Hot Tub Paul Hollywood

Jarrett’s hot tub arrived and my heart ached. What a life of impossible good fortune, I thought. It was the same as if he had bought a one-million-dollar yacht, or a fridge that talked at you and made ice on command.

In October the town hosted a pumpkin-weighing contest. Each year, Jarrett loaded his pumpkins with different combinations of chemicals. Still, they never grew large enough to qualify. He backed the trailer up into his pumpkin patch and deposited the hot tub right there.

That fall he didn’t grow a single pumpkin. Instead, he spent his time building a gray slat shed around the hot tub.

Have you seen Jarrett’s cabana? my father asked.

Later, I realized that Jarrett resembled Paul Hollywood. This is a British TV actor who watches people as they bake cakes.

This is something that Jarrett once said to my mother: I prefer a woman with large breasts. He told this to her when they were at work together one day.

All summer we heard Jarrett playing music in his cabana and carrying on. Sometimes my father went and stood by the fence and then came back indoors, shaking his head. It was so dark in our backyard that it might’ve been a place no one had thought up yet. Only the fireflies clicked on and off.

After Jarrett told my mother about his fondness for large breasts, he cupped his hands at his chest, as if he had just discovered himself a set and now wanted to test out their buoyancy.

Sometimes I’d also stand on the back step and listen to the music from Jarrett’s cabana. Ah, sounds like Ted Nugent, I’d say to myself. I was nine or ten years old. I didn’t know a thing about Ted Nugent. But boy, this is how I imagined his music must sound.

My father loved music, but he liked to play records over a stereo in the basement with the door closed.

Jarrett and my mother worked together at a private school, Jarrett on the grounds crew and my mother in dining services. My mother returned home at precisely 4:30 in the afternoon. Then she stood at the fridge and drank directly from a bottle of seltzer water.

My parents liked to joke about Jarrett and his hot tub. On a warm summer night, my father might say to my mother, Why don’t you go out to Jarrett’s hot tub party? And my mother might say, Imagine being in a soup with Jarrett.

Because they were so simple and made us feel that we all understood each other, I loved these jokes.

Jarrett had a wife named Terry. I saw Terry two or three times in my entire life. One of these times was when she was on an advertisement we got in the mail.

On the other side of us lived a family that my older sister called The L’s. Linda, Lisle, Leslie, Lina, and Ludmilla.

On the advertisement, Terry wore a red velvet dress and high heels. She was holding up a pair of oversized blue jeans. A yellow bubble in the corner read, How I lost 40 pounds!!!

Linda, the mother of The L’s, was a woman with very large breasts.

This is something else Jarrett told my mother at work: I like Linda. She’s a woman with a pair of bazookas.

Years before, Linda had been caught embezzling money from a bank. I didn’t understand the mechanics of embezzlement. I was nine or ten years old. But I liked to picture Linda holding up a bank with a black ski mask and a bazooka under each arm. What a life of glamour and intrigue, I thought.

Sometimes I also liked to picture the inside of the cabana. I figured there were palm trees inside, and pale blue light that came up angelically through the water. Ted Nugent played over speakers disguised as pineapples and tiki torches and ceramic frogs.

I understood stealing money from a bank. I was a little boy and I wanted so much. I wanted the kind of house that had suits of armor inside. I wanted an Afghan Hound. I wanted to eat whatever I’d like for dinner. I wanted to kiss pretty girls, and to travel to the white sand beaches of Aruba.

For a while, the real-life Paul Hollywood dated a woman thirty years younger than him. The woman said that Paul Hollywood mostly liked to eat Rice Krispies for dinner.

The hour between my mother’s arrival at home and dinnertime seemed soft and infinite. If I happened to be playing outside, I liked to watch my parents through the kitchen window, as if they were in a diorama. My mother leaned against the oven, and my father ran his fingers along the edge of the table.

This is something we found out years later, when I was in high school: Jarrett’s hot tub parties were, in fact, hot tub orgies. Another woman at my mother’s work told her this. The other woman knew. She had been to the orgies herself.

Now imagine being in that soup with Jarrett, my mother said. Then she pretended to shudder.

I had certain logistical questions. Was this all the hot tub was ever meant for? Did this mean that Jarrett had by now hosted hundreds of orgies? And how had he and Terry arrived at this arrangement in the first place? What had they said to one another? How had they agreed this was what they both wanted?

By then, my mother had fallen into the habit of sleeping on the couch each night. She liked to watch television shows about men and women arguing and suing each other and murdering each other and making love and making up again.

But we all still joked about the hot tub parties. I said to my parents, Just imagine Paul Hollywood with a cannoli in his Speedo. We acted as if the jokes were funnier than ever.

In fact, my mother joked even more about the hot tub parties. She seemed also to have certain logistical questions.

In the summers, my father began to spend more time in the backyard. He liked to build campfires and listen to baseball games sent the thirty miles from Boston by means of wire or satellite or god-signal.

Most nights Linda and Lisle sat on their porch with their heads almost knocking, trading cigarettes back and forth and laughing.

Through the radio you could almost hear the light in the stadium, you could almost hear the crowd breathing and pressing up against each other.

Squares of light fell from the cabana and onto the pumpkin patch. If you watched for long enough—as I believe my father did—strange enraptured shapes seemed to move there.

Last year my mother called me and said that Jarrett had decided to try his hand at pumpkin growing once again. Except he has a family of woodchucks who like to torture him, she said. She sounded as if she had a desire at which God had waved his long fingers and granted.

But what did either of my parents really want? I asked myself. I was a young man and I wanted fiercer than ever. Mostly, I wanted my life to be nothing like it was.

My mother called me again, indignant. Jarrett’s trapped a baby woodchuck in a cage out there, she said. And it’s eighty degrees, and it’s the middle of August. She was silent for a moment or two. Your father and I are thinking about jumping the fence and letting it out, she said.

This is how I spent the rest of the afternoon, imagining my parents at the fenceline like foxes by a coop. Eventually, my mother might work up the courage to cup her hands for my father to step into. He’d pull himself over the fence, adjust his glasses, keep watch until my mother stood there beside him.

And then—their hearts on fire, the pumpkin vines like lengths of tendon at their feet—they’d go searching for this wild animal.