24
The High Summer
A strange thing happened around the Fourth of July when the fireworks were going off on the shore. Corey drove out to the Neck. He thought he was going to see Tom. Along the way, he passed the Hibbards’ neighbors grilling in front of their houses with their friends. The day was hot. He drove uphill into the trees with his elbow out the window of the hatchback. He was coming from work. His arm hairs held black iron dust from cutting rebar with a grinder, like the pollinated hairs on a bee’s belly after crawling inside a flower. He could hear the birds and smell the woods. He parked.
The garage was open, but Tom’s pickup wasn’t there. Corey walked across the yard, cement on the knees of his jeans. The yard glowed in the sun. His boots crushed the grass into the warm black dirt. He knocked on the door and said, “Hello?” No one answered. He went around the side of the house and looked. In the semicircular hollow before the trees, he saw Molly lying on a lawn chair alone in the sun.
He said hello and she looked at him and said hi.
“Do you need anything?”
She said she was fine. He found himself walking towards her and when he reached her, he wasn’t sure what to do. He bent down and hugged her. Then to be near her, he sat on the grass. She leaned back in her chair and looked at the woods lazily as they talked. He had a hard time thinking of things to say.
He reached up and played with her arm.
“Been working out?”
“No.” She’d been lying here relaxing finally. It had been a busy summer.
She got up to get a drink. He followed her inside her father’s house. Tools lay all around the carpet. The lights were off. The sunlight glanced past the roof and entered the abode by reflection. The shadows of trees mingled in the shaded rooms. She took a pitcher of water and poured a drink and set it on the chopping block. A fly flew past their heads. Her father had left out a pack of hamburger meat. “I should put that away,” she said. “He’s such a pain in my ass. Just kidding. I love my dad.” She drank her glass of water.
Corey reached out and laid his hand on her hip while she drank. She was wearing a bikini. The burs of his callused hand ticked against the fabric. Across the border of the nylon, her skin was smooth as a space-age polymer. It was only possible to invent that polymer by playing with millions of atoms for millions of years.
She told him that if they did anything they could never be friends again, but that if he restrained himself their friendship could continue.
He petitioned her for mercy and asked her to believe that their friendship would only be improved if she were merciful in this instance. However, she remained steadfast. The choice was his; he could have the one thing but not both.
If she put it that way, he didn’t think he could very well proceed, and he withdrew his hand from her hip.
Just at that moment, the door opened and Tom clumped in in his heavy boots and black wraparound safety glasses and beard. He greeted his daughter, who glided away to the backyard. He strode into his kitchen and got a beer. When he opened the refrigerator door, his hand, which held the handle, was an inch from Corey’s chest—the kitchen was a small room—and Corey saw it in such high definition that he could see the cross-hatched crevices in that massive, thick-fingered rhinoceros-skinned extremity. “I saw your car,” Tom said from inside the refrigerator. Corey mumbled that he’d just dropped in to wish him a happy Fourth. Tom came out with a beer. He uncapped it.
“How’s work?”
“It’s great. It’s a lifesaver.”
Corey pulled himself together and went home to his mother.
The night came. His guilt-sickness eased. He left several messages on Molly’s phone, apologizing. She didn’t call back, so he contrived to see her the day after. “I really needed to apologize in person,” he said. “For what?” she asked. She’d already forgotten. She made out the whole thing to be unimportant and talked to him in such a way as to give the impression that it had never happened.
Oh, he kept reliving the moment in her kitchen before her father came home!
Around the same time, one day after work, Joan put on a green mud face mask to cleanse her hormonal skin and went for a jog along the shore in the late-afternoon sun. She ran among the strange formations out on Houghs Neck. There were rocky cliffs and rusted iron railings to climb the stairs and jetties going out into the dark blue water. She came upon an empty sub-development like a vision from Northern Ireland—wooden houses, shuttered. A jungle gym, deserted. She jogged through, the road leading from one Norway-shaped peninsula to the next, the little penile Norways of the coast.
On her way back, she ran into Tom. His snow-white truck was stopped at the end of a dead-end street that met the ocean.
“Hey, what’s up, guy!”
He was wearing black shades and a Harley-Davidson do-rag. He stopped in the act of pulling a tackle box out of his truck and said, “Hey.” There was a bucket of seawater at his feet and a folding knife on the pavement. His fishing rod was propped against the railing and his line was out.
She had forgotten the mask. It was cracked and sweated through. Green mud was running down her neck into her cleavage. The roots of her hair were stiff with mud. Her fat, golden brown upper arms shone with sweat. A heavy metal guitar was wucka-wucking out of her earbuds.
“I’m the girl from Corey’s house!” she shouted.
“I know. Of course. How are ya? What are you doing, jogging?”
She pulled her earbuds out. “Yeah. I’m getting this fat off from the winter. It’s getting harder and harder to lose. I want to go to the beach without embarrassing myself.”
“You’re not going to embarrass yourself.”
She put a hand on her hip, shot her hip out, did a fingernail display and head-shimmied. “Right?”
Then she saw her reflection in his truck. “Holy shit, did I leave my mask on? Is there green on my face?”
“It’s fine,” said Tom and waved away the subject. He was getting set to fish but could offer her a ride.
“That’s okay. I need to get the miles.”
“So, that’s your thing? You’re into working out?”
“Yeah, working out. Karate.”
“No shit? Karate.”
“I was never one to leave my fate in other people’s hands. There’s sick people out there, I’m sorry.”
Tom listened to her talk about it. “I know,” he said. “I’ve got a daughter.”
“We understand the danger from growing up the way we did. It’s like they don’t get it anymore.”
“Yeah,” he sighed.
Her iPod was still screaming.
“Is that AC/DC?”
“I think so. Let me check. Most definitely. You recognize it?”
“Of course. The music of my misspent youth.”
“Want to hear it again?” She held the earbud out to him.
The Hibbards became a subject of discussion in the Goltz household that night. Gloria said of Tom, “I’m sure he’s very nice, but I met him once and thought he was bor-ing.” Corey rushed to Tom’s defense. He described the precision and complexity of the project in Norwood. “He’s the man I admire most of all!” Gloria thought her son was cut out for more in life than being an HVAC installer. Corey said he didn’t think there was anything more than that in life; it was one of many paths to glory, all of which were equal—scholar, fighter, builder, farmer, sailor, poet, monk. All were equally good ways of getting to Nirvana.
“Corey, I want you to go back to school and get your diploma and then I want you to go to college.”
“Mom, I’d do anything you wanted, but I don’t want to do that.”
“Joan, can you tell him?”
“I dunno. I kinda always felt like school’s for fools.”
“Joan!”
“Mom, it’s okay. Please—I understand. But I respect Joan’s path.”
Gloria was so adamant she risked offending Joan.
Corey tried to bring them all together: “Reading, doing art, doing poetry, thinking independently, living a life of independence: Isn’t that what you’ve both done? That’s what we all respect.”
“But there’s so much more!” Gloria cried.
Joan said, “I guess I’m gonna go smoke a cigarette.”
When she was gone, Corey said, “I think you’re hurting her feelings.”
“Who cares? So what! For God’s sake, this is your life we’re talking about.”
“Well, Mom, I can’t just do what my mommy wants me to do. I’m seventeen. Let me figure it out.”
Later, Joan remarked to Corey, “Your mother sure cares about you.” Corey was mortified at the implication that he had an overprotective mother.
In the middle of a hot August day, a black Mercury, reflecting the sun, turned down the crooked street and stopped. Leonard and his passenger, Adrian, got out. The sky was blue. The block was quiet. The trees in the nearby park stood still; there was no wind. Leonard wore black trousers, an undershirt and carried handcuffs on his belt. His companion was wearing a black baseball cap, skimpy jean cutoffs, black combat boots, and no shirt, his torso so perfectly muscular it didn’t look real. He gave off ripe body odor. The older man led him to his house and unlocked the front door.
“Gosh, I can’t believe you’d take me into your confidence like this,” Adrian said. “I know you don’t like people.”
“You were ready,” replied Leonard, letting him inside where it was suddenly dark. “But this isn’t my total confidence. This is one degree. There are further degrees. You’re not seeing everything.”
“I’m not sure I could ask for anything more than this. I love it here. Just to sit here and do physics—it’s such a great place! I love the depressing neighborhood. It’s so grim and nihilistic—almost like a chunk of uranium where nothing can live except me—without meaning—creating my own meanings, like Nietzsche says, from math and physics—just these perfect, precise facts of the universe that I can discover with my mental power.”
“Well, that’s Malden for you. It’s a depressed area. That’s mainly because of corruption, mind you. No one wants to commute from here, thanks to the tolls, so the property values crashed in the eighties. But there are some compensations. You never know who your neighbors are. Take a look across the street. See that house? The guy who lived there would interest you. He killed his girlfriend.”
“He did? I’d love to talk to him and ask him what it was like!”
“You can ask me. He told me everything.”
“You’ve got to tell me.”
“We’ll have to think of something you can do for me.”
“I was willing to make those phone calls for you.”
“And I was willing to get you the best lap dance in Boston.”
“What do you want?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll think of something painless. I know you don’t want to jeopardize your university career.”
“And then you’ll tell me? Is it good?”
“It’s vivid.”
“I can’t wait. That’ll be perfect for my psyche.”
“You’ll feel like you’re there.”
“That’s how I want to feel! That’s what I’m into: using fantasy and rationality to control the world, while minimizing risks.”