by John Glynn
I liked the idea that Montauk was not fully finished. Its architectural DNA was in a constant state of becoming, the old and the new existing in harmony.
“What about the Hive?” I joked. “Something tells me that was not a Carl Fisher original.”
“Let’s be honest,” Perrie said, her window down, her red hair floating about, “the person who built the Hive was Mike.”
The beach by the Sloppy Tuna was burbling with life that day. Knots of people lay beneath wind-popped umbrellas. Everyone looked young and fit, eyes scoping, ready.
We carried our beach chairs, passing by games of Spikeball and Kadima. Frisbees clattered into buckets for KanJam, the echoes of songs carrying from one Bose speaker to the next. I followed the others, who seemed to have a set destination. We kept close to the dunes, passing the lifeguard tower and the two volleyball courts where a lone girl roughed it up with a group of sand-caked guys.
“There’s Volleyball Girl,” Mike said. “She’s always there.”
We arranged the chairs in a semicircle, laying our towels in the middle. A communal tote held magazines, sports equipment, and a variety of sunscreens. We doused each other’s backs, we shivered from the cream’s coldness. This was the Hive’s spot, I learned, beyond the volleyball nets. Some days, when the tide was strong, the waves formed a shelf of sand, and we’d sit right on the edge, sliding heels-first into the surf when the sun got too hot.
People came and went throughout the day. A revolving door of college friends, city friends, friends from other houses. Visitors fresh from the ocean dried off on our blankets. Housemates journeyed into town for iced coffee, for bags of chips. Others came back with cold cuts from Herb’s Market, turkey stacked so high you had to angle your jaw to eat it.
“Be careful,” warned Kirsten. “The seagulls here are bold as fuck. Last year I was eating a tuna sandwich and one came and stole it out of my hand.”
She handed me a two-liter soda bottle filled with a pink mixed drink.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Tina Juice. It’s better just to drink it and not ask questions.”
Each of us took a swig.
Ashley sat on the towel next to me, a football by her side. She was reapplying tanning oil across her chest.
“You know how I paid for these?” she asked me, staring down at her cleavage. “Tennis lessons.”
I laughed.
“Honest to God. Thirty bucks an hour. Took me two summers.”
She caught sight of something over my shoulder and leaned over to Perrie, whispering in her ear. They both walked to the tide line.
Ashley couldn’t stop thinking about the guy from the Sloppy Tuna, the one she’d locked eyes with over Memorial Day weekend, the one who’d smiled from across the deck but never approached. She’d been on the lookout for him ever since.
Sloppy Tuna Guy didn’t appear that day, but within seconds a tall, ab-shredded man approached her. He was broad-shouldered and handsome, with dark hair wet from the ocean.
“Oh my God, it’s you!” he said. “I feel like I see you everywhere! At Ruschmeyer’s, at Surf Lodge.”
They spoke for a few minutes. Then they started tossing the football.
Perrie returned to her towel.
“This is her thing,” she said, adjusting her yellow frilled bikini. “She sees a guy, she stands by the water, they toss the football. If he has a good spiral, he’s in. If not, she’s not interested.”
We watched as the guy caught Ashley’s pass. He set the laces and released. The ball wobbled and quivered in a loose arc.
Perrie and I swapped dubious glances. “Not a prayer,” I said.
Sloppy Tuna Beach was nothing like the beaches of my childhood. The crowd was rowdier, the surf more daunting. As a kid I spent the last week in June on the other side of the Sound, at Hawk’s Nest Beach in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Twenty of us nestled into two cottages raised on stilts. My mother had gone to Hawk’s Nest as a girl. My grandmother, too.
The beach there crackled with slipper shells and big flaps of seaweed. A barnacled jetty daggered the sea, corralling tides. The waves on the Long Island Sound were less waves than the scalloped suggestions of waves—the perfect tideline for a bluster of small cousins. At low tide the beach revealed its treasures—a shoreline backfilled with glimmers of sea glass, fusillade from the beachside Pavilion bar in Sound View.
When the cousins and I built sandcastles, we’d patrol the sand for cigarette butts and use them as turrets.
Our cottages were porous and timeworn. Polynesian art and old rattan furniture decorated the living rooms, which opened to small screened-in porches. The attic bedrooms where my cousins and I slept had metal beds and low, sloping ceilings. We’d lie awake, listening to the sounds of our parents laughing and playing cards into the night.
As our family expanded, we needed more sleeping space. Rather than rent a third cottage, my aunt Ellen packed a tent, positioning it as a reward. If we cousins were good we could sleep in the tent. If we misbehaved we had to sleep inside. The tent was pitched in the front yard, and sound carried. In our canvas sleeping bags my cousins and I spoke in whispers, suppressing our laughter in the down of our pillows.
One night, too wired to sleep, we dared each other to venture to the beach, a hundred yards down the street. I was ten years old and felt brave. I accepted the dare. To prove I had made it, I had to bring back a handful of sand.
I unzipped the tent and felt my skin electrify. I was the good kid. I never got in trouble. I wasn’t yet familiar with the thrill of rule-breaking, the adrenal rush that floods the senses. I walked by rows of dark cottages, their stilted underbellies like black yawning mouths. The street felt etched with danger, and I suddenly realized I was quite alone.
The beach stood at the foot of the street, and as I got close I could hear sounds. A fire came into view. There were all sorts of people on the sand.
I remember intuiting that the people by the fire were deviant. But something called me to them. I darted to one of the waterfront cottages and crawled beneath its stilts. I watched the scene, my belly pressed to the sand. Someone threw a beer bottle into the ocean. Music played from a boom box. I remember seeing two guys holding hands.
I lay there, still as a stone, hiding, observing. For a few minutes I had stepped outside the world of my cousins into something else, I didn’t know what. I was watching from afar.
I returned to the tent, the sand falling from my open palm.
We drank through the afternoon and went to a day party at Cyril’s fish shack until six. By the time I got home, my body craved sleep. I dozed off to the hum of towels spinning in the dryer.
I’m not sure how long I rested. Five minutes, a half hour. I was cocooned on the futon when my nostrils flared. The scent of burning flooded my sinuses, popped my eyes open, ringing every alarm in my brain. I flung off my blanket in a hot panic.
I started running up the stairs toward the smell of smoke. My mind was screaming. Someone must have fallen asleep smoking. Someone must’ve knocked over a candle. I reached the landing and could barely see. Sheets of smoke rolled across the living room.
The Hive was on fire.
The alarm began to sound, puncturing my ears.
I barreled into the living room. The smoke was chuffing out of the fireplace, webbing across the ceiling, sinking over the entire floor.
I stood inert. In my earliest childhood nightmare, I’m standing outside my house with my mom and Kicki, watching a fire bloom in my bedroom. I try to get my mom’s attention, but she and Kicki are talking and won’t listen. They don’t see the fire. Only I do. Fire was my earliest fear.
Through the smoke I spotted Shane. He was carrying two plastic bottles. A loud hiss, more smoke, a subsiding heat as the fireplace went dark. The smoke began to disperse.
Shane swatted at the air above the fire alarm until it stopped. He was still in his beach attire—a lacrosse pinny and neon green Chubbies.
“Whoops!�
�� he said drunkenly. I realized he had put the fire out with seltzer. From the SodaStream.
“Shane, why the hell were you building a fire!”
He was mopping up the ash with a beach blanket that read IT’S JITNEY, BITCH. He mentioned something about the house being cold, the flue not fully opening. I didn’t care. I was just relieved the Hive hadn’t burned down.
While I stood frozen, Shane had averted a crisis like we all would that summer—with a vodka mixer.
Chapter Twelve
Ashley started selecting her weekend outfits on Monday. She cataloged her tank tops and vintage cut-offs, she paired her bandage dresses with stilettos. By Tuesday she thought about being skinny for the beach. She ate kale salad and grilled chicken and fish, or she didn’t eat. She cold-cleaned her skinny jeans in the freezer. At night when she craved ice cream, she went into the bathroom and inspected her body instead. She did SoulCycle every day, sometimes twice a day. She went to the hard instructors like Rique and Akin and Taye. Mike was working part-time at the Union Square location and would let her ride for free.
Ashley did financial research for a real estate developer based in Fairfield. She worked alone in an office suite on Madison Avenue. The office next to hers still had the faded impression of furniture—dust rings, carpet indents, a rectangle on the wall where a painting had hung. An abandoned golf putter and a handful of golf balls sprawled across the seafoam carpet in the hallway. She’d look at the putter each morning, wondering why it had been left behind.
She spent her lunch breaks searching for light. She knew the movement of the sun and the best spots to find it. From 11:00 to 11:35, the tables by the Central Park Apple Store. At noon it was Park Avenue down by Grand Central. At one p.m., the outdoor area across from the GM building. Casa Lever on Fifty-Third and Park, early afternoon but not past two. After two, the fountains on Fifty-Third or a small square outside of the Blackstone building.
We had all purchased half shares, eight weekends total. But Ashley went to the Hive every weekend, whether it was assigned to her or not. No one questioned this. No one wanted it any other way.
During that same week I hunkered down, worked late, read manuscripts in bed. I threw myself into work to keep my mind occupied. The dark thoughts had not dissipated. I could be washing my hands or waiting on the platform for the C train, and an anxious shame would gather in my chest, sometimes making it hard to breathe. I continued to construct a future in which I was alone and unloved. I felt a level of self-loathing that blinkered my vision. Before Montauk the possibility of love, to my mind, had all but dissolved.
But something had shifted. New building materials arrived. I was pulling down beams, letting in some light, crumpling up the blueprints that no longer made sense. I was still anxious, still painfully insecure. But a new trace of hope wove through those late June days, bringing me back to the freedom I felt during the first week of summer as a kid. A breeze off the river, the shine of sunglasses, marble buildings cast in warm melon light. With the heat came a sense of opportunity, a return to the days when anything might be possible. That night in Tribeca my roommates came home to pack their overnight bags and meet up with their girlfriends, and our apartment was hot and still and quiet. I stepped out on the deck and packed a bowl, admiring the rectangles of light from the windows on Duane Street. I took a hit and sank into a chair, listening to the spectral chime of the ice cream truck below. I texted Matt.
Matt and I were becoming friends outside of the Hive. On Wednesdays I’d open my Gmail, awaiting the weekend room assignments. Sometimes his name would appear on my Gchat list, and I’d scroll across it to reveal his avatar. In it he wore a pink polo. His hair was longer and swept to the side. We’d chat for a few minutes, then I’d go invisible. A longer exchange, even through a screen’s cold remove, made me flushed and anxious. Matt would appear and disappear, too, going idle for hours only to resurface with a few rapid-fire comments, then disappearing again. Doors opening and closing all day.
On Friday, my coworker Whitney taught me the shortcut to Montauk. The trick was like a warp pipe in Super Mario. If you caught the originating train from Hunter’s Point in Queens, you could bypass Penn Station and the elbow-slash at Jamaica. You could leave work later and still get there with time for an iced coffee at the bodega. Best of all, you were guaranteed a seat.
I was staring out the window at the Hampton Bays water tower when Matt texted me. See you tonight :)
As the train pulled into Montauk station, I could feel the strictures unbinding. I was in a different world, a summer world, a world baked by the sun. I felt a breathless anticipation as I walked down the platform, a journey protracted by the slow clod of weekenders shouldering leather bags.
Mike had been out running errands and was waiting for me in the parking lot. Kirsten and Ashley were already at the house. D.Lo and Perrie were on their way.
“Shane’s driving out with Colby,” Mike said. “We got in a huge fight last night. We were out to dinner with Tyler and Timmy and he got blackout drunk and fell asleep on his plate.”
Shane had always enjoyed getting after it, but lately his drinking had noticeably escalated.
“I feel like it’s partially my fault,” Mike continued. “He’s miserable at work. He hates living in Stuytown. When I quit my job to start my company I promised I’d support him. Now the company’s failing, I’m working at SoulCycle, and he’s stuck picking up the extra rent.”
Mike had quit his marketing job two years earlier to start his own social media search engine. The idea was to aggregate content and influencers and quantify the impact of tweets and Instagram and Facebook posts. Mike woke up each morning, made coffee in his Keurig, and followed up with beta users while watching Kathie Lee and Hoda. His developer had set up the back end so that he could go in and see what people were searching. He’d look for observable patterns and figure out how to build a smarter search.
When Klout came along, his product became redundant. His start-up had failed, his investors were losing money, and his entrepreneurial dreams were dead. That summer Mike was desperately trying to sell the company.
He asked me when Matt was coming. I told him he was taking the Cannonball.
“I saw him last Thursday,” Mike said. “At this gay happy hour at a bar in Chelsea. He was saying how much he liked you.”
Mike was taking the long way down Edgemere Street. We passed by the Surf Lodge and rounded Fort Pond.
“Matt and I have gotten really close,” I started. “I think…”
I could see Fort Pond through the trees. The flat glass water glistened blue and yellow. I didn’t know what I thought.
“I think he’s really awesome,” I finally said.
“Yeah,” Mike agreed as he flipped on the radio. “He’s really great. I’m glad you two are friends.”
There were nineteen people in the Hive that weekend. I was assigned to Bedroom 5, the smallest bedroom in the house, pressed between the larger basement bedroom and the Game Room. The air in Bedroom 5 breathed thin, and when the door was shut my sinuses closed up. At night, lying in one of the two twin beds, you could feel a cold aura tingle your flesh, as if a ghost had passed through.
That evening Ashley, Matt, and I were taking tequila shots in the kitchen. Someone had convinced us that tequila was an upper, so we guzzled back Milagro to jolt ourselves awake. It was only nine p.m., but Ashley was dead set on leaving by nine thirty. She wanted to get to Ruschmeyer’s early. She had an intuitive feeling that something important was going to happen.
“Do you guys remember that guy I saw at the Sloppy Tuna over Memorial Day weekend? The one I locked eyes with on the upstairs deck? He was tall and wearing a water polo jacket?”
She had pretended he was no one, but I remembered how she’d stopped midsentence, her eyes shooting across the bar at the handsome guy in the windbreaker.
“I was on my way to Equinox on Tuesday and I saw him again. On Forty-Fourth and Lex. He was with a bunch of analysts; t
hey were all in suits. They were probably on their way to lunch.”
She was worked up from talking about him. Her fake eyelashes kept fluttering.
“Did you say anything to him?” Matt asked.
“God no. But we made eye contact again. He smiled at me. I know this sounds crazy, but I think I’m supposed to be with him. If someone is meant to be in my life, they keep circling back. I just have this feeling I’m going to run into him again.”
“At Ruschmeyer’s?” I asked. “Tonight? Do you know his name?”
“Not yet. But I’ll find that out soon enough, too. I need to go straighten my hair. I already texted Henry to bring his cab in fifteen minutes. Anyone who wants to come with me can.”
Just then Kirsten walked into the kitchen. She was wearing pearl earrings and her blond hair was swept up in a tight bun. She was dressed in the gaudy silk bathrobe from the master bedroom.
“Hello! Do you guys like my new outfit?” She swirled around and took a chug of wine from her clear plastic Hive cup.
“Tina!” Colby slammed his drink on the sideboard, rattling one of the twisted tubular glass candleholders. Next to them sat a big pewter bowl of lost items—BlackBerry chargers, hairbrushes, headphones, and nail polish. Tina was Kirsten’s Montauk alter ego. When she got drunk, Tina came out in full force. Thus the Tina Juice.