If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go

by Judy Chicurel

  But over the years they never did change the ad in the yellow pages, and we used to scream with laughter, wondering what would happen if some family from Elmhurst or Philadelphia, even, lured by the promise of waterfront views and proximity to the beach, pulled up in their station wagon expecting a brief respite from the city heat and found instead—well, The Starlight Hotel. What would they think, we wondered, seeing the collection of funky losers sitting out front in their sagging beach chairs, with their fifty-cent sunglasses and torn visors, the cracked and calloused soles of their yellowed feet tipped toward the sun? There was Silvester, palsied from some unknown malady, who would stutter into the lounge after a day at the track, waving a fistful of bills, crowing, “It was a cool, cool, pigeon blue, and my baby rode it all the way home”; Jay, a retired English teacher who could read tea leaves and write letters of recommendation for the price of a Schlitz; and Amos, a leathery specimen who, when drunk, would give away his silver rings and then stagger up Comanche Street, screeching, “Which one of you Goddamn bedbugs stole my jewels?”

  And if the family was brave enough to venture inside, what would they make of the nameless waitress who wandered the halls hoisting an empty tray high in the air with one arm, stopping random visitors to ask, “May I take your order?” and then turning abruptly to continue her solitary sojourn? Or the young mother with three children who lived on the ground floor and would go out at night, leaving her babies asleep in one bed underneath an open window, their bare bottoms dotted with mosquito bites the shapes of tiny half-moons, as if waiting for someone to walk up Starfish Alley and steal them? And Roof Dog, the mangy German shepherd who lived in the hotel and would make his way up to the roof if someone left the door open, howling long and loudly as he galloped from one end to the other?

  Well, where else were they all going to live in such sordid splendor for three dollars and fifty cents a night? The Starlight may have been little more than a flophouse, but the rooms were saved by the water views and the smell of the ocean crouched right outside the windows, and the gaily colored Japanese lanterns strung around the ceilings, whose dim glow provided reading light and hid the true crustiness of the surroundings. Because of its proximity to the Comanche Street beach entrance, it seemed somehow less sinister than it would have in the city, say, or on a more isolated stretch of road. And because of that proximity, and the cool, dim lounge with its long mahogany bar, and the cheap drinks, and Len, the bartender, who was generous with buybacks, and a jukebox that played an eclectic mix of Santana, Frank Sinatra, the Doors, and the Wild Irish Tenors, among others, and because of some bizarre notion we had that hanging around a seedy dive with marginal lunatics made us somehow superior to our high school counterparts, with their pastel, split-level palaces and Velveeta lives, that last summer before everyone left, The Starlight Hotel became our headquarters, our nocturnal home away from home. It was where Billy Mackey stayed when his parents discovered the stash of quaaludes beneath the loose floorboard in his bedroom and threw him out; where Kenny and Joanie Kramer held their wedding reception when it became clear her parents wouldn’t contribute a nickel after finding out she was three months pregnant; where Carlie Slattery slept the night of her miscarriage so that she could bleed safely on the hotel’s moth-torn sheets without her mother finding out. It was where I thought I might find my mother, not the one who stood in the doorway of the bathroom while I applied lip gloss before heading out to Comanche Street, screaming that someday I’d regret this attraction to the seedy side of life, my father had a master’s degree, for God’s sake, but the mother who had given me up for adoption when she was sixteen years old, younger than I was that final summer. The Starlight Hotel seemed exactly like the kind of place a woman who’d given birth to an illegitimate daughter would be living, and on graduation night, while everyone was dropping acid or smoking angel dust or snorting heroin in the men’s bathroom, I wandered, lightly stoned, through the vacant hallways, dreamily pushing open doors to empty rooms, imagining my mother lying down on one of the lumpy double beds, her long hair fanning down the stained chenille bedspread, her flesh smooth and uncurdled against the flimsy slip she was wearing, gazing up at the ceiling while the smoke from her cigarette curled out the open window. I would be standing at the foot of the bed, and she would rise slowly and stare at me, at my hair, my face, the shape of my nose, and then she’d smile wide and hold out her arms, and say, “If I knew you were going to be this beautiful, I never would have let you go.”

  • • •

  That night of Mitch’s wake, standing next to Luke, I grew tired of waiting, and when Frank Sinatra began singing “My Way,” I took his hand and led him out to the patio and said, “Dance with me,” and we moved into the music, our faces so close I could kiss the small scar on his left eyebrow, but I didn’t. I had my arms around his neck and he held me around my waist, pressing lightly against the small of my back. At one point I thought there were tears on his face, or they could have been my tears leaking onto him, or maybe they were stars casting shadows, it was a bright night, the exact kind of night I’d pictured a thousand times over, Luke and I slow dancing, then breaking slightly, sneaking up the back stairway, Luke’s hand cupping my ass as we climbed up to an empty room and finally closed the door on the rest of the world. The next morning, the waitress who wandered the halls would fill her empty tray with chocolate cake and orange slices and bring it to us for breakfast, and in late afternoon, Jay would read our tea leaves and we’d spend our nights swaying to the music, to the sound of the ocean practically on the doorstep, and on nights when the clouds hid the moon, we would lie under the patchwork quilts that smelled of salt water and mildew and tell bedtime stories against each other’s skin.

  I could see it all so clearly that I thought it had already happened, and when the song ended and we broke apart, it took me a minute to understand that this was Luke, Luke, and nothing had happened, we had barely kissed yet. He stood there, suddenly looking so lost, so empty, that again it was I who took his hand, and led him up the hotel’s back stairwell to the floor where the rooms were sometimes unlocked, and I found one and went in and opened the window, and we lay down together on the stained chenille bedspread, and for a moment I could smell my mother, what I thought she smelled like—cigarette smoke and lilies of the valley. I turned toward Luke and smiled, relieved that we were finally here, and I closed my eyes and waited for him to kiss me, hold me, waited for it to begin. But then I heard a strangled sound, and my eyes flew open and it was Luke, leaning against me, sobbing, tearing at his hair, and I didn’t know what to do, I had no idea what to do. I tried to lift his tee shirt and kiss his scar, but he pulled it back down again. “No, no, please don’t,” he choked out, so I put my arms around different parts of his body through his turbulent thrashing until he felt dead in my embrace. I leaned in close, to make sure he was breathing, and when I saw his shoulders rising and falling, I settled back and held him, through the night sweats that soaked the bed while he slept.

  It was a long night. A thousand thoughts ran through my head but I couldn’t tell you what they were; I don’t remember. I was too conscious of Luke, of thinking he might wake up any minute and want to talk to me about things. I thought maybe he’d wake up and we could go for a walk on the beach and watch the sunrise. My arm was becoming numb, electric pinpricks all over, but the whole time I was hoping he’d get up, I still wouldn’t move for fear of waking him. I tried lighting cigarettes with one arm and almost set the sheets on fire. Still, I smoked an entire pack of Marlboros and longed to go downstairs and buy more from the temperamental machine in the lobby, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, but still I wouldn’t move away from Luke. My arms were beyond tired, and Luke’s tee shirt was as wet as if he’d stood out in the rain, but his face looked peaceful and his breathing was even and his occasional whimper never rose to a scream. At one point I tried turning so that I was facing him, so that I could watch his face while he slept, and I hear
d a soft rustling beneath me. I reached down and felt the lonely weight of the crumpled condoms I’d bought at Coffey’s Drugs in the pocket of my jeans.

  It was a very long night. Below us, I heard the jukebox stop playing. I heard Len telling everyone, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” I heard everyone moving out of the bar and onto Comanche Street. I heard voices fading. Above us, I heard Roof Dog bark twice before settling down to sleep. I heard Len closing up downstairs, bottles banging, the clang of the cash register as he counted out for the night. I heard him lock up, start his car and begin driving back to Rockaway. I heard the silence on Comanche Street, interrupted by a muffled cough somewhere in the hotel, a lone cry from a child’s nightmare in the bungalow across the street from the bar. But then the quiet completely covered everything, and right before I finally fell into a short, dreamless slumber, with Luke’s breath warm on my neck, I heard faintly, through the window, a woman’s whiskey voice, playful, almost laughing, singing: “. . . something, something, something, yeah! / My baby and, my baby and, my baby and me.”

  When I woke up shortly after daybreak, Luke was gone, the sheets still damp from his night sweats. I hadn’t felt him slip from the bed or heard him walk across the room. I hadn’t heard the door close. Two days later, I learned that he’d left town. He’d told Conor that he needed time away from everyone, everything, that until he was at home again in his own skin he couldn’t be at home anyplace else. He was heading west, and he might stop in Boulder to see Maggie and Matty, or he might just keep going until he found a place he’d never been before, where he didn’t know anyone. Conor, perpetually stoned or drunk or both, shrugged his shoulders, heading for the beach, his surfboard hooked under his arm. “It’s cool, man,” he said. “My parents are, like, freaking out. But I can wait until he’s ready to be my brother again.”

  But I was done waiting. I was ready, now, ready for those arms that had tried to hold me before Luke came back and went away again, ready to embrace someone, something that would hold me through the night when I needed to be held. But then Labor Day came and summer was over and everyone was talking about leaving, taking off for communes in California and New Mexico, moving to the city to get better-paying jobs, to Canada to avoid another draft lottery. Time to get real, man, people were saying, which made me sad and anxious, because all along I thought it had been real, that the whole point of being together was that we wouldn’t be like everyone else and that for all our summers we would lie next to one another on the sand at Comanche Beach, a chain of sun-kissed flesh that would never break. And years later, Liz, like a sister to me, only better because our blood didn’t get in the way, said half scornfully, half pitying, “It’s like we all knew it was this big myth, but you were the only one who really believed it.”

  And I did, I had, I’d bought the myth, even when I finally left I still thought I was leaving something behind and kept coming back to find it, and a few years later, when they started pouring federal funds into dissipated seaside towns on the East Coast and Elephant Beach received its fair share, and The Starlight Hotel was sold to developers and its ragtag crew of tenants cast out, and Conor and Billy, winos in waiting, tried petitioning Comanche Street residents to keep it open so that the crew of funky losers would have a place to live, or perhaps concerned about their own hazy futures, the neighbors slammed the door in their faces, saying, “What are you, crazy? Let that Goddamned rattrap burn to the ground!” Which it almost did, the blaze set by someone’s careless cigarette or the phantom owner’s hankering for insurance money, no one ever found out. And when I brought a sun-bleached boyfriend home from school, and insisted on driving past it, charred and boarded now, waiting to convert to luxury condos—Steps from the ocean! Waterfront views!—and selling for less because they never could quite get the smell of funk and mildew out of the walls, because I wanted my new love to know something of my past and be charmed and delighted by it, when we parked and, after looking around, the only thing he had to say was, “If we get out of the car, do I need to lock the doors in this neighborhood?” I knew then that it was over, and I chose, instead of him I chose the part of me that was trapped forever inside The Starlight Hotel, along with all the dreams that never came true, and some that did.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to John Freeman for opening the door that led to Granta and my excellent agent, Sarah Burnes; to Amy Einhorn for loving the book and opening yet another door; and to Liz Stein for taking it over the finish line. Thanks also to the rest of the amazing team at Putnam/Penguin Random House: Ivan Held, Katie McKee, Lauren Truskowski, Kate Stark, Mary Stone, Lydia Hirt, and Arianna Romig, and to the lovely folks across the pond at Penguin UK: Marion Donaldson, Emma Holtz, Georgina Moore, Yeti Lambregts, and Jo Liddiard. Additional thanks to former Granta editors Patrick Ryan and Ted Hodgkinson; André Aciman and the Writers Institute at the CUNY Graduate Center; the Writers Institute first-fiction class for feedback on “Babies”; Karen Spear Ellinwood for her insights on “Catholic Girls”; and Barbara Greenwood and the New Bedford nightbirds for their input on “Adventures in Zombie Land”; always loved the image of you all on overnight, reading aloud. Love and gratitude to all the friends who have been there and been there, especially the ladies of the beach: Susan Allen, Linda Allen, Deborah Emr, Jenny Briggs, Glynnis Burke, Patricia Slattery, Mitty Smith, and Jean Sondergaard, and to Joe Becker, Cindy Burch, Tim Chandler (RIP), Lynn Duffy, Hank Kattan, Marcia Klugman, David Laibman, Linda Nahum, Maite Reyes, and Irene Roberts. Big love and tremendous thanks to my husband, David, who told me now was the time to go for it, for all the reading and insightful editing, for riding around Brooklyn listening to Jimi Hendrix, and for the support that helped this book get written. Much appreciation to the New York Writers Coalition and to Melody Brooks and New Perspectives Theatre for providing spaces that helped keep the creative fires glowing. And finally, thanks to all the funky East Coast beach towns that served as home over the years and came together as Elephant Beach.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Judy Chicurel’s work has appeared in national and regional publications, including Granta, The New York Times, and Newsday. Her plays and screenplays have been produced and performed in New York City and published internationally. She belongs to the New York Writers Coalition, was a fellow in the inaugural class of the fiction writing program at the Writers’ Institute at the CUNY Graduate Center, and is a past resident of the New Perspectives Women’s Work Playwrights’ Lab. She has developed writing programs for high school students and facilitated writing workshops for teens and adults in New York City. Judy lives in Brooklyn, New York.