Chapter 32
JOEL
There is this cave in the air behind my body, Joel thought as Carmen laid her palm against his thigh.
Often, after he had two beers, lines of poetry would come to him.
One of the men they’d befriended was telling a story about his dog.
It was obvious his wife knew it wasn’t interesting—animals and babies were typically dull unless they were right in front of you—and so she kept hurrying the story along to its conclusion.
Luckily or unluckily, the man didn’t seem to notice.
They’d all given their names at some point, but Joel had instantly forgotten them.
Carmen would remember. She was like a politician in that sense, able to retain names and details: that the waitress at the diner on Essex had a son named Jamal, that Joel’s colleague Linda was a Taurus.
This ability came at the expense of arguably more important pieces of information, like when her rent was due and when she’d told him to meet her outside the movie theater.
“And that’s where we found the chicken leg,” the man announced, and the table joined him in laughter. His wife gratefully finished her drink, and her lipstick left a chalky pink ring at the mouth of the beer bottle.
“Shay’s here,” the other wife said, lifting her arm to wave.
Joel briefly turned to look behind him, finding Shay in an ankle-length blue sundress, the low neck ending in a point between her breasts. Relief that she had arrived safely flooded through him. Grace whispered in her ear.
Carmen was watching him, and he did his best to seem disinterested. To pretend Shay was just another body in a crowded bar. It was enough to know that she was here; he could speak to her later about the woman with the shaved head.
“Do you want to check out the jukebox?” he asked Carmen. Two young men he believed to be Shay’s cousins had been monopolizing the music, playing Buddy Holly and Frank Sinatra—songs that already sounded like they were from another century—but they’d finally abandoned their post.
“I don’t have any change,” Carmen said.
He dug in his pockets, presenting her with a few nickels and dimes, and they rose.
As Carmen flipped the paper cards of titles, it became obvious why they’d been listening to old crooners. The jukebox hadn’t been updated with any music from the past twenty years. She clucked her tongue.
“It’s your choice,” he said.
“Very gentlemanly of you.”
When he glanced back at their table, he saw Andrew take one of their seats.
His face, eager and open as always, was sunburned, though not so severely that it wouldn’t fade by tomorrow.
Tomorrow: the day of the wedding. The thought made Joel feel like he could vomit, though that was why they were here, why they’d come to this unknown island that felt like it had risen from the ocean just for the occasion.
Carmen dropped a nickel into the slot, punching a number and letter with her thumb.
“I think Elvis is more attractive now,” she said. “Hound Dog” had begun to play. “Everyone always laughs when I say that, but he was too beautiful when he was really young. Like a mannequin.”
Carmen moved her shoulders to the drumbeat, taking a swig from her beer.
His bottle was empty. A cloister, a silence, he thought.
Next to him, she smelled like the lavender soap from the hotel and cigarettes.
When he looked back to their table, he saw Shay winding through the tight throng of bodies and chairs, coming toward them.
She held a full pint of water, and he was seized with the sudden urge to take her hand and run.
“I’ve been wanting to meet you,” Shay said to Carmen.
The room was loud, so she was nearly shouting.
It was obvious she had been in the sun like Andrew.
Faint freckles that were familiar to him as a constellation speckled her cheekbones, though she still seemed malnourished, like she hadn’t gained back all of the weight in her face since leaving Riverside.
“Oh,” Carmen said. “That’s so nice. I’m Carmen.” Her voice was light, but he noticed her shoulders stiffen.
“Shay.”
“I’m sorry we haven’t met before.”
“Yes, well, Joel and I haven’t seen each other in a little while.”
Shay was giving Carmen her full attention.
This was how it always was whenever Joel was with another woman in college, even if just for an evening.
Shay would lay no claim to him. Just the opposite: she would barely speak to him.
Maybe it was a punishment, but it felt more like she was granting him this time, safe with the knowledge that he would always, in his own way, return to her.
“Thanks so much for coming all this way,” Shay said.
“It’s a nice vacation. I almost never leave New York.”
“Carmen was born there,” he said.
Shay asked where, and they triangulated streets and addresses, spoke about Pete’s and Morningside Park.
There was an ease to the patter, Shay seeming like her old self, and he wondered if she and Carmen would have been friends if they had met waiting for the bathroom at the Bottom Line or crossed paths at a gallery, both frowning at the same inscrutable painting.
Shay didn’t wear any jewelry but her engagement ring, and he found himself staring at the small, empty pinpricks at her earlobes, imagining the needle puncturing her skin. He wondered if she’d seen his note.
“The Upper East Side is an odd place,” Shay said. “It’s beautiful, but it feels like a different city, or just a different New York.”
“Did you like the Upper West Side more?”
“I’m sorry?”
“That’s where Synanon’s building is, isn’t it? On Riverside?”
His attention snapped back to Carmen. There was an astounding innocence in her inflection, like she had just asked something as pedestrian as where Shay would honeymoon.
Shay opened her mouth, temporarily at a loss for what to say—a look he had rarely seen—and Carmen took a small sip of her beer.
He felt anger toward her, but also an eddy of admiration: she was an incredible actress.
“Let’s not talk—” he began.
“I didn’t get outside much, when I lived there,” Shay said. “At a certain point, they didn’t like for me to leave the building.”
There was a brief silence where it felt like Carmen and Shay were still speaking to each other, their eyes locked together, though he could not understand what was being said.
The music had stopped. Someone nearby was talking about jumping from the island’s lone cliff near Haven House, and how the locals had left stones to indicate where it was safe to dive, so you didn’t hit the jagged rocks below.
He was grappling for the next line of the poem, as if that would reveal something to him.
His mouth tasted like he had bitten his tongue.
“Do you remember that James Wright poem, ‘The Jewel’?” he asked. It was absurd, he knew, but no more absurd than anything else he could think to say. “What’s the last line?”
“I don’t know it,” Carmen said, just as Shay said, “ ‘My bones turn to dark emeralds.’ ”
Someone called Shay’s name—Betty, appearing at her side, touching her bare shoulder—and Carmen took another sip of her beer, glancing back to the jukebox.
Shay excused herself, and as Joel attempted the polite motions of a conversation ending, Betty watched like a hungry cat, aware that something was amiss.
Carmen was flipping through the songs again. Andrew was still at their table.
“Do you want another drink?” he asked.
“I think it’s time to go,” Carmen said, and he nodded, taking the empty bottle from her hand.