Summerlong Read Online Free PDF Page A

basement, to straddle him with the TV’s blue light behind her bare shoulders. It’s rare that Claire ever takes a nighttime shower without him slipping in with her, bending her over, and fucking her against the tiled wall. They’d retained a primal attraction to each other over the years, and instead of the sex getting worse or worn or tired as they aged, it was getting better and more frequent. Everything else, well, that’s gotten worse. For a long time, a healthy sex life had been her proof that their marriage was stellar. When her friends complained about their husbands—slobs with waning sexual desires and emotional unavailability—Claire always felt smugly superior.
    The master bathroom is a ridiculously palatial room with a double walk-in shower, a sunken Jacuzzi tub that fits their whole family, and two separate water closets. Her husband had picked most everything, all of it with a sort of subtext. He’d been born poor, raised poor, and spent much of his twenties poor. This house, as tacky and sprawling as it seems to Claire, and this bathroom in particular, an unnecessarily lavish place to piss, shit, and wash, means to her husband that he had escaped something most people could not escape. She understands. Sometimes she dreams of a farmhouse in Vermont, mice infested, a barn in decay, or a loft in Brooklyn, cramped by her family but in the heart of something bigger. Places to hide. She wonders what it would be like to live elsewhere, without her husband, even, but that night, exhausted, bewildered, sore, she loves the water pressure, a cascade of calming heat washing off the scent of sweat and cigarettes.
    Usually, that is enough.
    After her shower, overheated now from the long, luxurious length of it, Claire goes out to the back deck in her robe, first shutting off all the lights inside and outside the house. The breeze has picked up considerably—it is nearly three A . M . now—and the mosquitoes are not as abundant as they’d been on her run. Her skin still steaming from the extended shower, she opens her robe a little at first, and then fully, and then, safe behind a privacy fence and giant pines and maples that circle the edges of their half-acre lot, she drops the robe entirely and stands naked under the stars.
    When was the last time she had stood naked like that, outside, in the dark? Fifteen years ago, the summer she was twenty-three; she’d been at an art center in Vermont and had gone skinny-dipping in a river with some other artists. Drunk, she had coupled off with a sculptor, a man ten years older, later, in the woods. She’d already been dating her husband—they’d been college sweethearts—though they’d had a huge fight a few nights before, over a shitty pay phone connection, and had agreed to take a break from each other.
    Soon, when her residency was over, she came back to her husband; she never told him about it, the skinny-dipping, the sculptor whose hands she still remembered. He would have been jealous. He would have considered it something that was about him, not her. Was he better looking than me? What did he like about you? Did you fuck him?
    But what she remembered more than the water, or the slickness of skin in the hot night, the leaves on her back later, was the possibility in the air. She had stopped the sculptor before he entered her—but they were there, naked, him on top of her, and it would have been so easy for her to let him. She wanted to, and when she said, No, I don’t think I can , he told her he wanted her for real, forever . She had laughed at him then, still holding him in her grip when he finished into a mess of leaves and then he quickly dressed and left her in the dark woods alone and she thought for a moment of staying in those woods forever.
    Now, lying on this deck, thinking of what might have happened if she’d ended up with the sculptor, or even more tantalizing, maybe, all alone, she doesn’t think of the sex, though it would have been mind