Summerlong

by Dean Bakopoulos

  “He was fun at parties,” the philosopher says. “He would have loved this! You want some coke?”

  “Or a blow job?” the biologist asks.

  Charlie snorts a line off the mirror as if it is something he does every day, though he’s only tried cocaine once in his life, right after college at a cast party in New York. What the fuck is he thinking? He knows, of course, what he is thinking. He knows, deep down, the one legacy he has inherited from Gill Gulliver, and that is this: He likes to be the center of attention. He likes to feel people fall in love with him. The cocaine blows a hole through his brain that seems to light this truth up in dazzling pink letters.

  “Once they love you,” he tells the biologist, “it’s not very fun.”

  As Charlie leaves, the giggles intensify. Two junior professors come into the bathroom as Charlie is leaving and there are more shrieks of delight.

  Charlie is standing by the cooler of beer now, drinking a bottle of Negra Modelo, when ABC and Don Lowry come over to him. His heart is racing and his head feels as if it’s full of helium. Don has a small wooden bowl of lime wedges in his hand and he thrusts it at Charlie. “You should have a lime in that,” he says, and shoves one into Charlie’s beer aggressively.

  ABC gets a beer from the cooler and opens it and takes one of Don’s limes too. She is leaning on Don. She is drunk. She keeps finding reasons to run her hand through his chest hair, the considerable mat of it visible under the oxford shirt Don wears, which is damp with sweat under the arms and on the back. Charlie is flying. He can barely think.

  Don’s eyes are bloodshot and he looks sunburned and stoned, like most of the other adults at the party. There are a lot of joints going around. ABC holds up her bottle to toast Charlie and he offers her his bottle, knocking them together with a clink.

  “You guys are quite the pair,” Don says.

  Charlie and ABC both smile at Don then turn toward each other.

  “We hate each other,” ABC says.

  Charlie raises his beer bottle as if responding to some unspoken toast and has a drink.

  He bellows into the night, “Wooooohoooo!”

  “Jesus,” ABC says. “Come on!”

  “What are you guys even doing here?” Don asks in a loud, drunken shout. He looks as if he’s gone off the rails somehow. He looks dazed, as if he’s survived a plane crash. ABC’s never seen him this drunk. Mostly she’s seen him stoned. He is angrier drunk, sweatier.

  “ZeeZee invited us,” Charlie says.

  “Not here!” Don shouts. “Why are you in Iowa? Why the fuck aren’t you in New York? Both of you. This place, kids, this place is a prison.”

  “I know!” Charlie bellows. “Why the fuck?”

  People are watching them.

  “No, no, I’m joking,” Don says. “Grinnell is lovely. It is. It’s just—I mean, why? You can be ANY-FUCKING-WHERE.”

  “I happen to like it here,” ABC says.

  “Total bullshit!” Don barks, and for a moment Charlie worries Don might get violent, but he exhales a bit of drunken laughter. Someone, a guy about Don’s age who looks vaguely familiar, brings Don a can of Coke, unbidden, and says, “Drink this, Donny, okay? Let’s keep it down. It’s getting late.”

  The guy raises an eyebrow as he walks away, as if he’s blaming Charlie for Don’s condition.

  “Not my fault!” Charlie says. “Fuck you!”

  Don obediently cracks open the can of Coke and has a drink, sufficiently chastened by whoever that was. Don lowers his voice. This, to Charlie, has always been the mark of a decent man. Even drunk, he understands when he has crossed a line and can quickly regain his dignity. For a moment, Charlie almost feels affection for Don, a pang of sympathy that, inexplicably, makes the idea of fucking Don’s wife even hotter.

  “Guys,” Don says. “Guys. This is what I mean, kids. Why not, what’s stopping you from just going to New York and starting a life that is different, a life that means something?”

  Charlie wants to swim.

  “Go to New York,” Don says.

  “Kind of a problem with going to New York,” ABC says. “No place to stay.”

  “Place to stay?” Don says, spitting incredulously. “I hate that phrase. I need a place to stay. Right? A place to exist in paralysis, right, a place to stay static. You don’t need a place to stay at your age. The world is your place to stay. What? Will you cease to exist if you spend one night wandering around Manhattan because you don’t have a bed? Kids, here’s something I shouldn’t tell you, because I am a real estate agent. But places to stay are overrated. Places to live. You want to find places to live!”

  “So we should move to New York and be homeless?” ABC says. “Sorry. I’m not interested. I happen to like it here. For now.”

  “You want to leave the whole world behind, right? Huh?” Don says, really slurring now, spitting at them.

  “Live in the moment, Don. Tonight, I am here. So are you.”

  “So is he!” Don says, slapping Charlie on the back with an overzealousness that borders on violent.

  “I’m just saying, you know, we’re happy to have you kids here,” Don says. “But don’t remain in Grinnell, Iowa, simply because you have a place to stay.”

  “What do you think, Don?” Charlie says, grinning, loudly hissing the words. “Better to ignore a year’s worth of foreclosure notices and not tell your wife?”

  A few people near Charlie and Don and ABC stop and stare. Charlie has raised his voice.

  Nobody says anything in response.

  “Let’s use that fucking slip and slide, eh?” Don says, devilishly, and leads ABC by the hand. She turns to Charlie and offers him a middle finger as a farewell.

  Charlie is happy to see Claire then, out on the patio. She is in only her swimsuit now. In one hand, she holds her dress, in the other her shoes. She’s been swimming in the kiddie pool or using the slip and slide. He goes up to her, downing his beer as he approaches. Maybe she’s also snorted a line of coke upstairs. She looks wired, as if she might burst into sparks and flames.

  “I’m leaving,” Charlie says. “Also, you look amazing.”

  “I hope no one takes a picture of me, because I am sure my mental image of myself is not what the rest of the world is seeing. I bought this dress for a trip we took, long ago. I bought it for Don. But now we’re pretty much three bricks shy of done.”

  “You mean a load,” Charlie says.

  “What?”

  “The saying. It’s ‘three bricks shy of a load.’ Also, I just did a line of coke upstairs with some professors.”

  “What?” Claire says. “Seriously? You did?”

  “I know,” he says. “It was insane.”

  “Okay, now I want to do something insane,” she says.

  She steps closer to him.

  “You what?”

  “Do you want to do something insane with me?” she whispers, in his ear, her hand on his chest.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t do it,” she says.

  “Do what, Claire?”

  “I didn’t do it. I did what you said. I didn’t talk to Don after you told me not to talk to him.”

  “What?”

  “I haven’t talked to Don all night. Earlier, he tried to tell me something, and I walked away. I obeyed you. And now, you are going to obey me.”

  She walks over to a cooler, pulls out two Coronas, opens them with a church key, and hands one to Charlie. She whispers in his ear, “I’m leaving,” she says.

  The last thing Charlie sees is the crowd that forms as Don Lowry and ABC careen down the two side-by-side slip and slides, shouting fuck at the top of their lungs.

  On the walk home, they cut through the park and atop a hill, under a massive oak, they stop and Charlie is behind Claire and she feels his hardness through the thin, slippery trunks. She presses her ass against him. She will let him fuck her there if he tries. She is that drunk; so is he.

  She leads him down the hill to her house,
to his house, to their house. In the yard, she comes up behind him and reaches into his trunks and he turns and runs his hands down her body, reaching under the fabric of her suit, grabbing her ass and pressing her against him again.

  “Put your hands behind your back,” she says.

  He does.

  She grabs his hips, turns around, and pushes her ass up against his groin.

  “Wait here.”

  In a few minutes, she comes to the front door and motions for him to follow. He keeps his hands behind his back.

  They go inside without turning on any lights. She goes to the kitchen and he follows her. Somewhere they have dropped their empty beer bottles—at the park, perhaps—and now she gets two more from the fridge. She puts her hand on his hip and hands him another beer. She rubs her hand against the trunks again, feeling how ready he is.

  “I love the way you feel,” she says in his ear and she goes down his belly, onto her knees, and blows on him, nibbling him playfully through the swim trunks. The gesture of this, of being down in front of him, of giving him a love bite on his hard cock, freezes her slightly. She has flashbacked to the time she and Don had worked as lifeguards in college and she had gone down on him; it had begun in much the same way. It had been at a lifeguard party. She had handed him a beer, had felt his hard-on, had teased him with her mouth in the shadows behind the filter shed. She doesn’t want to be thinking of Don, but she is.

  “Are you okay?” Charlie says. She has stopped moving and she looks up at him.

  “You’re not allowed to speak,” she says.

  And now she is wondering if Don is still sliding across the slip and slide in his underwear, making a drunken spectacle of himself, or if he is somewhere else.

  A small part of her hopes he is somewhere else, doing the same things that she thinks perhaps she is about to finally do.

  4.

  He is somewhere else. He is, at that moment, breaking into his foreclosed house, which is three blocks from the heat wave party. Holding on to his hips as he shimmies open the side door is ABC. They are drunk, having done shots for each round on the slip and slide, and then they discovered that Charlie and Claire were nowhere to be found. They’d looked everywhere, finding at least three copulating couples in their exhaustive search. They left when the cops arrived.

  They are also pretty fucking stoned, having smoked a joint with Jean-Claude in the iced-down kiddie pool. Their clothes are soaked. ABC’s strapless dress is a problem. It keeps coming off under the weight of the water. She holds an arm pressed over her breasts to keep them covered.

  Inside, they keep the lights off and she holds his hand as he leads her through the dark and up the stairs.

  “I loved this house,” he says.

  Inside the house, the detritus of a domestic life. Things they left behind. Some old bottles of sauces in the pantry, newspapers and magazines on the floor, bottle caps and rolls of paper towels and cleaning supplies. An old towel on the floor in the hallway.

  “We didn’t leave the place spotless,” Don says as he kicks a shoe box out of the way. Finally, they come to the master bedroom, empty, and then they go to the bathroom. The door is shut and then, since that room has no windows, Don flips on the light and the exhaust fan whirs to life.

  “Ha!” Don says. “They haven’t cut the power!”

  “I have to pee,” ABC says, and ducks into the small water closet. There’s a half roll of toilet paper and some air freshener on the toilet, a half-burned scented candle on the floor. As she pees, she calls from it, “Isn’t this really breaking and entering?”

  “I don’t care,” Don says. “It’s my house. If the cops come, tell them I lied to you.”

  Out of the water closet now, in the yellow bathroom light, ABC sees the two of them in the mirror. They look horrible. She looks away from it. Her makeup is smudged and her hair is wet and frizzed and the dress is a limp raggedy secondhand garment from the eighties. She remembers how Don Lowry had found her under the sycamore and how it is, in the strangest of ways, that Don Lowry has led her to Philly in the spirit world, that Don Lowry will somehow be the one to help her earthly suffering, and set her free in some strange realm. Don Lowry is a good man; he doesn’t deserve what is happening to him. He found her when she needed to be found. She wants to tell him this. She feels unhinged, she feels insane. She wants to cry and laugh and scream all at once.

  What was in that joint?

  Don turns on the water in the massive Jacuzzi. “Ha!” he says. “Ha! They haven’t cut the water yet! Ha!”

  And then he adds, “I loved this fucking Jacuzzi. I loved this fucking bathroom.”

  “I bet!” she says.

  “I loved fucking in this fucking bathroom,” Don says.

  As the tub fills, Don begins to undress. ABC lights the scented candle she’s found and then finds another on the sink. She finds the discarded bath towel in the hallway. She watches him hang his shirt on a hook, and then watches him slide off his pants and hang those too, as if he still lives here. As if tomorrow morning he will wake up and get ready for work. His boxers, red plaid, he hangs on the empty towel rack, and the shoes and socks he neatly places beneath the rack. He looks good. He looks like a man who has some fight left in him, a lot of fight. ABC thinks that Don Lowry must have done this a million times. He stands there watching the water, thickening, already getting hard. How do you not notice that, no matter what your intentions are?

  “We don’t really have any more towels,” he says. “On account of the foreclosure.”

  And then he starts to laugh.

  “Claire never understood the Jacuzzi,” he says. And then, “I tried to talk to her tonight. She gave me the silent treatment. My idea had been to break in here with her. To tell her about the money I have from Ruth, about how we could start over, but . . . How do you just decide you don’t want to be married anymore? How do you fall out of love like that? That fast?”

  ABC reaches behind her, unzips her soaked dress, and drops it to the floor with a thwack. She puts her hands on her breasts.

  Don locks the door of the bathroom.

  “Just in case,” he says.

  She bends down and picks up her dress, knowing he is watching her body, looking at her ass in the thong she is wearing. She hangs the dress on a hook. She turns and faces him. She goes toward him.

  Looking in his eyes, she grazes the tip of his penis lightly with her fingertips. It is pointing up now, right toward her breasts. He shudders at her touch. She drops her arm. “Let’s get in,” she whispers in his ear.

  They enter the tub at opposite ends. Don sits down immediately.

  ABC steps in, wetting her body first with her hands, deliberately, slowly, torturing him like she was some Maxim model in a shitty photo shoot, playing all the cheesy slow-motion breast-washing cards. She thinks of Philly laughing, but then forces that out of her brain.

  And then she lowers herself fully into the water.

  Don Lowry feels like he might be sick or have a small stroke.

  He feels her foot move up his leg and touch him under the surface of the water.

  When she resurfaces, she says, “Do you want to smoke up some more first?”

  “No. No, I’m good,” he says.

  But Don Lowry is lying. He is not good. He has never once cheated on Claire, not since their first kiss on Mac field when he was a freshman in college. He’s come close before: there was a woman at a real estate convention in Baltimore, a woman who leaned into him at the bar, who kissed him in the hotel elevator, followed him back to his room, had even started to undress. And then he had told her no, that he couldn’t, and the woman stayed in his room until three in the morning, drinking nine-dollar beers from the honor bar, sitting in her black panties and white bra, and telling him that he should leave his wife.

  But he hasn’t cheated. Has Claire? He doesn’t actually know.

  He doesn’t want to know. He wants to know. If the marriage was really done, did it even matter? />
  He is so aroused, it is hard to think about Claire anymore, but yet he does, even now, even after ABC has pressed herself up to the edge of the tub and sits naked across from him. The water is still filling the tub. It is too low to turn on the obscuring foam bubbles of the jets. He leans back in the enormous tub and lets his hips float upward, his erection breaking the surface of the water.

  “Thar she blows!” ABC says, and splashes the water at him with her toe. She rubs water on her legs. “You’re so serious all of a sudden, Don Lowry! This is supposed to be fun.”

  She is very drunk and stoned and still feels a ripped kind of sadness at the center of her being that she has to push back down over and over. Seeing Don Lowry naked in front of her makes her miss Philly more than she ever has in her life.

  “Has my wife fucked Charlie Gulliver?” Don says.

  ABC looks at him.

  “What?”

  “Has Claire . . . Have she and Charlie . . .”

  “Not yet,” ABC says. “Not to my knowledge. Don’t think about that.”

  ABC flips her legs, splashing him, and lowers herself down into the water, wetting her hair, her breasts submerged by the bubbles that rise to the surface when Don Lowry finally turns on the jets.

  “Don’t think about anything,” she says as Don Lowry closes his eyes.

  5.

  They go upstairs to the master bedroom, where Claire usually sleeps on a double sleeping bag that rests atop an inflatable bed. It is the first time she’s had Charlie up there with her; it is the first time they have been without children inside this house.

  She has all the windows open and all the lights in the house are off and they don’t turn any of them on. She turns the ceiling fan to high and the air whips around them. They barely speak to each other. The beers are empty again and Charlie gets down on the sleeping bag, puts his hands behind his head, and looks up at Claire and then up at the skylight.

  “This should be the perfect view,” Charlie says. “My parents’ bed used to be right here. I remember they liked to watch summer storms from here and I used to lie between them and my father would smell of beer and my mother of wine and I would feel them falling asleep, and I know now, they were drunk, of course, but I can remember that they also held me; it’s as if we all, the three of us, couldn’t be close enough no matter what.”