This is a summer home, a place for family. The bathroom fixtures clash, but there’s a harmony in the discord.

(source)

 

Lisa & Richard

Lisa believes in God, though God is no one she’d like to meet today. (p. 13*)

For Richard, peace is illusory. There’s beauty in the world, sure, but look closer. The world wants you dead and will not rest until it gets its way. (p. 50*)

Do you know what it’s like to fall in love, not with a person, but a place? Hill slope and dock creak. Sunlight and breeze. A V of geese reflected on the surface of a lake.
Lisa does. (p. 64*)

They thought one day they’d tell the boys, then thought better of it. Michael and Thad had no reason to know they had a sister. Why upset them? Why conjure a girl to life only to smother her before their eyes?
Even now, June is a balloon bound to Richard’s wrist. She hovers behind him, just out of view. He turns, and she turns with him. But she’s there, always, afloat at the periphery. (p. 97*)

Beside her, a gap between the curtain and the wall reveals Lisa’s feet and, above them, the polished silver of the bathtub faucet. The silver is at odds with the sink’s brass, something Diane loves about this place, the house a mishmash, each broken part swapped out, over time, so that nothing matches because nothing needs to match. This is not a place for suppering with colleagues or entertaining guests. This is a summer home, a place for family. The bathroom fixtures clash, but there’s a harmony in the discord. (pp. 112-113*)

She takes his head in her hands and kisses the top of it. She holds his face to her chest. She can be mad at him and love him at the same time. No one stays married thirty-seven years without learning that trick. And she’s no saint. She can be unkind. (p. 128*)

To have a child is to ruin yourself, forever, in the name of love. (p. 146*)

The church is white, two stories, with a peaked roof and a tin cross at the top. The siding is vinyl. Lisa doesn’t know how to feel about a vinyl-sided church. Then again, vinyl is practical, long-lasting, cheap. If God exists, if Jesus is God’s son and if he said all he’s meant to have said, then wouldn’t God prefer vinyl to the Vatican? Save your gold leaf. Feed the poor. Amen. (pp. 148-149*)

[...] when is shared loss ever a comfort? When, in one’s darkest, soul-fucked moments, is it helpful knowing others suffer too? (p. 158*)

Lisa tries to keep up. She’s liberal. She’s progressive. She’s a feminist. But, the ever-changing language, good Lord. Disorienting to be called intolerant by one grad student for learning the term non-binary too late. She likes this generation. She does. She admires their compassion, their drive for inclusion, social justice, civil rights. Still, they could learn a little patience, show a little more respect to those who came before. She was marching before these kids were born. Lisa will miss her students, but not the self-righteous ones, the ones so sure they have it all figured out at twenty-two. (p. 183*)

Thad & Jake

If only Jake listened, asked about his day, showed him affection unattached to sex. That, to Thad, would look like love. (p. 18*)

The room’s one concession to ornamentation is Jake’s painting—a gift last year upon his first visit to the lake. In the painting, a girl palms a pomegranate half. A cherub hovers over one shoulder. A compass at her feet points north. One of the girl’s breasts is out. All of these add up to something symbolic, though, gun to his head, Thad couldn’t say what. Part of him wonders whether Jake could say. Jake might be a genius, or he might be making shit up as he goes. Could be anyone who tries to analyze his work, the joke’s on them. Thad merely remembers being relieved his mother hadn’t protested the wayward boob. (p. 19*)

Those eyes, though. He loves this boy. Jake’s sledgehammered Thad’s heart a hundred times, but it’s Thad who’s let him. You can only blame the hammer so long before you have to blame yourself for not stepping aside. (p. 21*)

Two more days and they’ll all adopt their family roles: his father withdrawn, his mother smothering, Michael moody, Thad jockeying for everybody’s love. (p. 44*)

Thad should flush his system, go a week un-stoned. Except, without weed, he isn’t sure how best to wrestle with the world. He isn’t like the rest of them. He doesn’t have his father’s brilliance, Jake’s talent, Diane’s grace. He doesn’t have Michael’s cynicism to keep him warm at night, or his mother’s faith to fold into when things get rough. He wants to be happy. But how to get there without a joint in his hand? How to live without the love of someone else? How to be happy sober and alone? (p. 56*)

Sometimes you have to let go of what you love to love what you have. (p. 60*)

But, more than he wants to cry, he wants Jake to understand. He wants him to have seen the house thirty years ago. How bright it was. How clean. How you pulled off your shoes, and the carpet rose to meet your feet. How the kitchen filled with the smell of fish and potatoes fried in the same cast-iron pan. How, after a year away, your throat would tighten walking through the door. (p. 61*)

Half of Jake wants to turn and embrace the man he loves, to leave this place and go about their lives. The other half, the half that hates ultimatums, hates shame—the half whispering in his other ear that pride is superior to love—steadies his hand, pinches one nostril to the straw, and inhales. (p. 107*)

The bed is covered by a quilt, and Jake knows this quilt. Once, drunk, he and Marco argued over whether the quilt’s color was seafoam or green, the kind of argument art school students have when all they have to show for all the work they’ve done, so far in life, are their opinions and inflexibility. (p. 110*)

“But here’s the thing.” Jake takes a breath, exhales. “It’s never going to be just us. I don’t want that. But I want you. I can’t imagine life without you. But I can’t imagine life with you alone. I need more experiences than that.”
Gravity, goodwill. Thad floats, and for the first time, sees himself through Jake’s eyes.
Before Jake, he’d been with one man at a time. He’s tried to change, for Jake, but he’s never loved the love they make with other men. Still, he’s gone along with it, refused to speak up, afraid to be alone. And Thad can’t say who’s selfish here, can’t say which is worse, to coerce openness or compel monogamy. Which is when he knows this isn’t just Jake’s fault. (p. 125*)

Michael & Diane

Diane Maddox who grew up watching Mad About You and wanted to be Helen Hunt. Diane Maddox who, in eighth grade, cried—cried—through the Mad About You finale, cried over the fact that Paul and Jamie weren’t together anymore. They would give it another try, the way Diane’s parents gave it another try too many times to count, giving it another try code for the pain a daughter feels when some mornings Dad’s there, eating Cheerios, and some mornings Mom says, “I hope that fucker drives that thing off a fucking bridge.” Diane Maddox who is unhappy but for whom divorce does not feel like an option (whether to prove something to her parents or to Mad About You, she isn’t sure). Diane Maddox who wonders whether things would have gone better had she taken her husband’s name, though of course a name can’t save you. A name can’t save a marriage, can’t save a house from sale or a boy from the bottom of a lake. (p. 24*)

There will be stitches, though she hopes against concussion, against brain injury, against anything permanent because, in all fairness, can the girl who said in sickness and in health still speak for Diane at thirty-three? Say Michael slips into a coma or spends his life in diapers, drinking through a straw? Does the Diane who said I do love this man enough to wipe his ass another fifty years? (p. 24*)

If fates are steered by thoughts, by words, the least Diane can do, on this day, is keep quiet. So she lets her husband hold her hand. She smiles. And there are many, many, many, many, many, many things she does not say. (p. 26*)

There is not enough kindness in this world. Michael should know. He’s more than contributed his share to this insufficiency. The world won’t miss him when he’s gone. Diane might. A child would. But giving yourself someone new to miss you—that’s not a reason to bring life into the world. (p. 142*)

He wants to sip, but something slows him for a moment, then a moment more. It’s a feeling like when you really have to pee. You’ve unzipped your fly. The toilet’s there. The breeze is on your balls, and sweet relief will soon be yours. Still, you savor the moment, the pressure leading up to the release, the exquisite torture of almost. Michael relishes the suspense, then tips the glass and guzzles it.
His eyes shut. He’s warm all over. He is loved. (p. 192*)

Jake & Marco

The next room turns out to be photography. The prints are sepia, mostly, and the person behind the camera feels very strongly about the rule of thirds. There are the obligatory beaches at sunset. There are children with balloons. There is a mouse perched on the forehead of a cat. Motivational posters, most of them, minus the accompanying captions underneath. (p. 161*)
 
“You think we don’t know the difference between what we have here and what you have in New York,” she says. “But we do. You made your point. You rubbed his face in it.”
“Amelia,” Marco says.
Jake has no words. He underestimated her. He’s underestimated them both. (p. 164*)

“Best-case scenario? When you’re seventy, someone floats a ‘forgotten masters’ puff piece in the Times. Your name gets dropped, but so do twenty others. One of those names ends up in lights, and, if it’s yours, people buy your work again. But let’s not kid ourselves. We both know your name won’t be the one that’s called. Because it’s not about the art. It’s about the artist. And what are you? You’re white, you’re cis, you’re upper-class, you’re male. You’re not what the art world needs right now. Fifty years from now, they’ll need you even less.” (p. 165*)

But here’s the truth. I’ve tried. I’ve tried, and I can’t paint that way anymore. Whatever dreamland I was in at twenty, I can’t find my way back to that place. I don’t expect you to understand.” (p. 166*)

“I thought you’d be different,” Marco says. “When I reached out, I thought we’d have both grown up, calmed down. But you’re still the little boy in the black jacket who thinks he’s better than everybody else. It must kill you, knowing I don’t envy what you have.” (p. 166*)

* as indicated on my e-book reader

David James Poissant - Lake Life (Simon & Schuster, 2020)