The Lifeguard Read online

  That was when I saw Ric Spencer, running across the burning sand, waving his hands in an awkward way. He ran forward, then back, then forward again, like a dog wanting to play catch. He kept waving, shouting, then rushing back again. Then Mr. Potter, whose own failing heart kept him pacing the shore, came puffing to me. “A child,” he said with surprising composure. “Over there,” pointing to the Spencer umbrella.

  I was amazed by this, taken off guard. While I had been searching ahead, what had happened was behind me. A crowd had gathered around the blue and yellow umbrella. The Mandels put their newspaper down and started walking, Mrs. Mandel clinging to her husband’s arm. I saw a small frenzy of people moving up and down. I ran toward Ric. He caught me in his arms. “It’s Becky.” He shook me like a wet towel. “Get your kit. Get your damn kit.”

  I dashed back to my stand, grabbed the first-aid kit, and raced, my own feet searing on the sand. I made my way through where the crowd had gathered and saw Becky Spencer, her face puffed, her mouth open but no sound coming, her eyes in a fixed stare, turning as blue as the sea I’d set my sights on, and I knew this was the color of Billy Mandel when he’d been tossed back to the shore.

  “She swallowed something,” Ric said. He shook violently. “Do something, man.” Tears fell down his cheeks. “I’ve tried everything. God, please do something.”

  “You’ve killed her,” Mrs. Winston, on her knees, shouted. “You’ve killed your daughter.” And Sally, tears streaming down her face, kept banging her daughter on the back.

  “Turn her over,” I said, and I tipped Becky upside down, pounding on her back, but no breath came from her, no sound. I tipped her again, like an hourglass, but still nothing came. Then I clutched the dying child in my arms.

  “You’ve killed her,” Mrs. Winston shrieked, pointing at Ric. “You’ll live with this forever.”

  Sally Spencer, who’d once dug her nails into my arm during the horror movies of my youth, now did so again. “You’re the lifeguard,” she said matter-of-factly. “You’re supposed to know what to do.” But I’d done everything I’d been trained to do, and nothing could bring Becky Spencer, her mouth gaping in a silent, breathless hole, back to life.

  It was then that I saw Mrs. Lovenheim close her book, take off her hat, and rise. I saw that woman, left and bereft, who had languished all summer beneath her umbrella, coming toward us, her red hair wild in the breeze, and like Moses she parted the spectators, the advisers, the lookers-on. She pushed the screaming mother away, shoved the accusatory grandmother onto the hot sand. She thrust Ric into the background and plucked the dying child from my arms, forcing me to my knees. She held Becky, the child’s face the shade of the deepest recesses of the sea, her body rigid and motionless. Then Mrs. Lovenheim wrapped her body around Becky’s, folded the blue breathless body into her own.

  I watched from my knees as the woman whose beach umbrella I had planted day after day, whose chairs I had arranged, who had tipped me poorly, whose face was beset by the grief of her own failed marriage, who nursed what I now recognize to be a broken heart, Mrs. Lovenheim, perhaps not more than thirty then, grappled the child into her arms, engulfed her as if bringing her back into her own womb, then pressed some place I had not found. She squeezed Becky above the navel three times with a force I’d never before seen in nature, until a perfect, unblemished green grape shot like a bullet from the child’s mouth.

  Becky gasped and spit as Mrs. Lovenheim handed the whimpering child to her mother, who sobbed in the sand. For the first time the grandmother was silent. Ric stood shaking, his life altered. Then Mrs. Lovenheim turned to me where I stood, first-aid kit dangling in my hand like a lunch box. I felt as if she were about to say or do something, but instead, without a word, she moved past me back to her umbrella, collected her things, and left.

  That night I could not sleep. It was late, and I wasn’t sure what was bothering me, so I went downstairs. I sat in my father’s chair in the darkened den until I knew what I wanted to do. I found the address in the phone book. Then I got into the car and drove. I drove along the ocean road until I was a block short of her house, and I parked there.

  It was a clear night at the end of August, and a salt breeze blew off the ocean. It was a nice night for a walk along the shore, so I took my time, sucking in my breath. Then I headed down the street until I reached the house where she lived. The lights were on upstairs, but I stood for a long time on the porch. Then I knocked on the door, softly at first, then louder.

  At last she descended the stairs. She wore a yellow robe, tied around her waist, and her red hair fell to her shoulders. “Yes?” Mrs. Lovenheim said, her voice warm like a breeze.

  “It’s me,” I said, “Josh Michaels.”

  She slowly opened the door, only partially at first. She looked at me oddly, as if trying to remember when she’d seen me before. “I’m the lifeguard,” I said, not knowing what else to say. And it suddenly occurred to me that she had no idea who I was, that she’d never really seen me at all. So I added foolishly, “At the beach.”

  “Yes,” she mumbled. “What is it?”

  “I wanted to thank you,” I said, not really knowing why I’d come. “I wanted to thank you for what you did. This afternoon.”

  She cocked her head. “Oh, it’s just something I learned. I take silly courses sometimes.”

  “But I didn’t know what to do,” I mumbled. I was not aware as I said it that tears streamed down my face. But soon I found myself crying on Mrs. Lovenheim’s porch, on the porch of the woman to whom I was, in fact, nothing at all. I dropped my shoulders and stood there, sobbing. “I didn’t know what to do.”

  I don’t know how long I stood there like that before she reached for me, pulled me to her, wrapped her arms around mine. She smelled of shampoo and oils, not the salt and sand I’d expected. It was the first time I felt what it was supposed to feel like to be in the arms of a woman, not the girls whose breath steamed my car on Saturday nights. But it was not her body I felt, though I liked the feel of it, it was not her sex, though I was aware of it. Rather, I felt myself longing for something I could never have, and I wanted her to take me back, fold me inside of herself as she’d folded Becky that afternoon.

  But then she let me go. I grabbed at her, trying to hold on, as if her arms could save me from what came next. But without a word she went inside. “Wait,” I said, “come back.” I knew I would never want anyone or anything as much as I wanted Mrs. Lovenheim right then, and I found myself slipping into despair as she released me back into the world.

  It was the last time I saw Mrs. Lovenheim that summer, or any other summer, for that matter. Or perhaps I saw her again, but we no longer recognized each other. It was my last summer on the beach, and after that the winds shifted, the weather changed, which would bring my departure for college. Years have passed since that day on Pirate’s Point, and I am old now, perhaps as old as Mrs. Lovenheim was then, and I’ve never seen the water or the umbrellas of summer in the same way again.

  When Meg moved in with Zachary, he said she could do anything she wanted to fix the place up, except paint the wall. She liked the house well enough. It was colonial-style, white with green shutters, and most of what she didn’t like Zachary said she could throw out. There was the accumulated junk—the old roller skates in the basement from children who wouldn’t be caught dead in them now, the three-legged Ping-Pong table, newspapers from terror-stricken Sundays, the foreign coins from too many business trips, napkins stained with the assorted sauces Lucinda made that never came out right and never turned things around.

  Meg scrutinized this house of dead plants that drooped like eavesdroppers in the living room, and dreary cacti that would never bloom, of burnt-down candles and cat-clawed sofas, the paint-chipped ceilings that fell on Meg like the sky on Chicken Little, and the closets filled with Lucinda’s clothing—the clothing of a flower child of the sixties. All this debris, Zachary said, she could do away with. “You can do whatever you want,” he to
ld her as they carried in her boxes. “You just can’t paint the wall.”

  The wall, which was in the kitchen, was quite large and was covered with a mural. It had an angel rising out of a cloud, grasping a lightning bolt, standing in the Urubamba Valley amidst Aztec burial mounds, the pyramids of Egypt, and the oracle at Delphi, in the shadow of the Taj Mahal, encircled by the Great Wall, protected by a moat where snakes and lizards swam, beyond which rabbits, birds, buffalo, and squirrels scattered as if before a brushfire across a field of giant sunflowers that covered the ceiling.

  The first time Meg saw the wall was the morning after she’d first stayed with Zachary. She hadn’t seen it the night before when he’d brought her home in the dark, snuck her upstairs, and wildly pulled every piece of clothing off her before carrying her to the king-size former marital bed that hadn’t been used in this capacity, he told her in the midst of his passion, in almost a decade. It was a rare weekend when Lucinda had the kids, and Meg had tiptoed down in the morning to make coffee, feeling relaxed, her body at peace. When Zachary came down a few minutes later, he found her staring, not knowing what to say. Finally she was able to speak. “Why sunflowers?” she asked.

  “Because Lucinda liked sunflowers,” Zachary replied.

  Meg loved all the rooms of the house, except the kitchen. She loved their old-fashioned feel. She could deal with the modern built-ins in the colonial house, the pale oak against the walnut floors. She could live with the mysterious fact that all the furniture was nailed down—that beds and tables and sofas could not be moved. Or with the fact that the bed was so big she woke up sometimes feeling confused about where she was, the way she did in foreign countries.

  What she could not deal with was the wall. It had been painted by a friend of Lucinda’s, an artist named Mona. Mona had felt a profound connection to Lucinda and Zachary, to their children, and she had painted this mural, Zachary told Meg, as guardian and safekeeper of home. She wanted to depict the enduring spirit of man in the face of the rise and fall of civilization. Zachary admitted it wasn’t the best thing Mona had ever done, but “as long as we live in this house, until we get a place of our own, we’ll just have to live with it.”

  “Out of loyalty to whom?” Meg had asked, concerned that somehow he could not move on to the next phase of his life.

  “To Mona,” Zachary had replied. “To a friend.”

  Examining the closet where some of Lucinda’s rejects still hung, Meg said, “I’m not sure I can sleep in another woman’s bed.”

  Zachary assured her that he hadn’t been in love with Lucinda for as long as he could remember. They had hardly ever made love in that bed, hardly even touched in that bed. The entire romantic part of their marriage had taken place in the first two years, when they were in the Peace Corps in India. “We stayed together for the kids,” he told her. “I knew it was over,” he said, “when she moved to pillow 4.”

  The king-size bed had four pillows, which Meg and Zachary referred to affectionately as pillows 1, 2, 3, and 4. Their bodies always lay close, on pillows 2 and 3, though at times Meg felt as if she might teeter onto the edge of pillow 4 and float away. In the back of her mind, she told herself, when the time was right, they’d get a smaller brass bed where there’d be no danger of drifting onto the pillows at the extremes, then off into the world.

  “With you,” he said, “it is different. You’re easier to talk to. I can get close to you. We really are friends.”

  She’d met Zachary on a commuter train riding into Manhattan a month after he’d signed his divorce papers. She loaned him her business section. They met again on the train going home that night and from then on rode the train together. It took him a week to ask her to dinner. “I’ve just gotten out of something,” he told her. “I can’t rush right in.”

  She wasn’t in a hurry either. Her marriage had ended a year before. A terrible, bitter ending in which her ex-husband and she called each other names neither could believe. How could people sink this low. She’d taken a vow and been alone for a year. She’d learned to enjoy living out of the city, spending Sundays taking walks in the woods. But soon Zachary and Meg were taking autumnal walks, buying baskets of apples upstate. They carved pumpkins like kids. Still they took it slowly. They didn’t hop into bed. They spent weeks kissing in movie theaters, dancing close at clubs. They dreamed of each other in their separate beds. It was two months before they made love. They’d been seeing each other over a year before Meg moved in.

  Zachary’s son, Bennett, thought there was a spirit in his room that wanted to destroy him. Bennett was sixteen and he had a crucifix in his ear. He sang in a rock band called the Retards that played bar mitzvahs and school dances. He took the crucifix out when he played the bar mitzvahs but thought for now that the crucifix would keep the spirit away. He was concerned about what would happen when its power wore off. One night over dinner he said he could hear the spirit rumbling through his closet. “I think it likes my clothes,” he said.

  Bennett lived half the week with Lucinda and half the week with Zachary. Their daughter, Tracy, lived the opposite half of the week with each parent. It was what the kids wanted. “We each want all your attention,” they said.

  Meg found the arrangement tedious. Zachary and she had no time to themselves. There was always an adolescent around, always the bass of heavy metal and the ringing of phones. But Zachary said, “I’m a package. Take it or leave it.” And Meg had replied, “I’ll take it.”

  While Zachary wondered if Bennett was on drugs, because of the spirit, which he’d named Tronka, in his room, Meg was on Bennett’s side. She wasn’t sure what it was but at night she felt things. A movement, a trembling. She woke to the pounding of hooves, of things gone wild. When Bennett complained about the rumbling, Meg would say, Yes, I’ve heard it too.

  Meg called a decorator. Her name was Lizzie and when she came over, Lizzie handed Meg her card. It read, “A rainbow in every room.”

  “A rainbow?” Meg asked, concerned.

  Lizzie laughed. She was a slightly anorexic woman with limp brown hair and an extremely nervous manner. “It just means if you want a purple ceiling, I’ll give you a purple ceiling. But I’ll also give you mango throw pillows. If you want a turquoise floor, I’ll give you a turquoise floor, but with lemon yellow chairs.”

  “Oh,” Meg said, wondering if this was a good or bad sign.

  “I believe in color. Fuchsia, tangerine, chartreuse. Lots of it. Brightness. And I can work around anything.”

  “Anything?”

  Lizzie smiled smugly. “Anything!”

  Meg directed her to the kitchen. “Can you work around this?”

  Lizzie skipped only a beat. “No problem,” she said, her mouth slightly agape before the wall. “I mean, if this is what we’ve got to work with, we’ll make it work. I say we bring more color into the kitchen. More reds and yellows. Pick up what’s in the mural. Oranges. And sea green.” She wanted to look at the rest of the house.

  “I see,” she said, opening the closet that contained Lucinda’s things. “This is what I call a house in transition. A family in flux.” Downstairs Meg watched as Lizzie, a large, frail woman who reminded her of a twig about to snap, shoved the sofa with a bony hip. “It’s nailed down,” Meg said. Lizzie looked at the sofa in disdain. She made a note on her pad. They wandered back into the kitchen.

  “How do you get along with your stepchildren, Mrs.…?”

  “Miss,” Meg said. “We aren’t married.”

  “Uh-huh.” Lizzie made a note. “Do the children mind your redoing the house?”

  “Well, we hadn’t exactly …”

  “Which child do you feel closer to? The boy or the girl?”

  “Oh, the girl. I don’t know. There are good things with each one.”

  “And you and Mr. Payne, are you very close …?” Her lips trembled as she spoke.

  “Excuse me, but what does this have to do with decorating?”

  “Oh, everything.” Lizzie ran
a nervous hand through her hair. “You’d be surprised. The whole family dynamic is the decorator’s responsibility. The way you all integrate with one another—it all has to do with my big scheme. It’s not just throw pillows and wall hangings, you know.” Her eyes scanned the wall. They stopped at the inscription, which read, “To Zachary, Lucinda, Tracy, and Bennett in peace and love, Mona.”

  “Lucinda?”

  “The Ex.” They both gazed, transfixed for a moment by the wall. “I can’t do anything about that.”

  “Maybe you could just paint her name out,” Lizzie said. “Stick your name in.”

  That night the heat rose, the boiler churned even though they’d lowered it. Bennett came downstairs twice, shouting, “Hey, Dad, quit turning the heat up.” And Zachary shouted back how he’d just turned it down. The house creaked like a lonely cat and Meg felt the dark coupling of objects in the night—toaster to blender, chair to table. Appliances stirred. In the morning she woke as if she had not slept at all.

  Meg hired Lizzie and the process began. The long-haired brown rug that lay like a dead animal on the floor was pulled out, the floors buffed smooth. The bright architectural lights that made the bed more a place for police investigation than lovemaking were removed and soft amber spots installed. New blue-green carpet was laid and with the amber spots, the bed looked like a raft, drifting on a gentle sea. The nailed-down furniture was unnailed, the walls painted off-white. An obstructing wall in the living room knocked out. Light came in.

  Late at night in the construction site that was to be their home, the phone would ring. “Zachary, please,” Lucinda would say, and then Meg could hear her scream. “Your son has blond streaks running through his hair. He’s becoming a fairy, a creep.”

  One night rather sleepily they were making love when the phone rang. “Don’t get it,” Meg said. “She’ll call back.”

  “I have children,” Zachary reminded her, as if she had forgotten.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you,” Lucinda said. “I just called to say that it’s one in the morning and your daughter has not come home.”