Sara had had a series of disappointing lovers. Most recently, there had been an environmental lawyer named Sloan, who came around a few nights a week, folding his pants over the back of her chair and letting a spill of coins hit the floor; Sloan was affable and shaggy and was, as her mother, Natalie, might have said, “fun in the sack.” But then he had gone up to British Columbia for some complex logging legislation, and that had been that, which was just as well, since after several weeks of sleeping with him Sara still hadn’t been able to imagine what this overflow of sex might lead to. And besides, there were details about him that she didn’t like; he had admitted to her that he had changed his name from something more ordinary—either Steven or John, she couldn’t remember which—and Adam pointed out that this was a suspect and pretentious thing to do.
Sara was a graduate student at Columbia, and had made her peace with the fact that she might be in school forever, a program in Japanese history ambling slowly toward a doctoral dissertation that would grow to become biblical in length, with footnotes jamming up the bottom third of each page. She didn’t mind the prospect of being an eternal student, although she pretended to; school offered a familiar swaddling, and Sara wasn’t really sure if she would ever be good enough at what she did to snag one of the very few academic positions available. A friend of hers from Columbia who had completed the program a year earlier had given up looking for a teaching post and had taken a job translating the instructions for the assembly of Japanese-made toys sold in the States (“Your new Turbo Robot-Pak is easy to play with, and
will delight you and your friends for hours!!!”). Sara was terrified of winding up with such a job. If she tried to imagine herself somewhere ten years from now, she was unable to picture herself doing anything at all. The screen was simply blank and unrevealing. When Sara was deeply immersed in the text of a Japanese book, she loved the intricacy of the language, the thrill of the chase as she tracked down the meanings of unusual phrases. But when she objectified what she was doing, she understood that the world would not welcome a scholar of Japan with open arms. She would probably have to translate the folded instructions inside toys someday, or else marry well.
Sara and Adam continued to take the house in Springs every August along with Maddy, who was a lawyer, and her husband, Peter, a teacher in a public high school, even though there were better deals to be found, bigger houses with wider lawns and higher ceilings. Even though, after anyone took a shower in the downstairs bathroom, a few slender, bobbing mushrooms often pushed their snub noses up between the aqua tiles. They continued to take the house even though Adam, for one, could have certainly afforded his own place by now. The house made them feel unhurried, dumbly caught in that vague nebula of the late twenties/early thirties, when you don’t yet feel frantic to own property or to breed, when you can lie around smoking cigarettes and eating an alternation of heavily salted snack foods and sweet, spongy packaged cupcakes, and no one cares.
In previous summers, they had all slept until noon every day of the vacation, but the shape of this summer would be somewhat different. Seven months earlier, Maddy had given birth to a baby named Duncan, who would certainly change the atmosphere this month. The baby, with its endless, insatiable needs—and with its own portable infant monitor that its parents toted from room to room, lest they miss a single coo or explosion of gas—was both an advertisement for fertility and a deterrent. Sara wasn’t remotely ready to have a baby; she hadn’t even started to scale the walls of
awareness of her unreadiness, yet was vaguely worried that an abortion she’d had a few years earlier had rendered her infertile. Although she’d had almost no ambivalence about the abortion at the time, she had still known that an older, more mature and focused version of herself would probably want children someday. But the actual thought of being a mother was still so unpleasant that she held her diaphragm up to the light before sex for an extended moment of squinting inspection. No pinholes, no apertures. She had no idea of what kind of mother she’d be: Would she behave the way her own mother had—overinvolved, frenetic, or would she find her own style? There was no way to know. She couldn’t tell if it would be worse having a baby now, like Maddy, or never being able to. At this point in her life, sex was for energetic body-slamming and the kind of yowling, cats-in-an-alley orgasms that made the neighbors long to be young again.
Now Sara stopped the car in front of a lunch stand, and she and Adam ate at a picnic table. “This taste,” Adam said as he swallowed the first bite of a crab roll, “is like Proust’s
madeleine.
When I’m not young anymore, this taste will bring every sensation back to me.”
“No offense, but you’re already not young anymore,” said Sara. “Young was two summers ago. Last summer was the cusp. This summer it’s all over.”
“Then I guess I should get on with my life,” said Adam, as a clump of crabmeat tumbled down the front of his shirt. “I should start writing about different things. Not set all my plays in my parents’ paneled rec room. I should write a play called
Bosnia.
I should write about oppression, or cruelty.” They both laughed, because he was no good with such material; it would have been a huge stretch. Instead, he sat here wiping a mess of crab off his shirt, leaving an oblong stain behind. His clothes were full of old, faded stains. “Shawn is cruel,” Adam added. “At least, he has a cruel mouth; you’ll see what I mean. Do I get extra credit for that?”
Shawn Best had recently pushed his way across a crowded reception in the city to get to Adam at a meet-the-playwrights evening. In a clutch of admirers, Shawn stood out as particularly striking and aggressive, inquiring whether Adam would listen to a cassette tape of songs from
his
play, and then, even though Adam politely declined, sending it to him by messenger the next morning. The tape, as far as Adam could tell—having listened to only a few songs and not particularly liking musicals—wasn’t good, but at least it wasn’t truly terrible; he remembered that it had to do with the plight of two American spinsters in Rome. There was a passport mix-up in the second act, and one of the spinsters fell into a fountain and sang a long ballad about all the missed opportunities in her life. A few days after he had sent over the tape, Shawn telephoned for Adam’s response, and arranged to pick up the cassette in person. Adam, dazed and passive, had let this stranger into his apartment, where he made himself instantly at home, wandering into the kitchen, where he took a peach Snapple out of the refrigerator without asking, popped it open and drank. When he was done, he sat on the couch in the living room, put the bottle down on the coffee table, then suddenly produced a condom from his wallet.
“What are you doing?” Adam asked, slightly frightened.
“Oh, you don’t want to?” said Shawn.
“Well, I don’t know …,” said Adam. “I hadn’t thought about it. I don’t even know you. This is very confusing.” Actually, he
had
thought about it; he’d imagined being wrapped in Shawn’s arms, inhaling the vaguely brothy sweat-smell of him. Shawn seemed to know all of this without being told; he took it for granted that other men had these thoughts about him.
Shawn tore the packet open with his teeth, then stood up and led Adam to the bedroom. “Wait. Wait.
No,
” Adam had said on the way, because his knee-jerk reaction to sex was always “No.” But now there was no reason for “No.” It wasn’t as though he was a teenager with an impending curfew, frantically making out with
someone in the azaleas beside his house, while nearby his parents lay in bed as innocent as children, lulled by the gentle tedium of
The Tonight Show.
With Shawn, who was a complete stranger, there was the question of safety, of HIV status, but he held a condom in his hand like a peace offering. “Are you, are you …
you
know …,” Adam whispered a little later in bed, cringing at his own question.
“Am I
what?”
“Healthy,” said Adam. “Clean. Negative.”
“Well, to be honest, I don’t know,” Shawn said.
“You don’t know?” said Adam, incredulous—he who had already been tested several times.
“I’m not ready to take the test,” said Shawn. “The idea of it freaks me out. The abolute black or white quality. The yes or no.” He paused. “But look,” he added, “this will be totally safe. I’ve got this little latex raincoat here.” So Adam closed his eyes and let himself fall back against the bed.
That night, seconds after Shawn was gone, Adam had called Sara up and babbled details to her: the line of hair running down Shawn’s stomach like an arrow leading the eye to its destination; the way Adam had felt frightened at the idea of having sex in daylight, where his own body and all its pores and imperfections would be on display, but how Shawn had made him feel at ease; and how, after the sex was through and Adam’s heart was still beating as fast as a hamster’s, the two men had lain on the bed and played Twenty Questions, which Adam had played during every long car ride of his childhood. Lying in bed with a lover after sex was almost like a long car ride. Times stood still; you didn’t know how long you would be there, inert bodies stuck together in this small space, limbs bumping, but you didn’t really care.
This had all happened only a few weeks earlier, and somehow it had led to Adam inviting Shawn out to the beach house in Springs for the first weekend of August. He would be arriving in a few hours.
Now Adam and Sara finished their lunch and climbed back into her mother’s Toyota, which was already hot from sitting in a parking lot in the sun. They drove a few miles more until Sara noticed a stand by the side of the road with a sign that read
“PIES.”
Sara thought they ought to buy one for their landlady, Mrs. Moyles, and so they did. She hopped out and returned with a fresh raspberry pie with a latticework crust. As they drove on toward the house, the pie box slid around on the seat between them, and Adam steadied it with his hand, feeling an intense swell of contentment.
He could have driven with Sara forever; this was so much better than almost everything else in his life, certainly better than the writing that lately seemed to go nowhere. He knew that the follow-up to his first success would be closely watched. Everyone would want to know if he could do it again; could he make those matinee audiences weep with laughter? Oh, he thought, probably not. This summer he would finish his second play, and in the fall he would show it to Melville Wolf, his producer. “Make it funny,” Mel had warned. “Make it really, really funny. Make me bite my tongue, it’s so funny. Make the inside of my mouth bleed.”
Adam constantly dwelled on the burden of his early success, and on the futility of even vaguely approximating the experience again. He had seen a TV talk show recently that featured a panel of ex—child stars; clips of their early work were shown, and in each case it was extremely painful to observe the long-gone purity of skin, silkiness of hair, and open-faced hopefulness of those children, and then have to compare that with the lumpy plainness of their fully formed, adult selves. Adam thought of his own father, a businessman who had enjoyed a big success very early in his career when he invested in an electric fan company called, dully, FanCo, and how, when air-conditioning blew across the parched American landscape, his father had lost all his money.
There was one aspect of Adam’s life that was removed from all anxiety. Sara was that aspect, as good and loyal a friend as he
had ever known. He thought that women understood the world in a way that men did not. A woman could lead you, could take you by the hand and show you which of your shirts to wear, and which to destroy. His love for her was so great that when they were apart for too long he felt as unbalanced as a newlywed and almost lightheaded. During the year they saw each other at least once a week for a cheap Tandoori meal at an Indian restaurant draped to resemble a caravan, and they usually talked on the phone a few times a day. They even watched television together on the phone late at night—explicit nature documentaries and peeks into celebrity palazzos—lying in their separate beds in separate apartments, laughing softly across miles of telephone wire.
Now August had arrived and they would be living in the same house for a month. Adam wanted to live with Sara forever. His fantasies often placed them both in Europe; he saw them living in the South of France and having children, a boy and a girl who could romp in a vineyard and be effortlessly bilingual. The idea of marrying Sara excited him, then always burned away in the gas of its own foolishness. He didn’t want her, and she certainly didn’t want him. They would spend August together, the high point of the year, and when Labor Day came they would part, as they always did.
When they pulled into the driveway of the house now, Adam was asleep against her shoulder, his head big and heavy and damp. She woke him up, and they carried their belongings up the weedy path, noticing that each year the small mustard-colored house looked a little worse upon approach, and that one year it would look so awful that they would back away without entering, and never return again. Sara lifted the stiff brass knocker on the front door and let it drop; the sound it made seemed tinny and insignificant, yet from inside they heard immediate footsteps, as though the landlady had been huddling by the door, awaiting their arrival.
Mrs. Moyles looked the same as last year, only a little worse,
not unlike her house. She was a pudding-faced woman whom they suspected of alcoholism or dementia, or both, and who had a head of hair that looked as though she cut it herself while blindfolded. There was nothing charming about her house, either, no details that you could point out to guests, such as a secret passageway, or a set of fireplace pokers with handles shaped like mermaids. It was a no-frills house, a place to stay if you wanted to spend a month in the vicinity of a fancy beach resort and didn’t mind the presence of linoleum and a hive of tiny, hot rooms.