Catskills
fiction
Carl’s in the backseat staring at nudes, trying to calm an emerging erection as Michael and Heather bicker about having to find somebody to watch their dog for the weekend since Meg informed them it would be a no-pet weekend. Carl zooms in on her collar bones, like wire hangers where her breasts are draped.
“It’s the fucking Catskills. That’s crazy, right Carl?” Heather was always eager to implicate others in her disdain. Carl agreed, but his voice broke which created an opportunity for Michael to veer away from the bickering with Heather and into the realm of childish jokes about puberty, faggotry, the like, but it just made Carl’s dick harder to think about hormones.
I’m hungry, Carl texted back with a tongue emoji. He adjusted in his seat, irritable that he was here and not there, castrated for his weekend as the seventh wheel, and he wondered why he agreed to come in the first place.
The bickering began again, this time about which bedroom they’d be assigned which signaled to Carl that they were close and he’d finally have peace. As many years as they’d been going to the Catskills, Carl always forgot how similar the culture was to his upbringing in the South. The people drove pickup trucks, voted for republicans, and spoke in Southern dialects that he’d assumed they’d stolen as some sort of Confederate fantasy. There were trailer homes, dip cans littering the concrete roads, and barbecue restaurants, and as they turned into the gravel road that lead to the house, Carl felt a sense of peace being surrounded by rurality, away from the city, a place that—in his almost decade of calling it home—still seemed to reject him.
Meg inherited the house from his parents before they moved across the country to California. He’s on the front porch, his feet propped on the railing, smoking a cigarette and reading something, something he won’t shut up about all weekend. He’s so engrossed that he doesn’t wave as Michael slows to a halt just next to him in the driveway. Michael honks. Meg jolts, rolling his eyes playfully.
“Pull around to the back! You’re the first ones!” Heather says something about the new paint job, how the shrubbery is different from the last time, how hideous both are in relation to one another. Michael grips her thigh and shakes it. It tickles her and they share a dirty look with one another. Their language is sex and they speak it and hear it in everything. They don’t share common interests, values, even dislikes, but Carl was often jealous that, no matter what new junction of discordance they arrived at, all it took was one rabid fuck for them to align once more.
Around the back of the house, Casey was clipping herbs from a small garden on the porch. She was sweating under a wide-brimmed hat that shielded her fair skin from the sun. She dropped the clippers immediately at the sight of her friends and ran to the passenger side of the car to embrace Heather as soon as she opened the door. When she pulled away from their embrace, Carl noticed a now-translucent patch on Heather’s shirt where Casey’s sweaty forearm had been. Heather picked it away from her skin as Casey embraced Michael next.
Casey was hesitant as she approached Carl, half-hugging him from the side, suffering from some latent attraction to him that had been festering inside her since their college days. The more unexamined it went, the more it sweltered, but Carl—for the most part—was unaware of it, plagued by a general state of awkwardness that convinced him that Casey disliked him rather than desired him.
Casey lead them through the house, directing Michael and Heather to take their pick of the rooms which pricked Heather with a slight guilt. They chose the room furthest from all the others and closed the door behind them, Michael’s deep, rugged voice ringing out “do not disturb” as the door swung to a close. As apparent as it was how often they had sex, Michael reveled in a pleasure bordering on kink announcing to anybody within earshot that he was about to breed, because, even though he was a married man, pussy was still a commodity that required bragging about as uncomfortable as it made Heather privately.
Like always, Casey expressed her light disgust at Michael’s expression of dominance. It was her way of feeling quietly superior for coupling herself with a man who reads novels rather than professional sports analytics, who would rather talk about ideas instead of tits, but Carl knew that disgust was also a little demon being exorcised from her spirit, a subliminal jealousy that she and Meg hadn’t made love in ages. From where they were standing, Meg could be seen underlining passages in some novel by some man about some war as Casey craved attention to her body the way Meg gave attention to words.
“We redid the entire space.” Casey said it as though she believed herself to be reading Carl’s mind, assuming he had noticed at all, let alone cared about interior design, because he was still thinking about the nudes. About tendons in necks.
“Love the sofa.” Carl said it like he knew things about sofas. Carl’s roommate picked out their sofa. Carl slept on a mattress on the floor. Carl ate Hershey’s kisses for breakfast.
Casey pointed him toward the only bedroom with a twin sized bed where he’d be relegated for the weekend. The assignment reminded him of his mother who was a maid his entire childhood, how she’d spend months in large mansions with entire quarters historically utilized by the help. He wondered what help he might be of to his friends this weekend. Would Lindsey and Sean ask him to have sex with them like they did when they first opened up their marriage? Would Michael further invest in him emotionally than he does his own wife? Would Heather flirt with him to make Michael jealous? Would Meg belittle him to assert intellectual dominance? Would Casey cry on his shoulder when she got too drunk?
Carl closed the door and tossed his duffel in the corner which was over-saturated by natural light beaming in through the six windows that wrapped around the corner bedroom. Outside, there was a feral cat stalking some unseen prey. It was well-fed, a superior hunter, and its chin was impressively flat against the ground as it slowly placed one paw in front of the other in pursuit of its next meal. Carl tapped on the glass. The cat snapped its attention to the window, trying to see inside, but the light only reflected the landscape back to it. Another tap, and the cat ran off behind a rusty shed near the back of the property.
Carl texted Casey, asking her for the WiFi password, but she couldn’t remember it and told him to text Meg. Before he could type out a message, Meg sent him the password followed by “maybe unplug for the weekend?”
There were no drapes or blinds in the windows, so Carl closed himself in the closet and stripped himself naked. He opened the closet and crawled on his hands and knees across the scalding hot floor and situated himself at the foot of the bed, his back against the metal frame. He propped his phone against the wall and dialed, waiting, enticing his dick into an erection. When she answered, she was sitting in almost the exact position, her feet planted in the ground, spread open, playing with herself. She had a white tank top on and she folded the hem of it over her breasts, clenching it between her teeth. She rubbed her nipples until they were hard and Carl spit on himself, half to make the stroking easier and half to cool his skin down from the blazing hot sun. Carl finished very quickly, so he watched, whispering good girl, c’mon baby encouraging her to climax, but all he could think of was the fat cat, how he’d spoiled its next meal, wondering if it would starve due to his brutal intervention, of Michael and Heather, inevitably—shamelessly—fucking across the house from him as Casey clipped strands of dill from her garden and Meg underlined talking points for the weekend, waiting on the front porch for Lindsey and Sean, late as usual.
Casey’s dill plant hadn’t yielded enough for the recipe she’d intended on serving that night, so she saved it for lunch the next day, giving her enough time to send Meg into town to fetch some.
Casey called everybody in from outside, telling them to find their places around the table. Each couple placed themselves across from each other leaving Carl at the head—or as it seemed to Carl—the rear of the table as Casey place an eight-quart, steaming Dutch oven in the center of the table. Lyndsey’s sense of heroism overcame her and she offered to switch places with Carl, practically shoving him out of one chair and into the next.
Lyndsey and Sean always made the clearest attempt at blurring the lines between couple and friend when they were together with Carl, going out of their way to include him in conversations he had no business or desire to be in. It was their incessant need for Carl’s appreciation that made Carl most adverse to their attention out of all the rest. Their singling out of Carl, meant to bring him in, only pushed him further and further out. Now Carl, sat across from Sean against his will, couldn’t help but hear himself as atonal amidst an otherwise harmonic chord, a chord that—while sturdy—didn’t particularly sing to him, and was now dissonant, seeming to vibrate into an erosion of the rest of the weekend.
“Smells exquisite.” Meg thought about that word. Thought about using a different, less obnoxious word.
“It’s a recipe from this YouTube chef that I love. She’s so funny and self-deprecating and I’ve never tried a recipe of her’s I didn’t love.” Casey labeled a few spoonfuls into each of their bowls, scraping the bottom of the pot by the time she got to Lyndsey at the head of the table.
“See! Aren’t you glad we switched places?” Lyndsey and Sean laughed in each other’s faces, looking for Carl to join in, but Carl was staring into the bubbling brew, fixed on the fresh sprigs of green dill sinking into the mucky, pungent stew.
“This is a very similar circumstance to one in a novel I finished a few weeks ago.” Whenever Meg revved up, the group did everything in their power to steer him away from monologue. Michael would crack a joke and Heather would laugh flirtatiously, Lyndsey would argue semantics as Sean obliterated the diatribe entirely, spinning it into a story of his own in an attempt to save them all from another five minutes of their precious lives being muddled into wordy teasers of their own eventual deaths.
But Carl listened intently, followed every turn of phrase along Meg’s circuitous path toward meaning, every inflection in his sweet voice a burst of kinetic energy, because even though Meg was prickly and earnest, Carl found his utter void of self-awareness endearing, his greatest quality even. Meg did not have a magnetic sense of humor, alluring beauty, or charm, but he made Carl wonder. Carl, a begrudgingly-lapsed lad of sorts who fucked and snorted coke off waists, adorned himself in expensive clothes from independent fashion brands, who navigated the world bodily, this Carl became hooked on words, ideas, whenever Meg spoke them, and it was that palpable sense of filial enamor that made Casey intrigued by Carl that much more, thinking that if Carl could take Meg as he was—intellectual gibberish and all—so could she.
“The Waves is probably more significant to the modernist canon than Ulysses.” Meg spoke of friendship and loss, pausing before loss to represent his opinion of it as a more meaningful theme of the novel. But the thing that sets it apart is the voice, the internal monologue, that each of the six characters never truly speak, only divulging their deepest thoughts and feelings in extensive, poetic monologues of thought. The characters grow from school children to adulthood, always remaining a part of one another’s lives throughout time, though they are fractured by the death of a dear friend they all share, a friend that became part of the group at some point in the middle, and was lost later in the middle, a character who is only referred to by the others, never speaks—or thinks, rather—for himself.
“It’s all about how we really have no individuality, and that we’re just summations and collages of the people we surround ourselves with.” But Carl didn’t buy that. That there was no foundational difference between them all and that Meg, by saying it out loud, was hoping it would become true—and quite transparently. In fact, Carl felt that their stark differences were the things driving them abjectly apart. He had suspected this would be the last time they were all together, and every would Meg spoke in the direction of this earnestly wishful thought was luring the group toward the same conclusion.
Sean did not spin, Michael did not joke, Heather did not laugh, Lyndsey did not critique, and Casey just scraped and scraped at the bottom of the cast iron pot until Meg finally became aware that he had alienated all of them.
“If two trees fucked in the woods, would you hear them fucking?” Michael joked as he and Heather laced their shoes up for a stroll in the woods, Sean and Lyndsey opting for a bike ride to Hudson for some window shopping, and Meg returned to his books as Carl helped Casey clean up lunch. She was abnormally silent throughout the chore, indicating to Carl a parade of second-hand embarrassment was rounding the corner, but as she scrubbed each spoon, rinsed each bowl by hand while the machine washer sat empty, she began to poke fun at her husband’s literary sermon which, to Carl, —as each jab grew in venom—began to sound like an admission of loss, a confession.
Meg made Casey feel such shame, but she couldn’t articulate why or what for. He was an intelligent man, a gentle one, and for all of his stuffy gesticulating, there was an equal if not greater portion of genuine and reliable care at his disposal, but the menagerie of desirable qualities he had accrued through life only made his obsession with public ideation that much more reprehensible. How, in all of his books and studies, had he not come to realize that he was tragically boring?
“Want to go for a walk? It’s nice out.” But Casey declined, knowing the end of this chore was only the beginning of the next one: preparing for the bonfire, so she dried her hands on a hand towel—it was cherry red— and shuffled toward the bedroom, failing to keep a straight line.
Carl unlocked his phone to find text after text of new nudes. He scrolled through them and began to wonder if Michael and Heather were fucking in the woods. Carl slid the glass door open as Meg underlined more words.
“Hey, I’m off to nap for a bit. Sounds like a cool book. The one you told us about just now.”
“Cool.”
Carl found himself stripping in his closet again, ashamed at how pubescent it was. He crawled from within, making his way to the foot of the bed, but from the ground on his hands and knees, Carl spotted the fat cat, only this time it was not flat against the ground stalking some rodent or bird, but perched on a branch of a tree, staring at him. As though it had been waiting for him, trapped him, and he wondered if the girl had conspired with the cat, sent Carl pictures of her chest at the cat’s behest, knowing Carl would disappear into the bedroom to relieve himself. They stared at one another for some time until the cat became bored of Carl, knowing it had some power over him, then it scampered down the trunk of the tree and trotted into the woods in a way that stirred some primordial, beastly urge in Carl to hunt it down for a battle to the death. But Captain Ahab turned his attention from the great white to his FaceTime sex date, realizing Meg was mocking him for calling Virginia Woolf “cool.”
“Who the fuck are all these people?” Sean did not handle strangers well. He was queer, icy, but the wit and cynicism that made him a wicked delight to his established friends often repelled potential male friends who assumed he was gay and therefore hitting on them, and women who found his insecurity a red flag wether as a friend or lover.
“I thought it was just going to be us this weekend,” Lyndsey whispered, she and Sean flanking Carl on the back porch as more guests emerged from around the side of the house.
Carl left them in their distress to join Michael and Heather who were mingling with Hannah and Thomas—another couple and Meg and Casey’s neighbors—near the pit as Meg rolled a fresh log into the fire. They were saying things to one another about vans and car seats, formula and prenatal vitamins, but Michael steered the dialogue away from children to the World Cup, changing the conversational gears without popping the clutch. It was the one thing sex could not solve between the two of them. In fact, any time they’d argue about when, where, why or why not to have kids, it would culminate in some emotionally complicated tryst leaving Heather feeling reduced to nothing more than some vessel, and Michael puffing his chest, widening his stance behind her, trying and failing to be bigger—enough—to fill it. So as Michael and Carl joked about the men’s national team with Thomas, Heather averted her eyes from the knowing glance of Hannah, the expectant and glowing mother, who had just witnessed a desecration that left Heather consumed by shadow.
Michael did not notice, or pretended not to, as Heather stormed away from the fire, through the crowded yard, and into the house. Carl watched as Lyndsey ran in after her leaving Sean alone on the porch, checking his phone in pitiful loneliness before moseying over to one of the three coolers scattered around the landscape to retrieve another drink.
“You’re Carl.” Hannah the neighbor said it certainly.
She told him how fondly he was spoken of by Casey and Meg. How darling he was, how charming. She was certain it was him by the way he noticed Heather’s sadness, and she recounted how once, under the influence of just two glasses of wine, Casey revealed that he was the one she’d go after were she not married. Hannah asked Carl if he was single, apologizing for being so forward, but mentioning she had a friend in the City he might get along well with. Carl wondered if he was in an exclusive relationship. He had not spent much money on her yet which told him no, but he spent most of the day thinking about her which told him yes. He slept with other women which made him wonder if he wanted exclusivity ever again, but he felt bad after sex with them, thinking of her, and would text her photos of himself smiling, the food he was eating, and obscure objects he saw on the street out of guilt or in love—both. And because of this, Carl politely declined, saying he wasn’t looking for a relationship at the moment which seemed true enough for Hannah to drop the subject giving Carl an opportunity to find a stump around the fire and sit, thankfully alone.
From his stump he could barely see the house through the infestation of people that had swarmed to Meg and Casey’s yard, but weaving through them all was a belligerent Sean making his way to the tree line at the back of the property. Lyndsey and Heather were still inside and Michael, either oblivious to or unconcerned with Heather’s absence, was skewering a hot dog with his new friend Thomas.
“I think Sean’s super fucked up.” Carl wasn’t sure if Meg could hear him over the crackling of the fire, so he said it again, this time loud enough for Michael to overhear.
“Oh, Sean’s super fucked up? What’s new?” Meg stoked the fire with a stick, but the tent of kindling he’d constructed fell yet again sending a flurry of embers into the air and calcifying in Carl’s understanding of Meg that whatever care he did possess for Sean, his friend, would not take precedence over his contempt for him.
“Where’s Lyndsey. She’s the only one who can calm him down when he gets like this.” Michael’s words brined in embarrassment as he dipped his prong of hotdogs into the flames.
It was then that Casey emerged from the crowd, a bit beyond nervous at Sean’s demeanor.
“Are you guys seeing Sean right now? We need to get Lyndsey,” but her frantic concern read as dramatics to Meg who snapped at her.
“Sean is embarrassing us in front of all of our new friends, Casey.” He hissed it swatting smoke out of his face.
“Have you guys seen Lyndsey?” She shifted between Michael and Carl, but Michael was busy cracking jokes about wieners and meat.
“She’s in the house. With Heather.” Carl was rarely petty, and he regretted pausing between the two thoughts. He regretted saying it loud enough for Michael to hear. But it also felt good.
“I’ll go get her. Carl, will you go make sure Sean’s okay?” Carl nodded, noticing Michael’s gregariousness morph into seething anger, Meg’s petulance stemming from borderline ego death by a basic survival skill.
By now, many were rubbernecking as Sean broke through the tree line. Carl called after him, but not so loud as to draw even more unwanted attention to the scene. Carl’s call spooked Sean in his drunken stupor and it revved him up to a run as he hurtled deeper into the woods, now black and increasingly disorienting as the pursuit flew further and further from what little light Meg’s puny fire provided.
Carl could no longer see Sean. He stopped in a small clearing, knowing Sean’s noisy recklessness would give away his location, but as Carl listened, he heard nothing but the boisterous cackles of partygoers, now at least a hundred yards in the opposite direction. Carl patted himself down, hoping to use his phone’s flashlight to get his bearings, but it was not on him. Carl called Sean’s name to no reply. He began to panic when he remembered from one of Meg’s many lessons that this wood stretched for ten acres behind their property and that silence meant Sean was already too far out of ear shot to hear Carl’s call, willfully concealing himself in the labyrinth, or hurt and unable to cry for help. But before Carl’s panic could erupt into distress of his own, he heard Sean, whimpering somewhere nearby.
Carl was about to head toward Sean. He was oriented toward his cries, a straight shot and maybe thirty feet away, but then he heard voices, Lyndsey and Casey calling out for him and Sean. They must’ve lured Heather too, guilted Michael and Meg into the hunt as well, all of their voices splintering off of trees and rock faces amid the wood like some discordant choir of reluctant angels, descending upon the damned. Carl could no longer hear Sean’s whimpers over the cries of the search party. He could’ve called after them, and they began to worry when he didn’t.
“Something must’ve happened to Carl. It’s not like he can’t hear us. They couldn’t have gotten that far.” Heather clutched onto Michael as she muttered it, her fears mounting higher and higher with every unanswered call.
“I’m over here!”
Casey was ashamed to admit it, but she was disheartened when she realized it was Sean’s voice and not Carl’s.
“That’s definitely Sean.” Lyndsey ran frantically toward Sean’s voice, her flashlight flickering through the rows and rows of trees.
They reached Sean who had gathered himself only just enough to express his concern for Carl.
“He was just behind me, but then it got silent. I thought he was right there.” He began to weep, fearing that his episode might have lead to his innocent friend’s demise.
“He probably just turned back when you weren’t answering,” Meg’s reassurance just barely breaking the surface of his scorn.
They bickered about staying out to look, about the pros and cons of splitting up, about the ruined party cut short by Sean’s instability, local wildlife, and wether or not Meg had put the fire out. Once they had settled—once their fears were no longer possessing them and they were in collective agreement that Carl was measured and sensible above all else—they left. Together.
But Carl was still there. So near, behind a tree. He could hear Meg’s curtness and Casey’s disillusionment, Heather’s belittling and Michael’s pouting, Lyndsey’s suffocating concern and Sean’s avoidant slurring, but as their voices distanced and Carl was enveloped by black silence, he wondered if he’d ever give himself to them—any of them, in any combination—again. How long before they came looking for him again? Could he sneak in, collect his things, and escape unseen? Or maybe he’d leave it all behind, surrender what few possessions he brought along for the weekend: casualties of the destruction of friendship. But as much as it stung him to admit it, they were right about Carl and his sense, his rationality, and he followed the fading sound of their voices, making his way back to the A-frame house.
From the yard, he could see them inside pacing about the room, numb with fear, Casey, in tears, as Meg comforted her in a moment of pure compassion. Michael was on the phone, presumably with the police as Sean wept in the corner consumed with guilt. When they saw Carl bound up the stairs onto the back porch, they all flocked to him outside in palpable relief to hear his fiction of being lost and running too far in the wrong direction. But not Casey. Casey, whose emerging grief over the potential loss of Carl incensed her true feelings of love for him and activated her uncharacteristic decisiveness to finally leave Meg, tangled up in a snare caused by her own lack of action, this Casey was skeptical, now staring at the key and cudgel to her problem, but even though she had nothing even remotely resembling proof besides her acute intuition to suggest otherwise, she knew Carl was a liar, and when Carl locked eyes with her from outside on the porch, he knew that she knew that he was a liar too. Casey left quietly, burrowed herself in the bedroom without speaking a word of her suspicions, and succumbed to sleep.
Lyndsey dragged Sean into their room before he could descend into some disorienting spiral of guilt, but not before he gave Carl a kiss on the cheek. Carl wiped the slop onto his sleeve and told Sean that he had nothing to apologize for which only made Sean cry harder once he was hidden behind the bedroom door. Michael was salivating to get Heather back in their room. He patted her on the ass and wished Carl and Meg a goodnight with a bastardly wink.
Meg seemed lost in the middle of the room, thinking about his fire probably. He seemed drawn to the porch for more reading, but he shuffled toward his bedroom instead without a word to Carl who suddenly found himself coldly alone in the house longing for the fresh air of the woods.
It was quiet now, and dark, woolen grey, only moonlight reflecting off of the wood floors and industrial metal dining table. Carl laid awake in bed, propped against the headboard, staring blankly out the wall of windows, toward the back of the property at the line of trees. They were still, no wind, only the tips of the ends of the thinnest branches, quivering.