Covers by Gwen E. Kirby
(now experimentally a first chapter)

1.

Simon’s mother had discovered his father’s body in the pool, face up, eyes shut, stretched out on the floating mat. How had she even known he was dead? His father liked to lie as still as possible, trying to keep the cold pool water from coming over the edge of the mat and running down the indents to chill his skin. As a child, Simon had spent afternoons in the pool pretending to be a submarine, or a crocodile, or a piranha, swimming under the water, closer and closer to his father. He liked it under the water, listening to the muffled silence, watching his father’s mat float above him like a cloud. Simon would surface just next to the mat, his nostrils above the water, and then circle until his dad noticed and yelled at him. Or didn’t notice, and Simon finally gave up and ended the game.

The only object in the pool, the mat must have slowly ricocheted off the sides until it lingered near enough to his mother for her to realize what had happened. He could picture her standing by the edge of the pool in her light blue kimono, eyes crusty with last night’s makeup, pouring her martini into the water as if it was the Great Gatsby lying amidst his flowering blood. She called Simon later that evening, drunk. “Darling,” she lurched. Then her voice took on an odd edge of hysteria. “I found your father in the pool this afternoon. He’s finally gone and bought himself a pine condo.”

“Where?”

There was a strange silence at the other end, then she simply yelled, “He’s dead, you ass!” and slammed down the phone. She called back five minutes later to apologize, it was the shock of having found him that way, and the timing was so terrible—her book was coming out that month, they had been planning on having a dinner party to launch it. Now she just didn’t know. What would people think? Maybe if she was wearing black and didn’t have anything too showy, just some dull crackers and cheese spread. Did that seem funereal enough or would people think she was over doing it? Loitering barely submerged under her words, Simon could hear pleasure. A love of the dramatic that had caused her, he thought, to remarry his dad only a few years after their divorce was finalized. She was upset, that was clear, and babbling, but even temporarily not herself she managed to keep up her circular self-focused thoughts.

“I called his side of the family. They want to have the funeral as soon as possible. Needless to say, they didn’t want my help planning it.” She paused for a moment. “I won’t hold it against you if you don’t go.”

“Of course I’m going to go, Mom. Jesus.”

And this time it was Simon who had hung up the phone. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and tried to picture his father’s face. All he could see was a round belly protruding over swim trunks, slowly growing cool in the afternoon sun. The light was getting slowly darker outside, and even though it was now well past dinner time he didn’t feel like eating the dinner he had made for himself. The soup had acquired a thin film over the top, the firming cream turning a slightly darker color. It reminded him of the big pots of soup in the dining hall at college. He pushed his spoon through the skin and watched the soup ooze out from underneath. Then he put his spoon down and pushed the bowl away from him.

The pool had always been the center of his family’s life together, it seemed; there was so much life that happened apart. When they bought the house, when Simon was four, there had been no pool. He couldn’t picture the backyard as it must have looked then, full of small shrubs and dying if not already dead grass. A typical Los Angeles landscape, tucked behind one of the many warm colored stucco houses that lined the canyons. They had made the move on his mother’s money. It had been enough to make a down payment, but not enough to improve it. They lived amidst other people’s bad decorating choices: fake wood paneling, deep brown carpeting. “No one would choose that color unless they were expecting someone to shit on it,” his father used to say, remembering the house as it originially was, pointing out to friends how much better it looked now.

Then his father had gotten his first big acting contract, signing him for at least four more seasons on the suddenly hit show “Shady Street.” The complete DVD set had come out last year and for some reason, Simon had bought it. It was still in its saran wrap, underneath his bed. He had already seen all of the episodes growing up and he didn’t really like the show anyway. His father played “the best friend” of the main family’s father. They lived next door to each other on a heavily tree lined street. It had been a bit part at first, but people had liked him and the writers included him more and more. When he got the extended contract, his father had decided then and there to put in a pool. Not because he liked pools—Simon often wondered why his father got into the pool at all—but because everyone he knew in acting had a pool. Somewhere to bring a few friends, have a few drinks, and talk about the business.

The business. Simon felt a small bubble of anger well against the back of his throat, not in defense of his father but in frustration with that entire world. Whatever there had been to say about the business, his father must not have said the right things. Smug assholes in sunglasses, Simon remembered. Sitting by the pool with their cups in their hands, the women tanning, the men who were actors showing off their chests while the producers and directors sat smug with their bellies and brains. At some point, between his first game of little league, which he always hated, to when his voice dropped and finally stayed that way, the visits from friends got less friendly. After “Shady Street” ended, his father looked at first confidently and then less so for other acting jobs. He got type cast regularly at first, but then work dropped off to guest appearances and celebrity game shows. Simon remembered his father suddenly being at home more; he hadn’t wanted him there and neither had his mother. Not during the day, their time to be masters of the house. As work dried up, his father tried putting the pressure on friends to help him out, get him one more screen test. Eventually people stopped coming to visit at all. But his father kept using the pool. Any sunny day during the summer or warm day in the winter he would be floating out back, rigidly trying to avoid getting wet, stubbornly tanning his softening midsection.

“Why don’t you have some of your friends over for a pool party?” his mother would always ask Simon when they were in hearing range of his father. “I hate to see such a luxury going to waste. And I would love to get to actually see them for longer than it takes to pull out of the driveway.” She had a gift for killing two birds with one stone. As her husband’s work had begun to fall apart, she had begun to have a career of her own. Her family had always been wealthy, she didn’t need to work, but she was restless. She loved to make claims about her great restlessness. “It’s an itch,” she would say to chefs she interviewed for her food column or, later, to the journalists who interviewed her about her new book, whichever new book it was at the time. She did love to cook. The first thing to be improved in the house, after the swimming pool was installed, was a better kitchen. New countertops, a new oven, and a huge window letting light inside. She hated cooking in anything except natural light, but she would stay in her room with the blinds drawn until four in the afternoon reading a book.

For the last three years Simon hadn’t even spoken to Richard. He started trying to think of him that way, as Richard, instead of father or dad or that asshole. Ever since he had come out to his parents, by that same swimming pool, Simon had tried to think of his father as Richard Blain, that actor, and his mother as Lynn. Thank God Blain was such a generic name. No one ever asked him if he was related; no one probably remembered his father to even think to make the comparison. And they looked nothing alike. Simon’s dark, curly hair looked faintly Jewish and his chest looked a little sunken, like it had forgotten to fill out with the rest of his body. His father, not a traditionally handsome man, was tall and during his prime quite muscular. He had green eyes, eyes that Simon had to admit that they shared. Richard simply looked like he should be good looking, like he was going to make people want him. And that had been enough, Simon guessed, at least for a little while.

Simon hadn’t wanted to tell his parents that he was gay. He couldn’t see the point, he told his friends at college after he came out to them sophomore year. He was still figuring things out for himself and besides, it wasn’t like he was ever going to live at home again. It was easy at school to make people see how his parents, a product of the “business” and LA weren’t ready to be the sensitive, supporting people that he needed them to be. But then, a few years into his first job teaching English at the high school, Simon fell in love for the first time. A man with red hair and swimmer shoulders who begged him, in the dark, to stop being so afraid and just start letting people know. It was inevitable, he argued, looking up from under his hair in a way that made Simon want to do anything he asked. So, in the deck chair, nervous, Simon had sat on his hands until they were deeply lined from the horizontal plastic strips. They were what he best remembered from that moment. Temporarily scarred hands and the intensely warm sunlight pounding behind his eyes as he uttered the words, “Mom, Dad, I have something I have been sort of wanting to tell you.” The water slapped against the concrete lip of the pool, the filter gulped water in loud slurps. “I’m gay,” said Simon. And he had left those words sitting by the swimming pool. His father had never even said anything. His lips simply tightened, and he rolled over onto his side, away from his son.

Then, as now, Simon had thought about how upset he ought to be, but at the time he had only felt relief, a sense of calm as the excepted way fulfilled. His mother had called him later, telling him that she understood. She probably just wanted the details, he thought disgustedly. Who was his “lover” as she referred to him, how had they met, when had he first “done it” with a man. That conversation; he didn’t even remember what he had said, her presence and voice filled up all the room in his memory of it. The many they had had and would have. The one they had just had.

Simon buried his head in his arms on the table and waited for tears to come. It wasn’t until an hour after hanging up, still sitting at the living room table with dry eyes itching, that he realized he didn’t even know of what his father had died.