But the thing is, I’ve started to think, you can’t only say no. You can’t only tear shit down and assume that what springs up in its place is going to be better. You have to build at some point. To commit. Isn’t this what punk was supposed to be about? Like, don’t despair, people. You can still pick up a guitar and drumsticks and make something. No Future - that stuff was just the content. The form said: HERE is your future. I think even SG and DT and NC have to see this at some level. The personal and the political being somewhat indissoluble in the hothouse of that house, there’s been some jealousy of the time I’ve been spending with certain of them lately. But at this point, having experienced what a real adult relationship looks like, if I stay interested in the PHP, it’s not in the way any of them think. What I’m interested in now is minds. Specifically: in changing them.
BOOK IV
MONADS
[ 1959–1977 ]
I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,
I too had receiv’d identity by my body.
—WALT WHITMAN
Leaves of Grass
59
THE FERRY TO BLOCK ISLAND WAS RUNNING BEHIND SCHEDULE, and it was already dark by the time Regan reached the Goulds’ rambling vacation house that last official weekend of the last summer of the 1950s—the start of her junior year. The driveway’s cars looked like cultured pearls in the moonlight, or a line of cooling embers. In the lit-up windows, hired men in white jackets bustled to and fro. Laughter and surf and the pock of badminton rackets could be heard from out back; that must have been where everyone was. But where the Goulds were, her brother was sure not to be, so she carried her suitcase inside and asked a tall woman with a guest-list where she might put her things.
The woman showed her to a room under the third-floor eaves, as far from the grown-ups as possible. The dresser where Regan put the clothes she’d brought from Poughkeepsie smelled faintly of talcum, and under that, rot. She was revising downward her assessment of Felicia’s personal fortune when out in the hallway a familiar voice began to count backward from sixty. Little kids, the unsupervised offspring of the guests who would be filling the house and the island’s one hotel for the weekend, stampeded over weary floorboards. She found William at the far end of the hall, in a room that mirrored her own. He lay back on the swaybacked bed in his blazer and unknotted school tie. His eyes were closed. “Forty … thirty-nine … hello, Regan.”
“Are you peeking?”
He patted the bedspread beside him. “Come give us a kiss.”
“You’re peeking, I can’t believe it. Don’t stop counting! You’ll disappoint the kids.”
“Maybe, but at least I’ve bought myself peace and quiet until they figure it out.”
“You’re terrible.”
“Come on. Kiss kiss.”
In his yearlong journey through the digestive system of the nation’s most prestigious prep schools, William had been trying on and discarding various selves, but with this latest incarnation, there was an element of recklessness, of testing to see how much she was willing to put up with. As he pooched his lips at her, a sour scent wafted up. “Jesus, William. You absolutely reek of booze.”
He grinned and opened his blazer to reveal a bottle of rum. “Bad form to let the birthday girl’s hospitality go to waste, don’t you think?”
They sat on the bed for a while passing the bottle as he made fun of the room’s generically nautical décor and the pinheads whose laughter kept gusting up beyond the open window. And of course the posturing of the Ghouls. Each time he mispronounced the name, she heard pain. She felt it, too, obviously. On the other hand, she also felt, as she increasingly had these last years, the difference in their ages. Yes, she would rather her father have entered a monastery, but they were both adults, and if Daddy preferred to have a … a girlfriend (though the word stuck in her throat like a fishbone), the honorable thing was to smile and nod and not to stand in the way. Perhaps, too, she imagined some benefits accruing to filial diligence. Wasn’t the Karmann Ghia she’d gotten for Christmas one of these? In its too-perfect congruity with what a twenty-year-old might have wanted, it had clearly been picked out by Daddy’s consort, but maybe the larger impulse had been his. Maybe for the first time her superior maturity was being acknowledged. Appreciated, even. And when the little kids came back to confront William about his failure to look for them, Regan left him to charm his way out of the mess he’d made and went downstairs to join the party.
The house’s sandy backyard extended forty or fifty feet. This being the year when all things South Pacific were in vogue, the perimeter had been marked off with rattan torches that puffed and guttered in a stiffening wind. Whitecaps crashed grayly beyond the dunes, nearly invisible, while within the charmed circle glowed the faces of executives and their wives and various friends of the Goulds. Daddy, dignified in his summer-weight wool, pecked her on the cheek. She’d been hoping for an embrace, but he had a drink in his hand, and this felt more sophisticated—which, with Felicia looking on, was probably a good thing. She summoned over a waiter to give Regan a cocktail of her own, in a cup shaped like a tiki god. Then the brother, Amory Gould, offered his arm. “Come, dear. There are people I’d like you to meet.” Daddy’s smile may have wavered a bit here—Regan would never quite be able to decide—but when she pivoted into the haze of booze and firelight and the deeper black of stormclouds piling up to the east, a kind of inner hum overtook her.
Amory’s hand, soft on her lower back, propelled her through knots of guests. She kept waiting for him to get bored, but he hummed with an intensity of his own. He was barely taller than Regan, but had the impressive white hair even then, in his thirties, and that ingratiating manner; the way he introduced her as “Bill’s daughter—exquisite, isn’t she?” would have made her blush, had it not been as if she weren’t there. Eventually, they reached the outermost orbit of guests, where a gangly boy in a yachting sweater stood smoking. He wasn’t bad-looking, in a sort of bland, Episcopalian way, but his only real distinguishing features were his horn-rimmed glasses and his hair, so blond it too was almost white. Regan was surprised to feel the quickening of the hand on her back, unless of course she was imagining it.
“Regan Hamilton-Sweeney, may I present …” and then Amory said the name Regan would subsequently expunge from her memory, leaving only the initial L. “Regan here is down from … Vassar, isn’t it? I can’t keep my Seven Sisters straight.” They laughed more because it had the rhythm of a joke than because it was funny. L., said Amory, was a Harvard man.
“That makes us cousins, practically.” L.’s pause here was to let Regan know that he, too, saw Amory’s clumsiness, and she smiled, genuinely this time. It was all the opening Amory needed to burrow back into the crowd. L. gazed after him. “None too subtle, is he.”
“Oh, he’s not so bad,” she said. “It’s his sister you’ve got to look out for. This is her birthday we’re celebrating.”
“I mean I reckon he’s assuming because we’re around the same age …”
“You think he’s setting us up?”
At which they both laughed again, anxious. That should have been out of the question, L. said. His father was the president of a rival holding company in the City, and evidently in private called William Hamilton-Sweeney II all sorts of names that didn’t bear repeating. “Father can be kind of a son of a bitch, if you’ll pardon the expression. I’m surprised we were even invited.”
“Well, the, uh, Goulds were the ones making the arrangements,” she said. “It is their place, after all.”
“Yeah, we’ve been out a couple times already this summer. Have you seen the water yet? We should walk down.”
And because the alternative was to spend another half-hour talking about their parents like good children of the ruling class, she acquiesced. L. grabbed another pair of tiki cups from a circulating waiter, and without anyone seeming to notice, they slipped down the moonlit path and out between the dunes.
&
nbsp; They went maybe a quarter-mile, to where a rock jetty broke the curve of the shoreline. On an impulse, or maybe because adjunct-hostess duties had been wearing on her, Regan pulled off her shoes and waded into the water in her tennis skirt. It was cold, but she stayed in calf-deep, letting the shiver rise past her knees. Far-off lightning stabbed the sea. “You know,” L. said, wading out to her, not bothering to roll up his pants. “You’re not so bad yourself, for a Hamilton-Sweeney.”
As he stared at the side of her face, she felt as she did more and more these days: excitement and nerves and transgression all mixed together so you couldn’t tell which was which. She drained her drink—her third or fourth of the night, she’d lost count—and set the tiki cup adrift, a bottled message. “I think I felt a raindrop.” He tried to blame this on the surf, but she knew that if she stayed here, he would want to kiss her, and she wasn’t sure she liked him that way. “We should head in.”
They returned to the yard to find everyone packed together, facing the wide back porch, the proscenium where stood her father and the Goulds. Daddy beamed stiffly, but his discomfort with public speaking wasn’t something Felicia shared. She hoisted her pagan vessel into the air. Her voice, scrubbed of any trace of her native Buffalo, was capable of remarkable penetration. “When Bill asked, I can’t say I hesitated,” she was saying. Regan thought of Lemuel Gulliver lying there politely while soft-footed Lilliputians scampered back and forth with their tiny ropes. And then of the buffalo nickels her mother used to save for trips to the beach, to give to her or William, whoever saw the ocean first. “Although it’s always a daunting task to bring two families together, we’ll have all our friends and colleagues to help. I couldn’t imagine lovelier people to celebrate with, and we certainly look forward to seeing you all at the wedding.” The wedding? No wonder L. had been surprised; this wasn’t a birthday, after all, but an engagement party. Regan looked around frantically for William, but maybe he’d already sensed it, earned the nickel no one was around anymore to give them, because he still hadn’t come down from upstairs. Which was where she finally spotted him, or thought she did, a childlike head in a small, square window.
WHETHER DADDY GENUINELY LIKED FELICIA or was merely being swept along by her energies had been a topic of regular debate between Regan and her brother, back when the latter had still been living at home. It might have been some kind of silver lining here that the point had at last been settled in Regan’s favor. But that night, when she broke the news, William accused her of having taken Felicia’s side all along, which couldn’t have been further from the truth.
The truth was that she would have been the first to scrap the diplomatic pose and join him in his fulminations against the Goulds if she hadn’t seen how lonely Daddy had been. Mom had died in ’51, and for most of the next decade, he’d sworn off dining and opera and the social functions they used to frequent. He gave himself over to his work, sometimes returning home as late as eight in the evening. But business and pleasure were not so easy to wall off from each other in a city as thick with both as New York. A couple years ago, he’d returned to public life, and Felicia had arrived soon after, trailing her brother and familiar. When he couldn’t avoid talking about her, Daddy referred to her as his “friend,” as if Regan and William were still children whose sensibilities this half-truth might spare. In fact, it had only aggravated their sense of betrayal, in that it let Daddy feel he was being more solicitous toward their feelings than he actually was. He didn’t believe in feelings, really—not even his own. It was almost an ideology with him now. Regan had seen him cry only once over her mother’s death, and then only through the cracked door of his study the morning of the memorial service, when he and Artie Trumbull had sat with a bottle of cognac on the desk between them (though, as William would point out, she couldn’t be certain the glimmer in Daddy’s eye hadn’t been a trick of the light, or of memory).
But in at least one respect, William turned out to be right: alcohol made the engagement go down more smoothly. Regan had two Bloody Marys with breakfast the next morning, and lunch was similarly boozy. Brother and sister might have shared a conspiratorial look from their respective tables on the lawn, except that brother refused to come down to eat; he would spend much of that weekend holed up in his room, or out God only knew where, on the principle that the greatest punishment he could render against his oppressors was to deprive them of the glory that was William. Not that Daddy noticed; at his own table, surrounded by well-wishers, he seemed a little drunk, too. And so Regan ended up smiling over at L., who sat across from her, under the flapping white edge of a tent thrown up against the threat of rain.
Later, when the tables had been cleared and a seven-piece band brought in to approximate the golden hits of Felicia’s youth, they danced together three times. Regan at that point still loved to dance, still loved the way it made her feel. She had played the Cyd Charisse role in the sophomore production of Brigadoon, and as her feet moved over the scrubby grass, she imagined she was back there, behind the footlights. Again, though, when L. wanted to kiss her, she shied away, she supposed because by that point she was too sloshed to feel in control, but perhaps really because she sensed in his wandering hands an impatience that gave her pause.
It was on this same sandy expanse that some of the younger men and the kids got up a game of touch football late Sunday morning, before a group luncheon at the island’s one nice restaurant. Whether it was suppressed recklessness or her second mimosa or the unstable interaction between the two, Regan decided to join in. Two of the Company’s junior vice presidents chose up teams, and out of deference to Daddy, she got picked early, even though she was the only girl. She and L. were on opposite sides. They ended up shadowing each other, offense and defense.
And how could she have failed to notice before how suitable L. really was, in his generic way, the summer-tanned calves beneath his rolled khakis bursting into motion, churning up the sand like a million fragments of light? Then again, maybe these thoughts were somehow emanating from her uncle-to-be, who stood on the back porch, having sworn off the sport as “too physical.” Because after the ball had been handed to her for the first time all morning; after L.’s own ardor or fighting spirit had gotten the best of him and he’d burst upon her and laid her out, in flagrant violation of the protocols of two-hand touch; after she’d lain on her back on the sand with the wind knocked out of her and her hair whipping around her head and L.’s beery breath in her face and his thigh like a marble pillar between her legs; when she’d turned her head like a little kid to see how others would react before deciding whether to laugh or cry, it had been Amory, some fifty yards away, her gaze had landed on. The other man on the porch—L., Sr.—had turned toward him, oblivious to the cries of foul gone up from the sand. But Amory, hands on the railing, was unmistakably focused on her. She began to laugh, and the boy on top of her did, too, his golden face flushing red. It was almost like acting. You decided to feel something, and then you felt it. She could see the cracked lenses of L.’s glasses and the pores of his upper lip. Their heaving bodies pushed apart and fell together, and then he rolled onto his back. They lay with the backs of their hands touching and belly-laughed at the lowering sky.
It was also Amory who proposed that the two teams, victor and vanquished, walk down to the restaurant before it started raining. Regan felt as if it were not her but some larger force operating through her that murmured something about taking a shower. She couldn’t have said to what degree something similar was at work in L. when he, too, opted out.
In the empty kitchen, over gin and tonics, they confirmed again that there were no hard feelings. “It’s just that sometimes a feeling gets the better of me,” the boy said. As he edged around the counter toward her, she slipped farther away and said she should really shower. There was still grit in her teeth.
Under the hot water, time moved too fast and not fast enough. She couldn’t decide if she wanted the luncheon expedition to stay away or come back. S
he would get out once the air temperature of the bathroom matched the warmth of her skin.
L. caught her in the hallway when she had only a towel on, as if he’d been waiting there. Kissing, fumbling, they moved through the gray house. Upstairs into who knew whose silent room, reeling backward laughing. Only not so silent now. From the roof came the first experimental spatter of rain. Plink. She scrambled up so that the bare part of her back was pressing against cold wood. “We just met,” she blurted. She laughed again a little nervously and pulled the towel he was tugging at tighter.
“Come on,” he said. “It’ll be fun.”
The hush that followed was unsettling. In the city, the continuous buzz and shudder of planes and cars and industrial machinery reminded you that the outside world still existed, and thus that you existed for it. Now, propped up against the headboard, she could see beyond the cross-stitch of drops clinging to the windowscreen only sky … and so couldn’t quite be sure what was real. Was it her laughter at the chill of his hand on her thigh? Or was it her knees pushing away his torso in the unlamped room? To some more sober self the scene felt sinister, like something on a movie screen that makes the audience mutter, Don’t. “Don’t,” she heard herself say. But he must not have heard. He had his khakis undone, the towel rucked up around her waist. At that moment, the outside world became imaginary; if she could have gone downstairs, she would have found that everything, people and dunes and lifeguard stands and jetty, had been raptured away in an atomic flash. Was she losing her mind? She’d consented to be kissed at first, she remembered, her ear, her neck, while between her thighs his hand might have been looking for misplaced keys. Or had that been the gin talking? Was this the gin pressing against her crotch? Her body was submerged in a liquid that kept her from moving, while her head reeled through space. Should she yell for help? No one would believe this wasn’t what she wanted. She was too drunk. And maybe he was too drunk, too, to know what he was doing. At any rate, there was no one around to hear. Even the servants were gone. “Don’t,” she begged, adding a fake laugh so he’d know she would forgive him if only he’d stop. But he had her wrists now in his surprisingly strong hands, and wouldn’t look her in the face, and he didn’t stop, until he did.
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