A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [32]
“Women are cunts,” his father says. “That’s why.”
Rolph gapes at him. His father is angry, a muscle jumping in his jaw, and without warning Rolph is angry too: assailed by a deep, sickening rage that stirs in him very occasionally—when he and Charlie come back from a riotous weekend around their father’s pool, rock stars jamming on the roof, guacamole and big pots of chili, to find their mother alone in her bungalow, drinking peppermint tea. Rage at this man who casts everyone aside.
“They are not—” He can’t make himself repeat the word.
“They are,” Lou says tightly. “Pretty soon you’ll know it for sure.”
Rolph turns away from his father. There is nowhere to go, so he jumps into the sea and begins slowly paddling back toward shore. The sun is low, the water choppy and full of shadows. Rolph imagines sharks just under his feet, but he doesn’t turn or look back. He keeps swimming toward that white sand, knowing instinctively that his struggle to stay afloat is the most exquisite torture he can concoct for his father—also that, if he sinks, Lou will jump in instantly and save him.
That night, Rolph and Charlie are allowed to have wine at dinner. Rolph dislikes the sour taste, but enjoys the swimmy blur it makes of his surroundings: the giant beaklike flowers all over the dining room; his father’s speared fish cooked by the chef with olives and tomatoes; Mindy in a shimmery green dress. His father’s arm is around her. He isn’t angry anymore, so neither is Rolph.
Lou has spent the past hour in bed, fucking Mindy senseless. Now he keeps one hand on her slim thigh, reaching under her hem, waiting for that cloudy look she gets. Lou is a man who cannot tolerate defeat—can’t perceive it as anything but a spur to his own inevitable victory. He has to win. He doesn’t give a shit about Albert—Albert is invisible, Albert is nothing (in fact, Albert has left the group and returned to his Mombasa apartment). What matters now is that Mindy understand this.
He refills Mildred’s and Fiona’s wineglasses until their cheeks are patchy and flushed. “You still haven’t taken me bird-watching,” he chides them. “I keep asking, but it never happens.”
“We could go tomorrow,” Mildred says. “There are some coastal birds we’re hoping to see.”
“Is that a promise?”
“A solemn promise.”
“Come on,” Charlie whispers to Rolph. “Let’s go outside.”
They slip from the crowded dining room and skitter onto the silvery beach. The palm trees make a slapping, rainy sound, but the air is dry.
“It’s like Hawaii,” Rolph says, wanting it to be true. The ingredients are there: the dark, the beach, his sister. But it doesn’t feel the same.
“Without the rain,” Charlie says.
“Without Mom,” Rolph says.
“I think he’s going to marry Mindy,” Charlie says.
“No way! You said he didn’t love her.”
“So? He can still marry her.”
They sink onto the sand, still faintly warm, radiating a lunar glow. The ghost sea tumbles against it.
“She’s not so bad,” Charlie says.
“I don’t like her. And why are you the world’s expert?”
Charlie shrugs. “I know Dad.”
Charlie doesn’t know herself. Four years from now, at eighteen, she’ll join a cult across the Mexican border whose charismatic leader promotes a diet of raw eggs; she’ll nearly die from salmonella poisoning before Lou rescues her. A cocaine habit will require partial reconstruction of her nose, changing her appearance, and a series of feckless, domineering men will leave her solitary in her late twenties, trying to broker peace between Rolph and Lou, who will have stopped speaking.
But Charlie does know her father. He’ll marry Mindy because that’s what winning means, and because Mindy’s eagerness to conclude this odd episode and return to her studies will last until precisely the moment she opens the door to her Berkeley apartment and walks into the smell of simmering lentils: one of the cheap stews she and her roommates survive on. She’ll collapse on a swaybacked couch they found on the sidewalk and unpack her many books, realizing that in weeks of lugging them through Africa, she’s read virtually nothing. And when