Body Surfing, Page 2

  Jeff leans against the porch railing a few feet from Sydney. His slighter frame and its concavities suggest exposure, whereas Ben’s body, comfortably on display, seems fully covered.

  There is talk about the backup at the Hampton tolls, idle joking about resorting to civil disobedience to get the state to adopt an E-ZPass system: of finding seven guys to drive into the tollbooths, park their cars, and walk away. Ben releases Julie and picks up a glass of iced tea. He drains it in one go, the ice cubes slamming against his upper lip. His engine operates at higher revolutions than his brother’s: he seems anxious to be on the move. He laces his fingers behind his neck and flexes his elbows. He asks his father about his golf game.

  “Worse and worser,” Mr. Edwards replies, though no one believes the man. One expects self-deprecation from the gentle patriarch.

  Mrs. Edwards is queried about the guests, who have gone off to Portsmouth in search of antiques. A fourth for golf is promised for the morning.

  The brothers mention dinner. Sydney guesses lobster, steamers, triple-berry pie. This is the first visit Jeff and Ben have made to the cottage since she arrived in early July. It is, in fact, their first visit since mid-June, work and other commitments having kept them from the summerhouse—a situation that will soon be rectified, Ben promises. When they come next, it will be for a week. Mrs. Edwards’s eyes focus and unfocus. One can see her planning dinners, counting linens.

  Jeff laughs easily, but Sydney notices that he stands with his arms crossed over his chest. She wonders what he thinks about when he is not actively listening. Cost-benefit analyses of regime changes in Sudan? Complex algorithms involving terrorists and the relative price of oil?

  Sydney can easily picture Ben at his job. In his shirtsleeves and tie, he would make a stolid, handsome presence, the dark eyes suggesting gravity, the smile a light touch. Perhaps he makes the same gestures at work as he does at home: lacing the fingers behind his neck, flexing the elbows.

  The nucleus drinks its tea, clinking the ice cubes. The Stewarts and a couple named Morrison are mentioned. There is talk about a sail to Gloucester and back. Sydney has a sense of trying to put together an accurate history of the family with half the relevant sentences in the text blacked out, the accessible sentences referring to a chapter she hasn’t yet read. A woman named Victoria is coming Saturday. There are to be, Sydney gradually comes to understand, a number of people present for the weekend.

  A strange couple approach the house from the beach and point. Perhaps they have walked from the public parking lot at the crescent’s other end. Sydney knows precisely what they are saying. Remember the Vision crash? The one in Ireland?

  Sydney wonders if Mr. and Mrs. Edwards mind the mild celebrity of having bought the house from the culpable pilot’s widow. She wonders if they got it for a song.

  Ben rubs his hands together. “Have you had the grand tour?” he asks.

  Sydney is confused. “Of?”

  “We’ll leave the harbor, swing around the point. I’m told you haven’t been on the boat yet.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  Ben addresses his sister, who is standing close to her father. “Julie, want to come with us?”

  But no one is surprised when the girl says no. It is a well-known fact that she is afraid of the water.

  “Julie’s going to help me with the roses,” Mr. Edwards says.

  A sweatshirt and a fresh towel are produced. Sydney finds her sneakers by the back door. The two brothers and she climb up into Ben’s Land Rover. Sydney sits in front. Jeff asks her questions, easy enough to answer.

  “What were you studying at Brandeis?”

  “The emotional and sexual development of adolescent girls.”

  “Not a moment too soon,” Ben says and chuckles to himself.

  Neither brother, surely briefed, mentions the aviator or the doctor.

  Ben drives along a sandy road to the center of the beach community, too small to be called a village. There’s a lobster pound and a general store. Carrying life preservers, the three make their way down a gravel drive to the end of a wooden pier. Jeff speaks to a young man in shorts and T-shirt who shakes his hand and smiles. Sydney, the brothers, and the young man ride in a small boat through the harbor. They are deposited at a Boston Whaler.

  Once inside the Whaler, Sydney sits on a small bait box. Ben takes the wheel, while Jeff stands near Sydney, one hand on the console railing. There is a low-throated rumble of an engine and an instant breeze. She puts on the sweatshirt, which covers her tank suit but leaves her legs bare. She feels more naked than she did with just the suit on.

  The Whaler fights the incoming tide, and for a time the boat seems to stand motionless in the water. Ben says they’ve timed it exactly wrong. But Sydney likes the sensation of suspension: the motor straining, the water insistent. She thinks of gulls just outside her window. Of the aviator in a deliberate stall.

  Close quarters in the boat produce a kind of intimacy. For moments, Sydney’s face is inches from Jeff’s bare thigh. Were they lovers, she would lean forward and kiss it. It would be expected.

  This is simply an observation Sydney makes and not a desire. But it occurs to her that it is an observation she might not have made a month ago.

  As they cross the harbor, Ben obligingly points out the massive cottages along the shore and tells an anecdote with each. The Whaler rounds the point and runs parallel to the long beach. Jeff indicates the family cottage at its end. Sydney contemplates the drive in the car, the walk to the dock, the ferry out to the boat, the struggle against the tide, the rounding of the point, and the motoring along the beach. She thinks it a long way to go a short distance.

  “Whose girlfriend is coming for the weekend?” she asks as they idle in the gentle swells.

  “Mine,” Jeff says.

  Chapter 2

  That night, they are eight at dinner, Mr. and Mrs. Edwards anchoring a walnut table Mr. Edwards made, the oval surface polished to a high gloss, the beveled lip uneven, as if the router had occasionally got away from him. Sydney makes a point of sitting near Julie, a point that wasn’t as necessary when there were only four or five of them in the dining room. But with the brothers and the guests who have returned from Portsmouth triumphant—not to mention all the paraphernalia and detritus that accompany a lobster dinner, bibs and all—Julie seems, as the guests near their seats, a bit lost and unsure of herself.

  “I did the math,” Julie confides.

  Forget the math, Sydney wants to say. “Good,” she says instead in what she has come to understand is her encouraging teacher voice. “Very good, Julie.”

  “I won’t have to do any homework tonight,” the girl says and then pauses. “Well, I mean, I could. . .”

  “No,” Sydney says. “Not tonight. Tonight is special.”

  “It is?”

  “Your brothers are home.”

  Julie smiles, looking first at Ben and then at Jeff. She beams, but not possessively.

  When Sydney arrived at the house, she intuited immediately that she might be expected (for all that money) to spend more time with Julie than was strictly necessary for tutoring. Sydney doesn’t mind. She and Julie walk the beach together, the girl collecting sea glass and sand dollars, her eyes remarkably sharp, more so than Sydney’s, who often doesn’t spot the piece until Julie has bent to pick it up. Earlier in the day, Julie found a thick amethyst chunk on which Sydney could see two faint circles, and, at the apex of the inner circle, a glass blower’s mark.

  The guests, Wendy and Art, are overdressed for lobster, and already Sydney can see small squiggles of white flesh on Art’s pink oxford cuff.

  Ben attacks his lobster with relish. Jeff breaks the soft-shell claws with his fingers and eats the sweet meat without butter. Mrs. Edwards drenches even the smallest shreds in the yellow liquid. No carbs in butter.

  Neither Wendy nor Art addresses Sydney during dinner, having ascertained when they arrived the day before that she was there for Julie, mu
ch like an upper servant might have been a century earlier. Wendy has on a chocolate-brown Armani sweater wrapped casually around her shoulders, the tied arms dangerously in the way. Sydney knows it’s Armani because the label, flipped up and visible behind her neck, says so.

  Through the open door, the surf hammers the shore, oddly boisterous on such a hot night. The dining room is airless, even with all the windows open. Sydney wants to be out on the beach. She wants to be in the water, swimming.

  Three or four times in her life, Sydney has truly relished a lobster dinner, regarding it as a celebration rather than just a meal. Tonight, however, she eats perfunctorily, breaking the claws, drawing the meat out with a pick. The heat has stolen her appetite.

  Sydney notes, throughout the dinner, that Ben is always present, while Jeff seems elsewhere. Ben is clearly a gourmand; Jeff appears to be indifferent to his meal. Ben has perfect manners vis à vis the guests who are going on at exhaustive length about a lamp made from an antique car horn they got for a steal in Portsmouth. Jeff leans into his father for a private conversation. Sydney hears the words shutters and help you with that.

  “We just loved Portsmouth,” Wendy says. “All those coffeehouses and little boutiques.”

  “Crowded,” Art says.

  “The city turned itself around in the eighties,” Mr. Edwards says. “It used to be a rough place with the shipyard.”

  “We ate on the water,” Wendy says. “Art had the chowder, and I had the fried calamari.”

  “Couldn’t find anywhere to park,” Art says.

  “Then we were walking along that main street there, and I saw the lamp in a window.”

  “You should bring it in and show it to us,” Mr. Edwards says.

  “It’s all wrapped up,” Art says.

  “You can take a ferry from Portsmouth out to the Isles of Shoals,” Ben offers.

  “Maybe we’ll do that tomorrow?” Wendy asks in her husband’s direction.

  “So what are you up to, Jeff?” Art asks as he wipes his mouth with a foot of paper towel.

  Jeff, startled, raises a pale eyebrow. “Teaching,” he says amiably. “In the fall. Research now.”

  “Like what? What courses?”

  “Postcolonial East Africa,” Jeff says. “Genocide in the Twentieth Century.”

  “Nothing about the Middle East? The War on Terror?”

  Art is bald on top but hirsute elsewhere, curly tufts emerging from the open V of his dress shirt. Sydney searches for a connection between the man and Mr. Edwards but can’t find one. She reasons that the true friends are Mrs. Edwards and Wendy, both of whom seem nearly giddy at the prospect of a visit to Emporia, a local flea market, in the morning.

  “I’ve found all my etched glass there,” Mrs. Edwards says, raising her long-stemmed wineglass. “I never pay more than two dollars for one.”

  Sydney raises hers as well and admires the delicate workmanship. She wonders how old the glasses are, to whom they once belonged.

  “He’ll ruin us all,” Mr. Edwards says with feeling. From prior conversations, Sydney knows he is referring to the president of the United States.

  Shortly after her arrival, Sydney learned that Mr. Edwards switched his political allegiance, the conversion taking place during the contested presidential election. Mrs. Edwards appears to invent and groom her political opinions in anticipation of her sons’ visits.

  “He’s set us back a century,” Mr. Edwards adds with surprising vehemence. “Two centuries.”

  That would be, Sydney calculates, 1802. Her command of history is poor. Was the country in bad shape then?

  “You think he can get reelected?” Art asks.

  With his lobster pick, Mr. Edwards stabs the air in the direction of the waxy container in which the already-cooked lobsters arrived from the lobster pound. “I’d vote for that [stab] paper [stab] bag over there if I thought it would get rid of the guy,” he says.

  Displays of anger from Mr. Edwards are rare. Respect is paid in silence. A silence that appears to annoy Mrs. Edwards, who drops her metal lobster cracker into her deep tin lobster plate, making quite a racket.

  “Bread?” Sydney offers, picking up a basket.

  Mrs. Edwards stares. Mrs. Edwards does not eat bread.

  In the distance, there’s a distinct but low rumble.

  “Fireworks!” Julie says.

  “Big storm coming later tonight,” Art informs the gathering.

  “Good,” Mrs. Edwards says. “Clear the air out.”

  As if it smelled, Sydney thinks.

  (For Sydney, the sudden smell of Troy. Sydney is eight or nine. Onions from her grandmother upstairs. Diesel fumes from the delivery trucks. Cigarette smoke woven into the old upholstery. Her father smokes Marlboros, her mother Virginia Slims. Sometimes, coming home from school, Sydney finds lit cigarettes in ashtrays in the bathroom, near the kitchen sink, and in her parents’ bedroom, where her mother sits at her sewing machine making purses out of silk and cotton, the colors too bright, never seen in nature. Hot pink and shiny aqua, slicker-yellow, neon orange. Her mother reaching for the cigarette as she says hello to Sydney, her upper lip puckering into lines that will soon become permanent. “What do you think?” her mother asks, holding aloft a design of a purple convertible, the women in it with royal blue head scarves and red arms flying. This is meant to suggest, Sydney guesses, freedom.

  Outside the front windows, color enough. None of it in nature, either. The fat pink of the Troy Pork sign. Magenta curtains on a brass rod in an apartment across the street. Yellowed Venetian blinds at the office of J. F. Riley, DDS. Kodak, Molson, Kent in the window of the candy store on the corner. The apartment a railroad flat in a row house, theirs identical to all the others on the street, in the city for that matter. Two windows in front, two in back looking out to the covered deck. The only sun through the front two, a couple hours in late morning. If you missed it, you were out of luck.

  “They look happy, don’t you think?” her mother, who never looks happy, asks. The purses are the life that is leaking out of her.

  “Wild,” Sydney says.)

  Sydney learns that Art is in the paper business—sheets of paper, rolls of it—and that Wendy, retired now, was once a magazine editor in New York (or an assistant editor, or possibly even an assistant to an assistant—this isn’t quite clear). One child, a daughter, is completing graduate work at the University of Vermont, while a son has recently graduated from Williams. Wendy mentions Williams twice more in passing the way others use Harvard as currency. Sons are in ascendancy tonight, Sydney thinks, and immediately has sympathy for the girl at UVM, who, for all Sydney knows, might be her father’s favorite.

  A petal falls from a bouquet picked earlier in the day by Julie and her father. Sydney touches it and rubs the velvet between her index finger and her thumb. A perfume is released. When she looks up, both Ben and Jeff are watching her.

  “What are these called?” she asks Mr. Edwards.

  “Cabbage,” he says. “Those are Damask. Pride of nineteenth-century gardeners. They’re drought resistant, which makes them good for the shore.”

  “This one’s my favorite,” Julie says, fingering a heavy beige blossom.

  Sydney waits, hoping for more from the girl, who usually offers only a sentence or two at the table. But Julie immediately bends to her meal.

  “What happened to the woman, the widow?” Sydney asks after a long silence, Sydney having an affinity for both widows and pilots, culpable or not.

  Beside her, she can feel Mrs. Edwards stiffen. Perhaps the guests have not been told they are sleeping in the house of a mildly notorious celebrity.

  “She and her daughter moved in with her mother here in town,” Jeff answers. “Then I think the widow went to live in London.”

  Jeff gives these facts in a polite but businesslike way, as though to signal the end of the conversation. The sons, Sydney can see, defer when necessary to their mother’s emotional weather. Perhaps they have heard rumbles i
n the distance and fear a storm.

  Julie’s face is flushed pink with heat and happiness, the girl seemingly not at all attuned to her mother’s mood. Her thick blond hair has been tied into a careless knot, unfortunately emphasizing her mother’s sprayed banana clip. The girl’s lashes are blond as well, long and beautifully shaped. Julie appears not to worry about her weight, and, as a result, there is an appealing voluptuousness about the girl. The brothers must be watchful, Sydney thinks. Someone needs to be watchful.

  “Victoria will be here in the morning,” Mrs. Edwards announces, and it is clear that the guests have been briefed, for both glance over at Jeff, who is sipping a Rolling Rock.

  “Lovely girl,” Mr. Edwards says, his political vitriol a dozen comments back and seemingly forgotten.

  Ben looks pointedly at Jeff. “She certainly is,” he says.

  Apart from a possible blush, Jeff gives no indication that he’s heard a word. The blush might mean anything. Unhappiness at being singled out? A mention of the very thing dearest to his heart? A history of prior teasing?

  “I’m looking for a new condo,” Ben says, abruptly changing the subject.

  “You’re the man to go to,” Jeff says.

  “I’m tired of the South End. Like to give the waterfront a try.”

  “They say never live on the water year-round,” Mr. Edwards says. “Depressing as hell.”

  “Some terrific luxury condos going up,” Ben says.

  Mr. Edwards plants an elbow on the table and points his hand toward Ben. “It will be your generation who will suffer,” the older man says, his anger apparently not having been forgotten after all. “You’ll be decades extricating yourself from this mess. Monstrous debt. Terrorists. Abysmal foreign policy.”