Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (18 page)

“You’re right, I was ready for this, too,” I told Caroline. “This was a good idea.”

I watched a father flying a kite with his little son. It was one of those kites with two pairs of strings, the kind you can make spin and dive. Every time the father handed the strings to his son, the kite would smack down hard into the sand. Out to sea at this hour you saw only the occasional white sail. A white cruise ship was moving almost imperceptibly from left to right, along the horizon.

“How long do we have to keep this up?” Caroline asked.

“Keep what up?”

“Marc … you know what I’m talking about. It’s fun for Julia and Lisa, but how long do
we
have to keep it up? How long before we can leave without feeling guilty?”

“Come on, is it that bad?” I began saying, but then I saw the expression on her face. “No, sorry. You’re right. It
is
bad. I mean, it’s hard for me, too, sometimes. All those people. Ralph …” I looked at her questioningly. “Is it still bothering you? Does it still bother you, the way he looks at you?”

“Thanks to our stunning fashion model, not anymore, no.”

I detected something in her tone, a not entirely clear and uncomplicated undertone as she spoke the words
stunning
and
fashion model
. Women think that men find them mysterious, but they are above all very transparent.

“So Ralph has traded you in for a younger model,” I said, laughing. “And when it comes right down to it, you’re sorry about that. That you, as a woman getting on in years, are no longer whistled at by window washers and famous actors.”

Caroline flicked her spoon at me; a few drops of foamy milk hit me in the face. “Marc! Don’t get funny! I’m really glad to be off the hook for a while. Really I am. But have you noticed how he looks at Emmanuelle?”

I shrugged.

“Yesterday?” Caroline went on. “Before that repairman came by? It’s like he doesn’t care who notices. Stanley was working at his little table and Emmanuelle was lying in her deck chair. You know, when Ralph was going around with the white wine? First he leaned down almost right on top of her to get her glass. And then he just stood there looking as he poured the wine. At everything except her face. He started at her feet, then moved up slowly. And then the same route back again. It was like he didn’t notice what he was doing, or didn’t care. He ran the tip of his tongue over his lips. As though he had some tasty fish on his plate. But then … then. Oh no, it was too terrible!”

Caroline covered her face with her hands and leaned over till her forehead almost touched the tabletop.

“What?” I said. “What?”

“He had the bottle in one hand and the glass in the other. But after he had put the glass back down, he had one hand free. First he rubbed it slowly over his stomach. Around his navel. But then he just moved it down. To his dick. He grabbed it, Marc. He sort of squeezed it. All very casually, as though it
were the most normal thing in the world. If anyone had caught him at it, he probably would have pretended he had an itch. Well, believe me, he did! Less than a minute later he put the bottle down on the ground and dove into the pool! You could almost hear the water hiss!”

I laughed. Caroline couldn’t help laughing, too. But she grew serious again right away.

“Sure, it’s hilarious,” she said. “But I still find it a nasty idea. A loathsome idea.”

“Oh listen, I’m sure Emmanuelle kind of summons that up on purpose. I don’t think she really minds. The way she has old Stanley wrapped around her little finger … and she just happens to be a very pretty girl. One mustn’t forget that.”

Caroline squinted as she looked at me. “Do you think she’s pretty, Marc? Do you think she’s a pretty girl? Do you sometimes sneak a look at her, the way Ralph does?”

“Yes, I think she’s a pretty girl. Any man would think that she was a pretty girl. And yes, sometimes I look at her. I’m a man, Caroline. It would be almost suspect if I
didn’t
look at her.”

“Okay, all right. But that’s not what I mean when I say I find it loathsome, the way Ralph looks at her. You said so yourself. A pretty
girl
. Emmanuelle is still just a girl. How things are between her and Stanley, I don’t need to know. That’s their business. But there are also other girls around the pool.”

I stared at her. I’d found it loathsome as well, the proximity of Ralph’s dick to Julia and Lisa playing in the pool, but I hadn’t thought about it in these terms before.

“I’ve been paying attention,” Caroline said, “and I have to admit that I haven’t really been able to catch him at it. But still … he’s no fool. Maybe he controls himself as long as
we’re around. I don’t know how he behaves with them when we’re not.”

I said nothing. I blinked my eyes in the bright sunlight reflected from the beach. I saw black spots. Black spots dancing from left to right across my field of vision.

“They’re still only children, our girls,” Caroline said. “At least that’s what we tell ourselves. But look at Julia. How much difference is there between Julia and Emmanuelle? Two years? Four years? A couple of hundred miles south of here, Julia might have been married off by now.”

I suddenly remembered something. A few days ago. Ralph playing Ping-Pong with Alex, Thomas, Julia, and Lisa. Not a real game of old-school Ping-Pong. They all had a paddle in one hand and they were running around the table. You had to knock the ball back to the other side, then it was the next person’s turn, and so on. If you missed the ball, you were out. What I remembered most of all was Ralph. He was wearing shorts for a change, admittedly, but it was a weird sight, that big body running around the Ping-Pong table among those other little bodies that were so much smaller and above all slimmer. A
comical
sight, if you looked at it that way. He was barefoot, and there was a puddle of water on the ground. He slipped and fell, landing with his full weight on the tiles. I had just stood up from my deck chair and was walking toward the Ping-Pong table with a can of beer in my hand. At the moment when Ralph crashed down onto the tiles you could feel the ground shake. As though a truck was driving down the street outside. “Damn it!” he roared. “Goddamn it! Cuntass! Cock-sucker! Fucking cunt! Ow …! Ow …! Damn …! Goddamn it …” He was sitting with his shorts in the puddle and rubbing his knee. You could see the nasty scrape on it. A scrape
with stripes of blood across it where the skin had been dragged across the rough tiles. “Jesus’ fucking whore!” he shouted.

The children had stopped running around the table right away. They stood a little way away from him and looked at the large body on the ground. With a certain awe, but also in amazement, the way one might look at the carcass of a stray whale that has washed up on the beach. But after that last three-word oath, I believe it was Alex who started laughing. Then Thomas yelped and began to giggle. That was the signal for Julia and Lisa to burst out laughing, too. They looked at Ralph one more time, and then surrendered completely to a liberating fit of laughter. It was laughter that wailed, that shrieked the way only girls’ can. Weak-kneed, hysterical laughter. The kind of laughter that sounds as though it will never end. And deadly, too. A deadly laugh for us boys. They slap their hands over their mouths and explode with it, often behind your back, sometimes right in your face. Like now.

It was not only Ralph who was being laughed at, it was all men. The man as species. Normally speaking, that man was big and strong. Stronger than a woman. But sometimes he fell. Due to a force greater than his own. The force of gravity.

“Oh, I’m going to wet myself!” Lisa shrieked, tears running down her cheeks.

I looked at Ralph, his big, clumsy body on the tiles, the scrape on his knee. It was—I don’t know how else to put it—a
childlike
injury. The injury incurred by a little boy who has fallen from his tricycle. A scraped knee that you run crying to show to your mother, proud on the one hand of so much blood, afraid on the other that she might put iodine on it. That was also what you heard in Julia and Lisa’s laughter—if you listened closely. The laugh of all mothers. The mothers who chuckle at
the eternal clumsiness of boys. Ralph inspected the cut on his knee one last time, his face contorted with pain, and shook his head. Then he did the only thing you can do in a situation like that: He started laughing along with them. He laughed along with his sons. With my daughters. He laughed at himself. Or at least it seemed as though he was laughing at himself, as though he had a capacity for self-mockery. In reality, of course, it was above all a laugh to save face. A damage-containment laugh. A grown-up man who falls down hard is laughable. A man who can laugh about it himself is that much less so.

“Goddamn,” Ralph said, laughing as he struggled to his feet. “You scumbags! Laugh at an old man, would you?!”

And then it happened. It was a detail, no more than that. A detail to which you pay no attention at first. That takes on meaning only later. In retrospect.

Ralph Meier rose halfway to his feet, supporting himself on his undamaged knee. He still pretended to be laughing, but it was no longer real—if it ever had been. “And you, you’d really better watch your step!” he said. As he said this he rose farther to his feet and pointed his index finger at my older daughter. At Julia.

Julia shrieked. “No!” she screamed. “No!”

And she grabbed hold of her red bottoms with both hands. Her bikini bottoms.

I saw it quite clearly. The gesture could be explained in only one way. Ralph Meier was threatening my daughter with something. He was threatening to do something. Something he had done before. All as a joke. All with a knowing wink. But still.

It was, as I said, a mere detail. You’ve seen something, but you push it aside. Or rather, something in you pushes it aside.
You don’t want to think that way. You don’t want to go looking for things that aren’t there. You’ve been living next door to someone for years. A nice neighbor. A friendly neighbor. A
normal
neighbor, that above all. That’s exactly what you tell the police detective when he comes for more information about your neighbor. “Quite normal,” you say. “Very nice. No, never noticed anything peculiar.” Meanwhile, inside the neighbor’s house, physical remains have been found. Physical remains that may correspond to fourteen missing women. In his freezer. In his garden. Then you suddenly remember something. The meaningless detail. You saw your neighbor go to his car a few times, carrying garbage bags. Garbage bags that he then placed in the trunk. Not after dark or at some other “suspicious” moment. No, in broad daylight. He didn’t even look around when he put the garbage bags in the car. He did everything out in the open, where everyone could see. Then he would raise his hand and wave to you in greeting. Or come over and talk for a while. About the weather. About the new people across the street. A normal man. “I have the feeling you’ve suddenly remembered something,” the detective says. Then you tell him about the garbage bags.

Julia’s reaction could only mean that Ralph Meier had tried to pull down her bottoms before. During a game, in the pool … I hadn’t thought about it much at the moment, but now, here at the beach with Caroline, I wondered whether I hadn’t passed over it too lightly.

“I have the feeling you’re thinking about something,” Caroline said.

I looked my wife straight in the eye.

“Yeah, I was thinking about what you just said. About Emmanuelle and Ralph. And about Julia.”

Now I was thinking about something else, too. How would Emmanuelle have reacted if Ralph had pulled down her bikini bottoms? Or Stanley? I blinked my eyes again, but the black spots were still there.

“You should know,” Caroline said. “You’re a man. How do you look, Marc? Do you sometimes look at your own daughter as a woman? As the woman she’s going to be?”

I looked at my wife. And I thought about it. She had asked me a question. I didn’t think it was a weird question. In fact, not at all. It seemed to me like the only real question you could ask.

“Yes,” I said. “Not just at Julia. Also at Lisa.”

A man has two daughters. From the time they are little, they sit on his lap. They throw their arms around him and kiss him good night. On Sunday morning they crawl into bed with him, snuggle up against him, under the blankets. They’re girls. Your girls. You’re there to protect them. You can see that, later on, they will be women. That they already are women. But you never look at them the way a man looks at a woman. Never. I’m a doctor. I know what should happen to those who commit incest. There’s only one solution. A solution that’s not open to discussion under a government constrained by law. But it’s the only solution.

“I actually meant something different,” Caroline said. “Are you able to imagine how men other than you, other than their own father, look at our daughters? No, wait, let’s stick to Julia. How does a grown man look at Julia?”

“Come on, you know that. You just said so yourself. There are cultures where she might already be married. And look at Alex. Those two are completely in love. What do we know about what they’ll do together later on? Or what they may be
doing already? I mean, shouldn’t we talk about that? Alex is fifteen. I hope they’re aware of what could happen.”

“Honey, I’m not talking about fifteen-year-old boys. I think it’s lovely to see the way those two revolve around each other. Yesterday they were holding hands. Under the table, at dinner. I mean, I think Alex is a bit slow, but he’s a handsome boy. I understand completely. I know what I’d do if I was Julia.”

“So what do we call that? Women of a certain age who leer at pretty fifteen-year-old boys? Pederasty? Or is there a nicer name for it?”

I laughed as I said it, but Caroline didn’t laugh back.

“It’s only pederasty when you actually
do
something,” she said. “I’m not blind. I see pretty fifteen-year-old boys. I enjoy looking at them. But that’s where it stops. I don’t take the next step. And that’s the way men look at girls, of course. Most men. Maybe they fantasize a little more. But they don’t
do
anything. Right? I mean,
normal
men don’t do anything. That’s what I’m really trying to ask you. As a man. To what extent do you, as a man, see this Ralph as being normal?”