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Overview
One hot New York City summer in the 1970s, the lives of three very different people - each uncomfortable with their surrounds and struggling to find a place where they can feel a sense of belonging - are forever changed.
Raymond, an overly cerebral 17 year old, lives in the Bronx with his increasingly estranged parents. He's decided that the time has come for him to fall in love even if he is soure why or with which gender and grapples with the conflicting directions in which he is pulled by his desires and fears. As his parents become increasingly estranged, his mother leaves for a trip to Israel leaving Raymond and his father housemates in an apartment in which neither feels at home.
Jerome, one of the legion of unrecognized poets marginally employed as a delivery man Seven Wonders Gourmet Foods, cannot rid himself of his obsession for the woman he loved and lived with - until she threw him out when he uncovered her secret past. His mentor - and sole friend - is the aging, erudite Maurice Rose, who - like Jerome - is about to thrown out of his home.
Lester, Raymond's maternal uncle, is the middle aged owner of Seven Wonders Gourmet Foods and an unsuccessful suburbanite living on the edges of New York City. In a family and area were success and status are everything, he must confront the miseries of his failing business, a tense home life, and a persistent obscene caller who knows a bit too much about his wife.
Drawn together by chance, circumstance, and mysterious woman with a secret in her past, their lives' intersect, collide, pull apart, and irreversibly change.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312274498 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/09/2000 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Eric Gabriel Lehman is the author of two previous critically acclaimed novels - Waterboys and Quaspeck - and his stories and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies He is the winner the National Arts Club Award and the New Letters Literary Award for fiction. Born in New York, where he currently lives, he teaches at City College of New York.
Eric Gabriel Lehman is the author of two previous critically acclaimed novels - Waterboys and Quaspeck - and his stories and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies He is the winner the National Arts Club Award and the New Letters Literary Award for fiction. Born in New York, where he currently lives, he teaches at City College of New York.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
For as long as I could remember,my parents didn't get along. They never argued, no. ThePodilacks two floors above us, now they argued. Several nightsa week, Mr. Podilacks's drunken Ukrainian snarled as Mrs. Podilackhurled plates, and their noisy strife slid down the heatingpipes and slipped menacingly into my dreams. Things seemedquieter in our house, but it was the stiff calm of a truce.
I was their only child, moody and intolerant as only childrenare, fulcrum of this delicate balance, and I soon grewaware of my power to upset it. A fork dropped at supper or afuse blown when I fiddled with a lamp socket brightened thedullest evening. When I was older, hitting my father up forspending money brought on my mother's protest, which flamedinto argument the moment he reached for his wallet. I'd leavethe house, pockets full, as my mother glared. I justified my anticsby telling myself that I took their minds off their domesticmisery. I was as good as a marriage counselor.
Yet my motives weren't selfless; I was terrified of a breakup.For a long time, we'd been but paper-clipped together by lastname. With no siblings, I sensed that our frail family treewouldn't withstand too much of a storm. I needn't have worried.My mother considered divorce something for the irresponsibleand unstable, not for decent Jewish people. As for myfather, staying married was a matter of practicality or, perhaps,habit. He lived innear-biblical simplicity and claimed that he'dalways be happy as long as he had a roof over his head andmoney coming in. This, as it turned out, was not entirely true.
Perhaps the chief source of my mother's dissatisfaction withmy father was her failure to accept that her life with him wouldalways be ordinary. Sundays she took me downtown in searchof elegance. She dressed with care, hat and gloves and a newBonwit Teller dress bought with her employee discount, and shereminded me to shine my shoes. My father never went with us,preferring to work at his drafting table in his undershirt.
"Just look at that architecture," she exclaimed before theelegant town houses near the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ourdestination for the day. "Those magnificent windows, the masonry."I dutifully scanned the glass polished to a blue sheen,cornucopia clustered over spandreled doorways, columns bearingCorinthian curls. Other people's luxury enthralled her.
Her face took on a reverential glow inside the museum. "Ican't remember the last time I was here," she said, but I alreadyknew: not since I married your father. She divided her life historyinto Before and After, with marriage the dark line of demarcation.The portraits of the Old Masters regarded us withseverity from their heavy gold frames. My mother filed pastpiously, a guest in their house, and she seemed relieved whenwe made it to the more-recent American paintings, where thewomen wore recognizable clothing and jewelry.
Afterward, we stopped at a coffee shop for sandwiches.
"Don't wolf your food down," she said. She longed tostretch out our Manhattan holiday for as long as she could, butI'd already had enough, a token at the ready in my pocket, andsoon we'd been back on the train, returning to our old lives.
She consoled herself over her unsatisfying marriage withbuying clothes. The worse things were, the more she bought.Like with the Queen of England's hats, I could rarely recallseeing my mother in the same outfit twice. My father, on theother hand, grew ever more spartan. For every new dress, heheld onto a shirt a year longer, wearing it out at the elbows,perhaps out of spite.
But life went on. We ate together. My mother signed myreport cards, and my father paid for my clarinet lessons. Wedutifully attended family functions together, my father and I inour rented formal wear, my mother in yet another new dress,but once back in the house, their estrangement quietly resumed.We might have been no happier than the Podilacks, but at leastno one knew.
They maintained a discreet distance from one another, mymother in her bedroom and my father in his: a corner of theliving room where he'd set up camp a year or two earlier. Atfirst my mother took pains to mask their separation and keptthe room as photogenic as a furniture advertisement, the glasstop of the coffee table mirror-bright, the vacuumed carpet afreshly plowed field. Early in my senior year of high school,when she ceased folding up his bedding in the morning, lettingthe living room look like the boarder's room it had become, Iknew things had taken a turn for the worse. It wasn't long afterthat when we found out that my father had been having anaffair.
I was never the chummy type, and I had my own opinions aboutthings, so perhaps for those reasons, I was obliged to discoverthe melancholy pleasures of solitude early on. I busied myselfwith things best done alone: rearranging my drawers, readingmagazines, and collecting postcards while my mother's mamborecords blasted in the background. I shunned the playground—anest of carnivorous local toughs lying in wait for chumpslike me who didn't care about stickball. I felt safer with theshyer kids, although they, too, had their shy-person way of doingthings that they also preferred doing alone. I often fell intoconversation with old ladies on line in Woolworth's, mesmerizedby the poignant ring of their voices. I spent undisturbedafternoons in the yard behind our building, cloister-like andfragrant with rot. The abandoned railroad station nearby drewme to its picturesque decay. Stray dogs were always sniffingtheir way over to me.
I'd inherited my mother's insomnia and was proud of thisaffliction, for it seemed the mark of the stylishly neurotic andurbane. Nights, I snuck out of the house and went for walks.Our neighborhood was bounded by railroad tracks, expressways,and the oily arm of the Harlem River. Defying prudence,I followed streets until they dead-ended and crumbled into no-man's-land.There I'd sit, waiting for the subway to churn outof the tunnel up onto the El, a deep-sea beast breaking the surfaceof the water with a lusty snort. I'd think of poems to write,imagining myself the subject of a curled sepia photograph,wearing a faraway and wistful expression. Mostly I waited, althoughit took some time before I knew exactly what I waitedfor.
"You and your solitude," Agatha would say later that summer.She told me I remained at too much remove from myself."You'll never be able to love anyone that way."
"I love you," I told her.
"No, you don't, Raymond. You just like the idea of lovingme. We could become good friends if only you'd get these romanticideas out of your head." She was a good ten years olderthan I, which seemed to give her the right to tell me what I wasthinking. But she didn't understand how necessary my solitudewas. People scared me.
There was another reason why I took those long walks riverward:it kept me from going the other way—toward the park.The park wasn't like most other city parks—concrete deserts,dry boccie courts, and peeling beech trees. This park was a wildoutcropping of granite, a green fortress above a moat of trafficon all sides, rising to a rocky summit flattened by a rectangularterrace set with benches. Like all such castles, it housed secrets,dangers, temptations. The terrace was reached by broad stairsthat curled around the park's perimeter, turning ever inwardwith Yellow-Brick-Road whimsy. Missing bench slats and brokenglass marked the place as a hangout, and only one of thetwo lamps worked, so at night, the terrace hung in shadow. I'dsit there breathing in the city's sour spirit. I imagined myself tobe standing at the very top of the world, poignantly alone, exceptthat, unlike those walks to the river, I knew that I wasn't.There was always a guy or two up there.
Guys began to be everywhere, or, more precisely, I beganto notice them in a different way. They'd always been there, ofcourse, elbowing their way around and ready to slug you if youstepped on their feet by accident. But suddenly I saw how theirmuscles bunched up when they bent their arms, the appealingbulge of sinew in their calves, and the enticing curve betweentheir neck and shoulders. I became aware of their shoulders. Idiscovered that just about all guys looked great from the back.In short, I stopped seeing them as who they were, but as whatthey were. And what were they? The objects of my as-yet-unnameddesire.
About the same time, I also began to see a different kind ofguy, one who walked with just a little too much edge in his stepas if in a hurry, or anxious to draw glances toward himself asif by convection. Without looking at anything in particular,these guys took in everything with a microscope's precision.They often wore shoes without socks. Sneakers without sockswouldn't have stood out, but shoes? For some reason—did Iattract them?—they always managed to sit themselves next tome in the subway, their butterfly net of a glance dropping overme. I enjoyed the attention, aware of the alluring power of mydisinterest, but any pleasure curdled the moment they spoke or,worse, looked ready to touch me, since it implied that we werealike. I always saw it coming. A watery pleading softened theirfaces, and their mouths opened just enough to emit a waitingbreath. I'd tell myself to change places or look away, all thewhile curious about what might happen next. If I didn't move,it wasn't long before I'd feel a slithery caress to my thigh or ahand darting between my legs, swift as a lizard's tongue. ThenI'd flee, disgusted and full of pity. Knowing they wanted mewas reason enough to find them repulsive.
But last summer I let a man from the terrace do me. He hada tattoo of a dark sun just below his left shoulder and smooth,shapely arms. He slid beside me on the bench, graceful as adancer, and my heart sped into a trot and then a canter, and Iwas ready to flee. But I didn't. The light painted a delicate linedown his smooth arms, and his eyes were large and deep. Withhis narrow face and long hair, he was, I thought, pretty, whichconfused me, since I'd never thought of men as being pretty.We began to talk, and all the while, I waited for the sly caress,the sneaky hand slipping onto my knee when he thought Iwasn't looking. Instead, he surprised me by inviting me up tohis apartment and pointed to a row of windows in a buildingacross the street.
His lobby was brightly lit and walled with mirrors reflectingus paired together dozens of times. People looked, knowing justwhat we were up to, I was certain. The elevator came and disburseda frowning old matriarch with a laundry cart. Go home,she seemed to say. Go home right now, meet a girl, marry andmultiply. But the closing elevator doors sealed my fate, and weascended.
My eyes shot around his living room, on the lookout forsigns of strangeness, which I thought must mark men like him,but the sofa and coffee table appeared innocent enough, and sodid the stereo. He offered me the same cheap brand of orangesoda my mother bought and served it in a normal glass. Butwhen he lowered the lights—men like him obviously had dimmerswitches—my teeth started chattering. I was on the edge ofan arctic precipice, and the slightest movement might hurl meinto its icy, jagged mouth.
"Gotta warm you up," he said in a voice suddenly deep.His palms worked heat into my skin. Slender fingers iviedaround my wrist, forearm, and arm muscle, while his large eyesmonitored my every reaction. His hands sleeved my skin inwarmth, and the tattoo slithered over the muscle hardening inhis forearm, its sun shooting out fiery flares. He slung his armaround my neck and pulled me close with just enough firmnessto let me know he meant business. His mouth sought mine, butI wouldn't kiss him, and my face fell against his neck, whosesour-salty smell was exhilarating because it was so uniquely aman's. His hand slid under my shirt, migrating across my chestand soft belly, which I quickly tightened. He pushed my mouthagainst his chest, and I tasted him. This was a man, I told myself.A man.
He parted my knees tenderly, deliberately. His fingersworked my zipper and belt; soon my legs were exposed and,seconds later, my thing, wrinkled and puny in his hand, shamingme. His mouth swiftly engulfed it, kneading it between histongue and lips, and miraculously it hardened. Soon—too soonfor me to worry about what was happening—everything pulledout of me. I looked down to see my juice clinging to his facelike fat, white tears. He grinned. It had happened. It had reallyhappened. He went for a tissue.
I didn't stay. I feared he'd make me do to him what he'ddone to me. I hurried down the hallway, its every peephole widewith surveillance. I took the stairs to avoid looking at myself inthe elevator's mirrors and barrelled down the stairs until dizzy,rounding each landing with centrifugal speed to throw off whatI was certain would now cling to me for the rest of my life.
I began watching old black-and-white movies on TV afterschool. Not surprisingly, my favorites were melodramas ofrocky marriages: Back Street, Five Finger Exercise, and ComeBack, Little Sheba. I began pumping my mother for details ofher domestic misery, but she clung to her secrets tightly. Secretshad a long tradition in her family. A careless remark about mygrandfather's youthful liaisons had all the adults in the livingroom shushing. There was talk of my grandmother's clandestinevisits to a woman in South Brooklyn to get "cleaned out" whenshe couldn't afford another child. And what had my grandfathersaid to Uncle Abe one fateful afternoon that made him stormout of the house—the very same day the Brooklyn Dodgers wonthe pennant—vanishing for years until turning up in San Franciscomany years later? (When my grandfather's beloved Dodgersmigrated to the coast, Uncle Alfred termed it divineretribution.) There were more secrets: one of my mother's cousinshad been a communist; another believed that Adlai Stevensoncommunicated with her via the radio; still another—hername was never mentioned without a hush falling on theroom—killed herself. Nothing of this was ever spoken ofopenly—no one wanted to risk being quoted—but passed onby word of mouth, tongues clicking like telegraphs. "Hint at,don't accuse," might have been the motto on the family crest,had there been one. When Uncle Lester landed in Chapter 11at the end of that summer, no one in the family was surprised,since they'd already found out about it.
So many secrets. No wonder I found myself trapped in myown.
The biggest secret was, of course, my father's affair. Therevelation came, sadly enough, just before Mother's Day. In anact of stupidity or cruelty, depending upon whose version youbelieved, Uncle Lester told his wife about it, and Aunt Rhodain turn told my mother by phone. The question on everyone'smind was why Uncle Lester had waited until just that momentto drop this bomb. My father, it seems, had been carrying onfor months.
Perhaps my mother must have sensed that something badwas about to happen, for she began confiding in me. On someof my sleepless nights, I'd creep past my father snoring in theliving room and tap on my mother's door. She, too, was wideawake, propped up in bed with countless pillows before the latemovie, doing her nails. My father banned, the room had becomea feminine domain, soft as a tent from the many dresses hangeredon the backs of doors. New blouses and a Pandora's boxof scarves streamed out of drawers.
Doing her nails was my mother's sole hobby. A case held amanicurist's battery of delicately curved nail scissors, woodencuticle pushers, emery boards asparkle with grit, as well as alarge palette of nail polish and polish remover smelling of fermentedroses. Somehow, my mother found something to cut,file, or polish on her nails every night. She'd claim to be readyto turn in, but it was never long before she set her nail thingsaside and reached for her cherished Gutenberg-sized snapshotalbum, its stiff black pages paned with snapshots.
"This was when your father came back from overseas,"she'd say, the tip of a nail punishing the snapshot. "He stillthinks that the whole world revolves around him, his mother'sfair-haired boy who could do no wrong, the good one—"
As if summoned, my father passed by, ghostlike, Hamlet'sdead father afoot in Elsinore. We fell silent as a pair of thieves,and the book's cover flipped closed, releasing a sigh of dust. Ihalf-expected the door to open and for my father to thrust hishead in and give his version of the story, but his soft treadcontinued across the carpet to thud upon the bathroom's tile.
"This was taken right after we were married," she'd continuewhen the coast was clear. A couple resembling my parentsleaned against the railing of the Coney Island boardwalk, mymother short—"petite" was the word for it—and my father talland lanky. He wore the baggy pants of the period, a jauntycap, shirtsleeves rolled up like a stevedore's; she, a square-shoulderedjacket, hair pulled back ballerina-style and toppedwith a tam-o'-shanter. Another shot showed them sunk into themountainous cushions of my grandmother's sofa, diligentlyfluffed up before the next person sat down. I appeared in thepictures, wrinkly and unidentifiable at first, then defiant as Iinched my way into as many scenes as I could. For the nextcouple of pages, we were a real family, a smiling twosome posingfor the picture-taking third. I'd examine those snapshots forsigns of the heartache to come, without ever finding any. Thelens had captured only sunny, weekend days. But after all, onlyhappy people had their pictures taken.
They'd met as art students, moving in the scruffy but noblebohemia south of 14th Street. They'd each started out as apainter, but my mother went to work selling dresses at BonwitTeller's, and my father quit school to draw illustrations for atechnical magazine. Just before I started junior high school, UncleAlfred got my father a job at his printing press in LongIsland City. A sour cloak of ink clung to him when he arrivedhome in the evening, and no amount of soap erased the stainetched into his fingers.
Sometimes I went to work with him on the weekends whenthere were rush jobs to do. The press occupied a loft like anairplane hangar. I carried folders of material from one departmentto the other or hauled reams of paper, cool from thestorage room. The smooth repetitions of the great hot-typemachines were the calisthenics of steel giants. There at the press,cushioned by noise—and far from my mother—my father wasat ease.
He lugged home an unused drafting table from the pressand set it up in a corner of the living room. His dream was todesign a new typeface, and he copied type specimens from catalogueswith the patience of a monk. I'd find his penciled marksin the Post, mimicking the curves and serifs of advertisements,and his calligraphy embellished the covers of my book reports.
Nights, the patient scratch of his pen drew me from myhomework into the living room. He molded each letter like astrip of wrought iron. O was the most difficult of letters to drawcorrectly, he said, all curve, hardly a letter at all. S was a tobogganride. M was a cathedral's twin spires, W a valley, andB the side of a cliff, while Z was old and stooped. Strange: hespent his days around machines that spat out pages by thethousands, but he labored over individual words at night. Everysecond letter or so, he stopped to let the nib's proboscis drinkup the shiny ink; then he'd continue and soon an entire sentencefiligreed the line. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazydog. Let Hertz put you in the driver's seat. Yes, we have nobananas. How important it all looked.
"What do you think?" he'd ask, holding up a sheet.
"Nice." It was what I always said. I never knew what elseto say. He wasn't much of a talker, and I was shy with him. Iwas convinced that he didn't like me, a careful, clean-shirtedboy who pleased his teachers. My loose-leaf notebook was asneat as a scrivener's ledger, my textbooks crisply covered. I'dbanned all wire hangers from my closet, using only woodenones, and I hung up my shirts with the top button buttoned.Yet even if I was sure that I was too nice for him, he intriguedme. There was something slick and seditious about the way hesidestepped my mother, and my esteem for him only grew whenI learned of his affair.
The Friday night Aunt Rhoda broke the news, I'd lumbered intothe apartment later than usual. My friend Stuie's dope stillfogged my head.
"Where were you?" My mother's bark was whiplash to thebrain. The Sabbath candles flickered with accusation in thekitchen. She sat on the sofa, still in her work clothes, stockingedfeet pulled under her, an ominous sign, for she was never homefor more than five minutes without changing. She told me thenews.
"Your Aunt Rhoda apologized afterward for having to callme up," she said. "So why did she?" She tore a tissue from thebox. "I would have been better off not knowing." She avoidedmy eyes; the news shamed her.
"How did Uncle Lester find out about it?"
"Your Uncle Alfred told him." She blew her nose. "It's beengoing on for a couple of months already."
"Who with?"
My mother glared at me. I'd asked the wrong question. Iwas supposed to share her grief, not be excited by it.
"Typical of Lester that he should make his wife call and dohis dirty work for him," she muttered, throwing down a pulpymash of tissue. "What I want to know is, how long did Lesterknow about it before he said anything?" In our family, matterswere pondered, even in the midst of tragedy.
I realized that my father should have been home by now."Where's Dad?" I asked.
She didn't know. She'd called the press. Uncle Alfred saidhe'd left early. We continued sitting there for I don't knowhow long, my mother tearing out tissue after tissue, me notknowing what to say. It occurred to me that we were waitingfor my father to return. When the phone rang, my motherleaped for it.
"Oh, hello, Ma," she said in a small voice.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Summer's House by Eric Gabriel Lehman. Copyright © 2000 by Eric Gabriel Lehman. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.