Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel by Herman Koch

back, maybe so that I wouldn’t see it. But just then Caroline appeared in the doorway, carrying two rolled-up sleeping bags.
    “Aha,” I said. “And what is this supposed to mean?”
    “Nothing. It’s just that I thought sometimes you find a pretty place where the only possibility is to camp out. Where there’s no hotel, I mean.”
    “Aha,” I said again. A lighthearted approach seemed best, to approach the matter as though my wife was really only sort of joking. “And I suppose that means I’ll have to commute from the hotel to the campground every morning?”
    Caroline put the sleeping bags in the trunk, up against the tent.
    “Marc,” she said, “I know how you feel about camping. I won’t try to force you into anything. But it’s such a waste to stay in a hotel sometimes. I looked around on the Internet. They have campgrounds there with all the trimmings. With restaurants. And you’re only a hundred yards from the beach.”
    “Hotels have restaurants, too,” I said, but I knew I was fighting a losing battle. Caroline missed camping. I could come up with arguments. I could say that the tent and sleeping bags took up half the room in the trunk, but then I would be ignoring the simple fact that my wife longed to hammer stakes into the ground, to tighten ropes and wake up in the morning in a sleeping bag covered in dew.
    And there was something else I realized. After the garden party at Ralph and Judith Meier’s, I had asked Caroline if she had talked to Ralph. And more specifically, whether he had made a pass at her.
    “You were completely right,” she’d said.
    “About what?”
    “About him being a dirty old man.”
    “Really?” We were lying in bed, the reading lamps on, but we weren’t looking at each other. I don’t know what expression I would have had to wear if we had been.
    “Yeah, you were right. I don’t know, I guess I started paying attention after you said that: about the way he looked at me. Something in his eyes … He licked his lips while he was looking at me. He smacked his lips. As though I were a hamburger. We were standing beside the barbecue. He was stabbing his fork into the meat to see if it was done and flipping the hamburgers. Then he lowered his eyes. Like a bad actor in a movie that’s meant to be funny. He rolled his eyes a little when he looked at my breasts. Don’t get me wrong: That can be nice. Sometimes a woman likes it when a man admires her body. But this … this was different. This was … what did you call it again? Filthy? Yeah, that’s it. A filthy look. I didn’t know what to do with myself. And then he started telling a joke. I don’t remember how it went, but it was dirty. Not funny-dirty, dirty-dirty. And you should have seen the look on his face as he was telling it! You know how some people, when they tell a joke, they laugh as though they just made it up themselves? Well, that’s the way he laughed.”
    “And now I suppose you don’t want to go by and visit them at their summer house,” I said a little too quickly.
    “Marc! How could you even consider that? No, thank youvery much, no. I’m not really into that, anyway, visiting other people while I’m on vacation, but now there’s no way. I wouldn’t get a moment’s rest there beside that pool with Ralph around.”
    “But when we left you acted like you thought it was such a great idea. At the door, when we said good-bye. And in the car you even asked Julia and Lisa about it. About what they thought.”
    Caroline sighed. “So we’d all had a little bit too much to drink, all right?” she said. “Then you don’t really say that you have no intention of visiting their summer house. And in the car I was only thinking of Julia. About that boy she liked. It’s a good thing she wasn’t too enthusiastic, either.”
    “Well, we’ll see,” I said. “There’s no real obligation.”
    And now we were standing beside the open trunk of our car. I sensed an opportunity, but it