“You pick the perfect moment to bring this up,” he says.
“What do you care when I bring it up? It had to be said.”
She is sitting in her bathing suit, fingers lightly on the photograph, as if it might be a ouija board, as though her fingers might begin to move, as though the fingers might direct her somewhere … to the lifeguard? He decides to take a walk down to the beach and look more carefully at the lifeguard.
“How do you feel, Andrew?” he asks his son. His son is playing with a dump truck in front of the house.
“Fine,” Andrew says.
“Where’s Randy?” David asks.
“He’s at the beach with the Collinses.”
Andrew pushes the back of the dump truck down. Sand spills on top of five sticks, all neatly in a row.
“What are the sticks?” David asks.
“What do you mean?” Andrew asks.
“What kind of game are you playing?”
“I’m just using my dump truck.”
Andrew seems very defensive. He has seemed that way all summer. Eight is a bad age. Penelope, on the other hand, is quite cheerful when she is well. Now she is sick. He should call a specialist. But first he wants to go look at the lifeguard.
*
The lifeguard is wearing glasses that can’t be seen into, so his eyes show no expression. His mouth is covered with zinc oxide, smeared on so thickly that it’s hard to tell if his bottom lip has curled into a faint smile or if it’s just the guck. The lifeguard wears bright-blue swimming trunks. There is a chain around his neck with a whistle dangling from it. David would like to blow the whistle into the lifeguard’s ear, make him show some emotion. The lifeguard looks remarkably fit. He would slug him, then grind him into the sand with one of those large, perfect feet. Then he would stand on top of him, the way people stand on top of sand dunes, and wait for him to die.
“Hi,” he says to the lifeguard.
The lifeguard raises his hand. His palm is very white.
“Been in the water?” David asks.
“No,” the lifeguard says. “Not yet, sir.”
By the lifeguard’s foot (large, perfect) is a sweatshirt. Dartmouth.
“You don’t have to call me sir,” David says. “I’m not much older than you.”
The lifeguard smiles. The zinc oxide cracks.
“How old are you?” David asks.
“Twenty-two,” the lifeguard says. He takes off his sunglasses and squints at the water. He puts them back on.
“Do you know my wife?” David asks.
“No,” the lifeguard says.
“A tall, blond woman. She usually wears a red swimsuit.”
“No,” the lifeguard says.
“She also has a green swimsuit. Very tall. As tall as me.”
“Does she come to the beach very early?”
“Yes. She likes it when it’s deserted.”
“I think so,” the lifeguard says. “What about her?”
David had not prepared himself for that question. He smiles foolishly.
*
“You know, honey, you forgot my birthday,” David says.
She shrugs.
“Have I done something?”
“No,” she says.
“You just feel like giving me some shit,” he says.
“I don’t even feel like doing that. I’d just like to be alone. I think about the lifeguard all day.”
“That might be like the sunsets I’ve been imagining. I’ve been seeing the sky at night as rosy and bright and pearly … I’ve been seeing flashes of light across the sky, hearing birds, I think …”
“I don’t see the similarity,” she says.
“We’re both obsessed by something that isn’t real.”
“He’s real. He’s standing on the beach right now.”
“But you’re imagining he’s better than he is.”
“I see what you’re saying,” she says. “I think that maybe after living with you for ten years I’m going crazy too.”
“What do you mean ‘too’?”
“You’re crazy. The way you’re always arguing with doctors, the sunsets you were talking about.”
“If I can’t talk to you, who can I talk to?” David asks.
“Bea Collins said she saw you talking to the lifeguard.”
*
The lifeguard awoke several times: once because he was sleeping on his arm, another time when there was a noise, either in the house or in his dream, and again when the bright light shone into the room. The third time he woke up, the lifeguard made a mental note to change the position of the bed so that the light wouldn’t shine in his eyes every morning. Finally, he got up. He remembered awakening only once; the light, the bed …
He put on his blue swimming trunks and walked to the bathroom. It made no sense to have put them on, because he had to pull them down to urinate. He flushed the toilet — his pig roommate, a former waiter who had worked himself up to maitre d’ at the Cliff House this summer — couldn’t even be bothered to flush the toilet. The lifeguard felt himself getting angry. He went to the kitchen and took a peach out of a bag on the counter. He rolled the peach back and forth on the counter, but didn’t eat it.
In the bedroom, the lifeguard examined himself in the mirror. His lips were puffy from too much sun. As awful as it felt, he should put zinc oxide on his mouth. There was a half-full glass of water on the dresser, and the lifeguard dipped his comb in the glass and combed his hair back. He had seen pictures of men in the thirties and forties who slicked their hair back that way. It didn’t matter what the lifeguard did to his hair; the early-morning mist and the hot sun would make it fall into his eyes.
A thought came to the lifeguard on his way out of the bedroom: you might also have looked at that glass as half empty.
He put on his sandals and went out. It was a steamy morning. The cloudy sky might mean rain, or it could just be overcast all day. Half the summer was gone. It was the fifteenth of July, and at the end of August the lifeguard would return to Dartmouth to begin his senior year as a mathematics major. Before becoming a mathematics major, he had been a political-science major, and before that a psychology major. His girlfriend, who was a waitress at the Cliff House — who associated with his pig roommate every day and who thought he was a “nice guy”—was studying art and thinking about becoming an interior decorator. She was a Lutheran, and on Sunday she always went to church. The lifeguard felt himself getting angry.
He walked through the parking lot and across the wooden planks leading to the beach. There was a woman sitting on a blanket on the sand, with a child sleeping beside her. It was windy, and the woman held the edge of the blanket up so that sand wouldn’t blow in her child’s face.
Later, her name, Toby Warner, would be as familiar to him as his own, but today he didn’t know, or care, who she was. It was the fifteenth of July. The ocean was slate-gray. The seagulls flew over the shoreline as unpredictably as rolled dice. He took a little tube of zinc oxide out of the pocket of his blue shirt — a button-down, wouldn’t be seen dead in it anywhere but on the beach — and smoothed it over his lips. He took the chain with the whistle on it out of the same pocket and put it around his neck.
A seagull swooped low over the empty trash can, and the lifeguard blew his whistle at it. A shrill noise — quite a contrast to the slow, regular slush of the waves. The woman laughed. She giggled like a girl. Her little boy stirred, but continued to sleep. The lifeguard felt awkward; it was foolish to have blown it, awakened the child. He took off his blue shirt and dropped it in the sand and sat on it. He looked at his feet stretched in front of him, and thought that his toenails never grew in the summer. Toenails continued to grow after death, so why would his stop growing in the summer? The sand probably wore them down. All day the lifeguard sat or stood, but when he was off duty he always ran three miles down to the main beach, where he met his girlfriend. Her name was Laura. They must have eaten almost a hundred pizzas together, at the stand by the main beach. Laura got the pizza all over herself. The lifeguard was not in a very good mood. He was displeased with Laura because of the way she ate pizza, for God’s sake, and he loved Laura. It also bothered him, though, that she liked sausage on the pizza and he liked it plain — mozzarella only. They could have compromised, but Laura pouted, so they always ordered pizza with sausage. Tonight he would insist that they eat it the way he liked. Maybe she would even be nice about it. That made him feel better. He looked to his right and saw an old man in a golf cap walking in the surf. The woman on the blanket had her head on her knees, but he thought that she had been looking at him the second before and that she did that to cover it up. The little boy looked comfortable, and he was sleeping soundly. The lifeguard suspected, as he often suspected when he contemplated a child for a long time, that he was a father. Maybe he was in hell and the punishment fit the crime — he was a lifeguard to watch over little children, and one of them might be his. But his would be only … two years old now? It couldn’t possibly be the child on the blanket. And this child had a mother. And he had never seen the woman before. That made him feel better. He was proud of his ability to think things through.