2
We had a miserable breakfast the following morning. Oren and I engaged in a sort of arms race, seeing who could pile his plate with the hotel’s most luxurious food; and while I declared myself the winner based on sheer mass (scrambled eggs and sausage links, a Belgian waffle with whipped cream, a bagel with lox, and a chocolate croissant), Oren’s creativity shamed me, building as he did a skyscraper of pancakes with strips of bacon interspersed between flapjack floors.
“Can I have a bite?” I asked.
“You can make your own,” Oren said.
“You both better eat all of that,” Dad said.
“It’s not like it’s à la carte,” Oren said.
“There are children starving in China,” Dad said.
“There are children starving here,” Mom said. She glared at him with a rare unvarnished and appalled disdain, while Dad gave the hotel fountain that splashed behind us a thousand-yard stare. Dad slugged his black coffee and disappointedly shook his head. From where I sat, I could see, through the hotel’s entrance, Broad Street shining as bright as a nuclear flash. There were other cast members eating at the tables nearby, and usually we could rely on Dad to at least fake the pleasure of our company. But when the occasional colleague would wave hello or say hi in passing, Dad ignored them, as if too pained by our presence to even bother with niceties.
“There’s an earlier train,” Mom announced.
Dad did one of his slow-mo nods, feigning an expression of thoughtfulness to hide his relief. “You’ll miss the matinee,” he stated.
“Both boys have to work tomorrow,” Mom said, giving him an out, but adding, “I know how important it is to you that they earn their keep.”
“Suit yourself,” Dad said. Then he got up from the table and left the restaurant, a departure to which Mom did not react and which seemed to turn up the volume of the cutlery striking the plates, of the fountain jets detonating in the pool.
We did not say goodbye to Dad before we left.
That night, back in New York, through our walls, Oren and I listened to Mom and Dad fighting over the phone. Oren whispered, “I know what this is about.”
Had he also recognized the woman in the cast?
“Last summer,” Oren continued, “I picked up the phone right when Dad answered, and this lady on the line was crying and said, ‘I don’t want this furniture, I just want your love.’?”
Sometimes, Mom would speak while she sobbed. Between this and the way the walls muted what she said, all her words were buffed of contour, edgeless as sea glass.
“Do you think she found out he bought that stuff?” Oren asked.
We listened to their fighting some more, their argument punctuated by gasps so terrible I thought they might suck all the air out of the apartment.
“Do you think they’re going to get a divorce?” he said.
“No,” I said, speaking from a place of conviction I did not understand. “They love each other too much.”
“You do,” Mom shouted. “You do, you do, you do, you do!”
“I’m going to Matt’s,” Oren said. He got up and began stuffing clothes in his book bag. He did this with great force, so that his haste was closer to anger than fear, had more fight in it than flight. He scanned the room. He pulled several cassettes from his tape collection and, from the shelf where I’d placed the books Mom had bought me, grabbed Moby-Dick and opened it to reveal a fat stash of crisp twenties, which he folded and placed in his pocket, and then glanced at me, so that I could take in his disappointment—in the fact that he could hide something valuable from me in plain sight.
“Please don’t go,” I said.
He was riffling through our sock drawer, tossing out pairs with abandon, with disgust, until he found his Ray-Bans case. “You did the same thing to me,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“The fire,” Oren said. “You just left me there, in that closet.”
I sat up in my bed. “I don’t remember that,” I said, “at all.”
“Of course you don’t,” Oren said. “Nobody here does.”
He was grimacing. Packed now, he lingered, observing me as this information registered.
“I fucking crawled out under that coat, and where were you? Gone. AWOL. And who’s gonna find the fucking cat after that, Griffin? Not you. Not me either.”
He was furious, his lower lip shaking. Tears sparked in his eyes. He’d held this in for so long, and it had erupted so suddenly he couldn’t contain his emotions. What made it worse was that the revelation did not land, that my bafflement was genuine, and this obliterated his composure before he fled. While I, left alone—Oren let the apartment door slam—once again found myself being told something that was true but could not for the life of me remember.
—
When I got home from work the following night, Mom was in her bedroom, watching the news. She was dressed up in a nice blouse and skirt. She was standing in front of the television, drinking a glass of wine. The bottle rested on her dresser. They were replaying Reagan’s press conference from earlier that day. He wore a smart gray suit. Ever since he’d been shot, he’d sloughed off the salesman’s slickness, the B-list actor’s knack for overemphasis. In this new, no-nonsense mode, he seemed more like a commander in chief. And this made me more appreciative and skeptical of him all at once.
…on the South Lawn, Reagan gave the following statement:
“This morning at seven a.m., the union representing those who man America’s air traffic control facilities called a strike. This was the culmination of seven months of negotiations between the Federal Aviation Administration and the union. At one point in these negotiations, agreement was reached and signed by both sides, granting a forty-million-dollar increase in salaries and benefits. This is twice what other government employees can expect—”
“That’s a lot of money,” I said.
“Hush, please,” Mom said.
“Now, however,” Reagan said, “the union demands are seventeen times what had been agreed to—681 million dollars.”
The president went on to assert that the tax burden on Americans for such an amount would be too high, and that while the system was not operating at capacity, a number of air traffic controllers and supervisors across the country had quit their union to return to work. The president went on to clarify the administration’s position.
“Let me make one thing plain,” Reagan continued. “I respect the right of workers in the private sector to strike. Indeed, as president of my own union, I led the first strike ever called by that union—”
“What union?” I asked.
“Screen Actors Guild.”
“Really?” I said.
Mom pressed her index finger to her lips.
“But,” Reagan said, “we cannot compare labor-management relations in the private sector with government. Government cannot close down the assembly line. It has to provide without interruption the protective services which are government’s reason for being.”
Mom slowly, bitterly shook her head.
“It was in recognition of this that the Congress passed a law forbidding strikes by government employees…”
Mom took another sip of wine as if she might take a bite out of the glass.
“It is for this reason,” Reagan continued, “that I must tell those who fail to report for duty this morning they are in violation of the law, and if they do not report for work within forty-eight hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.”
Mom snapped the TV’s knob and the screen went dark. “Even your grandfather saw this coming. And he was appointed to the NTSB by Nixon.” Which explained nothing, so far as I was concerned. She poured herself more wine. “Who didn’t fire the postal workers when they went on strike, I might add.”
The news could make both my parents so furious in ways and for reasons I didn’t understand. Mom stepped into her bathroom.
“Sneaky bastard,” Mom said—to me, as if I’d been the one standing at the podium. She stuck her head out the door. “All of them!”
There was a small circular mirror in her bathroom, and from where I was standing, I could see, in its reflection, her giving her eyelashes a final brushing. “Did you eat dinner at work?” she asked.
I never ate dinner at work.
Mom reappeared, looking even prettier. “I’m meeting a friend for a drink,” she said. Mom never did this, and it scared me. “There’s leftovers in the refrigerator.” She plopped her lipstick in her purse and left.
In the kitchen, standing before the open fridge, I ate the spongy Popeyes chicken and considered my prospects. Tanner was still at camp. Cliffnotes was working a double. I’d left my Dungeons she repeated my name and then said, “Hold on, please.”
When Amanda came on the line, she greeted me with a tone that, in its welcome, was close to wariness: “How have you been?” she asked, as if our recent date hadn’t been a disaster.
I told her I was going to be in Montauk that weekend, maybe I could come see her Saturday if she was around?
“Montauk’s pretty far from Westhampton,” she said.
When I didn’t respond to this, she said, “But if you’re in the area, sure, let me know.”
From my bed later, I could hear Mom in the bathtub, weeping.
—
The following afternoon, Mom and I caught the 7 Train to the Vernon Boulevard stop in Queens, where Al picked us up in his car. It was a dual-tone Cadillac Seville. “Nice ride,” I told Al when we got in.
Al grimaced. “The only bad piece of advice Elliott ever gave me,” Al said, “was to buy this piece of shit.”
It was a Friday, so we hit traffic on 495.
I lay stretched out on the back seat with my Walkman, listening to the mixtape I’d made Amanda that morning.
It began with Air Supply’s “The One That You Love” followed by Blondie’s “The Tide Is High.” My fantasy began in Montauk.
I had my arms wrapped around Amanda’s waist at the Puff N’ Putt, together we stroked the shot and the ball dropped in the hole, then we were on a catamaran, me firmly holding the boat’s rudder, she in a bikini, her legs stretched out like the girl pictured on a semi’s wheel flaps.
I imagined the pair of us swimming in the ocean, at sunset, and I saved Amanda from a great white by punching it in the nose, my heroic act backed by Foreigner’s “Urgent.” I lay on the beach with my leg bitten off (Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”), Amanda held my hand while I bled out on the sand, and she confessed her undying love for me, but I came back to life during “More Than a Woman,” by the Bee Gees.
When Al, Mom, and I stopped at the Lobster Roll in Amagansett for dinner, I said to Al, since Mom couldn’t drive, “I kind of wanted to go visit a friend in Westhampton tomorrow.”
Al said, “Westhampton is an hour the other way, kid.” He took a bite of fried cod. “So I think no dice.”
“I could take the train.”
Al shrugged. “It’s up to your mother.”
I asked Mom if she minded my taking the train. Her back was to me. She had barely touched her food. She was watching the cars on Route 7, chin resting on her palm. She turned to face us and, after blinking several times, said to Al, “Whatever he wants to do.” She emptied the carafe’s contents into her glass, then went back to watching the traffic.
Al caught my eye and mouthed, I’ll handle it.
Because it was dark by the time we arrived, I couldn’t make out much of Al’s house beyond the splash of lights against its siding.
We’d driven down a long gravel drive; its dust drifted through the headlights’ beams.
After Al cut the engine, he gently rubbed Mom’s shoulder to wake her.
“Lily, we’re here,” he said.
She started and then looked at Al as if affronted, which made me embarrassed for her.
She then checked the back seat, although it wasn’t clear she recognized where she was.
She said, “Where’s Oren?” and I told her, “In the city.” She said, “What?” and crossed her arms, sinking in her seat so that she disappeared beneath the headrest.
“I need to go to bed,” she said, and I suffered the twinned desires to clutch her to my chest and run away.
Al said to me, “Get the bags,” and in the headlights’ glare, I watched him walk Mom to the screen door with his arm around her waist and, supporting her, lead her inside.
When the light flicked on downstairs, I got her suitcase and my book bag and stepped into the house, waiting several minutes while Al thudded about upstairs.
I heard Mom say something.
It was close to a sob, but there was also a question nestled in it, which Al answered softly.
The floor plan was open, like our apartment.
There was a small kitchen on the left.
Over its bar, I could see a breakfast nook by the far windows.
To my right there was a sofa and a love seat and a coffee table and, in the corner, a narrow wicker shelf of paperbacks, their jackets battered and their pages swollen from sea spray and sun.
Straight ahead, a set of sliding glass doors looked out onto the ocean.
The stairwell was to the right of the doors, and Al wearily thunked down their carpeted runner.
He walked past me, out to the car, and turned off the headlights.
When he returned, he cut the overhead light and waved for me to follow him, which I did.
He unlocked the sliding door, pulled it open, and stepped outside.
There was a wooden deck, edged by reeds that shushed and sighed down the slope of a hill that dropped off precipitously; and beyond it, beneath the mute crescent moon, which sat abandoned in a cloudless sky, there stretched before us the bone-white Atlantic.
I could hear the breakers boiling before they thumped invisibly below.
Al produced a pack of Marlboros from his pocket, shook out a cigarette, and held it toward me, and after I fearfully shook my head no, he produced his lighter, cupped his palm over the flame, and inhaled, the illuminated mask of his face now snuffed out, and along with this world’s deep blue and the bleached ocean, there was for color only the ember orange of his cigarette’s cherry.
“Sweet spot,” I said.
“It’s something, huh?”
“Dad calls this place a saltbox,” I said.
Al frowned. “For your information, a saltbox has a sloped roof. And gables. Which this house does not have. So once again, beyond opera, your father doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.”
I was mildly shocked by his anger; I was also relieved that he expressed it. We listened to the tide’s poom and hiss, and Al said, “My parents fought so much when I was a kid. They were like cats in a pillowcase getting carried to the fucking river. But back then I thought it was my fault and that I could maybe stop them by being good—which you can’t, for your information.” He blew smoke. The ocean sighed. “So be good for you first and foremost, Griffin. You weren’t put on the planet to make sure they love each other, okay?”
“Okay.”
He flicked his cigarette out over the reeds. It caught the wind and meteored over the ledge.
“I checked the train schedule,” he said. “I’ll get you fed tomorrow and on your way.”