Out East

by John Glynn

  After getting kicked out of Surf Lodge, Matt and Shane had napped until nightfall and were now awake and drinking on the balcony off the bedroom.

  “Matt was complaining about his new guy and how he travels all the time. The age difference is taking its toll. I asked him what he thought of you. It just came out, I didn’t even mean to—”

  “What did he say?”

  “He didn’t say anything. He had this hesitation in his voice. So I told him how you had feelings for him.”

  My stomach tightened. “Then what?”

  “He has feelings for you, too. It’s mutual. He said he likes you. He asked if I thought your feelings for him were real. I said one hundred percent.”

  I was overcome with a wave of delirium. A cosmic euphoria. I’d devoted every waking thought to him. Every song lyric grafted to his existence. It was real. I wasn’t making it up. It was real.

  “So then what? Where did you leave it?”

  “He said he has to think about it. He felt he had to make a decision.”

  “About me? About his relationship?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s still upstairs? I need to talk to him—”

  “Not yet. Give him at least a night. I don’t want him to think I immediately relayed all this to you, even though of course I did.”

  “I can’t believe this is happening. It’s not in my head.”

  “There’s no one who deserves it more.”

  I had no time to process. The moment Mike and I walked back into the living room, Matt came tumbling down the stairs. He walked right up to me and grabbed my hands.

  “Hi!” His eyes sparked in a new way.

  “Hey! You made a comeback!” We were holding hands, our grip radiating intensity.

  “Cabs ah hee-ya!” called Dana, imitating Pauly D from Jersey Shore. “We can’t keep Henry waiting on our last night!”

  In the back row of Henry’s cab I had my arm around him. His hand rested on my leg. This was how we rode the whole way to town.

  Shagwong was crowded and hot and bathed in red-filtered light. Our friends from other houses were already there. Matt grabbed my hand and guided me to the bar. He ordered us both Blue Moons.

  My memories of that night are vivid and impressionistic. The band was set up in front, by the windows. Shagwong had a bar on one side and a restaurant on the other, and on the bar side everyone was dancing. Matt handed me a foaming beer. We did not leave each other’s side.

  The band started playing “Mr. Brightside.” It was one of my favorite songs from college. The whole house swarmed together, jumping up and down, shouting the lyrics. Matt and I were dancing, a part of the group but separate from it, ensconced in our own unspoken world. Everyone in the house must’ve sensed what was happening. I felt only a sweeping wave of relief. I remember thinking this was the happiest I had ever been.

  When we got home I was completely wired. It seemed the whole house had caught a second wind. We ate pizza and danced around the kitchen. Timmy started grinding like a male stripper and Kelley became his objet d’art.

  We decided to go skinny-dipping. Mike, Parker, Shane, Timmy, Matt, and me. I hunted through the house for a dry towel and brought down the speakers.

  “Timmy, you’re a never-nude,” Mike joked as we reached the pool deck. “Your idea of skinny-dipping is swimming in long underwear.”

  “I am not a never-nude!” Timmy tossed away his shirt and kicked off his shorts. “What a terrible thing to call someone.” He stepped onto the diving board naked and raised his arms to the sky. “Kelley, grade my front flip on a scale of one to ten.”

  We did naked cannonballs, naked backflips, rode naked down the slide. A primal giddiness charged the air. I stared into the canopy of trees illuminated by watery light, spotting stars through the branches. We stuck to the shadows, strategically covered ourselves with our hands. There was nothing sexual about it. It felt like freedom.

  Matt kept playing “Applause” over and over.

  “Matt, not again!” Kelley sat by the pool house, taking in our antics.

  “Just the chorus! Just the clapping part! Then we can listen to something else.”

  We were back in the kitchen, just Matt and me. Our hair was wet, but we had changed into dry clothes. Everyone else had gone to bed.

  “Wanna keep listening to music?” he asked.

  I handed him my iPod and the speakers. He put on Rihanna’s “Do Ya Thang.” We moved closer. My arms wrapped around his waist and his arms rested on my shoulders. His back was against the counter and we held each other. I could smell the vodka on his breath. I had sobered up, but he was still drunk. He rested his head on my shoulder.

  It was like my body had unlocked a new level of perception. The lightest touch was a live wire, electrifying new dimensions of consciousness. The physical and emotional had never coalesced for me with such intensity.

  Matt looked up from my shoulder. We started leaning in. Our foreheads touched. I closed my eyes. We were on the verge of kissing. I had envisioned this countless times, had prayed for it each morning on my walk to the subway. We were as still as Roman statues. We did not speak. I was about to lean in. Then the thought. He was drunk and had a boyfriend. I’d be his point of guilt. I wanted to kiss him more than anything. But I knew that this was not the time. This was not the way.

  Knowing it could’ve happened was enough. This is what I convinced myself of. A cold pastoral.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It was early, around eight a.m., and no one else was awake. In the dark of Bedroom 4, I hunted for my bathing suit. I walked barefoot back down to the pool. Everything was quiet and still.

  I stood at the edge of the diving board, bouncing up and down, the sun striking my body in buckshots of yellow light. This pool, which we’d hardly used, felt like a synaptic bridge, a portal to past selves. Fiberglass diving board, netless basketball hoop, a concrete deck capped with white filters. It reminded me of the long afternoons I spent with my cousins at my aunt Bootsie’s pool, pretending we were in the Olympics. On the ride out to Bootsie’s we would beg whichever aunt was driving to turn on the car’s heat and roll up all the windows. We wanted to get as hot and sweaty as possible, to torture ourselves. That way, when we finally dove into the pool, we’d have truly earned it. We’d sit in the back of the car, bodies stuck to the leather, feeling the wet film on each other’s hands. Time stretched and the pain united us as we anticipated the pool’s cold release.

  I felt my grandmother’s presence in the slant of the sun. At Bootsie’s pool Kicki timed our handstands and graded our cannonballs. Wrinkled hands dabbing our noses with Coppertone. Her final gift had brought me to this moment. I was in the Hive because of her. This nascent happiness, this hope, this new life, was because of her.

  Shane and I went to the Bake Shoppe for one last jelly croissant. We poured milk through the domed lids of our iced coffee cups and listened to Yacht’s “Second Summer” one last time. When we got back to the house, the energy had shifted. Everyone was gathering the remains of their summer lives. Trash bins filled with unsalvageable items—cheap H&M bracelets, overstretched tank tops, a broken pair of Jack Rogers sandals. People passed through the house like ghosts, silent and monofocused. The anxiety was contagious.

  Matt brought his duffel bag to the living room. He looked hungover—eyes bagged and skin ashen. “Have you seen my green sweatshirt?” he asked me.

  “I think it’s on a chair in the kitchen.”

  “Oh, good. I was so drunk last night I thought I might’ve worn it out and lost it. I barely remember anything after Surf Lodge.”

  His words threw me. “Last night was nuts.” I laughed nervously.

  “Totally.”

  I scanned his gaze, trying to discern the truth.

  Lost and found items accumulated on the kitchen table. Black Tory Burch flats, Mardi Gras beads, a Sonicare electric toothbrush, one Rainbow sandal, a neon-orange windbreaker, bottles of Aleve, a tennis racket, two di
fferent blue striped bikini tops, gold hoop earrings, La Mer moisturizing cream, a battered copy of Gone Girl, New Balance running sneakers, a tangled pile of cell phone chargers, and sweatshirts from Air + Speed.

  Ashley went for one last run and rewarded herself with a cigarette on the upstairs deck. She looked down at the driveway, our housemates loading the cars. Perrie’s was already pulling away. Ashley would miss her Montauk family. But she had a second date planned that night with Sloppy Tuna Man. They were going to a wine bar on West Fourth Street. She had accomplished what she’d set out to do.

  I packed my bag in the dim light of Bedroom 4. I had spent all summer living out of my duffel, never once folding my clothes into a Hive dresser. I wanted the comfort of mobility, the safety of quick escape.

  The door creaked open and Matt stepped in.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  “I’m doing a load of laundry.”

  “Oh, smart.”

  The laundry room was connected to Bedroom 4. He walked past me and unhinged the latched door. I could hear him moving his clothes from the washing machine to the dryer. I followed him in.

  “Hey,” I said. “Can we talk?”

  He tossed in the last of his clothes and mixed in two dryer sheets.

  “Of course.”

  My hands were shaking. My heart stammered. The back of my throat went dry. Every insecurity I’d ever harbored was rising and crushing me, fracturing my thoughts. I forced myself to speak.

  “I know Mike talked to you last night and I just wanted you to know that everything he said was true.”

  “Oh, yeah. Thank you, I appreciate that.”

  “I have feelings for you. I really like you. I know you’re seeing someone, but I feel like we have such a strong connection.”

  “I agree.”

  “Obviously this is new terrain for me. But I know myself and I know how I feel.”

  “I appreciate that. It takes courage to articulate that. And to be honest, I have feelings for you, too.”

  No one had ever said those words to me. Not in a way that I could hear. They filled me with deep currents of joy. A lifetime of feeling out of step. Everything now aligned.

  “I think you’re the best,” he continued. “I tell everyone how awesome you are. Kelley loves you.”

  “She’s great. I love her, too.”

  “And if I weren’t in my current relationship I’d totally want to see where things led.”

  A sudden change, the gears shifting. This was a different conversation. This was obliterating. As he continued to speak I felt myself being whisked away.

  “But I really like this new person. I know our connection is real, but there’s a big difference between having feelings and being out with them.”

  I was five and holding Kicki’s hand. We were walking along the tide line at Hawk’s Nest Beach in Connecticut. She spotted a green shard of sea glass wedged between belts of seaweed. I picked it up and held it in my palm.

  “These feelings are new for you and you’re still figuring everything out.”

  The sea glass was curved and luminous. Kicki told me it came from the neck of a bottle. We were walking to an amalgamated rock at the end of the beach. We had all left the cottages together, but Kicki and I had fallen behind. I could see the silhouettes of my cousins against the sun.

  “I’ve been there. It’s a lot to process, but it’s something everyone has to sort through and it takes time. I can be your friend and help you through it, but I can’t be your coach.”

  The sea glass cast a green shadow across Kicki’s golf shirt. She asked me if I thought it was ready. True sea glass was tide-battered and sunbaked. Ossified and parched and dried up by salt. Swept against rocks and hard shells. The harshness made it softer. Its edges became smooth and opaque. In my head the bottle neck was already mine. I pictured it next to the little things atop my dresser: my neon snap bracelet, my California Raisin figurine, my bamboo case of baby teeth.

  “I’m not looking for a coach,” I said. “You’re not an experiment. I know we’re at different stages, but I know I want to be with you. I’m not afraid of how I feel.”

  I knew the sea glass wasn’t ready. The edges were still too sharp. But I wanted it. Kicki understood. She had her own little things atop her dresser, and boxes and boxes of things in the attic. Once, when I was little, I explored her trove with my cousin Carly, opening boxes and cedar chests and sifting through costume jewelry and yearbooks and the loose fabric of my grandfather’s World War II parachute. The adults saw what we had done and yelled at us. Not Kicki, though. Kicki never once yelled or got mad.

  “The timing isn’t right. You’ll see. Who knows what can happen down the road.”

  Seeing the anguish on my face, Kicki quickly scanned the beach around us. Johnny, she said, and pointed.

  There, lying in the sand, was another piece of sea glass. It glowed an indigo blue. Back in Springfield Kicki had whole jars of sea glass that she’d take down and let me play with. In all her years of collecting she had only ever found one other piece that was blue.

  I scooped it up and dusted the sand off. Kicki told me the blue was the rarest of them all and that it was mine.

  “Okay. Obviously I’m disappointed, but I understand,” I said. “I’m glad we talked.”

  “Me too.”

  On our way back to the cottage, Kicki let me toss the bottle neck back to the sea. It was an offering for another day, another beach, another year. The sky was clear and Kicki pointed across the Sound. I didn’t know it then, but she was pointing directly to Montauk.

  Winter

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It was already setting out to be one of the coldest winters on record. Just after the new year a nor’easter struck, pummeling the city with arctic winds and whorls of snow. The temperature in Central Park plunged to four degrees Fahrenheit, breaking a previous low set in 1896. At night, Chauvin, Evan, and I set up a space heater on the coffee table and huddled around as we watched the news. The weathermen were calling it a polar vortex.

  As the cold front persisted, I found myself longing for summer. I pictured our beach camp on the other side of the volleyball nets, the days that were too hot to do anything but body surf. I yearned for those humid, buzzy nights when, in T-shirts and shorts, we’d drink vodka sodas outside the Mem. These nostalgic echoes of Montauk initially caught me off guard. The emotional fallout from the Hive had been almost too much to bear.

  Labor Day weekend had left me cratered. I’d revealed my feelings to Matt and exposed a part of my inner life I was just coming to understand. Returning to the city in disarray, I’d retreated inside myself. I felt simultaneously unmasked and invisible. I had no idea how to continue to live my life.

  I walked to the subway each morning fighting back tears, praying to my grandmother just to make it through the day. I remember weaving through the underground concourse beneath my building the Wednesday after Labor Day, lost in the sunless glow of shops and restaurants. I got in line at a salad shop. Who knows what I ordered. Even the simplest act of getting lunch had become alien and humiliating. Amid the winding ropes of people, I felt exposed, unlovable, and deeply pathetic. I had risked everything for a chance at real intimacy. It hadn’t worked out. In my own interior world I no longer felt welcome.

  That night I texted my mom. I asked her if I could come home for the weekend. I explained that I was feeling sad and overwhelmed. I was suffering the worst heartache of my life. She told me not to take the train all the way home. She’d meet me halfway and pick me up in New Haven.

  On the Metro-North that Friday I took in the landscape. The city had faded to oceanfront suburbs—Greenwich McMansions with blue lawns and boat docks. I pictured the families that lived in those houses, their life paths replicated over and over. I wanted to replicate that same path, too. I wondered now if I ever would.

  I found both my parents outside Union Station. My dad had gotten out of work early and decided to
join my mom for the trip. I tossed my canvas bag in his trunk.

  “I’m so glad we get you for the whole weekend,” my mom said as she kissed me.

  After twenty minutes of compulsory small talk, the conversation shifted inward.

  “So,” my mom asked. “How are you?”

  I tried to speak but couldn’t. A heat was rising through my chest. I had kept it in all week, bottled my pain.

  I admitted I had had my heart broken. I realized I was crying.

  “Johnny, I know you’re in pain, but it’ll be okay. You’ll find someone soon. Trust me.”

  “No, you don’t understand.” I was too emotionally decimated, too sleep-deprived and mentally burdened to even consider what I was about to say. “My heart was broken by a guy.”

  The car veered, a horn blasted. The steering wheel whiplashed back into place.

  “Phil?” my mom said. “Phil, are you okay?”

  “No,” my dad said. “No, I’m not okay. I need to pull over.”

  My dad took the nearest exit and pulled into an empty factory parking lot. He stopped the car.