3
When I came downstairs the next morning, Al was already in his bathing suit and flip-flops. His Hawaiian shirt, which was unbuttoned and open, let his belly protrude. He was sipping coffee and staring out the screen door, a cigarette in his hand. The surf took great slow swings of its hammer against the shore. On the horizon, I could make out a tanker’s ghostly form. “Fucking spectacular,” Al said. Then he consulted his wristwatch. “There’s a ten a.m. to Westhampton, which gives us plenty of time to eat.” As if reading my mind, he said, “Let’s let her sleep, okay?”
“Okay.”
“How do you take your coffee?”
We drove to town slowly, Al in no great rush, it seemed. Our windows were down, the sun made every color vibrant—who had seen such blues, such greens? When I glanced at him, he glanced at me, gladdened I too was gladdened by the day, since the both of us were sad, I was sure of it, that my mother was not with us to enjoy such weather. We descended a long hill, and the town of Montauk came into view, its streets mostly empty. When Al placed a cigarette in his mouth, I pushed in the car’s lighter; it popped and he removed it and pressed the lava-coils to his cigarette. He replaced it and thanked me as if I’d done him a great kindness, and we went back to regarding the lonely palette of this Hopper painting. At the bakery, Al bought me a bacon and egg sandwich and an orange juice. When we arrived at the train station, the platform was completely empty, an abandoned, desert-dry feeling rising from the gravel beneath the tracks, as if all of Montauk were, like Mom, sleeping off the previous night. On such a spectacular day, no one was headed toward the city.
“Don’t forget to buy your ticket before you board or it’s more expensive,” Al said.
We stared west down the rail line, which was already wobbling with heat haze.
“You got enough money?” Al asked. When I told him yes, he said, “Hold on,” and took out a business card. Al Moretti, LCSW and Hairstylist. “Call if you need anything,” he said. He consulted his watch again. “I’m going to the supermarket before it gets crazy.”
He kissed my forehead and turned to leave but then came back.
“Don’t worry about your mom,” he said. “I’ll take care of her.”
He turned to leave but came back again.
“Fuck it, I’ll wait with you,” he said.
He waited with me for five minutes.
“Actually, I’m leaving. But here.” He gave me a twenty. “Just in case.”
I thanked him and watched him walk to his car.
I waited a few minutes, then I made my way to the station to purchase my ticket and then to the pay phone to call Amanda.
On the phone’s stainless steel faceplate, next to the keypad, someone had etched a penis with several drops shooting out of it.
I deposited my dime and dialed.
I listened to the burr of the ringer quite a few times before Amanda answered.
When I told her it was me, she sounded surprised again.
When I told her I was headed her way, she said, “Really? When?” When I told her I was at the train station right now, she said, “You’re taking the train?” When I confirmed this, she said, “Does that mean we need to pick you up?” When I told her I guess it did, yes, she said, “Oh.
I didn’t—” Then: “Hold on,” and covered the receiver.
“What time do you get here?” she asked when she came back on the line.
When I answered, she covered the receiver again and then after a moment said, “Okay, well, we might be a little late? But we’ll be there.
At some point.”
A half hour later, when the train arrived at the station, it seemed as if ten thousand passengers issued from it.
There was a sudden frenzy of activity—of cabs lining up with their trunks open, and friends of the arrived pulling up in full convertibles and honking and laughing, and people like me carrying only backpacks and wearing bathing shorts and impassively scanning the platform and then brightening and waving and hugging their people before departing together.
I boarded the car, which smelled slightly of limes and diesel and the toilet’s blue deodorizer.
The floor was sticky.
The windows were green.
The cabin was stiflingly hot.
Not a single person was headed west but me.
I took my seaside seat.
The train lurched forward, and then the town slowly rolled past as if we’d taken our foot off the brake at the top of a hill.
I was so nervous about seeing Amanda I had no appetite for my sandwich.
The conductor appeared and punched my ticket, then walked away.
My mind was as smoothed of thoughts as the ocean.
As we got up to real speed and clacked alongside Highway 27, we whipped through the Napeague State Park’s scruffy barrens.
I grew dreamy and dozed, and when I was occasionally shaken awake by the train’s shudder, the traffic that sped alongside us appeared to float, as if we were riding an unseen current, and for the several seconds beyond the foreground’s blur of pines, these cars hovered parallel to mine.
I saw vividly into the passenger windows, saw the passengers’ and drivers’ silhouetted profiles, and when it happened that, during one of the moments of swift stillness, while the telephone wires rose and fell and rose in a continuous, creaturely ripple, a woman leaned out far enough for her face to catch the light, to stare at the train—to stare at me, since I was alone in the cabin—and then she smiled, and for an instant it seemed I could see her with such clarity I could count her teeth.
She turned and said something to the man next to her, who replied with a laugh, and at that moment I thought of my father’s story about Millie, about their trip to the point, and the part he never told me about, which was their drive back, which must’ve felt, I imagined, bittersweet and, like my drive with Al this morning, full of silences;
and in that moment I considered staying on the train all the way back to Manhattan, abandoning Amanda and this visit, since as the train raced ever closer to my destination, every part of my guts screamed, Flee.
We decelerated on our approach to the first station, slowing until the Amagansett sign drifted past.
Maybe a couple of people boarded; the train’s engine idled.
The conductor shouted, then the horn, the lurch, and we accelerated again, never getting up to the same speed as the previous stretch, my reverie interrupted by periodic slowing as the East Hampton station sign appeared, soon replaced by Bridgehampton and Southampton and Hampton Bays , and in what seemed like the shortest hop, the Westhampton sign slid from my window’s right edge toward its left until it was perfectly centered.
The train stopped, I stepped off the car, and everything after that continued at what felt like the same strange combination of slowness and rapidity, solipsism and silence, as if I were watching everything that weekend subsequently unfold through a diving bell.
The train station was a nondescript two-story building of yellow brick.
Since no one awaited me on the platform, I walked to the parking lot on its other side, which was empty and hot.
The train departed; birdsong replaced its production-line chugging and engine roar.
The world, I figured, either was packing up to go to the beach or was there already, which made the now-deserted space seem even quieter.
I thought about how to appear when Amanda arrived.
I decided I wanted to seem indifferent, occupied, not too excited to see her, so I took a seat on a bench beneath the roof’s eave and looked through my book bag for my Walkman.
I’d pose reading, with my earphones on, but I couldn’t find the machine and panicked, thinking I’d left it on the train.
And while rummaging through my D and when, after a pause, I went to hug her, she hugged me formally in return, patting my back like an acquaintance might.
“Nice to see you,” she said.
“You ride up front with Dad.” She got in the seat behind me, and I reached to close my door.
Dr.West looked at me over his sunglasses and nodded politely.
He was wearing a worn-in white button-down shirt, its sleeves rolled up past his biceps, its tails loosely tucked into peach-colored shorts.
On his feet, a pair of Top-Siders.
A half-empty bottle of Heineken sweated between his legs.
The car had a four-speed stick, whose knob Dr.
West gave a gentle side-to-side shake, revving the engine before dropping it into gear.
We drifted toward the lot’s exit, then Dr.
West took a left and gunned the accelerator, and I felt pinned to the seat’s black leather, as if Amanda had looped her Lasso of Truth around my torso and yanked.
God forbid she ask me a question, like: Am I already breaking your heart?
Once again, my father spoke through me. “What’s the make and model?” I asked.
“This is a 1968 Buick GS 400.”
“My dad has a Buick too,” I offered, not knowing why.
“Manual?” he asked.
“LeSabre,” I said intentionally, thinking it was funny, and was relieved, because Dr. West chuckled. In the side mirror, I could see Amanda staring at the sky, deaf to my wit, her sunglasses on and eyes hidden, her hair Medusa’d in the wind. Dr. West, who was kind enough to talk to me, deserved, I figured, some entertainment.
“Ever driven a stick?” he asked.
“My grandfather’s Peugeot,” I said, as if my parking lot lesson with Dad this past winter counted for anything.
“Was it the 505?”
“Diesel.”
“ Fantastic car,” Dr. West said.
Because Amanda’s present absence unnerved me, I focused my attention on where we were going.
We passed through the Westhampton township, which soon disappeared, and the engine roared through the soles of my feet to vibrate my spine.
The Atlantic sparkled beyond the trees and hedges and beach houses.
We took a left on Dune Road and then another onto a long, tight, sandy driveway that opened, broadly and dramatically, onto a circular plot of manicured lawn.
At its center stood a two-story house with a gambrel roof, a single dormer stretching its entire length.
Its windows, hazed with salt spray, were flanked by red shutters, tiny crescent moons carved into each.
Its cedar shingles were noticeably warped and spalled.
In the background, at once dwarfing the house but also making it seem majestic, was a bay pricked with sails, speeding pleasure boats distantly foaming the water’s iron-blue surface.
It was a place, I thought, that seemed a direct expression of Dr.West’s character: a classy, almost refined brand of dilapidation, the money that built it as sturdy and as weather-beaten as the shingles, as many-layered and as chipped as the shutters’ paint.
Maybe Dr.West was a millionaire; maybe he was nearly destitute.
The car, I noticed as I came around the front, showed signs of rust at its fenders’ edges—corroded, if you looked closely, at the wheel wells. It was not mint, but the seats were soft as a well-worn saddle in spite of the tears where the foam protruded; and hidden beneath the hood, the machine had tremendous power he had clearly not even tapped. The man, I thought—overbrimming as I was with heartache and the lonely clarity it conferred—must drive his relatively impoverished daughter crazy.
Inside an Irish setter greeted us.
“Hello, Hellie,” Dr.West said, grabbing her ears and giving her head a shake before she quickly disappeared.
The house was wood-paneled and dark, although the windows were filled with light.
There was a smell to the place of mothballs and, from the fireplace that dominated the living room, ash and creosote.
The interior was a hodgepodge—a forgotten antique-store feeling to the decor, at once high-end and remaindered.
In the living room, which looked out onto the bay, a pink fainting sofa with its fraying fabric and cigarette burns sat opposite a pair of giltwood chairs: a man and woman picnicking on the embroidered tableau of one; a pair of monkeys, the first standing atop the second’s back, on the other.
Green-bound Harvard Classics on the narrow shelves framing the fireplace were mixed with popular novels and nonfiction— Fear of Flying, Chariots of the Gods? —that I’d also seen on Mom’s bedside table.
The dining table, with its thick spiral legs, was surrounded by caned chairs, one of which had a fist-sized hole in its back.
“Show Griffin his bedroom,” Dr. West ordered.
Amanda looked at him, surprised, and said to me, “Are you staying?”
Dr. West frowned at her, equally surprised, and said, “Are you daft?”
He finished his beer and shook his head, then disappeared into the kitchen. Amanda watched him go. Then she smiled at me, emptily, and trudged upstairs. I noticed I was smiling, but it was partly an injury or an infliction. I realized if I stopped smiling, I might cry.
“That’s your room,” Amanda said on the landing, opening the first door to her right.
I looked inside; I could see the bay through its window. A breeze bellied the thin curtains.
“Did you bring a bathing suit?” When I nodded, she said, “Claire’s coming over.” And then, as if on cue, Claire, the strawberry blonde I’d met auditioning at Nightingale, called out Amanda’s name from downstairs. “We’re going to the beach club if you want to come.”
I did, knowing she would not have cared if I didn’t, would have probably preferred it, and changed and grabbed my book bag and then joined them outside. Amanda and Claire stood, holding their handlebars, waiting for me on the driveway. “Oh,” Amanda said of her bicycle, “I guess you need one too.”
They were wearing bikini tops and shorts, and each had a rolled towel in her bike’s basket. Claire’s sunglasses were perched above her forehead, her hair wild as wheat. She sneered at me with such pure disgust for slowing their progress, for simply being here, that I was both shocked at and appreciative of the honesty.
“Hold on,” Amanda said, and walked past me into the house.
I realized neither of us had even looked at each other yet, had not truly acknowledged each other yet.
The screen door banged against its frame twice.
Amanda appeared with Dr.
West in tow—following so close and so clearly frustrated he looked as if he might grab her by the ear.
He then said, for what I could tell was my benefit, “Of course he needs a bike.
What’s he going to do, jog ?” He disappeared around the side of the house and shortly returned, walking a bike toward me with a towel under his arm, Hellie heeling alongside him, a long pink training bumper in her mouth.
I thanked him and turned the rust-splotched handlebars toward the driveway that the girls, who had already mounted their bikes, were vigorously pedaling down.
Dr.West said to me, cordially, “One moment please, Griffin,” and then shouted, viciously, “A man da,” which stopped her cold.
She dismounted, almost falling off her seat between the bike’s sloped frame.
She and Claire glanced over their shoulders as Dr.
West marched toward them.
The wind was up, so I couldn’t hear what he said, but whatever it was, it was not pretty: it arched Amanda’s eyebrows while Claire zoned out, staring at a point somewhere between the lawn and the bay, and then Dr.
West, after grabbing the hand pump clipped to Amanda’s frame, turned and marched back toward me.
Now that his back was to them, Claire’s stunned expression morphed into a sly smile, Amanda’s into afflicted embarrassment.
Dr.West filled both my tires, squeezing each tread for good measure when he was done.
“Apologies,” he said, “for my daughter’s total lack of manners.” He snapped the instrument back into place on my bike.
We rode in single file down Dune Road.
For a moment I considered slowing, and then stopping, and then returning to Amanda’s, it was all so hopeless.
I did not so much rally as keep up.
And the late morning light everywhere was so evenly diffused that the ocean’s cobalt stood in tiled contrast to the sky’s arctic cyan, that by deeply contemplating these colors I noticed I eased my pain.
After a mile or so we turned right, into a vast parking lot, past a sign at the entrance that read Quogue Beach Club , its main building perched atop the dunes.
The midday siren sounded as we entered the lot, and the girls parked their bikes among hundreds of others, these lined before the clubhouse in a great tangle of chrome and rubber, kickstanded, daring to be dominoed, I trailing Amanda and Claire as if I were their page boy.
There were kids everywhere and of all ages ascending the walkway toward the beach or descending from it, disappearing into doorways or emerging from them in packs, so that it felt, on the one hand, like the rush between class bells and, in a strange sense, like entering the home of a gigantic extended family.
Amanda looked over her shoulder, either to make sure that I was following her or to see if she’d lost her tail.
The older kids were a breed apart, the boys in swim trunks as entirely comfortable and unselfconscious among the bikini-clad girls as if among cousins, the girls here and there as astonishingly beautiful as Amanda, the ease of their fraternizing, their sly familiarity, regressing me, so that I felt the same shyness as on the first day of high school.
There was an unspoken and alluring knowledge in the way these kids greeted one another that carried all the glamour of the word “older.” The younger children also seemed so at ease here, running after each other without regard to the strangers they slalomed, shouting each other’s names with no respect for volume, with outside voices in this private space that by dint of their piercing insistence sounded both wild and warding.
Their baked-in tans conferred on their eyes an aquatic opalescence, this summer in the sun streaking their damp, ocean-darkened hair with lemon, the same sundown shade of yellow that striped the umbrellas rippling and snapping on the restaurant’s patio.
All the tables were taken, the moms in sun hats and sunglasses, in smart shorts or tennis skirts, the dads in bright pastel golf shirts with the collars popped, in seersucker and loafers or Sperry Stripers, laughing at their children’s jokes, at their ice-cream-smeared mouths before their wives wiped these clean—a world, I recognized, of Adlers and Wexworths, of Binks and Buffys.
A clan, then, with which I associated certain characteristic markers: L.L.Bean and puka beads; pearl chokers and striped canvas belts; a love for boats and bird dogs, martinis and Manhattans; an abiding silence at the mention of politics; a proficiency in country club sports;
mismatched pastels, socks to ascots, like a box of broken crayons;
and their effortless projection of an ever-present, albeit invisible, force field that was at once detectable and repellent to outsiders—that if I were carrying a Geiger counter right now would set it clicking like a pod of dolphins.
“Griffin,” someone said.
Tanner was walking toward me.
His dirty-blond hair was late-summer long, and he was shirtless, his whole body wet, just out of the ocean and air drying.
He seemed in a rush to get somewhere.
He’d greeted me with enough surprise that it mimicked warmth but immediately called attention to my out-of-placeness, beating me to the punch with the question I wished to ask.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
He hadn’t alerted me he was back from counseling at camp.
Without waiting for an answer, he jerked his head in the direction I’d come and then hung a right.
I followed him down a passageway to a set of narrow changing rooms.
In his family’s locker were a pair of boogie boards and rusting beach chairs.
Stacked in the corner were kids’ pails and shovels and sandcastle molds.
Some swim goggles with disintegrating rubber straps hung from a salt-rusted hook by the door.
An umbrella with one of its ribs chicken-winged, punched through its canvas, was propped against the back wall.
Tanner stepped out of his bathing suit and, from a hanger, removed a white Lacoste shirt.
When he pulled it over his head, it was instantly dotted with moisture.
He stepped into boxers and pink shorts and affixed a belt with ducks on it.
He sat and brushed the sand from the soles of his feet.
His hair, parted to the side, was like a creek bottom full of gold to be panned.
He tugged on a pair of ankle socks and sneakers and grabbed his golf spikes—their laces tied to each other so that he was able to drape the pair over his shoulder—then he waved me to follow him again.
“Who are you here with?” he asked.
“Amanda West.”
He seemed puzzled. “Isn’t she dating Rob Dolinski?”
“I think so.”
This cleared up nothing for him. “Are you coming to the field house tonight? There’s a party.”
I shrugged. “I guess,” I said, not knowing where he meant.
“What’ve you been doing all summer?”
“The show,” I said. “When did you get back?”
“A couple of weeks ago,” he said. He removed a watch from his pocket and then fastened it to his wrist.
“I’ve got a one o’clock tee time with my dad.” By now we were back at the parking lot and, as if plucking a single fish from a bait ball, Tanner yanked his bike free.
“See you later, man.” Then he rode off, one hand on the handlebars, the other pumping his leg at the knee.
When he turned right onto Dune Road, a passing car honked at him, then slowed down until he caught up; he took hold of the passenger door’s handle, and the driver pulled him along at speed.
I went back to find Amanda and Claire.
I walked past the outdoor patio to the stairs leading to the beach.
Two lifeguard stands.
A yellow flag day.
Big surf, bathers everywhere.
Families.
The umbrellas’ abstract pointillism.
No sign of Amanda.
I think back on this moment now and, if you’d asked any random member on that strand to pick out the one person who did not belong, they’d have scanned that scene for less than ten seconds and spotted me trudging down the beach, book bag over one shoulder, like someone selling knicknacks to tourists.
So that it was to my credit that I decided to leave.
I found my borrowed bike and proceeded east down Dune Road, with no destination in mind and no intention beyond the fact that this was what I chose to do with my afternoon.
Like Tanner, I rode like I belonged.
My route was dense with houses at first, these intermittently spectacular, lining the road or perched atop the dunes.
I passed named beaches to my right— Quogue Village Beach , Hot Dog Beach —their parking lots full of luxury cars.
Every person on the island, I imagined, was ocean-facing, the beachgoers’ chairs and towels ticking clockwise after the sun.
When I passed Tiana Beach , the landscape turned more barren, the telephone poles bleached and lonely.
The wind combed the dunes’ shrubs with a hiss, brushed the sea grass back, like a mother a child’s hair; a wide bay was visible to my left, and I could feel the same stupid smile on my face I’d worn since I’d arrived.
I thought, I am having an adventure.
I am seeing new places.
What I wanted: Amanda’s company.
What I had: the wind at my back.
A long wooden drawbridge came into view, stretching across the bay.
It sagged in places, tumbledown and slightly humped at its center, like some Leviathan breaching.
I passed Ponquogue Town Beach , Dune Road became Beach Road, a marina appeared on my left.
I had come to a point of sorts, to the bay’s mouth.
There was more land across the channel, but I couldn’t keep going.
A harbormaster’s small outbuilding had a soda machine out front and I bought a Coke.
I remembered that I still had an egg sandwich in my book bag, so I parked my bike and sat on one of the benches facing the water. Fishing boats prowled toward open ocean, their outriggers like a cricket’s antennae. My sandwich, in spite of the cold eggs and congealed cheese, was the best I’d ever eaten. The Coke’s sugar was a gift to my blood. The food restored my optimism. I really believed some sort of reset was possible. Like this was a video game and the destroyed avatar that had arrived at this place would return to Amanda’s reconstituted, ready to triumph over her disapproval and disdain; that whatever discomfort she was suffering—now that I had so generously granted her some space—would be dissipated.
On the return, the brutal headwind slowed my pace.
Despite the straight road, the extra effort made me paranoid I was lost.
Over the low dunes, after I passed a jetty, a deserted beach came into view, and I stopped to consider it.
I shouldered the bike’s frame and walked across the sandy path toward the water.
I placed the bike on its side and, from my basket, removed my towel.
I took off my shirt and shoes.
At the water’s edge, I watched the breakers for a while.
I entered the ocean slowly at first and then swam out.
The water was chilly and revivifying.
I bodysurfed several waves.
Their lines were very clean.
I imagined Amanda watching me from the shore.
I swam out far—farther, perhaps, than I’d ever allowed myself in my life—sprinting, to exhaustion, well beyond the breakers.