Chapter 7
JOEL
By the morning, Carmen had sprawled across the bed, her black hair wrapped around her neck.
At some point, she’d thrown the sheets off, and her body was naked except for another pair of white underwear, thin as the wing of a moth.
Joel could never sleep so exposed. When he rose, she stirred, rolling onto her stomach.
There was a pink flush under one of her buttocks, and he had the sudden urge to run his thumb across it, but they didn’t feel close enough yet for those sorts of nonsensical, proprietary intimacies.
Perhaps after living together, they would.
“What time is it?” she asked, her voice muffled by the pillow.
“Just a little after six.”
“You snore more on vacation.”
“I’m sorry.” He smiled. “You should go back to sleep.”
She did not respond, which he took as acquiescence.
In the bathroom, he tried to pee quietly against the porcelain of the toilet bowl, but it was a wasted effort, as the shower loudly groaned when he turned on the faucet.
The water was as cold as the Atlantic. A daddy longlegs scurried from the drain, and he remembered his youngest brother once telling him they were venomous, but their fangs were too minuscule to bite humans.
There was nothing planned until the welcome party that evening.
He expected white wine and Tom Collinses on Andrew’s parents’ back lawn, similar to the weddings he’d been to as a child growing up in Swampscott, though Andrew’s family was older, wealthier, which meant this weekend was even more lavish and sprawling.
As an adult in New York City, weddings were different.
One of his best friends from college, Roger, simply went to city hall and had everyone meet for lunch at some cramped seafood restaurant after, where he’d ordered rounds of oysters and champagne until the bride was so drunk she fell asleep at the table.
A coworker had a friend officiate their ceremony in an apartment crawling with spider plants where no one was allowed to wear shoes.
These seemed better than the buttoned-up, mirthless celebrations from his childhood, but they weren’t what he wanted for himself.
Even with their oddities, these new weddings felt mundane in their intimacy.
Since Shay, he had struggled to picture his own wedding, but he knew he didn’t want to abandon traditions just for the sake of it, with nothing meaningful to replace them.
Still, Shay’s wedding was too much: a Thursday welcome party and Friday drinks that all guests were invited to, an island that no one had ever heard of before.
We could just arrive on Friday evening and only go to the wedding, Carmen had suggested.
He knew that way she wouldn’t have to miss another shift at the bar or the Thursday rehearsal for the off-Broadway play she was acting in.
But getting there is such a haul, he had reasoned.
We might as well make a real trip out of it.
He turned off the water, which had gone from icy to boiling. After wiping the mirror, he shaved the tan, angular planes of his face and dried his thick dark hair. He opened his glasses case, meticulously cleaning the lenses as he did every morning.
Carmen was still asleep. The only place to sit in the room was an armchair facing the bed, so he decided to go downstairs after he dressed.
On the second-floor landing, he felt something hard under his shoe—a jagged shard of glass, the length of his pinky.
When he picked it up, he imagined the meat of his heel sliced open, blood soaking the carpet, and felt ill.
There wasn’t a trash can in sight, so he brought it to the girl at the front desk.
She took it from his hands, and he felt an immediate relief to no longer have it in contact with his skin.
“Shirley must have dropped it after cleaning up.”
“Is it from a window?” he asked.
“Yeah, one shattered upstairs from a rock.”
“A rock?”
“Some stupid kids, you know, and my manager really freaked. We had to find the guest a different room. I probably know who it was, you can—”
The girl kept on until he found a pause where he could extricate himself.
Like she said, it was undoubtedly local teenagers, a drunken bit of vandalism, but he still wanted to distance himself from the shard, to walk off the phantom pain at his heel.
He followed indistinct voices to the dining room.
There, he found a smattering of couples in their fifties and sixties halfway through their breakfasts.
Everyone his age seemed to be able to sleep as long as their alarms would let them, but he had the internal rhythms of the elderly, perhaps left over from his early-morning practices on the track team.
The others looked up as he entered, sensitive to any new presence.
He wondered if they knew about the window.
“Would you like to take a seat?” a young man in a vest asked him.
“Sure.”
The waiter brought him coffee and a plate of fried eggs, toast, and greasy sausages.
It was less refined than Joel had imagined breakfast would be, and he was grateful.
As he was buttering his toast, another young man entered the dining room.
He had shaggy, hay-colored hair and a pointed chin, his polo a collegiate burgundy.
Their eyes met, and Joel knew there was no way for either to pretend they didn’t know each other.
“Joel,” the man said, approaching the table.
“Ken.”
“I didn’t expect you to be here.”
“I’ve known Shay almost as long as you.”
“Yes, but—” Ken smiled his familiar, wolfish grin. “Well, never mind.”
The young waiter was lingering behind Ken, clearly waiting for an opening.
“Would you like to take a seat, sir? I can bring you some coffee?”
They had no choice. Joel desperately did not want Ken to join him, but Ken was already telling the young man to make sure the coffee was hot and asking if the chef could make a proper French omelet.
“We have a set breakfast,” the waiter said.
“Well, if you have eggs, the omelet should be no problem, if the chef is any good.”
The waiter’s Adam’s apple bobbed like a buoy. “I’ll go ask, sir.”
Ken picked up the butter knife at his place setting, rubbing out a water stain with his thumb.
Joel tried to remember the last time he’d seen him—likely the day of their college graduation three years ago, when Ken had leaned out his dorm room window with a bare chest, some unknown blonde trying to pull him back inside, and yelled that he’d never read another book as long as he lived.
“So you’re flying solo as well?” Ken asked.
“No, my girlfriend’s still asleep.”
“Well, mine probably is too, I guess. I left her in Boston. Never bring a girl to a wedding unless you’re ready to propose. It’s all they’ll think about.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
“I am. Just wait.”
“I probably know my girlfriend a little better than you.”
“I probably know women a little better than you.”
Joel cut a sausage link in half, shaking his head.
This was their dynamic: a tautness to every sentence.
Ken had never seemed interested in Shay romantically, but at Cornell, he was always wary of Joel’s presence; first because Joel never laughed at his cruel jokes, and then because of what Joel had lost, how he had to start working at the library circulation desk to have any money in his bank account.
He compromised Ken’s collegiate Eden, an ivy-coated garden of lazy hours and rivers of free alcohol.
“You’re in New York, right?” Ken asked. “What’s your line of work?”
“Publishing.”
“Ah, of course.”
Joel did not mistake his tone. He knew Ken would not be impressed by his recent promotion—Robert Gottlieb, Knopf’s editor-in-chief, was right: the glamour had gone out of publishing, most graduates seduced by jobs at record companies and film studios.
Joel’s father, a real estate titan, wasn’t impressed either.
The novel was perpetually on its deathbed, but publishing, with its all-consuming cycles of order and chaos, was where Joel felt most at home.
The waiter set down Ken’s coffee cup with a clatter.
He said the omelet would be out soon, and Ken lit a Parliament.
Joel rarely smoked, feeling the aftereffects when he ran, a burning breathlessness.
He looked out the window to a stretch of tall grass, a cat skulking through its blades.
There were so many cats on the island, collarless, perhaps ownerless.
“So what do you think about all of this business with Shay?” Ken asked as he took a drag.
“You mean the wedding?”
“Ha,” Ken barked. “You know what I mean.”
“I—” Joel looked up at a woman entering the dining room, briefly aflutter with hope that it was Carmen, that she would save him from this. Instead, it was an exhausted-looking mother with a toddler clinging to her neck. “I’m glad she got out.”
“You know they started their own private security force? They’re called the Imperial Marines, if you can believe it. They’re stockpiling their own arsenal out in California.”
“An arsenal?” Joel said skeptically.
Ken sighed. “I don’t know the exact details, just that they’re bad people. Unhinged. I don’t know how someone like Shay got involved with all of that. I mean, we all got stoned in college, but she was no worse than the rest of us.”
“Well, it’s not just about getting people clean anymore. They target anyone now. They probably needed to start recruiting more people to keep making money.”
When Shay first mentioned Synanon nearly a year ago, Joel had read the articles.
The ones from a decade back were glowing: politicians and businessmen rhapsodizing about a new residential drug rehabilitation program in California that helped addicts remain clean at record percentages by making them go cold turkey.
The founder, with his square face and crew cut, was built like a high school football coach and spoke with the same easily quotable bluntness.
The problem, he claimed, was simple: using narcotics was stupid.
Users simply had to be broken of an addiction to stupidity.
And how could this not appeal to Americans?
Donations swelled, and their centers spread across the country like pigweed; companies were encouraged to save lives by buying Synanon-branded pens and notebooks, the name a point of pride.
Only in the past two years had the founder declared Synanon no longer a program but a religion, and only after Shay joined did reports begin to leak about beatings and neglected children, of shaved heads and what was starting to happen during sessions of something called “the Game.”
“Well, if she wasn’t using, then I have no idea why she’d fall into all of that,” Ken said. “She was in law school, for Christ’s sake.”
“I don’t know. She must have just been . . . looking for something.”
“Well, look where that got her. Where she is now.”
“She isn’t anywhere anymore—she left. She left four months ago.”
“Still doesn’t seem like herself, though, does she?”
“So you think she’s still involved with them somehow?” He thought of the broken window, the glass shard.
Ken lifted his hands in a gesture of innocence. “I’m just asking questions.”
“I’m sure Andrew would know if she was visiting Riverside again. When’s the last time you even really talked to her?”
“Listen, I love Shay. Like a sister,” Ken continued, ignoring what Joel had said. “All I’m saying is that Andrew’s a brave man to be marrying her now. Ah, finally.”
The waiter slid the plate onto the table. A hard, wrinkled curve of egg frowned up at Ken. Joel smiled and took a sip of his coffee, looking outside for the cat that was no longer there.