss repellent, climate change, health insurance, and no one responding—not so much as a grunt.