Down the Shore (12 page)

M
orning,” Clare said, standing in my doorway, his polo shirt tucked into his khakis.

“Where are you going all dressed up?”

“Golfing. Damien just called me and told me to meet him on the links. You up for a round?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I've never played before.”

“So you didn't buy a links pass.”

“That's a safe assumption.”

“Well, whatever, you can walk the first hole and then play through. We're meeting at the clubhouse in half an hour. Clayton's coming. You never used the course at Lawrenceville?”

“I used it. I got high there on the weekend sometimes. What do I wear to this?”

“Something with a collar. Don't wear jeans, if you can help it. You can use my clubs.”

“When did you get clubs?”

“They showed up a few days ago.”

“They showed up?”

“My dad had them sent from his club in Pennsylvania.”

There was actual fallout from the explosion of his father's life—all these things, bought in better times, that kept crashing down out of the sky.

“I'm gonna swing by my room and grab them,” Clare said. “Meet me in the lobby.”

Damien and Jules were waiting for us in front of the towering stone clubhouse that overlooked the eighteenth green. Damien had a big driver laid across his shoulders, his hands hanging over the head and the handle like a country club crucifix as the wind blew his hair into his face. Jules was texting furiously, and Clayton was coming from the direction of our hall, dragging his clubs, stopping now and then to catch his breath. An old man in a plaid driving cap informed us that we could tee off in ten minutes, that the schedule was light.

“Are you going to make it?” Damien asked as Clayton dropped his bag in front of us and braced himself with his hands on his knees. I couldn't see his eyes behind his sunglasses, but there were dark sweat stains in the places where the breeze had blown his silky polo shirt against his body. He was trembling, swallowing visibly every few seconds. It didn't look like he had been to bed.

“Did anyone bring water?” he asked.

“Clare, is this your caddy?” Jules said, ignoring Clayton, and nodding toward me without looking up from his phone.

I blinked, shocked. I had put on a pair of pleated suit pants, a white polo I used to wear on jobs, and Adidas Stan Smith sneakers, which, from a distance, could have passed for spikes. Jules gave me a dry smile to let me know that it was both a joke and not a joke. I tried to imagine what Kelsey would have told him about me. Some kid from Jersey, single mother, fancy high school, friends with Courtney. Nothing to worry about, in other words.

“You lads are up,” the old man called, waving us over.

“He's just along to watch,” Damien explained, jabbing his thumb at me as the rest of them flashed their links passes to the man's approving nods.

We followed the towpath to the tee box where Clare lost a coin toss to Jules and had to tee off first. His practice swings looked tight and powerful, but he shook his head and clenched his jaw after each one. He sliced his first shot, cursing as he let the head of his club hit the ground. Jules hit a ball halfway down the fairway, but he was back on his phone before it had bounced twice. Clayton hooked his first shot off the course.

“Want another?” Damien asked.

Clayton shook his head.

“Watch,” Damien said to me, settling down into his stance. “Keep your left arm straight and bring the club up just past vertical. You wind your body up, create the tension, and then you let it go. Down and through.” He swung and I watched the ball shoot straight off his club. “Short,” he said under his breath as the ball skipped down the fairway.

They all fucked up their putts once everyone was finally on the green. Mini golf is essentially a varsity sport on Long Beach Island, and I wondered if any of that training was applicable here. I watched Clare drive a second time, beating back my instinct to grab a club and give it a shot. As Damien was teeing up, Clayton dropped his clubs and ran for a sand trap cut into a rise in the green.

“Get it all up,” Damien called, squinting down the fairway. His second shot was as good as his first, and he turned to me before the ball stopped rolling, holding out his driver. Clare was attending to Clayton, who was doubled over, hawking up long beaded strands of saliva as his stomach searched for something to expel. Jules took a call.

“Jesus, just tell her to meet us at the ninth hole,” Damien said.

Jules turned his back to us, and I heard him running through the kind of low-toned reassurance you use when the person on the other end is crying.

“It's not baseball,” Damien was saying. “You're swinging down and through. Stand back from the ball a second.”

He stood behind me, and arranged my grip on the handle, interlocking my right pinky and left forefinger, wrapping my hands with a loose grip that was half cool leather glove and half warm palm.

“Good,” he said, and tapped the back of my right thigh, forcing me to bend my knees while he pressed himself against my back, directing my stance with his body and a low tone that I felt as a hum and hot breath behind my ear.

“Keep your upper body loose, point your outside foot like this, and tell me what it's like to fuck Kelsey sometime. I can't decide if she'd be any fun or not, and Jules doesn't kiss and tell. Spread your legs a little more. Keep your eyes down when you bring the club back, and once you're all wound up, just let go and follow through. Always follow through. Take a few practice swings.”

A gust of wind dispelled the heat of his body as he stepped back and left me standing on my own, my hands twitching as I lifted the club. I swung down and through.

“Good,” Damien said. “Keep doing that.”

I tried it again and again, waiting for my heartbeat to settle before I stepped up to the ball.

“Keep your head down,” Damien said.

I heard Jules tell Kelsey that everything would be fine, and something else that I was sure I could make out if only I could turn around and read his lips. My first swing missed the ball completely.

“You were high,” Damien said. “Kill the grass, if you have to. Follow through.”

I caught air again and looked to Damien for guidance, but he folded his arms and raised his eyebrows. It was on me now. Down and through. I felt the club connect with something and a patch of sod burst in the air in front of me. Damien pointed at a low bank of clouds just as my ball seemed to fall out of it. It bounced along the fairway a hundred yards or so in front of us. From the way that Damien was looking at me, I gathered this was not the norm.

“Can you do that again?” Jules asked, his hand covering the speaker of his phone. “Or was that beginner's luck?”

Damien took another ball from his pocket and teed it up in front of me. I fixed my grip and swung, remembering to lift my head as the ball soared and then slowed as though the atmosphere was thicker just above us. My second shot went farther than my first and then bounced off the course into the high grass. Clare started toward me, but Clayton grabbed on to his ankle.

“Wait,” he said. “Stay here.”

Damien cocked an eyebrow at the two of them, which prompted Clare to kick his leg free, leaving Clayton on all fours in the sand. Damien placed another ball in front of me.

“You've done this before,” Clare said.

I shook my head and fixed my grip.

“Kid's a natural,” Damien said.

H
ey,” Clare said, as I opened the door to my room. “I know this is last minute, but my parents are here. They want to meet you. Can you come to lunch?”

He was showered and dressed and visibly disappointed to find that I was neither, that his knocking had woken me. It was almost noon.

“Fuck,” I said. “Yes, of course. Give me five minutes. Less.”

My head filled with blood as I snatched my dead phone off the floor. I swayed and realized that I wasn't sober yet. We had closed Ma Bells, and then the bar at the Old Course, which had a long-standing tradition of staying open until the last guest retired, which had been sometime after 5:00 a.m. I had a splitting headache that ran around my skull and down my throbbing neck. I blew my nose into some toilet paper, and stared down at the composition of thick yellow snot mixed with clotted blood and caked white powder. I remembered looking at my watch as Clare and I were walking home and thinking, in a moment of coke-sponsored overconfidence, that four or five hours of sleep would be plenty. What were his parents doing here? I felt steam slipping around the edges of the shower curtain, and tried to decide what to wear to lunch with a wanted man.

•   •   •

“You boys in the service?” the cabdriver asked, smiling at us in the rearview mirror after Clare told him we were headed to RAF Leuchars. For the first time in my life, I felt worse after a hot shower.

“Why are they flying into Leuchars?” I asked as we drove past the Old Course, ugly in daylight, the grounds surprisingly bare and unkempt. Leuchars was an air force base.

“They don't do chartered flights at EDI.”

“Your parents have a plane?”

“They're borrowing it. They're flying back tonight.”

As we pulled into the parking lot, I saw a single off-white jet in front of a yawning hangar, the pointed body of the plane shaped like a rifle cartridge. Two figures were standing on the tarmac by the tail. Mr. and Mrs. Savage saw us pull up and step out, but whatever they were discussing took precedence over our arrival. Clare asked the taxi to wait, and we closed the distance between them and us on foot.

Michael Savage hugged his son and closed his eyes for a few seconds just before he let Clare go. He looked thinner than he had in his portrait in the
Times,
his cheeks padded out with a well-groomed salt-and-pepper beard. His eyes were narrow enough that I couldn't make out their color, and every angle of his face—the slope of his bald forehead, the slant of his jaw—seemed to culminate in the sharp point of his nose. He was holding a Dopp kit cut from heavy leather, and I wondered why he had brought toiletries if they were just here for the afternoon.

“Nice to finally meet you, Tom,” he said, and shook my hand.

Camille, Clare's mother, was asking Clare if the shirts she sent had fit him properly, and I picked up a whiff of a French accent in her fluent English. Wire-rimmed glasses sat neatly on her tan face, and a cool breeze kicked up the ends of her dark blond hair. She had clinically perfect posture; the line of her back was as straight and firm as the heels on her shoes. She kissed me on both cheeks.

“You two look like a hundred bucks,” Mr. Savage said, as we headed for the cab.

“Yeah,” I said, with a nervous laugh. “Long night.”

•   •   •

The restaurant Clare had chosen, a café at the east end of North Street, was a casual lunch spot with a menu chalked up on a blackboard. Clare was quiet, studying the people around us in a way that made me wonder whether his father would be recognized. Mr. Savage had his Dopp kit on the table underneath his right hand. Mrs. Savage asked what trouble we had found so far.

“We were at the Old Course Hotel last night,” I said, triggering a memory of shooting tequila past my numb front teeth in the bathroom of Damien's suite.

“The Old Course,” Mr. Savage said. “The bar there is famous.”

“They look as if they've discovered that already,” Camille said.

Camille asked if Prince William was still here, and I told her how Jules had called them out as twins.

“What have I told you all these years,” she said to her son as our food hit the table.

“How's the living situation?” Michael asked. “Is the dorm nice?”

“It's nice,” I said. “It's a hotel in the summer.”

“It looks like a prison,” Clare said, spreading his napkin across his lap.

My eyes flashed back and forth between Michael Savage and his wife, as if the two of them were playing tennis. He smiled when he caught me staring.

“I heard you two ran into a friend of mine in Ridgewood.”

Clare looked as surprised as I was. His father turned to me.

“So Tom, Clare tells me you're a future business leader of America. Tell me about the public perception of this thing. It's hard to understand from the inside.”

“I don't know that much about what's going on,” I said.

“You must have the broad strokes by now. It's a terrible story, am I right?”

I looked to Camille for help, but she was smiling at her husband with her hands folded in her lap. Clare was applying ketchup to his side of roast potatoes, somewhere else in his mind.

“It's not the worst story I've heard,” I said.

“No, I don't imagine it is. What's the worst story you know?”

“You want to hear it?”

Mr. Savage took his hand off the Dopp kit.

“I do,” he said.

My mother's friend Amanda was beaten almost to death one night at Somerset Medical Center, where she worked as a nurse. No motive, lead pipe. The police knew who had done it, but they fucked up the evidence gathering and the arrest, and had to let him go. With her settlement check from the hospital she bought a place near the ocean in New Hampshire and a 12-gauge shotgun. My mother went to visit her and came back with the gun, but Amanda killed herself anyway, with enough pills to let everybody know she meant it. She was thirty-four, unmarried, haunted by the figure who had appeared in a doorway behind her, who watched her run the copy machine in silence until she turned and saw the length of the scrap pipe in his hand. She didn't really survive the attack.

I stopped then, realizing that I'd just betrayed the memory of my mother's friend and demonstrated for a master class in How to Change the Subject. There was no returning to the topic of the Savage family's legal troubles now. I hated myself for being baited, and hated Michael Savage twice as much for baiting me.

“What made her do it?” Michael asked. “In your opinion. I mean, she was probably safe where she was.”

“She ran out of options,” I said.

“What makes you say that?” Camille asked.

“She felt like she didn't know people after that. You get cut off from the crowd, you look for the exit.”

“There must have been some other legal channels she could have pursued,” Michael said. “I mean, come on.”

There was an urgency in his voice that made it sound as if he had something at stake here, as if he had a lot riding on the legal recourse of my mother's dead friend.

“Who told you that?” Camille asked me, ignoring her husband now. “About why she did what she did?”

“No one.”

“Good for you,” she said. “Would anybody like dessert?”

•   •   •

“Clare and I have to stop by a bank,” Michael said to his wife in the street outside the restaurant. “Maybe Tom can give you the grand tour, and we'll give you a call when we're finished.”

“Let's walk by the water,” Camille said to me. “I'd like to see the beach.”

The Scores Road was deserted, and a stiff breeze was blowing off the bay. We walked in silence, seagulls shrieking overhead.

“You handled yourself well at lunch,” Camille said, finally.

“Thanks. I don't know why I told that story.”

“I do. And I don't apologize for Michael, but I'm sorry to hear about your mother's friend.”

“I didn't really know her.”

“That's not important, is it?”

My phone was buzzing against my leg.

“It's Clare,” I said. “Hello?”

“Hey, stupid question: Who are you banking with here?”

“I'm not banking with anybody.”

“Where do you get cash?”

“At an ATM. The Royal Bank of Scotland on Market Street. The fee's cheap.”

“Do they have safe deposit boxes?”

“No idea,” I said. “Why?”

“Never mind,” Clare said. “I think we're good.”

The Dopp kit didn't contain toothpaste or aftershave or hair product. It was Clare's tuition, in cash, and then some. Camille smiled at me as I hung up.

At the end of the Scores Road, we found the path that wrapped around the eighteenth green of the golf course and led down to the beach. The sand was white and surprisingly fine, and the water was shallow for what looked like half a mile out. An endless succession of low breakers had worked the sand under the surf into a pattern like a fingerprint. We cuffed our pants, carried our shoes, and threaded our way between the kite fliers, the yellow labs, the children building sand castles. Camille slung her coat over her arm and revealed a frame that I could see had not always been this thin; the tension in her shoulders betrayed the ghost of a fuller figure they no longer had to bear. She was silent until we were beyond the crowds.

“When Clare told me the story of how you found each other, I thought to myself, ‘Ah, this is something.' You don't know yet what it means to a parent, especially a mother, to have someone look out for your son when something terrible has happened and you have to leave your home.” She stopped, and look back toward the town. “I think it's good for the two of you to be out of America, to see something else. I wasn't born there, but I came just in time for its moment, I think. You're too young to understand this. You've never known anything else. It's changing now. It's good to be away. It's an exciting time, for both of you. You can become whatever you like this far from home.” She threaded her arm through mine and we started back. “Who knows what can happen,” she said.

We met Clare and Michael in front of Ma Bells and walked back to Andrew Melville Hall. The Dopp kit was gone. Clare was having problems with his computer, and Michael seemed happy to put on a fatherly air and fix something before he climbed back in his borrowed plane and flew away. Camille sat next to me on the bed facing the window, and we watched a cluster of rabbits feeding at the top of a sharp slope behind the hall while father and son hunched in a corner to play with the laptop. The cat seemed to come up from the grass. It was crouched so that its legs looked like the wheels of a locomotive as it took three quick steps and sunk its teeth into a rabbit, just behind the ears. The cat shook its head once, hard enough to break the rabbit's neck, and dragged it out of sight. Camille let out a quiet laugh and turned to me. The other rabbits didn't move.

“This could be the problem,” Michael said to his son.

•   •   •

In the cab back to Leuchars, I listened to Michael apologize for the brevity of their visit, and explain that the plane was only free for the afternoon.

“Look at this place,” he said, as we drove past the Old Course. “I don't know why you two would ever leave. Travel Europe, play golf on days that end in
Y
.
”

“We were just speaking about that,” Camille said, turning to me.

We watched them board the plane, and watched a pair of hands reach out to close and seal the door. I would have stayed for takeoff, but Clare told the driver to go. His father had paid the fare both ways.

“Hello?” Clare said, into his phone. “Yeah. Is it OK if Tom comes? He's with me now. Seven. Sure. We'll see you there.”

“Who was that?”

“Clayton wants to have dinner at that Indian place.”

With you, I thought. Not with me.

“Let's just go straight there,” he said. “I need a drink.”

•   •   •

At Balaka, Clare told the waiter that we were waiting for a third before we ordered. He checked his watch for the third time in ten minutes, drumming his fingers on the table in time with the sitar music. He was tense, but present. Back in the world. I wondered how much of that had to do with being flush again, and just then Clare fished out his wallet and handed me six fifty-pound notes, crisp as the napkin in my lap.

“Thanks for the spot at the airport.”

“This is too much.”

“Buy me a drink sometime. I wonder what's keeping Clayton.”

“Where's Chantal?”

“Having dinner with one of those twins. Sounds like she's in love.”

How do you know that? I wondered. What conversation did you have that I wasn't there for?

“Was Kelsey with Jules when you met her?”

“Unclear,” I said. “She says they broke up and got back together.”

“Classy,” Clare said, laughing. “I guess that's Jersey for you.”

There was an edge in his tone that shocked me like a paper cut. I thought: There must be some equation to correlate lack of empathy or visible disdain with net worth or cash on hand. Clare was looking over my shoulder to where Clayton was threading his way between the tables, apologizing as he came.

We ordered martinis, wine with dinner, Scotch in place of dessert. I dropped out of the conversation sometime after our appetizers were cleared, and sat there, listening to them talk London shirtmakers and tell St. Barts hotels. Clare placed his hand on the black leather folder when the check dropped and said that he would take care of this one. Clayton insisted that it was his idea, his treat, and covered Clare's hand with his. I watched Clare's tall water glass topple as he jerked his hand free. Work one shift in a kitchen and you realize that we can rest our skin on a scalding surface for a few seconds before we register the pain. There was no delay in Clare's reaction, as if it were born of some older instinct, the recognition of a threat that predates fire. Clare dropped his napkin over the spill and motioned for the waiter. I thought: What's this?