The Summer Guest Read online

  Meredith took my hand. “It will be all right,” she said.

  I wanted to tell her this was so, but couldn’t. It would not be all right. I looked at her hand in mine, then back out the window, where the darkness of a winter night hid everything from view.

  “You’ll see,” she said.

  Our car was waiting in the station lot, the windshield and fenders dusted with snow. Hal was still at a friend’s; we would have the house to ourselves. As we stepped into the front hall I felt a sudden rush of panic. The stairs, the narrow doorways, the bathrooms with their sleek tile floors: everything would have to be changed. Meredith would need a bedroom on the first floor; we would have to add on, or move. What a heavy task, to plan for these things, to sit at the kitchen table over cups of coffee and describe to a carpenter the ramps and handholds we would need to install before they actually became necessary.

  The house was cold, even for me. I let Ritzy out into the yard, adjusted the thermostat, and got myself a whiskey; Meredith moved through the house, turning on lights and setting things to rights. I heard her dial the kitchen phone, then her voice, tired but somehow bright, speaking to the mother of the boy Hal had passed the day with: oh yes, absolutely, everything was fine, it was a nice day to be in the city, especially with the holidays over and all that craziness done for the year, and would it be all right, we were wondering, for Hal to spend the night? We so rarely got an evening to ourselves. One of us would come by in the morning, to pick him up for school. Wonderful, she said, loud enough for me to hear. We couldn’t thank her enough.

  She came to me where I was sitting on the sofa, a glass of whiskey in my hand, though I had yet to take a sip.

  “Do you want one?” I raised my glass. “I could make tea too.”

  She shook her head: no. After all that had happened, after this long day of all long days, she still looked fresh: her gray suit still pressed, her makeup in order, her brown hair framing her face. Around her neck she wore the pearls I had given her for our fifth anniversary; somewhere between the front door and the kitchen she had removed her shoes.

  “I always knew, Harry,” she said finally. “Not exactly, not the name for it, but the kind of thing it was. In a way I’m relieved to hear it.”

  “How did you . . . ?” But of course I knew how. It was her body; she’d felt it moving away.

  “That’s not important. And I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “Not now. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.” Her eyes were unyielding; she had decided something. “I’m tired, Harry. I need you to warm me up.”

  “I set the thermostat. I can build a fire too.”

  “Never mind that.” She extended a hand to me. Beneath the skin her bones were rods of ice. “What I mean is, you’re my husband, and I want you to come upstairs with me, now.”

  She led me up the stairs, slowly, each step cautiously planted, as she had learned to do. In our room she turned on a bedside lamp, a blaze of light that neither of us wanted, and she quickly doused it again. The house had never felt so quiet. It seemed as if the whole world had forgotten about us, that the lights had dimmed everywhere, all across the planet. In New York and Chicago, Paris and Peking, in all the towns and villages of the world, humanity had lapsed into a sleep that did not include us, even in dreams. In the dark we undressed and got under the covers of our bed. For months, a year even, making love had been impossible; she was simply not able. We held each other a long while without speaking, both of us crying a little; I thought how we would have to be content with this from now on, holding and crying, but then she left my side. I felt myself sink into the warmth and softness of her, then the familiar pulsing that seemed to come from everywhere at once: from what she was doing and the air of the room and deeper still, through all the walls of the house, into the foundation, straight down through miles of rock to the center of the turning earth, and I closed my eyes and followed it. I understood what she was telling me; this was how we would make love from now on. She would love me with her body, however she could, until this could happen no more.

  I want to tell this story truly, so here it must be said that I also loved another, and how that came to pass: the story in which the married man with the sick wife and the son he does not love enough, or well enough, because he is simply afraid to, permits himself the one, small present he is forbidden. The story in which he is not a hero, not at all.

  And yet to say I loved Lucy would be a lie, or at least a kind of self-flattering half-truth. Those weeks in summer: I took them like medicine, a balm against my life, and Meredith’s slow dying. All year long I didn’t think of the place at all; I saw to my business and took Meredith to the doctor and learned to dress and bathe her, and hired the nurses that would help me do these things; I learned, in due course, about the drugs she needed for pain and infection, and how to keep her skin healthy and dry, and about the pans and bags, when that time came. When she could no longer hold a book or magazine or even a newspaper, I read them aloud, or sat in our bed beside her, turning the pages as she asked. I did all these things, and then each July, I packed the car, leaving Meredith in the care of her nurse, and drove north, and the camp would be there waiting, as if I’d never left. Nothing was ever stated or planned; and yet Lucy would find me at the check-in desk, timing some minor chore to coincide with my arrival, or else leave a basket waiting for me in the cabin, always number nine, and tucked in with the sandwich and fruit and sweating bottle of beer still cold from the icebox, a sarcastic, flirty note: Back for more raspberry pancakes, huh? or Warning, this basket will self-destruct in ten seconds, so eat fast. Innocent enough, though they were nothing I could bring myself to throw away or allow myself to keep.

  Hal accompanied me only a handful of times in those years; it was boring, he said, by which he meant quiet and always the same, and he missed being at home with his friends. He was an athletic kid who liked and did well at sports, rough games where boys collided into other boys: basketball for most of the year but also football in the fall and lacrosse when he was old enough. Standing in a cold stream or sitting stock-still in the bottom of a canoe for hours at a time, not even daring to speak so as not to scare the fish—these were as anathema to his nature as needlepoint. By the summer he was twelve he had had his fill, and it wasn’t for years and years, not until long after his mother had died, that he joined me again; for now I went alone.

  “Tell me about Meredith.”

  It was the summer of 1968, our fifth July, when Lucy asked me this. A year of tribulations: King was dead, Bobby Kennedy was dead, there were riots in the slums and in the prisons, that great liar Johnson had all but locked himself away, a mad king in his tower; on television every night we watched the prosecution of a war that seemed to test not one’s patriotism but the human appetite for gore. In March, Meredith had broken her hip in a fall in the bathroom; two surgeries, and it was still unclear if she would be able to walk again. The worst possible year. And yet here I was, drinking a beer on the dock after a day so idyllic I hadn’t wanted even to cast a flyline into it, lest even this small fingerprint of my presence disturb its perfection. I had spent the morning walking the long trail that ran beside the river, and then taken a canoe out for an aimless paddle around the lake. I hadn’t spoken a word since breakfast, not until Lucy had seen me on the dock and taken the Adirondack chair next to mine. That summer she had taken over the kitchen from Daphne Markham, who, it was said, had met a man through a Methodist missionary pen-pal service and gone off with him to Ecuador.

  We were sitting side by side, watching the lake soak up the last of the light. A scene of such preternatural calm, the effect was distorting, like a spell: two miles away, the pine-clad mountains that rose from the far side had the softened look of Iowa hills in a Grant Wood painting. It seemed possible to reach out and hold one in the hand.

  “Fair enough. What do you want to know?”

  “Is she pretty, is she smart, does she like hats, what’s her favorite color?” Lucy laughed and
folded her legs under herself, as limber as a gymnast. “You know, Harry, the details.”

  I sipped my beer. “Yes to the first, very much, and I’ve always thought so. Yes again, but not in the same way as you. Absolutely no to hats. As for the last, I don’t know. Blue, I think. She used to wear a lot of blue.” She let the compliment pass, unremarked: just as well.

  “Used to. What happened to blue?”

  I took a moment to think. “Well, now that you mention it, she does have a kind of blue dressing gown she likes. My turn?”

  “Not so fast. And you know Joe, anyway. Where did you meet her?”

  “Why do you want to know that?”

  “People meet.” She shrugged. “It’s always a story.”

  “In a restaurant, near the end of the war. Where did you meet Joe?”

  “High school. I was a dorky little freshman when he was a sophomore. It was kind of a May-December thing. We didn’t get together until later, though. What restaurant?”

  “I don’t remember the name. It might have been more of a taproom. It had a separate ladies’ entrance, I remember, though you don’t see those anymore.”

  “Thank God for small favors. Was she pregnant when you married her?”

  The question caught me so short I laughed. “What gave you that idea?”

  “Don’t be offended. A bar sounds . . . I don’t know, a little questionable. Even one with a, what did you call it”—she deepened her voice mockingly—“a ladies’ entrance.”

  “I’m not offended. But it wasn’t that kind of place.”

  “Okay, it wasn’t.”

  I could have let the matter go. And yet to do so seemed foolish. Why not answer the question? “Well, technically—”

  She stopped me with a laugh. “Technically, Harry? Oh, being pregnant is very technical, I’ve heard. Happened to a girl I knew at school. She was very technically pregnant.”

  “Point taken.” I was not angry at all; far from it. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but the truth is, yes, she was. Barely, a matter of weeks. We didn’t even know ourselves. Or at least I didn’t. We just told everybody that Sam was born a little early.”

  At the mention of his name, a silence fell over us, deeper than the simple absence of sound. She knew about Sam, of course. But I almost never spoke of him, not even with Meredith.

  “Oh God, Harry,” she said after a moment. “Me and my mouth. I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s all right.” I smiled to reassure her this was so. “It’s not bad to talk about him. In a way it’s easier up here. I didn’t realize it before, but I think he was on my mind all day.”

  “What were you thinking?”

  For a moment, I let my mind drift: where had my thoughts gone, through all the quiet hours?

  “It’s hard to say, exactly. You don’t have specific thoughts, like I bet he’d enjoy this walk in the woods I’m taking, or he’d be this tall by now if he were still alive. It’s more a feeling, like he’s not so far away.” I shrugged, a little embarrassed. “I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “I think it does. Maybe it’s why you come here like you do.”

  “Maybe that’s it.” I paused. “You know, it’s not the only reason, Lucy.”

  Another silence, even of held breath. The mystery of the feeling between us, whatever it was, was suddenly out in the open, like a deer that had stepped without warning from the underbrush. Even the slightest movement would scare it away.

  “Harry—”

  “You have to go, I know. Feed the masses.” I made some nervous business of looking at my watch. “You’d better hurry, actually. I think I’ll stay here awhile, finish my beer.”

  “That wasn’t what I was going to say, but you’re right.” There was sadness in her face, though I somehow felt I wasn’t the cause; it was for something I didn’t know about. It seemed to spread from her in ripples, like a disturbance on water.

  “Harry?”

  “Yeah?”

  She unwound her legs and rose to go, touching me quickly on the shoulder. “Thanks for saying I’m smart.”

  The next summer, Joe was gone. The story I heard through the grapevine was that his father had driven him north to Canada just before he was supposed to be inducted; Joe Sr. had a special way up there, involving old logging roads that nobody used or checked. He had arranged a job in New Brunswick for his son, as he had for so many others. A warrant had been issued for Joe’s arrest, on the charge of desertion.

  The sadness I had seen in Lucy’s face that afternoon on the dock seemed to have settled over her like a change of season; it was the first summer that she neither greeted me at check-in nor left a basket in my cabin, and in fact I didn’t see her at all until the following morning, when I came into the dining room for breakfast. The place was packed; I lingered at the entrance, pretending to scan the room for a table. Then the kitchen door swung open, exhaling a sweet breath of cinnamon and bacon fat, and there she was, wiping her hands on a dish towel, speaking over her shoulder to somebody at the stove; turning, she caught my eye and smiled. She looked tired, older somehow, as if far more than a year had passed. The skin at her temples was stretched by worry. Her brow was damp, her hair uncombed and tied back in a careless bun. She hugged me quickly and told me I looked well, and that she was sorry she hadn’t been able to see me sooner. “I guess you heard” was all she said of Joe.

  Later that afternoon everyone gathered in the main lodge, where Joe Sr. had rigged up a television. The room was crowded with guests, some regulars, old friends I knew; someone had brought wine and was passing it around in little paper cups. A man I hadn’t seen before said he’d brought a better television, a color Trinitron. A murmur of interest went up—well, why not, if he had brought a better set? But then someone else pointed out that the broadcast would be black-and-white anyway, the images beamed from a quarter million miles away, and the momentum behind the idea was lost.

  Lucy appeared and took a place beside me on the sofa. Like some of the other women, she had dressed up a little and put on a bit of makeup, as if for a party.

  “I wonder if Joe’s watching this,” she said. “Do they care in Canada? Do they even have TV?”

  “Look,” a woman behind us said. “He’s coming out.”

  The opening door, the slow progress down the ladder, the bouncing, marionettelike steps: images at once familiar and completely new, their strangeness magnified by their very ordinariness. As Armstrong’s foot touched the surface, a hurrah went up from the room. I suddenly wished I was back in New York, watching this with Meredith and Hal. I resolved to phone home as soon as the broadcast ended. Did you see it! I would say. The moon!

  “I’ve heard it’s all faked,” someone said. It was the man with the color set. He looked around the room, grinning like a pumpkin. “This is all being televised from a TV studio in Texas.”

  When no one laughed, the woman beside him, his wife I guessed, swatted him on the shoulder with a magazine.

  “How would you know?” She spoke loudly to friends. “Believe me, he wouldn’t know if something was faked if his life depended on it.”

  That evening after dinner we all went out to the dock and drank champagne, under a wedge of gray moon that seemed somehow closer, as if the world had risen to meet it. It followed a descending arc along the tips of the trees and, just past eleven, disappeared for the night. The champagne had taken hold: some people were swimming, despite the cold. The night had opened like a book. When the swimming ended a call went up for music; somebody ran a long extension cord up the dock to connect a radio to an outlet by the lodge. A wall of static, and then the air was filled with the sound of an orchestra, Basie or Ellington, the first bars of a song I didn’t recognize, and scampering up and over the wall-like barricade of strings, the unmistakable voice of Ella Fitzgerald. Bar by bar, the song came into focus, like a picture: “How High the Moon.” The sound seemed to reach us not through the airwaves but across a sea of time.


  “Hey, everybody,” the man with the radio said, “I guess they heard!”

  Couples found one another and danced on the dock. Lucy had left the party when the swimming began; sitting by myself, I felt a little relieved that she was gone. Had she stayed, I would have asked her to dance—it was inevitable, a fact ordained by the evening’s currents—but I felt this would have been awkward, not only because of what had passed between us the summer before, but also because Joe was gone.