Wes looked up from his knuckles to see that the movie had already begun. He had missed the first few minutes in his reveries, but it seemed to be about some irresistibly handsome and charming guy who was paid by other men to date their recalcitrant girlfriends and behave so obnoxiously that the girlfriends would go running back to their boyfriends, chastened and grateful. Within minutes Wes was able to forecast the entire plot, and also to determine that the movie was completely inappropriate for Nora. He looked around to see if there was anybody else in the audience as young as her, but there only seemed to be teenage girls in large groups and middle-aged men by themselves. On the screen, the gigolo guy was walking through a bar full of beautiful women, every one of whom turned in their seats to watch him pass and make nakedly lewd eye contact. Since the gigolo guy’s best friend had already showed himself to be a well-intentioned, pure-hearted nerd, it stood to reason that he would eventually ask the gigolo to perform his services on the girl he was in love with and that the gigolo would, in turn, fall in love with the best friend’s girl and experience a life-altering conversion that he would have to spend the rest of the movie extricating himself from. But why, Wes asked himself in despair, did the movies always have to hammer home the point that women are attracted to selfish, shallow dicks? It was such a bad lesson for Nora to learn, and besides it wasn’t true. Even at Dalton, the jocks had to behave kindly and sensitively if they wanted a crack at the finest chicks, and plenty of brainy, bookish guys had girlfriends, even if they weren’t always on the a-list. Wes didn’t think Delia was attracted to bad boys, though in truth he’d never known her to date anyone and had never met anyone who had dated her. And then, look at Lucy—she could have her choice of any boy at school, and probably not a few of their dads if she wanted, and she’d chosen him, Wes.
“Shit,” he muttered under his breath. “What time is it?”
“Shhh,” Nora said without taking her eyes from the screen or the straw from her lips.
“I’ve gotta go.”
Nora turned to him with a look of alarm. “You can’t go! What about me?”
“I’ve got to meet someone. I totally forgot. I’ve got to do it.”
“Wes!”
“You can stay. I’ll meet you downstairs at the foot of the escalator when the movie’s over. Just don’t talk to anybody. If anyone tries to sit next to you, move over next to those girls over there, okay?”
“Wes!”
“I’m really sorry, cookie. I’ve got to run.”
Wes was not half-way down the escalator when he felt the phone vibrating in his back pocket. Without breaking stride, he pulled it out. It was Delia calling, and it was 2:54. Wes went to push the “ignore” button but his finger changed its mind and pushed “answer” instead. He put the phone to his ear.
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s Delia.”
“Oh hey.”
“Did you get my message?”
“No, what message?”
“I left you a message earlier. You didn’t get it?”
“What did it say?”
“Well, I was wondering if you wanted to hang out later?”
“When?”
“Like, tonight, maybe?”
“Can’t do it. Too much work, and I’m making dinner for my mom.”
“Oh. Did you have a good time last night?”
“Hmm.”
“I missed you. I mean, we talked and everything, but you seemed a little out of it. I really wanted to talk to you. What happened to you?”
“I went home early. I wasn’t feeling so good. What did you want to talk about?”
“Oh whatever. You free tomorrow?”
“Probably. Maybe. It’ll depend on how my paper goes. Can I call you in the morning?”
“Yeah, sure. I’d really like to see you.”
“Me too. I’ll call you.”
Wes had to stop to catch his breath, even though he had not been running. It was not at all like Delia to want to just “hang out.” When had she ever called him just to hang out? Could it possibly be a coincidence that she had done it for the first time ever today of all days? He wondered what she knew about last night, and if she was only playing innocent. Some people might think of that as being manipulative, but Wes thought it was the considerate thing to do, and in any case as far as she was concerned he had nothing to hide. It would be surprising, a little odd even, if she hadn’t caught at least a whiff of the gossip that must have been spreading all day, but then again she’d always been a little aloof from the life of the school, as if her mind were already somewhere in the future, at Yale or Brown or whatever Ivy was sure to accept her, a place where she could finally study philosophy and religion among her intellectual peers. So Wes thought it quite possible, after all, that she had not heard a thing, at least not yet. And if she had heard something, as she was eventually sure to do, how would she react? She might be happy for him, but more likely she would find it a little distasteful and sordid. She might be a little disappointed in him, and then shrug her shoulders and dismiss it as typical boyish behavior, and think that she might have been wrong about Wes, that he wasn’t so different from everybody else after all. There were strictures in Buddhism for sure, the importance of self-control and resisting unhealthy distractions, but Wes was pretty sure those mostly applied to monks and nuns; even so it seemed almost impossible to imagine that she could hear of what he had done and think of him in the same way afterwards.
He remembered the weekend she had invited him to her family’s house in the dunes at Napeague. Not long after they had first talked at the drug-awareness circle, she had approached him in the hallway and handed him a kind of beginner’s handbook of Buddhism. He had read it straight through the night and returned it to her the next day with a request for more. After that, he had in effect become her student, ploughing through her reading lists, asking pointed questions, just skeptical enough to show that he was taking it all very seriously but careful never to come across jaded or cynical. He had even sat in on one of her classes, taught by a famous master who only came to the city from Boston once a month. Wes genuinely enjoyed the learning and tried to incorporate some of the most simple tenets of the discipline, such as mindfulness and basic meditation techniques, into his daily schedule, but always plagued by a nagging sense that he might be doing it all just to impress her or ingratiate himself. After all, he did intend to allow her to seduce and deflower him, whenever she felt the time was right.
When he was little, Wes had thought he was very rich because his family lived in a townhouse in Greenwich Village. No other pupil at his local elementary school, not one, had lived in a house. But when he went to Dalton on scholarship, he found that he was not rich at all, and that until then he hadn’t even known what it meant to be rich. His father explained that when they’d bought the house with a down-payment out of his first advance, long before Wes was born, that part of the Village close to the water had still been an isolated and kind of scary neighborhood, and real estate there had been cheap. And even though Wes’s mom had inherited a shitload of money when her parents died—money that made it possible for their grandchildren to attend fancy private schools and for their daughter to be attended by a live-in aide now that she was sick—they could never afford to make the same move today. So in his early days at Dalton Wes had had a bit of a chip on his shoulder about money issues and did not necessarily encourage downtown play dates or sleepovers because his home was kind of run-down and ratty compared to theirs. By the same token, he had been reluctant to accept invitations to weekend homes in the Hamptons or Litchfield County. Having grown up closely observing his father, he already knew what it felt like to be torn between contempt and envy, and he didn’t necessarily need it rubbed in his face. But there was never a moment’s hesitation about accepting Delia’s offer.
It was a fine Indian summer Saturday morning when Wes took an early jitney to Amagansett and Delia met him in the family Mercedes station wagon. On the ten-minu
te drive, she was at pains to downplay the house. It was just a ramshackle old cottage, she said, bought decades earlier when Napeague was nowhere. Theodore Roosevelt had lived in it when the Rough Riders were stationed in Montauk, but then it had been picked up and transported by barge to its current location. It was really nothing, she insisted, but it was in a beautiful spot. Wes played along, sharing his own family story about living in a beautiful house they could never afford if they had to buy it today, but he knew she was snowing him, and he appreciated it. There weren’t many girls at Dalton who would go to the same trouble. The car turned into a development of ugly, modern beach houses on tiny, sand-swept plots arranged in a grid. For a moment Wes wondered if Delia had actually been telling the truth about the modesty of her house, but then the road ended and she pulled into a driveway overgrown with wisteria and beach plum, and when she removed the key from the ignition the roar of the surf was the only sound to be heard.
“None of those houses were here when my parents bought ours,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand as she led him along a side path to the rear. “But you won’t even know they’re there.”
A large deck was built onto the back of the house, with an old-fashioned cedar hot tub and a circular cast-iron picnic table with built-in benches. From here, all you could see were undulating dunes covered in beach grass, and the nearest house was hundreds of yards away at the far side of a nature preserve. You couldn’t see the ocean, but you could hear it. At the end of the deck was a low gate that opened onto a sandy path that wound through the dunes and disappeared at the crest. Delia opened her arms to gather in the scene, and turned to him with a joyous smile. Wes thought that it was good that all this belonged to her, if it made her smile that way, because one day she might find that he was worth as much as all the dunes and beaches and nature preserves, and she would smile like that when she looked at him. She gave him a tour of the house; it actually was not fancy in any way, furnished haphazardly in a casual, beachy style, and had obviously been added onto more than once, as each room seemed to be on a different level, reached by steep hidden stairways of bare, worn planks. When she’d asked him to come, Delia had never mentioned sleeping arrangements, and Wes assumed that, with her parents present, this was not the moment she had chosen to upgrade their relationship; even so, when she showed him to the room that was to be his—the maid’s room, down some steps from the kitchen next to the laundry room, and on the far side of the house from her own—he experienced a moment of giddy disappointment at being treated like a fond younger cousin. She went upstairs to change, and warned him to use plenty of sunblock, despite the lateness of the season. He quickly slipped into his bathing suit and pulled on a pair of cargo shorts over it, then did a dozen hasty push-ups before spraying himself with the expensive French sunblock she had left for him. She came down for him, wearing a red bikini with white polka dots and little bows at her hips, covered in some sort of gauzy, transparent caftan that emphasized the shape of her breasts. She offered to do his back, but the spray was so fine that she didn’t even need to rub it in.
On the beach, she found a pair of low-slung canvas folding chairs, draped with damp towels, that she said belonged to her parents, although they were nowhere in sight. In fact, in the miles and miles of broad white strand visible in either direction, there were no more than a handful of people, strolling in pairs or with their dogs, and no one in the water. The surf was gentle and regular, producing waist-high waves delicately laced with foam. Delia assured Wes that the water still retained most of its summer warmth and that the swimming was delicious.
“Are you going in?” he asked.
“I want to warm up first,” she said, stretching herself out on a striped towel with one knee slightly raised and the caftan fluttering translucently between her thighs. Wes was mildly surprised to note that she wore red nail polish on her toes. Without removing his shorts or his shirt, Wes lay down on the sand, parallel to but at a reasonable distance from Delia. The scent of the sunblock was subtly erotic, but he couldn’t tell if it was her or himself that he was smelling. He took one last look at Delia on her back under the caftan, then closed his eyes and tried to make his mind go blank, though the rise and fall of her chest remained burned into the back of his eyelids. He fell into a light trance, from which he was roused by the return of Delia’s parents.
The rest of the day was spent in precisely the way an idyllic interlude at the beach should be spent if you want it to remain a highlight of your memories of youth for the rest of your life. Delia’s father, sporting shaggy gray hair and a modest potbelly, was a professor of philosophy at CUNY, though not a Buddhist—that was Delia’s own path, he said with restrained pride—and burning with ingenuous curiosity about Wes’s intellectual interests and development and his hopes for the future. It soon became clear from the tack of his questions that Delia had described Wes as a tutee of her own, rather than as a potential love interest, but Wes was happy nevertheless to bask in the sunlight of her father’s approval. Her mother, a writer, was beautiful like Delia, maybe even more so, but not sculpted or even svelte like so many Park Avenue moms. Delia later suggested that all the money was on her mother’s side, passed down from a famous industrial engineer grandfather. Delia had an older sister, Mariah, who was away at Rhode Island School of Design and whose lovely face, pale and freckled like Delia’s but thinner and more angular, shone out from multiple instamatic snapshots magnetized to the refrigerator. When it was Wes’s turn to describe his family, he shamed himself by lingering a little too long, and with a hint of self-deprecating pathos, on his mother’s illness and the responsibilities it had thrust upon him, but felt that he redeemed himself with his enthusiastic renditions of Nora and her fantasy life. Of his father, he provided the minimal outline necessary, though he did acknowledge at Delia’s prompting that he had written a novel long ago that had almost been made into a movie, but neither of Delia’s parents had read or heard of it. Delia and Wes went for a long walk along the beach, interrupted by some splashing in the surf, after which she put her caftan back on before she was dry then removed it in one languid movement over her head when she found it chaffing, revealing the most gorgeous armpits Wes had ever seen. They talked about schoolwork, Hillary Clinton’s inevitable victory in the Democratic primaries, the death of Sri Chinmoy, and Buddhism. Wes was unable to steer her in any satisfying way into a sharing of school gossip, let alone any history of boyfriends past or future. Lunch was a Caprese salad with fresh baguette and tapenade, after which her parents retired upstairs for a nap and Delia and Wes drove into East Hampton to browse the bookstore and buy fish for dinner. Delia bought Wes a book about happiness written by a French Buddhist monk who had given up a promising career in molecular genetics for life in a Tibetan monastery in Nepal. By the time they got back to Napeague her parents were awake. Wes and Delia went for another swim and a long walk, during which they twice brushed shoulders, the first time by accident, though Delia seemed not to notice either event. Dinner was a simple fillet of striped bass, drizzled with chile oil infused with garlic and grilled on a gas-fired barbecue on the deck, and served with olives, spicy chickpeas and cold, marinated asparagus. Delia, a vegetarian, passed on the fish, but she and Wes drank a Bridgehampton rosé along with the adults. They talked politics and Heidegger, of whose work Wes knew nothing but Delia’s father was an expert. Before bed, Delia’s mother got out the Polaroid 600 and took a picture of Wes and Delia, arm in arm leaning against the deck railing. It was the closest Wes had ever gotten to Delia and it unnerved him a good deal and made him glad they were going to bed. When the snapshot had developed they passed it around, then Delia’s mother stuck it among the other pictures magnetized to the fridge. He shook Delia’s father’s hand and kissed her mother on both cheeks, and Delia kissed him goodnight on the lips, but Wes suspected it was just the wine and that she hadn’t quite meant to do it because she turned away immediately afterwards without meeting his gaze. On his way to the maid’s room, Wes
stopped at the refrigerator to admire their photo; it looked very natural there among all the handsome strangers, and Wes imagined that one day somebody would have to notice it and ask Delia if that was her boyfriend.
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