Electrical Storm

SARAH AND TODD MADE LOVE FOR THE FIRST TIME DURING A LATE-AFTERNOON thundershower on the scratchy rug in her living room, the bed upstairs being occupied just then by Lucy and Aaron, both of whom had conveniently dozed off on the way home from the pool.

“This is incredible,” Todd whispered as he thrust himself into her with a vigorous yet artful corkscrewing motion that she would soon come to recognize as his trademark sexual maneuver.

“We smell like chlorine,” she replied. Despite her fervent wish to remain in the moment, to block out all extraneous information and sensation, she found herself thinking sadly of her husband as she gripped the taut muscles of Todd’s ass. At forty-seven, Richard was still reasonably thin, but his butt had gone flabby. Even when they’d had a halfway decent sex life, Sarah had preferred not to think too much about that part of his anatomy and only touched it by accident.

“I love your red bikini,” he told her.

“Thank you,” she murmured.

He stopped, mid-spiral. A vaguely pained expression passed across his sun-burnished face, as if he were trying hard to remember the name of his congressman. My first handsome boyfriend, Sarah thought proudly. She wished Arthur Maloney and Amelia and Ryan and everyone else who’d ever hurt her could be watching right now on closed circuit television. Todd peered down at her, his face enormous above hers, a lovely eclipse.

“Do you feel guilty about this?” he asked.

Sarah hesitated. She would have liked to explain that her husband had become some sort of panty fetishist, but it didn’t seem like the right time to broach such an awkward subject. It had been hard enough to discuss it with Richard, to keep a straight face while he attempted to convince her that he’d mail-ordered the panties for professional purposes—some sort of research he was conducting on web-based sales and marketing models, blah blah blah—and had inadvertently let his curiosity get the best of him. Sarah had accepted his pathetic alibi with a polite expression, feeling both sorry for him and oddly liberated, as if she’d been formally released from her marriage by the sight of her husband huffing another woman’s underpants.

“No,” she told Todd. “I thought I might, but I don’t.”

“I do,” he said.

Oh God, she thought, here it comes. Some primitive high-school-era defense mechanism kicked in, and she managed to accept this confession with a calm, curious expression, while at the same time bracing herself for a sudden descent into misery. This is where he rolls off me and buries his face in his hands.

“I feel really bad,” he continued. But then he shrugged, as if this were a minor nuisance at best. “What can you do?”

Sarah forced herself not to smile.

“You better pick up the pace,” she said, slapping him lightly on the thigh. “They could wake up any minute.”

With admirable haste, he started up the corkscrew again. Sarah couldn’t help laughing.

“Who are you?” she asked in not-quite-mock bewilderment. “The Roto-Rooter Man?”

Before he could respond, a ferocious crack of thunder shook the house, as if the sky had exploded directly above them. The lovers froze in place, their faces turned toward the stairs, waiting for a cry to erupt from the bedroom.

“Keep going,” she said, after a few seconds had passed. “It’s okay.”

He sprang back into action, but then abruptly checked himself.

“Did you just call me the Roto-Rooter Man?”

“It’s a compliment,” she assured him.

 

Sarah had come to the Town Pool the previous week in the full knowledge that she was offering herself to Todd. There was nothing coy, or even subtle, about her methods. She had spotted him from a distance before she’d even shown her badge to the gate attendant—he and Aaron had staked out a prime piece of poolside real estate, a shady patch of grass near the shallow end, neither too close nor too far from the rest rooms—and once inside, she led Lucy over to this spot with the confidence of someone who holds an equal claim on the property. She spread her towel on the grass just inches from his, sat down without a word of greeting, and began rummaging in her straw bag for a container of sunscreen. Only after she’d found it did she deign to acknowledge the neighbors whose space they’d so blithely invaded—the father shirtless and reading Men’s Health magazine, the son in Rugrats swim trunks and his jester’s cap, and Big Bear, still buckled into the double stroller, watching the scene with his perpetually horrified expression, as if he could foresee a calamity he felt helpless to prevent.

“Oh, look, honey, it’s that nice little boy from the playground.”

“He’s a bad boy,” Lucy said darkly.

Aaron didn’t take the bait. He was busy staging a head-on collision between a garbage truck and an oil tanker, an act he choreographed with peculiar sound effects and an air of grave concentration.

“Don’t you like his hat?”

“It’s stupid.”

This got Aaron’s attention. He glared at Lucy.

“You stupid,” he informed her.

“Aaron,” said Todd. “That’s not nice.”

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” the boy muttered, in a barely audible voice.

Sarah smiled, offering Todd a small shrug of apology.

“I hope you don’t mind. Lucy has sensitive skin. She’s better off in the shade.”

“Not at all,” he said, swatting the magazine at a fly that was dive-bombing his head. “It’s nice to see you again.”

Sarah made Lucy stand at attention for a thorough slathering of water-resistant SPF 45 sunscreen that included the tips of her toes and the rims of her ears. After getting her daughter settled with a coloring book and a box of crayons, she shed her baggy T-shirt and began applying the protective goop to her own body, wishing she had something a little sexier to caress into her skin, baby oil or one of those coconut-scented lotions so popular during her adolescence, back when a lobstery sunburn was seen as a necessary first stage in the tanning process. Then she turned to him, as casually as if he were her cousin or brother, and said, “Could you do my back?”

“Sure.”

She wriggled toward him, passing the plastic bottle over her shoulder. Bending forward, she lifted her hair away from the nape of her neck—she knew it was one of her finest features—with a languid gesture that made her feel momentarily glamorous, a model posing for a cover shoot.

He didn’t overdo it. He rubbed the sunscreen onto her back and shoulders in a polite and businesslike manner. He didn’t linger unnecessarily in her lumbar region or take any other liberties.

And yet.

It felt illicit.

She might as well have been naked.

“Oh my God,” she whispered.

“Tell me about it,” he said.

 

She knew, at that moment, as clearly as she knew her own name, that they were going to be lovers, and that it would happen sooner rather than later. They didn’t really have a choice; there was some kind of raw sexual connection between them that she’d never experienced with anyone in her life.

That was Monday. By Friday her opinion on the matter had taken a 180-degree turn. It’s not going to happen, she told herself. And maybe that’s okay.

It wasn’t that her attraction to him had faded as they spent more time together; if anything, it had increased. He looked like some kind of blond American god stretched out on his rainbow-striped towel, baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, bronzed torso rising and falling with each lazy breath. Lying beside him without being able to touch his hand or lick his skin was a fresh erotic torment to her every day.

But there were compensations. She’d been so focused for so long on the memory of their unexpected kiss at the playground that she’d forgotten how easy it was to talk to him, the way they’d just plunged into conversation as they pushed their kids on the swings, his disarming honesty about himself, a quality he had of accepting people for who they were, of simply enjoying their company for however long he was allowed to share it.

Day after day, they sat in the shade, distributing snacks and brokering occasional disputes—having little choice in the matter, Aaron and Lucy had formed a fragile friendship—talking all the while about their own childhoods, things they’d read in the paper or heard on the radio, household matters, the people around them. When the kids got too hot or bored, they took them in the pool, continuing their conversation in waist-high water. Sometimes they traded offspring. Todd taught Lucy to doggie paddle while Sarah played rough with Aaron, lifting the feathery boy in and out of the water, the jingling of his bells mingling with his giddy laughter as he windmilled his arms wildly at the air.

It was the most fun she’d had in years. On three separate occasions strangers complimented Sarah on her beautiful family, and she neglected to correct them. One afternoon, when she and Todd were snacking on a huge bunch of grapes, Sarah saw Mary Ann and gave her a big wave. Mary Ann hesitated for a moment—she was wearing sunglasses, a gigantic straw hat, and some kind of gauzy yellow cover-up—before putting on the fakest smile Sarah had ever seen on the face of another human being. She raised her arm slowly, as if it were made of lead, and waved like it hurt.

As badly as Sarah sometimes wanted to just grab Todd by the face and kiss him, to crawl onto his towel and blast away the pretense that they were just a couple of pals killing time together, she wanted just as badly to hold on to the innocent public life they’d made for themselves out in the sunshine with the other parents and children. If they had an affair, all this would have to head underground, into a sadder and darker and more complicated place. So she accepted the trade: the melancholy handshake at four o’clock in exchange for this little patch of grass, some sunscreen and conversation, one more happy day at the pool.

 

So much depends on the weather, she thought later. Maybe that first week felt idyllic not only because of the supercharged current running between her and Todd, but also because every day of it was sunny and dry and in the mid-eighties, a cosmic smile of approval, one blessing piled on top of another.

The idyll ended over the unspeakably dreary weekend that followed, when a stubborn heat wave pushed into the area and refused to budge. Monday and Tuesday were brutal, in the nineties, with the kind of humidity that turned Sarah’s already frizzy hair into a freak show, the air quality index edging from “bad” to “unhealthy.” The pool was packed, the patch of shade she’d come to think of as “our spot” overrun by early birds. Lucy was cranky, Aaron lethargic; Todd couldn’t think of anything to talk about but how damn hot it was, which at least gave him a one-topic advantage over Sarah, who didn’t want to talk about anything at all.

By Wednesday the whole world was in a rotten mood. The sky loomed low and heavy, promising rain but not delivering. The pool was tepid, barely any relief at all. Todd squeegeed the sweat off his forehead with an index finger.

“It’s funny,” he said. “In the middle of winter you can’t even imagine a day like this. And if you could, it would probably seem okay.”

Sarah could barely muster the energy to nod. We should just go to the movies, she thought. They could see Spy Kids at the mall, hide out in the air-conditioning for a couple of hours. But she kept this idea to herself. It seemed dangerous somehow, too much like a date.

“It works the other way, too,” he went on. “On a day like this, it’s hard to believe in February. You know, that week around Valentine’s Day, when you don’t even want to walk out to your car.” He shook his head. “Remember those vinyl seats they used to have? Might as well sit naked on a block of ice.”

“I wish,” Sarah muttered.

“It’s a little like being dead,” he added, after a moment’s thought.

“Vinyl seats?”

“No, it’s just like when you’re dead and you try to remember being alive, it’ll be like thinking of winter on the hottest day of the year. You’ll know it’s true, but you won’t really believe it.”

“That’s actually sort of comforting,” Sarah pointed out. “I always figured that when you’re dead, you wouldn’t be able to think of anything. There wouldn’t be any you to do the thinking.”

“That’s a depressing thought.”

“Only if you’re alive,” she said. “If you’re dead, it doesn’t matter.”

Todd looked at the sky. There was a whiny note in his voice that Sarah didn’t like.

“They said scattered showers. I don’t see any scattered showers.”

Oh, what the hell, she thought. I’ll just ask him to the movies. We don’t even have to sit next to each other. But then something distracted her. A disturbance in the air, maybe. A low murmur of warning. Some kind of collective shift of attention. One of those moments when you and a lot of other people are suddenly looking in a certain direction, though most of you have no idea why.

The Bellington Town Pool was set at the bottom of a grassy hill, an enormous, but still somehow jewel-like circle of water ringed by a concrete walkway. A group of coltish adolescent girls, awkward and lovely in their tiny bikinis, did their sunbathing on the walkway, but everyone else pitched camp on the hillside, which undulated upward in a series of gentle plateaus that gave the whole facility the feel of a natural amphitheater.

Sarah and Todd and the kids were sitting maybe a third of the way up the hill on that sweltering Wednesday afternoon, much closer to the center of the pool than if they’d been able to claim their usual spot under the spreading oak tree. They had an unobstructed fifty-yard-line view of the water, from the toddlers sitting in the shallow end to their left, to the junior high kids batting around a beach ball in the middle, to the teenage daredevils doing backflips off the deep end diving board to their right.

But like most of the people around her, Sarah wasn’t looking at the water just then. Her gaze was drawn—irresistibly, it seemed—to the nearside walkway, to the man standing near the lifeguard chair and glancing around with a worried expression, apparently searching for a clear patch of grass on which to spread the rolled-up pink towel that was draped around his neck.

At first she thought she was looking at him because he was holding a bright orange scuba flipper in each hand and had a diving mask of the same color perched high on his forehead. People didn’t often wear that sort of gear to the Town Pool, and even if they did, this guy wouldn’t have seemed the type. He was a pasty, overweight man who had made one mistake by going shirtless and another by wearing a ridiculously loud pair of swim trunks, lurid tropical flowers throbbing against a flat gray background, a combination of errors that somehow made him seem overdressed and underdressed at the same time. But then Sarah took a second look at his oddly familiar face and realized that she was staring at him for an entirely different reason.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“What?”

“It’s him.” She lowered her voice and pointed. “You know who.”

Todd squinted. “Oh, Jesus. He shouldn’t be here. I don’t care how hot it is.”

As if by reflex, Sarah turned to check on the kids, who were engrossed in a game of Car Doctor. Lucy was the doctor. After Aaron staged one of his crashes, she examined the injured vehicles, listening to them with a toy stethoscope and then kissing them to make them feel better, at which point they were eligible to participate in another collision. Sarah reached out, in a rush of tenderness, and pressed her hand against her daughter’s sweat-sticky cheek. Lucy brushed it away, annoyed by the interruption.

When Sarah turned back around, Ronald James McGorvey was sitting on the edge of the pool, tugging his flippers onto his feet, the towel resting in a heap beside him. Then he lowered the mask over his eyes and nose and wiggled it into position. He slid feetfirst into the pool, breaking the surface with only the barest hint of a splash.

No one minded at first. The beach ball kept popping into the air as McGorvey cut through the game with the heavy grace of a seal, the flippers beating a frothy trail in his wake. The divers kept cannonballing and somersaulting and bellyflopping off the springboard as he moved into the deeper water. But then a woman’s panicky voice cried out from the base of the hill.

“Jimmy! Jimmy Mancino! Get out of the pool this instant!”

A skinny kid, maybe ten years old, started paddling uncertainly toward the voice.

“Jimmy, now!”

Another voice rang out.

“Randall, Juliette. You too!”

“Sheila!”

“Pablo!”

“Mark! Mark Stepanek!”

Once the exodus began, it happened quickly. The shallow end emptied first, anxious mothers wading out with frightened-looking toddlers in their arms. The older kids were slower to leave, but before long they were climbing out, too, standing in sullen confusion on the walkway, water streaming off their bodies, puddling at their feet. All over the hillside, adults were whipping out cell phones, dialing 911.

For maybe five minutes, McGorvey had the whole gigantic pool to himself. He dove to the bottom of the deep end, then rose slowly, breaking the surface just long enough to catch his breath before heading back down. When he got tired of that he floated on his back for a while, his gaudy shorts billowing around his waist, the pale mound of his belly rising out of the water like a deserted island. He kept his mask over his face the whole time, so Sarah couldn’t tell if he was defiant or embarrassed or simply oblivious of the fact that he’d cleared the pool as effectively as if he’d been a shark.

By the time the police cruiser pulled into the parking lot—it was located near the deep end, behind a tall chain-link fence—Aaron and Lucy had caught on to the fact that something momentous was going on. They suspended Car Doctor and wriggled into the laps of their respective parents.

“Kids not swimming,” said Lucy.

“Why police?” Aaron wondered.

Sarah checked with Todd, uncertain how to explain the situation. But before she could begin to answer, a busybody with pink cheeks sitting directly in front of them turned around.

“There’s a bad man in the pool,” she said. “The police are coming to get him.”

“Why he bad?” Lucy asked.

“He’s not nice to children,” said Sarah. “But you don’t have to worry about it.”

By then, the cops—there were two of them, an older white guy and a younger black guy—had entered the pool area through a padlocked gate that had been opened by one of the lifeguards. Looking hot and miserable in their uniforms, they trudged down the walkway, stopping near McGorvey’s pink towel and gazing at the lonely swimmer with what seemed more like envy than professional interest. Sarah didn’t hear them say anything, but McGorvey swam toward them as if they had. He had a little trouble hoisting himself out of the pool, so the black cop reached down and gave him a hand. The white cop handed him his towel.

“What’s those?” Aaron asked. “On the feet.”

“Flippers,” said Todd. “They help you swim better.”

The cops talked, and McGorvey nodded as he toweled off, the mask still concealing most of his face. The white cop shrugged. The black cop touched McGorvey, almost gently, on the shoulder. They didn’t seem to be arresting him. If you didn’t know better, you would have thought they were all friends. The cops stood motionless as McGorvey turned on his heels and began trudging toward the exit, his flippers slapping wetly against the concrete of the walkway. After just a few steps, though, he stopped to pull them off, balancing unsteadily on one leg, then the other. He did the same with the mask. Then he turned toward the hillside, spreading his arms wide, like an actor addressing his public. His voice was loud and plaintive, as if he wanted everybody to hear.

“I was only trying to cool off!”

After McGorvey left, the swimmers returned with a vengeance. It was a massive invasion of the Town Pool, the decent people of Bellington reclaiming it for their own. Grabbing their children by the wrists, Sarah and Todd joined the stampede, stumbling downhill with their fellow citizens, then waiting in an orderly line for their turn to walk down the safety ramp into what felt just then like the world’s largest bathtub.

Despite the overcrowding and disconcerting warmth of the water, there was a giddiness in the air, as if the collective funk of the past few days had finally broken. Adults got into giggly splashing fights. They bumped into one another and smiled. A beach ball appeared, and everyone understood that the point was to keep it aloft for as long as possible. When it finally touched the water, what sounded like a hundred voices said Oooh in unison.

The fun was only a few minutes old when the clouds abruptly darkened. A breeze stirred for the first time in recent memory, and faces turned skyward in surprised gratitude as fat, widely spaced raindrops began plummeting into the pool with the force of small pebbles. Kids staggered around with their tongues out, the way they did during the first snow of the year. Then it thundered. Nothing too scary, a sustained bass rumble off to the right.

“Clear the pool, please,” said a voice over the PA. “Everybody out! No swimming during an electrical storm.”

The swimmers groaned but obeyed. Once again Sarah and Todd were part of the herd, this time tugging their children uphill. As soon as they reached their towels they began gathering up their stuff with a sense of urgency that was intensified by another boom of thunder, this one considerably louder than the first, and followed seconds later by a crackling spike of lightning. Lucy whimpered and latched on to her mother’s leg.

“It’s okay, honey.” Sarah squatted to lift her daughter. “We better get going.”

“You’re gonna carry her?” Todd asked.

“It’ll be faster this way. She’s scared of the you-know-what.”

“That’s crazy,” he said. “Put her in the stroller. We’ll walk you home.”

The next thunderclap made Lucy squirm in her mother’s arms, her grip tightening uncomfortably around Sarah’s neck. Lightning flashed right on top of it, a yellow exclamation mark in the greenish sky.

“But that’s out of your way.”

“We don’t mind, do we, Aaron?”

Aaron looked skeptically at the stroller.

“What about Big Bear?”

“He won’t mind a little rain.”

To Sarah’s surprise, Lucy agreed to ride in the stroller, her usual disdain for that childish mode of transportation trumped by a desire to get home as quickly as possible, not to mention the novelty of riding with a friend. She switched places with the stuffed animal, whose synthetic fur felt no better against Sarah’s body than her daughter’s clammy skin.

The rain remained light during their journey across town, Todd pushing the stroller at a brisk clip, Sarah lagging a few feet behind, trying to figure out a good way to hold the unwieldy bear that didn’t require her to look at his creepy, disapproving face.

“Here we are,” she said, amazed to be standing in front of her house after only a ten-minute walk. It usually took her a half hour to cover the same distance with Lucy.

She handed Big Bear to Todd with a sense of relief and walked around to the front of the stroller. Kneeling to unbuckle her daughter, she suddenly understood why the kids had been so quiet on the way home.

“This is amazing,” Sarah whispered. “She never naps.”

It was a sweet sight, Aaron’s hand resting on Lucy’s thigh, her head leaning against his shoulder. She was sucking her thumb, making happy smacking noises with her lips.

“Aaron’ll be out for the next two hours.”

The wind rushed through the treetops, spinning the leaves upside down, signaling the true arrival of the storm. A faucet opened in the sky, releasing a sudden deluge.

“You better come in,” Sarah said, tugging Todd toward the house. “I can’t let you walk home in this.”

Dripping wet, they carried their sleeping children upstairs and laid them down on Sarah’s bed, which she was glad she’d made before leaving the house. Still sucking her thumb, Lucy rolled onto her stomach, sticking her plump little butt in the air. She was wearing an orange-and-yellow bathing suit with a little ruffled skirt that had flipped up, exposing the dimpled baby fat at the top of her thighs. Aaron was sprawled out on his back, the pink-and-purple tentacles of his jester’s hat spreading wide along with his arms and legs. He had delicate features, and those miraculously long eyelashes you only saw on little boys, never on grown men.

Sarah and Todd stood at the edge of the bed for what felt like a long time, watching their children sleep, and listening to the rain drumming against the house, afraid to even look at one another. Sarah’s mouth was dry, her bathing suit unpleasantly tight around the waist. When Todd finally spoke, there was an audible tremor in his voice.

“We’re not gonna do anything crazy, are we?”

Sarah thought it over for a moment. She felt light-headed, almost weightless, as if she were about to rise off the floor.

“I don’t know,” she whispered, reaching for his hand, threading her fingers through his. “You’ll have to define crazy.”