Chapter 10
JOEL
Before evening drinks with the rest of the wedding guests, Carmen wanted to swim.
After lunch, she and Joel went to the beach the woman at the front desk recommended, away from the docks.
They laid out towels and rubbed sunscreen on each other’s shoulders.
In the sun’s white light, Joel noticed the faint, jagged teeth of stretch marks above Carmen’s tailbone.
It hitched in his chest, the realization that he was coming to know every inch of her.
He’d brought a manuscript with him, a debut novel by a young man who couldn’t write a sentence that wasn’t a paragraph, and although his hand began to cramp from the frequent strokes of his red pencil, it brought him calm, how simple certain flaws were and how easily he could excise them.
“That page looks mortally wounded,” Carmen said, flipping from her back to her stomach. “I don’t think it’s gonna make it.”
Joel laughed. The beach was relatively empty; it was a Thursday.
Children on summer break sprinted into the water, parents nowhere in sight.
Two old women in metal folding chairs threw torn-off Wonder Bread at the seagulls.
The simplicity of it all made Joel happy.
It reminded him of swimming out into the ocean with his brothers, their nanny Lucy spraying them with a garden hose so they wouldn’t grind sand into the carpets.
How long those days felt, not like the interminable drone of a workday, but as if you could begin the morning as one boy and go to sleep as another.
He wanted to share this feeling with Carmen, but hesitated. It was the sort of thing he’d tell Shay during those sacred months of their junior year, when they formed their own orbit.
“I’m going in,” Carmen said, rising from the towel.
He abandoned his manuscript and followed, neatly tucking his glasses into her purse. The sand scorched his bare feet. Close to the water, they passed a skinny young boy. He was digging a hole with a plastic cup with the solemn intensity of a gravedigger.
“He’s probably digging for treasure,” Carmen said. “When I was five, I found this gold bracelet on Rockaway Beach. I was so giddy with this crazy feeling of luck, and then, when I was sitting on my towel, staring at it, this old lady came over and said it was hers.”
“Amazing that you found it,” Joel said. The water rolled over their ankles as they stood on the damp shore.
“Ha!” Carmen crowed. “Oh, come on, you think it was actually hers?”
“What do you mean?”
“She just heard me telling my parents what I found and wanted the bracelet.”
“You think? That she’d steal from a kid like that?”
“Yes, Richie Rich.” She stroked his forearm in affection, though in these moments he always felt talked down to. “I do.”
They waded out to their hips and then counted to three before submerging their whole bodies. The cold water was a relief from the heat, the salt cleansing. He paddled out into the deep while Carmen lay floating on her back.
Joel still ran every morning, winding through the small park by his apartment, sprinting past its sickly elms and overflowing trash, its homeless men who twitched and muttered in their sleep.
His body was lean and muscled, but he was not as strong as he had been in college.
There was no coach to push him, no teammates to spend hours with in the weight room.
His boss at the publishing house told him he was so young, but he’d started to feel as if parts of him were calcifying.
There was a twinge at his elbow when he stretched.
A sluggishness to his thoughts after four in the afternoon, like a building whose lights were being turned off one by one.
Not like in college, when he could finish a paper at three in the morning, an electric heat snapping at his fingertips as he hunched over a typewriter.
“Are you aiming for England?” Carmen yelled, and he stopped to tread water, realizing how far he’d gone. Without his glasses, she was no more than an orb, and in the distance, he could just make out a white sailboat cresting a wave, a small party gathered at its prow.
On the beach, they let the sun burn their bodies dry.
A new family was thrusting an umbrella into the sand and laying out striped towels.
Joel knew they were also guests at the wedding, and he thought how odd that was, to know so easily that a little girl in a red bathing suit was not from this island.
He imagined it would be harder to tell if they were from Shay’s family, which was composed of clerks, mechanics, and teachers, though he remembered the severe grace of her mother, how she’d looked at him at her husband’s funeral four years ago as if he were a threat.
“So, welcome cocktails this evening, yes?” Carmen asked without opening her eyes.
“Yes, at Haven House.”
“Haven House.” She laughed. “The people you’re friends with.”
“I know, I know,” he said, a familiar apology.
“It’s just always funny to me. I like Tom a lot.
I could tell right away he was actually a New Yorker, but then there are people like Jack and Roger, and they kind of dress like normal people and kind of talk like normal people, but then you go to their apartments and they have Fabergé eggs on their coffee tables. ”
“Come on, no one I know owns a Fabergé egg.”
“All right, but you know what I mean. A photograph of them bicycling through France as children, or some side table from the 1700s that their great-great-great-grandfather brought over on the Mayflower. When we were cooking at Jack’s that one time, he handed me this chef’s knife, and all I could think was, this is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever held, more beautiful than any piece of jewelry my mom owns. ”
“They’re just people with nice things, that’s all.”
He said this, though he knew it was a lie.
Wealth changed you. It made you recognize the weight of an expensive dress shirt and crave the taste of a perfectly cooked steak.
It had changed Shay. But he liked to think he was stronger now for standing on his own, hungrier for his long hours working in the library and the publishing house.
His family had never known what to make of him—his devotion to books, how taciturn he could be in a family of gossips, his opposition to the war—and so, away from them, he felt most like himself.
Shay would be stronger too if she could leave it all behind.
At the thought, he scratched a wet scab of sand from his forearm.
“I think it all amounts to a lot more than that,” Carmen said. “But as evidenced by you, people can change. And I will happily drink their liquor and eat their canapés so long as you’re there.”
Joel laughed hoarsely. “Good.”
As the clouds floated past the sun, Carmen fell asleep on the towel.
Joel did not want to return to his manuscript, and so he tried to read the new Bukowski but quickly lost interest. It was a book he told himself he should read, not a book he actually wanted to read, and he felt annoyed for not allowing himself such a simple pleasure as a good book on a trip away.
He wanted that absorption he’d first experienced as a child in his parents’ cavernous colonial, where his mother had to pry books from his fingers.
That sacred devotion that animated his thoughts when he was editing an excellent manuscript.
It was not a feeling of escape, like so many described, but something that grounded him more deeply in his body.
He looked up at the screeching of the little girl in the red suit, her blond hair a tangled halo around her head, rolling in the sand like a spaniel.
Joel smiled at her wildness, but her mother was crouched over her in a pose of admonishment, and he had a flash from visiting Shay at the building on Riverside.
That young boy he’d passed in the library ripping pages out of an open book, his head shaved like the others.
Only one sock on his feet, a freneticism to his movements, like no one had tended to him for weeks.
The only words Joel could hear on the beach were Don’t be such an animal.