The Goodbye Summer

by Patricia Gaffney

  “I bet you’ve had a very interesting life.”

  “Not that interesting.”

  “Or I could interview you—just ask questions, and you could answer the ones you wanted.”

  “That’s an idea,” Thea said. “Why don’t you, Cornel?”

  He looked dubious and flattered at the same time. “I’ll think about it,” he begrudged. “Meanwhile, can we get this foolishness on the road?”

  “Yes, let’s.” Thea’s eyes danced with anticipation; she was almost rubbing her hands together. She had on a flowered sundress that bared her freckled arms and chest, the kind of dress Doré Harris said nobody over sixty should wear. “Women past a certain age ought never to reveal their arms,” she’d once told Caddie, in an obvious reference to Maxine, who’d been sporting a sleeveless blouse that day. “Even in summer?” Caddie had asked. “Not if she has any personal pride.”

  “You look beautiful tonight,” Caddie said to Thea impulsively.

  “Why, thanks. I wanted to come as a hippie, but I don’t have any bell-bottoms.” She had on gold hoop earrings, though, gypsy earrings that made her look reckless and carefree. No wonder Cornel couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  Magill struck a match and lit the tight, fat joint. Took a hit.

  “Is that how you do it?” Thea took the cigarette from him in her fingertips. “Hold it in for a while before you blow it out, right?”

  “If you can,” he said, exhaling. “But take a small puff the first time, just a little, otherwise it’ll make you cough.”

  “I used to smoke cigarettes,” she said. “I quit in 1968.”

  “I quit in 1969,” Cornel said interestedly, as if this gave them a special bond.

  “Just a little puff,” Magill warned again.

  Thea brought the joint carefully to her lips and inhaled. Her eyes bulged; she looked as if she was strangling, but she managed not to cough. “Aagh,” she exclaimed on the exhale, “it’s so harsh, not like tobacco at all. Let me try another puff.”

  Magill sat back and laughed.

  “What else do you call this besides a joint?”

  “Doobie, jay. Spliff. Joystick, roach. Twist.”

  Cornel was scowling like a vulture but missing nothing. “Sure you don’t want to try?” Thea asked, holding the joint out toward him, waving it invitingly.

  “Positive.”

  “Could be your last chance.”

  “Good.”

  She shrugged and took another hit, very expert-looking now, holding the smoke in her lungs for a full five seconds before blowing it up at the ceiling. “Here, honey,” she said, handing the joint to Caddie. “Your turn.”

  The loose paper crackled and sparked; Caddie tapped the long ash into the ashtray and started to take a drag. But then—“No, you know, I don’t think I want any, not right now.”

  “One sensible person,” Cornel said.

  “Maybe later. I have a little headache. It’s nothing—maybe later.”

  “I thought so,” Thea said, reaching over to touch her arm. “Thought you weren’t quite yourself tonight.”

  “Sure?” Magill said. Caddie said she was sure, and he took another toke.

  “Okay.” Thea straightened her skirt over her legs and draped her hands over her knees, yogi style. She stared ahead, alert-faced. “I don’t feel anything. Shouldn’t I be getting paranoid?”

  “Not quite yet,” Magill said consolingly.

  “I’ve been wanting to try this for years.”

  “Why?” Cornel demanded.

  “Because.” She looked at him in perplexity. “It’s a new experience.”

  “Hmph.”

  “I like the way it looks, too. I like the way you hold the cigarette and the way you hiss the smoke in through your teeth.” She stroked her hands over her knees. “Mmm,” she said on a drowsy but intense sigh, “I think it’s hitting me.” She leaned back against the sofa and stretched her legs out. “I love this music. Who is this, Caddie?”

  “Hoagy Carmichael.”

  “What’s it feel like?” Cornel wanted to know.

  “A little strange. But dreamy. Disconnected. Time, something about time…”

  “It becomes groovy,” Magill said, and he and Thea started to giggle.

  Caddie and Cornel smirked at each other.

  Magill lay down on his back. He tried to haul the dog up on his chest, but Finney was more interested in the cheese and crackers on the coffee table. “Now what are we supposed to do,” Cornel groused to Caddie, “just sit here and watch?”

  That set Magill and Thea off again. Caddie was enjoying the way Cornel’s craggy face softened when he looked at Thea. The conversation meandered in a familiar, stoned way. Caddie thought of a boy she used to go out with in college, Michael Dershowicz, whose idea of a good time was getting high and listening to heavy metal music. They’d lie on top of his dorm room bed and listen to Megadeth and Annihilator while he described to her the geography of the music, explaining it like architecture, like a painting. He could see it, he’d say, and they would have long, abstract, artificially intense debates—he stoned, she straight—over what color the notes were right here, this section, or what shape, what personality. She’d enjoyed those conversations, but she hadn’t been tempted to try pot herself. If she was ever going to, she couldn’t think of anyone she’d rather do it with than the three people in her living room tonight.

  “Oh, I’m having a good trip.” Thea scooted over and lay down beside Magill. Immediately Finney ran over and licked her in the face. “Oh, bluh.” Her stomach bumped up and down with laughter.

  Cornel put his fists on the floor. “Oh, hell, give me some of that spliff.”

  Thea and Magill sat up in astonishment, which caused Finney to scuttle back in alarm and bark at them. “Really? You’re going to try it?”

  Cornel pointed at Caddie. “If I go haywire, you’re responsible. You’re the one who has to calm me down, get me to the hospital if it comes to that.”

  He looked so serious, she couldn’t laugh. “I will, I promise. Don’t worry.”

  “I can do it,” he snapped when Magill started to light the half-smoked joint for him. “I know how to light a damn cigarette.”

  “Not too much.”

  “I know, I know.” He took a deep drag and went into a violent coughing fit.

  Magill lost it. He laughed so hard, he fell over backward. Caddie poured Cornel a glass of iced tea, but he couldn’t stop coughing long enough to drink it. Thea patted his back. That didn’t help either, but he liked it.

  “What the hell is that,” he said when he could talk, “dried horse manure?”

  “You have to take tiny little puffs,” Thea told him, like an old hand. “Drink some tea and then try again.”

  “But watch out for madness.” Magill definitely looked stoned, loose-jointed and slack-grinned. “I think it’s improving my balance. I’m gonna get Lieberman to prescribe it for vertigo. Sure you don’t want a little toke, Caddie?”

  “Maybe later.”

  “You okay?” he asked in a quiet voice.

  “Fine, I’m fine. I think I’ll just…” She gestured toward the stereo and got up.

  Because of Christopher, everybody at Wake House had been treating her with extra kindness and consideration. It was awful. She didn’t care about Thea knowing, but she wished she hadn’t gone on and on about him to Magill. How stupid that had been, she saw in retrospect, how uncharacteristically self-confident. Arrogant, practically: Look at me, I have a boyfriend. She hated it that he felt sorry for her now. Not just him, they all did, but she minded Magill’s pity more than the others’.

  She’d never had her heart broken before. She’d had two weeks to get over it, but nothing much had happened, she still felt buried alive. She’d wasted a lot of time on false hope, imagining different endings, imagining Christopher coming to his senses. Each time the phone rang her heart would stiffen and leap up, like Finney for a ball in the air, and each time it wasn’t C
hristopher she’d feel flooded in personal humiliation. When she heard the sound of a car slowing or stopping in front of the house, or in front of Mrs. Tourneau’s house, or across the street, the same wave of stupid hope would gush up and send her to the window, where the same shame and disappointment would swallow her back down.

  At night she lay in bed and remembered dear, trivial things—like how pretty his hair was, how it always smelled like shampoo. The day he’d gotten so mad at her for not telling him sooner he had a poppy seed in his teeth. His habit of watching only two TV channels, the all-news one and Animal Planet. His plaid flannel bathrobe, how it looked tied around his waist in the morning. His beautiful smile, so sincere, so blindingly white.

  She meant nothing to him. It must be true, but she still couldn’t believe it, because she’d had no warning, no bad memories to look back on and reinterpret as danger signs. In one phone call, he’d pulled the rug out from under her. She was still falling, hadn’t hit the bottom yet, so how could she recover? Today she couldn’t think at all, today was a wash as far as recovery went. She’d been in a fog since morning, some kind of protective haze making everything blurry and unreal, like the wrong glasses.

  “Let’s play a game,” Thea suggested.

  Cornel groaned. He was sitting up stiff as a plank with his arms around his knees, eyes wide, facial muscles tense. If anybody could will himself to stay straight, it was Cornel.

  “You, too,” Thea said, leaning against his arm. He went even tighter for a second, then relaxed. “Everybody.” Thea was getting that croaky, hoarse, marijuana voice. “Name three things you want to do with your life before you get too old.”

  “I’m already too old. Ow.” She’d poked him with her elbow.

  “I’ll start. First, I want to dye my hair red. I do,” she insisted over the laughter, “I’ve wanted red hair all my life.”

  “What was it before?” Caddie asked. Before it went a soft, shiny silver-gray.

  “Oh, brown, just a sort of light brownish brown.”

  “Your hair’s fine,” said Cornel. “Leave it be.”

  “Nope, I’m dying it red. Not fire engine red,” she said, leaning over again and putting her face right in his face, so all he could do was grin. “A nice reddish-blonde, the old-lady version of red hair.”

  “You go, girl,” said Magill.

  “Caddie, you come with me when I get it done.”

  “Okay.”

  “What’s the second thing?” Cornel was liking the game better now.

  Thea got to her feet with a slow, wobbly grace. “Play ragtime!” Laughing, she went to the piano, plopped down at the bench, and banged out, over the music already playing on the stereo, the two introductory bass chords and the first two right-hand measures of “Maple Leaf Rag.”

  “Wooo, my fingers aren’t working. This afternoon I had them going together, top and bottom.” Her laughter erupted again. She bent over and touched her forehead to the hands she still held on the keys “Oh, my goodness, it’s kicked in. Whose hands are these?”

  “She plays it pretty good,” Cornel told Caddie, “on that piano at the house. She practices all the time.”

  “All the time,” Magill confirmed.

  Thea stuck her tongue out at him. “It sounds better there than here because that piano’s out of tune. Honky-tonk. That’s my problem, Caddie’s piano’s too good.” She swayed on the bench, chuckling with merriment, infecting the others with her silliness. “Caddie, you play something now. Come on.”

  “Yeah, play something,” Magill said.

  “Maybe later,” she said. “Okay, that’s two. What’s the third thing?”

  “Oh, I have lots of things.” Thea ambled back over. “Well, the main one is, I want to go to Cape May in October.”

  “What for?”

  “The birds,” Cornel guessed. “The fall migration.”

  “Yes.” Thea’s surprise and pleasure made him color. “Have you been?”

  He shook his head sorrowfully, as if he hated to let her down. “I like birds, though.”

  “Oh, so did Will. They were his favorite hobby, practically a passion. He’d ask me every year to go with him to see the fall migration on the flyway, the East Coast flyway, but something always came up and I’d put it off.” She smiled sadly. “So we never went.”

  “Not your fault,” Cornel said gruffly. “Not something to feel guilty about, Pete’s sake.” His frown didn’t look natural; his eyes had a hazy, unfocused swimminess he was trying to correct by scowling. Thea put her hand on top of his absently. That cleared his vision.

  “It’s not guilt. It’s more like…” She paused for a long time. “A correction.” She gave the word a stoned vehemence, then shook her head. “I do not want to get maudlin.” No, no, they all agreed, leaning toward her. “But when he was dying, he told me it was one of his regrets, that I’d never gone with him to see it. It meant something to him.” She laughed, dashing a tear out of her eye. “This is not right! I’m not sad, I feel happy tonight. And it’s not the end of the world that I never went with Will to see the birds at Cape May, even he didn’t think that. I just use it, I’ve made it a thing, a marker, a…oh, I can’t think of words.”

  Magill reached over and squeezed her foot inside her white flat.

  “It stands for all the things I wish I’d done that I didn’t, that’s all. Anyway, I’m going. That’s my third thing, I’m going to see the birds at Cape May next October. Okay, I’m finished. Henry. You go.”

  Thea was the only one who called Magill by his first name. He was still on his back with his hairpin knees bent, gazing up at the ceiling. He’d taken off his shoes and socks. Finney lay curled up in the crook of his arm, and they wore similar drowsy, comfortable, satisfied expressions. “I forget the question.”

  Caddie reminded him. “Things you want to do before you die.”

  “Before you get too old,” Cornel corrected.

  “Get too old,” she said quickly.

  Magill’s amused grin faded slowly. “Get my life back,” he said in a monotone. “That’s what I’d like to do.”

  Nobody spoke; the Ike and Tina Turner song on the stereo sounded too loud all of a sudden, too crass and unconcerned.

  Cornel cleared his throat harshly. “Well, if you want it, you can have it. All you gotta do is take it.” He didn’t feel as unsympathetic as he sounded, Caddie knew that. But he looked mean to her just for a second, like someone who couldn’t fit much compassion inside himself anymore because getting old had made him smaller.

  Magill speared a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his shirt without disturbing the dog, shook one out, and lit it. Finney hated smoke; he scrambled up and jumped on the couch, blinking his eyes and looking put out.

  “How did it happen?” Thea asked. “The accident.”

  Caddie turned to her in alarm. Why would she ask him that now? His hand holding the cigarette stopped halfway to his lips. He stared at Thea through the smoke, first in disbelief, then something else. Caddie thought it looked like panic. “Does anybody need anything?” she asked. “More beer? I could make popcorn.”

  “How did it happen?” Thea repeated, softer, not taking her eyes from Magill’s. She nodded, sending him a message. “Tell us if you want to. It’s as good a time as any.”

  He kept looking at her, wouldn’t drop his gaze. It was as if they were hanging on to each other while she guided him across a cliff edge, urging him to look at her, not down. If only Cornel would say something cynical or dismissive or snotty right now, it might head off what Caddie could see coming. Nothing had changed, she still didn’t want to hear this story. Maybe she was a coward, but how could it be anything but hurtful? Cornel sat hunched over his beer bottle, absorbed in scraping the label off with his thumbnail. No help.

  Magill shut his eyes. Caddie felt as if she were on an edge, too, waiting for him to decide. She could see it going either way, but it seemed more likely that he would say something funny or mocking now, then ro
ll to his feet and stroll out to the kitchen for another beer. She could see his Adam’s apple rise and fall when he swallowed. He put his hands on his upraised thighs, gripping the ropy muscles. “I took her up for a tandem dive from fourteen hundred feet. It was her birthday,” he said, and Caddie closed her eyes, too.

  14

  “A tandem jump is the safest dive there is. Nothing can go wrong. You’re harnessed together, back to front. I’ve done hundreds, thousands. I was a jumpmaster, I taught it.”

  Thea, kneeling beside him, put her hand on his shoulder. Just that, but Caddie saw how it steadied him, kept him from veering off into something dark, some form of self-recrimination it would be hard for him to come back from.

  “It was a perfect day. June the fourth. Blue sky, white clouds. Holly was okay on the ground, nothing but excited, acting like a kid. But as soon as we took off she got scared. Waiting for your turn to jump is always the hardest, it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve done it. There were nineteen of us packed like sardines on the twin-engine, and we were second to last. Last was a guy named Mark Kohler, a level-eight student, two jumps away from his A license. He laughed at Holly when she cried.”

  She cried. Oh, God, Caddie thought. Holly cried. She kept her eyes closed tight, because then it was like hearing confession. Magill was the penitent and they were the priests.

  “She was so scared.” His voice went down low, became rough. “She was laughing and crying, yelling, trying to psych herself up. She kept saying, ‘What have I done?’ I told her, ‘Relax, relax, you’re gonna love it, relax so you can feel it,’ trying to get her loose, trying to wake her up so she wouldn’t miss the whole thing with her eyes shut. I told her—I told her nothing bad would happen. I swore it. Then we jumped.

  “Free fall was perfect. We dropped two miles in less than a minute, and she never stopped screaming. But she liked it, she really loved it, she gave the thumbs-up, she…tried to kiss me, but her cheeks were flapping in the rush of the air, she couldn’t make…” He made a guttural sound Caddie couldn’t bear to hear, a laugh that came so close to a sob, he couldn’t talk at all for a minute.