The Beach Club (14 page)

“Do you ever think maybe Mack will give in? You know, to get a piece of the Beach Club and all?”

“No,” Maribel said sharply, “I don’t.”

“Sorry,” Jem said. He should just keep his mouth shut! “I didn’t mean I thought he should. Hell, no. You two make a great couple. How long have you been together?”

“Six years,” Maribel said.

“Are you planning on getting married?”

“No,” Maribel said. “We have no plans to get married.” She paused. “You know what the funny thing is about Cecily? She and I are good friends. Everything would be so nice if Therese just backed off.”

“Oh,” Jem said.

“Never mind,” Maribel said. “It’s just politics. You’re smart to stay out of it.” They turned left by the high school. “So tell me, do you have a girlfriend?”

“Me?” Jem said. “No, not right now.”

“Haven’t met anyone on the island, a handsome guy like you? Mr. November?”

He’d opened his mouth during his job interview, and it would haunt him forever. “I haven’t been out much,” he said.

“Cecily’s coming home next week,” Maribel said. “Maybe you’ll like her.”

“I don’t know,” Jem said. “I hate being set up.”

Maribel patted his knee. Jem felt a sort of thrill when she touched him, and instantly he began to worry. What was he doing with his boss’s girlfriend? Maribel turned onto a sand road. The Jeep started bouncing up and down in whoop-dee-dos.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Miacomet,” she said. “The pond’s coming up on the left.”

Jem looked out Maribel’s window. Cattails and dune grass bordered the pond, and there were a few wild irises. A red-winged blackbird.

“This is one of my favorite spots,” she said. “And the beach is terrific too—very peaceful. It’s a nude beach.”

Jem took a deep breath.
Nude beach?
“Wait a minute, I’m the beach agent here. I don’t know if that’s in the contract.”

“Does it make you uncomfortable?” Maribel asked. “Because we can go someplace else.” But she made no move to slow down the car.

“Well…”

“You can keep your suit on,” she said. “I sometimes do. Tell you what, I will today, how about that?”

Now Jem felt like a child. What was wrong with a nude beach, really?

“Whatever you want,” he said.

Maribel shrugged. “Okay.”

Maribel drove the Jeep over the dunes onto the beach. She was right—it was peaceful. The beach was a long stretch of practically deserted sand—way down to the left Jem saw the mob of folks at Surfside, where he usually went. The waves here were giant and rolling, and the water bottle green. Behind them, all Jem could see was blue sky and dune grass. This was the real Gold Coast. He started to relax.

“This is nice,” he said.

Maribel spread out a blanket, stripped off her shorts, and sat down. She waved Jem over. “Join me,” she said. “I brought lunch.”

Jem sat tentatively on the edge of her blanket. He removed his shirt and looked down at his abs. He did a hundred sit-ups before he went to bed each night and it was paying off. “Thanks, but I already ate some chicken.”

“I packed enough for about sixty people,” Maribel said. “And I’m a good cook in case you haven’t heard.” She unwrapped a sandwich and handed Jem half. “Here, this is Saga, prosciutto, and fig.”

The sandwich was delicious, the kind of delicious Jem had never tasted before.

“You like it?” Maribel asked.

He finished chewing. “It’s the best sandwich I’ve ever eaten.”

“You can be my sandwich agent.”

“Definitely,” Jem said. “Definitely your sandwich agent.” An old woman walked by, naked. She smiled at Maribel and Jem and wandered off down the beach.

“See, it’s no big deal. This is a free and easy place.” Maribel pulled more food out of her backpack: homemade potato chips, clusters of tiny purple grapes, thick chocolate brownies.

“Nothing at all like the chicken at Stop and Shop,” he said. “And no exhaust. Where did you learn to cook like this?”

“I taught myself,” Maribel said. She threw a scrap of bread to the seagulls. “My mother worked full-time and when she got home she was too tired to do much of anything. I liked having dinner ready for her. I cleaned the house and did the laundry, too. My mother called me her housewife. And I thought of it as practical training.”

“Training?”

“For when I get married myself,” Maribel said.

“So you do want to get married,” Jem said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

Jem had stepped in mud and he hadn’t even seen it. “Nothing. It meant nothing. I’m sorry.” Where was safe ground? He finished his sandwich and licked his fingers, and then, before he could stop, he thought about being married to Maribel himself, and how awesome that would be, awesome beyond his wildest dreams.

“You know when you asked me about work before?” Jem said. “I was just wondering, does Mack ever say how I’m doing?”

“Not really. He did tell me about Mr. G.”

“He did?”

“Yeah, and I don’t see what the big deal is. So the guy was an hour late. So he had to cancel with the president. Shit happens. I’ll bet by noon he’d forgotten all about it.”

“There was this other thing that happened, too,” Jem said. “This woman Mrs. Worley. I walked in on her in the bathroom and she started to cry.”

Jem was expecting Maribel to laugh the way Mack had, but she didn’t.

“When I was a little girl, I walked into the men’s room at a restaurant and I saw the men standing next to urinals. I didn’t know men peed standing up. I don’t have any brothers and my father wasn’t around, and I just didn’t know. Now,
that
was a shocker.”

“So it was just you and your mother then?” Jem asked.

“My mom was only nineteen when she had me. It’s just the two of us.” Maribel fell back onto the blanket. “Nap time.” She rolled onto her side and propped her head up with one arm. “I’m going to take my top off, if that’s okay with you.”

“Wait a second. You said—”

She put her hand on his arm, and again he felt a thrill.

“We don’t have to tell Mack we met up,” she said.

“We don’t?” He didn’t like where this was headed: lying, secrecy, a secret from his boss. But Jem was happy sitting next to Maribel—so astonishingly happy whereas just an hour before he’d been so miserable—that he didn’t care. “Go ahead then,” he said.

Maribel untied her bikini and slipped it over her head. Jem looked at her breasts; he knew she wanted him to look at them, and admire them the way he’d admired the food. They were just like the rest of Maribel—sunny, perky, gorgeous. They were the size of teacups with a pale pink nipple. She took a bottle of Coppertone from her bag and rubbed herself with lotion. In a minute, Jem had an aching erection pushing through his swim trunks. He flipped onto his stomach.

“Nap time,” he said.

He closed his eyes and tried to think about other things, things that were not Maribel related, things that were not Maribel’s breasts and their impossibly pink softness. He surprised himself by falling asleep. When he woke up, it felt as though he were emerging from a hot, dark tunnel. He raised his head. Maribel was lying on her stomach, reading. She still had her top off.

“What are you reading?” Jem asked.

She flashed him the cover. “
The Collected Stories of John Cheever
,” she said. “And there’s a whole lot of cheating going on.”

“Really?” Jem said. What was
that
supposed to mean? “Hey, want to go for a swim?”

“Sure,” she said. He was thankful that she put her top on, tying the strings tightly. When Jem felt ready, he dashed to the water. Maribel chased after him. The water was freezing but that was okay. He needed to cool down. Maribel went under and when she popped back up, she shrieked.

“This is great,” Jem called out. A wave rolled over him.

“Next stop, Portugal,” Maribel said. She went under again and surfaced right next to him. “The rip current is bad here,” she said. “I don’t want to get too far away from you.”

“I don’t want you too far away,” Jem said. He touched Maribel’s forehead. Her hair was sleek. God, she was pretty. If she were anybody else, he might playfully untie her bikini. He might go under and pop up with her on his back. He might simply hold her and let her rock in his arms as the waves passed over them. But it wasn’t anybody else. It was Maribel.

“Would you like to come over for dinner some Sunday?” Maribel asked.

Here was the dinner invitation Jem had been waiting for, and yet now he felt uncomfortable. “Sunday is the day Mack eats with Lacey,” he said.

Maribel squinted her eyes toward shore. “Yep.”

“So it would just be us?” Jem asked.

“You’re more than welcome to bring a date,” Maribel said.

“I couldn’t find a date,” he said. “Would you tell Mack I was coming for dinner?”

“Would you want me to?”

He took a mouthful of salty green water and spouted it through his teeth. “I don’t know.”

“What do you say we call this a friendship,” Maribel said. “Unless you’re still determined to be my agent, in which case it’s a business arrangement. Would that make you feel better?”

“Yeah,” Jem said, “it would.”

“So you’ll come for dinner sometime?” she asked.

“Okay,” Jem said.

“Great,” she said. She rode the next wave all the way to shore, where she washed up on her hands and knees. Jem watched as she picked herself up, cleaned the sand from her legs, and headed back to the blanket. At that moment, Jem hoped she didn’t tell Mack about their day together. It had been Jem’s best day on Nantucket by leaps and bounds—good enough to wipe away all the nonsense that had preceded it, and Jem wanted the memory of it all to himself.

On the twenty-first of June, summer officially arrived. The sun stayed out longer, the restaurants opened seven nights a week, and the bars were full of college girls who, Vance noticed, favored blue toenail polish and tattoos this year. The weekly edition of the
Inquirer and Mirror
printed its first five-section paper of the season. The Stop & Shop was such a madhouse that management kept the store open twenty-four hours, which meant Vance could pick up his Cheerios and lunch meat at 3:00 A.M. if he wanted. The cobblestone streets of town were clogged with cars coming off the ferry, bicyclists, and pedestrians, people holding their maps, crossing the street without looking. Who were all these people? The island became inundated with Range Rovers from Connecticut (that sounded like a stereotype, but Vance swore it was true; that morning on Main Street he counted no less than three Range Rovers, all with the telltale blue license plate). The Steamship Authority ran six boats a day in each direction and the Nantucket airport was busier than Logan in Boston. The climbing roses and hydrangeas bloomed, causing more slowdowns; through his open window, Vance heard women cooing, “Look at the pretty flowers!”

It was popular to complain about the tourists and so Vance decided to take the opposite approach. He embraced the tourists. He waved to people in the long lines outside the Juice Bar and the Brotherhood, he gave directions to a family on bicycles—the man turning his map every which way, while the mother, with a baby jammed in a booster seat on the back of her Schwinn and three kids behind her, said, “Honey, why don’t you just ask someone if we’re headed toward a beach? Here, ask this nice man.” Tourists, to Vance, meant one thing: money. Vance had been raking in sweet tips from the hotel guests, especially since Jem was constantly screwing up, making Vance look good.

June 21, summer solstice, was also the day the Beach Club opened. This meant that a hundred Beach Club members would now be crawling over the property like ants on a picnic. The members wanted
their
specific umbrella in
their
specific spot on the beach. Some members had been sitting in the same spot for forty or fifty years. (Vance did the math: if a person came to the Beach Club four times a week and stayed for six hours a day during the ten weeks of summer over fifty years that meant they had spent
twelve thousand hours
sitting in the same place.)

One of the good things about the Beach Club opening was that Vance had two more lackeys to boss around. Mack hired beach boys named Kevin and Bruce who looked just like all the other beach boys Vance had seen over the years—pimply, sarcastic prep school kids who somehow lucked into the cushiest job on the island. That morning, Vance wanted to scare the kids so they would not only respect him but shudder a little when they saw him coming. They waited in front of the lobby at eight o’clock sharp, a good sign. Vance parked his Datsun 300ZX, and the two boys looked it over appreciatively, another good sign. As he stepped out of the car, they nervously eyed his shaved head. Excellent. Vance bit his tongue to keep himself from grinning.

“You the beach boys?” he asked.

“Man, could you call us something else?” the taller, skinnier kid asked. “I don’t want to be associated with some washed-up sixties band.” This kid wore a South Carolina Cocks hat, another popular item at the bars this summer. With a lightning-quick motion, Vance hit the bill of the cap and flipped it off the boy’s head. The boy flinched and stepped back; his hair was matted as though he hadn’t even run a comb through it that morning.

“Are you Kevin or Bruce?” Vance asked.

“Bruce.”

“Bruce, let me tell you something. Beach boys have been called beach boys since the Club opened in 1924. And guess what, buddy? We’re not changing it for you. Got that?”

Bruce bent down to pick up his hat while Kevin, who was chubbier with more pimples, stared wide-eyed at Vance. They were off to a good start.

Vance took the boys past Lacey Gardner’s cottage to the umbrella room.

“These are the beach umbrellas,” he said. “They cost a hundred sixteen dollars apiece. If you break an umbrella because you’re negligent, you get docked that much plus the amount it costs to ship these babies back to the south of France where they were made.” This wasn’t true but Vance found that saying this led to fewer broken umbrellas. “The umbrellas come in kelly green, royal blue, and canary yellow. Sometimes members want a certain color. You’re going to have to memorize who those people are and their umbrella color. I’m not taking any crap from a pissed-off member because they got royal instead of canary.
Capiche?
”

Kevin picked at his chin. “How will we know which ones?”

“I’ll teach you,” Vance said. He hefted seven umbrellas onto his shoulder. “Follow me.”

The sun was out and already hot. Vance raised his face. He’d picked up some kind of crazy sun addiction in Thailand; he couldn’t get enough of it. But practically speaking, a warm, sunny summer solstice was bad news. The Beach Club would be packed, and because the beach boys were brand-new that meant Vance would have to set up all one-hundred umbrellas by himself.

“Now,” Vance said, “this is how you set up an umbrella. Watch carefully.” He held up the spike, as long as a Louisville Slugger. “This is the bottom of the umbrella, the part that gets driven into the sand. It’s sharp, as you can see, and for this reason you have to make sure you drive it deep. I don’t want to tell you about umbrellas I’ve seen that got loose in the wind because some beach boy did a half-ass plant job. Can you imagine catching this spike in the face?” He lowered his voice. “Or the balls?”

Bruce curled his lip, Kevin looked like he was about to lose his breakfast. Vance bit his tongue again. Then he raised the spike in his arms and blasted it into the sand.

“Pretend the sand is your ex-girlfriend,” he said. “Or hell, pretend it’s me.” Plenty of times, Vance imagined the sand was Mack. “Then wag the spike back and forth until it goes even deeper. When you feel there’s no possibility of it getting loose even in gale force winds, pack sand around it like this. Then you’re ready to put up an umbrella.” Vance slid the umbrella pole over the spike and locked it in. He opened the umbrella triumphantly; it bloomed like a big royal blue flower. “There,” Vance said. “That’s how it’s done.”

“Not bad for a bellman,” a voice said.

Mack walked toward them through the sand.
Not bad for a bellman?
What the hell kind of comment was that? All of Vance’s good work at getting these Romper Roomers to respect him was down the drain with that remark.

Mack shook hands with the two kids and then he put his arm around Vance’s shoulders. Vance tensed, like Mack’s arm was one of the cobras he’d seen at the Snake Farm in Bangkok.

“Vance was a beach boy himself once upon a time,” Mack said. “So maybe someday you too will be a bellman.”

Bruce scoffed. Vance wanted to flip the kid’s hat off again and make him eat it. Vance had half a mind to quit right then and there, and as long as he was at it, he might as well beat Mack to a pulp in front of these two clowns. If the money weren’t so damn good, he would do it.

Vance picked up another spike. He threw it to Bruce, point first. “Here,” Vance said. “You try.”

Bruce lifted the spike the way Vance had done and brought it down with an “Ooomph!” The spike grazed the sand and shot between Bruce’s legs, like he was hiking a football. Kevin giggled.

“Unbelievable,” Vance said.

Mack clapped Vance on the back. “Keep up the good work, Professor,” he said. “By the way, there’s a twelve-knot west-southwest wind.”

Vance thought briefly about how sweet it would be to set all the umbrellas facing east northeast just so he could watch them pop out of the ground and fly down the beach. He thought of the Beach Club members lying impaled and bloody in the sand. But why should he punish the members when the person he was after was Mack? Vance crunched two Rolaids between his teeth. Then he picked up the spike and tossed it to Bruce.

“Try again,” he said.

By nine-thirty all the umbrellas were up and Vance’s arms ached. Bruce was the crappiest umbrella planter Vance had ever seen, although Kevin wasn’t bad, just a little shallow. Vance showed the boys where the Sleepy Hollow chairs were kept and instructed them on how to properly open and close the chair without snapping their fingers off. He left them out on the beach, practicing opening and closing the chairs like the amateurs they were.

When Vance got back to the office, Mack was in the lobby schmoozing with the guests. Vance went into the utility closet and shoved past the stand of vacuum cleaners. There, in the back of the closet, sat Vance’s locked toolbox. Vance found the key on his ring and opened the box. Inside was his hammer, various nails and screws, a set of adjustable wrenches, a ratty, torn-up copy of “The Downward Spiral,” Vance’s published short story, and Mr. Beebe’s handgun. It was a .38. Vance held it straight out in his arms. Mack was lucky Vance didn’t have the gun when he made his cutesy remark. Mack was lucky Vance didn’t feel like going to jail, otherwise he would be Vance’s first target, no question about it.

“Not bad for a bellman,” Vance said softly. “Pow.”

Within twenty-four hours of summer solstice, two important women in Mack’s life arrived on the island: Andrea Krane and Cecily Elliott. Cecily arrived first, at ten o’clock on Sunday night. Mack was watching TV with Maribel asleep in his lap when the phone rang.

“I’m home. Mom and Dad said I should call. Hope I didn’t wake you up.”

“Cecily?” Mack said. Maribel blinked her eyes. “How are you, kid?”

“Butt tired. I partied until seven o’clock this morning, then spent the day trying to get my dorm room clean enough so they would give Dad his security deposit back.”

“Are you happy to be home? We missed you, kid.”

“I’m not a kid. I’m eighteen years old, Mack.”

“I know. How was graduation?”

“Boring. Hot. I was hungover for that, too.”

“How’s the boyfriend?”

“I’ll fill you in tomorrow,” Cecily said. “Can I please talk to Maribel?”

Mack covered the receiver. “It’s Cecily. She wants to talk to you.”

“Of course,” Maribel said. She took the phone from Mack. “Cecily? Hey, girlfriend, how are you? No, you didn’t hurt his feelings. He understands there are some things that can only pass between the lips of women. Now, tell me everything.” Maribel disappeared into the bedroom.

Mack listened to Maribel’s muffled laughter through the wall. The friendship between Maribel and Cecily surprised him. For the past several years, Therese had been trying to light a fire between him and Cecily, insisting that if they got married, the Beach Club would go to them both. Mack loved Cecily like a sister and he supposed Cecily reciprocated, although she was frequently sarcastic with him, and sullen. She’d had a crush on him when she was eleven or twelve, but as soon as the crush faded it seemed as if he’d disappointed her, fallen short of her expectations. This made him feel like doing a better job, so he tried to stay updated about her boyfriends and school, but everything she told him sounded suspiciously like old news, or a lie.

Cecily adored Maribel, and for good reason: Maribel was beautiful, friendly, intelligent, genuine, and all despite the fact that she’d been raised by a single working mother in rural New York. Mack had met Maribel during her first summer on the island, when North Beach Road was part of her daily running route. Mack found himself waiting for her to show up, the blond runner. He volunteered to sweep the parking lot around ten o’clock, hoping she would take off her headphones and talk to him, but she never stopped, except for a brief moment, to drink in the sight of the ocean. One day Mack waited in the middle of the road with a bottle of Evian. She waved him away, but her eyes lingered on the bottle; it was, thankfully, a very hot day, and she gave in. She poured half the bottle down her front and inhaled the other half sloppily, letting it drip down her chin. She gasped, “Thanks,” and was about to run off when he said, “Can I call you?” She readjusted her headphones, and said, “Library, in the afternoons.” Mack remembered his first time walking into the Atheneum, its intimidating white columns, its intimidating quietness. He found Maribel in the stacks, reading a paperback romance, licking her finger as she turned each page. He tapped her on the shoulder and she whipped her head around, narrowed her blue eyes. She couldn’t place him. He said, “I manage the Beach Club. I see you running.” She reddened and quickly replaced the book on the shelf. “You like romances?” he said. “No,” she answered sternly. “I don’t.”

But she did. Her job at the library was a summer position, and when the fall came, she stayed. And stayed, for six years.

This past Christmas Eve, Maribel had the stomach flu and yet she insisted on going to the midnight service at the Unitarian church. No sooner had the choir filed in singing “Oh, Come All Ye Faithful,” then she had to be sick. Mack escorted her out and she threw up all over Orange Street. They sat on the steps in the cold still night, with the clock tower above them as they listened to the faint singing from inside. “The most beautiful night of the year,” Maribel said. “And I ruined it.” Mack almost proposed right then, and what a story it would have been, but no, he didn’t have the courage, if courage was what he was missing. In the end he just held Maribel’s hand, and when she felt well enough, they walked home. After six years, Maribel didn’t pester him about marriage, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew he had to make a decision soon. First, he had to decide about the farm and the Beach Club, and then he had to decide about Maribel.