Justin Cronin - The Summer Guest

We were sitting side by side, watching the lake soak up the last of the light. A scene of such preternatural calm, the effect was distorting, like a spell: two miles away, the pine-clad mountains that rose from the far side had the softened look of Iowa hills in a Grant Wood painting. It seemed possible to reach out and hold one in the hand.

“Fair enough. What do you want to know?”

“Is she pretty, is she smart, does she like hats, what’s her favorite color?” Lucy laughed and folded her legs under herself, as limber as a gymnast. “You know, Harry, the details.”

I sipped my beer. “Yes to the first, very much, and I’ve always thought so. Yes again, but not in the same way as you. Absolutely no to hats. As for the last, I don’t know. Blue, I think. She used to wear a lot of blue.” She let the compliment pass, unremarked: just as well.

“Used to. What happened to blue?”

I took a moment to think. “Well, now that you mention it, she does have a kind of blue dressing gown she likes. My turn?”

“Not so fast. And you know Joe, anyway. Where did you meet her?”

“Why do you want to know that?”

“People meet.” She shrugged. “It’s always a story.”

“In a restaurant, near the end of the war. Where did you meet Joe?”

“High school. I was a dorky little freshman when he was a sophomore. It was kind of a May-December thing. We didn’t get together until later, though. What restaurant?”

“I don’t remember the name. It might have been more of a taproom. It had a separate ladies’ entrance, I remember, though you don’t see those anymore.”

“Thank God for small favors. Was she pregnant when you married her?”

The question caught me so short I laughed. “What gave you that idea?”

“Don’t be offended. A bar sounds… I don’t know, a little questionable. Even one with a, what did you call it”-she deepened her voice mockingly-“a ladies’ entrance.”

“I’m not offended. But it wasn’t that kind of place.”

“Okay, it wasn’t.”

I could have let the matter go. And yet to do so seemed foolish. Why not answer the question? “Well, technically-”

She stopped me with a laugh. “Technically, Harry? Oh, being pregnant is very technical, I’ve heard. Happened to a girl I knew at school. She was very technically pregnant.”

“Point taken.” I was not angry at all; far from it. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but the truth is, yes, she was. Barely, a matter of weeks. We didn’t even know ourselves. Or at least I didn’t. We just told everybody that Sam was born a little early.”

At the mention of his name, a silence fell over us, deeper than the simple absence of sound. She knew about Sam, of course. But I almost never spoke of him, not even with Meredith.

“Oh God, Harry,” she said after a moment. “Me and my mouth. I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s all right.” I smiled to reassure her this was so. “It’s not bad to talk about him. In a way it’s easier up here. I didn’t realize it before, but I think he was on my mind all day.”

“What were you thinking?”

For a moment, I let my mind drift: where had my thoughts gone, through all the quiet hours?

“It’s hard to say, exactly. You don’t have specific thoughts, like I bet he’d enjoy this walk in the woods I’m taking, or he’d be this tall by now if he were still alive. It’s more a feeling, like he’s not so far away.” I shrugged, a little embarrassed. “I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“I think it does. Maybe it’s why you come here like you do.”

“Maybe that’s it.” I paused. “You know, it’s not the only reason, Lucy.”

Another silence, even of held breath. The mystery of the feeling between us, whatever it was, was suddenly out in the open, like a deer that had stepped without warning from the underbrush. Even the slightest movement would scare it away.

“Harry-”

“You have to go, I know. Feed the masses.” I made some nervous business of looking at my watch. “You’d better hurry, actually. I think I’ll stay here awhile, finish my beer.”

“That wasn’t what I was going to say, but you’re right.” There was sadness in her face, though I somehow felt I wasn’t the cause; it was for something I didn’t know about. It seemed to spread from her in ripples, like a disturbance on water.

“Harry?”

“Yeah?”

She unwound her legs and rose to go, touching me quickly on the shoulder. “Thanks for saying I’m smart.”

The next summer, Joe was gone. The story I heard through the grapevine was that his father had driven him north to Canada just before he was supposed to be inducted; Joe Sr. had a special way up there, involving old logging roads that nobody used or checked. He had arranged a job in New Brunswick for his son, as he had for so many others. A warrant had been issued for Joe’s arrest, on the charge of desertion.

The sadness I had seen in Lucy’s face that afternoon on the dock seemed to have settled over her like a change of season; it was the first summer that she neither greeted me at check-in nor left a basket in my cabin, and in fact I didn’t see her at all until the following morning, when I came into the dining room for breakfast. The place was packed; I lingered at the entrance, pretending to scan the room for a table. Then the kitchen door swung open, exhaling a sweet breath of cinnamon and bacon fat, and there she was, wiping her hands on a dish towel, speaking over her shoulder to somebody at the stove; turning, she caught my eye and smiled. She looked tired, older somehow, as if far more than a year had passed. The skin at her temples was stretched by worry. Her brow was damp, her hair uncombed and tied back in a careless bun. She hugged me quickly and told me I looked well, and that she was sorry she hadn’t been able to see me sooner. “I guess you heard” was all she said of Joe.

Later that afternoon everyone gathered in the main lodge, where Joe Sr. had rigged up a television. The room was crowded with guests, some regulars, old friends I knew; someone had brought wine and was passing it around in little paper cups. A man I hadn’t seen before said he’d brought a better television, a color Trinitron. A murmur of interest went up-well, why not, if he had brought a better set? But then someone else pointed out that the broadcast would be black-and-white anyway, the images beamed from a quarter million miles away, and the momentum behind the idea was lost.

Lucy appeared and took a place beside me on the sofa. Like some of the other women, she had dressed up a little and put on a bit of makeup, as if for a party.

“I wonder if Joe’s watching this,” she said. “Do they care in Canada? Do they even have TV?”

“Look,” a woman behind us said. “He’s coming out.”

The opening door, the slow progress down the ladder, the bouncing, marionettelike steps: images at once familiar and completely new, their strangeness magnified by their very ordinariness. As Armstrong’s foot touched the surface, a hurrah went up from the room. I suddenly wished I was back in New York, watching this with Meredith and Hal. I resolved to phone home as soon as the broadcast ended. Did you see it! I would say. The moon!

“I’ve heard it’s all faked,” someone said. It was the man with the color set. He looked around the room, grinning like a pumpkin. “This is all being televised from a TV studio in Texas.”

When no one laughed, the woman beside him, his wife I guessed, swatted him on the shoulder with a magazine.

“How would you know?” She spoke loudly to friends. “Believe me, he wouldn’t know if something was faked if his life depended on it.”

That evening after dinner we all went out to the dock and drank champagne, under a wedge of gray moon that seemed somehow closer, as if the world had risen to meet it. It followed a descending arc along the tips of the trees and, just past eleven, disappeared for the night. The champagne had taken hold: some people were swimming, despite the cold. The night had opened like a book. When the swimming ended a call went up for music; somebody ran a long extension cord up the dock to connect a radio to an outlet by the lodge. A wall of static, and then the air was filled with the sound of an orchestra, Basie or Ellington, the first bars of a song I didn’t recognize, and scampering up and over the wall-like barricade of strings, the unmistakable voice of Ella Fitzgerald. Bar by bar, the song came into focus, like a picture: “How High the Moon.” The sound seemed to reach us not through the airwaves but across a sea of time.