Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (7 page)

Ralph Meier was too fat as well, albeit in a different way. A “more natural” way, you might say. At first his true girth was hard to identify. The extra weight hung all over his body like a roomy overcoat. But during his first appointment I once again heard noises one rarely hears inside healthy people. I placed my stethoscope on his bare back. First of all there was the breathing. It sounded heavy and labored, as though the air, scarce enough already, had to be drawn to the surface from a well that was far too deep. There was an audible echo to his heartbeat. An echo like the ringing of a bell. And farther down, in his intestines, in the pit of his stomach, I heard a brewing and a bubbling. He had a fondness for shellfish and game birds, as I would witness later. Small birds—quail, partridge. He pulled the skeletons apart and stuck them in his mouth. He slurped the marrow from the cervical vertebrae, ground spinal cords between his teeth to get the last juices out of them. “I’m onstage every evening,” he said. “And in the afternoon we’re rehearsing a new play. I can’t keep up the pace.” A colleague had mentioned my name, he said. A colleague who had been a patient of mine for years. He’s the one who had told him about the pills. About how easy I was about prescribing those pills—Benzedrine, amphetamines, speed—whatever I, as his doctor, thought was best for him. I bent over the stethoscope. I seriously asked myself what havoc those pills would wreak on this body. Benzedrine, amphetamines, speed—all different names for the same thing, in fact. The pulse quickens, the
pupils dilate, the blood vessels, too. For a few hours, we are able to go back into overdrive.

You could, indeed, call me “easy” when it comes to prescribing certain medicines. That’s right, I’m easy. Why should anyone lie awake half the night when one milligram of lorazepam will knock them out till noon? Medicines are what boost the quality of life. I have colleagues who warn their patients about the dangers of habituation. They give someone a prescription for Valium, but when the patient asks for a renewal, they suddenly get all fussy. I’m not like that. Some people need a kick in the ass, others just need to think less for a couple of hours. The beauty of all these medicines is their simplicity. Five milligrams of Valium really does calm you down; less than three milligrams of Benzedrine is enough to make someone bounce off the walls till five in the morning. Some men are afraid to go into shops or talk to girls. After two weeks on Seroxat, though, the patient will return home with twelve Hugo Boss shirts, an Alan Setscoe desk lamp, and five new pairs of pants from the G-Star RAW Retail Store. After three weeks he’s chatting up every girl at the club. Not one or two—no, all of them. He no longer lets himself be put off by silly giggles or outright refusal. He has no time for giggling or for refusals. “The night is still young” is for losers, for the pizza faces who hang around for seven hours with beers in their hands and then go home alone. The night is not young—if there’s one thing Seroxat has taught him, it’s that. The night starts
now
. The sooner it gets going, the longer it lasts. He has a perfect pickup line. Or rather, he doesn’t have to think about lines anymore. All lines are good. They’re especially good when you’ve forgotten them already, thirty seconds later. They’re conspicuous by reason of
their simplicity. You’re looking good, he says to the girl who looks good. Is there also a
Mr
. Mulder? he asks the woman who introduces herself as Esther Mulder. I never used to be able to come up with lines like that, the Seroxat-user says. Your place or mine? Your eyes are prettiest when you smile. If we leave now, we’ve still got the whole evening ahead of us. May I touch you there, or would you hold that against me? After five minutes with you I felt like I’d known you all my life. It’s—he doesn’t know how else to put it—
liberating
to come up with lines like that. Simplicity, that’s what it’s all about. Simplicity is telling a pretty woman that she’s pretty. You never say, Do you know that you’re very pretty? A pretty woman already knows that. Do you know that you’re very pretty? is something you only say to an ugly woman. A woman who’s never heard that before. Her gratitude will know no bounds. Later in the evening she’ll put up with anything: A dirty, unwashed dick right in her face. An unwashed prick that sprays a month-old backlog of old sperm all over her. All over her navel, her lips, her eyelids. Yellow sperm. Yellow as the pages of a book that no one wanted to read, which is why it was left out in the sun beside the deck chair. Filthy, worthless sperm that smells like a half-finished bottle of fermented dairy drink stuck at the back of the fridge and then forgotten. On the other hand, though, it
does
happen sometimes. No, let me put it differently: You can be dead sure that a pretty woman almost never gets to hear how pretty she is. That none of the other men at the party have the courage to say that. You often hear pretty women complaining to one another about that: that their looks are so much taken for granted. As though it were all just par for the course, like the
Mona Lisa
, the Acropolis, or the view of the Grand Canyon from Grandview Point. We have no words
to describe pretty women. We’re speechless. Tongue-tied. We talk around their beauty. Been to any nice restaurants lately? the tongue asks. Got any plans for the summer? The pretty woman replies normally. At first she’s relieved to be spoken to so normally. To have someone just talk to her about day-to-day things. So normal. So ordinary. As though she’s not pretty at all, just a person like anyone else. But after a while something starts bothering her. Because it
is
kind of weird. The pretty woman wears her beauty like a feather headdress. So it’s kind of weird when someone goes on talking without making any reference to the headdress.

“You have a very lovely wife,” Ralph Meier said, for instance, the first chance he got. He was sitting across from me at my desk and at least he didn’t beat around the bush. It was during his second visit to my office, a little less than a week after the opening night of
Richard II
. He had simply shown up again, unannounced, without an appointment. “Could I just bother him for a moment?” he’d asked Liesbeth, my assistant. “It’ll only take a minute.”

I thought at first that he had come back for a new prescription, but the pills weren’t even mentioned during that second visit. “I was in the neighborhood, anyway,” he said, “so I thought, I’ll swing by and ask him in person.”

“Oh yeah?” I tried to look at him as blandly as possible, but I couldn’t help it, there was no stopping it: The only thing I could think about was that look on his face the week before, when he examined my wife from head to foot.

“We’re throwing a party on Saturday,” he said. “At our place. If the weather’s nice it’ll be in the yard. I wanted to invite you and your wife.”

I looked at him and thought my own thoughts. Would he
have invited us if I had been married to a woman other than Caroline? I wondered. A less tasty woman?

“A party?” I said.

“Judith and I. Saturday, it will be twenty years since we met.” He shook his head. “Unbelievable. Twenty years! Where does the time go?”

“He doesn’t waste any time,” I said. “He goes straight for the kill.”

We were sitting at the kitchen table. The dishwasher was bubbling. Lisa had already gone to bed, Julia was in her room doing her homework. Caroline divided the last of the wine between us.

“Marc, come on!” she said. “He just likes you, that’s all. You shouldn’t always go looking for ulterior motives.”

“Likes me! He doesn’t like me at all. He likes
you
. He told me so, in so many words. ‘You have a very lovely wife, Marc!’ That’s how he looked at you in the theater. The way a man looks at a
very lovely
woman. Don’t make me laugh!”

Caroline sipped her wine, then tilted her head slightly and looked at me. I could see it in her eyes: She found this entertaining, this unexpected attention from the famous actor Ralph Meier. I couldn’t really blame her. If I were to be completely
honest, I found it entertaining as well. It was, in any case, a lot more entertaining than having famous actors not even notice your wife, I told myself. But then I thought about that dirty look of his. His raptor look. No, it wasn’t all pure amusement.

“You’re saying he only invited us to his party because he’s after me,” Caroline said. “But that doesn’t make sense. He invited us to that opening night, too, didn’t he? And he hadn’t even seen me yet.”

She had a point there, I had to admit. Still, these were two different things, an invitation to an opening night and an invitation to a party at someone’s private home.

“So turn it around for a moment,” I said. “Your birthday’s next month. Would you invite Ralph Meier to your party?”

“Well …” Caroline looked at me teasingly. “No, okay,” she said. “I don’t suppose I would, no. You’re right as far as that goes. All I’m trying to say is that you shouldn’t always assume the worst. Maybe he really does like us. Both of us, I mean. It could be that, couldn’t it? I talked to his wife for a long time the other evening. I don’t know, sometimes you have that feeling, that you click immediately. I had that with Judith. Who knows, maybe she told Ralph to invite us.”

Judith. I’d forgotten her name again. The first time I’d forgotten it was less than a second after shaking her hand in the theater lobby. The second time was this morning, when Ralph Meier had started talking about the party.

Judith
, I admonished myself inwardly.
Judith
.

I’ll be honest. When she held out her hand and told me her name, I looked at her the way every man looks at a woman who enters his field of vision for the first time.

Could you do it with her?
I asked myself, looking her deep in the eyes.
Yes
, was the response.

And Judith looked back. It’s only ever a matter of a few fractions of a second, of making eye contact for just that little bit longer. That’s how Judith and I looked at each other. Just a little longer, strictly speaking, than one might consider entirely respectable. And while I was forgetting her name, she smiled at me. It wasn’t so much her mouth that smiled, it was above all her eyes.

Yes
, those eyes said back to me.
I could with you, too
.

Respectable
is not the right word.
Respectable
belongs in sentences you’d rather not hear yourself say out loud. Sentences like “I thought we were going to at least keep things here to a minimum of respectability.” No, respectability is not something I can claim for myself. I look at women that way because I have no idea how to look at women any other way. It may be too bad for the “likable” women, for the “really rather nice” women, but to be safe I never look at them for too long. I’m not rude. I’ll launch into an animated conversation if I have to, but my body language leaves no room for misinterpretation.
Not with you
, my body language writes in big block letters on my forehead.
I don’t even want to think about it. Not with a ten-foot pole
. Likable women compensate for their lack of physical attractiveness with talents natural or unnatural in other areas. At meetings attended by more than a hundred people, for example, they make all the sandwiches themselves. Or they go out and hire party hats and masks for all the guests. Or they arrive on a delivery bike carrying more firewood for the braziers. “She’s so lovely, Wilma,” everyone says. “Such a lovely person! Who else would come up with something like that? Who else would even think of that?” Wilma, of course, is plainly too pale or too thin or just too ugly, but at the same time she does so many lovely things out of the goodness of
her heart that you’d have to be a complete asshole to say anything negative about her. In the end, at one of those meetings of more than a hundred people, there is always some man who remains hovering around Wilma. Often literally. It’s the same man whom we saw hanging around at the edge of the dance floor. He was trying to make the moves along with the dancers but never stepped out onto the floor itself. The bottle of beer in his hand was rocking to the beat of the music. But that was the only thing about him that moved rhythmically. “Remember that guy?” people ask one another later. “That guy at the party? Did you know that he and Wilma …?” From that day on he’s the one who buys the two hundred whole-wheat buns from the bakery and chops wood for the braziers. Wilma takes a break from years of being “lovely.” And who can blame her? Then the children come along. Usually ugly children. Highly gifted and socially handicapped. Children who actually
like
going to school. Who skip a few grades but are always the ones who get bullied. Later on, when the only jobs they can find are shoveling stalls for an organic dairy farmer, it’s mostly society’s fault. Meanwhile, Wilma’s friends wonder what she could ever have seen in that guy with the motor skills of a wooden clothespin. But they understand. What it is they understand exactly they never say to Wilma. But they say it to one another. “I mean, it’s really nice for her that she at least has
someone
,” they say. “Maybe it sounds weird, but in some strange way they’re actually a pretty good match.”