My Summer With George by Marilyn French
I looked at him. His face was impassive.
“The park looks really neat at night,” he said as we came within sight of it. “I’d really like to take a walk through it at night.”
“It’s not safe,” I said.
“That’s what I hear. But it sure looks neat. You want to try it sometime?”
“Not without a Doberman pinscher,” I said laughing. But it was a thin laugh, dredged up. I don’t know if he noticed. Or cared.
We had reached my building. “Boy, Hermione, you know what I’d really like? There’s nothing I’d like better than to go up to your place and sit in that great living room and look down at the park. That would really be nifty. I’d really like that.”
“Of course you’re welcome,” I said blankly.
“Oh, I know, but I can’t. Too busy; gotta go—gotta read that report tonight, a thousand pages of bureaucratese. We’re having an editorial meeting on it tomorrow, nine a.m. sharp!”
“Right. Thanks for dinner,” I said, turning to him and trying to smile. “Good night.” I walked toward my building.
“Hey, Hermione!” he cried as I entered the front door.
I turned.
“I’ll call ya!”
II
I’LL CALL YOU, HE said.
But Saturday went by, and Sunday, in silence and heat. It was not yet July, but ninety-degree days and terrible humidity were already upon us. Normally, at this time of year I am safely in my cool Sag Harbor house, but here I was, stuck in sticky New York, and by my own will! Sweat dripped down my forehead and trickled into my eyes, burning them; my clothes were damp a half hour after I put them on. If I wanted to move without my skin dripping onto the floor at each step, or write without my arms sticking to the desk, or read a newspaper without the pages adhering to my hands, I had to run the noisy, smelly air conditioner. To add to my discomfort, since all my friends were out of town, no one called, and I felt lonely and abandoned.
Monday came and went, with only a few business calls. Lou and I had a chat about her vacation, to begin the first of July. She had arranged for her friend Lisa to come in for an hour a day to go through the mail and phone me to report on it. Lou simply assumed I would be in Sag Harbor, as in previous summers.
By Tuesday, I decided to go. But I couldn’t move. Every time I thought about leaving the city, my limbs ached; I was an animal caught in a trap I could escape from only by tearing off my leg or arm. Like an athlete at the end of an endurance test, I was dulled, hopeless, foggy-headed, yet I couldn’t give up and stop, couldn’t sit down on a bench, had to keep moving straight toward the finish line. My future, my very life, was at stake.
I forced myself to act. I waited until well after lunch hour and then called Newsday, the editorial department, and asked for George Johnson. He was not at his desk, and I got his voice mail. I left a light message in a light voice; I said I was prostrate in this heat and asked how he was holding up. I said I just wanted to let him know that I was thinking of him and that I was planning to go out to Long Island for the summer…
I didn’t say what day I would go. I didn’t mention the Sag Harbor number. I kept anger, sorrow, and despair out of my voice. I made it young, calm, sweet. I made it so he could hear a smile in it. I knew he was at the office; he went in every day. He must have been at a meeting, or chatting with someone across the room. He was certain to receive my message sometime that day.
But he didn’t call.
Wednesday morning, I left for the country, my thigh bleeding and raw where my leg had been attached.
I drove out in a blur and settled in the same way. It was good to be cooler, to be able to throw myself into the water whenever I wanted to, but I had to tell myself that. I didn’t feel much; I was, almost entirely, numb. I had left in defeat, having lost the fight for my future happiness. I had lost at love before, several times; the numbness, the shuddering ache, were familiar. But I could not recall a time before when I had believed that the happiness of the rest of my life, of whatever life remained to me, was at stake.
Obsessively, I went over everything I had done or said in our various encounters, finding fault with myself at every point. I should have been less assertive; I should have played harder to get; I shouldn’t have asked him about his parents; I should have kept the conversation light; I absolutely should not have kissed him.
I knew it was finished, yet wisps of hope still sometimes blew past my face, softening its strained lines. Liz Margolis came on Thursday, as usual, and threw herself upon me.
“Oh, Hermione! I’m so sorry I took off that way two weeks ago; I’m so awful, I just have no control. And then next time I came, you were gone. I didn’t know you were going away! I thought you were here for the summer, like other years. Whenever you’ve gone abroad, you told me beforehand!
“It was just such a shock, but how infantile of me, how mean! I mean, to assume that people, that a woman, that you couldn’t still fall in love at your age. You look great, you know, you don’t look old…but”—she paused, holding me by the shoulders and pushing me a little distance away from her—“you don’t look good.” She frowned. She let her sculptor’s eye play over my face. “It fell apart, huh?”
“Yes,” I said. My face felt tight. She hugged me, held me against her as if I were a small child, patting my back and whispering comforting nothings, like “There, there, poor baby,” which did not comfort me, but did make me want to laugh. This impulse I suppressed; but it enabled me to tell her in complete honesty later that she’d cheered me up.
Over coffee, she demanded the details. But one really charming quality of the narcissistic younger generation is their distractibility; you can easily deflect any unwanted attention they may direct at you simply by asking them about themselves.
Once Liz was gone, however, I sank back into my stuporous fog. I felt as if my head were encased in plastic, or a bag of flour, or a cloud, while the rest of my body went through normal motions. I swam, marketed, cooked, made telephone calls, and read, all the while using only a pinch of my brain. The novel was finished, but I did not call Molly to tell her. I just let it sit there in the computer, didn’t even print it out. I didn’t call friends, and I put off those who called me. I didn’t feel up to speaking to people. My one sharp perception was that I was driving badly. I worried about having an automobile accident, and the next week, I did hit a car stopped ahead of me, banging my front bumper. In fact, I did it twice. The first time, the woman asked only how I was, assuring me I hadn’t done any damage to her car (still, it cost me over a thousand dollars to fix my headlight—Porsches are expensive to repair). The second time, the driver claimed I had done over seven hundred dollars’ damage to his truck. Although I was only going ten miles an hour, and only scratched my bumper, there was a dent in his bumper. That accident raised my insurance rate.
Ah, well.
Actually, George had called that week. Tuesday morning, Lisa phoned to say that sometime Monday, someone had left a message on the New York machine. The caller had not left his name but said he was sorry not to have gotten back to me sooner. A young reporter at the newspaper had been mugged and left with a fractured skull, and he was spending all his spare time at the hospital. He would call me.
Did that make any sense to me? she wanted to know.
“Yes,” I admitted, jealousy crawling up my spine. I craved a fractured skull, anything that would make him turn that attention to me.
The days stumbled by. I hardly noticed. I swam a great deal, and I read or reread all the nineteenth-century novels the local library possessed—Trollope, Galsworthy, Austen, Gissing, Eliot, Burney, the Brontës. Just as I could not read anything serious when I was sunk in the misery of my first pregnancy and marriage, I could not read anything now that suggested modern life.
But as I always used to tell my children, nothing good happens without dragging along some attendant misery, and no misery occurs without its attendant good fortune. A version of the cloud-silver lining ma
It would be complicated, I thought. But I wanted to be engaged with technical details of plot, intricate conspiracies rather than intense emotions. Also, I could set it in wonderful cities and give myself a nice long trip to research it. I would start it in London, move to Paris, then to Constantinople, and end perhaps in Singapore, a tyrannical state from which the heroine and her lover escape in terror…
Yes. I began to make plans for the trip.
The second idea came to me in the middle of the night. Because of the heat, I was sleeping on the porch regularly. My fantasies had infiltrated my unconscious now, and I would frequently wake up in the darkness from a dream, my body still tingling with a lover’s touch, his murmurs of affection hovering in my ears, my entire front alive with crying desire. One night, at such a moment, it occurred to me: what if I wrote a novel about a love affair, filled it with sex, put one or two erotic scenes in every chapter? The heroine and her lover are drunk with desire. They make love near the ocean, under palms and hibiscus; on a sleeping porch utterly surrounded by trees and shrubs, whose leaves brush against the screens in the wind; in a hotel bedroom where the sheets are perpetually damp despite the whirring ceiling fan. Bamboo blinds hang over the glass doors, which open on a view of a pale sky. The lovers, their bodies always wet, call room service and order more champagne…I would set it in some sleepy, flower-and-frond-bedecked, humid, tropical place, where the water is aqua and the sky a deeper blue. Samoa or Fiji or one of the Caribbean islands. I could spend the winter there, researching it, writing it. Take my laptop.
What would make it unusual is that at the very end, the reader discovers that the entire affair has taken place only in the heroine’s imagination, that nothing actually happened with the man, that he rejected her early on, and that throughout the virtual time of the novel, she is wandering listlessly around, helpless with desire, dreaming it all up…Would love be less real that way? Less intense? Would the sex not still be ecstatic?
Of course, I would have to write this under another name; I could not taint my reputation with a novel like that. I would lose my audience, who did not like their sex explicit. I might even have to go to a different publisher. But it would be fun.
One Wednesday night, the phone rang. I was shocked to hear George’s voice on the other end.
“So what are you doing out there?” he wanted to know.
“I always spend summers here,” I said. “It’s beautiful and cool. I swim every day. You ought to come out and visit.” I heard myself say.
“God, I’ve been too busy. This poor kid that got mugged, it was touch and go for her for a while there. I spent a lot of time in the hospital, all my spare time…”
I wondered at his offering such devotion to a complete stranger—a young reporter, didn’t he say? Maybe she wasn’t a stranger at all. He went on about her a bit: it seemed she was making a full recovery. “Yeah, well, she’s young, you know,” he said, as if he did expect me to know.
“Oh,” I said finally. “Well, that’s good. So what happened? I haven’t heard from you in a long time.” I hated myself, hated hearing the words come out of my mouth, hoped there wasn’t a whine in my voice.
“Well, you know, you really blindsided me!” He laughed.
“I what?”
“Blindsided me. Came at me from a direction I wasn’t expecting. You know, I’m not very strong. I can’t fight. But one thing I can do—I can run and I can hide!” He was laughing. “I sure can run, and I can hide!”
Hide from me?
From me.
My heart was beating so hard in my ears that I was momentarily deaf, and his words passed me by. Only later did I realize that he’d said he was returning to Louisville in August. And not until the next day did I realize that Thursday—today—was the first of August. He’d decided not to take the job at Newsday, he said. He’d found New York fun. He’d learned a lot. But he was going back home.
“I’ll call ya,” he said, and hung up.
August arrived. The green world began to shrivel and dry up. The brilliant pinks and purples and whites of the flowers in my garden turned yellow and brown. The geese began to mass in the fields and flew, evenings, in formation in the sky above my house. At night, they gabbed and quarreled in the fields. So short, summer. August, summer still, foreshadows autumn: it always saddens me.
I lied to everyone who called, saying I was holed up to finish a novel. I could not bear the thought of seeing people, and preferred not to talk to them, either. I swam, read, and perused travel books, making plans for an extended journey to the cities that would figure in the novel I privately called Odi et Amo. Of course, that would not be its real title: no one would get it, including, probably, my publisher. No one reads Catullus anymore. But I preferred to think about it from the perspective of its male protagonists rather than from that of the heroine. I knew only too keenly how she felt—like a bug on a pin, legs still twitching. But I didn’t understand them, the men who hate and love, hate and love so strongly. To think I had once prided myself on understanding ambivalence! I was a naïf, I! I should reread Catullus before I began to outline the book. I felt lucky to have a new novel to think about, to have anything to think about. I was lucky to have a trip to plan, and I spoke every few days to my travel agent, revising my itinerary.
But of course, I still had to eat, which meant I still had to market, and one day at the butcher’s, I ran into Nina Brumbach, who with surprise and enthusiasm reminded me that I had asked her to lunch, and where had I been and why hadn’t I called? I was stuck without an excuse. We arranged to meet the following Tuesday.
Nina twirled into Giorgio’s in a flowing pink dress, a red cape, and a broad-brimmed red straw hat. Heads turned, mouths smiled and whispered behind cupped palms: she was a local celebrity, the town eccentric—the latter, simply because of her dress. It doesn’t take much to make one an eccentric on Long Island.
We each ordered one of Giorgio’s little pizzas: prosciutto, peppers, and onions for her; broccoli, mushrooms, and extra cheese for me.
She launched in eagerly. “So tell me all about it!”
I had been dreading this and, before I left the house, had practiced speaking in an expressionless voice. I reached for it now but came up only with a rusty squeak: “Well, it’s really over now. It came to nothing. Of course, I still have fantasies that he will suddenly realize what he’s lost and decide to call me, but I know they are only fantasies.”
“Oh!” Her face fell, bless her. She had really wished me well. She was a good soul.
“Do you think he knew how you felt about him?”
I pondered. “No. Not really. Not fully, that is. He had an inkling. But even that inkling terrified him. If he had known how strong my feelings were, he probably would have fled even faster than he did. I think he flirts and acts seductive without being conscious of it. I think he thinks he’s just being friendly, just a friendly country boy, when he’s actually being quite provocative. Then he’s shocked and disgusted when women respond to his seductiveness. He thinks the women are weird. I imagine it’s a pattern in his life.”
“So he’s a cunt
“Kind of a willful naïveté,” she continued. “But it’s pretty cruel to other people.”
“Yes. Since he’s totally unconscious of what he’s doing, he’s able to go on feeling he’s a good guy. He’s intelligent—just self-deluded. It’s hard to believe he’s as ignorant as he acts.”
“It sounds as if he really hates women.”
“Umm. That’s what he says.”
“Really? He admits it?”
“I think he’s proud of it.”
Nina was silent at that, regarding me thoughtfully.
“You invested a lot in him.”
“Everything. I planted all the repressed dreams of my sixty years in this guy. Can you believe it? Someone I hardly knew? It shocked me, what I felt. The nature of it, the intensity of it. Felt. Feel. I can’t get past it. All these dreams, these scenarios, these plans, just fermented in my brain, just bubbled up, one after another. I couldn’t sleep…I still have trouble. It’s crazy. I’d say I felt like a teenager, except I never felt this way when I was a teenager.”
“Umm. Doesn’t matter. You just had a delayed reaction to what’s been in you all your life. It’s part of our upbringing, all of us, girls and boys, in America.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, I’ve devoted considerable thought to this stuff. I’ve had to, given the way I feel about Garson. Have discovered I feel about Garson…”
“Discovered?”
“Well, I didn’t know I felt this way,” she said, a little testily. “How is a person supposed to know a thing like that? I mean, while he was alive, I was annoyed with him half the time, in a rage with him the other half. Oh, not at first. The first years we were together, we talked talked talked, we never stopped, we couldn’t get enough of each other’s minds; we craved the other’s mind. We talked about poetry and dance—we were wild for Martha Graham in those days—we went to hear Auden read, we screeched together about politics: we were both socialists then, we just didn’t join the party…