Summerlong: A Novel Part 15

Don's mother, Annie, comes to the door and tells the children to take off their shoes-easy to do since both of them are wearing Crocs that day-and then she asks Claire if she wants coffee.

Claire politely declines. All she wants is to be alone. She suddenly has a craving for it. It's as if she couldn't possibly bear to talk to anyone any longer.

"Is there anything they need at the mall tomorrow?" Annie says. "I plan to take them. I don't have much money, but I did just get my Social Security check and could buy them some new shoes or slacks or . . ."

"You don't have to do that," Claire says. She knows Annie has enough money.

"I want to," Annie says. "I feel so bad for the kids."

Claire watches as Wendy looks up at her. Claire knows exactly what her younger kid is thinking: Why does she feel bad for us? What's wrong? So Claire smiles and says, too loudly, "What in heaven's name for? The kids are going to have a great summer! Swimming and hiking and then Minnesota in August, just like always."

"You're still going to Minnesota?"

"Yes. It's a free vacation. We love it up there. We haven't ever missed a summer, not since Wendy was born."

"Have you found a place to live yet?"

"What do you mean?" Claire says, gritting her teeth and glowering. She nods her head toward the children and whispers, "Little ears, Annie. Please."

Annie does this thing she sometimes does where she has her eyes fill with tears by making this extended grimace of pain. It is an ugly expression. Claire has seen her do it at funerals and weddings.

Claire ignores the tears; she looks past Annie at the living room, where her kids are flopped, already bored, on the sofa. Bryan leafs through a magazine and Wendy doodles in her journal.

"Grandma," Bryan says. "Can we go swimming tonight?"

"Oh, it's getting late," Annie says. "It's almost five. You'll get chilled without the sun."

The children protest with moans.

"It's light for four more hours," Claire says. "And hotter than h.e.l.l."

Normally she'd let Annie do her thing, which is to ask the children to sit still and watch television, but she wants to picture her kids leaping into a swimming pool rather than sitting dejectedly in a dim living room of a gated community, eating Sam's Choice lemon cookies from Walmart. "It's at least ninety degrees out."

"Okay, okay," Annie says. "Go get your swimsuits on."

Then Annie hands Claire two hundred-dollar bills from the pocket of her khaki capri pants. "Get some groceries for your family, Claire," she says, without a smile. "I've already bought mine for the month. I don't need much."

Claire takes the money. She's no fool.

Is it sad if you admit that, for many mothers, the only moments of solitude come when driving to and from a store, or shopping within one? Claire's at the Trader Joe's twenty minutes after leaving her mother-in-law's condo and it feels like a small vacation to be there alone, away from home, away from Grinnell, walking through the steaming parking lot. It is a new addition to the sprawl of West Des Moines and she hates being there in the traffic and the barren, treeless acres of box stores. She always feels profoundly dumb when she shops at places like Trader Joe's, as if she is confirming her rather pathetic status as an easily led member of a target demographic.

She finds herself, soon enough, cooling off in the overwhelming frozen foods aisle-a visual cacophony of strange wraps and pastries and prepackaged ca.s.seroles that promise life will be easier, warmer, more wholesome if only you consume these products. She's trying to remember which frozen whatever it is that Don likes-samosas or the minichimichangas or maybe the pierogis-because she is going to pack up the kitchen soon and they will not be cooking much after that.

The whole store looks garish to her, and all the convenience foods are suddenly some profound judgment of her worth as a wife and a mother, a discounting of her choices and her marriage.

She will have a night alone with Don that evening, and that will help matters. Won't it? They've been spinning their wheels for two weeks, acting on those twin demons panic and impulse, and they've not made any progress, not logistically or emotionally. Maybe she would seduce Don as soon as she got home, f.u.c.k him on those bas.e.m.e.nt stairs again. Could she f.u.c.k her way back into loving him? Or maybe she could write all night-a night without kids-and go on some manic fifty-thousand-word binge, producing one of those sly, powerful comeback novels in one weekend, a fragmented tour de force about a thirty-nine-year-old woman's emotional free fall, surprising her agent on Monday morning with a phone call and saying, "I have a new book."

She realizes she has paused right there in the frozen food aisle, and gets snapped back to reality when a fat man nudges her aside and opens a freezer door with a chilly blast.

Um: samosas, Don likes the samosas, and there is a pear-mango chutney near the salsas that he also likes. Claire is reaching for the samosas when the phone rings.

"I have a terrible migraine," Annie says. "It's just awful. I am sorry."

"Oh dear, Annie. I'm sorry. What should I do?"

"You have to come back. You have to get the children."

"Really? I mean, if you need to sleep, they can watch a movie."

"They've been fighting since they walked into the house, Claire. They are being monsters."

"Let me talk to Bryan," Claire says.

"Just come and get them. I am going to lie down. I can't do this tonight."

It's clear to Claire that she didn't show Annie a significant enough amount of respect and deference earlier. This is payback.

That is fine, Claire says. She will finish grocery shopping and then she'll come and get the kids.

"You just get some sleep, Annie," Claire says. "Let them watch a movie until I can get there. I just stopped for groceries."

"Are you at the Hy-Vee?" Annie says.

"Trader Joe's," Claire says.

"Oh, well, good for you," Annie says, which means, You idiot. You're spending too much for someone so broke.

It is not a big deal. The kids will be happy to see her and Claire will have fulfilled her monthly obligation to take the kids to her mother-in-law's for a visit.

Why isn't she disappointed? Now she could admit it, now that it isn't possible. She had so badly wanted to see Charlie that night, without the pressure of her children waiting for her at home. She had fantasized about calling him from a Motel 6 near Newton and saying, "Come here now."

Would she have done it?

Yes, she could admit this more easily now that it didn't have a chance of happening. She'll be with the kids that night, which is really the only sensible thing she should be doing in such a dark time.

Why is her lip trembling? Why do her hands shake?

In this state, Claire is wandering up and down the aisles of Trader Joe's, randomly placing things into her cart: salsa, granola bars, rice crackers, yeast. She doesn't want the kids to come home because, as she is staring at the frozen foods and busy moms in yoga pants and tight Lycra pullovers are annoyed by her aisle-blocking, she is thinking of Charlie Gulliver.

And now, right there in Trader Joe's, what she really wants to do, right there in front of the sixteen different kinds of vegetarian pizzas, is have a breakdown. She sinks down to her knees in front of the gla.s.s coolers. Here it comes: A complete, f.u.c.ked-up, terrify-the-pa.s.sersby breakdown. A tear-offyour-clothes and writhe-on-the-floor-weeping breakdown. She wants to crawl out of Trader Joe's with a torn shirt and no shoes, knocking down the displays of two-bite brownies and mango shampoo as she leaves, and get into the car and drive west, perhaps. Men do that s.h.i.t all the time. Men go out for some eggs and milk and get the f.u.c.k out of their lives. Their sad marriages become happy lives. She could do that too. It would not even be permanent. It'd be temporary. A few weeks of being a f.u.c.king freaked-out crazy woman. She'd go to some hotel somewhere near some mountains, Aspen or somewhere, and she'd max out her credit card, the emergency American Express that is in her name only, which Don couldn't cancel. She'd do nothing but take baths and sleep and eat. She'd get ma.s.sages from big ski b.u.ms with foul minds. And then she would feel clean and rested and limber, also a bit fuller in the a.s.s and t.i.ts from all the room service (who the f.u.c.k cares!), and she'd call Charlie Gulliver, she'd tell him to come to the hotel in Aspen and f.u.c.k her over and over. She'd be called crazy by then, it'd be widely known, so when Charlie arrived she could do things like pour champagne on his belly and smoke weed and watch p.o.r.n and yell at him: Eat my p.u.s.s.y or f.u.c.k me hard or I'm gonna suck your big c.o.c.k and she'd yell when she came because who the f.u.c.k cared. She'd be the Lindsay Lohan of Midwestern moms for one month. Men could do that. Men could go crazy and then come home and say, "I don't know what happened. I got scared. I lost my mind." Generals and preachers and football coaches tweeting pictures of their junk and snorting cocaine off a stripper's a.s.s. They'd apologize. And the story would be over. Women as brilliant and tough as Hillary Clinton accepted this truth for some reason; they didn't like it, but they accepted it as fairly normal male behavior. But would men ever accept a woman saying the same thing? Would that woman who f.u.c.ked that famous general get a free pa.s.s by pleading temporary insanity?

"Ma'am," a voice snaps at her. "Ma'am! Are you okay?"

Her phone is ringing. A crowd of people has gathered around her. She's sweating and has twisted the hem of her T-shirt up into a knot that exposes her stomach. She stands with a freezer door open, the pizzas a few inches in front of her face, and she realizes she probably has not moved in at least five minutes.

Someone brings her a bottle of water. A small crowd of other concerned middle-aged women surround her. She drinks some water.

"It takes a village!" she says, trying to joke, but no one even smiles.

She asks for a cigarette, but n.o.body around her seems to have one, or to have even heard of one. There are three women with her, all of them in an exercising outfit of some kind.

"Do you think that's a good idea?" one of the women says.

"Yes! I'd like a beer and a cigarette pleazzzzze."

"Call 911," says another woman.

"Okay," says the third, the one wearing a sun visor and tennis skirt. She pulls a phone from her small purse.

"I have a brain tumor," Claire says, hoping that would excuse her and get these well-meaning people to let her leave without calling 911. But they all just stare at her.

Here comes the store manager.

"I'm probably going to f.u.c.kING die soon!" Claire yells. "I am so sorry!"

What Charlie had been discovering that summer, in his father's incredibly cluttered study, was not a series of brilliant unpublished essays, or the drafts of a secret but genius, genre-bending novel, but several file boxes marked CONFIDENTIAL, in each of which was a neatly kept system of slim manila folders marked with hearts and dated, and in the smallest red-penciled print, a first name: Jennifer. Hannah. Laura. Li. Suzanna. Belinda. Anjali. There were dozens of files like that, most of them slim, and containing a letter or two. A few of the files contained multiple letters, thick stacks of correspondence, some of them Xeroxed, some carbon copies of letters sent, some papers printed off of computers on dot matrix, ink jet, and laser printers. Some handwritten.

Charlie and ABC had been going through them in the afternoons, while Ruth napped and before Claire would come and see Charlie or Don would go to smoke with ABC. They killed time reading through the letters, taking breaks for swimming or sometimes s.e.x, or beer and pizza. The letters, buried among so many useless stacks of paper-old syllabi, yellowed department memos, forgotten expense receipts-were the only things of interest in the study at this point. The letters spanned more than twenty years, and they'd all been written to women, the names in the label area of each folder: students, former students, colleagues, women he'd met at conferences, women he'd met on planes. All of them were similar: strangely pathetic and romantic at once, admissions of his unhappiness and his desperation.

"I don't think I should be looking at this," ABC had said at one point. "We should burn them."

"These are not anomalies, ABC. He's written hundreds of these."

That afternoon, ABC stands back as Charlie opens another box of letters.

He reads each one as he goes, as if he is afraid he might miss something.

"It'll take me all summer to read these," Charlie says.

"Don't torture yourself," ABC says. She has opened another file box and is absentmindedly flipping through its folders, reading more first names aloud: "'Cindy, Donna, Emily, Franny, Georgia, Hannah, Ivy, Jen.' Everyone has a secret life, Charlie."

Charlie has even begun to pinpoint the rhetorical strategies Gill Gulliver used in his love letters. He could have written a paper on the topic. He even memorized some pa.s.sages of prose. Some lines were easy for Charlie to memorize, because his father had used them over and over in so many of his letters. When each written piece is devoted to a private audience of one, some recycling is possible.

Now, he reads some of the pa.s.sages out loud to ABC. She looks at him with sad eyes.

"These were very well hidden," Charlie says. "If they were real affairs, I wonder if my mother knew of them? Or worse, they weren't really affairs, but pathetic attempts at them? Listen to this: 'In some ways, the only situation that is preventable is love. One must not open up one's self to it. Then one can be free of it. But once the door is opened, as I fear it has been now, there is no turning back. Love must be pursued with an intensity that borders on obsessive, addictive, insane.'"

"There's some truth to that," ABC says.

"But who is this, um, Joanie, he wrote this to and why?"

ABC shrugs.

Charlie reads another letter: "'The weather here has been outstanding, and I find myself taking in each vista as if you were with me, and I can almost hear your reactions, a breathy whisper, a soft moan of approval.'"

"Huh," ABC says. "Don't do this to yourself, Charlie. What's the point?"

"Or how about this?" Charlie says, ignoring her question. There was obviously no point, not really, but how could he not keep reading? His father had been such a mysterious wreck to him. How could one not look at his leavings, the physical evidence of his inner life?

"Listen: 'Your hair with the faint scent of cuc.u.mber and lemon when you come to my cla.s.s fresh from the shower.'"

Or this: "'If what I was feeling was not so true, so undeniably a wholly new and original feeling for me, I would be ashamed of it. But when something completely new enters the world, what can one do? One can only embrace it with the innocence of a small child reaching for a piece of dandelion fluff.'"

These letters had been saved by Charlie's father for some reason-in that sense it is not as if he had destroyed any evidence of his somewhat lecherous yearnings. It was as if he had meant to chronicle his career as a womanizer, or at least a womanizer on the page, as the legacy of his particular and pa.s.sionate genius. Why else save copies of such d.a.m.ning notes? Why not just let them remain sent, rotting in a landfill somewhere, or at best, lingering at the bottom of someone's forgotten box of college mementos?

Some of the files contained responses from these women too. Charlie began to look through these as well, and the letters ranged from the mundane Thanks for your note! I hope you have a great summer too! to the cautiously interested Professor Gulliver, I do understand what you are saying, but I am young and such an adventure as you propose-a trip to Rome-would be scandalous if anyone found out. Still, I am flattered. I will think about it.

Other letters to Gill Gulliver spoke circuitously of past events: I will always remember Chicago, and I understand why I can't visit you in Iowa, but if you ever make it to Boston, would you please, please call. I will meet you in a second. Some letters spoke with regret: If anyone finds out, Gill, oh, G.o.d, can you imagine? Burn this letter after reading, please! One letter recounted, in erotic detail, what had apparently been the woman's first s.e.xual experience: I remember, she wrote over and over, how you did that from behind me, and I couldn't see your face, and I wanted to see it when you finally came. Other letters were more forceful: Professor Gulliver, you seem to be crossing a line here that I am uncomfortable with and I ask that you do not write me again or I will have to forward your notes to the dean's office with a formal complaint.

It is almost midnight when ABC hands Charlie a letter she has found.

And then there is this brief note to a woman named Claire, dated September 1995.

Dear Claire, If you would please stop by my office tomorrow evening, I'd very much like to personally apologize for my behavior at the student-faculty mixer yesterday. I had intended to walk you home, that is all, since your dorm was on the way, but the stars pulled me along and I felt youthful again, as if being near you had helped me rediscover a feeling I long thought dead. Please forgive me, Professor Gill Gulliver "Do you think that's Claire, I mean, Claire Lowry?"

ABC grins.

"I bet it is."

"I mean," Charlie says, "I don't really know where to start. Look at all this s.h.i.t. I should just burn everything."

"I suppose you could, but is that really what you want to do?" ABC asks. "I mean, if your father spent his whole life writing an epic novel, shouldn't we try to find it and help him publish it?"

"I thought we were just supposed to tidy up," Charlie says.