The Unfortunates: A Novel

by Sophie McManus

  How do they know? No one is to know. He considers saying something. He swims away.

  The girls are loud and the news skips across the water.

  “She isn’t well?” one of the widows asks.

  “Swim’s over,” the ambassador says.

  * * *

  The guests file up the stairs, all at once. George is last to drip his way up. She asks if everyone is socializing well.

  “What? I don’t know. I have water in my ears. I hate swimming. I’m going to change.”

  There is a tapping and tugging at her calf.

  “Do you know how these eggs got here?” It’s the Foxes’ grandniece, a plastic snorkel and goggles plastered to her wet head, water dripping from the rainbow belly of her swimsuit onto CeCe’s shoes, which, now that they are wet, might as well have gone in the shoe pile. The child is pointing to the refuse of the buffet.

  “How, Maggie dear?”

  “First the farmer buys a lot of birds. He puts them in rows like bunk beds. He feeds them way too much so they are stuffed and he gives them medicine with a needle like our neighbor Mrs. Rose. Mrs. Rose is always allowed to come over. Then the farmer turns on a light that scares the chickens to lay more eggs—”

  “No, dear, these eggs are from wild quail. That means they are quail, not chickens, and they are wild.”

  “My dad says they just put wild on the package because people like it.”

  Parties are so seldom what one wants them to be. She wishes everyone would go home. She wishes she were home. She feels betrayed by each person she’d watched wetly ascend the stair. She scoots her chair closer to the buffet and plucks two eggs from the bed of chopped ice.

  “Have you ever wondered, little fox, how many eggs you could fit in your mouth at once?”

  “No, but at recess when there are grapes—”

  She shoves the eggs neatly into the mouth of the child. “Impressive! Two, perhaps try for three! This boat was once a whorehouse. Do you have an opinion on that? I do. Tell that to your daddy, dear!” The girl’s hands fly to her mouth. Something pulls CeCe’s attention—Iris, on the other side of the buffet. Iris looks away. If CeCe had known the wife and the dog were so nearby, well! She hears the child’s feet slapping across the deck. She slices off the top of a fresh egg’s head using a little spoon and her thumb, scoops caviar into the recesses. She watches Iris join George, now under a heap of towels, watches him reach out to Iris from inside the mound of terry cloth. CeCe calls merrily to the fleeing child, “More eggs, dear, a different kind of egg!”

  Dana Barnes is looking at her oddly. CeCe smiles. “I hope it hasn’t been too difficult for you, not smoking this afternoon? Was that a secret?”

  “Oh, CeCe.” Quite unexpectedly, CeCe finds herself crushed to the woman’s swimsuit, enveloped in a wet hug. “We’re so close by, you call us anytime you need. Day or night. I hope—a lovely time.”

  Later, CeCe stands in her wet dress and her wet shoes, locked between George’s arm and the rail at the top of the metal stairs Javier has for a third time lowered into the sea. As the guests descend and board the launch, she says, “Goodbye! Goodbye, dears, goodbye!”

  3

  Two weeks later George and Iris are in bed, staring at the ceiling, not wanting the day to begin. George is to help his mother move to Oak Park. They’ve been preparing for this morning for almost a year.

  “I miss you already,” George says. “I don’t want to be a grown-up.”

  “I know,” Iris answers.

  “Here we go.” He rubs his eyes, pads to the closet. “You want this one?” He holds up a ragged sweatshirt, her favorite on cool mornings. He tosses it to her, opens his top dresser drawer, and tosses her a pair of balled socks. He takes some out for himself, for they share, have worn the same socks, his socks, since the day she moved in with him, at his old apartment in Washington Square. A mystery she hadn’t arrived with socks of her own. She is beautiful by the window, the trees dense below. A surprise to them both, that their new home was in the woods and had no ocean view.

  “You’re inside out.” He tugs the hem of the sweatshirt. She shrugs and shuffles into the bathroom to trade her glasses for contacts, then heads downstairs. He listens to her bang around the kitchen as he packs his overnight bag.

  “Up or down?” she calls.

  “Up. I’m slow.”

  She reappears in the doorway, a cup of coffee in each hand. “Why are you taking so much stuff? All you need is this. And those. Paperwork from the doctor?”

  “Esme.”

  After toast, they walk the path, George’s bag catching in the underbrush.

  “Nice out this early,” she says. “Good air.”

  He inhales the cool smell of morning leaves and nods.

  “Hey,” she says, “maybe it won’t be so bad? No, it probably will. But you’ll do it and it’ll be done.”

  They stand a moment at the edge of CeCe’s property and watch the pale ocean rolling in, buying George a few more minutes.

  “Ready?” she says. They stride onto the lawn and up to the house. Soon, she’s hugging George and CeCe goodbye—CeCe, looking askance at the inside-out sweatshirt, Javier standing beside the gleaming black car, Esme in the front seat, the engine running. Iris waves as the car grows smaller and turns out of her vision. She jogs home. She sits with a second cup of coffee and her laptop and looks at news and shoes and property listings and a YouTube video of a monkey playing tag with a bear and vacation packages and recipes using kelp. Because it’s Monday and she doesn’t have any houses to show, she’ll go for a proper run, go to the grocery and the dry cleaner. She calls the real estate agency and asks them to keep her on client rotation even though she hasn’t got any appointments. She’s lacing up her sneakers when a truck rumbles up the drive. The father and son are back to clean the pool. She greets them in the driveway.

  “Morning. It’s time again,” the father says. “The filters.”

  They climb down from the truck and make their way on the stone path past the house, the son dragging the rubber snake. The air is damp for June, overcast and still. Iris walks alongside in the grass. She offers to get them something to drink. They refuse, drop their gear. They do not like her. Still, she’s glad to see them. To expect the disapproval of strangers is part of her, the bleak places she was raised: the saltbox in Great Village, Nova Scotia, where she loved the wet air and the sea and her stern aunts, her father’s sisters who lived down the street. Camden, New Jersey, where her parents—Richard and Carol, devout and disappointed—were at Camden Bag and Paper. There’d been too much wind in Great Village and not enough in Camden, where Iris turned the public library inside out, the library that smelled like a diaper, even as she failed school. Failed, by bland catastrophe—nearsightedness long undiagnosed, truancy, Carol. In Lincoln, Maine, Iris finished high school but forgot about libraries—her father, still with them, working the paper plants up and down the coast. (We met at the margarine factory, her mother said, when Iris asked how they fell in love.) At least the pool cleaners’ indifference is honest. The Somners’ people, she can’t read. How to know, when nice and good wear the same face but are not the same? She’s only sure of George and Victor.

  “Unusual,” the father said to the son, the first time he saw the pool, its bottom and sides painted black, its edges rounded imperfectly to trick the eye into seeing a pond. “Hard to tell what’s what.”

  On account of this opacity they claim the pool is dirty as often as they like.

  “Anybody walk in by accident at night?” the son asks. “We can install lights around the perimeter. Safer. Solar charge. Right, Dad?”

  No lights, she tells them. The pool’s aesthetic in keeping—George’s phrase, his sound, more and more replacing her own—with the philosophy of the house.

  3D trails her back up the drive. She sets to pulling weeds from the flagstone at the front door. What do they buy with the money they make, cleaning a clean pool? She pictures the son jamming on a
vintage Fender at the mall, the price tag hanging from the strap, pictures them at home, sunk in front of a glossy flatscreen, laughing at what a moron she is, learning the remote. In her old life, she would’ve been a person to them. Here, she is Wife. Silently, she justifies herself—two years ago, I was a bartender in a college town. For a decade. Sticky floor, flat tap, black mop. The college was at the top of one of the scarred granite hilltops common to northern New York. A hill like a mountain, the cluster of austere old department buildings its stone crown. Roads climbed like greedy creeper up to the college. Within the campus were sweeping colonnades of tall, bending trees. The streets outside had what the students needed: a drugstore, a taco joint, the bars, a grocery. Town below, there was her apartment and a sad-carpet guitar store—to which, her first week there, she sold her guitar—and the highway. Evenings, as she wound her car up the black roads to work, the bars strung together by their neon looked like the tilting lights of a shoreline from a ship. To the right of her bar was a bar and to the left of her bar was a bar. In the bar on the right was a woman who stood between the faded Heimlich poster and the bottles. In the bar on the left was a woman who stood between the bottles and a fresher Heimlich poster. Iris’s bar did not have a poster.

  One night she carded this kid. The kid still comes to mind, not because she loved him but because he was right before she met George. He is the bright rip of before and after, where her life split in two. She carded all the kids, what with the bat cameras suckered up in the corners of the wall behind her, what with not giving a shit about the kids having fun. The date on his license—a twenty-first birthday. “You’re all grown up,” she said, making a perfunctory flap to the stoolflies until they wet-worked their eyes off the shelves of booze and raised their glasses. The kid looked mortified. She poured a shot of tequila and topped it with Everclear and set it on fire with the apple-green plastic lighter she kept under the bar by the sink rag, put the shot in his right hand and a basket of tortilla chips in his left. “Ta-da,” she said. He thanked her. Polite for a healthy-looking Ivy in a T-shirt that read LACROSSE PENNANT CHAMPIONS, NORTH EAST DIVISION II, 2008. The shirt was a film, wash-worn. They all wore their clothes that way. To say—my mother doesn’t dress me and I’ve had this shit a million years—I’m not trying to impress anybody. That these kids were fooling no one she found endearing. Her clothes and the clothes of the men on the stools—newer and cleaner and tucked together with a distinguished necessity.

  The light of the kid’s shot wove under the curve of his cap. “Blow it out, dummy,” she said.

  Later, he slid from one empty barstool to the next until he was sitting across from her, bleary-eyed. “Doctor,” he said. “Howmmmmidoin?”

  Why not? He was pretty—sandy hair needing a cut, wide, heavy eyes, locker shoulders and a field tan, a lopsided frown she figured to be his main move, not bad. Had he connected her to her band, the one CD they’d released being titled Doctor Edible? No. Ancient history. He’d probably never even owned a CD. Soon she no longer drove down the hill at the end of her shift. They woke in his room and crossed the campus to the coffee kiosk. He had the rolling walk young men have, which she noticed when she walked behind him so they would not be discovered.

  By the end of the semester, she’d kept him company through most of his intro classes, the big ones where she wouldn’t be noticed in the darkened lecture halls with seats deeper than at the movies, with the slides and the distant professor at the podium, who in Art History 101 shouted, “Putto!” waving his red laser over each winged, chubby menace perching on a cloud. There was Art History and American Literature: Civil War–Present, and Introduction to Western Philosophy One: Aristotle–Hegel. Listening in the dark, a complicated dream. Afterward, she’d forget to be careful and they’d walk the quad side by side. (That they had to be careful she’d at first thought was a game or a joke, and later became a point of disagreement.) She’d talk about what they heard and he’d say, “That’s an opinion. You’re smart. If you could come to conference they’d jump all over it.” She read the books he was assigned—not all of them, and not all the way through, but she read over the parts the professors discussed until she thought she might understand them. An unfamiliar kind of hunger, most satisfied when it wasn’t satisfied at all. The kid stopped going to lecture. Twice she went alone, but she felt like a burglar entering the dark auditorium without him. She tried to imagine what she was missing—the paintings projected on the wall, the way one idea lit up another.

  When summer came, he gave her his campus ID so she could use the library. She took a second job at a golf club, to make up for the falloff in bar tips with the students gone, and to save money for the trip they planned to go on when he returned—all over Europe, sharing a backpack. He’d show her the cathedrals. I promise, he’d said, touching his cap. At the library, they looked at the photo and would not let her in. At the Athletic Center, they didn’t care. Each day, before heading to the golf club, she swam in the Olympic-size pool and walked the garden behind the School of Agriculture’s Plant Science Building, her hair wet, her skin tight from the chlorine. She read the names on the markers stuck in the long neat rows of flowers and herbs, sounding out the Latin, memorizing the English. A library without a door. She didn’t consider signing up for classes on her own. She called her mother, whom she was not friends with but who did have a certain way with the truth. Her mother, by then in assisted living in Oswego with her sister-in-law, four plaid rooms that faced away from Lake Ontario, but her voice still resonant as a goose, Quebecois and Jersey. “Young man’s coming back, not to you.” And, “You, school?” At the golf club, jackets were required in the dining room. George was the guy with the intense face who couldn’t find his ticket.

  “All done,” the father calls.

  Back in the driveway, Iris balances her blue checkbook against the trunk of a fir. She writes TruClear Pool in block letters, having never learned script. She writes 00/100. And how unnatural the rip of the check off the book always sounds out of doors!

  They turn away but the son turns back. “I forgot,” he says, looking at the invoice in his father’s hand. “Cash might be better.”

  “Henry,” the father says.

  “A processing error at the bank. Can happen,” Henry suggests.

  They drive away.

  Iris blamed Carol for the year of the kid. All that French Catholic bullshit. Touch everything, go on, everything is delicious sex! God save you, look how your hand burns! It was comforting, blaming Carol. She’d learned to from a guidance counselor in Camden. Then it was fall, and Carol died.

  Screw the pool guys. Next time, she’ll tell them to wait a week. She slaps her leg so 3D will follow. On the way to the grocery in town, she drives by CeCe’s wrought-iron gate. Iris’s passage into the world is now always this—Cecilia’s driveway winding to infinity, a glimpse of the distant side of the great white house, the sea flickering through a break in the trees, the white afternoon sunlight a magic lantern. Hard to believe CeCe isn’t there.

  Iris is unpacking the groceries when it occurs to her: What had Henry meant about the bank? But the house is so quiet, she turns the radio on and loses her train of thought. When George is home, opera booms from his office. Without him, nothing distracts her from the truth that she dislikes their house. Her unease grows as the sun falls lower in the sky. Maybe it’s that Somner’s Rest dislikes her. Somner’s Rest, the stupid name CeCe gave the place, a name Iris and George don’t use. She can’t get used to all the glass—the house is low and long and split in two like a slingshot or a wishbone, sitting on a steep slope, half on exposed concrete legs. It splits around a towering white ash that rises before the front door. Windows for walls, porous concrete, flagstone—crudely, imprecisely in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. One-half of the ground floor is open, and to her eye, vast, for activities that can be shared—living, cooking, eating. Except for the support columns, this area—to call it a room is not quite right—is enclose
d by plate glass and suspended vertiginously over a waterfall at the back of the house, which flows into a stone-filled grotto. The other wing is divided into standard rooms furnished with Somner heirlooms and whatever else the decorator suggested: den (TV, bar, and games), office (George, opera theme), craft room (Iris, unused), library (small-scale entertaining), Sky Guest Bedroom 1 (bird), Sea Guest Bedroom 2 (nautical), sunroom/potting. This wing hangs over the carport and the semisubterranean garage, which smells of exhaust and turpentine and holds a twice-used cream-colored Lexus CeCe gave to George with the house.

  “We live in a miniature golf course,” Iris said to George when they first saw the waterfall.

  He’d looked crestfallen.

  “That’s funny,” she said.

  “It’s funny?”

  “Yes, it’s a joke.”

  “I get it.” He laughed. Later that day, they unfurled the old blueprints, left by the original owners, a pair of microbiologists, dead now, who’d included a note that Einstein, a friend from Princeton and devoted gardener, had in the spring of 1946 planted the stand of birches at the corner of the lot. George, pointing to the blueprints, said the house grew out of its site like a mushroom, designed to be a part of the woods around them. The waterfall, on a pump. One night, a few months after they moved in, she heard George say to some guests, “Somner’s Rest? More like Somner’s miniature golf course.” In the heat that first summer the grotto collected a scrim of gnat larvae.

  She makes it through the hours to nightfall. In the gloaming, the rising bank of trees presses in dark sentinel against the floor-to-ceiling glass. Because she’s worked at night most of her life, night alone is strange. She feels, as in a fairy tale, that whenever she turns her back, an ogre bends through the treetops and his face fills the glass. The tattered spiral of a child’s nightmare—stand too close, she risks being grabbed and pulled though the pane, right into the woods. Stupid. Still, she spends this first evening alone sitting cross-legged on the flokati in Sky Guest Bedroom 1, eating popcorn and drinking wine in front of the television, wearing the glasses she never wears in front of anyone, even George, except the five minutes in the morning and evening between contacts and bed. She’s in the library, staring sideways at the spines, when the phone rings. The caller ID glows an unknown number. She wishes it were George. She lets the voice mail pick up. Someone she doesn’t know, a Barker or Baker, thanks them for the boat party, invites them to tennis. The phone rings again right away. Another number. Whoever it is hangs up. The night turns windy and tree branches scrape the glass. Her phone says it’s going to rain. When she finally goes upstairs to bed—their bedroom being the only upstairs room, a concrete and slat-wood crow’s nest—she closes 3D in with her so he can’t wander down to his mat in the kitchen, where he prefers to spend his nights. He understands her dread and flings himself up into the pillows, rolls onto his back, floats his paws into the air, and falls into a twitchy snore, running through his dream.