It was pleasant to sit outside, near naked, the sun and air on your skin reminding you that you’re just another animal. He could have sat there nude. There were no other houses, there were no signs of human life, save an honor-system farm stand near a half mile back. There had been a time they’d been so naked together, Archie a wisp of bone and giggles sharing the tub with his parents, but you grew out of that unless you were a hippie.
He couldn’t hear the children carrying on in the pool. The house between him and them was not so large, but the trees absorbed their noise as cotton might blood. Clay felt safe, cossetted, embraced, the rampart of hedge keeping the world at bay. As though he could see it, he pictured Amanda, adrift on an inflatable lounge, pretending dignity (hard to do: even the duck lacks that somehow, the water’s undulations always ridiculous) and reading Elle. Clay unknotted the towel and lay back. The grass was itchy under his back. He stared at the sky. Without really thinking about it—but also kind of thinking about it—his right hand wandered down the front of his J.Crew suit, fumbled with his penis, gone cold and shy from the water. Vacations made you horny.
Clay felt light, unfettered, though he was not fettered by much. He was supposed to be reviewing a book for the New York Times Book Review and had brought his laptop. He only needed nine hundred words. In a couple of hours he’d put the family to bed, fill a tumbler with ice and vodka, sit shirtless on the deck, laptop illuminating the night, smoke cigarettes, and the thoughts would come and the nine hundred words would follow. Clay was diligent but also (he knew it) a little lazy. He wanted to be asked to write for the New York Times Book Review but didn’t want to actually write anything.
Clay had tenure, and Amanda had the title of director, but they did not have level floors and central air-conditioning. The key to success was having parents who had succeeded. Still, they could pantomime ownership for a week. His penis jerked itself toward the sun, a yoga salutation, bouncing, then stiff at the house’s allure. Marble countertops and a Miele washer and Clay had a full erection, his dick hovering over his belly like the searching needle in a compass.
Clay ground out his cigarette guiltily. He was never without breath mints or chewing gum. He tied the towel around his waist and went into the house. The garbage slid out on casters from beneath the countertops. Clay ran the butt under the faucet (imagine if he burned the house down?) then buried it in the refuse. There was lemon soap in a glass dispenser by the sink. From the window he could see his family. Rose was lost in a game of her own. Archie was doing pull-ups on the diving board, hoisting his skinny body heavenward, his bony shoulders the pink of undercooked meat.
Sometimes, looking at his family, he was flooded with this desire to do for them. I’ll build you a house or knit you a sweater, whatever is required. Pursued by wolves? I’ll make a bridge of my body so you can cross that ravine. They were all that mattered to him, but of course they didn’t really understand that, because such was the parental contract. Clay found a baseball game on the radio, though he did not care about baseball. He thought the description comforting, the play-by-play like being read a bedtime story. Clay dumped two packages of the raw meat into a large bowl—Archie would eat three hamburgers—and diced a white onion, mixed that in, pinched in salt and ground in pepper, added Worcestershire sauce like daubing perfume onto a wrist. He molded the burgers and lined them up on a plate. Clay sliced cheddar cheese, halved the buns. The towel was slipping from his waist, so he washed the raw meat from his hands and tied it more tightly. He filled a glass bowl with potato chips and ferried the food outside. Every step felt familiar, like he’d been throwing together summertime meals in that kitchen all his life.
“Dinner in a bit,” he called. No one acknowledged this. Clay switched on the propane, used the long lighter to make the flame catch. Half naked, he tended the raw meat, thinking he must resemble a caveman, some long-forgotten ancestor. Who was to say that one hadn’t stood once on that very spot? Millennia earlier or even just centuries, some shirtless Iroquois in hide loincloth, stoking a fire that the flesh of his flesh might dine on flesh. The thought made him smile.
5
THEY ATE ON THE DECK, IN DISHABILLE, AN ASSEMBLAGE OF towels in garish colors and ketchup-stained paper napkins. Hamburgers the size of hockey pucks inside airy bread. Rose was particularly susceptible to the tart charms of vinegar potato chips. Crumbs and grease on her chin. Amanda loved that Rose could still reach girlishness. Her mind was one thing, her body another: it was the hormones in the milk or the food chain or the water supply or the air or who knew.
It was so hot that the parents didn’t even bid the children shower, let them sprawl on the gingham-upholstered sofa in their fleshy bodies, Archie lank and Rose lush: visible ribs and a constellation of moles, dimpled elbows and a downy chin. Rose wanted to watch a cartoon, and Archie was secretly comforted by animation—wistful for his own youth! His skin prickled in the air-conditioned chill, the unfamiliar sofa was soft, and his mind and mouth felt thick and slow from the day’s heat or exertion. He was too tired to get up for another hamburger, gone cold, doused in ketchup, which he’d eat standing up in the kitchen, the tile cold underfoot. In a minute, he thought, but his body was pleading with hunger from those hours in the pool or maybe just the hours cooped up in the car, his body always felt this way.
Amanda went to shower. The thing was fixed in the ceiling, the water falling onto you as rain might. She set it as hot as possible to banish the residue of the SPF lotion. That stuff always felt vaguely poisonous, an ounce of prevention, etc. She wore her hair neither short nor long, without bangs, which made her look youthful in a way that was not good in an office environment. Two different kinds of vanity at odds—a desire to look capable rather than girlish. Amanda knew that she looked like the sort of woman she was. You could read it on her from a great distance. Her poise and posture, her clothes and grooming, all said who she was.
Her body still contained the secondhand warmth of the sun. The pool water had barely been a respite, the tepidity of bathwater. Amanda’s limbs felt thick and superb. She wanted to lie down and roll away into sleep. Her fingers strayed to the parts of herself where they felt best, in search not of some internal pleasure but something more cerebral: the confirmation that she, her shoulders, her nipples, her elbows, all of it, existed. What a marvel, to have a body, a thing that contained you. Vacation was for being returned to your body.
Amanda wrapped her hair into a white towel like a woman in a certain kind of film. She spread lotion across her skin, pulled on the loose cotton pants she favored in bed, summertime, and an old T-shirt with a logo that no longer meant anything to her. It was impossible to keep track of the provenance of all their earthly possessions. The shirt’s cotton so worn that it shone. She felt alive and if not sexy, then sexual; the promise mattered more than the transaction. She still loved him, nothing like that, and he knew her body—it had been eighteen years, of course he knew it—but she was human, wouldn’t have minded novelty.
She peeked out of the door to the living room. Her children looked dazed, fatted, odalisques on the couch. Her husband was bent over his phone.
“Bed in twenty minutes.” Amanda gave Clay a suggestive look, then closed the door behind her. She stepped out of her pants and into the cool percale of the bed. She did not draw the curtains—let them watch, the deer, the owls, the stupid flightless turkeys—admire Clay’s still impressive latissimus dorsi (he rowed at the New York Sports Club twice weekly), which she loved to sink her fingers into, catch the pleasant stink of his hairy armpits, applaud the practiced flick of his tongue against her.