Down the Shore (3 page)

“So what's the application deadline?” Clare asked.

“It's rolling. So whenever, until they fill the slots. I got in two months ago.”

Clare's phone was ringing again.

“Hello? Yeah, hang on. It's for you again,” he said.

“Hi, Kelsey.”

“Did you blow me off? I thought you'd be here by now.”

“We had to make a stop. We're close.”

“It's 567 Ocean Avenue, right on the water. Ask for me. I'll be out back. Drive safe.”

•   •   •

I knew the house on Howell and Ocean, which sat across from my favorite surf break in Spring Lake. Like most of the homes on Ocean Avenue, it was a busy mash-up of Dutch colonial and Victorian architecture, accessorized with turrets, balconies, and something that looked like a two-story gazebo attached to the north end. We took a space from a departing Mercedes and crossed a strip of bright green lawn. Someone inside was beating on a drum.

Two girls burst through the door as Clare and I hit the front steps, leaving it open for us as they raced across the grass. The drummer I had heard was perched on a piano bench with a djembe between his knees and his back to a white baby grand piano, the centerpiece of a two-story sun-drenched living room. On the floor at his feet, two kids were trading blues licks on acoustic guitars. This was clearly someone's summer home, but it had none of the seaside kitsch I associated with even the biggest houses in the beach town where we lived when I was younger. Clare and I cut through the kitchen, where someone had arranged empty champagne bottles like bowling pins on a table made of steel and glass.

The door to the back deck swung open and a wave of noise washed in from the yard—hip-hop from a tinny stereo, a splash, a scream. We cut through a tipsy badminton game to the pool deck covered in people who paid us no mind as we walked among them. A well-dressed couple in their fifties were playing beer pong on a patio table with a couple less than half their age, and as we looked around, I realized there were at least a dozen adults here. Parents drinking alongside their underage children was something I had seen only at the poles of the economic spectrum—in the trailer parks of the Pine Barrens and places like this.

We found Kelsey smoking on one of the lounge chairs by the diving board, deep in conversation with an elegant blond woman in a lot of gold. The woman placed a hand on Kelsey's arm and leaned out of her chair to say something
sotto voce
, entering into some confidence with Kelsey, who seemed used to talking to adults like this. She waved to us without taking her eyes off the woman's face, and the woman, realizing that Kelsey had company, kissed her on the cheek and excused herself. Kelsey beckoned to us. She seemed much older than she had in Kildare's.

“Better late than never,” she said, as we drew near.

•   •   •

It seemed to get dark all at once. Clare and I were leaning on the railing of a second-story balcony that faced the ocean. Behind us, in a guest bedroom not unlike the one where we had spent the night before, some girls were shooting Polaroid portraits of each other, littering the rug they sat on with their faces. Earlier, someone had handed me a Dixie cup of punch, which I took down like a shot before I heard that it was made with mushrooms.

“Don't freak out,” a girl said when she registered my shock. She was wearing a bandana as a shirt. “Just go with it. It's already in you.”

Forty minutes later I felt like someone had loosened my joints and rubbed something warm into my skin. I experienced no stark hallucinations, just colorful tracers as people came and went under the halogen lights out on the balcony, as if everyone was losing a little of themselves with every move. The ocean looked like it went on forever, but the ocean always looked that way to me. Clare had suggested that we come up here to get some air. I was lost in my head, trying to decide whether the effects of the punch were waxing or waning. I didn't do a lot of drugs at that point in my life. Down the block, someone was setting off fireworks, shaky little balls of light that looked like dandelions gone to seed once they exploded and began to fade.

“My dad was under investigation for insider trading,” Clare said, out of nowhere. “And what they found while they were looking into that was worse. That's why he left. I don't think they're coming back.”

“I'm sorry,” I said, with questions mushrooming in my mind. I thought: What took so long?

“So, I want—” he said, as a girl came up behind us and threw an arm around his neck.

“I'm so fucked up,” she said with a theatrical slur. “Scrape me off the floor. Take me home with you.”

I didn't recognize her, but she must have been at Kildare's with us the night before. I wondered who had put her up to it as she ran back into the house. Clare smoothed his shirtfront, annoyed at the interruption.

“I want to go with you,” he said. “To school. To Scotland.”

I knew what he meant because it felt like we had been through this before. There were layers to the déjà vu—I remembered Clare asking me this, and I remembered it happening again and making a mental note of the repetition, as though this conversation had taken place three times. My mind turned to the pictures of St. Andrews on the school's Web site: majestic buildings perched on cliffs above the water, smiling students walking through the quad with books under their arms, an afternoon pub scene where everyone was leaning in and laughing. I tried to picture the two of us across the ocean, but I couldn't shake those images, so I added us to them. In my mind we were sitting in the pub just behind the people in focus; we were obscured by pillars on the quad; we were standing on a rock overlooking the water, invisible to the camera's eye. There was something comforting about the altered pictures in my head. They contained a familiar face, I realized. I wasn't there alone.

“Is that OK with you?” Clare asked. “If I come?”

•   •   •

The party had been lightly catered all day, but by the time we made our way downstairs, the first floor had been transformed into a food court by a late-night supper. The heat lamps at the carving stations cast an orange glow on the walls, crepes soaked in brandy simmered over blue flames. I tried to read the expressions of the servers, to imagine what was going through their minds. I knew what my mother would say after a gig like this.

The adults said their good-byes a little after 10:00 p.m. I caught a glimpse of the owners as they departed to a standing ovation from the drunk teenagers occupying their home. They were crashing at a nearby bed-and-breakfast, someone said, leaving the kids to their own devices for the night. Something or someone had spooked Clare. He kept glancing over his shoulder as we stood in line for steak sandwiches, repositioning, using me as a screen. The trouble his father was in had changed him and dissolved the unassailable quality I had seen in him at Lawrenceville. I remembered a line from my mom's favorite song by the Band: “And now the heart is filled with gold, as if it was a purse.” Maybe that's what money did—filled you up and hardened you. I understood it in the negative now that I could see what was absent in Clare. I was staring at his profile when I realized that the man carving the meat was talking to me.

“You're Diane Alison's son, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, blood rising to my cheeks.

“We used to work Princeton reunions together. I'm down in Manasquan now. You don't remember me?”

“No,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Night off, huh? What can I get you?”

“I'm OK,” I said.

“Hey, if your mom needs help this year, tell her to call me. You sure you don't want something?”

“Thanks,” I said. “I'm fine.”

•   •   •

I found a half-full bottle of Sancerre on the kitchen counter, and tipped half of what was left into my mouth, the wine colder than I expected, like the mouth of a girl coming back to bed after a glass of water. Kelsey had texted Clare earlier to say that she was on the beach with friends. I floated around the house until I found her out on the gazebo-shaped balcony, sharing a cigarette with a boy in a Columbia Football sweatshirt, which stung a little. I stood a few feet from the door, trying to take the temperature of their conversation, shifting right and left so that my reflection in the glass blocked as little of her as possible. I was moving enough that she noticed me, and motioned for me to join them. The boy thanked her for the smoke and slipped inside as I went out.

“You know Spring Lake,” she said.

“I surf here sometimes. There, actually. Right across the street.”

“But you're not from here.”

“I grew up on Long Beach Island.”

“I was about to say you remind me of the boys I grew up with, but I guess that makes sense. I'm from Ocean City. My parents live two towns over now, in Avalon. I can't believe this moon.”

It was almost full, its light bright enough to read by, the water underneath it glinting like mirror shards. It looked like someone had taken a bat to a disco ball, and I said that before I had a chance to stop myself. Kelsey laughed.

“You have kind of a poetic side, don't you?”

“No,” I said, afraid that it would make me seem less serious to her. “I'm just high.”

“We should find a place to crash unless you're driving back to Princeton, which I wouldn't advise based on those pupils.”

I stared at her, wondering if this was the onset of auditory hallucinations, or if the thing I had been hoping for was now coming to pass.

“You're funny,” she said.

“Funny how?”

“All starry-eyed. Are you seeing six of me right now?”

“I'm not that high,” I said. “I bet I can find us a room.”

We knocked on door after door, encountering disembodied voices that told us to fuck off, that the room was taken. The hall ended in double doors, and I watched Kelsey press her cheek against the wood to listen. She knocked and tried the handle.

“Locked,” she said.

I waved her aside and dug out my wallet. With my palm pressed against the seam between the doors, I slid my Lawrenceville ID under the strike plate, feeling for the angled latch. My mother taught me how to pick a lock. There was a sharp snap and the doors broke open. We slipped inside and Kelsey shut us in while I felt along the wall until I found the lights.

It was the master bedroom, complete with a California king and a wall of windows obscured by heavy blinds. I ran my hand along the varnished surface of a long, low dresser, stopping at a brass ashtray filled with gold cuff links and foreign coins and collar stays. I had worried about leaving everything exactly as we found it, but the solidity and sparseness of the room made me think of a line from the Gettysburg Address, something about our poor power to add or detract. I wondered what the owner had done to acquire all this weight and space. And then I saw Kelsey in the mirror over the dresser, her image like a portrait framed by the double doors. I tried to decide what made her look at home here, but she reached behind her without looking, almost out of habit, and turned the light back off.

•   •   •

She was sitting Indian style in a crater in the comforter by the time my eyes adjusted to the darkness. I was lying on my side. The stiff denim on my shin was inches from the smooth curve of her knee, and I thought I could feel the heat from her skin, but that was my imagination. The house was nicely chilled.

“Are you an EMT or something?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Are you experiencing a shortness of breath?”

“You just seemed like you knew what you were doing with that girl.”

“I've picked up drunk girls before.”

“Think about what you just said.”

“I mean I've helped them up,” I said, laughing.

“That's a better story. It was nice of you to make sure she got home. Every girl should have someone like you around when she gets that fucked up.”

Something tightened in my chest when I realized this was personal history disguised as praise, that she hadn't been that lucky once. She returned my stare, unblinking. The drugs I had taken were making sense to me in a different way now—a self-administered anesthetic for the invasive things that she was doing with her eyes.

“Where did that little adventure take you?”

“Ridgewood,” I said. “That's where she's from.”

“And you live in Princeton with your parents.”

“With my mom. Who told you that?”

“My cousin. Do you have siblings?”

When I was nine or ten, my mother would sometimes use her sous chef as a babysitter. I would sit by the stove while he made stock and sauces and talked to me as if I were his age. One day after school he told me something I never forgot: Pay attention when a woman asks about your siblings. The desire to know about your brothers and sisters, he explained, signals a curiosity about how the genes that made you might express themselves in another manifestation of the self. He had long blond dreadlocks, and I remembered their earthy, oily smell mixed in with the smell of shallots over heat. It means she really wants to know you, he said, splashing wine into a pan, and it's because she's thinking about fucking you and, by extension, about having your kids. My mother used to call him Professor Horseshit. I was praying he was right.

“It's just me,” I said.

“I didn't think you were an only child.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“Yes,” she said. “It is.”

“So when was your eighteenth birthday party at the Plaza?”

“You can just ask me how old I am.”

I laughed, and bit my lip. I knew that she was older. That wasn't why I'd asked.

“I'm older than you. And I didn't have an eighteenth birthday party in the city. My dad was a carpenter. He built this house, actually. So I didn't go to boarding school. I went to public school.”