Summerlong

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Summerlong Page 8

by Dean Bakopoulos


  She loved the Midwest instantly, in a way that made her feel like she had always loved it. She loved it for its openness and because it was hers alone and because her mother and the bullies from high school and the teeming crowds of California could not follow her there. She had not sat in traffic once in Iowa. People told her it would be too white, and sometimes it was, sometimes her brownish skin and blackish hair and faint accent would cause some clerk or passerby to ask her where she was from, but then again, she wasn’t from Iowa, and so why not ask her where she was from?

  Philly said the question was racist; ABC wasn’t as sure.

  In the same way she instantly fell in love with Iowa, she knew now, she had always been in love with Philly. She loved her from the moment, during freshman year, when Philly had sat across from ABC at a two-top table in the dining hall. They were already roommates, but in the whirlwind of that first week, they had not done much socially. ABC was in orientation with the other Posse Foundation scholars; Philly was busy meeting every fucking student on campus. Left and right, people were falling in love with her.

  ABC had been reading a book at lunch one day—The Stranger—and Philly had sat across from her suddenly and said, “Howdy, Stranger.”

  ABC looked up at her, startled.

  “The book,” Philly said. “Get it?”

  ABC smiled.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Fine. You?”

  “I’m homesick,” Philly said. “Aren’t you?”

  “God no,” ABC said. And Philly laughed. Philly was from Philadelphia. Hence the name. It was her given name; her parents had been in graduate school there and had not planned on staying, but they had stayed. Her mother worked at a museum, her father at a radio station. They were divorced. And Philly grew up with the odd experience of having a first name that was the same as the city she lived in.

  “I love that. I love that you’re not homesick,” Philly said.

  “Thank you,” ABC said and looked over at Philly’s plate. It was nothing but a huge heap of chocolate cake drizzled with vanilla soft-serve ice cream from the giant machines near the dessert table.

  Philly looked down at her own plate. “I guess I’m sort of depressed,” Philly said.

  “Who isn’t?” ABC had said and then she did something that was completely out of character for her as a freshman. She set down her book, slid over her tasteless salad, and reached across the table, fork in hand, and took an enormous bite of Philly’s cake. When she put it in her mouth, a drizzle of vanilla ice cream ran down her chin and Philly reached across the table with a napkin and wiped it clean.

  “I’m so happy to be your roommate, ABC,” Philly had said. “I’m so glad.”

  All of that had happened at Grinnell, here in the middle of nothing, where everything important that had ever happened to ABC had happened and she was never going to leave it, she was never going to go away from it again.

  6.

  Don helps Ruth Manetti into the house.

  “Do you want the TV on?” Don says.

  “No. No, just quiet is fine. I’m exhausted.”

  “You overdid it,” Don says.

  He helps her into the bed, helps her remove her shoes, and gets her some water from the kitchen, a cold bottle of it.

  She closes her eyes now and she seems so tired. The air-conditioning is on in the house, and he draws the blinds shut for her, then covers her legs with a quilt that is folded on a chair next to the bed.

  “Should I try to find ABC?” Don says.

  “Why? For me? Or for you?”

  “I have to go to a showing, but, well, I don’t think you should be alone.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m, well, you’re so tired.”

  “That’s true. I’m also old. Tired is normal.”

  “And I just don’t think you should be alone.”

  “In case I die? I’ve been alone a long time now. People are scared of dying alone, but . . .”

  “I didn’t say that. I don’t mean you’ll die.”

  “I’m not afraid of death, Don. Would you bring that book from the desk? It’d be nice to die reading.”

  Don does. It’s an old book club edition of Madame Bovary, probably fifty years old.

  “You’re not gonna die, are you?” he says.

  “Not intentionally,” Ruth says, “though I would if that were possible. This would have been a nice last day.”

  “You plan to read?” Don asks. “I can open the blinds then.”

  Ruth says nothing. She opens the book to reveal a hollowed-out chunk of pages, a square cut out with a razor blade. Inside, a few rolled joints and a lighter.

  “I used to love this book, Don,” she says. “I used to read it every summer. That and Anna Karenina.”

  “I see.”

  “Your wife was reading that. Anna Karenina.”

  “Was she?”

  “People aren’t fair to women, Don. They don’t want us to have inner lives after a certain age. They don’t want us to have time for it.”

  “Claire has an inner life. She’s a writer.”

  “It’s been over a decade since her last book, Don. I’ve waited for it. Did you know that? I’ve read her book. My book club did, at the library, because she was local. Everyone found it depressing but me.”

  “She’s a good writer.”

  “I don’t think she is a writer anymore. I think you think she’s a writer.”

  “Is ABC around?” Don asks. “I could use . . .”

  Ruth picks up a lighter from the nightstand.

  “Burn?” she says.

  “Yeah,” Don says, though he has a showing and there’s no way he should be here, doing this. “I feel like my life just caught fire,” he says.

  “That can be good,” she says.

  He lights the joint and Ruth shuts her eyes as Don tells her all of his troubles—the foreclosure, the funds, the fact that he knows in his heart of hearts that his wife no longer loves him and that it is in the shadow of this unspeakable truth that he must conduct the rest of his life.

  “Do you know ABC wants to die?” Don says.

  “She thinks she does,” Ruth says.

  “You don’t think she’ll actually do it, do you?”

  “Kill herself? No.”

  “You sure?”

  “You’ll save her, Don. That’s why you’re here.”

  “I can barely save myself, Mrs. Manetti. My life is in trouble.”

  “Every life is in trouble, every minute of the day. Sometimes we are keenly aware of this fact, and sometimes we can ignore it.”

  Don feels his head lighten from the weed; his hands seem to fill with air.

  “I’m not sure how to help her.”

  “You’re here to lead her to something. Back to something.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Before Philly died, Philly told ABC that she’d send you. She’d send you to lead ABC to a sacred place where she could be with her again.”

  “Ruth?” Don says.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “You’re Don Lowry.”

  “And you think Philly sent me to ABC?”

  Ruth doesn’t say anything, he is not even sure if she is awake, and soon her breathing slows and he knows she is asleep. Was she dreaming? Is she senile? He wonders if he should wait there, for ABC to return from wherever it is she is, but eventually Don Lowry knows he must wander out into the summer’s staggering brightness and meet with clients, in hopes of making a desperately needed sale.

  For a moment, Don Lowry feels invincible: he can make Claire love him again.

  “I’m going to go now. I’m going to sell a house today, Ruth,” he says, though he knows she is sleeping, “I’m going to make enough money to save everything, including my marriage.”

  Ruth doesn’t open her eyes. She barely moves, but she answers him: “Most marriages are never saved, Don Lowry. Most marriages are just kept a
float. That’s much different.”

  7.

  They leave the bar pleasantly day drunk and with a mission: ABC will take Charlie to see his father. And soon, they stand outside the assisted living complex at the Mayflower, a sprawling compound of housing for senior citizens settling in for the last breath, some of them hoping it would not come for a long time, and some of them waiting for it, ready to be done with all of this living.

  ABC leads him through the door, his hand in hers—it was her idea to come—and she goes to the check-in desk and says, “We’re here to see Gill Gulliver.”

  The nurse, or attendant, or whatever title the thick and frowning woman at the desk is given, looks at Charlie.

  “We were wondering if you’d come,” she says. “You’ve been back for a while, haven’t you?”

  The woman looks at a computer screen, clicks and types, clicks and types, clicks and types again. “Your mother called to see if you’d been yet. She says you should call her.”

  “I lost my phone,” Charlie says.

  “He’s just had his dinner,” she says. “He likes to eat early.”

  “Dinner?” Charlie says. “He never ate dinner early.”

  “Dinner is what we call the midday meal. At night, there’s a light supper.”

  “Oh,” Charlie says.

  “You’ll smell some wine on his breath, perhaps. The doctor has okayed that—we do it for alcoholics, you know. To prevent withdrawal,” the nurse says.

  “He’s an alcoholic?” Charlie says.

  The nurse says nothing.

  “Is he, um, recognizing people today?” ABC asks.

  “I just heard,” the woman says, “that he was talking a lot at lunch.”

  “You mean dinner,” Charlie says. ABC nudges him with her elbow.

  “Right,” the nurse continues. “I just looked in on him. He’s having his coffee and working. He likes to type away on his laptop in there. But don’t look at his screen. I think he knows he is typing nonsense but doesn’t want anyone to see. He wants everyone to think he’s writing a book.”

  “Well, that makes sense,” Charlie says.

  “Room 118,” says the nurse. “Have a nice time.”

  Gill Gulliver, Charlie’s father, began teaching at Grinnell College in 1982, four years before Charlie was born. The country was rattled by recession and Gill Gulliver, toting a doctorate in English literature from the University of Michigan, arrived in Grinnell driving an old Ford Fairmont wagon that he’d bought used a week before. He was thirty years old and single.

  There were so few jobs that year, but Gill had landed a temporary two-year visiting gig out in the prairies of Iowa. He’d known of Grinnell—a reputable and shakily prestigious (in the Midwestern sense of the word) liberal arts college with a lefty bent. The campus, in August, was beautiful enough, as compelling and green as any campus in late summer, but noticeably flat, and his office in an old brick building, tucked away on the third floor between the offices of an ancient Joyce scholar and a maudlin historian, was the kind of place that a young professor might do a great deal of writing. His goal was simple: to spend two quiet years of teaching at Grinnell, working on shaping his Ph.D. thesis—“The Glamorous Tragedy of Unbridled Optimism: The Fall of Jay Gatsby and the Rise of Ronald Reagan”—into a publishable book.

  Gill did not buy a house, but lived, instead, in one half of a duplex owned by the college, a short walk from his office. His routine bordered on the monastic. Each morning, he woke at five, exercised—a vigorous run followed by calisthenics and dumbbell work in the duplex’s empty second bedroom—then showered, ate a bowl of oatmeal and a piece of fruit, drank black coffee, and left for the office. He always arrived by seven, the first one to show up on the third floor. He would work on his own book, expanding, revising, and annotating it, until ten o’clock, when he would open his office door and shift into teacher mode. Lines outside his door were long. He was a charismatic teacher, with wild eyes and wavy long hair and a sartorial sense that was often missing in academia. Charlie had seen the pictures and saw them again now, on the walls of his father’s study: Gill Gulliver with his first tutorial class; Gill Gulliver with his award-winning independent study students; Gill Gulliver accepting the President’s Medal; Gill Gulliver speaking at commencement, the wind blowing his hair and his robe and perhaps even his mustache in a way that suggested something epic.

  It was Gill Gulliver’s desire for stability, for routine, and for stoically Puritanical work habits, that—after one sexually thrilling and ultimately heartbreaking affair—attracted him to the woman who would become Charlie’s mother, Kathy Mulligan. Kathy had, on a few occasions, referred to the “woman Gill would never get over,” but Charlie had only overheard such talk in late-night, alcohol-fueled arguments, and he didn’t know the full story. Gill Gulliver, by all accounts, had been drawn to Kathy instantly: she was raven haired, complicatedly attractive, and desperately bored, a lifelong Iowan who had spent four years commuting to Iowa City because she couldn’t afford the college that was literally in her front yard.

  When Gill Gulliver’s visiting professorship turned into a tenure-track position, he had the brief idea that he might leave Grinnell anyway, head east or west or at least to one of the more prestigious public land-grant schools of the Midwest, but there were still so few jobs available, and besides, he hadn’t finished the book yet, and Kathy had her mother to care for (she was an only child), and so, why not, why not accept a position at Grinnell when they offered him one? He did so, thinking that once Kathy’s mother had passed away (her health seemed to be fading; she’d had Kathy late and was already seventy, suffering from a bad kidney and heart disease) and once he had finished his book, had secured a contract for its publication, they could leave. Someone would hire him. After all, he’d been on ABC News once and National Public Radio twice talking about Ronald Reagan! He was, in academic terms, a rising star.

  They did not leave though. Instead, Gill applied for jobs each year, and failed to secure one. Eventually, Charlie’s parents took out a home equity loan, using the paid-for house as collateral, and had gradually built, at the rear of the large lot, a building housing Gill’s study and a small guest room. A small kitchenette and a full bathroom connected the two rooms, both of which looked out at an inground pool. On weekends and summer evenings, Charlie remembers playing in the yard, or swimming in the pool, constantly aware of his father’s omnipresence at that study window, a massive desk piled with books and papers.

  Charlie can still picture his father in the study, a wonderfully comfortable place to work, but Charlie knows well that Gill Gulliver had never pictured that room, which he loved, which may have been his favorite place in the world, as the kind of place that would stand, decades later, as a kind of sad storage unit: packed with all his books and papers and notes and letters and research, a labyrinth of unfinished ideas and in-progress projects, while Gill Gulliver rotted away, half mad, prematurely mad, in the local nursing home.

  They go into the room.

  Gill Gulliver is in a chair. He types away on a small laptop computer.

  When ABC walks in, Charlie right behind her, Gill stops typing. He looks bewildered for a moment and then clasps his hands to his face and says, “Oh my God.”

  Charlie and ABC walk toward the chair; Gill seems to have no idea of how he might slide his rolling tray table away from himself and stand to greet them. It is as if he is in an invisible prison. ABC turns to see Charlie, his eyes drowning.

  “Oh God,” Gill Gulliver says again.

  ABC stands back while Charlie goes closer to his father. She wonders if she should slip out now. She wonders what Charlie wants. Charlie tries to say something, but the only thing that comes out is a phlegm-crippled hey.

  “Oh, oh,” Gill Gulliver says. “ABC! ABC, it is good to see you. So good! Come here.”

  ABC goes toward Gill. “Charlie’s here too, Gill.”

  Gill says nothing about that, just stares at ABC in a kind of
rapture. She moves the tray table and the laptop and coffee out of his way.

  He reaches out to her and she leans in and hugs him for a long time, and then, when she finally lets go, Gill Gulliver looks right at his only son, Charlie, and smiles and says, “Well, who’s this handsome man?”

  And then turning to ABC and winking, he says, “Whoever he is, he likes you. I can tell.”

  8.

  In the haze of a dying afternoon, they walk home across the empty campus. In almost every building, from the original chapel to the shiny new fitness center, ABC can locate a memory of Philly, still burning, like the corner library table where she often sat with Philly, where Philly would sleep more than study, her head in ABC’s lap.

  What do you do when you can still smell her hair?

  Charlie and ABC sit at the kitchen island of the Gulliver house on two metal stools, drinking beers, side by side, and ABC finds herself swept up in some inner turmoil of both grief and urgent lust. Her whole body is a moistening sponge, sweating, ripening, and she presses her beer to her forehead and she focuses on this feeling so she will not cry or moan.

  “I should turn on the AC,” Charlie says, and he leaps up and does that.

  “It’s the humidity,” ABC says. “Blah! It’s too early in the summer to be this hot.”

  Charlie comes back to his stool, nodding, and says, “I tend to run cold so, you know, sometimes I don’t notice it. Maybe I’m used to the stage lights.”

  “So, how long will you stay in Grinnell?” ABC says. She feels the urge to ask Charlie something easy and concrete, in an attempt to ground herself. She feels as if she’s floating. She needs to be distracted from this wave of grief.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s your next role?”

  The small talk is almost too much. She wants to communicate in a different way.

  “I told you. I’m done acting! Are you okay, kiddo?”

 

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