The Summer He Didn't Die

by Jim Harrison

  “What’s lithium?” Martha asked, drying her tears and beginning to form her patented grin.

  “It’s for manic-depressives. Bipolar people,” I said.

  “I never saw him depressed one little bit. Of course I never saw him calm either except for a few minutes after making love!” Frances said.

  I told them a vaguely funny story about how I had taken Daryl up to the farm one weekend. We got out of the car, strolled around to get over road weariness, and Daryl noted the pond behind the barn, really a small lake, and studied my father’s rowboat.

  “Nice rig,” he said. “I want to go fishing.” And so he did while I unpacked the car and settled the house for the weekend. He viewed my father’s jumble of equipment as “too fancy” but made a selection, looking with envy on an English Wheatley fly box with its little glass doors. I would row my father but was never able to fish myself because I could never bear the apparent terror and pain of the hooked fish. Hal trout-fishes up on the Au Sable River and says that trout don’t feel pain but they certainly do act desperate in their struggles. I went out once to check on Daryl and there he sat in the rowboat on the far side of the lake expertly casting the fly rod and looking untypically ordinary. He glanced at me and waved with his eyes back on his fishing. Anyway, he appeared in the kitchen an hour later with a nice mess of bluegills. My dad always refers to a catch as a “mess.” We put away the steak I’d intended for dinner and Daryl scaled the bluegills in the sink and did a nice job of sautéing them with butter and parsley. Daryl said that you don’t filet bluegills because like sole you want the sweetness of the bones to enter the flesh. Still fairly serene after dinner Daryl danced to a Cuban CD and sipped at a bottle of illegal Havana Club rum. He doesn’t dance well but sort of leaps around with fantastic energy. We made love on the sofa and it wasn’t until after midnight that he woke up and began ranting about the appointment of the latest poet laureate. Daryl is one of those writers who think that anyone else’s good review detracts from the future possibility of his getting a good one.

  After some fine huevos rancheros at the airport Martha and Frances became misty-eyed about leaving Mérida. Frances said that Mexico had been such a relief and Martha felt that she was leaving a beautiful place to go to her doom. She spun a little fantasy about becoming a wanted woman in the tropics, moving from country to country until she was extradited from the Galápagos where she lived in a hut among giant turtles and marine lizards. It sounded nice.

  On the plane they both began crying softly. I sat across the aisle from them in first class reading a book, partly because I’m not a good flier and reading takes me away from where I am. I finally told the stewardess that there had been a death in the family to explain my weeping sisters. I went back to my book and thought how many times I had sent Martha and Frances books even though I was sure that at best they’d only dabble in them. They read stacks of magazines which don’t quite work for me. I need the solidity of a whole book because life often doesn’t cohere for me, I mean my perception of life, and I need to find some bedrock however temporary. It’s like books help me glue the parts of my life together into an acceptable whole. But then it doesn’t always work. A friend at work loaned me a novel by this Toronto writer named Ondaatje, I suppose he’s a Dutchman, and the writer unforgivably killed off my favorite character, a woman called Anil with whom I shared a lot of feelings. It was like I got killed off myself. A lot of books I read are of a spiritual nature and Martha and Frances have teased me about my spiritual quests ever since prep school at Cranbrook. I admit these soulful enthusiasms form a long list but then their depressing worldviews were always more stable than my own. In ninth grade we were assigned Anne Frank’s diary and Martha decided that if Anne believed in the goodness of people she had no right to feel otherwise. Martha’s batty mother taught her to greet each day with a big smile. Her mother had had a stillborn baby after Martha and never quite recovered. So I continue on my intermittent spiritual quest that began at age twelve when my Scottish terrier Fritz died and I was inconsolable. My father told me that Fritz was headed for dog heaven and that I’d be able to visit him one day when my own time came. Fritz liked to be helpful and would pick the pair of socks out of the drawer that I should wear to school that day, often the wrong color combination but I felt obligated to him. I’m not sure if I’ll see Fritz again someday, but then it’s not up to me.

  We were halfway from Mérida to Houston and the girls were still snuffling. Martha was drinking water but Frances had had two scotches and it was only noon. I had that fuzzy Sunday feeling of not quite knowing what I should be doing though I was on an airplane and that limited the choices to zero. I put down my book and swiveled toward them.

  “Have you found God yet today?” Frances’s voice had a tiny slur.

  “Yes, he’s hopefully sitting with the pilot.” The plane had been jumping around a bit at the edge of a thunderstorm.

  “We’ve been talking about childbirth, our weddings, and women’s prisons and that’s why all the tears,” Martha said, as if she were a robin chirping. “You and Hal were smart to get out of town.”

  We were all married the summer after graduating from U. of M. Frances and Sammy were first, and then came Martha and Jack. Both were big weddings and seemed to consume the hot, wet summer with the usual nonsense of rehearsals, maids of honor dress fittings, dinners and dances at the club, the pointlessly lavish expenditures. A young woman is supposed to love this but I dreaded my own wedding date coming up in August.

  At the huge dinner and party after Sammy and Frances were wed both she and her mother were drunk and quarrelsome. Hal and I were at the head table with the other bridesmaids including Martha, and Hal kept muttering, “What a fucking mudbath.” I felt sorry for Sammy’s parents and relatives many of whom were schoolteachers, especially in the sciences, in the Detroit area, a profession to which they were passionately devoted. There was a big article about the extended family in the Sunday Free Press featuring all of the National Merit scholars and scientists their efforts had produced. Anyway you could tell that Sammy’s people felt awkward and a little embarrassed at the party after the wedding which cost Frances’s dad over fifty thousand. By contrast the wedding of Martha and Jack was more sophisticated and sedate. Martha’s father is from unobtrusive “old money” as they call it around Bloomfield Hills. Jack’s fraternity brothers thought it was quite a feather in his hat to be married into such a family. Even though Martha’s father is in a state of depression frequently he was able to eventually engineer Hal getting a Ford dealership.

  Anyway, after these two huge weddings I picked up Hal one Friday afternoon where he was working as a car salesman on Livernois and we drove happily to Chicago and I got married. My mother was absolutely furious. We lost a bunch of deposit money for the wedding but my father was very amused and one of our wedding presents was all of the money that would have been spent. In fact when we moved that October the money was enough for a down payment on a small house in East Lansing. Our real motive for running to Chicago, though, was Hal’s family. They were terribly worried about my mother’s plans for a fancy wedding. When I told my father about this he was also very concerned. For instance Hal’s dad and brothers would have to have tailored suits because nothing off the rack would fit them. We all had dinner together in Ann Arbor at the Depot and it was awkward with my mom trying her best not to look at Hal’s family as if they were aliens. We were treated beautifully at the restaurant because Hal was a football hero but you could see this meant nothing to my mother to whom football was just another activity she hadn’t quite figured out. Hal’s mother did an old-world curtsy at the restaurant and it was if my thin little mother in her Chanel suit had received an electric shock. Hal’s parents sent us a thousand dollars in a cigar box after our marriage, all tens and twenties that smelled as if they had been buried in the soil. We sent them to Florida on vacation for two weeks last winter but they returned a week early because there was nothing to do and the food
was strange. No one cooked short ribs and cabbage. Not oddly Daryl had accepted invitations to the weddings of Martha and Frances but hadn’t appeared.

  Sitting there talking to Martha and Frances my resolve withered and I had a Bloody Mary. I withdrew from the conversation when they began talking about Prada (a clothing company) and then while watching them I had a curious experience centered in a cluster of off-the-wall feelings. It started innocently with thinking of a quarrel with my son, Bradley, about his wearing a T-shirt to school emblazoned with MONEY SUCKS. Bradley wore that one despite the anger of his father. Every time a difficulty is resolved a new one begins, like after my daughter’s binge of promiscuity both children decided to become vegetarians which drove me batty with extra cooking work after I got home from my job. They seemed to enjoy my exasperation as I unloaded bags of groceries from the health-food co-op. Hal pulled a masterstroke by hiring a diminutive woman from New Delhi who was a graduate student in physics at Michigan State University. The key word here is “exasperation.” Maybe Daryl was a vacation from domestic exasperation. Throughout our long friendship Martha and Frances had had dozens of nervous breakdowns, small and large, and I once thought that their long-distance bills to me would support some families. I never cracked up and was occasionally envious of the way they’d disintegrate and then re-form themselves with professional help, including from myself. Looking at them chatter about their overfull closets I was suddenly fatigued with being instrumental in their balancing acts. I wanted to say, “I’m not your mom” but couldn’t. There was an emotional key in imagining the current situation if I withdrew. In short, a disaster. They certainly didn’t want to be cut loose from me.

  Maybe the closest I’ve come to cracking up was on a hot morning last July when I separated from Daryl. He had talked on manically through the night and then intermittently made love to me. He was using these sex pills for endless erections and I was both desperately tired and physically sore. Finally near dawn I got up to go to the bathroom and slipped out the back door and hid in the haymow of the barn, dozing and getting bitten by mosquitoes until first light when Daryl appeared in the yard yelling for me and drinking from his habitual bottle of rum. I opened the mow door and with an air of coolness to mask my churning insides told him that our affair was over. He looked stricken, yelled that he was going to drown himself, and ran around the back of the barn toward the lake. I scrambled down out of the mow and followed thinking that I’m a tentative swimmer at best and couldn’t save anyone. Daryl stood at the end of the small dock as if waiting for an audience. When I arrived, screaming of course, he quickly shed his clothes and dove in. I’m not sure I took him seriously but he stayed under for the longest time until he finally emerged in the cattails off to the right and a little behind me. He had caught a large black water snake which he held writhing above his head. He shouted my name then threw the snake at me. It hit me in the chest and fell stunned onto the dock, then recovered and slid off the dock into the water. If I had had a rifle at that point I would have shot Daryl but then I’ve never fired a rifle.

  We were in a Houston landing pattern and Martha had finally ordered a Bloody Mary which she slurped down greedily while the stewardess waited for the glass. Martha was saying something to Frances which I partially missed in the noise of the jet engines’ thrust to the effect that sex was similar to good pistachios in that you couldn’t stop devouring once you started. It was breath-takingly inane but probably true. The stewardess giggled and Frances literally guffawed. Maybe she would become one of those coarse, rich old ladies one meets at country clubs. At least three times in the last decade Sammy had called me and said, “I thought I married a princess and now it seems otherwise.” It seemed strange that he would repeat the identical sentence three years apart but then I supposed that he was so busy becoming a billionaire that people had become somewhat generic as they are to politicians. Martha’s husband, the noble trust officer Jack, is similar. He reminds me of a funeral director who thinks of everyone he meets as a potential customer. Martha said that when Jack slid the nude photo he had received at work across the breakfast table she watched as one of his tears fell into his habitual cornflakes.

  Customs in Houston was a horror. Two big charters from Cancún had landed just before us and hundreds of people laden with souvenirs struggled against one another. Frances was close to panic and held my left hand so tightly that it hurt. Martha had assumed her grinning mask of bravery. An older, quite obese man was wearing a very wide sombrero and he was short enough so that the rim of the hat kept hitting people in the face including Martha. He stunk sharply of tequila and was led by a spry old lady who was unmindful of the damage he was doing. The brim struck a young dark-complected surfer type quite hard and he barked, “Take off the hat, you fucking nitwit.” The old man held up his fists and squeaked loudly, “You dago,” which drew the attention of his wife who tore off the hat.

  We were nearly two hours getting through customs and immigration because of new measures brought around by Homeland Security. A small group of detained people was being guarded in a far corner and dogs were busy sniffing luggage. All of the travelers in the building looked fearful and pathetic except for the young people, to whom this process was just part of a vacation and they were babbling and laughing.

  Out in the reception area Martha’s father, William (no one calls him Bill except close friends), stood there with their ancient family lawyer Paquin, a man of French-Canadian descent renowned in the Detroit area for his casual shrewdness in getting the sons and daughters of rich people off the hook. Martha said, “Oh Daddy” and she and her father embraced passionately. It seemed odd that Jack wasn’t present but then I recalled that William had come to despise Jack. Off to the side Frances greeted two immaculately dressed businessmen that I took to be members of Sammy’s crowd of lawyers. Everyone was introduced and then we all trooped off to an airline lounge called the Admiral’s Club though no one there looked like an admiral. One of Sammy’s lawyers looked at me a bit too appraisingly and I felt an interior wiggle when I admitted to myself that he was attractive. The two of them explained to Frances that they were here a short time to offer advice and then would fly back to Dallas because it was important if the press got interested in the case that Sammy in no way be identified even on the periphery. Frances and I sat down on a sofa while the rest of them went into a conference room down a long hall. I drank a cup of coffee while Frances cuddled up and snoozed against my shoulder. A large television was tuned to CNN and some famous pundits were discussing the upcoming national election. Hal is an absolute news junkie but I have a small appetite for pundits who appear to believe that talking is thinking. In my line of work you don’t see any connection between politicians and actual poor people unless they’re the homeless littering the streets. Poor people make others nervous. Over the years I’ve persuaded my father a number of times to do pro bono orthopedic surgery on a few of my welfare clients who are uninsured, which is most of them. My father was quite uncomfortable around these impoverished patients and found them what he called “heartrending.” Consciousness came rather quickly to me as a young caseworker when I stopped at a McDonald’s with two abandoned children, a girl of six and a boy of eight. The boy ate like a Labrador retriever, then vomited and wept. His sister ignored him and ate very slowly with a lovely smile. The boy managed to keep down a milkshake and clung to me like Frances in the Admiral’s Club.

  It was nearly two hours before they emerged from the conference room. Frances was now awake and mildly flirting with a young businessman who had been drawn near when Frances was still asleep and her skirt had slid up her thighs. I was going to pull it down but then thought, Why bother?

  We stood in the club lobby for a few minutes and the younger, attractive lawyer whispered to me, “I think we have it wired.” He gave me his card which I stuffed down the back of the seat in the limousine that took us to the Four Seasons. After Daryl I meant to keep off the adultery circuit.

  At t
he hotel Sammy had reserved us an absurdly grand suite that would seem appropriate for visiting Saudi Arabian dignitaries. I glanced out the window and was frozen in incomprehension for a moment at the sight of the vast glistening buildings in contrast to Sunday morning’s comparatively empty streets in Mérida. William and Paquin went down the hall to their rooms for predinner naps. Martha slumped at the desk, red-eyed and exhausted, talking to Jack and Dolly on the phone, discussing certain legal issues that had come up in the conference room. Frances had taken a sofa pillow and lay on the rug in a square of late-afternoon sunlight. She reminded me of a napping, well-bred dog. When we got out of the car at the hotel entrance I overheard part of a brief conversation between William and Frances when she said her marriage was failing and he told her, “Take a month off.” Since our childhood William has had a soothing influence on Frances in contrast to the rather combative relationship she had with her own father. When we were in our teens Frances told me she had a crush on William which was so outrageous I couldn’t respond with a single word. When we were all up at their summer place in Harbor Springs I worried all one afternoon when William took Frances sailing. She was simply capable of anything and had driven a science teacher at Cranbrook to distraction with her flirting. On the dock I had seen William glance at her tiny bikini for more than a moment but I’m fairly sure nothing ever happened or Frances would have told me.