This One Time With Julia (9 page)

I’m pretty sure Julia had told me to lie about this, but somewhere in there I had decided that I would just tell Houston the truth, because he never reacted the way I thought he would anyway.

“Not quite yet,” I said.

“Education isn’t important to you at all?”

I shook my head.

“You think you could be happy being a pool man all your life?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Houston was beaming at me now. He looked like he was having the time of his life. “So far, Joe, you’re probably the best candidate for pool man that I’ve ever interviewed,” he said happily. “It’s about time someone had some respect for this job. Our last pool man thought he was too good for the position. He couldn’t see the dignity in it. But if you look closely, this is the only job in the hotel that’s done by a single person, all alone. The pool man takes orders from nobody, and nobody helps him, and nobody notices his work until the day the pool is not perfect. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

“Of course.”

“I’m looking for someone to lock down this job and make a lifetime out of it. And when you die, we’ll bury you under the pool, and your son will fill in the final patch of cement, and then he’ll refill the pool and clean it, because he’ll be the new pool man.”

I could see that Houston was passionate about what he was saying, and I could see it pretty clearly too. I could imagine teaching my son all the secrets of the pool, while Julia stood by with her arms folded, smiling at us in those beautiful white shorts.

“Sounds good to me.”

“Can I ask you one more question? Please don’t be offended.”

“Go ahead.”

“Have you ever cleaned a pool before?”

I rubbed my new haircut for a little while before I answered. “I’ll be totally honest,” I said finally. “I have no experience in any job at all. I’m not trained to do anything. I don’t even read well. I’ve never done anything. Ever.”

Houston studied me for a second, like he thought I might be making fun of him, but then his whole face broke into a huge smile. “What a wonderful answer,” he said. “Not only does it show exceptional honesty, but I’d actually prefer to have raw and unmolded potential. No bad habits to eliminate. Let’s head over to the pool and put you in charge.”

“So I passed?”

“That’s right.”

“I have the job?” I couldn’t believe it was happening so fast. I’d never applied for a job before or officially asked for something that I wanted, so I never imagined it could be this easy. “So I have a good face, then?”

“Ha! Julia told you I’d look at your face!” Houston thought that was the best thing in the world. He couldn’t stop chuckling about it. “What did she say?”

“Just that you’d be looking at it.”

“That’s great. That’s classic. What else did she say about me?”

“That you’d notice my suit.”

“She was right about that. Anything else?”

“I think that’s pretty much it. Oh, and she said you were very instinctive.”

“Imagine that,” said Houston. “She picks up on everything, doesn’t she? Yes, I’d say I’m quite instinctive. And for the record, you have a very good face. One of the best I’ve ever seen.”

The sun was already going down, but Houston wanted me to start work the next day, so he showed me the basics of the job that very same night. He taught me how to check the filters and the chlorine levels and the hot tub temperature. The towels were also my problem, and I had to keep the deck chairs in order and fix them once in a while, and I had to clean about a million different things. But it was a good job for me because there was no reading involved.

“People think cleaning a pool is easy, and in a way it is,” Houston said. “But it’s not the kind of work where you can try to get it over with quickly. You can’t finish in half the time by working twice as hard. You have to always be at the pool. If an acorn falls in the pool, a great pool man will fish it out before it starts to sink.”

“How long is that?”

“I’ve timed it actually. It usually takes about thirty seconds for the acorn to sink.”

I liked hanging out with Houston right from the beginning. He lived at the hotel in the city but came by to check on Julia a few times a week. He never forgot to come by the pool and say hello. Houston and I turned out to have a lot in common, and gradually we spent more and more time together, and he eventually turned out to be my first good friend.

I took care of that pool for about two months, I guess. From what Alvin had always told me growing up, I figured I’d hate having a job. But it wasn’t that hard to keep the pool clean, and swimming in it obviously made people happy. I hadn’t ever tried to learn anything but basketball and poker, and those were a long time ago, so I’d forgotten what it felt like to practice something and slowly get better at it. For the first few weeks I focused mainly on the swimming pool. But once Houston saw that I was getting the hang of it, he gradually gave me more and more to do. Eventually I could sweep and make a hotel bed in a pinch, and later I also did some laundry work and learned how to fix certain problems with a toilet. I even spent a little time inside the kitchen when they needed extra help in there.

I slept in the smallest guest room on the second floor of the hotel. It was supposed to be temporary, but I never got around to finding a place of my own, and nobody seemed to care. The hotel was never full anyway. Not even close. We had more than fifty rooms, but we only filled up when there was a big horse race down the road. On those weekends the pool would be totally packed, and everyone would have to work like crazy, and I’d sleep on the couch in Julia’s room. She lived at the hotel because her dad lived two hours away, and because she didn’t want to live with her mother. She said she wouldn’t live with her mother in a million years. She wasn’t officially allowed to have boys in her room past midnight, so whenever I slept over I’d have to wake up early and sneak out before anyone saw me.

Julia lived for the summer in this pretty big kitchen suite on the third floor, but it looked more like an apartment than a hotel room. All her old stuffed animals were in there, and the walls were totally covered in photographs—some in fancy frames, others stuck to the wall with double-sided tape. They were full of people that I eventually got to know: Cecily and Granddad, Mr. Manning and Ms. Delancey. I knew most of her family before I ever met them.

Some of the pictures had Julia in them. A few were taken at the hotel, or at her school, or on a river-rafting trip somewhere, but most of her life had happened at this huge wooden country house that I didn’t get to see until later. The pictures had been taken over many years, and looking at them was like watching a slideshow of Julia growing up.

You could see that she liked being photographed, because she was always in a pretty good mood, and she never had her eyes closed or a weird expression on her face. As a little girl her hair was bright, bright blonde. It felt strange to see her with a chubby little four-year-old face, because I’d never imagined her ever having been so young. As her hair got a little darker, she got taller and paid more attention to her clothes. She was pretty skinny for a year or two, and later on she got braces, and then broke her leg. Her smile got smaller, then bigger again. She drove a truck and played field hockey. She got a saxophone. A few different boys walked in and out of the pictures, but they never stayed long. I didn’t see any pictures of Alvin.

In one picture, Julia was standing next to that beautiful mansion on top of a hill. The picture is taken from a ways down the hill, so you can see just how big the house is, and how small she is against the house, and the forest all around. That was my favorite picture, and the first time I saw it I decided to steal it. I slipped it into the pocket of the suit pants that I wore almost every day by then. That was the first time I’d ever stolen anything where I didn’t get the idea from someone else.

I hung out in Julia’s room a lot, either watching TV or playing poker. Most of the time we’d end up kissing a little bit, but she would always make us stop. Then she would say it was still too soon after Alvin, and that it felt too strange. This happened over and over again, and I also remember that for the first few weeks she couldn’t look straight at me, at least not for very long. If she tried to look into my eyes she’d lose control and get all giggly.

I slept on the sofa when I stayed over, and I would sometimes wake up to find her sitting up in bed, churning her arms and legs and talking in her sleep. She always worried for a minute about breakfast the next morning, who would make it, and what exactly it would be. Once I calmed her down about that, she’d usually go back to sleep, but sometimes she’d stay up and talk to me some more, and it was always very interesting because Julia was a different person while she was sleeping—very calm and unafraid—and she would tell me things she wouldn’t normally. That’s how I learned her father had almost gone to prison the year before and that her parents had divorced during the trial. That’s how I learned she thought her mother had gone crazy.

I saw her mother around a lot, because she came by every week to take Julia to the salon, and sometimes she’d stay and lounge around the hotel in these amazing bikinis. She didn’t seem crazy to me, at least not right away. But I didn’t get to know her very well, because she never said a word to me or anybody else who worked at the hotel. She was very tall and stylish, with three or four cars and a little truck too. She had long, shining, gold hair and strange, expensive clothes that you would normally only see in a magazine. You could see how Julia came from her, but she was even more beautiful than Julia in a way: more graceful, and more like a queen.

The only time she spoke to me the first month was this one weekday afternoon when it was absolutely pouring rain. I was in the lobby trying to dry out when she came storming in and demanded that I act as lifeguard while she swam, in case she got hit by lightning and needed to be saved. In all the time she spent around the pool, that was the only time I ever saw Julia’s mother swim. She probably did about fifty laps while I shivered on one of the deck chairs and watched. And even though the air was almost as wet as the water that day, I remember that she never let her head dip into the pool and never looked at me again. She just swam her laps in this very slow and smooth breaststroke until the sun came out. Then she left without saying good-bye.

Gradually I met Julia’s whole family. Her granddad came by for lunch every Thursday. He was about ninety years old and dressed ten times better than anyone else. It was easy to be around him because he was so polite and hardly ever said anything except, “Well, yeah,” in this extremely friendly way.

And she had this little sister named Cecily who would sometimes bring a bunch of her middle school friends to the pool, and they’d spend all day splashing around and giggling. They were always breaking the deck chairs, and so I got to know her pretty well. Cecily was pretty grown-up for her age, but I didn’t realize how grown-up she was until one afternoon when I’d been working there about two weeks. I was sitting by the pool in my beautiful new suit when somebody put me in a headlock from behind. I knew it was Cecily when she giggled and twisted my ear so hard that I almost started to cry. She always treated me like I was a doll, and nothing could hurt me.

“Don’t think I haven’t seen you watching her,” she said.

“Watching who?”

“Don’t try to deny it. I know you’re in love with my sister.”

I was pretty impressed that Cecily had figured it out already, since she was only fourteen. But it turned out she had been thinking about me even harder than that.

“How can you tell?”

“Oh please. You only ever sit on this side of the pool, so you can see her walking back and forth from the lobby to the restaurant. You go to the bathroom about ten times more than you should, just so you can pass by her at the front desk. And you always hang around here way after your shift is over, just in case she decides to come out to the pool.”

“So what if I do?”

“I knew I was right.”

I realized that I didn’t care if Cecily knew. It was a relief to talk about it with somebody. “Do you think she knows?”

“It’s hard to tell, because she wouldn’t admit it if she did.”

“What do you think?”

“About what? Your chances?”

“Sure.”

“You think I’m a gossip?” Cecily punched me in the stomach as hard as she could, and laughed when I couldn’t breathe for a second. “You’re right. I totally am a gossip. Okay, I think you might have a chance.”

“Really?”

“But only as a summer fling. There’s obviously something about you that she likes, but I’m still not sure what it is. You really haven’t impressed me too much since you got here, but she needs a nice distraction until she goes to college. And I could see why you’d make a nice rebound guy for her.”

“What?”

“She needs a change of pace from her last boyfriend. He was a lot smarter than you, and that’s definitely working in your favor. He would always think too much and question everything she did. You don’t think about things much, do you, Joe?”

“No. Not that much.”

“That’s definitely good. That’s going to be a couple of points for you. You know our father almost went to jail last year, right?”

“She mentioned that.”