“I’m just chilling out,” he says.
“Chilling out,” she parrots, as if forced to bear the weight of this slang.
“George is at work.”
“George! When am I going to see him again? How is he?”
“He’s fine.” Last night, he ordered me around while I jacked off.
The clattering stops, and Dorothy seems to turn her attention to him at last. “Something’s troubling you, isn’t it?”
“No, no. Just a lazy Sunday.” Breezily, he adds, “I’m wishing I was down the shore with Ruby, enjoying the beach.”
Dorothy lets out a just-perceptible sigh of exasperation. “I really hate the idea of her spending the weekend at a house party.”
“It’s good for her to have fun.”
“I can’t quite put fun and beer keg in the same sentence.”
He licks his lips; his mouth is quite dry. “Did she leave you a number?”
“Mmm, yes. Are you trying to get in touch with her?”
“Actually, I wanted to talk to Calvin about this script he sent me.”
“Really? I can’t imagine he has anything to say. What’s it about?”
“Nightlife. Friendship. My generation.”
“Remember, you’re a stage actor, Robin.”
“You’re right. I might have to let him down easily,” Robin says, playing his part.
The phone number Dorothy recites for him is the number at Alice’s house, the same number Calvin gave him; he’s hit a cul-de-sac. Dorothy mentions that Calvin is supposed to drive Ruby back to the city this evening. “I’m making paella,” Dorothy says. “I’m sure she’ll be famished, after eating junk all weekend.”
“Paella’s not vegetarian, Dorothy.”
“Oh, yes. Meat is murder, how could I forget? Well, I made gazpacho, too. She can eat that.”
He wants to say something more direct, but it’s just impossible. His mother can be quick to jump to dangerous conclusions, especially about Ruby. He says, rather firmly, “I don’t think you should expect her too early. If she’s having fun, she’ll come home later.”
“Oh. I see.” Dorothy’s voice hardens. “She’s put you up to this.”
“What?”
“She told you to call me, to prepare me.” He can hear her smack something down onto the Formica countertop.
“No, no. Just be realistic. They might need to sober up before the long ride home.”
“You don’t think Calvin would drive under the influence?”
“No—”
“I’ll absolutely strangle him.”
“Stop! All I’m saying is, they might have a mimosa or two at brunch, and then need to sober up before the ride home.”
“It’s a good thing I didn’t put the paella in the oven.” For a few moments he hears breath moving heavily from her nostrils. Then she delicately sniffles, as if fighting back tears. “There was a plan,” she says. “Ruby was going to see your father and visit the grave. I was thinking about joining them, but she said you had a shift at the restaurant today. And I thought, well, I’d rather not do it if you weren’t going to be there.”
So that’s it. Yes, it’s true, Ruby had tried to wrangle them all to spend some time at Jackson’s grave, “as a family,” was how she’d put it, which had infuriated Robin because it sounded like a guilt trip at best and a willful distortion of reality at worst. They weren’t a family, not since the divorce, perhaps not since Jackson died, when the fracturing and splintering accelerated between Clark and Dorothy. He’d told Ruby bluntly that he couldn’t handle it: neither the grave nor the memories it would stir up, and certainly not the idea of the four of them together.
Dorothy says, “I wanted to be with at least one of my children this weekend.”
“I know, Dorothy. I know what day it is. June 16th.”
“And what year,” she adds.
It takes him a moment to understand what she means, and then he computes: Jackson had been ten in ’77. Softly, he mutters, “Wow. I’d lost track—”
“Yes,” she interjects, “your brother would have been eighteen today.”
“He’d be going to college this fall.”
“Old enough to vote. Old enough for the government to take his Social Security number for their Army records.” She falls silent; he can think of nothing to say, because all he can think is Ruby, Ruby, Ruby.
“Why don’t I call again later, Dorothy?”
She clears her throat, seems to pull herself together. “If you speak to your sister, tell her I’m going visit the cemetery on my own, with or without her. If she deigns to call me sooner rather than later, perhaps I won’t have to read her mind.”
He agrees. He gets off the phone and calls the number at Alice’s house, and talks to Calvin. There’s still no word from her.
His mind expands to a vision of Jackson as an eighteen-year-old. Jackson would have graduated from high school, would be living at home, getting ready for college. Maybe he’d be going somewhere on athletic scholarship. Even at age ten, he had been great at sports, baseball especially. By eighteen he’d have transformed into a sturdy, all-American jock, a state champion, the pride of Greenlawn. And in a startling flash Robin sees that the “home” he has been picturing here is Greenlawn, not Manhattan. Jackson alive means all of them still together, Clark and Dorothy still married. No divorce, no move to Manhattan: the life he would have lived.
On his own eighteenth birthday, he had been a college freshman, home from Carnegie Mellon on winter break. He’d dyed his hair platinum for the occasion. Dorothy set up a dinner party. He remembers being nervous, because they never made a big deal about his birthday, since it was also the anniversary of Jackson’s death. But Dorothy filled the apartment with some of his pals from high school and college. George was there, and Alton and his girlfriend, plus a few of her own friends, chatty women she’d known since her days at Smith or from her single-girl years in New York, who had reemerged after the move to Manhattan and were now part of Robin’s life. They drank champagne, opened gifts, ate chocolate soufflé for dessert.
His night ended in a cab, with Marco, a South American guy, a friend of a friend who had tagged along to the dinner party and flirted with everyone all night. He was lean, his eyes the color of caramel, his dark hair thick and wavy, his smile devilish. Marco directed the cab to a club on White Street, but the drinking age had gone up from eighteen to nineteen just ten days earlier, and Robin couldn’t get past the bouncer. So on the early hours of the morning, Robin found himself in a studio in a high-rise at the edge of Tribeca, making out with a guy who whispered in his ear, “I want to dominate you.” Scared, he still said “OK,” because Marco was probably the sexiest guy he had ever been with. Marco tied Robin’s arms to the bedposts during sex, but loose enough that Robin could twist around (and, he hoped, escape, if it came to that) and take in a view out the picture windows, a view across the Hudson River, looking back on New Jersey, the place where that life he used to live was being lived by other people. At eighteen, it seemed to him that he had already become the person he was going to be always. Now the memory of that night is tainted with something else, with the sex they had, and what sex has come to mean. Because who knows if Marco was healthy or not. Who knows where Marco is today.
The phone rings again. Finally!
But no. Not Ruby. George.
“The place is dead,” George says. “It’s too nice out, no one wants a restaurant.”
“Are you staying through dinner?”
“I could, but—” There’s a moment of humming silence. “I guess I’d rather come home.”
Robin lets this hang in the air. He hears the emphasis on “rather,” the suggestion it contains. Will it be that from now on, every time they’re both in the apartment, they’ll end up naked? It can’t be, it’s too much. But if they’re both into it…
“You just got real quiet,” George says.
“Sorry. The Ruby situation is stressing me out.”
“She hasn’t turned up yet?”
“No.”
“That seems bad.”
“I called Dorothy, but I just couldn’t tell her. It’s Jackson’s birthday today.”
“Oh, boy.”
At once, Robin finds himself expressing an idea only just making itself known to him: “What do you think about a road trip?”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with Peter, does it?”
“No. Just you and me. Seaside Heights is just a few hours away, right?”
“Are you talking about tonight?”
“As soon as you get home.”
After the briefest hesitation, George says, “You wanna drag me to the Jersey Shore, huh?”
“Believe me, I don’t like the idea, either, but—”
George finishes for him. “Gotta do what you gotta do.”
Robin hangs up the phone, and the air seems freshly voltaged. The time for waiting has passed. He knows immediately what to do next: pack a bag with overnight clothes, pull a couple bottles of Diet Coke from the fridge, fold his tips into his money clip. He makes a list of the relevant phone numbers, scavenges for dimes and nickels in case they need to use a phone booth. He finds a road map in a drawer.
He goes into George’s room to grab some clean clothes to pack for him, too, in case they wind up staying overnight somewhere.
The bed is unmade, still. He can picture everything they did, unfolding all over again. Next to the bed is the K-Y Jelly. He replaces the cap, wipes it off, carries it back to his room, and finds his condoms. Before he can change his mind, he packs all of it with their stuff.
The last thing he does is find the letter from the university, in the pocket of his work pants. He smoothes it out. Rereads it. Congratulations…London…highly competitive…a true challenge. He understands that he hasn’t given them his answer yet. He hasn’t confirmed that he’s actually going to do this. Why is he putting it off? He leaves the letter resting in a beam of sunlight, faceup on his desk. It seems to pulse with its own power. When he gets back from this trip, when he finds his sister—he will find her, he must, he absolutely must—he’ll know what his answer is.
He’s clenching his jaw, he realizes, as if he’s primed for a fight. A fight with whom? When he tries to envision his opponent, he sees only himself: two nights ago, at the restaurant, framed in the mirrored wall, sweating through his white shirt, doubled over a bottle of wine he is struggling to open, while everyone stares, waiting to see if this time he’ll get it right.
PART TWO
DOWN THE SHORE
Through dark glasses, Ruby watches a girl in a hot-pink bikini—crimped hair, bony body, viper face—rush through the living room, laughing and shrieking as she moves toward the front door. There’s a guy in pursuit—burly but agile, dodging bodies, furniture, outstretched legs. “You’re dead, you’re so fuckin’ dead,” he shouts, through a big, sloppy grin. His yellow tank top is soaked, doused in beer. Ruby can smell it as he flies by. Then more flesh—another girl, another bit of skimpy summer clothing. She holds high a plastic cup, sloshing beer, ready to dump it on one of them. Voices from around the room cheer them on. One, two, three, they escape through the screened door, sucked into the afternoon sun. One of the girls shrieks from the front yard. The other laughs loudly. The all-weekend party is hitting an early peak.
God—tell me, please, how I wound up here.
But she knows how it happened. Calvin wanted to. She came along. Same as always.
Remind me, God, why I said yes.
She sits on a lumpy love seat, squished between the sofa’s hard, upholstered arm and her fidgety boyfriend. Calvin is carrying on a loud conversation about what else?—movies—with the guy on the other side. Calvin’s a film student at Columbia and knows more about every movie ever made than anyone in the whole wide world. Ruby’s heard it all before. She’s struck by how out of place his snooty urban attitudes seem here, at this frivolous beach party. Maybe he senses this, too, maybe only half-consciously, which is why he’s getting louder. It’s like biting a hangnail. You keep biting until you’re nipping at the skin but you can’t stop. She wishes her nails looked better. The black paint is chipping off. She studies the arm of the couch. The upholstery is a ragged, pilly, green-and-white plaid. The white part is discolored to a popcorny shade, and the green part, where her elbow wants to rest, is marked by a hard, flattened splat of chewing gum. She becomes transfixed by that gray wad, wishing she could have witnessed the moment when it was left here. Just to see the person who did it, the kind of person who does something as vulgar as that. Was it deliberate vandalism? Or something casual: Oops, meant to drop it in an ashtray, now it’s stuck, might as well leave it.
This beach house is a weird melding of things that have been neglected and things that someone spent money on. The furniture, which probably came with the lease, is battered and mismatched, but sprinkled throughout are the current renters’ state-of-the-art stereo system and lots of fancy knickknacks. She sees the kinds of things that rich kids—one of them being Alice, Calvin’s younger sister—bring to even the most downscale beach house. A huge, vintage poster of Casablanca on the wall, expensively framed by bright white matte board. A polished silver martini shaker, possibly an antique, coated in condensation. A big spray of long-stemmed pink roses in a vase on an end table. Where did anyone get roses? Near this she sees two preppie-looking guys in a beer-chugging contest, egged on by the group circling around them. Ruby expects one of their elbows will send that bouquet crashing onto the dirty, low-pile carpet. She’d get a kick out of that—except, for all she knows, she’s sleeping on that carpet tonight.
She sits in a wash of afternoon light, so bright that she’s left her cat-eye sunglasses on. Sunglasses in the middle of the summer shouldn’t necessarily draw stares, but she’s already overheard one girl say to another, “Maybe she’s blind.” What a bitch. Maybe I’ll just leave my shades on for the whole weekend.
In a house full of tanned and sunburned bodies clad in neon swim-wear, she knows that she stands out. The black dye in her hair framing her frosty skin, her inky black Smiths T-shirt and black miniskirt up against the bare white of her arms and legs, her rubber-soled boots. The girls at this party are of the type who’ve sneered at and gossiped about her all her life, once because she was a quiet goody-goody too eager to please, and later because she reinvented herself as a cool outsider who didn’t seem to notice them at all. Now they look at her and then look away. Most of them are younger than her—most of them are probably still in high school, or just recently graduated. High school is only a year in her past, but it seems like something she endured a long time ago.
Until she determines a good reason to get up, she’s staying put on the couch, no matter how disgusting it is. Her hand, resting in her lap, is clutching a plastic cup of beer, which she has no taste for. The cup is half head—she has no idea how to properly fill up from a keg. The first gulp had the airiness of cotton candy and the sourness of French bread. When she licked off the foam, she tasted her own dark lipstick. The keg is on the front porch. She should have found the kitchen and poured herself a Diet Coke.
God, please get me out of here quickly.
This is not a prayer, but the leftover habit of prayer, still holding on two years after she decided she was an atheist. She waited until her seventeenth birthday to announce that she’d no longer be attending mass—she’d been going every Sunday since Jackson’s accident. She didn’t explain herself, didn’t need to. Her mother, her brother, her father—not exactly churchgoing people. Nana was the only one upset, but she didn’t live nearby, so Ruby could just tuck that guilt away. Now “God” is just a placeholder. A way to contain a thought when the feelings are threatening to spill over—as they are now, with her annoyance at Calvin coming to a boil.
Calvin is raising his voice, so loud it’s starting to sound like he’s in an argument. Only thirty minutes at the party, already making enemies. The current topic seems to be tha
t new movie, St. Elmo’s Fire, which Calvin has called “a perfect example of Hollywood trying to crush youthful rebellion,” and which the other guy is arguing “speaks for our generation.”
Calvin says, “Those characters would never be friends with each other in real life. They take one from every walk of life and then put them all through the same pseudo-romantic plot machinations.”
Ruby pipes up, “It’s not romantic. Half the guys in that movie are stalkers.”
“Exactly my point,” Calvin shouts, though that didn’t sound like his point to Ruby. “The quote-unquote bohemian character, the writer who keeps questioning the meaning of life, he’s supposed to be in love with the boring girl in pearls. If you ask me, he should have been in love with her boyfriend.”
“Man, that’s just weird,” the other guy says.
“It should be weird! It should be like life, which is messy and unpredictable!”
He’s getting worked up, his body jerking and shifting and creating vibrations that Ruby feels in her ribs, her hips, her arm. She gulps her beer to avoid a spill. Already she feels the alcohol doing its work, warming her up. She feels a trickle of sweat slide toward her elbow.
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