Late in the Season (2 page)

“Still am, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think we’ll always look twenty-seven years old to each other?” Dan asked.

Jonathan wanted to say no, that Dan no longer looked twenty-seven, that he looked his age: thirty-five. Dan had grown older and Jonathan liked that. Dan’s self-assured smirk had mellowed into a wry mature grin; his bright arrogant look was only occasionally present, replaced by a trusting, comfortable gaze.

“I suppose,” Jonathan said. “Go pack the shaving kit before you forget.”

“Aren’t we going to have a big parting scene?”

“Here? I thought we’d save that for the seaplane dock.”

“You’re coming? I thought you’d be busy composing.”

‘‘I’ll come.”

‘‘You don’t have to.”

“I’ll come,” Jonathan said. “I’ll weep and wave a tearstained handkerchief as the seaplane flies off into the sunset. It will be very touching, terribly domestic.”

Dan stared, then laughed.

“You’re nuts.” A quick hug, then he picked up the shaving kit and went to the bathroom to fill it with toiletries.

So, he had known where it was all the while. He’d thought that Jonathan would let him go away without saying a private good-bye.

Jonathan checked through the packed bags anyway, hearing Dan happily whistling in the bathroom.

“Don’t forget the allergy pills,” Jonathan called out. The bags were well packed: there was even a pocket-size chessboard. Evidently Dan wasn’t taking chances on boring flight companions. Jonathan zipped the bags, brought them outside, plumped them into the little red-and-white Radio Flyer wagon, then went around to the front deck, gathered up all his papers, and carried them inside.

“It’s getting late,” he called, then went out again. The day was beginning to cool. It seemed slightly gray in the west, where he could sometimes see weather approaching them a week in advance.

“How about a drink for the road?” Dan asked. He had his flight bag slung over his shoulder and held a bottle of vodka.

“Don’t you take Valiums for the plane?”

“Oh, all right.” Dan came out onto the deck without the bottle. He threw his free arm around Jonathan’s shoulder. “When I come back you’ll have the whole score done, won’t you?”

“I hope.”

“I do too. I was thinking last night how this would be a good thing, my going off like this alone for a month. I’ll be busy. You’ll be busy. You know how much I hate to see the summer end. I’ll come back to glorious autumn. You’ll be done. We can be together again, and I won’t have to apologize all the time.”

Dan kept talking as they pulled the wagon along the wooden plank boardwalks that encircled and formed the only paths in their autoless community. Jonathan kept his free arm around Dan’s waist, his fingers hooked into Dan’s belt loop, as they descended the incline, leveled off, passed houses he saw every day, telephone poles, trees he’d remembered blooming wildly earlier in the summer.

Everything Dan said made sense. He understood that Jonathan now needed privacy and solitude to do his work; that when he returned the pressure would be off, and they would be able to deal with each other again completely, without the score between them all the time. Look at me, Jonathan wanted to say to the few people they passed, look at me and my handsome, mature lover, who understands me better than I do myself at times.

The seaplane was already at the dock. Someone took the bags off the wagon and placed them in the rear compartment of the big metal and fiberglass craft. Dan dropped his bag onto the seat, then stood on the pier. Two passengers were already belted in. The pilot was talking to a local woman. The dock was otherwise empty.

“Now if I don’t come back,” Dan began, “you know where the will is. I keep the safety deposit box keys at the bottom of the safe. All my papers are in order. My family won’t give you any trouble. They’re provided for.”

“And I’ll have you cremated and scatter your ashes on Forty-second Street.”

“I could
die,
you know,” Dan said, suddenly offended.

“And I could get married and sire three bouncing babies.”

“In a month?”

“Well, I could make a start.”

“Would you name a boy for me?”

“Sure. Dan Two. Or better, Dead Dan the Second.”

“I once dreamed you died,” Dan said. “Remember when you were in the hospital? I dreamed they gave you the wrong stuff, instead of anesthetic, and when I came to visit you the next morning they had a sheet over you. I felt so awful. Sort of like being in a really bad Lana Turner movie, where she mopes and wears lots of black chiffon. Then I tried to picture my life without you. And you know what? I couldn’t. I’d open a kitchen cabinet looking for paper towels, and you’d be there, winking at me. I’d open a closet for a pair of pants, and you’d be standing there, shaking your head at my choice.”

“Stop,” Jonathan said.

“Even in the dream I couldn’t begin to think of what I’d do without you.”

“Stop! You’re not going to die in a plane crash, and I’m not going to die either. At least not for a while. Go to London.”

He kissed Dan.

“Go to London. Get rich and famous.”

The pilot got in, then Dan. Jonathan unhooked the dock line and the seaplane turned with the tide and floated parallel to the dock, out into the mainstream of the bay, very slowly. Dan looked out his window, but didn’t wave, as the pilot revved up the motor. The plane began to slide forward, its pontoons skimming the sun-shattered water. Then it began to lift slightly, tilting from side to side a bit, and finally it rose, leveled off, swerved slightly, and flew over the bay.

Jonathan remained on the dock until the seaplane was a speck against the darkening sky. Then he walked back to his house. Turning into his yard, he noticed the neighbors’ deckchairs were out. He’d thought the Lockes were gone for the season. Hadn’t they closed up the house last week? Maybe not.

It was too hot to work on the deck, so he made himself a vodka tonic, and sipped it slowly, listening to some medieval music on the cassette deck. Then it began to cloud over, and he felt exhausted. The bedroom seemed suddenly abandoned without Dan’s carelessly thrown clothing everywhere. Jonathan felt very at sea for a minute.

“I’m a lucky man to have a lover like Dan,” he said to himself. Then he fell asleep.

It was a mistake to come out here, Stevie thought, as soon as she stepped out of the ferry onto the landing dock.

Only five or six passengers had come across the bay with her, sparsely settling the big upstairs deck, making it seem even emptier. On the Sea Mist side, no one was waiting—no greeting families, no welcoming husbands, wives, lovers, boyfriends. Only a large sheepdog with a bandanna tied around its shaggy neck was sitting on its haunches, as though expecting its master. It stood up to sniff the legs of the departing passengers, then settled back to continue waiting.

Despite the few people, it was still pleasant being here, Stevie said to herself, determined to go through with what she’d begun. She only had a light weekend shoulder bag to carry, so she didn’t bother unlocking or unchaining her family’s wagon from its dockside hitching post at the harbor. And the walk to her family’s house, though solitary, was fine. The leaves were beginning to turn here already; the poison ivy was a blood red. The air was fresh. A large bird—a magpie?—was sitting on a high wire, chattering at her. She whistled a bit at it until it cocked its head, gave a short squawk, and flew off. Had she meant to send it off?

“You don’t know your own mind, Stevie.” The words came back to her, her mother’s words, last night; then again, this morning, in the big breakfast room, four stories above Gramercy Park.

“I do too!” Stevie had replied, fiercely. She said it again now, walking along the boardwalk, hitching the shoulder strap of her bag higher. “I do too!”

“You’ll regret your decision,” her father had said, shaking his head morosely over his French toast. “Believe me, Stevie.”

And so she replayed the whole argument. Last night’s with her parents, then later on, on the phone with Bill—God! that horrible conversation! He’d sounded as though she’d shoved a knitting needle into his heart—then again with her parents this morning.

She turned off the main walkway and onto the one leading toward the ocean, to her family’s summer house. Old furniture, a battered refrigerator, torn and buckled plastic lounge chairs, old wood sheets from a torn-down partition, all lay in a heap at the corner, strewn there for the heavy garbage pickup. She wondered if they’d left any firewood in the house when they closed up. Just like them not to. Boy, her parents were thorough. They never missed a touch, did they? They’d manipulated and cajoled and controlled Liz and Jerry’s lives already, beyond hope, Stevie thought. Now they’d started on her.

“You’re only eighteen,” her mother had sighed. “You don’t have to know your own mind. But listen to me, or at least to your father. We know better.”

Sure. They knew better. They knew what they wanted, that was all. They’d wanted Jerry to be a doctor, and now he was interning at Lenox Hill Hospital. They’d wanted Liz married to Tony Halle, and she was. They’d wanted Stevie at Smith College this afternoon to begin her sophomore year—another year! then two more!—and then they wanted her to marry Bill Tierney.

The bushes in the path off the walk to her family’s house had grown out. She had to brush past them to get by. Funny how fast they grew so late in the summer. Her father—her meticulous father—would have pruned them the last time he was here—Labor Day weekend.

Ah! and here it was: the house! Her house now. All to herself.

Her spirits rose seeing the darling, old, irregular gray clapboard house. She’d always loved it as a child, had missed not being here at all this summer, having to spend time weekends with Bill and his family at their house in the Thimble Islands in Connecticut. Or with Liz and her kids in Syosset. Now Stevie walked three-quarters around the house, looking into every curtained window as though she were a stranger, someone coming to buy it, or to inspect it, or rob it. Before going in, she climbed the ladder to the roofdeck—really a sort of widow’s walk—her father and brother and Bill had added on in front a few years ago. This was her favorite spot; she had come up here a great many times, trying to get away from the others, to sit undisturbed watching the ocean.

She would come up here again, later, at sunset, with a cup of hot tea, and watch the geese migrating south, across a parti-colored island sky.

From her perch, she heard a humming, and turned to see a white seaplane rise up over the treetops like a tiny bright dragonfly before it turned slightly, and smoothly glided toward the city.

How peaceful it was. The ocean seemed almost calm: majestic, perfectly ordinary, yet always wonderful. All the foliage had grown so much this year, the nearest houses seemed like enchanted cottages hidden away in spellbound forests that required secret passwords to penetrate.

The Galgianos’ house had never looked so still. The windswept decks looked bleak without their colorful chairs and bathing cushions and bikini-clad occupants. Farther away, two small partly attached houses belonging to the Winstons were closed. The entire stretch of beach in front of her perch was empty. She’d walk there later. She loved walking along empty beaches. How long had it been since she’d done it—been allowed to do it—alone? Two years? It seemed so long ago.

Only the lovers’ house seemed open: unshuttered, uncurtained, furniture still placed out on the decks: the big, handsome lounges from Hammacher Schlemmer, the large mahogany table, the elegant smaller tables, the slant board and weights neatly spaced to one side. She called them the lovers, but they had names, of course: Jonathan Lash and Daniel Halpirn. Sometimes she called Daniel David by mistake, thinking of the Biblical lovers, and all three of them would register the error and be pleased, and laugh. She called them the lovers to her parents, to her friends, to Bill, and in front of his family. Openly, declaratively, defiantly, at times. In such a way that none of their euphemisms could get by. Not “those nice men,” or “that couple,” but the lovers; as if she were in on a secret conspiracy with Jonathan and Daniel to keep what they really were as clear, as obvious as possible.

Leave it to the lovers to still be here after Labor Day. They knew what was good, what was truly valuable. Not the noisy, crowded Sunday August afternoons when everyone within a hundred-mile radius would arrive on the beach. But now, still hot and clear, even lovelier, in mid-September.

Well, at least she’d have their company in this isolation. Not of course that she’d visit them or anything like that. She hadn’t much in summers past, and only with Bill and Jerry for the big party the lovers had thrown last year. No, she’d see them, though: on the walkways, on the beach perhaps, on their deck having dinner or reading, or lifting weights. That would be enough for her—just a wave. Hi! Hi Lovers! Hi Jonathan! Hi Daniel!

She was here to be alone.

“You’re going out there alone?” Bill had asked last night. “It’ll be desolate!”

“That’s just what I want, Bill, to be alone,” she’d replied. “To be away from you and my parents. To get away from all the pressures.”

“Do what you want,” he answered, his voice turning that into a challenge, a threat. “Do whatever you want. You’ll be bored after one day out there.”