CARS MAKE SUBURBAN extra-marital affairs difficult. A doctor neighbor’s little red Volvo parked in a strange drive was like a flashing sign, The Adulterer Is In. In this case the neighbor became quite artful about parking at a distance or squeezing the car behind a screen of hedges. Even so, everybody caught on. Bea listened to Cassie’s story with slight discomfort. “You can’t call the glamorous Hamptons suburban!” She sounded complaining.
Cassie trumpeted, “That’s exactly what they are. I’m telling you the Hamptons, as we have to call them, are wonderfully vulgar. I like it. There’s nothing stuffy here like Noroton used to be. It’s all show-offy ambition. Shrinks and bankers. TV people. Carl bought this place back when Henry Geldzahler and Jerry Robbins and that whole gay crew were swanning around Southampton. It was kind of expected if you had a big gallery. And Carl was being gay back then anyway. Crossdressing, even. Crossdressing was a huge seventies thing. You remember?”
Bea did not. She smiled, ever more uncomfortable. Crossly, she thought Cassie’s conversation sounded pat and inattentive. Her friend was hauling stories out of one bin and tossing them into another, like separating whites. A chore. Their old girl friendliness felt irrecoverable.
They were in a large beach house in Bridgehampton, where Carl Hagen, Cassie’s long time going-to-benefits companion, sat out winter weekends. The blankness on the landward side, potato fields and empty houses rimed pale, balanced blankness on the thundering seaward side. The occasional wanderer on the December beach looked like he or she had no qualities at all in the existential ur-landscape. The plaintive gleam of a ship in the Atlantic offing was the epitome of solitude.
Cassie had invited Bea and her son Flossy to stay the weekend, thinking she would have a chance to catch up with a neglected friend at the same time she took the edge off a visit from Oliver’s son Darius. The two boys were about the same age and gay and Carl adored having young men in the house. Mounded like a toad in his wheelchair, he could only follow them around with his eyes.
Carl’s nurse, a cook/housekeeper and another young assistant lounged and chatted with the guests. Status was blurred. Everyone went around shoeless in heavy socks, wearing jeans or sweatpants, cable knits or slinky cashmere sweaters. Visitors could play a kind of parlor game, guessing who was a guest and who was paid for their time. Bea divined that the ones who really knew their way around the house were employees.
The cook/housekeeper answered Cassie’s nod by strolling over to the open kitchen. Pensively she started putting sandwiches together on the vast white counters. “I often think this is the nicest season,” she announced as she set out tubs of washed romaine and watercress.
In an immense living room, the nurse was contemplating a half-completed wooden puzzle on a low table. Flossy knelt near her though he’d stopped fingering pieces and pretending to help. He turned to look at the Atlantic over his shoulder. The sphynx cat was lounging by a heating register in front of the wall of windows. It raised its head alertly and stared at him. Without thinking, Flossy said, “Uch. Steel gray.”
“You don’t see something subtle in all this?” Cassie wondered, gesturing as she returned from confidential murmurs in the kitchen.
“Of course, I do. I’m sorry! That sounded churlish.”
“It has been gray for a long time,” the nurse commented. Cassie stared down at a sketchpad and a nest of charcoal pencils on the off-white living room rug. She looked like she might want them off the rug. The third employee, the assistant, who was coming back from the bathroom, noticed Cassie frown and promptly collected the pencils and pad for her. She set them on a white side table and called down a nearby spiral stair, “Darius? This art stuff is yours, right?”
From downstairs, Darius cried, “Oh, I’ll get it—yeah, I’m still working—I’ll take care of it.”
Cassie shrugged. With a thumb and forefinger, she held her watch on its limp diamond bracelet against her skeletal wrist. “I have a telephone call at four. I don’t know if you’re still working on the computer in the study. I need to make it in there.”
“I had to stop,” the assistant sighed. “I was feeling faint because I haven’t eaten anything, and that awful computer light! It’s like Occupational Affective Disorder. OAD.”
“Why don’t we all have sandwiches out here?”
The assistant protested, “I can easily make a sandwich for myself.”
“I’ve got them,” the cook/housekeeper called sweetly from the kitchen. Her various elegant sandwiches involved roasted peppers and artichoke hearts (not marinated), country pate, cornichons, cold salmon, butter, various greens, crusty sourdough and focaccia. Without much visible effort the sandwiches were set out with wine and bottled water and white cloth napkins. Even the nurse got up from her puzzle to help.
Flossy had to hold his sandwich away from the sphynx. Darius skipped up the steel spiral stair, which made a twangy rumble. His eyes hunted for his pencils and pad. He politely exclaimed over the sandwiches.
Bea was watching her son. “With that choker, you and Barry are twins,” she observed.
“Ow,” Flossy warned the cat and poured it from the crook of his elbow. He held his sandwich aloft.
Before taking a sandwich himself, Darius crossed the room to stand in front of the wall of windows.
Eyeing his back and, beyond him, the Atlantic, Flossy announced, “You’re right, Aunt Cass. It is subtle. It’s beautiful.”
Darius turned from the permanent winter twilight, from the cold beach, cold water, cold sky to look down at Flossy. “I think they call scenes like this sublime, not beautiful. Not to be a know-it-all.”
“Kant!” Bea ejaculated. The almost involuntary cry, so improbable that everyone stared, had come out when she remembered a survey course she’d taken at Smith years ago. “That’s Kant, Flossy. But that’s all I remember. The beautiful and the sublime.”
Flossy murmured, vague, not mocking, “Wow. Cool.”
Eating nothing, Cassie swept a strangely predatory gaze over the group. She decided visibly not to join the conversation for now.
“All I remember was he died a virgin,” Darius said.
Flossy raised his eyebrows, now skeptical of Kant.
“Or was Nietzsche the virgin?” the assistant wondered.
“Both of them, for all I know,” Darius said. “Thinking so much probably makes it hard to deal with people.”
“I’d find it depressing. I don’t want to sit around,” Bea said. “I want to be free, get out there!”
Cassie smiled faintly. In a hiatus of conversation, the landscape outside felt momentarily heavier and more insistent.
“Philosophizing’s not for me either, Mom,” Flossy said, picking crumbs from the carpet around him.
“You couldn’t possibly die a virgin, Flossy,” Darius said. He blushed in case what he’d just said without thinking sounded hostile somehow.
All of them were quietly absorbed through the afternoon. The nurse with her puzzle. Bea reading a thriller. Flossy walking on the beach with the assistant. Darius trying to draw them in the lineless foggy style of a Seurat charcoal. The cook/housekeeper napped after straightening up the kitchen. Cassie disappeared into the study. Carl, who hadn’t appeared for lunch, was supposedly working on the catalogue for an American Folk Art Museum show of non-representational outsider art. But that’s what guests were always told. Free time, leisure, old age, all had a bad reputation in that famous summer colony of work-crazed New Yorkers. The house was as silent as a library, except for the repetitive sound of the waves—like the muted collapse of bookshelf after bookshelf.
Carl finally made his start and stop entrance when they all sat down to dinner at a huge round table. He let Cassie adjust the placement of his wheelchair. Its joystick couldn’t manage fine motion. The cook/housekeeper and the assistant ferried dishes from the kitchen, but for once they didn’t join the party.
The all-day twilight had finally expired. The ashen sea thundered almost invisibly beyond candlelit, prosciutto-hued reflections of their hands and faces. Flossy settled his eyes on a blip of yellow light, a container ship coasting Long Island on its way to, perhaps, Rotterdam. This happy fantasy of trade didn’t make the ship appear any less forlorn to him.
Flossy wasn’t enjoying the weekend much, but he made a dutiful effort at dinner. He told a curious anecdote about an arrow delivered to him at his college dorm. “I think it was meant to be a cupid’s arrow. Love offering.” He shrugged. “But some people tell me they think there’s something threatening about it. I mean, it is sort of a stalker’s gift, isn’t it?”
“Decadent,” Darius commented. He was charmed by the idea. “The kind of thing some poète maudite would—”
“I didn’t like it a bit,” Bea said.
“But who on earth sent it?” Cassie asked. “Not anonymous I hope.”
“Oh, just some TA. Nothing came of it. It was still a lot better than the guy in a bar once who came up and gave me a penny and then said, Now you owe me something.”
Everybody made faces and clucked in disapproval.
“That’s insulting,” Darius said. “Who’d want to respond to something like that? The arrow may be creepy, but it’s a lot more—elegant. You have a lot of suitors?” He sounded nakedly interested.
With perfect pleasantness, Flossy didn’t answer.
“Carl!” Cassie raised her voice, leaning forward. Carl’s head swiveled. He squinted and raised a beaming face more or less in Cassie’s direction. “Carl, do you remember the first thing I ever bought from you? Trompe l’Oeil dollar bills or something. Americana. Well, I gave it to Oliver Van Nest, who is this boy’s father! I’ve told you about him.”
Carl rumbled something at length. Not a word could be made out, but he seemed satisfied with the comment. At least the tone of it was unmistakable: a drily humorous aside. Cheerily, Carl turned his head. Everyone at the table smiled, even chuckled, at the incomprehensible witticism.
Cassie laughed hardest of all, finally translating, “He says he ripped me off. But it was a positive thing, because he’s never been able to love anyone he hasn’t cheated first.” More polite laughter. “But Carl do you remember everything I told you about Oliver? Darius has come partly—” She looked to Darius for permission, and he nodded, even whispering to Flossy next to him, My dad needs some really serious help. “He wants to talk about his father. So, do you remember when Oliver was around in the old days? It seems like he’s closed himself off more than is good for him, or anyone.”
“Oh, Darius!” Bea said. “But that’s upsetting to hear. Preston and I never really knew your parents, but they were—I just hate it when things like that happen as people get older. It’s such a trial.”
Carl rumbled something briefer than the earlier joke but not much more serious. After giving him a frosty look of disapproval, Cassie translated, “He says capitalizing the Van in your name is an American vulgarization. Sorry,” she said crossly, though Darius was laughing. “That’s a big help, Carl,” Cassie huffed.
The cook/housekeeper came to set more dishes on the table, imposing a silence. “What were you drawing today?” she asked Darius.
“Lotte is a painter. A fine one,” Cassie glossed, smiling at her cook/housekeeper.
“Oh! Him actually.” Darius nodded at Flossy. “Down on the beach. But he’s just a smudge. And I’m sort of a dilletante, I guess.”
“Just doing it is the main thing,” Lotte said.
“I tried to get your necklace, though,” Darius told Flossy. “I love the color. Unfortunately, I only had charcoal and graphite.”
“Supposedly they’re antique trade beads,” Flossy said.
“It’s new,” Bea put in. “Our gardener has one just like. I guess boys all wear chokers nowadays.”
“Mine isn’t like Barry’s, Mom,” Flossy complained.
“Not Barry Paul,” Darius said.
Bea looked astonished. “Yes, as a matter of fact. Barry Paul. You know him from Lawrence?”
Darius said, “I heard he came back to New Jersey because his father was sick.”
“Why are fathers such burdens?” Cassie muttered. She chuckled when Carl mangled a word. “Only post-insemination, he says,” she translated.
Bea continued in excitement, “You know, another old Lawrence boy is living in our garage apartment. Did you ever know a boy named Dean?”
Darius shook his head. “No. But I knew Barry. We were best friends for a while.”
“We all have a big crush on him,” Flossy said. “Even my father. Even me.”
Darius flushed. Wildly, he thought for a second that this un-gay-seeming gay person had somehow managed to seduce his old friend. His mind reeled with jealousy, though he remained perfectly poised. “He’s another of your suitors?” he let slip, a touch sourly.
Flossy laughed. “Barry! No! I’m sure he’s not—well, actually I don’t know. I haven’t seen him with any girls.” A pondering expression cleared. “Oh, yeah, he is straight. Definitely. Dean told me he had sex with one of his teachers when he was twelve. A woman.”
“Good God!” Bea clapped her hands to her bosom.
Cassie laughed. “Bea!” The group allowed room for Darius to make some comment, since he’d said he knew Barry so well. But Darius looked quite stupid, and his flush redoubled.
Cassie had been frustrated during dinner. She was annoyed when she tried to say something, and her verbal memory ratcheted a bit too slowly for her to jump in and out of rapid conversation. She held her hands up. “Wait a minute. I have to get Carl to be serious for just a second.” But at that moment the cook/housekeeper/painter Lotte came back to the table and started picking up plates. Cassie shrugged, and the corners of her mouth screwed tight.
Obliviously, Lotte asked, “Has anybody seen Becca Stern’s gargantuan watercolors? A couple of them are up at the Parrish show. They’re kind of hideous.”
“That should cheer you up, at any rate.” Cassie smiled, lifting a plate for her on weak wrists.
“Why on earth?” Lotte asked.
“I’m sorry. I always thought you were a little jealous of Becca. The way people kowtow to her. And her family has that huge house. Fantastic art collection. Her father’s an even bigger cheese than me.”
“I’m not jealous of Becca.”
“Anyway, we have to get back to Darius.” Cassie played at pounding the table. “I promised Darius that Carl and I would try to—"
“I may have some slight, healthy degree of envy. But that’s what spurs you on in life,” Lotte said. “The only reason I said I didn’t like Becca’s family was they were Bush supporters, which I can’t conceive. And her mother had that extreme face-lift. I mean, who wouldn’t feel a little low looking at someone whose face is so—up?”
“Cassie,” Darius said. “I did finally get a chance to talk to Nathan Kimmelstine about Oliver.” Everyone looked attentive. The name prompted no recognition. “Isn’t he kind of famous in New York? I thought so. He’s a geriatric psychiatrist. He had an article in the New York Review of Books.” Faces remained blank.
“Was he able to help?” Cassie asked. “Carl, listen. I wanted you to think back if there was anyone around who used to know Oliver Van Nest. All of us, let’s bring the hive mind to bear.”
A few whispers or snuffles came from Carl. Bea threaded her napkin through the napkin ring repeatedly, vaguely magical.
“I’m sorry to drop this on everybody,” Darius said. “Cassie’s been incredibly nice. She’s trying to help me with my madman father.”
“Don’t be cruel about him,” Cassie said tepidly. She remembered Oliver was the cruel one.
“It’s true,” Darius protested. “He’s more or less insane. You saw what he was like in the old days. And now he’s worse. He lives like a hermit. Won’t—he won’t see anyone. Literally.”
“Was the geriatric psychiatrist able to tell you anything?” Flossy asked, sounding truly concerned in a way that caused Darius an extraneous shiver.
“Can you imagine?” Darius exclaimed. “You live in the same city, and your father refuses to see you? People aren’t insane like that anymore, are they? I was hoping it was something that would clear up if he started taking one of those drugs. SSRIs. But Nathan says that won’t happen. He did try to help, I guess.” Darius sounded grudging. “He gave me plenty of names. For nurses and stuff. He looks younger than me. Like Doogie Howser.”
“He knew what he was talking about?” Flossy asked.
“I guess,” Darius drawled.
“Darius thinks the situation can’t go on,” Cassie explained. “Oliver never goes out. The place is completely shut up. Anything could happen. I’ve been asking around, but what do you do when an old person holes up like that? It must happen sometimes.”
“As long as someone can get in,” Flossy tried. “The family. And it sounded like you’re still able to get in? Or not?”
“Only sometimes,” Darius said unhappily. “I think it’s worse than just the old person who doesn’t go out. I wasn’t being cruel about the insane part. I really think something organic might be wrong. But Nathan said he’d have to be able to make it to his office. Which I know my father won’t do, or can’t.”
“You can’t get through to him at all? Oh, Darius,” Bea commiserated.
“Basically, Nathan told me when someone really can’t take care of themselves, the first thing you do is contact a geriatric social worker or a geriatric nurse. See whether they can get in. And I will do that. Kimmelstine can’t do it himself.” Darius tartly demoted the doctor from first names. “Some geriatric psychiatrists will make a house call, but not him. I asked. He said it can be dangerous. I don’t think he wanted to get involved.” He snorted in feeble amusement. “I told him Oliver is hardly dangerous.”
Cassie made a face. “I hate this, but Darius may be right. That it’s more than just an old person being a recluse. I knew Oliver, and he was always—off. I’m sorry, Darius. By now, who knows? Maybe insane isn’t too strong a word. Not that that helps us at all.”
Darius stuck out his lower lip thoughtfully. “People just keep giving me names. Nathan said that if he gets truly disoriented or belligerent, I have to call 911. They’re actually trained to deal with people like that.”
“They break in?” Bea asked in discomfort.
“That’s what I heard, yes, they break in. They have a rule of thumb. If person is a danger to themselves or to others,” Darius singsonged.
“What?” Flossy demanded. He immediately softened the question. “I mean, if they’re a danger, then what?”
“What?” Darius echoed, wondering himself. “It must mean that if they’re a danger in some way, then you can do what you want and you don’t have to worry about what they want anymore. Or their opinions.”