Justin Cronin - The Summer Guest

Zoe drained the last of her bourbon and rose to go. “One thing I will tell you, Joe. Hal wants to put this thing together. That means you can do whatever you want. I’m telling you because I like you, and most people seem to think a guy like Hal holds all the cards. In this case, he doesn’t. The cards are yours.” She looked up at the mural then; a glimmer of recognition crossed her face. “Oh, I get it. Old King Cole. Like the rhyme.” She shook her head. “Hal’s a regular laugh riot.”

“Fiddlers three,” I said. “Okay. One and two-that’s me and Hal. The king’s obvious. What I can’t figure out is, who’s the third fiddler?”

Smiling, she moved her face toward mine. For a moment I actually thought I was about to be kissed, and was deciding what to do about that-as if the cards were mine. But then she stopped-I could have sworn she was about to wink-and tipped her head at my breast pocket.

“Read that and you’ll know.”

I kept my bargain with myself and let another twenty-four hours go by before looking at the papers Hal had sent me. You can’t make your living as a fishing guide without the patience to let things unfold in due course, and I passed the day as a tourist: window-shopping on Fifth Avenue, taking in the ceiling at Grand Central, riding the subway down to the bottom of the island to see the Statue of Liberty. It was nice to think of Hal’s envelope, sitting on the Louis XIV writing desk in my overpriced room at the St. Regis, waiting for me. I returned to the hotel for dinner, ate a steak at the bar under King Cole’s bleary gaze, and killed a couple of hours shooting the breeze with a pair of agribusiness executives in from Minneapolis for a trade show (their company manufactured a little gizmo that, from what I could tell, made it possible to control a tractor from outer space), rode the elevator to my room, showered and put on my pajamas, then lay on the big bed before finally opening the envelope. The document it contained was a photocopied addendum to Harry’s will, marked “draft,” with a little yellow Post-it note affixed: You never saw this. I read what it had to say, called Lucy to tell her what I had learned and what I thought our options were, then ripped the thing into pieces and flushed them down the toilet.

In the morning I awoke early, fisherman’s hours, and took a walk through Central Park just as the sun was punching through the skyline. I had the place practically to myself for the first half hour, but soon the paths filled up with people: joggers wearing headphones and dog-walkers with their dutiful pooper-scoopers, Rollerbladers who whizzed past me in a burst of musty air, a few nannies pushing strollers and talking together in Spanish. I walked around the reservoir and remembered my life, the days when my mother died and Kate was born and all the rest, and by the time I returned to the St. Regis, a little after nine o’clock, I knew what I would do. I took coffee and a sweet roll from a buffet in the bar and returned to my room to phone Hal.

“Two million five,” I said.

“Can you hang on a second, Joe? I have to go outside and fire Zoe.” A moment of silence followed, while he put the phone down and did whatever a man like Hal does when he’s about to drop a lot of money on what, he knew, was a sentimental whim, and not even his own.

“Okay, my friend. Two point five it is. And if you ever tell anyone what a pushover I am, I will have you vaporized. Believe me. I know people who know people. Are we done?”

“Mostly. Draw up the revised agreement but date it for September, after we close down for the season. I’ll sell him the camp, but I won’t be his employee. It’s nothing personal, I’ve just never worked for anyone and I don’t want to start now.”

I heard Hal sigh. “Of course it’s personal, Joe. It’s all personal. And September is too late, for reasons that are so obvious I’ll assume you’re bluffing. How’s this: Mid-July, but we’ll work something into the paperwork that leaves you in charge for the time being. Management to transfer to his estate at the time of his death, something like that. Sally can figure out the details. Will that satisfy you?”

I understood that it would have to. “All right. That’s good of you.”

For a moment neither of us spoke.

“Joe, it’s not everybody who gets to grant a dying man’s last wish. I don’t want to get too deep here, but that’s what you’re doing, and it matters. To all of us. I really mean that.”

“I know you do.” The receiver was heavy in my hand, and I realized if I stayed on the phone another second, I would probably change my mind. “Just send the plane, will you, Hal? I want to go home.”

When I was diagnosed with what I have come to call “the cancer,” and I told my new wife, Frances, that I would surely die of it, she said something that would surprise anyone but me. She told me the doctors were wrong.

“You’re not going to die of cancer, Harry,” she said, and took me tenderly by the hand, “because, my sweet darling, I’m going to fuck you to death.”

It is true that men of my age (seventy going on Methuselah), marital status (widowed since the Nixon years), and general station in life (rich as greedy Midas) have a number of options before them, and need not spend a single lonely hour if loneliness does not suit them. There are more than enough perfume-counter clerks, Croatian hand models, and former-ski-instructors-turned-massage-therapists to go around, and I have seen more than a few fellow travelers take this happy road.

But my Frances is no trophy wife. She is, to begin with, fifty-two years old: young for me, but not by the standards of the role. Nor is she what might be called attractive, or even, euphemistically, “handsome”; my Frances is a muscular girl, solid and big-boned with a wide face and strong jaw best suited for public oratory or, perhaps, the boxing ring. Her hair, which she does not dye, is gray as dishwater; her hands and feet are large. She is, in sum, constructed more or less as a suburban office building is constructed, low-slung and unobtrusive, built to take the wind and rain and sun and encourage useful work, her whole physical person communicating nothing more or less than a state of pure Midwestern practicality. Think: Kansas City. Think: Detroit. Think: Cleveland (where she’s from). If God were a real estate developer from Ohio, Eve would have looked exactly like my Frances.

And yet beneath this cunning camouflage of plainness lurks an altogether different sort of woman, a sensual companion of such responsiveness and enthusiam that she can be likened only to the most celebrated generosities of nature. She says the things she likes to say, grinds her hips into mine with joyful abandon, understands the virtue of interesting underclothes and has never disappointed me in this department; once, during my first stay at the hospital, she arrived at my bedside wearing nothing but a trench coat, a merry-widow, and a pair of shoes I won’t describe but will leave to your imagination, as they reside in mine. In the darkness of our room or even the sour, desexualized precincts of the hospital, she moves her sturdy body back and forth above me in a sweetly undulating motion that recalls the great parabolas-the moon and tides and all the ships at sea-and when at last she achieves her final transport, she calls out my name and buries her face and breath in my withered old neck, taking me with her.

I’m no fool. It can’t be such a lark to fuck an old man, especially a dying old man. She’s had three husbands before me, including, I kid you not, a professional deep-sea diver and the man who invented industrial bubble wrap, and who could blame her if, behind her closed eyes, she is actually reliving some carnal adventure from her past? Nor is it fair to say that we love each other, precisely. Of all the concessions one must make to age, I have discovered this is actually the easiest to face, because its theme is not scarcity but abundance: we have simply loved too many others-spouses, lovers, children, dogs, and all the golden days and hours in our lives-to add one more to the pile. Love there is between us, but it’s an impersonal sort of love, more like a recollection of love than the thing itself, and what we have to offer one another is the chance to sip together from the cup of memory.