It is very satisfying to be part of a dialogue in which a man invites a woman whom he’s already given up on to come visit him at his parents’ summer house, at the very moment when that woman has a man in her apartment watching basketball and waiting for her to come back inside with the barbecued chicken legs. I leaned against the waist-high concrete wall that separates our two halves of the shared balcony, cantilevered over the smoke of somebody else’s hamburgers being grilled one floor below, and said you could stay there as long as you wanted. That’s what we always say when we invite someone out to be a houseguest, and we always make it clear that they will have their own room.
“Of course I will,” you said, as I waited for the implied comma and the neutralizing counterclause, and when they did not come, I was not sure what to do.
It was the one day of the year when white fluff from some kind of tree blew in the air and collected in little transparent drifts against the curb. We both looked up at an airplane that was going over on its final approach to the airport two towns away, always the same aircraft, a homely, stubby little two-engine jet, this one painted up to look like Shamu, the Killer Whale. Then you went back to basting chicken legs, your back straight as a dancer’s, the same easy slant over the grill, and I went inside my own kitchen, knowing that words pronounced in chicken smoke can never be wholly false or wholly true. In literary theory, a statement like that is considered mystification, but I’ll stand behind it.
So at least I was able to slide the glass door shut behind me and go back to being a professional kind of guy, with paperwork at the kitchen table and a head full of positive thoughts on behalf of the category of houseguests, at all cottages, those important strangers on whose account we will hope for a good flight and good weather. I know how it feels to be resting from the trip, the long hum of a turboprop still vibrating in your ears, in a gingham-wallpapered room silent in the breeze through white curtains.
That’s a nice phrase. I should have said that, instead of just looking up into the air and wondering what cute themed livery (Star Wars, The Little Mermaid) the next aircraft coming over on finals would be painted in. But that too would be a problem. People who work together should not accidentally live next door to each other, because they will end up unable to talk about anything but the airplanes that pass over, while one of them bends gracefully, straight-backed over the grill, using a soft-bristled brush to put red sauce on the chicken for the unseen person who has come over to watch the basketball players run back and forth.
Maybe I shouldn’t have brought up the subject—though my experience with subjects has been that when you bring them up, it is exactly the same as not bringing them up. Maybe it’s better just to think about it, about the word I love so much: houseguest. A houseguest is a privileged character. He or she does not need to get a preparatory orange tan from one of those radiation chambers that my doctor calls melanoma mattresses. You can get off the plane white as a potato and nobody will care, and you will have free access to as many sun-protection factors of sunblock as there is space for them under the sink in the guests’ bathroom.
A houseguest doesn’t even have to be perfectly dressed. That idea is a big lie of cartoonists. One artist in particular that I keep seeing almost every week sketches with fluent freehand lines sleek partygoers with oversized wine glasses, guys in perfect suits with the jacket fabric rumpled at the inside bend of an elbow as evenly as the pleats of an accordion and the bulge of a Rolex somehow recognizable beneath the sleeve. Everybody’s hair is drawn beautifully; even the pattern baldness of stocky young power lawyers is perfectly rendered, their side fringes crimped and layered in the artist’s elegant pen-twirl, and one of them always makes a nonchalant remark, which usually I don’t quite get, about how rich they all are.
All you need to get you there is the word houseguest. That word will make a space available for you on the skinny, red, thirty-five-passenger commuter plane, with its solitary flight attendant rushing around through the whole short trip, trying to get everybody on the aircraft beveraged, as they say.
When a plane is scheduled to land, people meeting their houseguests wait in a kind of chain-link enclosure between the terminal building and the paved space where the planes wait, which many people inaccurately call tarmac, that word being a former trademark for a tar-based paving composition and now popular on prime-time news because the sound of it resonates well with that serious tone newscasters put into their voices when they are reporting terrorist attacks.
When the flight lands and the forward hatch opens from the port side, we look and look, until we and the other people waiting catch sight of our houseguests in the fierce light. Sometimes if the planes are running late and need to take off again as soon as they can get the outgoing passengers aboard and belted in, they leave the starboard turboprop running, feathering in the air, as if on the landing deck of an old aircraft carrier. Upstairs in the house, it is customary for an arriving houseguest to take a little nap, as the light streams through the curtains.
If the weather is all right the next morning, we go for a run—me, my sister, and my brother-in-law—down the ruts of the long driveway and then for a few miles along the sand road that runs through high scrub a quarter mile inland from the cottage. My parents bought this place fifteen years ago. I still don’t know how, and I never felt it was my place to ask: a miracle deal, a left-wing realtor so radical that he or she doesn’t even put the little copyright bubble at the end of the word? Incidentally, cottage is just the word people use out here to mean a house, of any size, without a basement.
We run slowly, in a close pack, and sometimes we go for half a mile without talking, in the bright haze over the rises and dips of green bramble that the road cuts through, with the ocean on the left, which you can’t see except for in a few spots, and higher ground sloping gently upward to the right. Sometimes we talk about business—mostly his business, because I don’t have a business.
What’s weird about running at the cottage is that we only do it after breakfast, and it’s always a serious breakfast. We trot slowly in the sun, full of pancakes and bacon and eggs mopped up from the plate with toast.
Maybe they make these meals just for me, because I’m the one who comes back for only a short time—the swinging single, with the beginnings of osteoarthritis in my tennis shoulder and a good enough appetite to fill myself up and then run off the eggs and toast—and after a few days I fly back home, to a place almost as far from the ocean as you can get in the continent of North America. I have no complaints; the house is nice, and they give me a nice room—not always the same one every year, depending on who else is staying there—but with everything there is to do, we all seem to spend a lot of time sitting around. There’s plenty to read, of course, but it’s hard to get started on a real book. If my parents ever see me paging through my sister’s Cosmopolitan, they start to look uneasy, not knowing whether to smile understandingly or to look away.
I should tell them to relax. I’m just reading a magazine. There’s nothing for them to be sensitive about. Besides, along with the pictures there are some very good articles.
So my sister and my brother-in-law and I all get up from the breakfast table, finally, and go running, with the ocean on our left and our stomachs bouncing in front of us, past Frank and Judy Rackoff’s big house, where at least once a season somebody comes along with a can of paint and changes the name on the mailbox to Jackoff.
* * *
What can I show you? The light that we run through in the mornings is like a thin plasma with a current running through it at a voltage high enough to make all visible air radiate light waves, or particles, depending on which experiments you choose to perform on them. I’ve never performed any experiments, so I have to decide for myself what they are. From the high spots on the road you can see boats, painted white, far out in the water. If they stay in the same spot for a long time, it means they are catching something.
As the day warms, the truncated cone of the lighthouse shines brighter in its coat of washed white. With the sun still low enough in the east for its light to spark from the surface at an obtuse angle, you will see so many points of light on the water that, even though it makes you squint, you will want to keep looking at it.
I don’t have any pictures of this, and if I did I probably wouldn’t get the colors right. Maybe I should see if I can find a coffee table book about the place, a great big one in the reduced-price bin: a whole compendium about the place, starting with a short history and some old-time pictures of people in high-necked dresses and big mustaches, and then beautifully photographed pages to be slowly turned: moods in fog, the bright sun hats of town, October solitude.
When I think about that light angled off the water, I think it is full of money. Maybe it is money, the purest currency. Looking at the light makes me think about the famous short story where a girl is being yelled at by the manager of a supermarket, and when she says something to defend herself, the kid narrating the story says he can slide down the sound of her voice into another town, the way I’d like to slide down that angle of light into the blue gardens where those girls live, where people walk around with clear drinks in stemmed glasses and always the same faces and clothes from the same cartoons—Rolexes, accordion-creased jacket elbows, perfectly drawn tangles of hair. I can sit in a wooden lawn chair for hours and worry about other people’s money, reminding myself that if I had a dollar for every time I’ve worried about other people’s money, that very lawn chair could be mine.
Still I will not have a long face when I meet your plane. You will recognize the cedar-shingled main terminal of the airport from television, and you will find that as on television, the airport is a happy place, with chowder smells drifting from the café and a whole crew of zany but kindhearted ticket clerks who spend their time trading straight lines for punch lines across the lobby’s tiled space, from reservation desk to baggage ramp, and at regular intervals get themselves locked in the bathroom without any clothes on.
If it’s a nice day, we can go right into town and take pictures of each other, some shots looking up the slope from the foot of what has been called The Most Picturesque Street in America. It’s not beautiful really, just picturesque. If we go someplace nice for lunch, we can have the waitress take our picture with either your camera or my camera or both, called a xenograph, a felicitous new word in the language.
Even in the less expensive restaurants, people are so rich that I have to talk, in a voice just clear enough to be heard at the next table, about things they won’t understand, such as my theory that Robert Lowell’s poem “Skunk Hour” covered that territory of the mind so completely that it has become impossible for intelligent people ever to be mentally ill in exactly that same way again. When I talk about that and related subjects, I can tell from the backs of people’s heads at the next booth that they don’t know what I’m talking about. Back home it’s easier. In my favorite local restaurant, I can just use the word effluvium a few times, and people will automatically understand that William Faulkner is one of my major influences.
Whatever happens, even if rich people think I’m a jerk, the word houseguest will protect you. You will be safe, in waterproof sunblock, wherever you go, at the beach, with no bathing cap, hair sleek as a seal, head in the freakish Atlantic, which is another phrase that I would like to say within hearing of some rich people and watch nothing happen. When you go back to your room, you can just lie down, in a room filled with that private register of light that pours into a house all day, if light has register, through closed curtains, when everybody else is still at the beach or has gone into town, and all you can hear, or could hear, is the high hiss of wind through a screen and once every five minutes the soft clunk of the refrigerator going on or off.
I’ve wondered about the light around that cottage, and I still don’t know anything. The lighthouse that we never reach looks like a little paper mock-up. When Albert Einstein thought about light, it was a Gedankenexperiment. When I think about light, I just scratch my head. On days when we don’t eat too much, we sometimes make it as far as the little village that the lighthouse overlooks, which is where we used to rent a house every summer before our parents bought the cottage.
I guess I have to say that the years we used to stay in that first cottage next to the lighthouse were a stormy time in our little family, perhaps echoing the stormy time in our country, when people raised their voices at cocktail parties. One day Mom brought home ice cream and a box of waffle cones. I remembered what a kid in my dorm had done to me. I told my sister that the ice cream was sour, that it was so bad you could smell it.
She smelled it, of course, and I smashed it in her face, of course. Our kitchen became just as noisy as it had been the times people were angry about the Vietnam War, before the people who could not be persuaded that it was wrong stopped coming. Something about the ice cream made my parents so angry that they said they’d be willing to buy me a bus ticket home, but I didn’t take them up on it. I make no excuse. At least it was vanilla, so the drips wouldn’t spot. As I walked away I could hear my sister crying in the kitchen.
Poor kid. Never got to see Darby O’Gill and the Little People. Spilled her milk at every meal. Found the word fuck penned onto the inside of the woven cloth Sam Browne belt the safety patrol kids used to wear.
Now everything is all right, except that she won’t go shopping with me, because I embarrass her by picking one shirt up from the pile, and then another, and then the first, and then the other. I don’t know how she wants me to do it.
She should have smashed back. Then we would have ended up on a more equal footing, a level playing field, as they say. And I like to think about what kind of a novel a scene like that could be part of: a sprawling family saga covering a hundred years in the life of a cottage full of people who can’t stop smashing ice cream in one another’s faces.
That’s the tour, most of it. It’s useful to imagine that we started out in the daytime and that now it has become night, so we’ve been able to see it both ways. If you walk in the other direction from the way we went running in the morning, you come to a real road, paved with the same kind of blacktop as the space around the terminal building at the airport. It curves inland and then for a short distance follows the shore of the long arm of harbor water, where you can look, from the stretch of protected beach, across the harbor to the lights of town.
You’re not supposed to walk on the beach, because it’s owned by a hotel, a long frame building on the edge of the harbor, with beams of light slanting down from the windows, whose photo spreads you may have seen in Gourmet magazine. If you want to make yourself unhappy, all you have to do is think about the people inside. They are not bad people, but their lives are so far away from ours that we can visualize them only from looking at the skillful line-drawn cartoons in magazines—the calm faces, unwrinkled white pants, and the protuberance of an unseen watch drawn so perfectly that even under a shirt cuff you can tell it’s a Rolex.
But I know better ways to make ourselves unhappy. Even from the road, without sneaking onto the beach, you can get a good view across five miles of water into town. The lights there will be full of so much fine detail that they will work on your eyes in a way similar to the lights that you can see sparking off the ocean on days when we go running early enough—except that it’s different at night. It’s much darker, and the sun is not visible in the sky.
It’s beautiful, and there you are watching it, but what always bothers me about standing there, in the middle of the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen, is that everything you look at is beautiful precisely to the same degree as everything else. You can drive into town, and that too is beautiful in its own way: the better suvs, like Lincoln Navigators and Mercedes ML 320s, angle-parked along the cobblestones with their big convex tailgates and spare tires jutting out into the traffic, and some good restaurants, and clothes shops open late, from whose open doors the saturated colors of raspberry and turquoise windbreakers spill out into the street, where kids are doing what they call “hacking around” and trying to get their friends to smell their ice cream cones, and girls not old enough to be waitresses in places where they sell alcohol, are standing, calm-faced, sometimes with a slight fringe of blue around their eyes, waiting in line for slices of pizza.
We have a family rule in town: no complaining about prices; you either buy it or you don’t. If my sister and my brother-in-law go into one store I usually go into another one, which means that she’s not there to tell me if the color’s right or not, so I don’t buy anything. I might as well admit that the thing that makes me uncomfortable about going into town is that at some deep, perhaps unresolved, level, I still want to smash ice cream in her face. Maybe I should—bring it all to a head. Maybe that’s what I don’t understand about being on vacation: other people do it so well, weeks and weeks, but I still don’t know what you’re supposed to do all day. Look into each other’s eyes? Wait in line for the Sunday Times? Go for a walk? Play tennis? If I ever did smash ice cream in her face—which would be especially ridiculous now, considering that she’s three years older than I am and her kids are already looking at colleges—I would be doing it with mixed feelings.
* * *
On the ocean side of our cottage a long flight of wooden stairs painted green runs down to the beach, through reeds and cattails so tall that you have to lift them over you as you walk down. At night there are so few details in the shape of the water, and the green bluffs are so much the same height for miles, that you don’t want to go outside without a flashlight. Once I got lost on the beach because I tried to orient myself by remembering that our stairway was fifty yards west of the moon.
From the top of the stairs you can look back to the house and see that the good news they’ve just found about has caused them to turn on every lamp on the first floor, where my mother sits at a desk, calling people, most of whom won’t be able to be there on such short notice. The big secret going out in all directions is that suddenly it turns out that the reason this mysterious houseguest is here in the first place is that she and I have been planning for the last three months to get married.
A genuine surprise; the house seemed to tilt for an instant, you might say—but they could have seen it coming if they’d been smart enough. I don’t bring a bottle of Mumm’s to dinner just to be a big shot. They could have looked in the refrigerator and figured everything out. Semiotics. What’s in the paper bag and why? When I actually said it, it took them so long to react that I thought somebody was choking. As James Thurber said, “You could have heard a bomb drop.”
Then my sister’s hand jerked at the table and she knocked over her champagne glass. Every meal that poor girl used to spill something. Later it was nice that she cried, and she was the right one to do it. I’ve never known a child who cried so easily.
Everything happens fast around here. The green-and-white striped caterer’s tent has already been pitched and tightened on the grass between the cottage and the road. It stands in the dark, a Faulknerian shape without color, stripes leached, or bleached, of their mint green, the whole blurred structure of it receding from our eyes, in abject furious retrograde.
I’m glad we have that vocabulary. Even if we only get to use it once in a while, it can’t hurt us. US News and World Report says that the big corporations are looking for people who have done some serious reading in widely distributed fields and who won’t scare clients away by not knowing who William Carlos Williams was.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s night, and everywhere you look, the big shapes of houses have their lights on. Phone calls have been flying around so fast that I’m not sure where we’re supposed to be standing, or even what the weather’s like—dark, I guess, having been that way ever since the sun went down. I don’t even know how many people are here. I count one, but then I look around in the dark and get confused.
* * *
Soon it will be time for us to go, walking and talking, presumably about art and literature, with no rich people around to hear us and not know what we’re talking about, back in the direction of the cottage and its lights, where we will find that the New York Times Magazine has been left on the screened porch. I don’t know where the other sections of the paper are—probably stacked in a corner to be recycled. The magazine’s pages are wet with the thin mist that blows in off the ocean, the unsupported half of the magazine flopping off the seat of a white spray-painted wicker reading chair. We didn’t really get married, by the way.
It will have been sitting there for hours, in the moisture, hanging, bent in half as if partly melted, the newsprint damp from cover to cover and as flaccid as the clock face in that famous Salvador Dali painting, which both of us already know is called The Persistence of Memory.