—
Twice we were nearly caught.
One afternoon, while parked again at the Dead Street, Naomi pushed me away from her in the back seat and refastened her bra.
“This is teenage stuff,”
she said. “We should be doing this in a bed.”
My solution was so obvious I couldn’t believe I hadn’t suggested it sooner: “My apartment’s only a block from here.”
At this, she knocked her palm to her forehead and, in imitation of me, said, “I could’ve had a V8.”
She took her time, when we arrived, to consider the place, Dad’s black-and-white photographs, his signed scores from The Fisher King and Jacques Brel. I took her out onto the terrace, told her how Oren and I liked to throw eggs at people at night. “Boys will be boys,”
Naomi said. A pigeon landed on the railing, considered us for a moment, and then flew off. I asked her if she wanted to see the roof and she replied, “It sounds romantic. Maybe later, sure.”
She opened a cabinet in the kitchen, surveyed its supplies of dry and canned goods, in case, I figured, we might have to ride out a nuclear winter here. She considered her appearance in the dining room mirrors and, when I stood next to her, smiled.
“Look how cute we are together,” she said.
“Want to see where I study?” I asked.
When I opened the door to my closet, she leaned into the space with her arms crossed, as if it were a clifftop’s overlook and I might push her over its edge. I clicked off the light and led her to the room I shared with Oren. She considered my Farrah Fawcett and Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders poster. “I have the top bunk,”
I explained, but when I indicated she should climb the ladder she said, “Uh-uh.”
So I continued to my parents’ room.
Taking a seat on their bed, Naomi asked, “Is this all of it?”
I assumed she meant the apartment, and I nodded. She considered my mother’s bookshelves. She turned to look at the window, facing the river. “Oh,”
she said, “that street there leads to where we park.”
Later, on my knees, glancing between my mother’s books and the underside of Naomi’s chin, spying our single body, now and again, in the blackened reflection of the TV’s screen, feeling her feel my tongue’s tiniest touch, its tip’s tensile adherence to her skin, like a starfish’s feet, send shudders through her stomach, I heard the front door bang shut.
Naomi rolled away from me, scooped up her clothes, and disappeared into my parents’ bathroom.
It was Oren.
“Hel lo ?” he said.
I dove under the covers and pretended to be asleep. I could hear him open and close several drawers in our room, and then he peeked into Mom and Dad’s door.
“What are you doing here?”
he asked, and entered.
I did my best groggy-disoriented groan and, after a big stretch, moaned, “I could ask you the same thing.”
Oren wasn’t buying it. He held up a plastic bag from Zabar’s. “I came to get some underwear,” he said.
I sucked my teeth. “I must’ve fallen asleep.”
“Naked?”
he said. Then he glanced at the closed bathroom door before looking back at me.
I shook my head as if to say, Don’t even think about it. While I was certain he wouldn’t disobey me, I was so scared I could barely keep my voice from cracking.
Oren snorted, and with a delivery that was a little too loud, that cruelly increased my discomfort, said, “Some summer, huh?”
“You’re telling me.”
“How’s living with the Shahs? You get to ride around in Sam’s Ferrari?”
“Every day,”
I said. “I’m working at his company too.”
Oren’s expression darkened. “What do you mean?”
“I’m answering the phones. It’s the best way to learn the business.”
Oren was enraged. “You already have a job.”
“It’s just part-time.”
“That should’ve been my job,”
Oren said.
“What are you talking about?”
He swung the bag at my head and I blocked it.
“Why are you always so mad at me?”
I shouted.
“Because you hog everything, ” he said.
Then he stormed out.
Traffic was terrible on the drive to Great Neck. From the FDR Drive, I could see the endless queue we were in, forking in both directions, east across the Triborough Bridge and moving at a snail’s pace across the river, above Randall’s Island. How much life was wasted like this? How much time, when it was added up, was idled away in this idiocy? How was I supposed to know that Oren wanted to work for Sam? And why didn’t I figure that out beforehand? Why was I so selfish?
“Why so quiet?”
Naomi asked, turning off the radio.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.
Why was I here?
“Someone’s in a bad mood,”
Naomi said, and turned the radio’s volume back up.
The second time was at the office. It was day’s end, and I had decided I needed to see Griffynweld in its entirety. The staff had already left, along with Sam. Naomi was working at her desk. I’d spent the slow afternoon photocopying all of my world’s various regions, taping these together on the floor behind my desk to form a complete map. When these puzzle pieces were all connected, the result was as big as a queen-sized bed. I sat cross-legged before this, feeling a tremendous sense of accomplishment, reveling in the detail contained in each landmark, the various keeps and castles and dungeons that had once filled individual notebooks now marked on visible coordinates. I sensed Naomi behind me.
“Wow,”
she said, and kneeled to join me on the floor, “what’s this you made?”
“It’s the world I’ve been building all summer,” I said.
“What’s all this for?” she said.
“My friends. My brother. It’s a game we play.”
“How does it work?”
“The Dungeon Master—me—creates a universe that has an overarching story, a beginning, a middle, and an end,”
I said. “But there are smaller stories, adventures, that take place in between. Like here.”
I leaned over the map and tapped the two towers icon at the southeastern tip.
“It kinda looks like New York,”
she said. Then she touched the map.
“This place, everything about it, is in this notebook.”
And I flipped through the spiral notebook containing the notes and maps, every room charted with treasure and traps. “And a group of players, who create characters of their choosing—they pick their race, class, and attributes—tell those stories with me. So the trick is to listen to their stories, to partly adapt the game to them, to let them help determine the game’s flow,”
I continued, tracing the snaking shape of the Cronos Canyon’s river, “and to sort of guide them, while also putting obstacles in their way. Using these dice. To account for probabilities, for chance. It’s also my job to nudge them toward the places they need be, to gain experience and weapons and magic in order to acquire everything necessary to complete the campaign. Which is the way it becomes our story. Together.”
I felt a little embarrassed having talked for so long but was also pleased with my summary.
“So what’s the big picture, then?”
Naomi asked, and sat down next to me, to my right, but with her back to the map. “What’s the story?”
She lay on her right hip, propped on her right hand, so that her shoulder nearly touched mine. I began to tell her, to outline for her the scourge that was the powerful and evil wizard, the Magus Moraga, and describe the band of teenagers who had witnessed their families and friends murdered by him and vowed revenge. I explained that, to defeat him, they would need to go on a quest for the pieces of the legendary Shield Sheafson’s armor, a set of relics more powerful than any weapon in all of Griffynweld, because it was invulnerable to all evil-aligned magic and could therefore destroy the tyrannical hold the magus had on his followers, freeing them, once again, to live peacefully among one another. While I was outlining all this, she said, “Well, I probably wouldn’t be much good at it. But I sure wish I could play with you.”
And at this moment, I missed everybody in my life so terribly: my father, to whom I hadn’t spoken in weeks; my mother, who was so sad; my brother, who was so angry; Cliffnotes, only a few miles uptown but as far as Castle Pym was from Griffynweld’s eastern ocean; Tanner, probably sitting by the ocean now and on the same beach as Amanda. Even Amanda, who had treated me so poorly. So that when I came back to myself, seated here, on the floor, with Naomi, whose attention was complete, my loneliness was more acute than at any point in my life. When Naomi noticed my expression, she placed her palm to my cheek and kissed me, and I kissed her back, her cheek and her ear, to hide my face; and as during those first times together in her car, she raised her chin ever so slightly and closed her eyes, allowing herself to be kissed. “Never,”
she whispered, “never in my life ever has anyone kissed me like you do. If I could only explain,”
she said, “what it means to me.”
And then Sam walked in the office.
Because I faced the door, because over Naomi’s shoulder I could see it slowly swing in my direction, I was the first to react.
Its glass was frosted, though I had an intimation it was Sam, I don’t know why, and because he did not expect to see us here, he’d proceeded hesitantly, surprised, I could tell, that the lights were still on, the office unlocked, Naomi—usually visible at her desk from that sight line—gone.
And when to his right he sensed a presence, beneath him, and glanced in my direction, his view of his wife was slightly obstructed by my desk; her back was to him, his view of me obstructed by her, though she did not move from her position, did not jump up from where she was reclined, her eyes slowly opening as she registered his footfalls, at which point she remained still.
There was time only for her to give me a fierce stare—it had just a hint of bravado in it, which I will never forget—for me to barely lean away, and while we were not, in fact, kissing at that moment, our faces were so close to each other’s, it was all so utterly compromising, that I was sure we’d been discovered.
And what I will also never forget was how the sight of us registered with Sam—how he paused, so unprepared for this sight, that I was reminded of a deer twitching into visibility as you walk along a wooded road, the same initial perplexity obtaining between Sam and me as our eyes locked.
Of what the next move was.
And whose.
Sam, flummoxed, said only, “I forgot something,”
and with a barely perceptible shake of his head—it was like watching someone convince himself he hadn’t seen a ghost—strode toward his office, assembled the papers for which he’d returned, and, as if for our benefit—we had not moved an inch—said to the both of us, “I’ll see you at home.”
Then he walked out the door backward, pulling it closed behind him, as if to undo the entire episode.
I witnessed Naomi and Sam’s fight that evening.
I was scraping the leftovers into the koi pond, enjoying the splash of the fish breaching for the food, when I heard them.
It came as if from a distance at first, what they said was muffled, but because I was in the backyard and because it was nighttime, I could see them on the second floor, through their bedroom windows.
Sam, miming an explosion in his head; Naomi, in response, jabbed her finger into his chest and then pointed behind her, as if he’d left something in the hallway that she demanded he retrieve.
They fought differently from my parents; the distinction was sonic.
Dad denied and bemoaned; Mom accused and wailed; pain and heartsickness were its tenor.
Sam, meanwhile, mocked and dismissed; Naomi raged and demeaned; their tone was hateful—Naomi’s voice as guttural as Sam’s was high-pitched—and it scared me more than my parents’ fighting but did not stifle my curiosity.
Naomi about-faced and marched out of their room, and I moved toward the very back of the yard, to stand invisible before the hedges and follow her progress, since the home’s bay-facing side was mostly glass.
Naomi next appeared in the second-story hallway and made her way down the stairs.
She entered the living room, where Danny was watching TV, and ordered her to turn it off.
Above, I spotted Sam, framed in his bedroom’s middle window, both hands clapped to his cheeks as he contemplated the water; Jackie appeared to my left in the sunroom, oblivious to this conflict, a pint of H?agen-Dazs in one hand, a spoon in the other, until Naomi appeared, striding past her, toward the garage—she waved off her daughter’s question—to go for a drive, I guessed (I heard the door to the garage slam), because I didn’t see her for the rest of the evening, and she didn’t find me in my room that night.
In the days that followed this row, and without fail, it was Sam who took me to lunch. I feared an accusation was forthcoming. In the meantime, he seemed glad for my company, energized at the prospect of introducing me to new cuisine. “The world is our oyster,”
he said, laughing, and he took me for these at Grand Central Station, insisting I drench the two dozen we split in mignonette, in horseradish, in cocktail sauce. Next we had the fried scallops with black garlic-ancho aioli. “The spice,”
Sam said, “puts hair on your chest.”
He chewed with his mouth open; he laughed at the food’s heady flavors; his good mood was both infectious and a relief.
He took me for Korean the next day, introduced me to kimchi, challenged me to go toe-to-toe with him and see who could eat the hottest dish.
“If I tap before you,”
he said, “I’ll give you five dollars per course.”
“What if I tap?” I asked.
“You tap,”
Sam replied, “and you still get a free meal, how’s that for a bargain?”
“Bet,”
I said, and we hooked pinkies.
It was a relief to be away from Naomi. It was a comfort to have Sam close. I did feel guilt deceiving him. Playing the part of his surrogate son, I could throw off the role of Lancelot, bedding the queen and destroying the kingdom. There was a lightness, a glee, in being the mentee. I won the fire noodles course, as well as the stir-fried octopus, but conceded at the pork cutlet—the “dreaded ‘drop-dead donkatsu,’?”
Sam intoned as the waiter placed the smoking plate between us. “Don’t worry,”
Sam said, as I fanned my tongue and drank glass after glass of ice water, “we’ll get milkshakes afterward to cool the heat.”
The next day we brought beef souvlaki back to the office and ate at our desks, letting the paper catch the glistening green and yellow peppers that squished from the bread.
Sam loved to lick the orange grease from his fingers afterward—I had never seen someone actually do this—sealing his lips to his digit’s lowest pad and then pulling to the tip, making a pop at the top and then moving on to the next, ending at the thumb.
It was an act I spied Naomi watching from her desk, over her glasses’ bridge, and which, upon its conclusion, caused her to raise her own hands as if she were drying a manicure, the expression on her face one of shocked disgust.
We had gyros on Friday, and that afternoon, while Sam was out of the office at a meeting, I called Naomi’s extension and told her to meet me on the elevator.
And as soon as we were rising in the car together, I pushed her against the wall and kissed her, at which point she pushed me away and groaned.
“What?”
I asked, my heart pounding, because she’d made the same growl with Sam.
“Nothing,”
she said, and yanked the deadman’s lever to D . “Just please go brush your teeth.”
It was now Sam who drove me home in the evenings. I admit this too was a relief: to be under his surveillance, to lose the window of opportunity with Naomi, since within his sight I could do little wrong. But the silence brought on by this change in routine was for me almost unbearable. Here, I sometimes grew most paranoid, I expected an accusation at any moment, and on that first drive home together the actor in my soul made his appearance almost immediately.
“Can I get your advice about something?”
I asked, and, after a beat, added: “It’s a girl problem.”
Sam downshifted, kept his eyes on the road. “I’ll be happy to help if I can,”
he replied.
I told him the story of Amanda, from our meeting at Nightingale through the school year, from babysitting to the dinner with her dad, the kiss on the night of her birthday, culminating, of course, with that dreadful weekend in Westhampton—“Ah,”
Sam said, “now I get why you were so upset that day”—and concluding with my question: “What do you think I should do?”
We’d arrived in Great Neck; we were on Saddle Rock’s residential roads. Sam pulled over. “For starters,”
he said, proving he had been listening to at least part of my story, “you need to learn to drive a stick.”
This was how we spent those final evenings together.
With me, driving the Ferrari all over Great Neck, wending our way down to University Gardens, then up to Kings Point, along East Shore Road, the nighttime vistas of Manhasset Bay ripping alongside us.
Other nights, we crossed over to Port Washington and Sands Point, and then pushed east to Hempstead Bay, driving with the windows down, the salt in the air so heavy at times it was like eating an oyster again, the automobile exhaust carried on the eastbound breezes from Manhattan, whose glow on the horizon blotted the stars.
I got the hang of finding each gear’s sweet spot, a conversation in resistance and inertia, between the road and the V12, always seeking that balanced feel, that zone where the car was never redlining but holding power in abeyance.
“Accelerate into the turn,”
Sam said as we leaned to the right. “Trust the suspension to claw the road.”
We headed south again, to Greenvale, bearing east on 25A to East Norwich— Perfect names, I thought, for Griffynweld —continuing on to Oyster Bay, Sam and me driving for hours, all the way east to Stony Brook, where we parked and could spot, to the west, the Eatons Neck Lighthouse, its beam’s flash and revolution fingering the sound while Connecticut’s shore twinkled across the water. We got pulled over twice during these lessons, Sam producing his Police Benevolent Association card and badge for the officer, who considered it and, after disappearing briefly to call in the plates, said only, “Thanks, Mr. Shah, just make sure that next time your son has his permit with him.”
“My son?”
Sam chuckled when we were back on the road. “Makes you wonder who’s your mother.”
And oh, the houses I saw on these long drives.
Mansions with columns and verandas, their crow’s nests looking out over the waterfront.
Their foyers lit by gargantuan chandeliers.
Their old-world masonry and landscaping, their limestone and copper flashing mottled with the sea spray’s patina, their ivy-covered chimneys and two-boat slips.
Their lawns for lawn’s sake, as if grass were a staple crop.
The millions of ways there were in America to make millions.
The beguiling edifices of the rich that proclaimed more, more, more.
What to do with such plenty? What to make of such wealth? How to live your life?
Why did Sam bring me here? Is it possible that he simply wanted the company? Was he planning to shoot me and dump my body in the Sound? Or did he want to justify?
“The middle class grows,”
Sam said, “the middle class needs cheap clothes.
When I was your age, when it was time for me to go into the family business, this fact was as bright as that lighthouse’s lantern back there.
But of this, I was sure: open up the borders, get rid of the tariffs, manufacture overseas to reduce your labor costs and increase your margins.
Deregulate all of it, and then it’s just an equation.
You, the government, you cut my taxes to swell the middle, even if the middle isn’t what it used to be, and guess what? The middle’s less will become my more, and the only solution when the economy tanks will be to tax me even less, while I laugh all the way to the bank.
These next few decades—it’s going to be like having a bucket when it rains.
Because if you’re rich in this great country, you’re in like Flynn.
You’re rich, first.
You’re not Jewish or Muslim or yellow or brown.
You’re rich, and you’re safe. Safe from the very place you call home.”
I touched 110 on the straightway.
“The truth of it is I knew there was no risk in this business when I started. When the game’s gamed it’s game over. I knew that if I just put in my time, there was mostly only reward. But risk,”
Sam said. “Balls. Nerve. No safety net. That, my boy, is the provenance of your father. Maybe it’s your provenance too.”
—
I’d lost count of the days since Naomi had last found her way to my bed. Something had happened. She seemed chastened, wary in Sam’s presence, cool and formal toward me. She avoided eye contact. She mumbled nonsensically. On the nights Sam and I did not drive together, she excused herself after dinner and retired to her bed, leaving Danny, Jackie, and me to do the dishes and then spend the rest of the evening watching MTV. It had premiered at the beginning of August and it was all the girls did, it seemed. Naomi sometimes joined us, though she sat as far apart from me in the room as she could manage.
But on the last night we spent together, when Sam and I arrived from Manhattan, Naomi seemed back to being her old self. She greeted me warmly, kissed her husband with an exaggerated pucker on the lips, and, after the big smack, said, “Have I got a surprise for you.”
She led us to the kitchen. “From Marvin Himmelfarb at Ralph Lauren.”
She held up a bottle of Nolet’s Reserve and then, with a flourish, a bottle of Petrus Pomerol.
Sam brightened, considering the label. “Nineteen sixty-one!”
he said. “What did you do to deserve this?”
“Let me fix you a martini, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
She gave Sam another big flirty smooch. “I brought home some steaks. They had a great price on the filet at the butcher.”
“Fantastic,”
Sam said. “I’ll decant the bottle.”
Later, after Danny, Jackie, and I had scraped the fat into the koi pond, we came back inside to find Sam asleep at the dinner table.
“You two,”
Naomi said to her daughters, “go start your bath. I’m going to give your father another antihistamine.”
Then to me: “So he doesn’t snore from the sulfites.”
Did Naomi know it was her last chance to show me that this was what we shared? As I watched her above me, it seemed, at times, as if I were only incidental, a bystander to her performance. She wanted to be unforgettable. She wanted us, I am certain now, to be something she might never forget, that she might tend henceforth, like embers. She slapped me occasionally; she stiff-armed my face, leaning with all her weight, palm to my cheek, and held me there. She pulled her own hair, gathering fists of it by her temples, and shook her head. And for a long time, at the very end, she just kissed me, and I kissed her back, and this kissing felt like a free fall in pitch-darkness, felt like something endless.
It was sometime in the middle of the night, but, waking, I knew I was not the only one awake. Like a dog’s ear for high pitch, I heard a sound, one I could barely discern or distinguish, and I got out of bed to find the source.
Naomi was seated in the middle of the front hall’s staircase, in her slip, crying.
She looked up and wiped her eyes and waved for me to join her, then took my hand and turned me around, so that I was seated with my back to her, between her legs, which formed chair arms as if she were my young king’s throne. She pressed her face to my neck and nuzzled me there and cried, silently, her body shaking. Her forehead was hot. She calmed down, finally, and for a long time just sat with her arms weaved around my neck.
“I don’t want to go upstairs,”
she said. Then: “I don’t want you to ever leave.”
Then: “I don’t want to lose my family.”
Then: “I don’t want to be with Sam anymore.”
Then: “I want to wake up in your bed one morning.”
Then: “I don’t want my daughters to ever be this unhappy.”
Then: “I don’t want to be scared anymore.”
Then: “I don’t want to keep hating myself.”
Then: “I’m so sorry for what I’ve done to you.”
She kissed the back of my neck, at the very base, and rose to her feet and left me there.
Adults, I think now, were the ocean in which I swam.