—
Dad came home from Delaware right before the July Fourth weekend.
The first leg of the tour for Sam and Sara had concluded, and we had the holiday together before he’d leave again for Philadelphia.
Oren and I hadn’t seen him in nearly a month.
He blew into the apartment, short-tempered.
Mom had already packed us for our annual trip out to Montauk, but Dad’s suitcase lay open and empty on their bed, which annoyed him more.
He was in a bad mood the entire weekend.
He didn’t want to swim and was distant at our dinners.
He didn’t want to fish with us or play miniature golf.
In the afternoons, Oren and I often returned to the motel room from the beach, where they’d left us, to hear them arguing in the room.
On Monday, Dad said he had to get to Philadelphia early.
We began our push back toward the city that afternoon but stopped, as we always did, at Elliott and Lynn’s house in Amagansett.
Their place was in that dune-swept stretch of barrens—a solid ten miles of moonscape—between Montauk and East Hampton.
Their house was supermodern, a two-story rectangle fashioned of white poplar sheared down its center by a glass-filled triangle.
These visits regularly followed the same schedule: Elliott made a huge batch of banana daiquiris in the blender.
The moment they were served Al, who had a house in Montauk, appeared, as if passing through (“I figure,”
he said, “I leave by four, I beat traffic”) but stuck around until later.
When Mom asked where his boyfriend, Tony, was, Al frowned and said, “As if I fucking know.”
Dinner was salmon and chicken and green beans with almonds and potato salad; after having seconds and white wine spritzers, Dad and Elliott fell asleep at the dinner table, Al and Mom talked on the back deck while he smoked and wept, Lynn did the dishes, Oren and I went to the guest room to watch Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.
When Dad, awake come evening, darkened our door, his bad mood had returned—he said it was time to go, and then there was the long drive home.
Mom’s and Dad’s faces were illuminated by the dash.
It was remarkable how they could conduct an entire conversation I somehow couldn’t follow about a couple whom I’d never heard of, never met.
“He thinks,”
Dad said, “she’s being a little too suspicious.”
“She thinks,”
Mom said, “she has reason to be.”
“He needs,”
Dad said, “for her to trust him.”
Here the conversation ended, though she allowed him to stroke her hair for the rest of the drive.
Traffic was a ruby-red serpent’s tail from Queens to Manhattan.
On Tuesday morning, Dad left to go back on tour, but I had to be at NBC studios even earlier—call was at six a.m.
My lines were barely memorized.
I still had not cracked a single summer reading book.
My backpack was full of graph paper for maps and dice and all the D world-building D and if, before it flashed, I correctly guessed the temperature that followed, that too meant Amanda would someday be mine.
I’d glare at the dressing room’s phone on my vanity mirror’s table—I’d never received a single call on it—and will it to ring, promising aloud, “Someday it will be Amanda on the line, asking me to go out with her.”
One afternoon in late July, it rang.
When I answered, it was Amanda, who said, “Where have you been all summer?”
And then she asked me out.
It was her birthday, she explained, and she didn’t want to spend it alone.
As if anticipating my question, she said, “Rob decided to go with some of his friends to the Cape this week.”
There were two women from school he was close with, Andrea and Sophie, did I know them? When I told her only by sight, she said they were having a final precollege bash—Rob was off to Princeton in the fall.
Which she reported in a tone somewhere between disappointment and resignation—they’d probably break up by summer’s end—a statement to which I simply listened.
Registering her pain and determined to cheer her up, I said, “Well, more Amanda for me”—not, I realized, a bad line, which was confirmed when Amanda replied, “I am all yours.”
Which made the blood hammer in my ears.
“How about dinner and a movie?”
I suggested.
“Mom’s ordering in Chinese and making me a cake.”
“How about a movie after,”
I said.
And then my father spoke through me.
“I hear the performances in Eye of the Needle are exceptional.”
She agreed, and I told her I’d call her back with the time and place.
After we wrapped for the day, I went to see Alison in wardrobe.
As I changed out of Peter Proton’s capri pants and suspenders, after I handed her the same pocket protector I’d worn for the past four years, I told her I had a big date tonight.
She kept her eyes on her book.
“Lucky you,” she said.
“I was wondering,”
I said, and then paused again because I was afraid to ask, “if you might consider helping me pick out something to wear.”
She looked up and then blinked at me several times.
She laid her book on her chest, lit a cigarette, then smiled and said, “Sure.”
The hangers clacked on the poles of the wardrobe racks as she considered and rejected shirt after shirt.
After holding a few of them up to my chest, she picked out a short-sleeved button-down—“This blue,”
she said, “brings out your pretty eyes,”
which no one except Naomi had ever told me were anything, much less pretty—black jeans and black Converses, neither of which I’d have ever chosen on my own.
“Snappy,”
Alison said, stepping back from me to get a good look, “but not trying too hard.”
I surprised both of us by hugging her.
It was overly enthusiastic, and she tensed up at first when I gathered her into the embrace, her arms out as if she were going to be frisked.
I forgot, for a moment, that she was a grown-up and figured she must’ve forgotten too, because I was taller than her now, filled out from weight training with Vince; but then she uncoiled, relaxed, and became heavy.
Settling, she pressed her ear to my shoulder and rocked ever so slightly, allowing me to feel, albeit briefly, the loneliness I now recognize she always seemed to carry.
“You’re welcome,” she said.
Later that evening, standing before the cinema’s entrance, I spied Amanda as she emerged from the street’s comparative darkness into the theater awning’s lights.
She had knotted a Clash T-shirt above her belly button, and she had rolled up the cuffs of a too-large gray blazer.
Her hair was in a bow.
She took a moment to appraise me, her eyebrows raised ever so slightly, as if she did not recognize me or as if I had, in some way she could not quite pinpoint, become unfamiliar to her, and in me this elicited a feeling of auspiciousness about tonight’s possibilities that I feared to trust.
It had been several weeks since we’d last seen each other, after all, and whatever difference she noticed went beyond the physical, seemed to put us on a different footing.
“Happy birthday,”
I said, and produced the bowed present I’d bought her on the trip home from the studio.
She considered the small box.
“Can I open it now?”
she asked.
She managed not to tear the wrapping, a trick every woman I knew could somehow manage, pulling the tape from the paper and then handing the latter back to me, as if it were failed origami.
“L’Air du Temps!”
she said.
Then she hugged my neck with one arm and held me, so that her cheek pressed to mine, and comparing it with the one Alison and I had shared earlier, it was different in kind: if the former was a respite from isolation, this felt like an invitation—to what I was not sure.
She removed the bottle from its packaging, unscrewed the ornate top—its fogged, abstract glass in the shape of a bird—then sprayed some perfume behind each ear; and when she lifted her chin for me to smell, I allowed myself to press my face into her soft hair, and she allowed me to remain thus poised long enough to enjoy it.
In the theater, when the lights went down, I kept my arm still on the rest we shared.
I was so hyperalert to our elbows’ lightest touch I could have taken her pulse.
Her nearness was so distracting the movie’s plot was mostly lost on me, her proximity something I dare not acknowledge, lest like some forest animal I might startle her and she bolt.
And yet my stillness also freed her to move, to press her shoulder to mine before asking a question, to tap my wrist to signal I tilt the bucket of popcorn toward her, or to lay her fingers on my arm, so that I bent my ear to her lips, before making a comment.
“They’re going to crash, ”
she whispered of Kate Nelligan and the actor playing her husband as they drive down the narrow road on their wedding day.
“She’s so lonely,”
Amanda said, when, years later, Nelligan’s crippled husband rejects her advances in bed.
“She’s in love with him,”
she murmured of Donald Sutherland, the Nazi spy, when he accidentally opens Nelligan’s bathroom door and pauses at the sight of her naked in the mirror’s reflection.
During the love scenes, I tried to swallow as quietly as was possible.
And when, at the film’s conclusion, Sutherland is foiled, killed at Nelligan’s hand, his stolen intelligence will never make it to the German high command, and D-Day can successfully commence—when the credits rolled but before the lights came up and there was that feeling of release that made you want to clap or cry or sprint down the aisles, I sensed Amanda turn and then stare at my profile.
She leaned over to kiss my cheek forcefully, gratefully, as if to confirm this had already been a lovely birthday, and then she waited.
How many times have I time traveled back to that moment? Have I, on take after take, kissed her in return? Only to understand how ill-equipped I was then to accept a direct invitation, being so adept at seeing around people, at watching their true selves peek out from behind their masks, that I could not match such spontaneous ardor? Sing, Muse, of a boy’s lack of know-how .
I’d been so trained in dissembling I didn’t simply distrust directness, I was paralyzed by it, no matter how blissed out I was, and did not dare turn to face her.
At least not yet.
I took her to Baskin-Robbins afterward for ice cream.
It was only a couple of blocks from her apartment.
After we were served, we stood on the sidewalk, brightened by the store’s interior light, watching each other eat as if each other’s eating was to be studied.
We finished our cones, and Amanda wrapped her arms around my waist and then leaned back, an embrace I copied, and we rocked from side to side, almost dancing.
She was beaming; she bit her lower lip and swept her eyes across mine, and once again this attention—this outright affection—made me bashful.
It was as impossible to believe as it was delightful, and in response to my hesitance she finally said, “Well?”
and when I did not reply, she asked, “Are you going to watch the royal wedding tomorrow?”
Because of the time difference, it started at six a.m., she explained.
She and her mother were going to set an alarm and have tea and English muffins with marmalade and not miss a minute of it.
Amanda assured me it was going to be the most romantic thing ever.
She was dying to see Diana’s dress, and when I asked what she wanted to do next, she demanded I come back to the apartment with her, even though her mother was home.
In Amanda’s room, I sat across from her, on her brother’s bed, the space between the frames narrow enough that our knees touched.
She leaned over to place a forty-five on her small turntable and, once she lowered the needle, adjusted the volume so that it was loud enough that we could speak privately but low enough that we could still hear her mother in the living room.
Miss West was talking on her ham radio, and when she spoke into the microphone, the sound of her voice was clear and insistent and unimaginably friendly.
She said, “Pointer-Cook-Seven-Zed-Zed, this is Patricia at Victor-Three-Five-Alpha-Bravo, calling from New York City, the Big Apple, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Nice to make contact with you, Tucker, it’s a very strong signal, over.”
The caller’s Australian accent was closer to a gurgled buzz.
The man said, “Victor-Three-Five-Alpha-Bravo, I’m coming to you at twenty meters.
Your signal’s very strong too, Patricia.
Tell me all about your fine summer weather, please, because we’re smack dab in the middle of winter here in Melbourne, over.”
Amanda leaned back on her bed, propped on her elbows, listening.
She swayed her knees side to side, which in turn swiveled mine.
She asked me what the rest of my summer looked like.
I said I was doing The Nuclear Family, it was six-to-six Monday through Friday, though I might get a Wednesday or Thursday off here and there, sometimes even a three-day weekend if I was lucky.
She said, “I’m going to my father’s house in Westhampton next week and then staying for most of August.
You should come visit.
When you have a break.”
“I will,”
I said, astounded at the invitation, already dreaming on it, and just as we noticed the music had stopped—that the needle was sounding the dead wax—it occurred to us Miss West had also gone silent, and she appeared at Amanda’s door.
She wore a consternated expression, so we both sat up straight.
She asked Amanda, “Have you seen my screwdriver?”
When Amanda replied, “No, why?”
Miss West said, “I have a transistor I need to replace and can’t remove the radio’s panel without a Phillips head.”
“It’s not in the junk drawer?”
Miss West shook her head.
“Are you sure you haven’t misplaced it?”
“Swear to God, hope to die,”
Amanda said.
Her mother squinted and then shot me a look of annoyance, a triangulated lie detector test: Was I an accomplice? When she disappeared, Amanda placed her index finger to her lips, then got up and walked over to her bookcase.
She took from its top shelf a tiny toy safe and sat down again, facing its combination lock toward me.
I could see that its metal door was damaged, like a swollen lip, bent outward from where the lock’s wheel engaged.
She reached in and removed the broken tool her mother sought, its small red handle bright as blood, the shank sheared off where she’d clearly snapped it trying to pry open the safe’s door.
Grimacing, mock guilty, she placed both pieces back in the safe.
Miss West reappeared from the kitchen, holding a very long letter opener, and said, “Not a clue?”
And when Amanda shook her head again, Miss West glanced at me and asked, “Don’t you have to go soon?”
to which I replied, “At eleven,”
and Miss West said, “It’s ten after,”
and I said, “Yes, ma’am,”
and then she disappeared once more.
I stood, but Amanda remained seated, watching me rise to go.
She placed her safe near her pillow.
She said, “Thank you for a lovely evening.”
“It was my pleasure,”
I said, and did not move.
Amanda’s eyes scanned mine.
Her expression I would best describe as suspicious—in fact it closely resembled her mother’s, as if I too were keeping a secret from her that she was waiting for me to divulge.
I knew what this was now, and even though I was still assailed by doubt there was nothing else to do.
I bent toward her, resting my hands on my knees so that our faces were within inches of each other’s, and mustering all my courage said, “I’m going to kiss you goodbye.”
To which Amanda replied, “Okay.”
And then I leaned in and kissed her.
It was barely more than a peck on her mouth, dry and quick, and afterward I withdrew ever so slightly.
I could not at first gauge her reaction because I remained so close to her, but she didn’t move.
I saw that her eyes were closed, that she was waiting, so I kissed her again.
It was awkward, fearful, and unassertive, my lips resting against hers inertly until, moving mine as she spoke, she said, “You can keep going, you know.”
And trying and failing to be cool, I said, “I can?”
And she said, “Yes,”
the s all smooshed between us.
I tilted my head and she tilted hers.
Her lips parted ever so slightly and, before they touched, so did mine.
At first the pressure was so gentle that I could feel the soft down above her top lip.
As we kissed each other, her tongue’s tip pressed delicately toward mine.
We parted, and I sat on the bed next to her and was about to kiss her, I imagined, for forever, when from the living room there came an agonized scream.
Miss West was seated with her back to the radio.
Her face was so white it looked powdered with talc.
Her hands lay on her lap and she held one in the other but would not look down at them.
She sat frozen, and then we saw what had happened.
She had somehow stabbed the letter opener into her palm, and the tip of the dull blade was all the way through to the other side.
Blood was issuing from it, slowly, thickly, just beginning to bloom on her skirt.
“I was trying,”
she explained, “to remove the panel screw,”
and then her eyes darted from me to Amanda, “and then the blade slipped.”
With a twitchy smile, she added, “I don’t want to faint.”
Amanda, who had covered her mouth, now rushed toward her mother and touched her mother’s shoulder, awaiting instruction, since Miss West was a nurse and the authority in such a matter, in spite of the fact that she was the one needing help.
With a courteousness incongruent with the moment, Miss West said to Amanda, “If you would get me a towel, please.”
Sweat beaded her forehead, and the skin at her neck was slick.
Amanda hurried to the bathroom and returned.
“Just put it underneath,”
Miss West said, “but gently,”
and raised her hand, “where the tip is,”
which hooked her soaked skirt when she lifted it from her lap.
“Don’t push it out,”
Miss West advised.
“In case…if I severed an artery.”
Amanda asked if she should call 911.
Miss West shook her head.
“We’re going to walk to Mount Sinai right now.
Griffin…” And she waved me over with her uninjured hand, indicating that I should help her to stand.
Out of the apartment, into the elevator, onto the street—the two of us supporting her—Miss West held her injured hand out before her with the towel beneath it.
Her other hand delicately supported the bunched fabric as if it were a ringbearer’s pillow.
Amanda and I huddled to her with our hands cupped beneath hers.
“Keep it elevated,”
Miss West said, “above my heart.”
The hospital came into view as soon as we turned on Amsterdam.
Shuffling as we were, the walk seemed to take forever.
Amanda kept saying, “You’ve got this, you can do it, not too much farther”; I kept saying, “Keep going, don’t give up, you’re doing great.”
Miss West kept repeating, “I’ve got this, I can do it, doing great.”
But once we arrived at the emergency room, once we stepped under the ambulance bay’s light, Miss West lost her composure.
She spotted a nurse she knew and called out, “Dolores!”
in a voice hoarse with terror.
The woman came running over to us and said, “Patty, my God.”
All the people seated in the waiting room looked up, and Miss West turned to me.
When she spoke, her tone was distant and professional, so at odds with the escalating emotion I couldn’t help but take note.
“I appreciate your help, Griffin, Dolores can take it from here,”
and Amanda, who was crying, nodded at me and then wiped her nose so that it smeared her mother’s blood on her nostrils and across her mouth.
Dolores took my place by Miss West’s elbow.
And the three of them walked into the building and through another set of double doors, which, along with my chances, swallowed them whole.