Dreamthorp Page 5

  "Okay, Mom, I'll be off in a minute."

  "All right, well, I'm sorry." There was a click.

  "Karen?"

  "I'm still here."

  "Sorry about that."

  "Aren't we going out to dinner?"

  "Yes, sure."

  "Oh, because you said that, I thought . . ."

  "It's easier to explain to her later that I'm going out."

  "Oh, okay. Well, what about afterwards? Can I stay with you?"

  "Ah, Jesus, I don't know . . ."

  "You don't know?"

  "I mean, sure. But not here . . . I don't think . . ."

  "Josh never minds."

  "Yeah, well, Josh isn't my parents."

  "God, Tom, you're a grown man, and I'm a grown woman, I'd think that we could—"

  "It doesn't matter that there's nothing wrong with it, Karen, it's just that it wouldn't be comfortable, believe me. What about a motel?"

  "A motel?" The springtime had gone out of her voice. "Sure. It might be fun. Surreptitious meetings, lovers' trysts, the whole works."

  "Oh, I guess."

  "Okay, fine. I'll pick you up at two?"

  That Tom would not be present for the pork dinner was a minor shock compared to his news that he would not be home at all that night. "Well, where are you going to go?" his mother asked him.

  "A motel, probably."

  "A motel? With this girl?"

  "She's not a girl, she's a woman, and I'm taking her to a motel because I don't want to offend your sensibilities."

  "You bring her here when Josh is here?"

  "I have. A few times."

  "Do you think that's a good example to set?"

  Tom sighed. "Mother, I'm sorry, but I cannot become a monk."

  "Nobody's asking you to, but a little discretion . . ."

  "Look, I bring her here so I don't have to leave Josh alone, all right?"

  "Well, are you going to marry this girl?"

  "We haven't discussed it, and I'm sorry, but I don't want to discuss it with you."

  All this time, Tom's father had been sitting on the sofa, his eyes on the book in his lap. Now he looked up. "If we're in your way, we can always leave."

  "Jesus Christ, you don't have to leave, I'm not asking you to leave, I'm doing this because I want to, all right? Josh will be fine, he understands, so please don't make such a goddam big deal over it!" Tom turned his back on them both and walked through the entry and up the stairs to find Josh.

  Tom was lying to his parents. Josh made no pretense of understanding, none at all. He did not like Karen, and made no attempt to hide it, even after Tom had told him that he should stop acting so rude when she was around. He had tried to explain things to his son, but the boy had not even wanted to listen. Though he had never come right out and accused Tom of betraying his mother's memory, it was apparent to Tom that was what he thought.

  Still, Tom wanted to bring the two of them closer together, so he knocked on the door of the boy's room at the head of the stairs, only to hear him call, "Over here," from the den. Josh looked up from his comic book when Tom entered the room, then began reading again.

  "How ya doing?"

  "Okay," Josh said.

  "I, uh, was wondering . . . Karen and I are going over to the beach this afternoon for a swim. You want to come along?"

  "Uh-uh."

  "You'd be welcome. Get some sun, a little exercise."

  "I got things to do."

  Bullshit, Tom thought, but didn't say it. "Yeah, well, if you change your mind we ought to be there around 2:30."

  "Okay," Josh said.

  "Also, tonight I won't be coming home. Karen and I are going to dinner."

  The boy looked up at Tom. He didn't say a word, he didn't sneer or frown or grimace. But there was something in the eyes that made Tom want to slap his face at the same time he wanted to hold the boy. Still, after the confrontation with his parents, he didn't think he could handle another one. He would lose his temper and say something he'd be sorry for later. So he just nodded, gave a weak smile, and went back downstairs.

  In summer I spend a good deal of time floating about the lake.

  —Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp

  No one said much of anything over lunch, and Tom was relieved to get out of the house and pick up Karen. She was wearing a white cotton blazer over a yellow two-piece swimsuit, and looked terrific. Her annoyance had cooled, and she gave him a long kiss after she threw her overnight bag into the backseat of his Subaru.

  It was a warm day with enough of a breeze to dry the sweat that coated them as they lay on their blanket at the beach. The lake at Dreamthorp, though not large enough for powerboats, was spacious enough to support a white sand beach with diving boards and floats, as well as canoes and rowboats. Tom and Karen lay side by side, their flanks touching. From under his sunglasses, Tom admired the soft, fine hairs covering Karen's thighs. They glowed gold in the blinding light, and he felt an urge to move his head down and rest it there, to feel her smooth skin against his rough cheek.

  But instead he reached over and put his hand on her shoulder, slick with tanning oil. He kidded her about the oil she used, which offered no sunscreen whatever, while he had to use fifteen or suffer one hell of a burn. Youth, he thought. She was the rich shade of white oak and as soft as velvet, and by the time her skin turned to leather in her fifties, he'd probably be dead.

  The thought depressed him, and he turned to her. "Want to go in the water? I'm starting to cook."

  "You go ahead. I'm feeling lazy. Maybe a little later."

  Tom rubbed her shoulder for a moment, then stood up and stretched, looking down at his body. It wasn't bad for thirty-six, he decided. A trace of paunch, but he exercised every day to keep it at bay, and double time in the summer, when he always drank more beer than he should. He had a blocky build to start with—Karen called him a furry bear in bed—and the older he got, the harder it seemed to stay trim. The hundred sit-ups, morning and night, took forever now.

  As he walked down to the water, he waved and smiled at his neighbors, many of whom knew him from when he had come to Dreamthorp as a boy to spend a week every summer with his grandparents. He'd done that right up until he'd been drafted the year he was graduated from Penn State. That summer he was in basic training, and the next he was living through the fall of Saigon. By the summer after that, his grandparents were both dead, and their cottage sold.

  Still, he went back to Dreamthorp the first summer after he was discharged. He had stayed in a cheap hotel in Lebanon and walked through Dreamthorp's groves, climbed its hills, and sat on its beach for a week, until he felt that the sun and the trees and the peace had drained the Army out of him and he could see Susan again. Now, as the cold water bit at his ankles, he thought back on that week, did some quick calculations, and realized that Karen had been only seven years old at the time.

  He did a lot of similar calculations—she had been two when he'd lost his virginity, seven when he married Susan, eight when they'd had Josh. The numbers fascinated and appalled him. It was true that he needed someone. Even though he was an artist and liked to work alone, he had never been the type to live alone. He liked women and could not conceive of a life without one as a partner, as a friend, as a lover.

  But he also liked a comfortable life, and that was something that his relationship with Karen had not brought him. There were times when she was too intense for him, too full of life. He knew that there was no further place to which their relationship could go, but still he clung to it like a lifeline, which, in a way, it was.

  You're scared of death, he thought. Thirty-six fucking years old and scared of death. It seemed ludicrous, and he knew that it was because of Susan. Terrified of random death, he had turned to youth. He knew it, he could admit it easily enough. But still, he was powerless to stop himself, to tell her what he knew but what she had not yet learned.

  He dove into the cool water savagely to drive away the thoughts, and stayed under fo
r as long as he could, kicking hard toward the ropes buoyed by red markers that indicated the limits of the swimming area. He broke water and gasped for air, and was surprised to hear an echoing gasp beside him.

  When he blinked his eyes free of water, he saw Laura Stark bobbing beside him, her ash blonde hair darkened by water. She lived on the other side of Charlie Lewis, in the small cottage that had once been the carriage house for Charlie's place.

  "My god, you startled me," she said, breathless from her own swimming. "You just came up like the Creature from the Black Lagoon or something."

  He panted for a moment before he spoke. "Sorry . . . just swam underwater . . . didn't mean to scare you."

  She got a funny look on her face, Tom thought, then smiled again. "You didn't scare me, not really. How's the carving going? You're the carver, right?"

  He smiled too, and nodded. "It's going fine." She had been in the cottage, Tom recalled, for only a few months. Charlie had introduced them last March when they'd all three been in the general store, and they had chatted a bit. He thought he remembered that she worked in advertising in Lancaster. "How's the advertising business?" he ventured.

  "A thrill a minute."

  "What company are you with again?"

  "Brown Advertising. Not with it, really. Am it. With another woman."

  "She's Brown?"

  "No, we bought it from Brown. Kept the name along with the clients." Tom nodded, smiled, was unsure of what to say next. As if aware of his discomfort, she went on. "Well, maybe I'll see you at one of the concerts, huh?"

  "Yeah, fine."

  She gave a little wave and kicked herself away from him, stretching her arms in an impressive backstroke. A pretty girl, he thought, then corrected himself—a pretty woman.

  She had to be thirty, although she looked younger. After all, kids don't own advertising agencies, even small ones.

  He floated on his back for a while, thinking that Laura Stark was the kind of woman he should have become involved with, a career woman like Susan had been, someone older, a woman who apparently liked Dreamthorp as much as he did. He'd noticed her working on her cottage, painting, doing carpentry, even trimming the branches of her trees at the top of a ladder high enough to give him pause. She was a big woman, even a bit mannish, perhaps, but he liked her independence. No, he had the feeling that Laura Stark wasn't the traditional type. She wouldn't be easily annoyed like Karen, or easily impressed, or easily scared. . . .

  And then he remembered the look on her face when he had unexpectedly surfaced next to her, and thought in retrospect that the look of shock in her eyes was greater than one might expect as a result of being gently startled on a warm and sunny day.

  He shook the thought away, deciding that he was reading too much into it. That he had been drawn to her he knew, and perhaps he had projected the fear there to give her more of a feminine vulnerability and so make her more attractive to him. No, he decided at last, this was a woman who would not scare easily. He was sure of it.

  If you represent a woman bearing wrongs with a continuous unmurmuring meekness, presenting to blows, come from what quarter they may, nothing but a bent neck, and eyelids humbly drooped, you are in nine cases out of ten painting elaborately the portrait of a fool . . .

  —Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp

  Laura Stark did not have nightmares about the incident. Ever since she had been a child she had slept heavily and well. If she dreamed, she never remembered her dreams in the morning. When other people spoke of dreams, and even nightmares, Laura felt jealous, as if they had experienced something ineffably wonderful.

  But that feeling died after the incident with Gilbert Rodman. Laura's waking moments were so filled with fearful memory that she no longer coveted dreams. What had seemed a withheld blessing now seemed a narrowly escaped curse, and she thanked God daily that her sleep was a quiet escape from her churning, conscious mind.

  Now she found herself in a part of the lake far away from anyone else, and she slowed her strokes, gliding through the cool water, feeling the ripples run through her hair like . . .

  . . . blood.

  She twisted, dove, surfaced, kicked toward the shore, pulling herself with powerful strokes, not stopping until her cupped hands scooped sand from the lake's bottom. She stood then and walked to the huge beach towel, where she flopped down and gazed at the diamond-like surface of the lake. She thought about it. She didn't want to, but she couldn't help herself. She thought about it just as she had thought about it every day since it had happened, every day for nine long months.

  It had started off so beautifully. All her life. Laura had wanted to go out west and camp, but she had never had the time. Her first few years after college had been filled with being a wife to Hank and building her advertising career, twin goals which, she quickly found out, were incompatible. Hank had wanted a hausfrau, and it took Laura four years to accept that a hausfrau was not what she wanted to be. Unfortunately, Hank never accepted it, and the divorce was less than amicable. At least there were no children, and their property consisted of little more than the two cars and their personal belongings.

  Laura, finally free to devote her entire time to her career, plunged into it with all her energies. By the time she was thirty, she was earning fifty-five thousand dollars a year as manager of Kleenline Industries' consumer products division, and found the Peter Principle to be in full force. The creative side was now forbidden to her, except for corrective input on promotions and campaigns that were already completed. Out of boredom she began taking on freelance jobs for some of the smaller advertising agencies in Lancaster and Harrisburg. She met Trudy Doyle at the Brown Agency in Lancaster, where Trudy was assistant to the president, Bob Brown, a sixtyish man with high blood pressure and lethal dandruff, who had founded the agency, one of Lancaster's first, back in 1946.

  When Brown died, his widow wanted to sell the agency, with its large assortment of well-established and conservative clients, to Trudy, who unfortunately did not have the money to buy it. But by that time, she and Laura were good friends, and Laura's antipathy toward Kleenline had reached a state as terminal as Brown's stroke. The best part was that Laura had the money. Her career was her life, and the only things she had spent her income on were clothes and memberships in her various athletic and sporting clubs. She lived inexpensively in the apartment she had moved into following her divorce, drove a '78 Chevy Nova, and packed her own lunch so that she could work at her desk.

  Laura and Trudy bought the agency as partners in 1985, and it became even more successful than it had under Brown. They lost a few clients too tradition-bound to listen to women but replaced them with better and more progressive ones. Trudy handled the business end, and Laura the creative; and by 1987 they were doing well over a quarter million a year.

  Laura never would have taken the vacation if Trudy hadn't insisted. "Do it, Laura," she said. "You're caught up, and the freelancers have all worked for us before—Tim Cleveland is doing most of it, and you never touch his stuff. When's the last time you had a week off?"

  Laura couldn't remember, and that fact as much as anything made her decide to take Trudy's advice. She had dumped her dying Nova for a Toyota Cressida that she had put barely five thousand miles on in a year, and which was ripe for a long trip. She knew precisely the route she would take, and she knew who she wanted to go with her.

  Kitty Soames was young and silly and wealthy, and Laura liked her very much. Her father was on the board of the country club to which Laura belonged, and they had met when both Laura's partner and the final member of Kitty's foursome had failed to show up by their respective tee-off times. After the round, which Laura had won by three strokes, the other two women excused themselves, leaving Laura and Kitty alone in the clubhouse bar, where they drank until it was dinnertime, ate together, and went back to Laura's to continue their tipsy conversation.

  That evening was the beginning of a strong friendship, one that Laura suspected, and grew to fear, might o
ne day turn into something deeper. They played tennis and golf together nearly every weekend, went to movies, and frequently had dinner. The one thing that Laura did not like about Kitty was her self-proclaimed promiscuity.

  Although only twenty-three, Kitty claimed to have made love to more men than she could count, although Laura never saw any evidence of it, aside from the flirting that she did when men tried to make a move on them in the bars they frequented. Still, she never left with any of them and never broke a date with Laura. Laura never met any of the men about whom Kitty spoke, and eventually grew to believe that the assignations, the long nights of fucking so explicitly described to her, existed only in Kitty's mind. It was at the same time that she began to wonder if Kitty might be a lesbian, a notion that was arrived at logically, since she had the same worrisome suspicion about herself.

  Laura had always been tall and big boned, towering over the other girls in elementary and high school. An only child, her father, a senior vice president for a large corporation in Harrisburg, had spoiled her terribly, and she had loved him for it. Widowed early, he took her nearly everywhere, and where she loved to go most was the rod and gun club of which he was president. She was a proficient archer at the age of ten, and learned to shoot shotgun, rifle, and pistol by the time she was twelve. He also took her on fishing trips, and many of the summer weeks of her teenage years were spent happily in the trout streams of Dauphin County.

  All of the boys her age, and most of the girls, thought she was strange, but she was still popular; and although she was seldom asked out on dates, and then mostly as a matter of convenience, she was happy in school.

  She met Hank in college. Hank was an outdoor type and was delighted that he was able to find an attractive girl who would be a buddy as well as a lover. She lost her virginity to him, and found that making love with Hank was pleasant but not the earthshaking experience that movies and cheap fictions promised it to be. They were married the summer after graduation, the same summer her father died, and Hank quickly learned that a hunting and fishing buddy was not what he had really wanted as a marriage partner after all, and especially not a hunting buddy who had a career of her own.