4
The silence was profound.
I was a good hundred yards out.
To the northwest, crowded Ponquogue Beach, full of umbrellas, appeared covered in rainbow sprinkles.
There came a low burble: in the sky, a single-prop plane pulling a banner inched west: Melinda Marry Me?
I felt a strange pulse beneath my feet; I dunked my head.
Below, between the green bars of sunlight, I thought I saw a shadow far bigger than my own.
It might be days before they found Dr.
West’s bike and put the pieces of my disappearance together.
Spooked, I swam in, pausing occasionally to tread water and look beneath the surface.
Did the shadow, reappearing, now have a more discernible length and form? I caught the first wave in to shore that I could and ran back to my towel.
I scanned the horizon.
Relieved, I lay on my back, closed my eyes, and let the sun warm my body.
I thought of the other shadows that had lurked beneath me this past year: Kepplemen, Fistly, Damiano.
Now, in some ways, Dad.
I did not include Naomi among this shiver.
Nor Amanda, who, I figured, had probably not given me a single thought since we’d parted.
And once again I was seized by fantasy.
It required we be alone.
I imagined her lying beside me.
She visored her eyes and smiled, and when I woke up from this dream, I realized I had slept deeply and for a long time.
I was cottonmouthed.
The sun was lower in the sky.
My body was covered in a fine layer of sand.
It came off only when I brushed it with my shirt’s fabric, and even then some of its glimmer adhered.
Amanda’s house, upon my return, was quiet.
The clock over the mantel read just past six.
I entered the kitchen, and there on the counter lay a plate of roasted bluefish covered in sour cream and herbs, asparagus and olives in a bowl.
In a sheet pan with aluminum foil, red potatoes sprinkled with rosemary, roasted almost to burned.
A pair of martini glasses, each with a lemon twist at the cup’s bottom, stood next to a sweaty cocktail shaker.
Not hearing anyone inside, not sure what I could help myself to, I drank water from the faucet until it sloshed in my belly.
Through the window over the sink, I saw Dr.
West and a woman eating dinner on the lawn’s bayside, Hellie seated beneath their small wrought-iron table, its tablecloth astir in the breeze.
When I walked out to say hello to them, Hellie hopped up and nosed my hand and then returned to lie at the couple’s feet.
Dr.West wiped his mouth with his napkin and stood to greet me.
He introduced me to his wife, Sylvia, who wore her golden hair in a hived bouffant.
Her shoulders, exposed by her sleeveless blouse, were browned and peeling, the dead skin like dried Elmer’s glue.
Because she faced the setting sun, she covered her eyes when she greeted me.
“Please, Griffin, sit,” Sylvia said.
“I’ll make you a plate,” Dr. West said. “Do you want a beer? A glass of wine, perhaps?”
Sylvia poured the last of the chardonnay and tapped the bottle with her fingernail before he walked off, and when he returned it was with a plate for me and a fresh bottle under his arm.
“Is Amanda upstairs?”
I told him I didn’t know, that I’d gone for a long bike ride, all the way to the bay’s channel. He looked at his wife and blinked several times in annoyance with his daughter, and for this allegiance I could’ve hugged him. “Do you know what that body of water is?” I asked.
He said, “Why, that’s the Shinnecock, of course.” And the resemblance between Dr. West and his daughter, in spite of his newfound kindness, was uncanny.
“Albert, not everyone knows the geography of Long Island,” Sylvia said. Then she turned to me. “Albert tells me you’re an actor.”
Now Dr.West generously gave me audience.
When I told Sylvia about how I’d fallen into the business, how a Candid Camera appearance led to roles in The Talon Effect and The Nuclear Family, he ceded the floor.
And when I talked about the radio dramas I’d done, it was he who had questions about how they were produced—he’d grown up listening to serialized shows like The Shadow and still enjoyed Mystery Theater —and when I told him that I too had appeared on the latter, he was fascinated.
What a fantastically interesting childhood, he remarked, to have worked with such people, to have been exposed to such professionalism.
If only Amanda could have the same experience, he complained, it might do her some good.
And since Sylvia had by now inquired about my father’s career, how fortunate, Dr.
West continued, to be so close to the creative process of titans like Leonard Bernstein, Joshua Logan, and Abe Fountain.
“That is some of the greatest American music ever written,” Dr.West said.
“If only my students,” he complained, “had Jacques Brel’s work memorized.
If that’s not a literary education, I don’t know what is.” For the first time, I felt my childhood to be out of the ordinary, even extraordinary.
“And here you are,” Dr.West said, after I’d told Sylvia about working with Alan Hornbeam this spring, “on the verge of stardom. That movie of yours is going to come out this fall, and we’ll say we knew you when.
Especially my daughter. Who”—he indicated behind me—“has finally decided to make an appearance.”
Amanda approached the table, showered, in a blue sundress, with her hair pulled back. I was grateful she refused eye contact as she approached, because I could take in her summered beauty.
At the same time, I had the nearly overwhelming urge to ask her why she’d invited me here. Why had she let me kiss her the night of her birthday?
Why couldn’t she simply make up her mind? More likely, I thought, the fault was mine.
The conversation with Sylvia and Dr. West continued, during which time she concentrated on her food, eating with complete inwardness, as if she were a critic parsing each of the chef’s choices.
Her answers to her father’s questions were monosyllabic or dismissed with a shrug until Dr. West asked her, “What are your plans for tonight?”
Amanda said, “Some of my friends are going to a movie in Southampton. Do you think you could take us?”
“We,” Dr. West said, after refilling his glass and then tilting it toward his wife before he drank, “are in for the evening.”
Amanda looked crestfallen.
“Griffin’s welcome to borrow my car,” Dr. West said.
For the first time since I’d arrived, Amanda looked at me—wide-eyed, with an expression between shock and slyness, as if by this remarkable oversight we’d been presented with an even rarer opportunity.
Dr. West shrugged. “He says he can drive a stick,” he replied, glancing between us, as if the offer were a no-brainer. And when I, unprepared for this surprise, returned his gaze fearfully, he said, “Just promise me you’ll keep it under the speed limit.”
“I’ll make sure,” Amanda said.
In my life I have been witness to several instances of perfect timing, the sort that syncs so silkily with luck the two are impossible to separate.
But undoubtedly the most memorable instance came later that evening, after Dr.West handed me the Buick’s keys.
He watched as I took the wheel and Amanda slid into the passenger seat, gave me the same look of outright affection I have seen, albeit rarely, in the expressions of the passionately married.
I did not forget from my Christmas lesson that I needed to depress the clutch to start.
I turned the ignition switch; the needles jumped and then settled.
I gave the stick the same left-right toggle Dr.
West had before pushing it into first.
I saluted him with two fingers and recalled, as my father had described, that with just the slightest pressure on the accelerator, with a steady and gentle amount of gas, I could ease off the clutch into the point of engagement, which I did, so that as with all beginner’s luck, I looked like a pro, like a fifteen-year-old with a hardship license, and I coasted down the driveway with a slow and expert confidence, at least the appearance of such, until we were out of sight.
Amanda said, “Wow, you’re good,” to which I replied, mysteriously, to myself as much as to her, “Mazel tov,” and when, at the driveway’s end, she ordered, “Take a right,” which I did without daring to stop, lest I stall the engine, and with no regard for oncoming traffic, we peeled onto Dune Road, fishtailing, ever so slightly, gravel spewing behind us like the contrails in a cartoon.
The Atlantic ripped along to the south, the Quantuck Bay to the north, the Shinnecock to my east, and Amanda, smiling, thrilled, and a willing accomplice by my side.
Perhaps I had been far more concerned with embarrassing myself in front of Dr.West than Amanda because her humiliation of me was already complete.
But we were finally alone, and despite the situation’s stressfulness and illegality, I felt happy for the first time since my arrival.
Where could she go, after all? Though it wasn’t long before I lost whatever actor’s nerve had gifted me with such a perfect performance earlier.
I stalled at nearly every stop sign and ground the clutch as the car lurched and halted.
But each time after I restarted it and stalled it again, Amanda at least interacted with me: she snorted at my mistakes, laughing, and she was occasionally encouraging, just as she might be to a cabdriver new to the area.
“Deep breaths,” she said, after I killed the ignition and before restarting yet again.
And when I looked at her, she was the Amanda of old—the Amanda, that is, when we had no audience.
“You can do this,” she said, and covered my hand on the stick’s eight ball.
“ There you go,” she said, as I gave the car gas and once again we were off.
(Although sometimes, after I’d waved the cars behind us to go around, with the same impatient, hurry-up gesture as my father, she mumbled, “This is crazy.”) The plan was to grab Claire and then decide where we were going.
Amanda mentioned a party at the Quogue Field House—maybe we go straight there, she said; and, as if I too summered out here, I replied, “Tanner Potts asked if I was coming.” In place of a heart she had, it seemed, a compass rose.
She pointed us down pitch-dark side roads, some with no name, and the convertible was a wind machine as we raced along streets lined with oaks, their overhanging branches forming what was nearly a tunnel, the leaves ghost-lit by the headlights’ high beams, and above, just beyond this coned luminescence, a star-splashed strip of sky that made the night seem miraculous to me, and made Amanda worthy of admiration no matter how coldly she was crushing my heart.
And after a while, I got more of a hang of the clutch, even confidently dropping into third when the speed limit allowed.
We soon pulled into Claire’s driveway, which was laid with powdered white gravel. The house’s windows, lit from inside, cast their soft yellow rectangles on the roundabout.
Claire approached us in silhouette, took the back seat, assessed the situation with something like wry shock, and then said to Amanda, “He can drive?” To which Amanda replied, “He’s learning.” Then she smiled at me proudly, and I loved her.
“Where to, ladies?” I said, briefly happy in my role.
Amanda asked Claire, “Should we go to the movie?”
“We should get drunk,” she said, and from her purse produced a hip flask, “on the way to the field house.”
Amanda said, “Onward, Jeeves.”
“The field house it is,” I said. I started the car, put it in first, and immediately stalled.
“Take two,” Amanda said.
Claire took a swig from the flask and handed it to Amanda, who took hers and, after swallowing, said, “Blech,” and then handed it to me. I, like the chaperone-chauffeur that I was, responsibly refused. This was no sacrifice: I was already high on adrenaline, the night colors were brighter and night sounds lovelier, the engine’s fraternal howl matched my soul’s cry, and while I cringed a bit at seeming uncool, I was also determined, partly out of self-protection but also chivalry (and a dash of desire for approbation from Dr. West) to get Amanda safely home tonight.
The girls were tipsy by the time we arrived at our destination. Out of the car together, they wrapped their arms around the other’s waist and walked with a hip-bumping shimmy; rather than slow them, their half-drunk conjoined state somehow helped them walk faster. But by now I expected desertion. The building, its eaves hung with string lights, pulsed with dance music, the bass line of “Le Freak” thumping outward, and voices at once articulate and indistinct rose above the clink of cutlery and glassware, all of it combining with the bay’s breeze to make it seem as if the structure were less a clubhouse than a moored yacht.
We made our way to a ballroom where the space was after-dinner dim and the tablecloths, set on the giant rounds, were blank screens across which the lights from the disco ball traveled.
Beneath it, seemingly the entire beach club’s cohort, sans youngsters, had migrated here wearing a broadly defined but consistent dress code: the men in seersucker or linen, almost all of them sockless in docksiders or leather slippers, their collared shirts unbuttoned at the top or cinched with bow ties that were pediatrician-bright.
The women all wore some version of modest, midlength summer dress, sleeveless and ruffled at the shoulders, with patterns mostly floral, so that, taken together, they formed what could be considered a vast and expensively landscaped backyard.
A half dozen couples danced, one pair synced with practiced skill, another doing the Hustle, most paralyzed below the waist and herky-jerky up top.
Claire and Amanda were mingling, were so remote from me that I, their driver, felt like the help.
With each passing second, I was more painfully aware of my Converse sneakers and lack of a jacket to hide the alligator on my shirt.
But here, again, was Tanner, in pleated shorts and a tie and blazer, taking huge pulls from a can of Foster’s.
Once again, he ordered that I follow him, and he led me down several dark hallways until we were in the darkened clubhouse locker room.
He spun a combination lock, opened the door, and handed me a striped jacket that looked closer to a convict’s uniform than a blazer.
“It’s my dad’s,” he said, “so be sure to give it back.”
Soon we were both standing at the bar. Amanda and Claire had made themselves scarce. Tanner and his friends—I was introduced to Croker, Squi, PJ, Brett, and Chip, who were discussing today’s round of golf. (From over their heads, someone handed me a beer.) It was a “scramble,” Tanner explained. I didn’t understand the scoring or the lingo, but my lack of knowledge mattered little to them.
“…so we’re at the seventh,” Tanner said, “there’s a prevailing right-left wind, and Biff can’t hit a fade for shit, he has to draw everything, so to cut the dogleg he doesn’t just take it over the bunkers, he takes it over Brett’s house.”
“No way,” Squi said.
“But it hits his roof—” Tanner said.
Everyone cackled, so I followed suit.
“—and kicks right,” Tanner continued.
“Oh my stars and garters,” Squi said.
“And lands smack dab in the middle of the fairway.”
“Most excellent,” said PJ, and slapped my shoulder so hard I almost covered up.
“So I’m one twenty-five to the pin—” Tanner said.
“Let me guess,” PJ said, and then pointed at him: “Punch nine.”
Tanner shook his head and tipped his beer can toward him. “Cut eight. I hit it so pure—”
“Candy,” said Croker.
“And it holds its line,” Tanner continued, pointing his flat hand skyward, “it’s right on the flag”—he tilted his flat hand downward—“and then it one-hops”—he clinked his beer to Brett’s—“right in the hole.”
“Jarred that bitch!” Brett said.
“No!” everyone said.
“No!” I echoed.
“My first eagle,” Tanner said.
Everyone clinked drinks.
I followed them out to the first fairway.
Several of them lit cigarettes while the rest stood arrayed along the green’s collar, aimed toward the hole, and pissed in its direction.
Two of the boys disappeared and then reappeared in a pair of golf carts.
“Gentlemen,” Croker said, “your rides have arrived.” We hopped on the carts and drove.
The sand traps looked like snowbanks; the water hazards, like black ice.
I was reminded of the last time I was on a golf course, this past winter, once again dressed in clothes that did not quite seem as if they were mine, the whiteout conditions limiting visibility as much as the darkness now, and me, even then, dreaming of a girl.
And yet there was once again the feeling that I was not the same person.
That beneath this outfit, there was another self I was becoming, emergent, powerful—dare I say calm?—ready to burst from beneath my skin because he was somehow larger than this form could accommodate.
“August,” Squi said, shouting to me over the motor, “always seems like the longest and shortest month.
Know what I mean?” I did now.
We stopped at a body of water.
“Penniman Creek,” Squi said when I asked.
Croker handed him a nine iron and dropped a ball at his feet.
Squi lined up his shot.
“It feeds into the canal that runs parallel to the ocean.
We are right now facing due south”—he swung, and the sound of the strike was pure, and the white orb disappeared into the night—“of Bermuda.” He looked at his audience and smiled.
“Depending on the alignment of your clubface.” Lights of spectacular homes lined the creek’s perimeter.
To achieve such luxury, I wondered, must one imagine it? Squi produced a joint.
When he smoked it, he pinched it with his thumb and index finger and then pressed his lips to these like the bars of a Jew’s harp.
“So we don’t swap spit,” he said when he offered it to me.
I declined.
Everyone else took several hits, and we loaded back into the carts and drove back to the field house.
I felt strangely wistful as the cars sped along.
I was certain I was the only one here who was sure I’d never see these people again.
When I found Tanner and returned his father’s jacket, it was like returning a costume on the last night of a performance.
Amanda was seated at a table. I touched her shoulder and she looked at me, blearily, and said, “I think I need to go home.”
Claire appeared.
Unlike Amanda, she seemed alert, awake, and when she bent between us, she said, above the music, which sounded louder now that the dance floor was nearly empty, “Where’s Vince Voelker?” And then, wickedly: “I want to fuck.”
So we left her there.
In Dr.West’s car, in and out of dozing, Amanda gave me perfect directions back to the house.
When we arrived, I killed the engine, pulled the keys, pressed the headlights knob to off, and we sat for a moment, staring at the stars and listening to the frogs sing.
I turned to her, hoping we might have a minute or two to ourselves, but she was asleep.
When I finally shook her arm, her skin was dewy.
“Home?” she asked, and got out of the car.
Amanda was a bit wobbly, so I caught up to her and steadied her by the elbow and waist.
“You’re a gentleman,” she mumbled, and nuzzled my neck before we entered, her breath smelling of vodka and cigarettes.
The living room was dark.
We walked up the dark stairs, Amanda ahead of me.
She held her dress’s skirt in one hand as she climbed, running her hand up the railing with the other.
If, during any part of the evening, we might have one moment that was going to be meaningful, this was it.
But over her shoulder, she said, “Good night, thank you for driving,” and went to her room.
I watched her door close, although not completely.
In mine, I stripped to my underwear and got into bed.
I stared at the ceiling; the floorboards creaked.
The house was so old it was almost never completely silent, which was a way, I thought, that such places made you feel a bit less lonely.