Everything Happens Today (15 page)

“None of those houses were here when my parents bought ours,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand as she led him along a side path to the rear. “But you won't even know they're there.”

A large deck was built onto the back of the house, with an old-fashioned cedar hot tub and a circular cast-iron picnic table with built-in benches. From here, all you could see were undulating dunes covered in beach grass, and the nearest house was hundreds of yards away at the far side of a nature preserve. You couldn't see the ocean, but you could hear it. At the end of the deck was a low gate that opened onto a sandy path that wound through the dunes and disappeared at the crest. Delia opened her arms to gather in the scene, and turned to him with a joyous smile. Wes thought that it was good that all this belonged to her, if it made her smile that way, because one day she might find that he was worth as much as all the dunes and beaches and nature preserves, and she would smile like that when she looked at him. She gave him a tour of the house; it actually was not fancy in any way, furnished haphazardly in a casual, beachy style, and had obviously been added onto more than once, as each room seemed to be on a different level, reached by steep hidden stairways of bare, worn planks. When she'd asked him to come, Delia had never mentioned sleeping arrangements, and Wes assumed that, with her parents present, this was not the moment she had chosen to upgrade their relationship; even so, when she showed him to the room that was to be his—the maid's room, down some steps from the kitchen next to the laundry room, and on the far side of the house from her own—he experienced a moment of giddy disappointment at being treated like a fond younger cousin. She went upstairs to change, and warned him to use plenty of sunblock, despite the lateness of the season. He quickly slipped into his bathing suit and pulled on a pair of cargo shorts over it, then did a dozen hasty push-ups before spraying himself with the expensive French sunblock she had left for him. She came down for him, wearing a red bikini with white polka dots and little bows at her hips, covered in some sort of gauzy, transparent caftan that emphasized the shape of her breasts. She offered to do his back, but the spray was so fine that she didn't even need to rub it in.

On the beach, she found a pair of low-slung canvas folding chairs, draped with damp towels, that she said belonged to her parents, although they were nowhere in sight. In fact, in the miles and miles of broad white strand visible in either direction, there were no more than a handful of people, strolling in pairs or with their dogs, and no one in the water. The surf was gentle and regular, producing waist-high waves delicately laced with foam. Delia assured Wes that the water still retained most of its summer warmth and that the swimming was delicious.

“Are you going in?” he asked.

“I want to warm up first,” she said, stretching herself out on a striped towel with one knee slightly raised and the caftan fluttering translucently between her thighs. Wes was mildly surprised to note that she wore red nail polish on her toes. Without removing his shorts or his shirt, Wes lay down on the sand, parallel to but at a reasonable distance from Delia. The scent of the sunblock was subtly erotic, but he couldn't tell if it was her or himself that he was smelling. He took one last look at Delia on her back under the caftan, then closed his eyes and tried to make his mind go blank, though the rise and fall of her chest remained burned into the back of his eyelids. He fell into a light trance, from which he was roused by the return of Delia's parents.

The rest of the day was spent in precisely the way an idyllic interlude at the beach should be spent if you want it to remain a highlight of your memories of youth for the rest of your life. Delia's father, sporting shaggy gray hair and a modest potbelly, was a professor of philosophy at CUNY, though not a Buddhist—that was Delia's own path, he said with restrained pride—and burning with ingenuous curiosity about Wes's intellectual interests and development and his hopes for the future. It soon became clear from the tack of his questions that Delia had described Wes as a tutee of her own, rather than as a potential love interest, but Wes was happy nevertheless to bask in the sunlight of her father's approval. Her mother, a writer, was beautiful like Delia, maybe even more so, but not sculpted or even svelte like so many Park Avenue moms. Delia later suggested that all the money was on her mother's side, passed down from a famous industrial engineer grandfather. Delia had an older sister, Mariah, who was away at Rhode Island School of Design and whose lovely face, pale and freckled like Delia's but thinner and more angular, shone out from multiple instamatic snapshots magnetized to the refrigerator. When it was Wes's turn to describe his family, he shamed himself by lingering a little too long, and with a hint of self-deprecating pathos, on his mother's illness and the responsibilities it had thrust upon him, but felt that he redeemed himself with his enthusiastic renditions of Nora and her fantasy life. Of his father, he provided the minimal outline necessary, though he did acknowledge at Delia's prompting that he had written a novel long ago that had almost been made into a movie, but neither of Delia's parents had read or heard of it. Delia and Wes went for a long walk along the beach, interrupted by some splashing in the surf, after which she put her caftan back on before she was dry then removed it in one languid movement over her head when she found it chaffing, revealing the most gorgeous armpits Wes had ever seen. They talked about schoolwork, Hillary Clinton's inevitable victory in the Democratic primaries, the death of Sri Chinmoy, and Buddhism. Wes was unable to steer her in any satisfying way into a sharing of school gossip, let alone any history of boyfriends past or future. Lunch was a Caprese salad with fresh baguette and tapenade, after which her parents retired upstairs for a nap and Delia and Wes drove into East Hampton to browse the bookstore and buy fish for dinner. Delia bought Wes a book about happiness written by a French Buddhist monk who had given up a promising career in molecular genetics for life in a Tibetan monastery in Nepal. By the time they got back to Napeague her parents were awake. Wes and Delia went for another swim and a long walk, during which they twice brushed shoulders, the first time by accident, though Delia seemed not to notice either event. Dinner was a simple fillet of striped bass, drizzled with chile oil infused with garlic and grilled on a gas-fired barbecue on the deck, and served with olives, spicy chickpeas and cold, marinated asparagus. Delia, a vegetarian, passed on the fish, but she and Wes drank a Bridgehampton rosé along with the adults. They talked politics and Heidegger, of whose work Wes knew nothing but Delia's father was an expert. Before bed, Delia's mother got out the Polaroid 600 and took a picture of Wes and Delia, arm in arm leaning against the deck railing. It was the closest Wes had ever gotten to Delia and it unnerved him a good deal and made him glad they were going to bed. When the snapshot had developed they passed it around, then Delia's mother stuck it among the other pictures magnetized to the fridge. He shook Delia's father's hand and kissed her mother on both cheeks, and Delia kissed him goodnight on the lips, but Wes suspected it was just the wine and that she hadn't quite meant to do it because she turned away immediately afterwards without meeting his gaze. On his way to the maid's room, Wes stopped at the refrigerator to admire their photo; it looked very natural there among all the handsome strangers, and Wes imagined that one day somebody would have to notice it and ask Delia if that was her boyfriend.

In bed, Wes tried to read the book by the French monk, but he had a raging hard-on, which he refused to touch, first because he thought it would gross Delia out to imagine him jerking off in the maid's bed, and second because there was always the remote chance that she would come to him some time in the night. She hadn't given him the slightest cause to believe that she might, and he repeated its impossibility over and over to himself like a mantra, but he could not shake the intuition that it would happen precisely because it was so impossible. Somewhere in the house—Wes suspected the parent's bedroom—a television was playing and a conversation engaged in low, light-hearted tones. Wes strained to listen; was it two voices or three? He couldn't bear the idea that the three of them were staying up and prolonging the day without him, and perhaps even talking about him. If they were, one of the parents would surely ask Delia if she had any romantic intentions towards Wes, and then she would have to put into words what she might not have considered at all up to that moment, and that would make it real and final for her in a way it would not have been if they hadn't questioned her. It could, of course, work to his advantage if the question suddenly caused her to recognize feelings of affection that she had suppressed, either because Wes was a year younger than her or because he was supposed to be her apprentice, and then maybe she would after all decide that there was only one thing left to do to make this perfect day even more perfect. But she didn't, and Wes awoke to birdsong the next morning in exactly the same position in which he'd fallen asleep.

How could he be sure he was in love? How could he know, now that it was so important to know? Is it easier to tell that you're in love if you've never been in love before, because it's something so different from anything you've ever felt, or if you have been in love before, because you recognize the feeling? And if you can't remember the feeling, is it because you've never had it or because it's different every time? Wes groaned under the burden of these luxuriant mysteries, but they were at least very interesting to contemplate. He noted to himself, however, that he had slept quite soundly despite being in love, and that was a little worrisome. Surely you weren't supposed to be able to sleep so well if you were in love? Or eat? He realized that he was painfully hungry. Maybe it wasn't love after all, or if it was it was the kind where you can sleep and eat, and also think about sex a lot, instead of about how much pain you were in. But surely that would have to be a kind of second-rate love, and Wes didn't think he was in too much pain, and this love that he was feeling now couldn't be that kind. It would bear further thought after breakfast.

Wes didn't remember much of what had happened the following day, except that they had left for the city early and stopped for steamed lobster at a restaurant overlooking an inlet. At the table, Wes had told the story about his mother, who had been raised in a kosher household in Inwood, and the first time she had eaten lobster, thinking it was some sort of fish, and had been violently ill when told what it was she had eaten. That was supposed to lead organically to the story of her first driving lesson, when she had crashed into the only car in an otherwise empty and enormous parking lot, but instead Delia's parents had latched onto the wrong part of the first story and started questioning him about his Jewishness. Wes would be naturally reticent on this subject, and had been particularly so on this occasion, where he hoped to keep their minds on his ailing mother and build up a store of sympathy that could lead to a second invitation for the weekend.

Crossing Hudson Street, Wes realized that all this had taken place eleven months earlier, and that he never had been invited back to Napeague, although he had had several hearty chats with Delia's parents on the phone and was convinced that he'd left a good impression of himself. In fact, his relationship with Delia had not really advanced in any distinctive way since then—they did not now exchange intimacies more intimate than those they had exchanged since then, if a shared preference for Twain over Dickens could be called an intimacy; they did not speak more often now than they did then, an average of once or twice a week outside chance encounters in the hallway; they did not touch each other casually on the arm or the back of the neck in the way close friends do without noticing, although Wes surely would have noticed if they had; and Wes had not come any closer in these long eleven months to telling Delia how he felt about her than he had when “accidentally” brushed against her naked shoulder on the beach. There was something wrong in all this, something he realized probably should have disturbed him a long time ago if he had not been so fixated on his own struggle to better himself on Delia's behalf. The way he had struggled and struggled without making any headway was, in fact, perfectly Tolstoyan in its total lack of self-consciousness and, apparently, of tangible out­come. So what could she now suddenly have to tell him that was so important?

The moment he turned the corner, Wes saw Lucy sitting on the stoop of his house, halfway down the block. It was odd and a little shocking, seeing her like that because, despite everything that had happened between them, it was almost like looking at a stranger, as if he would have to walk up and introduce himself and start from zero, the way they'd done the night before. That feeling of trepidation and possibilities was what had remained with Wes most clearly, and Wes relived it now as he advanced down the block. Last night at the party, James had hunted him down and was goading him to make his move, but Wes had been deeply distracted and disturbed by his conversation with Delia.

“Delia's behaving all weird tonight. What's she doing here, anyway?”

“Weird how?”

“I don't know. She's all . . . flirty. I've never seen her like this. It's driving me nuts.”

“Forget about Delia, man. Try to stay focused. You're here for Lucy, remember?”

“I know, but I haven't seen her anywhere.”

“Don't look, but she's standing right there, and she's staring right at you. I'm gonna stand up and walk away, fix you another drink, then when I'm gone you look up, as if you're looking for me, and catch her eye. I'm gone.”

Wes stared into his tumbler and counted to five, but when he looked up Lucy was nowhere to be seen. He stood, pushed his way through a small scrum of dancing sophomores and wandered into a hallway that seemed to lead to the rest of the apartment. At the far end, beyond a half-dozen closed doors, a brightly lit doorway evidently led into the kitchen, which even from this end Wes could see was packed to overflowing. He turned back towards the living room, but his eye was caught by a wall of family photos, primly framed and symmetrically arranged between the molding and the oak wainscot. Wes knew that nothing could more severely compromise his cool than to be caught in a lonely corridor, perusing the artwork all on his lonesome in the midst of a drinking party, but he couldn't help himself. All the pictures were essentially the same: a handsome couple with great posture and a conservative wardrobe, smiling for the camera in a variety of exotic settings with two pretty young girls, the younger of which was Lucy. Here they were on a white banquette on the deck of a yacht, probably somewhere in the Mediterranean; on horseback, in shiny black knee boots and riding helmets; an outdoor café on a piazza in Rome or Barcelona; squatting beside a tame cheetah on an African wildlife preserve. In all the pictures, the father's hair was immaculate and immobile, the mother's eyes were shaded by a broad hat brim or a hand at her brow, except in the very earliest one, in which she sat in pink satin nightgown in a luxuriant bed, propped up by fat white pillows, with a newborn baby in her arms and a look of weary apprehension. In all the pictures, Lucy's sister smiled boldly, confidently, and more radiantly as she grew older, but Lucy kept changing, and the series told the story, Wes thought, of an ever-widening gulf between her and her perfect, antiseptic family. The littlest Lucys wore a face of open joy that gradually gave way to a sad, frozen grin as she got older, and ultimately to dull resignation and withdrawal. In these photos, she didn't look duplicitous or manipulative at all; just sad. Wes was astounded that anyone should willingly choose to broadcast such a dismal narrative in a public space. How could they be unaware of the story it told? He thought of the jumbled snapshots stuck to Delia's refrigerator in Napeague, and how they too told a family story; and about Nora's beloved photo albums of happier times, warehoused under a bed somewhere, and how long it had been since anyone had bothered to update them, as if his own family history had somehow come to a premature and shameful end and were being preserved, vaulted, only because the only thing worse than having to relive it was summoning the passion to destroy it. Tolstoy had been wrong in this as in so many things—Delia's family was unique in its happiness, whereas unhappy families differed only to the extent to which they were willing to acknowledge their own failure. Lucy's parents didn't even know they had been stricken, that they carried the plague with them, whereas every single member of Wes's family slouched about the world with the mark of Cain on their foreheads. Which only made Delia's quest for spiritual enlightenment a painful, mocking indictment, like a millionaire whose judicious investments make him a billionaire, while the rest of us are still looking for loose change under the sofa cushions. The phone vibrated in Wes's rear pocket.