Read Online Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel by Herman Koch - Free Book Online

a pretty woman almost never gets to hear how pretty she is. That none of the other men at the party have the courage to say that. You often hear pretty women complaining to one another about that: that their looks are so much taken for granted. As though it were all just par for the course, like the
Mona Lisa
, the Acropolis, or the view of the Grand Canyon from Grandview Point. We have no wordsto describe pretty women. We’re speechless. Tongue-tied. We talk around their beauty. Been to any nice restaurants lately? the tongue asks. Got any plans for the summer? The pretty woman replies normally. At first she’s relieved to be spoken to so normally. To have someone just talk to her about day-to-day things. So normal. So ordinary. As though she’s not pretty at all, just a person like anyone else. But after a while something starts bothering her. Because it
is
kind of weird. The pretty woman wears her beauty like a feather headdress. So it’s kind of weird when someone goes on talking without making any reference to the headdress.
    “You have a very lovely wife,” Ralph Meier said, for instance, the first chance he got. He was sitting across from me at my desk and at least he didn’t beat around the bush. It was during his second visit to my office, a little less than a week after the opening night of
Richard II
. He had simply shown up again, unannounced, without an appointment. “Could I just bother him for a moment?” he’d asked Liesbeth, my assistant. “It’ll only take a minute.”
    I thought at first that he had come back for a new prescription, but the pills weren’t even mentioned during that second visit. “I was in the neighborhood, anyway,” he said, “so I thought, I’ll swing by and ask him in person.”
    “Oh yeah?” I tried to look at him as blandly as possible, but I couldn’t help it, there was no stopping it: The only thing I could think about was that look on his face the week before, when he examined my wife from head to foot.
    “We’re throwing a party on Saturday,” he said. “At our place. If the weather’s nice it’ll be in the yard. I wanted to invite you and your wife.”
    I looked at him and thought my own thoughts. Would hehave invited us if I had been married to a woman other than Caroline? I wondered. A less tasty woman?
    “A party?” I said.
    “Judith and I. Saturday, it will be twenty years since we met.” He shook his head. “Unbelievable. Twenty years! Where does the time go?”

“He doesn’t waste any time,” I said. “He goes straight for the kill.”
    We were sitting at the kitchen table. The dishwasher was bubbling. Lisa had already gone to bed, Julia was in her room doing her homework. Caroline divided the last of the wine between us.
    “Marc, come on!” she said. “He just likes you, that’s all. You shouldn’t always go looking for ulterior motives.”
    “Likes me! He doesn’t like me at all. He likes
you
. He told me so, in so many words. ‘You have a very lovely wife, Marc!’ That’s how he looked at you in the theater. The way a man looks at a
very lovely
woman. Don’t make me laugh!”
    Caroline sipped her wine, then tilted her head slightly and looked at me. I could see it in her eyes: She found this entertaining, this unexpected attention from the famous actor Ralph Meier. I couldn’t really blame her. If I were to be completelyhonest, I found it entertaining as well. It was, in any case, a lot more entertaining than having famous actors not even notice your wife, I told myself. But then I thought about that dirty look of his. His raptor look. No, it wasn’t all pure amusement.
    “You’re saying he only invited us to his party because he’s after me,” Caroline said. “But that doesn’t make sense. He invited us to that opening night, too, didn’t he? And he hadn’t even seen me yet.”
    She had a point there, I had to admit. Still, these were two different things, an invitation to an opening night and an invitation to a