Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (11 page)

“Yeah, you were right. I don’t know, I guess I started paying attention after you said that: about the way he looked at me. Something in his eyes … He licked his lips while he was looking at me. He smacked his lips. As though I were a hamburger. We were standing beside the barbecue. He was stabbing his fork into the meat to see if it was done and flipping the hamburgers. Then he lowered his eyes. Like a bad actor in a movie that’s meant to be funny. He rolled his eyes a little when he looked at my breasts. Don’t get me wrong: That can be nice. Sometimes a woman likes it when a man admires her body. But this … this was different. This was … what did you call it again? Filthy? Yeah, that’s it. A filthy look. I didn’t know what to do with myself. And then he started telling a joke. I don’t remember how it went, but it was dirty. Not funny-dirty, dirty-dirty. And you should have seen the look on his face as he was telling it! You know how some people, when they tell a joke, they laugh as though they just made it up themselves? Well, that’s the way he laughed.”

“And now I suppose you don’t want to go by and visit them at their summer house,” I said a little too quickly.

“Marc! How could you even consider that? No, thank you
very much, no. I’m not really into that, anyway, visiting other people while I’m on vacation, but now there’s no way. I wouldn’t get a moment’s rest there beside that pool with Ralph around.”

“But when we left you acted like you thought it was such a great idea. At the door, when we said good-bye. And in the car you even asked Julia and Lisa about it. About what they thought.”

Caroline sighed. “So we’d all had a little bit too much to drink, all right?” she said. “Then you don’t really say that you have no intention of visiting their summer house. And in the car I was only thinking of Julia. About that boy she liked. It’s a good thing she wasn’t too enthusiastic, either.”

“Well, we’ll see,” I said. “There’s no real obligation.”

And now we were standing beside the open trunk of our car. I sensed an opportunity, but it meant I would have to give up my resistance to taking the tent along. And the sooner the better.

“You know,” I said, “it’s been a few years. Sometimes I miss it, too: a little camping. Let’s give it another try. But I don’t want any messing around with pans and gas burners. We’re going out to dinner every night.”

Now it was my wife’s turn to look at me dubiously, as though I might be joking. But the next moment she threw her arms around me.

“Marc?” she said. “That is so, so sweet of you!”

I held her tight. I couldn’t help it, though; I was thinking about the last half hour of that garden party. I had looked everywhere and finally found Judith in a corner of the yard, where she was picking up glasses and half-empty bowls of chips and peanuts.

I took her by the wrist. She turned to me with a start. But when she saw that it was me an almost dreamy smile appeared on her face.

“Marc …” she said.

“I have to see you again,” I said.

We left on a Saturday. The first night we spent at a hotel. The second one, too. As usual, we had no fixed plans. Or, I should really say, to all appearances, we had no fixed plans. To an observer we would have looked like an ordinary couple with two daughters. A family with no fixed plans, making their way south. In reality, we were edging almost imperceptibly toward the summer house where Ralph and Judith Meier were spending their vacation.

On the third morning, still lying in the hotel bed, I flipped through the camping guide we’d brought along with us at the last minute. There were three campgrounds in the immediate vicinity of the summer house, all within a six-mile radius.

“So what do you guys think?” I said. “Shall we pitch the tent somewhere?”

“Yeaaah!” Julia and Lisa cheered, in unison.

“But only if the weather’s nice,” Caroline said with a wink.

That was the plan. My plan. We were going camping. We would spend a few days, a week if need be, at the same campground. Somewhere—on the beach, at the supermarket, in a sidewalk café in the nearest town—we would run into the Meiers, entirely by accident.

A few weeks before we left I had visited a travel bookshop and bought a detailed map of the area. So detailed that it showed each individual house. I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure, but using the address and directions Judith had e-mailed us a few days after the party, I thought I could tell which house on the map was the Meiers’. I went to ViaMichelin and typed in the address. Then on Google Earth I zoomed in so close that I could see the blue of the pool, and even the diving board.

Of the three campgrounds, one lay along the same road to the beach as Ralph and Judith Meier’s summer house. But to my horror I saw that the guidebook referred to it as a “green” campground. A campground with “farm animals,” “environmentally-sound toilets,” and “simple facilities for the true nature lover.” I could almost smell the stench. But a collateral plus of a campground where detergents and deodorant were presumably taboo was that it would make the contrast with the summer house all the greater. One dive in the Meiers’ pool and Julia and Lisa would never want to leave.

In her e-mail, Judith had sent me both her phone numbers. A week after the garden party I tried to reach her cell phone a few times, but only got the voice mail. At first no one answered the landline, either. I thought about leaving a message but decided against it.

Three days later—I had, in fact, already given up and was about to hang up—a woman with a voice I didn’t recognize answered the landline.

I gave her my name and asked to speak to Ralph or Judith.

“They’re not in the country right now,” the voice said—not a very young voice, I registered. “And at this point I’m afraid I can’t say when they’ll be coming back.”

I asked where they had gone.

“And who are you?” the voice asked.

“I’m the family doctor.”

There was a two-second silence.

“Ralph got an offer all of a sudden,” the voice resumed. “From America. A part in a new TV series. That’s where he’s gone, and my daughter liked the idea of going along, so I’m taking care of the boys for the moment.”

Judith’s mother. I vaguely remembered a woman in her seventies wandering around at the party, looking rather lost. The fate of all elderly parents. Your children’s friends exchange a few words with you for courtesy’s sake, then try to shake you off as quickly as they can.

“Can I …” Judith’s mother said. “Can I take a message?”

I fought back the urge to say, “I’m sorry, but I’m bound by professional confidentiality.” Instead I said, “I have some test results here on my desk. Your daughter was in to see me a few weeks ago. It’s nothing serious, but it would be good if she could contact me. I’ve been trying to reach her on her cell, but she doesn’t answer.”

“Oh yes, that, too. Judith called to tell me. That she forgot her cell phone. I’m in the kitchen now. I can see it from where I’m standing.”

Early the next morning, Judith called. My first patient of the day had just settled down across from me at my desk. A man
with thin gray hair and burst blood vessels in his face. He was suffering from erectile dysfunction.

“I can’t talk for long,” she said. “What is it?”

“Where are you exactly in America?” I asked, looking at my patient’s face. He had a face like a vacant lot, a lot where nothing would ever be built again.

“We’re in California right now. In Santa Barbara. It’s after midnight here. Ralph’s in the bathroom. I talked to my mother. She thought it was kind of weird. She may be old, but she remembered that my own doctor is a woman. I had to come up with an excuse really quickly, that I’d gone to you for a second opinion. But that only upset her even more.”

I imagined Ralph Meier in the bathroom. His big body without clothes. The jets of water from the showerhead. The drops that spatter as they strike that body: his shoulders, his chest—his stomach, which hung like a lean-to over his genitals. I tried to summon up an image of Ralph’s stomach, from that first time he’d come in to see me and I’d asked him to take off his shirt. I wondered whether he could see anything when he looked down or whether it was all hidden from sight by that belly.

“I can’t talk too long now, either,” I said. “I just wanted to hear how you were doing. And when the two of you are coming back.”

As I said this, I looked directly at the man with erectile dysfunction. There are pills to combat erectile disorders. But they remain a ruse. Those pills simply make it stand upright regardless, whether it’s for a sick horse or an empty trash can or the window display at a shop selling stationery. If I were a woman, I at least wouldn’t want to know when my partner was using medication.

“I don’t know,” Judith said. “Ralph still has to do a couple
of screen tests. It would be great if it actually worked out. It’s going to be a huge series. On HBO. They did
The Sopranos
. And
The Wire
. Thirteen episodes. About ancient Rome in the days of Caesar Augustus. They want Ralph to play the lead. To be the emperor.”

“I got your mail,” I said. “With the address of your summer house.”

“Marc, I really have to go now. We may be going down there in early July. That depends on how things go here. We may even fly straight from here. And then my mother can come down with the boys later on. Once the summer vacation starts.”

I wanted to say something else. An innuendo. A flirtation. Something that would make Judith remember right away what a charming man I really was. But the presence of the dead mouse on the other side of the desk kept me from anything but platitudes.

“We’ll be in the neighborhood,” I said. “I mean, we’re heading that way, anyway. It would be fun if we …”

“Bye, Marc.”

For five seconds or so I sat there with the receiver pressed to my ear. The receiver that was not producing a busy signal but simply static. I thought about the day that lay ahead. It was as though that day was filled with static now, too.

“You can go into the examination room and drop your pants,” I said at last to my patient, putting down the phone. “I’ll be right with you.”

The green campground was perfect beyond my wildest dreams. I have to admit, it was in a lovely, shady spot surrounded by pine trees. In the distance, through the trees, you could see a
narrow blue strip of sea. But I smelled something strange. The smell of sick animals. Caroline breathed in deeply through her nose a few times. Julia and Lisa looked doubtful. And we were no farther than the barrier gate at the entrance. We could still turn around and leave. The gate itself was fashioned from a simple, unpainted tree trunk. A trunk that wasn’t entirely straight, just the way things are in nature. Beside it sat a log-cabinish kind of office. We had climbed out of our car and were leaning against it a bit indecisively. I knew, of course, that this campground was nearest to the summer house, but there are limits to what one can take. The sick-animal smell was already stirring up a dull rage inside me. It was an odor I sometimes smelled in my office, too. Coming from patients who were “living at one with nature,” as they themselves put it. Patients who refused to have body hair removed from places where no body hair belonged; who preferred to wash themselves with water from a well or a ditch, and who refused “as a matter of principle” to use chemical or cosmetic products for their personal hygiene. If one could even speak of hygiene in such cases. From all their pores and orifices came the smell of stagnant water. Water mixed with dirt and dead leaves in a blocked gutter. When they undressed, the smell was worse. Like taking the lid off a pan. A pan that’s been forgotten at the back of the fridge. I am a doctor. I took an oath. I treat one and all, regardless. But nothing or no one could compare with the degree of rage and disgust I felt at the ecologically sound stench of so-called nature lovers.

“So what do you guys think?” I asked my family. “There are other campgrounds around.”

“I don’t know …” Caroline said.

Julia shrugged. Lisa asked whether they had a pool. I was
just about to tell her no when a man stepped out of the log-cabin booth. He glanced at our license plate, then came toward us, holding out his hand.

“Goedemiddag!”
he said in Dutch, with no trace of an accent. He got to Caroline first, and had hold of her hand before she’d had time to back away.

A Dutchman! Dutch people abroad. Those Dutch people who set up shop abroad. They convert a total ruin into a hotel or pension, open a Dutch pancake restaurant on the loveliest beach along the entire coast, or set up a campground in a quiet stretch of forest. I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that they’re helping themselves to something that actually belongs to the local population. Something that could be done just as well by that same population. Most of them don’t last for very long. The locals either give them the cold shoulder or simply harass them until they leave. The roofing tiles for the pension arrive too late, the permit for the miniature golf course gets lost in the mail, the cooker hood in the Dutch-style pancake restaurant fails to satisfy local fire and safety regulations. The Dutch entrepreneurs complain loudly about the obscure machinations of the bureaucracy in the country in question. “What do they want, anyway?” they ask rhetorically. “No one was doing anything with that ruin. Those woods were completely deserted. No one ever went to that beach. We’re the ones who rolled up our sleeves. We Dutch know how to get things done. So why are they giving us such a hard time? People around here couldn’t organize a pissing contest in a brewery, anyway.” After two or three years of cursing the indigenous population and lazy foreigners in general, they pack their bags and return home in a huff.