Midsummer

by Clements, Marcelle

• ISBN13: 9780151008360
• ISBN10: 0151008361
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-05-01
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

A splendid Hudson River estate, complete with cook and rose garden. The landscape is inebriating; the women are in full, passionate bloom; the men are incomprehensible. Susie, chic, smart, spacey, and no longer promiscuous, decides, at forty-five, to do what she would have done at twenty-five--invite a group of amusing friends to spend eight weekends of summer in stunning surroundings. The invitees include her oldest friend Kay, elegantly nursing a broken heart; her former lover Dodge--still the sexiest man she knows; his randy, neurotic, comedian friend Ron; and Elise, an on-the-cusp artist determined to be in a relationship before she hits forty. Add to the mix Susie's very ardent, very surprising twenty-four-year-old son, and an exhibitionist au pair next door, and you have a delicious romantic farce that deftly slides into and out of something quite a bit darker.

Author Biography

Marcelle Clements is the author of Rock Me, a novel, and The Dog Is Us, essays. Her award-winning essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications, among them the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Elle, and Esquire. She lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Tutti
Fourth of July Weekend	1	(46)
Kay
Weekend of July 11	47	(38)
Dodge
Weekend of July 18	85	(34)
Susie
Weekend of July 25	119	(26)
Ron
Weekend of August 1	145	(32)
Elise
Weekend of August 8	177	(42)
Billy
Weekend of August 15	219	(30)
Tutti
Weekend of August 22	249

Excerpts

TUTTIFOURTH OF JULY WEEKENDThursdayThe rose garden needed watering. By midday the ground was parched and the fullest, heaviest blooms seemed to be waiting for the wind to rise and scatter all their petals. Impossibly open, already a little seared on their edges, they yielded the last of their beauty to the sun. To be beautiful a few hours more or less, what does it matter to a rose?As if they had noted the lack of shadow on the old sundial, the birds and the butterflies had all left for their naps. Only one inebriated bee, on his way to the hive, still zigzagged greedily from flower to flower. Then, all was still, save for the perpetual trickling of a fountain: For the last hundred years the trio of bare-breasted naiads had been about to dive into the alabaster pool below, forever ready to frolic, forever unreasonably young and desirable (taunting thirsty roses for all eternity).And the truth is the fountain really should have been drained and cleaned, but never mind that for now. From the mansion's big parlor casement windows, Dodie glanced down toward the rose garden again and made yet another mental note-she never wrote anything down and it must have been the thirtieth time she reminded herself-to call the landscape guy, remind him the summer people were arriving tomorrow. Dodie sighed. Her husband was supposed to do the watering, but who knew where he was.The house was ready. She had checked and double-checked the upstairs. There were ten bedrooms. Ten! Although there would only be five tenants, or maybe six if the son came, all the rooms needed to be ready, just in case. All week, during daylight hours, the rooms had been aired, doors and windows wedged open, breezes vigorously communicating, lifting a white piqu curtain here or the corner of a dotted-swiss bedspread there, caressing the matelass coverlets spread over two chair backs, while on the beds, mattresses and pillows brazenly sprawled, stripped down to their striped ticking. Now each room was done, its door primly closed.Well, if you weren't super-rich, that's probably what it took, was five of you to rent this place, thought Dodie. I don't know, maybe ten of you. They may have gotten a discount because one of them, Susie Diamond, was a friend of Mr. Durrell's. Or Bennett, as he seemed to think Dodie should call him, though she never would if she could help it. The only thing she knew about Susie Diamond was that she was a costume designer in the theater. Mr. Durrell had been living in Italy for the last ten years, and when he came to New York it was usually to go on a talk show, so he stayed in Manhattan at the Carlyle and never came upstate at all. When they had established their arrangement, a decade ago, Mr. Durrell had explained that he wanted the house kept just so and that he might be back at any time. But he never returned. Dodie thought it was perhaps because the young man who had lived here with him had died, early in the AIDS epidemic, but of course that's n

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Excerpted from Midsummer by Marcelle Clements
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