And then the summer house is upon us, like a type of slow disease. We haven’t been feeling right for ages, we say, and have suspected it was maybe more than the vortical daily stressors of urban life to blame. Just yesterday morning a pigeon loosed itself from its hiding rook at the 52nd station to buzz us so closely we nearly fell to the ground. In front of everyone. Well. Now we’re here standing in front of the borough bedroom interior full-length wall mirror with the ACs blazing holding a pair of W36 seersucker shorts up to our waist in faux ensemble.
We feel an ague; or dropsy, scrofula. Something unspecific but bad.
“That will look nice,” she says.
If you say so.
We speak nothing of this malaise to doctors or the laic alike; we just bear it. Like modern day St. Peters Damain. We pack our things together, in a strange learned sync. But the truth lives on there like a family reptile that just won’t die. We are in a fundamentally incompatible situation. While packing, we lob verbal shots at each other. One longs for hot weather and its myriad discomforts and the other, yours truly, yearns for what?
Death.
We get our knuckles rapped when we retell this joke in the ricotta pancake & rosé sancto sanctorum of mediterranean brunch the morning before our trip. Don’t joke about suicide, the Friends say in scorned chorus. Some people really kill themselves. And yeah what’d Dorothy Parker say about that? We don’t say that we just think it. God, do these ceiling fans go any higher? We’re sweating like a hothouse pepper. The waiter here has gotten every single inhabitant of this place a refill three times over and will not make eye contact with us. Well. We promise to learn our lesson re: making that joke about jumping off the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Tappan Zee Bridge.
But do we ever learn a lesson?
We blackout after brunch and fall asleep like chalk outlines inside our small apartment.
Then it’s our alarm clock.
Moments leapfrog over moments, and meld molecularly into one another, per the math of drinking 5x frosties before 9AM; so that the apartment and the cab ride and the airport triage and TSA becomes one long tongue of memory. The first thing that truly breaks through the reverie is: great fat slabs of school bus yellow sun tomahawking in; the airport windows a high intensifying grid. I can feel the sweat on my body like the fat balls on a motion-capture suit.
Well, we are dragging our shit. We don’t feel so good. TSA. Boarding pass. Drinks-on-the-rocks at the gate. Another. One more real quick- we hear the announcements as we choke the last of it down. Takeoff. The long pressurized fugue. Touchdown. We have traded in my preferred flora (of blanched-out Modelo cans, pigweed, purslane, long-forgotten shoes) for California lupine, bellbottomed and purplish, pleasant and grass-smelling, sprouting from the punch boxes outside of LAX, while we wait, side-by-side, hungover, impatient, for the black car.
There’s not much here but shrubbery plus the big ole LAX sign; what we throw up into a water feature is about as black as pitch. An American kestrel penetrates the sunshiny haze going killy-killy-killy. A car backfires somewhere in the low geography. Rounds of voseo twirl off concrete. And then what feels at long last the black car pulls up in a peel of hot Los Angelean light.
We think of death.
Just flirting with it, doing coquettish little osculates with it, death in a pas de deux, we are daydreaming of Saturn colliding with its moons; it is like 95 degrees in the back of this godforsaken car, the black leather downright viscid, and the gratis Fiji waters are the temperature of minestrone. Calvacading into: spanned networks, odd dimensions, discrete units of highway, suburban, rural traffic.
“It’s a dry heat though,” she says.
Is it though? Feels like I could flop decumbent down the stratocumulus like a waterslide and come away sopping like a licked dog.
“Would you smile?” She directs.
Los Angeles here plays itself in reflection on the black car’s car windows; translucent sure, faded, xeroxic facsimile, but how much are we truly missing out on? We muse aloud.
Knuckles rapped for that comment.
We are to have fun, that’s the imperative. We do of course remember what Kanye said about being mad on vacation. Well. We begin to wonder if we are just tapped into a deeper more atavistic potentially even earthen and ancient form of misery that’s inaccessible to common agnostic folk.
Hard to say.
The billboards here fall into three major categories: lifestyle, plastic surgery and personal injury. The body, it is implied, is in grave peril. So many ten-digit strings of numerals in bright black-bordered lettering offer salvation. Or- retribution, transmutation.
And then before we know it, though far long after we’d’ve liked it, we are arriving at the summer house. A cabal of our friends had, presumably in the thick of night and without our direct involvement or consent, conspired to bring us here.
We pull down the stony driveway and the sheer breadth of the establishment is airsucking; like how people say staring into the Grand Canyon feels like. Like standing in space boots at the dusty red foot of Olympus Mons. Your whole sense of symmetry and perspective is thrown off. Palm trees, with their insane differential of height to foliage, dangle phallically on the property line. The house begins, predictably, at the end of the driveway, but tumbles down off the rockface behind in multiple planar jags and so the precise number of levels is impossible to discern. It’s like, we feel immediately like the architect of this place must’ve been Finnish, or Japanese or Danish. There are many windows, and some are pointing in directions no window has ever pointed before. Let’s actually call a spade a spade here: it’s a compound, and this compound might have you reaching for your architectural element dictionary. Spandrels, oeil-de-boeuf, spirelets and tasteful diapering galore. Crittal-framing and stringcourse above the doorway. Which- the door is statement orange. The surrounding shiplap a washed Prussian blue.
The car lets us out and its driver helps us with our bags. Well we’re sure a pair, huh? Both in black Jackie-O glasses and clothes incongruous to the weather because it was a little chilly back in New York. We take a teensy look over the cliffedge just to see. Pretty steep. We shuffle our bulk inwards. We open the fridge to find there’s nothing inside. We slip our shoes off. We already feel like we’re home.
Eventually, the others arrive. Having completed similar sojourns across country. They all enter the compound and begin staking claims to rooms like it was the Berlin Conference. In the summer house, all plots move poolwards. And so we move outside even though the sun out here feels like a warhammer wielded by an angry Norse god. “We” here now refers to just she and him, even though they are now amongst a greater “we.” We drink Campari on ice in the most lo-fi cups we can find because we think there’s something like genetically attractive about drinking aperitif; this is one of our most hideous affectations.
First in the pool is a character trait. We cast mental disparagement against the friend that first jackknifes off into the deep end. Our eyes both roll like two wipers on the same windshield. Then we watch the aquatic revelry through our Jackie-O’s, flipping lazily through some slop literature. The cerulean lap of the pool at its filters. The repeated placking sound of sunscreen application. There’s something gross and indiscreet about the look of a man’s thigh, we say.
“You can get some work done,” she says.
I am not so sure.
“Smile,” she directs.
And then I do smile. But not for the reason she wants me to. Down below her beach chair, in the latticed shadow there, is a bark scorpion.
“Scorpion!” I squeal.
We’ve never seen a scorpion outside of media and we have no idea how they behave. Watching it saunter across the macadam here therefore was unnerving. What was it capable of? Delivering sweet death. No. We do not say this aloud. We watch it, its tan carapace absorbing sunlight so intensely it looks almost golden. You can hear it skirling edgewise underneath the patio furniture; it sounds like the sound of scraping toenails. We watch it skitter, more afraid of it than it is of us. How strange a thing, a scorpion. For all we know, within the confines of its small body there is enough neurotoxin to sling us into a twin grave. And yet it square dances here, seemingly without purpose or direction.
She runs off into the house, and now he is alone. You might think he’d be relieved but he fears that he is not. He feels like what? Like a cancer patient looking longingly upon his excised tumor. The compound, in the distance, it’s just enormous; a beast with a thousand eyes. He can see her up there. She’s in their room. Behind a brilliant, expansive pane of glass. Behind it, she is changing. She takes off her shirt. She unclasps her bra. As with all things though, he doesn’t see the glass, or what’s through it, he sees the streaks.