They have lived in this house for a long time. There is the water through the window, the rain on the deck. Inside, the table counters are dry, and the house is warm and empty. It is the type of empty that has a sound, like white noise, a soft light over the armchair. When Aurora puts two fingers on Vincent’s hand, nothing changes; the world outside rains and sleeps. Aurora leaves her fingers tentatively on Vincent’s hand, so long that sweat begins to grow between their skins. Her arm begins to feel heavy, to cramp up, and the skin hangs down as if she is old, truly old. She has a vision of it, of no longer retaining control over her body, of her mind, slowly, being the last thing, dimming in, dimming out. Finally her finger feels like one part of Vincent’s hand, and her arm is numb, and she wouldn’t dream of moving it. Vincent stares straight forward, and it is the only communication she knows she can expect from him.
But in his head he’s remembering when Tommy was a boy and he put antibiotic cream on his cut knee. How Tommy said it burned, and how he told Tommy, Stop crying. She thinks about how there was a very specific type of candy that Vin used to stock in the store, twenty years ago, but she can’t remember the name now: just the chocolate taste, the peanut tang, a blue wrapper on the floor. How they took a box of them to the lake in Canada, eating them, one by one, while the miles marched by. In that moment, in the car, she remembers thinking about dancing. Outside, it gets wetter and wetter. It is an old house. The roof sometimes leaks. The walls creak with human sounds. The children’s bedrooms are made up like they’re about to come home.
WHY DON’T YOU
My father was born at the bottom of a hill: in a basement, where the landlord didn’t allow visitors. He had brown fingers, even then. At the top of the hill was where the mafia lived, or at least the rich people. It went down in wealth from there. He liked to say this at dinner. Feel more sorry for yourself, why don’t you, my mother said. She threw salad on his plate. Lorris had his fork and knife in his hand. I left, or I would leave, or I walked out again.
Natalia and I drank Coca-Cola in the oval in Marine Park. People played cricket there, between the baseball fields, but later it emptied out, and we brought drinks from the Russian teahouse. Inside they only used plastic cups, even though it was a nice restaurant. We mixed the soda with vodka from the liquor store down the block. On weekends, when she had no homework, we went into the city, to Times Square, no transfer on the Q. At the Marriott Marquis we rode the glass elevators up and down. We kissed pushed up against the glass, watching the hotel lounge get small below us. On every fifth floor there were platforms where you could see the lobby and Forty-Second Street. It’s incredible, isn’t it? Natalia said. It’s like from an airplane. The cars were black and small from so far up. We stood with our noses pressed against the double windowpane and watched the lights change on Broadway. In Brooklyn, in the middle of the park, the cars on the avenues sounded like waves.
I met Natalia one night, at a friend’s house, out in Sheepshead Bay. It was an exact replica of Marine Park, except the houses were smaller and closer together. We picked up forties from the corner store next to the House of Calamari, and my friend, who was born in Moscow, used a fake Russian passport to buy our beer. Why don’t you get a fake ID like a normal person? I asked him. He muttered in Russian. When he went back to Moscow, the one time, he told me once, people had tried to kidnap him, but when he answered in their own language they started laughing and shouting. They offered him a sandwich and let him go. It was thick bread, one layer of spreading. We sat in his parents’ basement and drank from coffee mugs, listening quietly to his mother yelling at his father upstairs. He turned his head up to the ceiling like he was baring his neck. Shut the fuck up! Company. There were other Russians there, and they didn’t react, and all of them spoke English.
Natalia came with four other girls, and they all had dresses on. The only girls who wore dresses at our high school were from Russia. They all gave my friend and the other Russians kisses on the cheek, but they shook my hand, except for Natalia, who pulled me close so I could smell her hair. Hello, she said quietly. She was from Rockaway, but because the schools were so bad there, her parents drove her in to Madison. The only thing they knew about Madison was that U.S. senators were graduates. Three, but it didn’t mean much of anything. They’d been musicians in Russia, but here they were computer engineers.
We were doing bar curls with the exercise equipment that my friend had in his basement. I was skinny from running track. The girls sat at the table with the plastic cover and played cards. We were outside, kneeling in his backyard, the smell of rain and fresh dirt around us, the smoke curling up to the second floor, the tendrils out of his open mouth. Here, he said. Come on. The toilet porcelain was cool and fresh when I laid my head against it, between heaves. Only Natalia knocked on the door, and whispered to ask if I needed something. For a moment I thought I did, but I didn’t know what to tell her.
The walk home was cold, though I didn’t feel it. When I woke up still clutching the toilet, and came out of the bathroom, my friend was asleep, lying with his back on the floor, the other Russians clustered around him. Two of the girls were on the couches, and one was in the middle of the Russians’ embrace. Natalia was asleep with her head against the wall. I put my shoes on without waking anyone, and when I left the screen door banged, and I couldn’t find the Q train. I worried that I hadn’t locked the door, and that someone would break in and it would be my fault. I asked a strange figure for directions, and my voice sounded wrong in my ears. He didn’t know. When I got home, the light was starting, and the old faces on the trees stared me down. Lorris woke me up, hanging on my shoulder, saying that I was supposed to hit him ground balls in the park. He woke up early, and did push-ups between meals. He wanted to make varsity when he got to high school. That morning I told him I was too tired, and he left without asking again, taking the bucket of balls to hit off the tee. I only asked for Natalia’s number the next Monday at school, from my friend who hadn’t asked how I got home. He pulled his phone out of his pocket along with the fake passport. It didn’t look real, even though I’d never seen a Russian passport. Here, he said. But do you want it?
We would stretch out on the grass, so that just our heads were next to each other. We came here often. On the ground, looking up, you could pretend there was nothing but sky. She reached her hands behind her to cover my ears, and I did the same with hers, and reached farther down until they were on either side of her neck. She got up and we stood together, her hands clasped on my back, trying to push me through her. We didn’t kiss. With my head on her shoulder I could see the water, the Marine Parkway Bridge in the heat-fog, where the ocean started and the city ends. Let’s go to my house, she said. I couldn’t talk, so I just squeezed her wrists.
Avenue U, the cars on all sides, where I was learning to drive without my father. The instructor, from another company, was a Vietnam vet who wanted to get into Republican politics. He let me into four-lane traffic even though I wasn’t ready. I told her about it. We made it to Kimball without letting go of each other’s sides. The B89 wasn’t running for the weekend, so we took car service instead. In the backseat, she sat in the middle, me on the end, and she put her bag on my lap. Her hand went underneath. I held it there for a little, then let it go. The driver was listening to a station with words I didn’t understand.
She was looking out the window. Motorboats went by on our left. Flatbush Avenue to the Parkway Bridge that goes to Rockaway and out toward the Hamptons. We didn’t want to know anyone who lived in the Hamptons. Summers, I’d thought about going there, somewhere right on the tip: bike out or borrow someone’s old Camry, sleep in the backseat; have one sleeping bag and throw it on top of us all unfolded, like a tent we hadn’t battened down. We drove past the hangars, the empty Air Force land where nothing grew. The bridge hummed beneath us. Her parents’ apartment, over Riis Park, before the houses started.
I paid the driver. We took the stairs up. H
er keys in the door and the voices of her family, her parents and sister. They were in the kitchen, and I just walked straight to her room. When she came through the door she closed it, and turned the lock. On the edge of the sheets, she put a hand over my mouth. They’re having dinner, she said. I hadn’t taken my jeans off. We stand by the curtains and start all over again. We go slowly. The lifeguards are gone from the beach. Their chairs are bare and flecked with paint. Her hair smells like sand, like the worn sea glass Lorris collected when he was little, to put in jelly jars, the blunt edges never scratching the glass. I see another, he would shout, making constellations in his palm. There’s another, with the glass grainy in his hands. Another, there’s another.
VAMPIRE DEER ON JEKYLL ISLAND
They were just getting out of dinner at the Jekyll Island Club Hotel Grand Dining Hall, the one where jackets are recommended, where the places of origin of the waiters are written on their golden name tags: Hungary, Kenya, Mozambique. Courtney had had too much to drink, gin and tonics, and Timothy was watching her as she navigated the steps, leaning on the wicker railing.
I’m fine, she said.
At the bottom of the stairs, Timothy waved off the valet, who was rummaging for the keys to their BMW. The valet stopped rummaging. The BMW had been one of the nicer cars in the lot, which surprised Timothy. Courtney was walking ahead of him, toward the water. He took long steps to catch up to her. When he did, she was stopped in the middle of the road, watching six deer stumble gracefully across.
Are those deer? Timothy asked, happily.
Of course they’re deer, she shushed. They were small, canine except for the long legs. They were eating at the seeds in the thick tropical grass in front of them, undisturbed by the human presence.
They should be moving, Timothy said. Like, running away.
Courtney took two steps forward and stamped her feet. The deer looked at her.
They’re caught in the headlights of your gaze, said Timothy.
What’s that? Are you really quoting right now? she said.
Sure, he lied.
The deer stayed where they were. They watched. I don’t like it when you do that, Courtney said.
Do what? Timothy asked.
Order for me, she said. He had, when the waiter from Hungary had come to their table surprisingly quickly.
He tried to put his arm around her, but she shrugged him off. Come on, he said.
No, she said.
She walked to the edge of the water, which was the bay. The beach was on the other side of the island. The hotel had been built here a hundred years ago, by J. P. Morgan and Joseph Pulitzer and Henry Goodyear and all the rest. They pretended to be duck hunting, but they were doing the things that millionaires did. They put the hotel on this side for ease of getting the building materials across the water, barged over from mainland Georgia. It had been in the guidebook that Courtney read on the drive down from Brooklyn. Courtney had woken up one morning and said, after they took their morning walk around the oval at Marine Park, I have to get out of here. The oval was sad concrete. The grass inside was tan and old. A block away they walked past the PTSD firemen outside the Mariners Inn. For a long time they’d been doing just the same thing. They found ways to get a week’s vacation. Timothy wouldn’t let her drive until they were well into Maryland. They didn’t talk on car rides anymore, like they had when they first started dating, five years before—even when they couldn’t find a radio station. For a while Courtney talked to her parents on her cell phone. Timothy felt that he knew them almost as well as he knew his own. He hadn’t stopped for a bathroom break until D.C.
The two of them looked out at the bay, where there was one red light blinking: a lighthouse. Timothy, rebuffed in his advances, settled for leaning backward on the railing so he could look half at her and half at the old hotel.
It’s creepy out here, he said.
I don’t think it is, she said. She had picked the place after hearing her coworker talk about it in a hushed voice on her office phone. More than romantic, the coworker had whispered. Southern. Timothy was convinced when she promised him there would be opportunities to swim, his largest indicator of a vacation.
Well, it is, he said, brushing a no-see-um off his chest. There’s no people around. It’s like there’s a curfew or something.
It seemed to Timothy that this bothered Courtney.
Why would there be a curfew? she said.
I don’t know, maybe it was in the fine print somewhere, he said. Half off the hotel reservations and free dinners as long as you’re in by ten.
But that doesn’t even make sense, she said.
Maybe it’s because of those wolves we just saw.
They were deer, Tim!
Maybe these are bloodsucking deer.
Courtney angled her body into Timothy. Bloodsucking deer! she fake squealed.
You never know in these places, he said. You just can’t tell.
They watched the lighthouse blink red and dark for a while. Timothy stroked Courtney’s shoulder. She didn’t pull away.
Maybe the vampire deer are owned by the hotel, Courtney said, her breath in his ear. Maybe it’s all a setup.
I bet the valets are in on the whole thing, Timothy whispered. That’s why they keep hopping into those go-carts—to let the deer out from their cages.
Courtney giggled. Timothy pressed on. By day, he said in his movie-announcer voice, they feed them the carcasses of dead guests, and once it gets dark, they go loose.
Courtney turned in toward Timothy and held each of his jacket lapels in her hands. She pushed her forehead into his chest. Save me, Tim, save me! she shouted.
He felt something triumphant. There was a heaviness in his throat. Maybe this trip would make him better at this. He was running out of ideas. He said, That’s my job.
He knew it was the wrong thing to say once her forehead stopped kneading his chest.
What the hell’s that supposed to mean? she said.
From the bloodsucking deer, he added.
She let go of his neck. For a while they leaned against the railing next to each other. Timothy waited for something to happen.
Aren’t you going to say something? Courtney said.
I don’t really know what the problem is, Timothy said. Courtney started walking back to the hotel.
Jesus, Courtney, he said.
I want to go home, she said.
Courtney, come on, he said again. She didn’t answer.
She walked the long slow curved lamp-lit path toward the hotel porch. There were plants hanging off the rafters, green overgrown ones, their pots sprinkled with dried-out petals and swaying in the dead air. She ignored the valet who tipped his cap at her and said, Evening ma’am. She planted herself on one of the white rocking chairs and sat in it, motionless, her face in her hands.
When eventually she spread her fingers apart and looked through them, to see what the night looked like, the valet was leaning against the railing with his back to her. His khaki shorts, she noticed, had the symbol of the hotel printed on them in white, on the side. He was wearing a white polo shirt, which was tucked into his pants. She imagined that this was emblazoned with the hotel signature too. It was only his belt that was something different, a pattern of red lobsters in a blue sea. Timothy always complained that she paid too much attention to little things. She never found a way to tell him that because he didn’t, he wouldn’t understand.
The valet stayed with his arms on his hips, looking out toward the path for cars coming in. After a while he said, I’m sure you didn’t mean to be rude.
Courtney arched her shoulders.
Excuse me? she said.
Rude, he said. You know, when you don’t respond to something that someone says to you.
Courtney had that feeling that the human body secretes when it starts panicking, though
it’s in no immediate danger. She started to open her mouth, then thought better of it.
Go on, the valet said. I can take it. But she pushed her hackles down, and the panicked feeling began to subside.
I see people like you fellas all the time, the valet said. Courtney wondered how old he might be. This hotel isn’t getting any newer. And northerners don’t tip, you know.
Is that true? Courtney said. That’s not true for us. My boyfriend tipped you when we left yesterday.
The valet raised his eyebrows. Boyfriend? he said. Aren’t you a little old for that?
Courtney thought she would feel the panicked feeling again, but she didn’t. Who even knows, she said.
The valet squinted lazily out onto the lawn, toward the dock. He pointed his thumb at the chair Courtney was sitting in, and said, You’re sitting right where Sean Penn was sitting.
Really? Courtney said.
Yep, he said. Last Christmas. Big Christmas party. The heat wasn’t working in the ballroom, so they put outdoor heaters into a tent out here, and there must have been a thousand people.
Good business, Courtney said.
Marine Park: Stories Page 5