Lapham Rising

by Roger Rosenblatt

  The toe hurts, but not so badly as to prevent me from hoisting myself up onto my forearms and elbows. I have to get out of here. Stealthily, I inch toward the edge of the gurney.

  “Is it you?” A whiny male voice is aimed at my head. Suddenly I am looking up into the lemon face of Dr. Whatshisname, of Sag Harbor, by whom I have been accosted before. “It is you!” he says. “This is great.” He must be referring to my hospitalization. “I was thinking of you only this morning.”

  “Why was that? And while you’re telling me, could you give me a hand and help me off this contraption?”

  “You all right?”

  “Sure. I came in after an attack of persiflage, but I’m cured.”

  “You’re lucky,” he says, not listening to a syllable. “My acid reflux gets worse every day. I come here twice a week. Had a terrible bout today, which is why I was thinking of you.” I won’t ask, but it will make no difference. “I got another rejection. That’s five this month. Can you beat that?”

  Regrettably, I know what he is talking about. Whatshisname used to be a nip-and-tuck plastic surgeon in New York, but he lost all his patients because he forced them to listen to him read excerpts from his unpublished novels before they went under the knife. In fact, after hearing him read, several patients walked out, deciding that they liked their original looks after all. He then moved to Sag Harbor, where he committed himself to his art full-time. When his efforts were rejected by every mainstream house in New York, he became a self-publisher. He writes to me every so often to complain of this outrage, which he terms a conspiracy, and to ask if I will intercede on his behalf. I tried to pass him off to Vandersnook, but the great man wanted to charge Whatshisname a fee for the service.

  “Don’t worry,” I tell him, as I do every time. “I’m on the case.”

  “And while you’re at it,” he says as he helps me to my feet, “see if you can find out why I am not invited to speak at writers gatherings around here. Why am I forced to give readings on my own sunporch? Is that fair?”

  “Another outrage,” I assure him.

  “You bet your ass it is.” He hugs me, and in doing so steps on my injured toe. I groan. “That’s the spirit,” he says, and he departs, leaving me clinging to the gurney for balance.

  “I like him,” says Hector.

  I transfer my weight to my working foot, pull myself back up, and wait for the renewed pain to subside. I wonder when the real doctor will appear and if he will turn out to be Lapham himself, ready to anesthetize me with his conversation, then operate and remove both my legs. From my lower depths, I hear, “Is it you?”

  This time the question is asked by a woman whom I do not recognize. A cloud of white hair encircles a face so fiercely coy that it appears to be peeking out from itself. “Yes!” she exults. “It is you!” She introduces herself as the chairperson of the benefit committee for the Endangered Turtles Ball, a perennial gala held for and by the slow.

  “We’ve been trying to contact you all summer”—her tone wavering between delirium and emergency. She clings to her vowels. “And here you are! On the very same day I’m conferring with Dr. Brouhaha, another committee member. Wait till I tell him that I saw you right here in the hospital. It’s destiny!”

  “God’s will,” Hector whispers.

  “Well!” she exhales, as if the word constituted the entirety of a conversation. She is a coliseum of merriment. “Well! Here’s what we’ve been wanting to ask you.” Hector, imitating her hopped-up fervor, wags his tail wildly and tosses her the rescue-me look. “What a charming dog!” she says. “What’s her name?”

  “Hermione.”

  He growls.

  “Well! All of us on the committee would be thrilled if you would lend your name to the ball this year. Thrilled! You wouldn’t have to actually do anything, of course. We’re asking for contributions of one thousand dollars each from ‘House Pet Turtles’ and twenty-five thousand from ‘Golden Turtles.’ It would mean so much if we could add you to our list.”

  “Sorry,” I tell her. “My religious convictions prohibit it. And then there are the dietary laws.” She seems confused, though she says she understands perfectly.

  “Well!” she says again, her voice not flagging. “As long as I have you here, Mr. March, I wonder if you might glance at the manuscript of my first novel.” She reaches into her tote bag, which has a weeping turtle painted on the side, and under it the words “Save Me.” “It’s about a woman who lives in Water Mill, as I do, who comes upon a turtle named Sweetie on the beach near her home. Sweetie is dying, but the woman nurses her back to health, and the two of them become great friends and have many adventures together. Would you read it? I’d be thrilled!”

  “No.”

  “Well! I also have my husband’s first novel with me.” She is not kidding. “It’s about a rat named Ebola who escapes from Plum Island and swims all the way to Water Mill, where he causes the horrible deaths of all the women in town. Would you read it? He’d be thrilled!”

  “No.”

  “Well, take this little darling anyway,” she says. She reaches into her bag again and pulls out a fuzzy toy turtle the size of a deflated football that she thrusts into my arms. It wears a pink tam-o’-shanter and has a satin teardrop sewn beneath its right eye. When I give it a squeeze, its tiny voice pleads, “Save me.”

  “It must be wonderful,” says Hector as the woman departs in a hailstorm of hand waves. “It must be wonderful, the literary life. To be a literary lion, as you are. I’m a literary dog, you know.” I look away. “Oh yes. Our church library has an event every year to honor the literary lights, mostly dogs who write how-to books and celebrity autobiographies. It’s quite a night!”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “Is Mr. Lapham a literary lion?” he asks.

  “Definitely.”

  “He has an awfully nice car. Do you suppose he might give me a ride someday? He must miss his dear departed Westie.”

  A TV monitor is broadcasting the news, giving me no choice but to listen. “And from our culture corner,” a frantic young man is announcing, “that great old series Murder She Wrote is completely going off the air. They finally ran out of repeats, Charlie. Back to you.”

  To his credit, and my surprise, Hector says nothing.

  “Excuse me,” I call to a woman passing my gurney. “Do you suppose you could help me off this thing?”

  “Is it you?” she says. I acknowledge the local gossip reporter, Parrot Light, so nicknamed because she reports anything anyone tells her. She has the face of Natalie Wood, though without the dolorous depth. In the 1980s she worked as a correspondent in the Middle East but was dismissed after filing a story in which she revealed that Yasir Arafat was preparing to drive every last Israeli into the sea. Arafat’s third in command had told her so himself.

  “Sure,” she says, extending her hand. I sit up, stare, and wait for the only question she ever asks me.

  “Because I ran out of Bic pens,” I tell her this time. She jots that down.

  “All of them?”

  “That’s a follow-up question.” I pat her on the head and move toward the door.

  “Oh, Mr. March,” Parrot calls after me. “I’ve always wondered, where do you live?”

  “On Noman,” I am able to say at long last, a tremor of small satisfaction hovering on my horizon. She asks what I know she will ask. “Noman is an island,” I inform her, and I await her reaction.

  “Oh. OK,” she says. She makes a note to herself and walks off.

  “We’re out of here,” I say to Hector, and we are but a few feet from freedom.

  “Is it you?”

  I turn to face a young man with copper-colored hair, wearing blue-and-green scrubs. He looks like a lollipop. “You’re not leaving, are you? I haven’t examined your toe yet.”

  “I’m fine,” I promise him. “Thanks all the same. But I really must get home now.”

  “I ought to take a look, just to be on the safe sid
e. We don’t want to lose a citizen like Harry March to a damaged toe.” He hacks up a laugh and forcibly guides me back to the gurney. “You know,” he says, in enough of a drawl to suggest that what is about to follow is going to be horrendous. “You know, I’m something of a writer myself.” Hector looks up at him, feigning avid interest. “Of course, I’m not a writer the way you’re a writer. But I know I have a book in me.” I do not say, Why don’t you leave it there? “A book about my life as a Southampton physician.”

  “Is that so?” I find myself missing Whatshisname, Light, and Mrs. Turtle. He squeezes my toe to see if it hurts.

  “Yes. I’m going to call it Hamptons M.D.: The Life of a Country Doctor.”

  “Fantastic title,” I tell him. “But I must be off.”

  “You wouldn’t believe the stories.”

  “I’d love to hear them,” Hector says.

  “I’d love to hear them,” I say to the doctor. “But I must get back to my wife. She swore she’d turn to stone if I wasn’t home in time to help her with our dinner party.”

  “Tell me about it!” he says. I do not. “Nothing broken. So off you go. But try to stay off that toe.”

  As we are about to exit the E.R., Medusa is wheeled in on a gurney of her own. “She’s hyperventilating,” explains the orderly who earlier put the smile on my toe. “A pervert attacked her in her store.” I attempt to avert my existence, without success.

  “Is it you?” she shrieks, then points to the toy turtle still in my grip. “Oh my God!” She rolls on.

  Reflexively, I go to fling the thing into a trash can, but the woman from the Endangered Turtles Ball, still chatting in the lobby, catches me in the act. “Well!” She glowers at me, then rushes to retrieve the discarded mascot, wipes it off, and pats its tam. The turtle bleats, “Save me.”

  Out on the street at last, I signal for a taxi. Hector jumps in, and I crawl in behind him, using my forearms for leverage. Like all Hamptons taxi drivers, this one weighs four hundred pounds and appears to be permanently wedged into his vehicle. His belly tapers up to a pair of boy-size shoulders, like a Buddha’s. I tell him we’re going to Quogue.

  “Is it you?” he asks. “You know, I’m doing a book that might interest you, about the secret roads and byways of the Hamptons. It’ll be a real time-saver for motorists. I’m calling it The Road Less Traveled. What do you think?”

  “Me too,” Hector says softly. “I’m writing a book called The Cat in the Manger. It’s a religious book about a bruiser of a Persian who refuses to let the Wise Men near the baby Jesus. I’ve already sold it to the movies. Mary is going to be played by Glenn Close, Joseph by Anthony Hopkins, Jesus by the latest Culkin boy, and the cat by Garfield. And for Peter the Apostle, I’d like to get that handsome young British actor who starred in Four Weddings and a Funeral and so many other sprightly comedies. You know who I mean—Grant. Fabulous actor. Grant. Can’t think of his first name. Is it Hugh?”

  Fourteen

  The only sensible thing for me to do now is chop down the walls of my house. So, upon returning home, I am bound to do just that. No time to hesitate, no time for anything but action. Odd, is it not? Whoever invented time did not want things to happen all at once, and yet they do. At this moment, as the Chautauquans are whipping themselves into a frenzy of anticipation of my visit, at the same time, in the same world, Lapham is addressing himself in a full-length mirror in an effort to determine whether he looks senatorial, Hector is scratching the back of his head with his left hind paw, and I, checking the time, note that it is not on my side.

  Yet barely have I placed my Oedipal foot on my beach when a young female voice cries to me out of the mist. “I need to sell you a swimming pool.” A girl in a kayak swoops inside the L of the dock, like a gull.

  “What are you talking about?” I attempt to shoo her away.

  “A swimming pool,” she chirps. She ties up to my rowboat, strides toward me, and eases herself into the Adirondack chair. Naturally, Hector sidles up to her, his tail as agitated as his useless penis.

  “He loves me,” says the girl.

  “He loves everyone but me,” I tell her.

  “He’s precious.”

  She is twenty, I suppose, though these days I can barely tell a twenty-year-old girl from a fifty-year-old woman. This one has an Irish look, her longish black hair parted on the left side, the way Gene Tierney’s was in Laura. Her body is longish too, slim and neat in a yellow one-piece bathing suit that contrasts attractively with the forest green of the chair. Her skin is pearly. She smells of biscuits.

  “I’ll give you two minutes.” I slump into the chaise and face her.

  And all at once I realize that I was wrong about Pam, the waitress who brought me blueberry pancakes topped with vanilla ice cream at the Hampton Bays Diner last month; wrong about the girl in Bookhampton whose neck showed seashell white as she bent over a volume of Terence; wrong about the redhead in the Miata, and about the one in the shampoo ad on TV during Murder She Wrote. This is the girl. This is the girl I ought to be with forever. The one with whom I should live out my remaining years, playing Chopin on the pianoforte while making exquisite puns at tea. Then she opens her mouth.

  “Mr. March, everyone around here says I could never sell you one of my dad’s pools. My dad says so too. Everyone says you’re mean and crazy as all get-out.”

  “They’re right. So get out.”

  The time is six o’clock on the dot. I really am up against it.

  She backhands the air as if scattering gnats. “But I said, No, that old man is just waiting for a little brightness in his life.”

  “In the form of a swimming pool?”

  “You said it!” She reaches toward the chaise and clasps my hand in both of hers, as if we were at a political convention. “What you need to cheer up your cranky and miserable life is a new Gunite pool with a Stanford-Cox filtration system, a Kolbell pump—they last forever—a Levinthal heater, which makes even the coldest December day feel toasty, and Newman stone and tile landscaping, all installed with expert craftsmanship and tender loving care by the czar of Hamptons pool makers and servicers, Tony Alvarez.”

  “Your father.” I find myself looking for her baby teeth.

  “My father.” She reaches into the top of her bathing suit and pulls out a business card, as if conjuring a magic trick. “Anthony’s Aqua Heaven. Pools and Service. Night and Day.”

  “‘You are the one,’” I mutter.

  “‘Only you beneath the moon or under the sun.’” She sings the line rather well and extends her long legs toward me. Her toenails are fire-engine red.

  “Good going, señor!” comes the cry across the creek from Little Mexico. “We see that you took our advice!” They whistle, clap, and cheer. “But she looks a leetle old for you!”

  “She’s trying to sell me a swimming pool,” I call to José.

  “A girl like that could sell me the moon!” She gives him a friendly wave. “Buy it, señor! I would if I had the money—if I had the money to buy anything.” He laughs. Dave orders his men back to work.

  I turn back to her. “Miss, I have important things to do. I have no need of or any desire for a swimming pool. I have no one to impress. If I want to swim, I do it off my dock. If I want the water warm, I take a bath.”

  “Good for you! But I must tell you, I don’t think you’re seeing this issue clearly.” She taps my knee like a schoolmarm. “You are thinking of a swimming pool narrowly, as a place to exercise or loll about. And speaking of exercise, if you don’t mind my saying so, you could use some.”

  “I do mind. Your two minutes are up.”

  She settles deeper into the Adirondack chair. “Think of a swimming pool instead as another notable room of your house.” She glances at my house and mutely ascertains that it has no notable rooms. She should see it after I go at it with my ax. “Think of it as your indoor body of water, your pond, your lake, your estuary. What, may I ask, is more beautiful than a body of water? The
light dance of the ripples, the shadows on the waves, the brooding darkness underneath?”

  I consider giving her a mini-sermon on the effect of swimming pools on the American soul, a history that begins with the public’s first glimpses of the things in the private duchies of Hollywood actors and their scrawny nymphets; winds through the turquoise oases of streamlined motels, with inflated pink sea serpents squashed beneath the asses of Finnair hostesses and discontented mothers of five; reaches its zenith in the bright and lurid satires of David Hockney; and culminates in the oblong “inground” holes of every community with a marina or a links. Fly over the Republic, I could urge her, and take stock of the pockmarked map of languid blue rectangles and kidneys that outnumber the fields of corn and wheat and malting barley. And then tell me again how everyone needs a pool. But I refrain.

  For a different perspective, I could also relate the story of the drunken American Studies professor who, one night a few summers back, hoped to re-create Cheever’s “The Swimmer” by doing a medley of strokes in a series of private pools in East Hampton. He made it safely into and out of three estates but was shot in midbutterfly attempting the fourth. In a way, though, I have to admit, that anecdote only reinforces her sales pitch.

  The girl may be overdoing it, but she is no dope. I tell her so in guarded terms and ask why she is wasting what is obviously a first-class mind on selling swimming pools, filial piety aside.

  “But it never is ‘aside.’ My dad is having a hard time of it this summer. I mean, moneywise.”

  “Moneywise’?” I clamp my hands over my ears, reviving the pain in one of them. “Please! Is this your full-time occupation?”