Burial of the Dead

SERENITY - VI.

VI.

On Saturdays Dr. Ley and Marta invite guests to put on wide brimmed hats, clam-diggers and Camp T-shirts and go sailing on Dr. Ley’s boat.

It’s a good size Cape Codder and seats six comfortably. Marta works the rudder and Dr. Ley works the sails.

This week two brothers and a dark eyed woman from some Persian royal family exiled to Georgetown join the doctor and his wife. They arrive in a limousine with a driver in his fifties, white, overweight, obsequious, humorless.

Levon watches them from the kitchen window, while Molly cleans up after lunch. Levon looks and looks again. “Jesus,” he says.

“What is it?” Molly asks.

“I know those guys,” Levon says, as he watches the younger brother, the harmless one, Little Drew, who appears to have a soft spot for the black-eyed Princess with features Levantine and Swiss accounts from the Peacock Throne. They pass by, and Levon listens as they talk money all the way down the flagstones to the docks below the lodge to the slope and the brown deck with half tires bunting wood. He listens as their voices dissolve in the sound of water lapping the docks and the webs of water spiders, the dust of crayfish, the last swarm of flies and the impossibility of unseen life.

Dr. Ley follows with Marta and Tom, the older brother, impossibly handsome, walking arm in arm, making the kind of small talk that requires first person-plurals and a tolerance for an excessive pride in toys.

Levon stands under a tree by stone steps and watches as Little Drew, Sweet Drew, educated now in the ways of snobbery, helps the Princess out on a floating dock rolling some beneath their feet, minor quakes, 1 point Richters as plates of water rub against and over themselves.

The chauffeur follows carrying a camera, a book, a bucket of sunscreen in brown tubes and a gym bag slung over his shoulder. His face is red, splotchy, sweating. He’s about to have a heart attack. Levon asks if he can help. The guy looks at him, says: Indigestion, and continues on.

In the boat Dr. Ley helps the others to their seats in the bobbing stern and then looks over the boom with the white sail shedding itself like the liquefaction of clothes about his brown legs, too thin for his body. He looks up the hill, sees Levon and calls out, asking him if he’ll work harder next week. Levon says nothing. The two brothers look up the grassy slope and see Levon standing there. They remember him too, not well, not fondly, and Levon continues to stand there, staring them down, envious, small, trying for the rebel pose of inarticulate ennui. He debates whether giving the finger is over the top, decides it is and maintains his line.

The doctor pushes away from the dock, and, as Marta steers the boat out into the lake, Levon sees Marta’s yellow hair in the patch of sunlight that opens and closes with admonitions of a front and summer storms. Dr. Ley pulls the lines taut and points out something to his guests and then leans his body over the side before the wind catches canvas and pushes them away, about to disappear in a fog bank halfway across the lake.

Levon watches the whole thing and thinks about Little Drew, Sweet Drew, the little brother who can’t afford to be arrogant, who hopes others will like him, especially the older brother, the desired one, the chosen one, the one made perfect, without need of humor, as dull as Apollo, solid, no gas or water-weight, no seepage, straight goods, square business, Atticus-integrity, a closed lipped superiority, the perfect company’s company-man, one of the good ones.

Levon watches from the shore and then steps on to the deck and sits next to Stella who predicts something more interesting than weather will ferry the boat to the island of dead trees and abandoned homes mid-mile past the summer theater camp, and Levon asks her what she means. She tells him to remember the storm the night he returned to a cabin by a lake. She tells him to remember what he saw in the glow of candles and the heart-sick of betrayal, the loss of love that was never love, the pain that is with him still and will be with him, forever resident in his furious chest.