Down the Shore (11 page)

I pictured the title grid from
The Brady Bunch
filled with drunk first years leering at each other while mom and dad looked on with pride. Jules filled the doorway and told Kelsey he was heading over to see Damien. When he was gone, Kelsey picked up her phone and motioned for me to follow her as she walked down the hall, ordering taxis for her guests. She opened the door to her room, and waved me in.

“Sit while I fix myself up,” she said, pointing to her bed.

There was a landslide of silk and denim and cotton piled against the foot of the mattress, outfits considered and discarded. Necklaces and bracelets poured out of a jewelry case on her dresser and a pile of books stacked beside an antique radiator had collapsed like the bricks of a demolished wall. Hanging above her bed was a small portrait done in oil paints. It was Kelsey in the painting, but it could have been an older sister, or her mother in her younger years; she looked like someone had tapped and drained some of her youth. She seemed to be doing something with her hands, but her hands were just below the edge of the canvas, the gesture lost. She was topless in the painting, and either her tattoo had been left out or her ink was more recent than this artwork, although I doubted that.

“Who did that?” I asked her.

“Jules.”

“He paints?”

“We broke up last spring,” she said, ignoring my question. “I saw him this summer and we got back together. Old habits die hard, right?”

“Or they don't.”

Kelsey's mouth was frozen open as she put on her mascara.

“Yes, he paints,” she said, finally. “It's almost all he does.”

“Where are we going?”

“The Old Course Hotel. This guy named Damien is living there until he finds a house, which is ridiculous.”

“He's a student?”

Kelsey nodded, snapped her compact shut, and turned to face me.

“Are you having fun?” she asked.

•   •   •

“It's two fifteen,” I said, after the girl in the front seat of the taxi turned to ask me for the time.

“It still feels so bloody early.”

“That's where we're going,” Kelsey said, squeezing my thigh and pointing.

The Old Course Hotel, the largest and brightest building outside the town, came into view as the driver spun around the traffic circle that launched us out of St. Andrews proper. We piled out under an enormous awning and revolved through the lobby door. I was expecting the kind of opulence you find in big American hotels, but the ground floor was all beige walls and cream-colored carpeting. This was where visiting parents stayed, Kelsey told us, and where people came to hole up for the weekend when there were good drugs in town. She led us to a room at the end of the third-floor hallway, and knocked.

The first thing I saw over Kelsey's shoulder was a motorcycle helmet on a dresser, and the second thing was a boy sitting on the bed with his back against the headboard, one loafer on the king-sized duvet, and the other planted on the floor of the suite that he was using as a dorm room. On the nightstand beside him was a disassembled set of throwing darts that he was piecing back together, a dart shaft tucked behind his ear. He didn't acknowledge us until he had inspected the point on a steel tip in the lamplight. Jules sat on the other side of the bed, ashing a joint onto an empty bottle of Bordeaux. Two new girls occupied the sofa, their legs tucked under their bodies like birds.

“This is Damien,” Kelsey said. “He's from New York.”

He was handsome in a way that made him seem unknowable, the product of generation after generation of good breeding, of men fucking a long line of successively more attractive women.

“Welcome to St. Andrews,” he said, as if we'd just officially arrived.

“Wait until you meet the rest of these kids,” Kelsey said, crossing the room to kiss the two girls on the couch. “The memories come rushing back.”

The other taxi had stopped for cigarettes and its passengers were coming down the hall now, with Clayton in the lead.

“Isn't this place just
dripping
with charm?” he shrilled, trying on an English accent.

“This one's a scream,” Kelsey said.

Clayton had a bottle of champagne in each hand when he burst through the door.

“There we go,” Damien said. “You all should be ashamed for coming empty-handed.”

Mary went straight for the TV and flipped through the local weather,
BBC News,
and a scene from a spaghetti western. She settled on a rap video set at a house party with tanks full of mermaids.

“You two can sit down,” Jules said to Clare and me, nodding at the bed. “Remind me what you're called?”

“I'm Clare,” Clare said. “And this is Tom.”

“Clare?”

“Lutèce,” Clare said.

It was his mother's maiden name, according to the
New York Times
. And this, I thought, is how far he's willing to go.

“What are you studying?” Damien asked.

“History of art, music.”

“You came all this way for that?”

Clare explained that he loved the UK, and golf, and that he had wanted to go here for the longest time. He was trying to align his life with theirs, but even I could have told him that he was getting it wrong. These people hadn't come here just because they wanted to.

“What about you?” Damien asked me. “What are you studying?”

“Econ.”

“No points for originality. You and I get to hit the books while Clare and Jules over here are surrounded by girls dressed to the nines, waiting for Will to trip in the aisle so they can help him up and get a shot at the throne. History of art is basically required for your M.R.S.”

“Your what?”

I looked to Kelsey for an explanation, and saw that everyone was deliberately looking at anything but her. And then I figured out the acronym.

“The M.R.S. degree,” Damien said. “Half the girls in this town came up here to be the queen of England, and when they realize it ain't gonna happen, they start fighting over the scraps, like the poor man's Prince William here.”

“Oh, naturally,” Mary said. “I've always wanted to marry some wanker like you and spend the rest of my life in some shit hotel like this.” She turned to Clare. “Don't listen to a word he says.”

“Anyway,” Damien said, “first-year econ is a cakewalk.”

“Have you taken 3001 yet?” I asked.

“I'm in it now. That's the third-year course. You've got a while before you have to do any work.”

I had been placed in 3001, but decided this was not the time to bring that up.

“Hey,” Damien said, “do you boys have academic parents yet?”

We shook our heads.

“Jules, you want in on this?”

“Jules doesn't want kids,” Kelsey said. “Do you, Julien?”

“I don't blame him,” Mary said. “Why don't you Americans adopt your own kind and Jules and I can spoil them from time to time?”

“Done,” Damien said, popping some of Clayton's warm champagne. He took a long draw, and passed the bottle to me.

“Drink up, kids,” he said. “Welcome to the family.”

Damien opened the nightstand drawer, and produced a glossy visitors' guide to St. Andrews, taking great pains to hold it level. It seemed like the beginning of some ritual presentation, until I saw that the cover, a photo of the crumbling castle by the sea, was covered in cocaine. There was a pile like a white island in the water and a row of lines cut across the sky that looked like jet trails left by planes. Eventually, it came to me. As I leaned in with Damien's £100 note in my right nostril, hoping there was no special trick to this, I couldn't be sure if cocaine smelled like money, or if it was the other way around.

Afterward, I sat on the bed, listening to other people talk. The coke, as it hit, reminded me of paddling a surfboard straight into an oncoming set, scratching to get over the top of the first wave before it begins to break. There's a moment when you know you've made it, a breathless feeling as your body floats over the peak. My first taste of cocaine was that split second, on loop. I thought of Rob, of his empire on LBI, built on an appetite that I didn't understand until then. I imagined everything he owned, every stud and inch of wiring, every chair and table. It made sense to me now. I had been staring at Kelsey without registering her. She caught me and winked.

“He's nice enough,” Jules was saying about some friend of theirs who was taking a semester off.

“Right,” Damien said. “That's one of his problems.”

There was no one at the reception desk by the time we stumbled through the lobby, and no taxis outside. Clare said he knew the way on foot, that it would be faster to walk home than to wait for a cab. I had no idea where I was, but Clare had some heightened sense of direction, like a bank robber who maps out an escape route as he rides into town. We crossed the highway, and a dew-soaked field. As our hall came into view, I had a clear picture of the two ships that made up the building, the hills behind them like frozen waves. The guide had said the ships were passing each other in the night, but that seemed like an optimistic view of the design, because the ships were actually smashing into each other, their bows joined at the point of impact. We were living in an accident. I hung back as Clare and Clayton and Chantal went inside. The clock in the church tower struck four. I unscrewed the crown on my watch, popped it loose, and changed the time.

R
e
gistration took place in an old concert hall on North Street. A bundle of bright-colored electrical cords ran from the foyer down the long center aisle and up to the stage, where a team of administrators sat behind long tables covered in file boxes and welcome packets. Clare and I signed in at the door, and I was drifting off in an overstuffed theater seat when someone called my name on the PA. I followed the wiring and found myself on stage, facing a Scottish woman with wind-burned skin and thick hands.

“You're American, then,” she said, opening my file.

A passport photo, taken at a CVS in West Trenton, was paper clipped to the corner, and I remembered my mother telling me to cut my hair as I left the house. The administrator flipped through a photocopy of my application, my standardized test scores, and a personal statement that detailed my desire to “broaden my perspective.” She stopped at a letter on Lawrenceville stationery and tilted her head back to skim it through her glasses.

The letter, addressed To Whom It May Concern, explained that on the morning of January 23, two officers served a warrant for Thomas Alison, eighteen, of Princeton, who was suspected of drug possession with intent to distribute. I could recite the whole thing from memory, and it was playing in my head like an audiobook as her eyes ran down the page. Mr. Alison fled on foot when the officers approached him on the corner of Craven Lane and U.S. 206, and was later apprehended.

By a cop who stood down on my ankle in silence, bending the bones while he waited for backup. My hands were cuffed behind my back, my face pressed against a grassy knoll behind the hockey rink, a hundred yards from my car, which I had been making for as fast as I could run. All I could see was a thin line of trees that rose out of the ground to wildly different heights, like a graph of some unimaginable volatility. A police radio crackled and spit out reports from around the county. I wondered if anyone else's life was crashing down right then, if I could call out to them through the radio.

A half ounce of marijuana was discovered in my vehicle. The distribution charge was later dropped, leaving me with a misdemeanor violation that was just enough to torpedo my college plans and preclude me from interning with an investment banking firm, which I had hoped to do that summer. I was suspended for a month, my sentence was suspended by a judge, and I successfully completed one hundred hours of service to the Lawrenceville community. And if this fucking nosy Scottish administrator had any further questions, she could address them to the dean of students, whose number was printed just below his signature.

The woman licked her finger and turned the page. Behind the letter was the thing she had been looking for: a blue sheet of paper with a gold seal in the corner that told her my tuition had been paid in full. There was a box of student ID cards in front of her, and her stubby fingers ran through a dozen that were not mine before she handed me a piece of plastic with my name and face on it.

“Here you are,” she said.

I snatched it from her outstretched hand, and looked out into the audience for Clare.

“Can you check again?” Clare said.

He was also on stage, two tables away. A woman was sifting through the papers in his file.

“It doesn't seem to be here,” she said. “There's not much I can do without it, I'm afraid.”

His tuition hadn't been paid yet.

“I'll get it taken care of,” Clare said. “I need to buy a phone. Where can I do that?”

“Hey,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder, keeping it there when he flinched. “We passed a place on the way here. Let's go. I need one too.”

In the Vodafone store, a salesman explained that without proof of permanent residence, the best he could do for us was a plan where you bought minutes as you used them. I watched Clare pacing in the street outside as the clerk sold me the same model that Clare was now using to make a call. His head snapped up when someone answered, and he said something in French and walked out of sight.

I found him on a bench by a dry fountain at the end of Market Street.

“Everything cool?”

“Let's get lunch,” Clare said. “The menu at Ma Bells looked good.”

“It looked a little spendy.”

“I'm buying,” he said. “Don't worry about that.”

There was a round of applause as we ducked in off the street. Kelsey beckoned to us from a back table where she sat with Mary and the two girls from the couch in Damien's suite. All of them had sunglasses pushed up on their foreheads. The sun had not been out all day.

“They'll have two Newcastle salads, the venison, and the fish and chips,” Mary said to the waiter, before we had a chance to read the menu. “That's a proper lunch. And two very dry martinis. These were perfect.”

I thought: Thank Christ this is on Clare.

“You two were at college together?” a blond girl named Lucy asked.

“College?”

“High school,” Kelsey whispered.

“College,” Mary said. “This is university. College comes before. You'll have to learn to speak proper English now that you're not in the colonies anymore.”

“What if we're not here that long?” I said.

“Ah, I see. You're the clever ones who got into trouble at some fancy college in America. We get dozens of your type.” She turned to Clare. “What crime did you manage to commit?”

The waiter arrived with our drinks, and Clare put his lips to the quivering dome of gin in his glass. I was on the hook now, bait to draw attention from him.

“You got me,” I said.

“I did, did I?” Mary shifted in her chair to face me. “Tell us about your trouble, then.”

“I was selling pot at school. At the ‘college' we went to.”

“And you were found out how?”

“I sold to one of our teachers, and she made a joke about it at a dinner party. Someone didn't think that it was funny.”

“Are you serious?” Clare asked.

“I don't think the admissions office here minds things like that,” Mary said, ignoring Clare's surprise. “Helps your application, I'd say. Sign of a budding entrepreneur.”

Our salads hit the table, and we listened to the girls talk shit—who slept with whom over the summer, who was suspiciously thin. All the food was well cooked and well seasoned, a far cry from the oily pub fare I had been expecting. Mary snapped up the check when the waiter dropped it between Clare and me. It was cold outside when we pushed through the door and into the courtyard, the sun hidden behind a smear of clouds, the town cast in a sharp half light.

“Come by my place tonight,” Kelsey said, as she kissed my cheek. “Bring your friends.”

I let Clare get ahead of me as we headed for the hall, and called my mother on my brand new phone. She told me she'd been worried, and lit a cigarette as I read off my number, the flick and spark of her lighter carried across the ocean to my ear. She was smoking inside, which usually meant something was wrong.

“Where are you now?” she asked.

“Heading back from lunch.”

“How's the food there? What'd you have?”

“Bunch of stuff. Why don't we do more venison loin?”

“It makes people think of road kill,” she said. “And I don't love it. Too gamey most of the time. How'd they serve it?”

“Pan roasted and sliced real thin, with this black-truffle-celery root puree.”

“Black truffle? That's part of your meal plan?”

“Someone took me out.”

“That must be nice,” she said, exhaling. “Give me more good news. I have to fire Carla in a few hours, and I don't want to think about it anymore.”

“I'm looking at the ocean,” I said, which had been true a hundred yards before and which always made her happy. “Was Carla skimming tips or something?”

“I don't want to get into it.”

“OK.”

“I'm sorry, honey. I'll call you tomorrow. Say hi to Clare for me, OK?”

Clare and I were almost home. A dozen Americans were playing Frisbee on the lawn in front of Andrew Melville Hall, ignoring the threatening shade of gray the sky was taking on, pretending that September in Scotland is as mild and predictable as it is in the American Northeast. This is one way to exist in a strange place: Ignore the weather and play with things you brought from home. Another is to get drunk at lunch and sleep it off before going out again. Clare and I cut cautiously through the game and went our separate ways to bed.