I walked away without saying anything.
He wasn’t the only houseguest that summer. In fact, there was never only one guest at Monk’s House, especially in summertime, when my parents’ teaching duties died down and they could focus on what they truly loved—drinking and adultery. I don’t say that in order to make some sort of tragedy of my childhood. I say it because it’s the truth. And that summer, the summer of Chet, there was a rotating cast of hangers-on, graduate students, ex-lovers, and current lovers, all coming and going like moths to a flickering porch light. And these were just the houseguests. My parents, as always, had endless parties—I would listen to these parties hum and roar through the walls of my bedroom as I lay in bed. They were familiar symphonies, beginning with bursts of laughter, discordant jazz, and the slap of screen doors, and ending, in the early morning hours, with the sound of yelling, sometimes sobbing, and always the slam of bedroom doors.
Chet was a slightly different breed of animal from the usual houseguest. My mother referred to him as an outsider artist, meaning, I suppose, that he was not affiliated with her college, neither a student nor a visiting artist. I remember my father calling him “the homeless degenerate your mother has housed for the summer. Avoid him, Lily, I think he has leprosy. And God knows what’s in the beard.” I don’t think it was genuine advice from my father—my mother was in earshot, and he was speaking for her benefit—but it turned out to be prophetic.
I’d spent my entire life at Monk’s House, my father’s name for the sprawling, rotting hundred-year-old Victorian mansion an hour from New York City in the deep woods of Connecticut. David Kintner—my father—was an English novelist who’d made most of his money off the film adaptation of his first and most successful book, a boarding-school sex farce that caused a brief sensation in the late 1960s. He’d come to America as a visiting writer at Shepaug University, and stayed on as an adjunct when he met Sharon Henderson, my mother, an abstract expressionist with a tenured teaching position in the school’s art department. Together, they bought Monk’s. It didn’t have a name when they purchased it, the year I was conceived, but my father, who rationalized the six bedrooms by plans to fill it with creative and intelligent (and young and female) houseguests, thought he’d like to name it after the house that Virginia and Leonard Woolf shared. It was also a reference to Thelonious Monk, my father’s favorite musician.
There were many peculiarities to Monk’s, including some unused solar panels that were smothered in ivy, a screening room with an old film projector, a wine cellar with a dirt floor, and a small kidney-shaped swimming pool in the backyard that was rarely cleaned. Over the years it had devolved back into a murky pond, its bottom and sides covered in algae, its surface constantly filmed in rotting leaves, its unused filter clogged with the bloated corpses of mice and squirrels. At the beginning of that particular summer, I had made an attempt to clean the half-filled pool myself, pulling off the mold-blackened tarp, finding a butterfly net that worked for skimming the leaves, then filling the pool from the hose over the course of one tepid June day. I asked my parents separately if they would pick up pool chemicals the next time they went shopping. My mother’s response: “I don’t want my darling daughter swimming around in a bunch of chemicals all summer.” My father promised to make a special trip to the store, but I watched the memory of the promise fade out of his eyes before we even finished the conversation.
I swam in the pool, anyway, for the first half of the summer, telling myself that at least I had it to myself. The water turned green, and the bottom and sides became slippery with dark algae. I pretended the pool really was a pond, deep in the woods, in a special place that only I knew about, and my friends were the turtles and the fish and the dragonflies. I swam at dusk, when the cricket whine was at its highest, nearly blocking out the sounds of parties starting up on the screened porch at the front of the house. It was on one of those dusk swims that I first noticed Chet, a beer bottle in his hand, watching me from the edge of the woods. “How’s the water?” he asked, when he realized he’d been spotted.
“It’s all right,” I said.
“I didn’t even know this pool was back here.” He stepped out of the woods and into the remaining light of the day. He wore a pair of white overalls that were spattered in paint. He sipped at his beer, foam clinging to his beard.
“No one uses it but me. My parents don’t like to swim.” I paddled in the deep end, glad that the water was green and cloudy, so that he couldn’t see me in my bathing suit.
“Maybe I’ll go swimming sometime. Would that be all right with you?”