Beautiful Days: Stories Read online

  That was when we knew. Where we knew. Big Burnt.

  Instead he led her along a path above the lake, speaking excitedly. Big Burnt was the largest of the Lake George islands, he said—thirty acres. It was so called (his father had said) because Native Americans had once burnt the trees to clear fields for planting.

  Now they were beginning to see campers at other sites, in colorful tents. Mikael waved at them, called Hello! Lisbeth tried to see how living in a tent on this remote island might be romantic—to a degree. She tried not to be distracted by the cries of children. She tried not to notice campers staring at her with something like envy. (Was this so? But why? Was it so clear that she and Mikael Brun were only day-packing, and not camping here?) To every remark of Mikael’s she was smiling, enthusiastic. She did not listen to everything he said but she gave the impression of devoted attention. He was pointing out to her the varying merits of the several campsites, which she would never have seen for herself—some had open views of the lake, some were farther inland; some boasted shady trees and privacy, others did not. Proximity to the lake, proximity to a marshy area, frogs at nighttime, gnats and mosquitoes, morning sun, evening sun, camping platforms, steep ledges, flat rocks, sandy soil—proximity to outhouses. These varying features had to be weighed carefully in choosing a campsite, Mikael said gravely.

  “Which would you prefer, if you were camping here?”

  “Which would I prefer? The campsite my father chose, of course.”

  What a naïve question Lisbeth had asked her companion! She wondered if she should apologize.

  Lisbeth asked if Mikael had brought his own family to the site and Mikael paused before saying vaguely yes, a few times he had.

  Mikael paused again as if there were more to say, but he did not say it.

  Not such happy times. Not often repeated.

  Lisbeth was thinking, she should have known better than to ask Mikael Brun about his ruinous marriage. For a man of such pride and self-regard, any reminder that he had failed at anything would be devastating to him.

  He’d become quieter now, walking slightly ahead of his companion. He was thinking—he was not thinking—of what awaited him after Lake George.

  The last things. Boldly and brashly he’d executed the last things, that would outlive him, so he had no need to think at all, now.

  Now, no question Why. For him there was only how, when.

  Hand in hand they walked along the edge of the island for some time. It had been rare in their relationship that Mikael Brun had ever taken the woman’s hand in quite this way—certainly, she could not recall Mikael having done so. By another route they returned, steadily uphill, in the increasing heat, to the picnic table at the Brun family’s old campsite. It was a mild shock to the woman, that their backpacks and other items were there—as if indeed they were camping here, and were returning to their temporary home.

  Mikael had bought lunch at a deli in Bolton’s Landing and had been very particular about the sandwiches he’d ordered; but now, the multi-grain bread was badly soggy, the lettuce limp. The tuna fish salad tasted as if it had been laced with something sugary and the coleslaw, in little fluted cups, was inedibly sweet. Still, Mikael ate hungrily. He had not shaved for two days—(it was a custom, he’d told his companion, that he ceased shaving as soon as he left Cambridge and headed north)—and his beard had come in graying and steely, a surly half-mask. At Lake George, he said, his appetite was always “prodigious.”

  He saw that the woman was eating sparingly, as she’d eaten sparingly at breakfast. She was having difficulty with the large, damp sandwiches that leaked watery mayonnaise. Each time she drank from the plastic water bottle, she took care to wipe the opening with a paper napkin. But she removed from a plastic bag the several ripe peaches Mikael had bought, offering him one and taking a smaller one for herself.

  The peach was delicious. Juice ran down Mikael’s chin. His mouth flooded with saliva, the taste of the sweet fruit was so intense.

  Shyly, yet with an air of recklessness, the woman was saying that she thought she might like to “try camping” again. She hadn’t been camping, she said, for a long time.

  Mikael laughed, not troubling to disguise his disbelief. “You camped, at one time? Really?”

  “Not in a tent but in a cabin. Just once. I mean—for about a week. When I was a girl.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Where? Oh, nowhere—important . . . Somewhere in the Catskills, I think. It wasn’t nearly so beautiful as Lake George.” Embarrassed by Mikael Brun’s bemused scrutiny the woman wiped her mouth. She’d given up on the soggy tuna fish sandwich. She’d used all the paper napkins she’d been allotted. In the dappled shade at the picnic table her face looked appealingly young yet strained.

  He did not want to hurt this woman, who had been hurt by other men. Without her needing to tell him this, he knew. For she seemed to open herself to such hurt, and to recoil from it belatedly, like a kind of sea anemone that is exquisitely beautiful but fragile. You begin in awe of such beauty but soon become impatient with it and want to injure it.

  “Nowhere I’ve been has been quite so beautiful as this,” the woman said, as if her point had been contested. “You must have been so happy . . .”

  “You think that children are made ‘happy’ by beauty? You should know better, you have children of your own. Children are blind to beauty.”

  They were silent for a moment. The woman surely felt rebuffed. But she persisted, as if reluctantly—“A terrible thing happened when I was at camp. A girl from my cabin died in a canoe accident . . .”

  “It wasn’t a canoe. It wasn’t an accident.”

  Mikael spoke with such authority, the woman looked at him. Her smile was faint, quizzical.

  “What do you mean? Why do you say that?”

  “There was a girl, and she died—she’d been murdered somewhere on Big Burnt. But it wasn’t a canoe accident. I was very young and all that I knew was what I could overhear from adults speaking . . . This was in 1972.”

  The woman was silent, staring at him across the badly weathered wooden table. Her eyes were widened in perplexity and yet in a distrust of her perplexity—should she know what her companion was talking about?

  He spoke sometimes in a kind of code. A kind of poetry. Elliptical, elusive. He left me behind. Probably—he left us all behind.

  The silence between them was strained for silence between individuals, in an island setting, is far more awkward than on the mainland.

  Mikael could not think of more to say because he’d just realized that the subject of the murdered girl had been a forbidden subject about which he should not have known. The memory of the girl (whose family had been camping at a site not far from the Bruns at the time of her death) was both scintillant and fleeting like a fish seen in murky water, that has no sooner emerged into sight than it has vanished.

  Sylvia. The forbidden name came to him, though he knew not to speak it aloud.

  He had not thought of Sylvia Delacorte for years. He was sure, it had been most of the years of his adult life.

  The girl hadn’t been so young, actually—sixteen. To Mikael, at age five, that had not seemed young.

  A man had strangled Sylvia Delacorte. Or had he beaten her to death with a rock.

  Somewhere in the woods it was rumored to have happened, in the dense interior of the island where no one went. He, Mikael, had been too young to be told what had happened, why the park ranger boat had come to Big Burnt in the early morning bringing such disruption and upset and why adults had stood about in small stunned groups speaking quietly together. His young mother he’d seen embrace herself as if she were cold, and shivering, and when he’d seen her, and she saw him seeing her, she’d frowned at him with a look he’d interpreted as angry and told him to go away, back into the tent.

  For the remainder of the summer he’d had trouble sleeping in the tent. In the child-sized sleeping bag which he’d so loved.

  Later
he’d learned, when he was a little older, that the murderer of Sylvia Delacorte had been a boy of just seventeen. He too had been a camper on Big Burnt, with his parents. One of those boys Mikael had probably seen on the island, older boys whom he’d envied, barefoot, dark-tanned, fearless swimmers off the docks, loud-voiced and jeering, oblivious of a five-year-old.

  Mikael was staring at his woman companion whose name—for just a moment—he’d forgotten as he’d forgotten what the thread of their conversation had been, before the subject of the murdered girl had derailed it. Dappled light gave the attractive fair-skinned woman an underwater look as if seen through a scrim of water of a depth of just a few inches.

  The woman was telling Mikael how much she’d like to camp on Big Burnt Island, and how much her children would love it. This was a bold statement, Mikael knew. But what could he say in response?—the last things determined that, after Labor Day, Mikael Brun would cease to exist.

  How vulnerable this woman was!—how perishable, the human body. That was the human tragedy, that no one could bear who dared to confront it head-on, without subterfuge and hypocrisy.

  He was touched that Lisbeth Mueller—(for that was her name, of course he knew it)—had trusted him, coming to Lake George with him on this impulsive venture, and to Big Burnt; he was obliged to protect her, since she had so trusted him.

  Yet still it was so—She too could perish, in the woods. Whatever has happened to one, can happen to another.

  HE ANNOUNCED THAT HE WAS going swimming, and hoped that Lisbeth would join him.

  She had told him earlier, in fact several times she’d tried to explain, that she did not much like swimming, and had not swum in years.

  Yet he seemed almost not to hear her. When she told him that she didn’t think it was a good idea to swim so soon after eating Mikael laughed at her. “That’s ridiculous. An old wives’ tale.”

  Zestfully he stripped to his swim trunks, which he was wearing beneath khaki shorts. His legs were covered in coarse dark hairs and were hard-muscled and tanned from the knees downward; his thighs were pale, his torso and upper arms so pale you might imagine you could see veins through the skin. His body was reasonably lean yet flaccid at the waist; his chest and back were covered in wispy, graying hairs. Lisbeth had not seen the man so exposed—that is, on his feet, a little distance from her.

  “C’mon! Come with me.”

  “I didn’t bring a bathing suit. I told you . . .”

  “Then wade in the water. You won’t get your shorts wet. And if you do, a little—so what?”

  Because I don’t want to! Damn you leave me alone.

  But she was laughing, for Mikael meant only to tease.

  Lisbeth accompanied Mikael to the edge of the lake, directly below the promontory; she would take iPhone pictures of him swimming, as she’d taken pictures that morning of the lake, the island seen from the lake, the mountains across the lake.

  Pictures of herself and of Mikael Brun in the rented boat, taken by the teenaged marina attendant who surely thought the two a married couple. Thanks!—Lisbeth had thanked the boy brightly.

  You want a record, a commemoration of an interlude so intensely lived. You believe that you do.

  Below the promontory there was no beach, only a few misshapen boulders strewn amid sandy soil. Boldly Mikael stepped into the lake and waded out until he was staggering waist-deep in the thick-looking water and then, as Lisbeth watched with some unease, he pushed himself out as if plunging into the unknown and began swimming.

  He was a good swimmer, as he’d boasted. Fortunately he seemed to have forgotten about urging her to wade by the shore. A stronger breeze had arisen and the lake was now reflecting a pale-glowering sky.

  For some minutes Lisbeth stood watching her companion swim in large, loose circles like a freed child. She smiled to think how totally oblivious of her he was—and yet, she could understand that he wouldn’t want to come to this remote place alone.

  It was a relief, her companion was swimming so well. Other campers, if they happened to glance in their direction, would think that the middle-aged husband was a competent swimmer but the middle-aged wife standing onshore looking on with a vague smile, probably not. She had no need to think, wryly—What if he drowns? How will I get back home?

  Lisbeth returned to the picnic table, and began the New York Times crossword puzzle. What a relief, to be alone! To be free of Mikael Brun’s laser-like attention, if for just a few minutes!

  Of course the crossword puzzles were trivial and a waste of time but there was solace in such brain-activity, that blocked unwanted thoughts. Even so, Lisbeth often left the puzzle unfinished. As (she thought) she left so much of her life unfinished. And now, she could not concentrate. It did seem ridiculous to be in this beautiful place and to be focused on a mere puzzle.

  Her attention was drawn to the figure in the water, diminished at a distance, vulnerable-seeming, and yet somehow stubborn.

  The man was her lover, but not her friend. She had trusted him well enough to accompany him on this end-of-summer trip to the Adirondacks, but in fact she could not trust him, she knew this. In his bemused indifference to her was the promise of betrayal to come. She could not risk this, not at her age.

  “I will risk it. Mikael Brun is worth it.”

  Onstage it is not uncommon for solitary individuals to speak aloud. The convention is that the audience overhears, and the convention is that the audience pretends it is plausible that a solitary individual, brooding, musing aloud, would think so coherently and succinctly. Badly in her adult life Lisbeth yearned for the protective confines of a play—a script. Chekhov, Ibsen, Shakespeare. Recently, she’d performed in a locally praised production of Synge’s Deirde of the Sorrows—which Mikael had seen, and seemed to have admired.

  It was the invention of original speech, spontaneous and unrehearsed speech, that had been so difficult in her life, and had propelled her into a succession of misunderstandings and mistakes.

  Farther out, she saw one of the ungainly predator birds Mikael had pointed out from the boat. A prehistoric-looking creature—“great blue heron”—though its feathers were gunmetal gray, not blue. The heron’s sharp beak was perfectly suited for aquatic hunting.

  At last, after about twenty minutes, Lisbeth saw to her relief that the swimmer was turning back. Streaming water down the length of his body, stumbling just a little, Mikael emerged from the water. He seemed to be searching for her, staring. (He’d removed his dark glasses before entering the water.) She saw the pale torso slick with wet hairs, that looked thin and wispy; the soft, fleshy knobs at the waistline; the legs, that appeared just slightly tremulous after the strain of energetic swimming. When Lisbeth came to him with a towel he was short of breath.

  His skin felt cold, clammy. His fingers were chilled. Lisbeth embraced him in the towel and rubbed him vigorously as she might have done with one of her children until he took the towel from her to dry himself. He insisted that the swim had been “terrific” and that next time, Lisbeth would come with him—“You’re a good swimmer, after all.”

  “Not me. You’re thinking of someone else, Mikael.”

  “I’m thinking of you.”

  His mood was brusque, jocular. But still he was short of breath. Ascending along the steep, scrubby path to the picnic table he surprised Lisbeth by leaning on her, just a little.

  Almost, her companion seemed to be feeling faint. Lisbeth took hold of his arm, and held him as he walked, in such a way that it wasn’t apparent that she was supporting him, if he chose not to notice.

  Returned to the picnic table Mikael drank bottled water thirstily, and insisted that Lisbeth drink as well. He asked Lisbeth what she’d been doing while he was swimming and she told him nothing really, for she’d been watching him—“Watching and thinking.”

  “Yes? Thinking what?”

  “How lucky we are to be here, in this beautiful place.”

  He was regarding her closely. Again, she’d uttered th
e word beautiful. She did not know if beautiful was a word that conveyed genuine awe or whether it was merely banal, over-used; she dreaded Mikael Brun disliking her, for the shallowness of her soul.

  His soul, she supposed she could never grasp. He was right to be bemused by her efforts to understand his work. When they’d first begun seeing each other she’d tried to read some of his scientific publications—A Short History of the Anatomy of the Human Brain, Cognition and Its Discontents: The Linguistic Wars. She could not read more than a sentence or two of his scientific papers, filled with the terminology, figures, and data of neuroscience. She understood that Noam Chomsky had long been a mentor of Mikael Brun, and had tried to read work by Chomsky on linguistics, biological determinism, genetically transmitted principles of language. But when she’d tried to speak to Mikael about these subjects he’d listened to her with such an expression of patience, if he didn’t laugh at her outright as he might have laughed at a bright, naïve child, she’d soon given up.

  “Yes. You are correct, Lisbeth. Our lives are purely ‘luck’—we are borne along by the current, and imagine we are the ones in control.”

  In his elevated, jovial mood Mikael pulled Lisbeth with him, to a secluded place beyond the campsite. He’d returned from the arduous interlude of swimming—and from the bout of breathlessness— with a desire to make love, Lisbeth surmised. She chose not to suppose that, in his exalted state, Mikael Brun would have made love with anyone; she chose to believe that he did in fact desire her. He was not always affectionate in lovemaking, and seemed more playful now. She wasn’t comfortable with the quasi-public nature of this lovemaking but there appeared to be no one within sight. And so she did not resist but returned his kisses avidly, and ran her fingers through his thinned, damp hair. His skull was hard, bony as rock; his breath still came short, but his skin that had been clammy from the water was warming. Soon, it would be aflame.

  She had not ever made love in any place quite like this. On the ground—which was hard, uncomfortable against her back—and the sky abruptly overhead—the sky not fair and tranquil as it had been but thicker-textured and bunched together, like blistering paint. Mikael was kissing her eagerly, pressing his mouth hard against her mouth as if wanting to devour her. His unshaven jaws were harsh, abrasive. He was much heavier than she, his limbs longer, dwarfing her as he held her down, in place; a moment of panic came to her, that the man would hurt her, he would suffocate her, half-consciously perhaps, for having intruded in this childhood paradise with her distracting questions. Clumsily he pulled at her clothing, pushing aside her hands though she meant to help. She felt like prey gathered in the beak of a great predator bird, without identity even as the life was being annihilated in her. She was thinking He has planned this. But not with me.