Summerlong

by Dean Bakopoulos

“Do you know what the winters are like up there, Don?”

  “Claire, he’s got a plow and a snow blower. Just think, all four of us, together round the woodstove. We can go down to Duluth once a month for supplies.”

  She blinks at him.

  “You’re nuts,” she says. “This is insane, Don. We just moved into new places. We’ve just set up our kids in new rooms and you want to play O Pioneers! this winter!”

  “With central heat and a Jacuzzi,” Don says. “It’s hardly roughing it. And we haven’t settled down again. We’re crashing with twenty-something stoners! Is that a way to raise our kids?”

  Claire frowns. “We don’t have a lot of choices.”

  “That’s why my Minnesota plan is a great plan!”

  “It’s not, Don,” Claire says. “It’s not going to work.”

  “Define it,” Don says. “What isn’t going to work? Moving to Minnesota? Our marriage? What? This is good, Claire. I’ve done it. I’ve come from behind. I have made a small amount of money, just enough money to fix our short-term problems. We can declare bankruptcy and live on cash up there. And then, I’ve been working with Mrs. Manetti, with Ruth, on this plan, a long-term one. Problems solved!”

  It is this final statement that makes Claire, already exhausted and nerves worn down to a nub, burst into tears. When she regains her composure, she stands up. “I hate that you think this is about money, Don. I hate that you think you’ve fixed a goddamn thing.”

  And soon after that, she is gone.

  Don pays the bill with the last of the cash in his wallet, leaving a gratuity that is larger than necessary.

  Later that afternoon, when Don Lowry goes home, as in home to the Manetti place, he finds ABC on the sleeping porch. She is rolling a joint. She points to an envelope on the counter. “That’s for you,” she says. When Don opens it, he finds a cashier’s check for $25,000, made out to him, and drafted on an account from a business named RM Enterprises LLC.

  In the memo line, it reads: “consulting fees, summer 2012.”

  “What is this?”

  “Your paycheck. Ruth is paying you to take us up north. In advance of your getting the house, of course. A bonus.”

  She lights a joint, takes a long drag, hands it and the lighter to him.

  “But I never actually accepted her offer,” Don says.

  “You want to take a nap before the party?” she asks after she’s inhaled a long deep pull of weed.

  “Nah,” he says. “I’m gonna go back to the office and make some phone calls. I made a small sale this month. Are you sure Ruth wants me to have this money?”

  “It was her idea.” As he turns to go, she says, “It’s been a while, Don, since you’ve slept next to me. I don’t have those dreams of Philly without you.”

  “I know,” he says. “I’m sorry. Maybe tonight?”

  “I’m sort of Charlie’s date for the party,” ABC says. “I’ll probably sleep there.”

  “Of course,” he says. “Thank you so much for this. For the money.”

  “Thank Ruth,” she says. “She insisted. I tried to talk her out of it.”

  She grins at him, a puzzling grin he cannot begin to understand.

  After making a deposit at the bank with a teller he thankfully does not recognize, some young college kid working a summer job, Don goes back to the office. The last thing he wants out in town is that he’s taking charity from Mrs. Manetti. Because it is a cashier’s check, there is no waiting period, and he takes a thousand dollars out right away, putting the cash in his wallet.

  He is ready for a winter away—Claire will come around. He is sure of it. Up in Minnesota, they could make that money last almost two years. They’ll sell one of the cars. They’ll have to figure out health insurance. They’ll have some expenses, but not many. Don has never before gone on unemployment or Medicaid or food stamps, it is not in his nature. But maybe he is dumb about that. Maybe it is time to simply swallow his pride and take whatever he can get. It is survival time now. Bankruptcy. Going off the grid. Don Lowry: going, going, gone!

  ABC goes out onto the front porch. Charlie is sitting out there with Ruth, watching the darkness set in, and smoking a joint. Ruth counts the fireflies. Then ABC enters this quiet space, twirls about, and shows off a flouncy black dress, short and strapless, that does nothing to hide anything about her body. She wears no shoes and her legs are shiny and bronzed from a day in the sun.

  “You are about the sexiest woman who has ever set foot in Grinnell,” Ruth says.

  “I’m overdressed, aren’t I?” she says. “I found this at Goodwill!”

  “It’s a heat wave party, ABC. You look great!” Ruth says. “I love the idea. A heat wave party. It sounds sexy.”

  “It sounds cheesy,” Charlie says.

  “Cheesy?” Ruth says. “I’d say it sounds more boozy than cheesy. If I remember such parties correctly, people will get powerfully and famously drunk. Just don’t talk to any professors and you won’t be bored.”

  She winks at ABC.

  “You sure you don’t want to come?” Charlie asks Ruth. She is toking up on the last of the joint.

  She laughs. “No, no, no,” she says, and she stands and lets ABC lead her inside. About ten minutes later, ABC comes back to the porch.

  “She’s asleep,” ABC says. “This is a powerful batch.”

  “You’re really something,” Charlie says.

  “You too,” she says to Charlie, who is dressed in red swim trunks, a sleeveless white undershirt, red canvas sneakers with no socks, and mirrored aviator shades. “You also are really something.”

  “I wanted to look like Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer, but I think I feel more like Slater when he worked as a lifeguard on Saved by the Bell.”

  “There have been many adolescent fantasies about A. C. Slater as a lifeguard. I can say that with authority,” ABC says. “Is that show still on?”

  “It was already on in reruns when we were kids. I don’t know if it translates well into 2012. It already seemed strange to me when I was young. I didn’t understand the hair or the clothes. I thought I was missing some joke. And then one day I saw, what’s her name, Tiffani-Amber something, and I got it. Like overnight, I thought, whoa. Whoa. Whoa!”

  “You lucky duck, you get to have sex with me at the end of the night,” she says.

  “That beats wanking it to a syndicated high school sitcom star in my father’s study,” Charlie says.

  A little later, when they walk into the party, the sun of early evening still bright, they see that the dominant theme is flesh, that everyone has tried to look sultry and hot, and together, unspoken, ABC and Charlie feel the full power of their youth, in a way young people often fail to recognize. They are the sexiest couple there. They can both feel it. Everyone is staring at them.

  Charlie takes off his shirt and hangs it on the fence.

  Don is working at his desk, answering e-mails, filling out paperwork, trying to figure out if he should or could pay any quarterly taxes, when Claire walks into his office, in a manner so stunning he involuntarily stands up from his chair.

  She wears white sandals with a heel, a white two-piece swimsuit, and over it a sheer white shirtdress that’s cinched a bit at the waist, comes down to the middle of her thighs, and buttons down the front. Her hair is slicked back and wet and she wears huge gold hoop earrings.

  “Wow,” he says.

  “Too much?” she says.

  “No, it’s amazing.”

  “Come to the party with me. I don’t want to walk in alone.”

  Don doesn’t feel like the party anymore, but a chance to be with Claire for the evening seems just the ticket. It’s his night to win her back—Charlie will be with ABC, and they’ll be drunk, in a crowd, and in the sultry heat of late July. They always had the best sex after parties, boozy and flirty affairs that gradually made them more and more aroused as the night wore on and on. If the kids were gone—as they would be tonight—it was not uncommon for Don an
d Claire to keep drinking when they got home, and fuck each other as many times as possible before passing out in a naked, sweaty heap. Of course, they no longer have their own house, and as soon as Don thinks this thought, he has a sudden plan for the evening.

  “My clothes,” Don says. “Are they okay?”

  He touches his khaki pants and feels the thick wallet in his pocket, and he feels, momentarily, as if everything is finally returning to normal. There even seems to be a flirtatious hint in Claire’s eyes. “They’re not very heat wave.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Claire says. “You look sexy. You always do.”

  He doesn’t want to admit how high this makes his heart soar.

  ZeeZee comes at Charlie and ABC, laughing uproariously as she does so, touching Charlie’s chest and saying, “Oh, good, a lifeguard, just in case.”

  She is quite drunk already. She had been friends with Charlie’s parents and had invited him to the party when she’d run into him at the coffee shop. Now, she wears a loose cotton top, white, in a vaguely Mexican style that falls from each bare shoulder, and her freckled neck is exposed, as is the top third of each breast. She wears impossibly high-heeled white sandals and pink-and-white-striped bikini bottoms. She looks like a half-finished wedding cake that has been left in the sun too long.

  “You two are hotter than the weather,” she says. “Go get yourself a cool drink.”

  Around the yard, there are tiki torches of smoking citronella, cans of bug spray, and a large bug zapper in the far corner of the yard, where bats zoom in and feed. There’s a large kiddie pool, filled with ice and water, but no kids are anywhere near it, and there is a sprinkler gently misting half the yard, and a slip and slide set up along the fence at the yard’s rear, though it isn’t on yet, but it is clear already, from the forced laughter that echoes from each small pocket of adult conversation, that it soon will be.

  Charlie and ABC help themselves to mojitos, which are being served by a young man in a Speedo. They have no idea who it is, though Jean-Claude himself, a barrel-chested hairy fellow, also wears a Speedo suit and cowboy boots, his own trunks decorated with the American flag. A straw cowboy hat is on his head.

  “Do you think he stuffed his suit?” ABC says.

  “A great idea,” Charlie says. “Next time.”

  Most of the group is dressed in some variant of the same costume: men wear swim trunks and summer shirts or tank tops and sandals, though there is one man in a seersucker suit, which ABC says is much sexier than a lot of the male flesh she is seeing. Lots of paunches and pale skinny legs. Most of the women are in thin dresses, though a few are in bathing suits—bikini tops with wraps around their bottoms and some of the women follow ZeeZee’s lead and drop the sarongs and wraps and wear only their swimsuits after a few drinks make them bold enough to do so. Nobody, thinks ABC, looks as good as she and Charlie look. Everyone is watching them. She knows already that Charlie will go home with her, and maybe, if Don can play it right, Claire will go home with him.

  The Beach Boys play from a stereo somewhere, though it isn’t quite tonally appropriate. It is the Pet Sounds album, probably the only Beach Boys album the hosts have, one that hasn’t been listened to in a long time. It’s an album on which even the ocean-groove love songs carry an impossibly melancholic subtext: God only knows what I’d be without you.

  ABC downs her drink and quickly gets another. “Personality drinks,” ABC says. “The first two drinks don’t count.”

  It’s then that they see Claire and it’s as if ABC can feel Charlie drop a bit further away from her as he waves Claire over.

  “A lot of flowers in the hair, a lot of body glitter borrowed from the dressers of teenage girls,” Claire says to them as she walks up, sipping her drink. “Women over thirty should not sparkle. Don’t you think?”

  ABC and Charlie laugh, a polite party laugh, a little overzealous appreciativeness in their tone. They are all drinking fast, in order to move the evening from awkward to bearable and maybe, possibly, if they drink enough, to fun.

  “Well, you look great,” ABC says, although she has a rule against complimenting women on their appearance as a means of opening up a conversation. But Claire does look great. It is clear to ABC that Claire is trying to look great. This worries her.

  “You too!” Claire says back.

  “Damn,” Charlie says. “Holy fucking sexy.”

  “Jesus,” Claire says. “That means I’m trying too hard.”

  “Which is fine if it works,” ABC says. “You look amazing! Where’s Don?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “He’s here somewhere. We came together.”

  “Um, I need a drink,” ABC says. “I’ll be right back.”

  ABC wants to get back to Charlie and Claire, but she also wants to find Don Lowry. She also wants a drink and it’s taking forever to get one. She finally orders a mojito from the shirtless buff bartender, who’s been mobbed all night by the quickly drunken professors, and then hears a voice behind her.

  “Make that two,” Don says.

  She turns around.

  “Don Lowry!” she says. “You came.”

  He is wearing a shirt and tie. She undoes his tie and slides it off, tosses it on a chair. She unbuttons three buttons of his white oxford, then rolls up his sleeves. She touches his chest.

  “That’s better,” she says. “Now go flirt with your wife before someone else does.”

  They see at that moment, across the crowded yard, Charlie talking up close with Claire, looking very much like two lovers in the gloaming.

  “Too late?” Don says.

  “Never,” ABC says. “Not ever.”

  “I don’t want you talking to him tonight,” Charlie says to Claire, pressing in close, ending the small talk they had been making up to that moment.

  “Pardon me?” Claire says.

  “I don’t like it. Don fucks with your head.”

  “Charlie!” Claire says. “Jesus.”

  “Don’t. Talk. To. Him. Talk. To. Me,” Charlie says, slowly, deliberately, and with some extra breath in his voice, leaning in to Claire, pushing air onto the side of her neck.

  “What if I do?” Claire says.

  “I’ll be jealous.”

  “What if I want to make you jealous?”

  “That’d be very naughty. I wouldn’t be pleased.”

  Claire’s eyes open wide. It takes her a minute to smile. Gooseflesh, even in the humid evening, manages to rise up and down her arms.

  “I’m gonna get some more ice,” Claire says.

  “Don’t forget,” Charlie says. “Don’t make me punish you.”

  He presses against her then and she can feel all of him, his flesh, his heat, his strength, his reckless and total availability.

  “Do you want anything?” she says, shaking the ice in her glass.

  “Yes,” he says.

  3.

  Ten o’clock and it still must be in the mid-nineties. The air so still. Most of the partygoers have fled the humidity and the mosquitoes by gathering in the misty spray of the sprinklers, and the laughter escalates as they do so. Some people have gone inside the house, an old house that doesn’t have central air-conditioning, though people gather near the window unit in the living room and you can see them through the window, a gaggle of scantily clad academics, pressed together in absurd conversations.

  Charlie has been making his way through the crowd, bouncing from one awkward stage of small talk to another. He is drunk though, deeply drunk, and although both ABC and Claire seem to be avoiding him, he also hasn’t yet seen Don Lowry. Still, Charlie does know a lot of the people at the party, knows them as his father’s former colleagues; he knows who they are, but he knows nothing about them, beyond, in some cases, what they teach at the college. He wonders how many of the women at the party his father has written letters to, or fucked.

  Everyone asks after Charlie’s father, and Charlie nods soberly and says his father is doing as well as one could expect.
Almost nobody asks about his mother, though one woman, an art history professor, says she’s been seeing his mother’s travels on Facebook and it looks like she is having a great summer.

  Charlie nods. He says that this is probably true.

  The novelty of near nakedness is wearing off for anybody who is still sober, and some of the crowd has begun trickling out. There are babysitters to pay and quiet, married sex to have back home, fueled by the muted and managed sultriness of the affair. At the party are college professors and local business owners and schoolteachers and even the Lutheran minister, a tall woman wearing cutoffs and a halter top, and all of them eating and drinking and drinking and drinking and talking in the backyard and drinking, wearing as little as they possibly can without feeling mortified, most of them wet from the sprinklers and the kiddie pools, and all of them, it seems to Charlie, have known Gill Gulliver.

  One couple, a philosopher and a biologist, two men, are snorting cocaine in the upstairs bathroom, one in tasteful Bermudas and a ribbed white undershirt and one in the seersucker suit, and they begin laughing hysterically when they realize who Charlie is. He’s only been trying to pee but when he knocks on the bathroom door, they answer it and usher him in and begin praising the legacy of Gill Gulliver.

  “That man could party!” the philosopher says.

  “Amen,” echoes the biologist. “Women loved your father.”

  Now Charlie is even more deeply drunk and has decided he needs to pee badly enough that the glass brick half wall that surrounds the toilet in the massive master bathroom is sufficient for privacy. For a moment, as he is peeing, it feels as if the stupidity of drunkenness is leaving him, and he wonders if he should find Claire and apologize for what he said, which he had meant to be hot, but which may have come off as insane. The two men are still sitting on the edge of a huge palatial bathtub, watching him pee.

  “Oh, your father!” the philosopher says. “Your father would have been amazed by this party! Amazed!”

  “Your father loved sex,” says the biologist in seersucker, and then places his hand over his mouth. “Oops!” he says. He breaks into a fit of giggles.