Long Summer Nights (17 page)

Didi started to smile. “Did you tell him that?”

“Absolutely.”

“You lied merely to prick his overripe ego?”

“Possibly. No. Definitely,” corrected Jennifer.

“Good. I like you very much. If you hurt him, I will kill you. At one time, I had a lover, an Italian prince, who gave
me a jeweled knife that belonged to his ancestors. I still have it. It’s very elegant, very deadly. It can disembowel you and slice your innards like a Japanese eel’s. In the end I had to dump him, poor man. He was much too much in love. Men can be such fools when they’re in love. They become tedious.”

Jenn understood the warning, she respected the warning, but it wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t within Jenn’s power to hurt Aaron. The man could withstand a nuclear blast without wincing. If there was anybody who was going to end up heartbroken and tedious, it was Jenn.

“Do you need something from me?” she asked, mainly to be polite.

“I need many things. An eunuch that will fall on my every word, the complete demise of the Internet and the proper respect for the principles of Marxism, but these dreams are impossible, so I must endure. Come along,” she commanded, snapping her fingers as if Jenn was her pet. “The waiter will think we are friends.”

Jenn trailed after her, with the beginnings of a smile. “No. We mustn’t have that.”

T
HERE WERE EXPECTATIONS
in this thing called a relationship. There were schedules and assumed plans and a certain amount of time required to be spent together, and not all could be sex. Slowly Aaron eased his way back into a world that he’d left. It wasn’t easy, but Jennifer was easy, not in the sexually promiscuous way, although she was fairly forward thinking, a fact that he appreciated, but she was easy company. She was learning to judge his moods and knew when to press, and when he needed her to sink down in his lap and love him.

He rented the apartment above her, but hadn’t made his way to informing her of this fact. The constant train rides
were now a pain in the ass, and he found that he could write as well in an apartment as he could in the cabin in the woods. There weren’t many furnishings in his new lodgings. A bed, the equipment to prepare food for Two, his typewriter and his gas lamp.

His relationship with Kevin was progressing in a backward manner. Each time he saw the boy, Kevin only resented him more. Jennifer would ask about Kevin, but Aaron knew that she expected him to report on these disastrous meetings, and sometimes he would tell her the truth, but sometimes he spun a work of fiction, implying that Aaron and Kevin were starting to bond.

Maybe she suspected the truth; he wasn’t quite sure. His writing had changed, his way of looking at the world was changed, glowing from her light, but he didn’t tell her that, either.

It was her writing that worried him. She sold articles to some low-rent publications on the world of Dumpster diving, on the chess clubs in Harlem and on the new baby penguins at the Bronx Zoo, but they were beneath her. She’d received a job offer from a weekly in Paramus, but she turned it down, which bothered him because he knew why she turned it down. She wanted to write for the
Times.
At one point, she had written for the
Times,
but she’d lost her job because of him. She didn’t say these words. She didn’t even blame him for it, which she should have, but Aaron knew he was responsible. He’d asked Didi to work her connections there, but first-rate newspaper jobs did not grow on trees, and nothing came of it, which bothered him more.

So, when she suggested they go out to dinner with her parents, he jumped at the idea, even though he hadn’t the foggiest notion of how a traditional Meet-the-Parents scenario was supposed to unfold.

They met at Eleven Madison, and Henry and Marian Dade were not the ogres he feared. Frankly they were very nice people, a little older than he expected. They were in their late sixties, and it was apparent they doted on their only child. Marian Dade was a doctor at Cornell Medical Center, currently contemplating retirement, and Henry Dade was a vice president at a bank.

The dinner was a tense, silent affair, with Jennifer’s parents not asking about her employment nor their relationship. When they asked about him, Jennifer would deflect their questions with the patient yet ineffectual kindness most often seen from a playschool teacher.

“So how did you two meet?” asked Dr. Dade.

“At a library,” answered Jennifer, but Aaron stepped in. “I live in Harmony Springs, where Jennifer was earlier in the summer.”

“You must not see each other very often. That’s such a long way.”

“I take the train into the city every few days.”

“That must get expensive. What did you say you do? I don’t remember what Jennifer told us.”

“I didn’t tell you, Mother.”

“I’m a writer.”

“Oh,” chimed in her father, not an encouraging sound.

Jennifer looked at him in surprise, and he shrugged.

“Do you ever think of moving to the city? I suppose you couldn’t afford it. Everything is so expensive. We’ve been trying to get Jennifer into steadier employment, but she seems determined to follow her dreams, no matter how improbable.”

“She’s very talented. She’ll be fine.”

“I suppose. But I would sleep easier if she could settle down. Have you ever thought about a real job?” her mother
asked him, smiling at him with those warm brown eyes that were much like her daughter’s.

“Mom!” Jenn protested, but Aaron trudged onward.

“No. It’s all right. I didn’t go to college, so I don’t have a lot of career options.”

“So you won’t be moving into the city,” assumed her mother, whom he expected had already condemned him to a fine career in burger-flipping.

“I might someday,” he answered vaguely, deciding it wasn’t a good time to mention that he already occupied the apartment above her.

“When you hit it big,” muttered her father, drinking from his glass of wine and shooting dark looks in Aaron’s direction.

“Maybe then,” Aaron agreed.

By the end of the night, Aaron was secretly convinced that they should have told Jennifer’s parents he was a drug dealer—they would have been more enthusiastic. He did insist on picking up the check, earning brownie points wherever he could. When he handed the waiter his card, the man looked at his name and gasped.

“Aaron Barksdale? Really?”

At this, Jennifer’s father perked up. “He knows you?”

“I had one book published,” admitted Aaron, hoping to earn a little more respect.

“And the waiter wants your autograph?” puzzled her father.

“It was a very famous book,” stated Jennifer, defending him to the end.

Her father wasn’t impressed. “I don’t keep up with the book industry. We don’t read very much. Journals, newspapers. Real things.”

And everyone was a critic.

T
HE SUMMER WAS LONG
and hot, and Jenn and Aaron settled into an odd routine of “Let’s Pretend.” At some point he moved into the apartment above hers, but did the cement-mouthed man choose to inform her of the fact? Oh, no. Instead he headed for the train station…on the
nights they didn’t sleep at his hotel.
If the New York tourism industry was booming it was solidly because Aaron was determined to deny the existence of any sort of attachment, emotional, physical, even, alas, geographical. At least the man was consistent.

The job offers from God knows where were flying in with a regularity that should have made the Department of Labor happy. Feeling more and more unsettled, Jenn turned them down, and every Tuesday she walked to the employment office at the
Times.
She wrote articles and sent them off, supplementing her income and keeping her resume intact, but the
Times
was her dream. It was prestige. Her parents would approve of her once again, and she could hold her head high.

Aaron told her that it didn’t matter. A fine bit of encouragement from a man who kept his Pulitzer in his underwear drawer.

Contrary to Aaron, every day it grew more difficult for Jenn to keep her mouth shut. Three little words that kept echoing in her brain.

I. Love. You.

She didn’t tell him. It seemed wrong on principle. That, and fear that any hint of emotional attachment would send him off screaming. But she kept up hope.

Sometimes he would tell her things. They had dessert at the Gramercy Tavern to celebrate when he finally broke down and gave his manuscripts to Didi—who, by the way,
still
hadn’t told Aaron she was retiring.

And Natalie wondered why Jenn was tense?
Secrets.
Too many secrets, all of which Jenn was freaking tired of keeping.

“I bet Didi was over the moon,” Jenn told him scarfing down on chocolate-raspberry-fudge cake.

Aaron looked at her and laughed. “Didi? She wanted to know why I held out for so long.”

He looked excited, animated, very into the moment, and she was glad to see him like that…coming alive.

“When she’s sending them out?” she asked. “I bet you could use the advance by now. The Four Seasons isn’t cheap.” That was the financially conservative Dade talking, the one her mother had raised. And yes, it was possibly to get him to mention that he was now living in the apartment above her.

“She had four offers on the lot already. Martin wants a preempt, so you don’t have to worry. The hotel’s safe for a while,” Aaron told her, as if she truly was the financially conservative Jennifer Dade that she claimed to be.

“Lovely,” answered Jenn, stuffing her mouth with cake so no screams of frustration could emerge.

“It doesn’t bother you, does it?”

Really? Slowly Jenn put down her fork, noticing that
he was looking at her concerned, attentive…emotionally bonded. “It bothers me a little. Certainly I know that you feel like you need to withhold things from me…”

His eyes grew puzzled, confused. Still emotionally bonded, but befuddled, as well. “Are we talking about the books?”

He thought she was jealous?
Dear God, professional jealousy didn’t even rate in the big equation of why Jenn was stressing. “No,” she told him, not sure she was ready to have this conversation. Correction. She was plenty ready to have a conversation about their relationship, but Aaron was not.

“What are we talking about?” asked the man who wasn’t ready to talk, but sounding suspiciously like a man who
was
ready. Jenn wasn’t fooled.

“We’re talking about talking. Saying things. Talking about things. Things that make us happy. Things that make us sad. Things we might keep bottled up until we think we’re going to bust a valve. A heart valve, by the way.”

“Have I done something wrong?” Again, he looked earnestly and sincerely as if he wanted to talk about things, and she told herself not to be the woman who sees things in a man because she wants to see them. Objective thinking, she reminded herself.

“No. You’ve been perfect.” And he had been. Aaron had been playing this relationship straight from the American Boyfriend Handbook.

“Then is something making you sad? Is it the job?”

She sighed. “I don’t care about the job. Give me a job. Give me a roof. I’m happy.”

Aaron frowned at her, shaking his head. “That’s not true. You want to work for the
Times.
You have turned down a lot of offers because you keep telling me that you want to get back at the
Times,
” he reminded her.

“I don’t know what I want,” she lied. “No, that’s not true,” she corrected herself. “I want to be happy.” It was the truth, perhaps not the truthiest of truths, because she wanted him to love her, and she knew that he loved her, but for him to admit that, he would have to first acknowledge the existence of that rare, passion-plumed endangered species known as love.

“I like when you’re happy,” he told her, which was a nice thought, but not exactly what she wanted to hear.

“What makes you happy?” she asked him, wondering if he ever thought about it, wondering if he ever equated happiness to “them.”

He stared at her blankly. “I don’t know.”

More violently than necessary, Jenn dug into her cake, ignoring the delicate middle and heading straight for the chocolate. “Chocolate. Chocolate makes me happy.”

He took away her fork and his smile was nice, sincere…almost understanding. “You. You make me happy.”

And then magically, she didn’t need her chocolate. She could look into those glimmering eyes, no longer detached, no longer cool, and everything she needed was there. “Aaron?”

“Yes?”

But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t say the words because Aaron was not the clueless man that he pretended, and he knew exactly where she was leading, and if he was refusing to follow, it was because he wasn’t ready to go there. Not yet. “It’s nothing. Let’s go home.”

“To the Four Seasons?” he asked.

“Sure,” she answered, and took a last biteful of chocolate for the road. She was going to need it.

T
HE SUMMER WAS LONG
and hot, July merging into Au gust, and Aaron felt the heavy weight of impossible expecta
tions upon him. Kevin expected a perfect father. Jennifer expected a perfect lover. At least Didi had her perfect book.

Except for his writing, nothing seemed to turn out like the perfection that he desperately wanted. His relationship with Kevin was strained, but with Jennifer, he’d never been happier.

Every day he pretended to take the train into the city, an elaborate charade to keep the truth from her and he wasn’t even sure why it was so important to pretend. He waited for the right opportunity to tell her, the right opportunity to tell her how much she meant to him, but he couldn’t find the words or more accurately, how to say them. Each time he tried, his throat grew dry and tight, and his head began to hurt, and Jennifer would look at him curiously, as if she knew, but she never delved. The woman with the insatiable curiosity couldn’t find the words, either.

After the disastrous meeting with his father, Aaron wisely chose not to attend any more parties. It was better that Jennifer thought he had no friends than to spend time with the people who were.

Although, after he met some of Jennifer’s former coworkers, he revised his interpretation of the word
friend.
Slowly he began to understand. Certainly he would still sit quietly while they chatted, talking about nothing, and seeming to enjoy it.

She went on interviews for journalism jobs, but Jennifer, the woman who had set her clocks by her need to be a reporter, had suddenly forgotten it. Or maybe not. One night, when Jennifer had gone off to check a message on her phone, Martina had explained it.

“She’s waiting to go back to the
Times.
”

He stared deep into the diet cola, stirring at bubbles as if they were the most dreaded poison on the planet. Guilt
did that to a man. He could have insured that she kept her job. He
should
have insured that she kept her job. If he truly loved her, he would have done that. But he didn’t.

“She could settle for something else in the interim. She’s had enough chances,” he pointed out and Martina nodded sagely.

“Yes, that would be logical, but then her parents would start lecturing, so she’s choosing to wait.”

“You’re telling me this so I’ll feel guilty.”

“Of course. I’m a woman. It’s what we do best, inflict guilt upon men so that they can shower us with romantic and thoughtful gestures that they forget the other 99.9 percent of the time.”

“Very clever.”

“It’s genetically coded in the DNA.”

“What am I supposed to do?” he asked, even though deep down in the hollows of his chest, he knew. He could get her job back for her, and if he truly loved her, he would.

“You can do nothing. Make her happy. You make her happy.”

“Are you sure?” He wasn’t. In the balance of the relationship equation, he felt like Jennifer gave everything, and Aaron gave all that he could…which was far less than everything. He justified this by telling himself that he had very little of himself left. A writer is a specter on the wall, whose value is defined by how honestly he can observe without bias, without emotion, without a heart. But now those words felt uncomfortably false.

That night, on their way home, he bought Jennifer flowers from a vendor on the street.

“Here. You should have these,” he said, pushing them toward her.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because I should,” he answered.

She inhaled and smiled at him in that politely detached way, but he knew he had disappointed her, and he wished he could do things right.

On Labor Day weekend, Didi was having her annual bash at the Hamptons. Lately it seemed like Didi was pressing him to get out more among editors and agents as if he had a book coming out. Which he did, but he wasn’t anxious to assume the famous author persona. He liked the man who wrote in the woods, a wise and modest Thoreau rather than an egotistical Nabokov.

The party started out well enough. The day was warm, the sand was soft, and the people were thankfully sober. For a long time he stood, watching Jennifer play chess with Martin and a quiet calm settled over him. Peace.

It was odd feeling the heat of the sun on his skin, the glaring rays reflecting off the ocean, and the tang of the sea in the air. For a second, only a second, he felt himself feel, let his heart pump something thick and liquid and warm.

His mouth curved upward, and he understood why people craved this like a drug. It colored the world through its prism of color and smudged the sharp edges of absolute truth. It made him feel as happy as a golden glass of Scotch.

No. Happier. The Scotch would numb him.

This. This made him feel.

Jennifer looked at him and smiled and he wondered if he could tell her what she brought to him. The golden glow of life that surrounded her, that had drawn him from the first, leading him further and further into the sticky mire that the world knew as reality.

Before her, he preferred the reality in his mind. The sky
could be any color he chose, the character spouted words that he cherry-picked for their effect, and the feelings that moved him weren’t based on anything real, anything that could hurt him. He was the master of all, the conductor that played the music as he wished. But now the skies in his mind weren’t quite as soft as the ones in the sky, the currents of the ocean weren’t nearly as warm as the one that lay outstretched before him, and there was no heaven that could compare to a night in her arms.

For a second, he opened his heart, and let the waves of emotions flow through him like water, and he wasn’t sure if now that he had opened that door, he was strong enough to close it again.

But maybe it wasn’t so awful if it stayed open? Jennifer was safe and warm and golden, and he wanted so desperately to sit and bask in her sun.

“You’re looking very happy this afternoon.” The voice belonged to Nathan Klein who ran an independent press in Jersey. He was well-respected and bookish in a way that few people were anymore.

Aaron glanced over, nodded once. “I am.”

“I suppose when a man has everything, he’s entitled to smile.”

“I don’t have everything,” he answered truthfully. “But almost.” It was there. He was there. Just within his grasp.

“I don’t blame you. It’s a good thing you sold off the books before Didi retires.”

Aaron knew better than to wade into the quicksand, but he did anyway because he was feeling too happy, too blindly revisionist, too foolish to do otherwise. “She’s not going to leave me.”

A dark flush ran up Nathan’s face, the sort of flush that spoke of embarrassment, of words spoken out of turn, of truths laid bare before their time. “You didn’t know?”

The sun burned on Aaron’s skin, baking him there like a fried egg on the pavement. He could feel a bead of sweat slide down his back, slow and torturous. Jennifer looked over, and began to walk toward him.

Aaron, who never reacted in public, walked away.

She caught up with him as he was striding toward the main highway. He wasn’t sure of his destination, but walking seemed the appropriate response.

“What happened? What did he say?” She grabbed his arm, trying to stop him, but he didn’t think anyone could stop him right now.

“Nathan was lying to me,” Aaron insisted, trying to wrest back control when he had none. “He said Didi was going to retire.”

Jennifer stopped, and the flash of light around her was too much. “He wasn’t lying, Aaron.”

At that, Aaron shut his eyes, blocking her out, because there comes a time when you can no longer look into the sun without going blind. “How do you know?”

“Didi told me.”

Realizing he could not shut her out forever, Aaron opened his eyes, blinking, trying to restore his perception back to its normal, placid state, but there was a golden fog in front of his eyes, in front of his mind. There were those damned shards in his heart, and he wanted them out. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, his voice cool and detached.