Roger chugged up to the woodsy landing in a metal rowboat with a spluttering outboard motor. He wore a slouch hat, torn shirt, baggy trousers and moccasins without socks. His mouth hung open to exaggerate his surprise and welcome. He beamed at me with his long horsy face and greeted me by singing verses from Handel: “See, the conquering hero comes! Sound the trumpet, beat the drums!” We loaded up, he pulled the starting cord a dozen times and, with the boat very low and the water sloshing sloshing into it, headed back along the curve of the rocky shore. When we bumped into the jetty at below the cabin, I looked back and could no longer see where I’d left the car.
Holding my wrist, he dropped his cheerful mask.
“I must tell you something before we go up to the house,” he said. “Susan’s had a recurrence. This may be your last chance to see her.”
“How awful. I’m so sorry. How is she taking it?”
“She’s pretty tough. She’s been through this before. Right now, between the radiation and the chemo, she’s holding up pretty well.”
I turned away and looked around me. The cold lake was too clear and blue, the hovering mountains too jagged and snow-peaked, the pines too green and pungent, as if they were all posing for an absurdly perfect postcard. The cabin, with its strange tilt and rickety deck, seemed about to slide off the steep hill. Susan, her daughter Brenda and their two barking dogs came down the sloping lawn to jump and slobber on me. Instead of looking emaciated, Susan was tanned, robust, red-cheeked. Her head, covered with short fuzzy hair, seemed too small for her large body and the drape of her matronly bathing suit modestly covered her crotch. A swampy smell of reeds drifted up from the lake as the waves gently slapped the rocky shore.
Roger and Susan had rented a primitive one-room cabin on Fallen Leaf Lake, just south of Tahoe, and wanted me to stay with them for a week. Their invitation seemed urgent, but I was reluctant to accept. I’d known them for a long time and had observed their decline from golden couple to pathetic wrecks. I’d met them when we were all in graduate school at Berkeley and Roger was courting the dark-haired, high-colored, cat-like beauty who’d grown up at the bottom of the map in Chile. Susan was great fun in those days, and a bit of her bottom always stuck out enticingly from under her tennis skirt. I teased the supposedly proper young lady from a proper New England girls’ school with outrageous sexual stories, which prompted a half-shocked, half-amused: “Oh, Nick!”
Roger was also radiant and full of promise. His father was a Harvard-educated bank president who dominated Roger’s wedding and nearly made off with the bride.
His uncle was a shipping magnate, his cousin an ambassador. His grandmother once told me that she liked reading Graham Greene’s The Comedians as long as she skipped all the “loorid” parts. Roger had gone to prep school and Yale, was a national tennis champion, crewed a sailboat across the Atlantic and studied the violin with a European master. He’d also been, by his own account, a hopeless and nearly court-martialed army officer. He lived off a trust fund, but after boarding school and military barracks, was willing to eat almost anything. He’d cook a huge pot of stew every week and doggedly work through it, bit by glutinous bit, every day.
Roger lost his first teaching job at an Ivy League college and had to resettle in Nevada, where the whole family became permanently miserable. As Roger shriveled up, and Susan and her attractive daughter ballooned into obesity, he said, “we’re not exactly short of breasts in our family.” Brenda dropped out of college and took a job cleaning houses in town. Roger observed that they’d managed to fall from the upper to the lower class in only two generations. He called his wild and uncontrollable grandchildren “little Idi Amins.”
Once propositioned at an academic conference, he was too shy to abandon his moral scruples and dally with the seductive woman. In his forties Roger got diabetes. When Susan made it painfully clear that the stallion could no longer mount her, their sex life ended in bitterness and recrimination. “She likes sex,” he confessed, “but not with me.”
Their radiance diminished, their tenderness vanished. They quarreled about money. He became tight-fisted and claimed he was saving up for his next disease. Susan had a Latin penchant for sulks and tantrums. She loved to stage her operatic battles in public and often drew me into them. After preparing an elaborate picnic she’d start a quarrel, suddenly explode and refuse to go out with us. Following their tedious scenario, Roger would flatter and plead until she finally changed her mind. The last time this happened, I insisted we leave without her—that we’d have a much better time without her. We loaded the car and were about to drive off when Susan ran outside. In a charmingly childish way, she asked: “can I come too?” She was forgiven and behaved beautifully for a whole afternoon.
I also hesitated to accept their invitation because conditions at Fallen Leaf were pretty crude. My plank bed was in a shallow loft, cooking facilities were rudimentary and there was no indoor toilet. I had to bring my own food and bedding, leave my car in the woods and be ferried in by Roger, a sad Charon. Finally, since I couldn’t see how to squirm out of it without offending them, I agreed to come—but only if there were no dogs and I was the only guest. There wasn’t room for anyone else in that hôtel des invalides.
“Brenda and Lizzie simply had to come,” Susan explained in response to my hesitant greeting. “It’s so hot in the city. And there’s plenty of room for everyone.”
“Where’s little Lizzie?” I shouted, over the uncontrollable barking of the dogs.
Roger had shrunk into the background.
“She’s gone with Hiram to get some groceries. He’s Brenda’s new beau. You’ll like him. He’s a real intellectual, a voracious reader and a brilliant poet.”
Brenda, who’d inherited her mother’s rosy complexion and formidable bosom, had had quite a number of brutish boyfriends. She’d smile with modest pleasure at the mention of her latest conquest. Some of her fiancés had moved incrementally into her apartment, which they found roomier than their own pick-up trucks, and took an alarming interest in her attractive but troubled ten-year-old daughter.
Roger and I drank beer and scanned the glistering lake from the pitched angle of the deck. We gossiped maliciously and joked about feckless friends, academic work and the idiocy of English departments.
He affectionately called me “grossbeak” and taught me how to “stroke the fur.” As always, we traded suggestive lines from Dryden and Pope. In response to Roger’s “Promiscuous use of concubine and bride,” I offered, “And girls, like bottles, cry aloud for corks.” We still found it hilarious to ask, when recalling that “s” looked like “f” in eighteenth-century printed books: “Will you fuffer me to fing you a fong?”
We bonded by discussing Sam Johnson’s perverse desire to be whipped, and applied Pope’s line to the Castro district of San Francisco: “Belinda smiled and all the world was gay.” Delighted by eighteenth-century scatology, we recalled the midget “perched like a tom-tit on the mountain of love,” the rake “prying open the two-leaved gate of chastity” and “the sack that bears the noble burden” carried by “Old Scrotum, a wrinkled retainer.” Our favorite stage direction was in the Earl of Rochester’s Sodom: “They fuck.”
At that moment Hiram appeared round the curve with Lizzie. He was good looking in a Clark Kent, All-American-boy way, and enhanced his appearance with a piratical earring, bubble-gum-sized beads and an Andean peasant poncho.
“What’s he like?” I asked, as he walked up to the cabin. “As bad as all the others?”
“Terrible. No, worse than terrible,” Roger whispered. “Phony and smarmy. Cocky and pretentious. He doesn’t exactly exude charm. He can’t tell the difference between Ovid and Enovid, and thinks Audubon is a German highway.”
Lizzie trailed behind—pretty, but angular, clinging and morose. Before we were introduced, Hiram exploded with, “You can’t buy fresh cream around here. So I can’t make the special dessert for tonight.”
“But we’re out in the bush,” I remarked. “You can’t expect the village shop to carry fancy things.”
Roger agreed, “I suppose we’ll have to suffer that deprivation.”
The ladies frowned. “We’re going to change,” Susan said, “and make lunch.”
“Shall I help you disrobe?” I teased.
“You wouldn’t be interested,” she said, smiling and scowling.
“I love Egyptian belly dancers.”
“Too late for me to learn those tricks,” she added and went inside with a heavy step.
“So what do you do?” said Hiram, turning his wayward attention to me.
“I was a college teacher who didn’t teach much. Now I’m a writer who doesn’t write much.”
“And what exactly do you write?” His aggressive tone suggested this was a touchy subject for a blocked writer.
“I’m writing about manic poets. Deranging their senses. Cultivating their madness. Straining for inspiration. Trembling out of control. Walking naked in winter woods. Smashing the wife’s face. Cutting wrists. Putting heads in gas ovens. Diving off bridges and falling onto rocks.”
Trying to relieve Hiram’s obvious irritation, I asked what he did.
“I’m, like, a poet.”
“What have you published?”
“So far, really, nothing. Editors don’t know great writing when they see it. You have to be an insider or professor to get anything published. I think grade school teaches you as much as grad school. But I’ve written a lot and have a lot of irons in the fire.”
“Who are your favorite poets?”
“I like the Romantics: Rod McKuen and John Donne.”
“In that order?”
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind. You sound like the Indian clerk I once asked about valuable letters in his office. He replied, ‘Sir, I am not knowing. I vass not born denn.’ ”
“If you haven’t got into print,” I said rather caustically, “you’re not a poet. Merely a poseur.” If he ever published anything, I swore to write a savage review that would warn potential readers and silence him forever.
“I also write an opinion column for a Spanish-language newspaper under the name of Guillermo Rodriguez.”
“¿Dónde aprendió español?”
“I don’t know any Spanish. Someone translates the stuff for me.”
“That’s a convenient way to cover your tracks.”
“I also spend as much time as I can with my daughter.”
“Does she live near you?”
“She’s on the East coast. So I don’t see her very often. My ex-wife makes sure of that. But we’re very close.”
“Anyway, what do you do when you’re not writing poetry or cooking up columns?”
“I’m a missionary.”
“Converting the cannibals?”
“Teaching Lizzie the new religion.”
“Have fun now,” I said, quoting a bumper sticker, “you’re approaching the church.”
Hiram, it transpired, was a fanatical convert to New Age thought, suffused with zeal but with a patchy knowledge of those bizarre doctrines. He subjected Lizzie, who wanted nothing more than to catch minnows in her net, to a brief catechism about the power of crystals and pyramids, vegan diets and herbal medicine, unguents, aromatherapy and dope. If he ever has another child, I thought—and I hope he’s stricken with paralysis before he can reproduce—it will probably be born in a Lotus position. Lizzie responded to his lecture with a sulky and stupefied look. She had understood nothing and rejected the lesson.
With a self-righteous air Hiram took the groceries indoors, and I sat next to Lizzie on the deck.
“What does your mother think about all this religious stuff?” I asked Lizzie.
“Oh, she doesn’t care,” Lizzie replied, looking nervously at the cabin. “She’s totally involved with her strict diet. She thinks Hiram’s cool.”
“Have you read his poetry?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” she replied. “But he reads it to me all the time.”
Trying to find out how she felt, I asked: “Are you mostly happy or mostly sad?” I was worried when she replied: “I’m mostly scared.”
“What would you like to do when you grow up?” I rather desperately continued. Blankly staring at the water, she responded: “I want to die before I grow up.”
Susan was absorbed with her illness, Roger with his writing, Brenda with keeping Hiram happy. They had all emotionally abandoned the child and ignored what suddenly seemed clear to me. Hiram was molesting Lizzie, and it gave me the creeps when he touched her. She was both attached to and afraid of him. He both smothered and hurt the fatherless child who clung fearfully to him.
After a substantial lunch, which Roger burrowed into like a boll weevil, I checked out the toilet. The view from the bog was spectacular, but a brief glance revealed that the septic tank hadn’t been emptied since last season. The bowl, not to put too fine a point upon it, was filled with bubbles winking at the brim. I couldn’t, despite compelling urgency, bring myself to use it. The alternatives were meager. The pristine lake was out of the question. The incriminating evidence would float back to the shore. The rocky exposed hillside afforded no shelter. Darkness might permit relief, but dawn would reveal the remains of the day. I’d have to wait till our promised hike to a hard-to-find campsite a few miles away. I was surprised to find that this pressing need could prey on my mind and become overwhelmingly important. I resented the demands of my body as much the constraints of the cabin.
This surely ranked with my previous worst-ever visits: with squalid conditions and domestic conflict, cuckolded husbands and moribund wives. The silences and speeches, the repressions and outbursts were all terribly disheartening. I asked myself: why not leave? I wanted, no doubt, to see how the drama played out and try to ease the tension with my soothing presence.
Hiram cornered Lizzie with more doctrinal drill. The women bravely plunged into the icy lake. Though Lizzie was afraid of the water, Hiram tried to force her to follow them. When she refused, he made her bite into a raw fish.
Late in the afternoon the sun, suddenly covered by thunderclouds, disappeared from the once flawless sky. As the wind whipped up the water and the sailboats ran for shelter, an unexpectedly rough hailstorm hurled down icy golf balls that bounced off the wooden deck. Roger and Hiram went down to secure the boats. The rest of us took refuge in the damp single room of the cabin.
The thin mountain air, cramped space and thunderous noise put everyone’s nerves on edge. Brenda, who’d been through a disastrous six-month marriage, mentioned that her ex-husband had stopped paying child support.
“Why,” I asked, “did you marry a drug addict and alcoholic?”
“He wasn’t an alcoholic. He just drank a lot and got violent.”
“But if you knew, why did you marry him?”
“To get even with my father.”
“Are you still trying to get even?”
“I’ll never get even enough.”
“What do you have against him?”
“He keeps telling me I’m fat. He’s spoiled and selfish and cheap. He doesn’t give a damn about anyone but himself. When I was working, he wouldn’t even pick up Lizzie after school.”
“Isn’t it time to end your rebellion?”
“No. I need to keep hating him. It keeps me going”
I was surprised, after all these years, that my charming friend could provoke such hostility in his family.
In a bitter mood, Brenda turned on me. “You’re rude to Hiram and don’t respect his poetry.”
“I came to see your parents. I was told there’d be no other guests. I’m not obliged to entertain your boorish lover.”
Roger rushed in, holding a ball of ice and shivering. Susan, who didn’t need much encouragement, took Brenda’s side and began to attack him.
“You’re too critical. I’m sick of your cutting remarks.”
“I can’t always worship and adore.”
Obsessed with her health and afraid of impure water, she shouted: “You can’t even rinse the dishes properly. You drain them instead of drying them and they’re disgusting.”
“I do the dishes my own way. Idiosyncratic, perhaps, but perfectly adequate.”
“I don’t like the way you prepared the salad. There were tiny bugs on the lettuce.”
“Letus now praise famous bugs. The little fellows won’t do us any harm.”
“Couldn’t we just have a quiet drink?” I pleaded.
“We could. Except that I hate him.”
Susan then announced in her best schoolmistress manner: “Madeleine and her daughter will be here tomorrow and should liven things up a bit. Her dog loves our dogs. Luckily, there’s plenty of room for everyone.”
Overcome by mental exhaustion and physical discomfort, I climbed the ladder and escaped to the cramped-coffin privacy of the loft. But Roger stoked the flames and the argument continued below.
“If you’re so crazy about Hiram why don’t you sleep with him? I’m sure Brenda could spare him for a quickie.”
“I have. And he’s much better than you ever were.”
“Mother!” Brenda screamed. “What a horrible thing to say.”
That night I got up, cracked my head on the low ceiling and climbed down the rickety ladder in the dark. The sleeping bags were spread on the floor and everyone seemed to be breathing peacefully. Outside the crescent moon was veiled behind the clouds. My physical urge remained acute. I longed for the excremental freedom of the dogs. There was nothing for it but to hold on—or in. Then I heard Susan whisper and moan and weep in the shadows. Shining my flashlight in her direction, I saw Hiram rogering her against the side of the cabin. As he grunted and thrusted, she cried out: “you’re so good, soo goood!” After nothing, anything seemed good. Desperate to assert her femininity when terminally ill and prove she was still attractive to men, she was willing to humiliate herself with Hiram. He was more intrigued by his perverse relations with Lizzie and illicit connection with Susan than he was by his tiresome existence with Brenda.
Absorbed with each other, the couple didn’t seem to see me and after a moment I retreated to the loft.
The next morning Roger and I tried to escape to the campsite in one of the boats. Hiram, backed by the ladies, insisted on coming with us and bringing Lizzie, who was pathologically attached to him. Hoping to restore peace, we agreed to take them. As the boat chugged along the rocky shore toward the campsite I tried to draw Lizzie out of her usual trance. Hiram began to needle Roger:
“Who wants to read, like, your boring scholarly articles?”
“People with the wit to understand them.”
“Is it true that most professors are impotent?”
“No more, I imagine, than any other learned profession.”
“I hear the great scholar can’t get it up any more.”
I felt like sinking the bogus priest by permanent immersion in the lake and cutting him up with an outboard motor. Furious, Roger grabbed an oar, swung wildly at Hiram and knocked Lizzie overboard. She sank into the pellucid water, I dived in after her and, shocked by the cold, pushed her back into the boat. When she regained her breath, she sobbed at Roger, “You tried to kill me.” Hiram threw a towel around her and she snuggled up to him.
We agreed not to tell Susan and Brenda about the accident. Roger was shocked; Lizzie was frozen and had a nasty bruise on her head. The outing was spoiled, so we turned the boat around and headed home. Though relief was in sight, it seemed the wrong time to mention my pressing need.
When I complained about the bog Hiram, boasting of his plumbing skills, said he could easily fix it. The trouble, apparently, was a blocked pipe to the septic tank. He found a rusty pickaxe under the house and traced the pipe from the bog to a bulge in the earth. As we all looked hopefully on, he struck with all his force at the crucial spot, which exploded in a twenty-foot geyser and seemed like a blessed release. Hiram looked up at the spout, ran the wrong way and was completely covered in an explosive shower of shit. Stripping off his filthy clothes before his female fan club, who dutifully burned them, he rushed bare-assed into the purifying waters of the lake.
I noticed from the deck that a fisherman had caught his line in an overhanging branch. A small, bright-eyed red bird, attracted by the glittering hook, was snared by it and fluttered helplessly above the lake.
Jeffrey Meyers, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has recently published Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes (2014), Robert Lowell in Love and The Mystery of the Real: Correspondence with Alex Colville (both 2016), and Resurrections: Authors, Heroes—and a Spy (2018).