Cal West had a triangular face-his forehead was wide and his chin narrow and the planes of his cheeks were straight edges. He had wispy brown hair which he combed down with water, a few faint acne scars, brown eyes. He stood five eight, wore sweater vests and loafers.
He’d started coming to the hotel six or seven years earlier for Columbus Day weekend. Therese might never have noticed him at all except the first year a strange thing happened. When she went in to clean Cal West’s room, the place was immaculate. The bathroom sparkled, the bed was made with perfect corners. At first, Therese thought she’d entered a vacant room, but Cal West’s suitcase was in the closet and his shirts and pants hung neatly on hangers. Therese checked the room the next day, and the next. His room was pristine. Therese could have gone through the motions of vacuuming the carpet and remaking the bed, but why? She had finally discovered a person as clean as she was.
Cal West spent hours reading in the lobby in front of the woodstove. One year he read the Bible, one year Shakespeare, one year every book that had won the Pulitzer Prize, in chronological order. In the evenings Cal removed his reading glasses, leaned back in the rocker, and listened to the music-Haydn, Schubert, Billie Holiday. Cal West seemed to have a quiet, contented life, and Therese envied that. She thought Cal West must be very wise. He’d done something right.
This year when Cal West walked into the lobby, he was as calm and unassuming as ever. He brought one plain black suitcase with a matching garment bag. He wore a maroon argyle sweater vest and a tweed jacket.
“Therese,” Cal said. “Hello.” He shook her hand. Always, with Cal, there was a warm handshake when he arrived and when he left. No more, no less.
“Hello, Cal,” Therese said. “Welcome home.”
Cal nodded; he took everything seriously. “Thank you,” he said. “It’s good to be home.”
“How was your year?” Therese asked.
“Fine, just fine.”
Just fine: The typical Cal West answer. But this year Therese wanted to know more. Surely there was something noisy, confusing, or messy in his life.
“How’s work?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said.
“What do you do again?” she asked. “You work for a university, but what do you do?”
“I work in the provost’s office,” he said. “I process complaints.”
“Really?” Therese said. “What kind of complaints?”
“Professors complain about funding, and students complain about professors.”
“Do you have a lot of student contact?” Therese asked.
“A little bit,” Cal said. He shifted his weight; he was still holding both pieces of luggage. To put them down might anchor him permanently in this conversation with Therese-something he clearly didn’t want. “I process written complaints only.” He laughed. “My God, if I accepted verbal complaints, my job…well, it would be chaos.”
Therese smiled at his sweater vest. “Any special women in your life, Cal?”
“No.” The answer was taut and clipped. He nodded toward the front desk. “I think I’ll check in now.”
Cal moved for the front desk as though it were home base, a place where he’d be safe. Therese puttered around her plants, checking the leaves for waxiness, checking the soil for moisture. She looked at Cal West’s back as he stood at the desk. What would it be like to be married to Cal West? To have life unfold evenly, without stumbling blocks, without unpleasant surprises like having a baby die inside you or waking up and finding your teenage daughter has disappeared? Therese would never know. She chose Nantucket, and the hotel, where things were always changing; she chose Bill. Bill, who climbed up on a widow’s walk during the worst storm in forty years out of devotion to their daughter.
Before Cal headed down the hall and outside to his room, Therese called to him. “Cal!”
Cal turned around. The expression on his face was both fearful and annoyed.
“Let me walk you to your room,” she said.
He stood, unmoving, until she was alongside him. She thought crazily, cruelly, of following Cal into his room and trying to seduce him. The idea of it was so completely out of the question that Therese laughed to keep from hating herself. She liked Cal West; what was her problem? Why did she have the urge to shake him up?
“You know,” she said as they moved toward the back door of the lobby, “I have a complaint to file. Or maybe it’s my daughter who’s filed the complaint. She’s run away.”
“Really?” Cal said. “Run away?”
“She ran away to Brazil,” Therese said. “After a very handsome boy.” They stepped out onto the boardwalk. Cal West always rented room 20, which was only one room away from the lobby. As soon as they stepped outside, they were at his deck.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Cal said.
“Never mind,” Therese said. Cal gripped his key tightly in his right hand; no doubt he wanted her to be on her merry way so that he could enjoy the hotel. “No, not never mind. I’m curious, Cal. I’m curious to know what you think about it. You work with young people. What do you think about an eighteen-year-old running away?”
“We don’t get many kids running away from college,” Cal said. “Especially not Ohio State. The kids love it. It’s paradise for them.”
“So you’re saying no one runs away.”
“No one I know of.” He pointed his key at the door of his room. “But I process complaints about grades and things. Bad food in the dining hall. Sorry I can’t help.”
“Okay. Look at it this way. What would you do if your daughter-your only child-ran away to another country for some boy?”
Cal licked his lips nervously and stared at his feet. She was torturing him by asking him such a question, by making him imagine such a thing could happen to him.
“I… I don’t have any children. I really don’t know what I would do.”
“What if you did have children?” Therese asked.
“Well, then, I’d be quite a different person.”
“Cal,” Therese said-her voice was growing belligerent, she could hear it. She was verbally abusing her favorite guest, her fellow clean freak-but she yearned for an answer. “What do you think I should do?”
“I don’t know, Therese. You’re asking me a question that’s impossible to answer.”
Therese touched his shoulder. “You know, Cal,” she said. “Sometimes I wish I could be you for a few days.”
He nodded. “I feel the same way about you.”
“You do?” Therese said.
“Of course,” Cal said. He unlocked the door to room 20 and somehow managed to get himself and his bags inside and turn around so that he stood on the other side of the door, as though he were bidding her good-bye. “You took the risk.”
“The risk?”
“The greatest risk there is. The risk of parenthood. You’re a mother. And who am I? I’m a nobody.”
“You’re not a nobody, Cal. You’re a man with a peaceful life.”
He smiled wanly and closed the door, leaving Therese standing on the steps of his deck, thinking that maybe this was why Cal West was her favorite guest-not because he was the cleanest guest or the quietest, or even the last guest but because something about his calm, safe life made her feel loud and daring and brave. Like a mother.
Vance cleaned his house, literally and figuratively. He’d lived all summer in a rental cottage behind a giant house owned by Frank Purdue’s chief financial officer. The house was called the Chicken and Vance’s cottage was called the Egg. This fact alone had been enough to keep Vance from telling people where he lived. He didn’t want to hear jokes about being an egghead or laying an egg or egg on his face, or which came first, the chicken or the egg-or any other stupid reference that people like Mack and Jem might come up with. Love had been to the cottage, but only a few times, and not for very long. It wasn’t a good place to bring women. Vance didn’t straighten often and so the cottage collected a jumble of CDs and books and tools.