Chapter 12
JOEL
In the cafeteria at college, Joel had loved to watch Shay eat.
Omelets filled with stiff flakes of cheddar.
Plain hamburgers and dry pork chops. Bowls of cereal drenched in whole milk.
He never saw her eat a vegetable or a piece of fruit, her cream skin flushed with the blood of living things.
In her too-large oxfords and worn leather sandals, she was a beating heart.
After their conversation in the grass, they began to walk to and from class together.
She asked him to come to the one bar on the outskirts of campus, the Palms, where a waitress had been killed several years before, stabbed with a knife used to quarter limes and rolled up in a carpet.
The violence almost mythic, like any death that had happened on campus, so close and so far from them.
He arrived in his favorite T-shirt, not one of the thick cotton ones his mother bought in sad paper packets, but the one that actually showed how many hours he spent in the gymnasium, lifting and sprinting back and forth until his mind roared like the ocean, empty and thoughtless. At the Palms, he had too many thoughts.
Shay wasn’t alone, and her friends looked nothing like the other students lounging nearby.
Whereas Joel had always tried to obscure his wealth, her friends put it on full display.
The boys wore their fathers’ Rolexes and cable-knit cashmere sweaters.
There was a girl who wore a different sherbet-colored shift dress every time he saw her; another whose stiff, patent leather purse rattled with a bottle of Benzedrine.
So many chairs and shoulders and arms between him and Shay, when all he wanted to do was gently rest his hand on the small of her back and see what she would do.
If she’d recoil or let it stay, giving him permission to touch more of her.
Some of her friends asked him questions.
They recognized him from the track team, from a course on the French Revolution.
They asked him where he was going to study abroad (he wasn’t), what he thought of the girls in Alpha Phi (he had no opinion).
They drank too much beer and forgot about him, Shay remaining at a distance, and he eventually left to find his friends from the track team at another table.
But then he looked up and found her studying him in the same way he studied her, as if the safest time to look at him was when he wasn’t near.
Haven House was an ivory colonial with a steep roof and pale blue shutters.
The sun hadn’t set, but even lit by its honeyed light, the house looked empty and haunted.
Cocktail tables draped with white cloth dotted the stone patio, and clusters of guests in halter dresses and sport coats fanned out across the freshly mown lawn, the air fibrous with the smell of cut grass.
It was the first time everyone was gathered in the same place, and he could tell many of the guests were assessing the crowd.
At this point, gossip had spread, knowledge of Synanon traded in whispers, so that everyone was wary of the prospect of guests with shaved heads.
The waiters wore the same black vests as the hotel staff, which made Joel wonder if the Pruitts owned it.
If the entire island was their property, its population fully in their service.
He scanned the guests clotted near the house’s patio doors, the men lined up at the bar and the women traipsing over the grass. Shay was not in sight.
“Shall we see what the liquor situation is?” Carmen asked. She wore an orange dress that hung off her shoulders, her hair plaited in a thick black braid. In their hotel bathroom, he’d told her she looked beautiful, and she’d smiled as if she already knew.
They each ordered a cup of gin punch. Joel coughed when he took a sip—it was as strong as rubbing alcohol—and Carmen laughed and slapped him on the back.
Waiters threaded through the guests with platters of salmon toast and shrimp and cucumber canapés, and the more he and Carmen drank, the more often they intercepted the waiters, pretending it was the first time they crossed paths.
“Oh, is this quiche?” Carmen would say as the waiter attempted to conceal their annoyance. Joel realized he was having fun.
“So, where are the bride and groom? I feel like I should meet them before I witness them say ‘till death do us part,’ ” Carmen said after bringing over their third cups of punch. The bartender’s pours were getting heavier.
“Oh, um.” Joel looked around. Shay was still nowhere to be seen, but Andrew was holding court inside the screened porch, surrounded by a few men Joel recognized from school, though some of their faces had grown puffier over the past three years.
Their hairlines crept toward their crowns. “Andrew is over there.”
Carmen craned her neck. “He’s handsome. Looks a little like Lee Majors. Should we go say hello?”
“Not now,” Joel said. “He’s busy.”
“Well, I think he’ll be busy all night.”
Joel took another sip of his drink. He didn’t know exactly how to explain that Andrew did not care for him.
When Shay started dating Andrew at the start of senior year, Joel had tried to tear himself away from her, but his resolve weakened as she left books she thought he’d like in his library carrel and waited outside his dorm in the soft dawn when she couldn’t sleep, walking with him to his early-morning sprints.
He was addicted to the presence of her body, the smell of her—a scent he could only describe as heat—even though he knew he could no longer touch her.
She’d made that perfectly clear, and Shay was never one to change her mind.
Even though their interactions had become chaste, Andrew sensed something.
With his wet brown eyes and toffee hair, he was like a golden retriever, sniffing the air.
Andrew was the kindest of Shay’s circle, and his love for her had been obvious for years; he laughed too loudly at her remarks and always pulled out a chair for her in the dining hall.
When he and Joel crossed paths that final year of college, he gave Joel a curt nod, but his friends made their displeasure more obvious, knocking beers out of Joel’s hands with their elbows, lying to his supervisor that he’d fallen asleep during shifts at the library.
Joel did not retaliate. He knew if it escalated, even the liminal space he and Shay shared would evaporate.
She would have to make a choice, and she would not choose him.
In the city, Joel knew she lied to Andrew when they met up for a walk or a reading.
Their lives did not overlap, their hours together charged with a sense of feverish isolation, everything else in the world—their work, their friends, their apartments—suddenly far away and of no consequence.
He did not know she was engaged until, at the end of one of their walks through Washington Square Park, she took her hands out of her jacket pockets.
When she looked to where his gaze had halted, she seemed as surprised as him to find the ring.
Joel refused to go to the engagement party, an act of self-preservation, but he could not recuse himself from their wedding.
On his invitation, Shay had written in her familiar block text lines from Jane Austen, There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends.
I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature, and he felt he had no choice.
Through the thatched screen of the patio, Andrew met his eyes. Joel quickly looked away.
“Maybe later,” he told Carmen. “Those guys he’s talking to are from college, and I never really liked them.”
“Why?” Carmen asked.
“They’re just rich assholes. Barely went to class.”
“Well, if you don’t like them, I don’t like them.” Carmen tapped a nearby waiter on the shoulder, frowning when he turned toward her with an empty platter. “So, where’s the bride?”
Joel turned to survey the crowd again. The sun was beginning to dip below the blue cliff of the ocean, waiters lighting candles in glass jars.
The distant sound of piano keys pricked his ear.
Someone was playing inside the house. He watched a man in his fifties with Shay’s coloring—that same pink and cream—spit an hors d’oeuvre into a napkin and a painfully thin girl from college whose name he couldn’t recall hold up a seashell-shaped mirror to reapply her lipstick.
At the party’s edge, a teenager in a tie the width of his neck stole an abandoned glass of white wine from a cocktail table.
And then the crowd parted like Moses’s sea, and there she was.