Summerlong (3 page)

Her hair is back in a tiny tight ponytail and her blue eyes and cheekbones are even more pronounced because of it. Charlie always felt as if he had a murky face, shadowed and dull in most light, unreadable. The women he dated would always ask him, “What are you thinking?” as if his own countenance was one failure of expression after another. Perhaps this is why he always felt a bit inadequate as an actor. He was inscrutable. He squinted when smiling, grew puffy when tired. You could not read his eyes.

This woman has the clearest eyes he has ever seen.

He knows this because she is staring at him, as if trying to place him, and he knows too that he has seen her before. But he would probably have been in high school then, maybe twelve years ago, or more. He’s not been back here much.

At least she has stopped kicking the ice machine.

“You don’t by chance have a cigarette?” she asks. His hands are full. He has a twelve-pack of Moosehead in his hands; a plastic sack of groceries hangs from each hand as well.

“Sure,” he says. “Follow me. I’ll set this down.”

She scans him, looks to the minivan parked in a dark corner of the lot.

“I grew up here,” he says, when she seems to notice his Washington plates. “I just got in from a long, long drive.”

She follows him and he sets his groceries on the slanted hood of the van. He opens the box of Moosehead then, pulls out two bottles, cracks them open with his key ring, and offers her one.
She steps into the shadows, out of the light, takes the beer, and drinks it.

“Are you twenty-one?” she says.

“Twenty-nine.”

“Just making sure. If the cops come, I’d like to keep this to a misdemeanor.”

“I don’t think Ashlyn will call the cops. What’s your brand?”

She looks at him, puzzled.

“Of cigarettes.”

“Right. Whatever you’ve got. Marlboro used to be my brand. Lights.”

He sets down his beer, goes into the convenience store, and faces the now-scowling Ashlyn.

“You know her?” she asks. “She your friend?”

“I don’t know yet, Ashy,” he says, smiling. “She might be. Marlboro Lights? In a box?”

“I almost called the fucking cops, Charlie! You tell her that.”

“She’s cool. I told you that I would take care of it.”

Ashy gets his cigarettes and offers a free book of Kum & Go matches; he thanks her again, apologizes for the ice-machine incident, and makes a vague comment about hanging out sometime.

“You know where to find me,” she says.

He takes the cigarettes out to the woman, who’s almost finished her beer.

“Well then,” she says, as he hands her the box and the matches. “You didn’t have to do that. I thought maybe you had a pack of your own.”

“My father told me to always carry cigarettes with me, and a lighter, so I’d have a reason to speak to beautiful women at parties and things like that,” Charlie says.

“Very smooth,” the woman says. “But you forgot his advice?”

“I didn’t expect to run into a beautiful woman,” he says.

“Well,” she says. “Ta-da!”

She flings the bottle over her shoulder into the alley of Dumpsters
behind her, and they both hear its loud clink and shatter.

“Whoa,” he says. “I just told the cashier not to call the cops. Let’s keep it down out here.”

“Sorry,” she says, laughing. “I haven’t slept well in days.”

She lights a cigarette and he opens another beer for her.

“We’re not supposed to be drinking here, are we?”

“I doubt it,” Charlie says. “Is Kleinbourne still the night cop?”

“Who knows? I almost never leave my house anymore,” she says. “Don’t you want a cigarette?”

It is quite amazing to see her grinning.

Finishing his first beer, Charlie feels the tension of the long interstate haul releasing from his muscles, and he goes and stands beside her, closer. They both lean now, against the side of the minivan, hidden in the darkness at the far end of the parking lot. She exhales a silvery stream of smoke, blowing it away from him, but the breeze brings it back toward their faces.

“Sorry,” she says.

“Don’t be,” he says.

He tells her he doesn’t mind the smell of the smoke, not in spring, not late at night, not in this parking lot where he’d spent many nights sitting on the hoods of cars, smoking.

“I’ve wasted my life,” the woman says.

They look at each other for a moment and then she puts out her cigarette in the now-empty bottle. She burps into her fist and goes to toss the bottle in the trash can a few yards away. As she walks back, she shakes out her short ponytail and slides the rubber band onto her wrist. She shakes her head as if she is trying to wake from a dream.

“Thanks for the beer,” she says.

She walks toward the college, then breaks into a jog. Charlie watches her for a minute, downs the rest of his beer, and gets into his van.

He finds her soon enough, two blocks away, outside the college chapel. She is no longer running. She walks slowly, backward, looking
up, it seems, at the illuminated stained-glass window depicting the agony in the garden, an anguished, pensive Jesus staring at the moon.

Charlie stops the car. He decides that if the woman takes off running, he will, of course, let her run away. But when he stops his car, she stops too. When he rolls down the passenger-side window, she comes over and rests her fingertips just above the door. He admires the muscles of her arm and he leans toward her.

“What do you think he’s thinking?” she asks.

“Who?”

“Jesus.”

“Well, he’s probably wondering how the fuck he got himself into such a mess.”

She doesn’t laugh at this joke, so he takes a moment to think of something else to say.

“You haven’t,” he says. “Wasted it. I don’t believe that.”

The woman takes her hand off the window then, as if it’s suddenly electrified.

“Get some sleep,” she says. “It’s good sleeping weather. Do you have a place to sleep?”

“My parents’ house, which will soon be their old house. It’s going up for sale.”

This seems to give her pause.

“Good,” she finally says.

“What if I had said no? Would you invite me home?”

“That’d be impossible.”

He sees in her eyes a noticeable weight that cannot be lifted. It is a look he has often strived after as an actor, playing Hamlet or Edmund or Astrov.

“Do something unpredictable,” he says in a low, flat voice.

Her eyes widen, but she doesn’t smile. She looks like she might faint.

“Pardon?” she says.

But she’s heard him, he can tell. And he waits.

She peels off her tank top, so she is wearing only her sports bra.

“Do you want to know my name?” he says.

“Nope,” she says.

She throws the tank top at him through the open window of his van and then goes off running, faster this time.

She’s lived in Grinnell long enough to know that someone in town might have seen her with that guy, in the parking lot, smoking and drinking. Or even tossing her tank top at him in the dim lamplight of Park Street, in front of the college chapel. And if she tried to explain the night to her husband, or to whoever in town might have seen her and might someday soon confront her about it, she did not know how to explain herself: she’d woken up, wanting to run, wanting to smoke. The house she’d found herself in felt suffocating in its familiarity.

Back home now, Claire checks on her kids. Both fine, both asleep. A weight leaves her shoulders. Every time she does anything purely selfish, she worries she’ll come home to find one of the children sobbing or maimed. It is not that she doesn’t trust her husband to watch the kids—although lately he is often distracted by work, by money, by something, a dreaminess that is not content but disturbed—it is that she’s motivated by an unseen force many mothers believe in: guilt. Guilt as not only an internal emotion, but guilt so powerful that it is a force in the world, one that will, when given enough attention, rise up out of the ground and smother your children while you work late, or go for a massage, or spend a weekend in Chicago.

Her husband isn’t in the bedroom, though this is not strange. How often, now, especially with the weather getting warm, he sleeps in the basement, the TV blinking at him. In the morning, while making coffee, he often announces—why? for sympathy? as
an explanation?—that he hasn’t slept at all, but of course he has. She’ll rub his back, say she’s sorry, and then resent him.

And he’ll say, “And I have a shitty day today too. So much to do.”

How much she’s grown to hate this song and dance.

She leaves the bathroom door unlocked in case her husband comes upstairs and wants to have sex with her. She’d go for such a thing right now, just as a distraction from whatever is keeping her from sleeping, but doesn’t have the energy to initiate it—to wake him from his sleep down in the basement, to straddle him with the TV’s blue light behind her bare shoulders. It’s rare that Claire ever takes a nighttime shower without him slipping in with her, bending her over, and fucking her against the tiled wall. They’d retained a primal attraction to each other over the years, and instead of the sex getting worse or worn or tired as they aged, it was getting better and more frequent. Everything else, well, that’s gotten worse. For a long time, a healthy sex life had been her proof that their marriage was stellar. When her friends complained about their husbands—slobs with waning sexual desires and emotional unavailability—Claire always felt smugly superior.

The master bathroom is a ridiculously palatial room with a double walk-in shower, a sunken Jacuzzi tub that fits their whole family, and two separate water closets. Her husband had picked most everything, all of it with a sort of subtext. He’d been born poor, raised poor, and spent much of his twenties poor. This house, as tacky and sprawling as it seems to Claire, and this bathroom in particular, an unnecessarily lavish place to piss, shit, and wash, means to her husband that he had escaped something most people could not escape. She understands. Sometimes she dreams of a farmhouse in Vermont, mice infested, a barn in decay, or a loft in Brooklyn, cramped by her family but in the heart of something bigger. Places to hide. She wonders what it would be like to live elsewhere, without her husband, even, but that night, exhausted, bewildered, sore, she loves the water pressure, a cascade of calming heat washing off the scent of sweat and cigarettes.

Usually, that is enough.

After her shower, overheated now from the long, luxurious length of it, Claire goes out to the back deck in her robe, first shutting off all the lights inside and outside the house. The breeze has picked up considerably—it is nearly three
A
.
M
. now—and the mosquitoes are not as abundant as they’d been on her run. Her skin still steaming from the extended shower, she opens her robe a little at first, and then fully, and then, safe behind a privacy fence and giant pines and maples that circle the edges of their half-acre lot, she drops the robe entirely and stands naked under the stars.

When was the last time she had stood naked like that, outside, in the dark? Fifteen years ago, the summer she was twenty-three; she’d been at an art center in Vermont and had gone skinny-dipping in a river with some other artists. Drunk, she had coupled off with a sculptor, a man ten years older, later, in the woods. She’d already been dating her husband—they’d been college sweethearts—though they’d had a huge fight a few nights before, over a shitty pay phone connection, and had agreed to take a break from each other.

Soon, when her residency was over, she came back to her husband; she never told him about it, the skinny-dipping, the sculptor whose hands she still remembered. He would have been jealous. He would have considered it something that was about him, not her. Was he better looking than me? What did he like about you? Did you fuck him?

But what she remembered more than the water, or the slickness of skin in the hot night, the leaves on her back later, was the possibility in the air. She had stopped the sculptor before he entered her—but they were there, naked, him on top of her, and it would have been so easy for her to let him. She wanted to, and when she said,
No, I don’t think I can
, he told her he wanted her
for real, forever
. She had laughed at him then, still holding him in her grip when he finished into a mess of leaves and then he quickly dressed and left her in the dark woods alone and she thought for a moment of staying in those woods forever.

Now, lying on this deck, thinking of what might have happened if she’d ended up with the sculptor, or even more tantalizing, maybe, all alone, she doesn’t think of the sex, though it would have been mind blowing of course—in one’s mind, the sex one didn’t have is always mind blowing—but what kind of trajectory her life might have had. Would she have ever returned to Iowa? Had children? Finished a second book?

Her thoughts return to the man who had given her a beer at the Kum & Go: she had known him before, years ago, as a teenager. He was heavier then, a cherubic face and a softer, pudgy build. But she had seen him in something—Chekhov’s
Uncle Vanya,
a disastrously ambitious production at the local high school, when they had just moved back to Grinnell. It would have been maybe thirteen years ago. He had played Astrov, and even at sixteen—so he was twenty-nine now—he had perfected the weary weight of middle-age ennui. She remembers him giving a speech in a tight tweed jacket and having been moved by it. So he’s back, she thinks, and she wonders why, why do people seem to come back here? And then she dozes out there on the deck, asleep in the nude, outside, almost hoping somebody finds her and is scandalized.

Among the things mothers don’t do: they don’t leave the house first in the morning, without explanation. Fathers can do this. They can blame work or a need to hit the gym or an early meeting or a doctor’s appointment and be gone before the family wakes up; but mothers need to be seen in the morning, present, directing the day’s traffic.

But when she wakes up on the back deck, still before dawn, Claire can think of no good reason to stay home. What kind of life is this? When you cannot leave the house if you want to leave the house. She’s awake again, alone in the early morning, four thirty, and the kids will sleep almost four more hours
.
Her husband’s still asleep too, it seems, in the basement, in front of the television.

She goes to the kitchen in her robe and flips on the coffeemaker. She hesitates to do this, because she worries the simple smell of coffee might wake her husband, and she wants solitude, but she wants coffee too. Isn’t that her life though, now, at thirty-eight? A storm of competing desires, one threatening to ruin the other?

She waits for the coffee to brew, just enough for one large mug of it, and she surveys the kitchen, a disaster. The dishes from last night’s supper stacked in the sink, the butter dish left out, rancid and liquid now on the kitchen island. Four empty beer bottles (Don’s) and a mostly empty bottle of Tempranillo (hers) near the sink. Fruit flies flit around the remnants of the wine. The trash can in the corner full, brimming over with a dozen gnawed-on ears of corn and bare bones.

She sets her coffee mug in the disgusting sink, goes into the downstairs bathroom, puts on a hint of makeup, brushes her teeth, drops her robe, and slides on a navy blue sundress, which she finds in a pile of clean laundry she dumped, two days ago, on the family room couch. She has no clean underwear. It is all upstairs in the three baskets of laundry she has yet to put away. If she goes upstairs, she might wake one of the kids, and then slipping out would be out of the question.

Fine, she thinks. It’s hot.

She walks out the front door and leaves.

Her husband will wake up later and find her gone. He’ll look around at the kitchen and then panic. The chaos of his life will seem insurmountable. How to give the children breakfast in such a filthy kitchen? And how will he get them all ready for the day, while he arranges showings of his newest listings? How will he shit, shave, and shower, his morning rituals, if he’s alone with the kids?

How many times, Claire thinks, in the past twelve years, has she forgone those three simple dignities of the mornings to care for the children, or how often has she done those things with a child in the bathroom watching her, crying, whining, or asking a million cheerful and relentless questions as she tried to take a shit.

She would come home and find him fuming, though he would say, “No, no, it’s okay.”

She goes to the house where she expects to see his van and she sees it. She sees the light on in an upstairs window, and she goes into the front yard and stands on the flagstone path, and then when she sees him, the man she had expected to see, the guy she’d talked to outside the Kum & Go, pass by the window in jeans and no shirt, holding a mug of coffee, she goes to the door and knocks.

Charlie Fucking Gulliver.

Behind her, she sees the glowing promise of a sunrise and the trees filling with it too, a spreading flame in the sky, and she remembers how much that once mattered to her, those brief moments of the new morning, when she had first moved back to the Midwest and was still in love with its light.