If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go (5 page)

“Like maybe a strawberry ice-cream soda, not even a black-and-white,” she added. “With no whipped cream.”

“Were you high?” I asked.

Nanny tried rolling her eyes but they were too heavy, so she closed them again. It
was
a pretty stupid question. “What do you think?” she said. “We were in his room, no one was home. The sheets were dirty, I could smell them. I didn’t think my first time would be on dirty sheets.”

She hiccupped a sob. “What am I going to do, Katie? What am I going to tell Tony? What if Voodoo tells him first?”

“Didn’t you feel anything? With Voodoo, like, didn’t you—”

“I just told you,” she said, frowning, impatient. “Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. I’m talking about Tony now.”

“You think Tony hasn’t been with other girls?”

“It’s different with guys,” she said. “You know it is.”

“Besides,” I said, picking my words delicately, “it’s not like Tony—like you and Tony—”

“I love him, Katie,” she whimpered. “The night before he went back, he stood outside my house throwing little rocks at my window. Like we were kids, right? And when I opened the window, he just looked up at me. Didn’t say a word. Just kept looking up at me. Then he went back to his car, and he turned around and lifted his hand in this, like, wave. It was so romantic.” She closed her eyes again and began nodding. “He never said, ‘I love you.’ But I know what was in his heart.”

“Let’s go back inside,” I said, taking her arm. But Nanny stayed surprisingly firm against my grip. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Wait one fucking minute. Just tell me the truth, Katie, that’s all I want. Do you think Tony will think I’m a slut if he finds out?”

I’d seen Tony go ballistic when someone sat in the seat he wanted on the early bus going home from school. He would have beaten Porter Jacobs, the poor kid sitting in it, to a pulp if the bus driver hadn’t pulled over and thrown Tony off the bus. They didn’t call him Tony Fury for nothing.

“How is Tony going to find out?” I asked, making my voice strong. “You aren’t going to tell him—”

“I have to tell him,” Nanny said, sounding sorrowful, like someone had died.

“You don’t have to do anything,” I said. “You don’t have to tell him a thing. Voodoo isn’t going to say anything. I mean, what, you think he’s going to write him a letter? And Tony won’t be home until Christmas, right? Leave it alone till then, man. Leave it alone, Nanny babe.” That was what her mother called her. Nanny babe.

Suddenly her eyes swung open, like rolled-up shades that snapped. “Should I confess?” she whispered. “Maybe I should go to confession. Not with Father Donnelly, but maybe Father Tom—”

“Nanny,” I said. Confession was supposed to be anonymous, but the
priests at St. Timothy’s had known most of us since birth and now knew even our footfalls by heart.

“I’m so scared,” Nanny said. “Katie, I’m so fucking scared. What if I’m pregnant? All he did was pull out, he always says he’s sterile because he never knocked anybody up, but what if I’m—”

“It’s not time to worry yet,” I said, firmly. That’s what Atticus Finch used to tell Jem and Scout in
To Kill a Mockingbird
. Sometimes I said it to myself, inside. I found the words comforting.

“I wish,” she said haltingly. “I wish . . .” Nanny’s eyes closed again. She began rocking on the heels of her flip-flops. I looked toward the lighted windows of the lounge at The Starlight Hotel. The door was open and I could hear Bobby Darin singing “Mack the Knife.”

“I’m going back inside,” I said. It was making me too sad, standing in the alley with Nanny. Luke barely knew I was alive, Tony Fury had never even bought Nanny a Coke. It felt like we were living in some kind of half-love twilight where everything was possible but nothing ever happened. I wanted to get back inside where there was light and music and Luke. By now, maybe the crowd around him had dispersed to play the jukebox or go out on the piazza to get high, and I could catch him alone, maybe grab the seat next to him at the bar and start a conversation that didn’t sound stupid.

“Am I a slut, Katie?” Nanny asked again, her eyelids flinching. “Tell me the truth. Do you think I am?”

“No,” I said quickly.

“Don’t tell Liz,” she said again. “She has a big fucking mouth, you know she does.”

“I won’t,” I promised. Liz was at work, probably waiting for Cory to take her for another Thursday-night test drive. So far, they’d done it in a Chevy Monte Carlo, a Ford Mustang and a Cadillac Sedan DeVille. But he’d still never taken her to the movies or to the Sunrise Diner for coffee, or for a ride in his own car, a Triumph TR6 that he’d bought secondhand.
Liz wanted to marry him, even though she said it still hurt sometimes when he balled her, that she’d lie awake all night, throbbing, afterward. Even when there was love involved, something always seemed to hurt.

“Come on, man,” I said, growing impatient. It was late now. I took Nanny’s arm again and guided her through the moonlit alley. Once, she missed a step and caused us both to stumble in the darkness.

•   •   •

W
hen we got back inside, Luke and Mitch were sitting in the far corner of the bar near the jukebox, both of them smoking like chimneys, talking so intently I didn’t dare go over. I went to play the jukebox instead, which was already buzzing with quarters, so I could listen to what they were saying. But between the music and the stoned babble all around me, it was hard to hear anything. I was turning to leave when I heard Mitch say, “You know how it is over there, the flowers?” I stopped to listen. He went on: “How sometimes you’d be walking and you’d forget for a minute why you were there? Because all around, man, so much damned beauty! All these exotic blooms, growing on top of each other! Orchids, right? You’d touch the petals and they gave off this scent, different from the flowers here, more delicate, but . . . pungent, that’s the word. Delicately pungent. Like a—a psychedelic garden. But it never lasted because of all the, you know, the smoke, the . . . you know, right? Yeah . . . so we’re walking, marching, by the river . . . the Mekong River . . . and we’re stoned out of our tits, man, the weed was, like, tripping weed over there, un-fucking-believable. Like the dope, man, everything so pure . . . and I see this, like . . . this giant . . . blossom, the biggest blossom I’ve ever seen, right on the river, like this unbelievably beautiful flower just floating on the river, getting bigger and bigger, like it was taking over the river, right? Like the river was a big, fucking, flowing flower! I was just blown away, man. Blown the fuck away. So I went
down by the riverbank, so I can, like, touch it, pick a piece of it to take with me, for, I don’t know, luck or something, maybe give it to one of the girls to put in her hair or something. So . . . I start leaning in, to, like, pick a part of this river flower, and my buddy, Tang, he comes over and pulls me back, he’s like, ‘What the fuck you doing, man?’ And I’m like, ‘Get off me, man, I want to pick part of this flower, you ever seen anything so beautiful? You ever seen anything like it in your life?’ And he looks at me, and he says, ‘Asshole, that ain’t no flower.’ And I say, ‘Sure it is, just look at it, motherfucker! If that’s not a flower, then what the fuck is it?’ And he gets pissed, right, he shoves me so I’m almost in the river, and he says, ‘
You
look at it, motherfucker.’ And I turn and I put my hands on it, I plunge my hands right
in
it, and he’s right, man. It ain’t no fucking flower. It’s blood. Blood on the water. Spreading as far as the eye could see.” Mitch laughed. He laughed like he’d heard a really funny joke. I didn’t want to turn around, to seem as though I was eavesdropping. I didn’t hear Luke laughing. I hadn’t heard him say a word the entire time I’d been standing at the jukebox. I saw from the corner of my eye Len putting a twin set of shots in front of Mitch and Luke. Mitch downed his right away. “Anytime anyone asks me, ‘What was it like over in Nam?’ I tell them that story. Whole country full of flowers, everywhere you look. All those flowers, drowning in blood. Hey, little darling!”

I looked up. I felt Mitch’s hand on my arm. He pulled me so close I could smell how fucked up he was. His eyes were squinty and filled with light.

“
Mmm-mmm
, you look good enough to eat,” he crooned, looking me up and down. I was wearing the new brown cotton peasant shirt with the hand-sewn blue silk roses at the collar that I’d bought at Heads Up, the local hippie head shop. I’d bought it thinking of Luke, thinking it would be the perfect thing to wear when I saw him. But then Mitch kissed the side of my face and hugged me tight so that my back was to Luke and I couldn’t see his face. I wondered what he was thinking.

When I turned around again, his seat was empty.

Mitch still had his arm around me and was banging on the bar with his other hand. “Service! Service!” he cried over Pat Whalen and the Country Whalers singing “The Wearin’ of the Green.” “A little service for the servicemen, Goddamnit!” I gently twisted out from under his arm and Mitch barely noticed, he just kept banging on the bar to get Len’s attention. I thought maybe Luke was in the bathroom and would be coming back. I glanced toward the men’s room, but when Billy came out and swung the door behind him, it looked empty. I waited a little longer, for the song to end, and then I was tired of waiting. I was ready to leave. I was out of cigarettes and I had to be at work early the next morning.

I walked away from Mitch and his clamoring for a drink he didn’t need, looking around for Luke and not seeing him anywhere. I looked around for Nanny but couldn’t find her, either. I felt my blood quicken with this new impatience that had been stalking me lately, at home, standing on the corner by Eddy’s, at work, ringing things up on the cash register. Everything, everyone was moving too slowly for me. I was tired of waiting on people, on things to happen. That seemed like all I’d done for the past three years, since I’d first seen Luke coming off Comanche Street beach, carrying his surfboard, dripping and grinning and golden. And now I couldn’t escape the feeling that everyone had been at the party for a while but I was just getting there, in danger of being left behind. Even now it was later than I thought, too late to walk home alone, so I started up Comanche Street to catch the bus on Lighthouse Avenue. I heard someone call my name and turned around. It was Bennie Esposito. He was walking instead of stumbling, and his eyes were wide and clear.

“Where you going so early, man?” And yet another surprise, he wasn’t slurring his words. “The night is young.”

“You okay, Bennie?” I asked.

He slipped a sly arm around me and pulled me close. “I’d be better if you was to, say, take a little walk on the beach with me, maybe search for starfish, you know, it’s an outasight night, man.” He winked at me and
I laughed. Bennie was one of the city boys. I liked him. I used to have a crush on him, when he first moved to the Beach. When he wasn’t on downs and his eyes were open, you could see how beautiful they really were.

“Well, it would be too obvious if I asked you over to see my etchings,” he said. “Besides, my room’s a fucking mess.”

“It’s late,” I said. “I have to be to work at nine tomorrow.”

“Ouch,” he said, wincing. “That’s like the middle of the night for me, man.” His hands were working upward, resting on my rib cage. They felt hot against my skin. I looked up at the sky, crowded with stars, a fat, full moon staring down at us. I looked back at The Starlight Hotel. I wished I could have seen Luke’s face when Mitch was talking about the blood flowers. I wished I could see him now, just to know where he was. I wondered if he was walking the beach, or maybe hanging out with Christa Cutler on the lifeguard chair. The thought made my insides twist, as though my heart was lined with bruises.

I looked back at Bennie for a long minute. Then I put my arms around his neck and kissed him, full on the lips. His eyes widened and then he laughed. “Man, this night’s just getting better and better,” he said. He held out his hand and turned toward the Comanche Beach entrance. I looked back one last time before twining Bennie’s outstretched fingers with my own. We crossed the entrance threshold and walked toward the abandoned lifeguard chair down by the water, the sand wet and cool as crushed flowers beneath my feet.

adventures in zombie land

E
lephant Beach was sinking; it had been for years. In 1928, Dolphus Rugby, the millionaire, commissioned circus elephants to build the boardwalk for Sally Stewart, his child bride, who wanted to live by the ocean. He built her Moonlight Manor, a sparkling palace with one hundred rooms facing the water; even the servants’ quarters had seaside views. There were ballrooms for dining and dancing and a rooftop garden with an orchestra, and at night, boats filled with liquor would pull up to the shoreline, and soon the town was filled with bootleggers and film stars and Broadway producers who came down from the city to savor the sea air. Before dinner, everyone would promenade the boardwalk, dressed in Mainbocher and Schiaparelli, sipping from their sterling silver flasks as they gazed restively at the sunset, waiting for the night to begin. Those were the days when the grand old hotels like the Prince Albert and the Sea Lion were filled to capacity. Florenz Ziegfeld and his Folly girls would come down after their show for a late supper; Fanny Brice held dinner parties in her rented mansion on the bay. Cab Calloway, the famed bandleader, built a house in the Dunes, where all the
rich people lived, and each morning tipped the boy who delivered his newspapers five dollars for bringing them right up to his front door.

Nobody promenaded the boardwalk anymore because you could trip on a rotting board and break your leg during an after-dinner stroll. The wonderful old hotels were now crumbling castles, left to dust after the film stars and bootleggers discovered air travel. Elephant Beach might have been only fifty-two minutes from the city by car or rail, but if you could fly to Santa Barbara or Cuba or the French Riviera, why would you spend your summers here? The hotels and the great mansions by the bay, with their glorious floor-to-ceiling windows broken and boarded up, went on the market at severely reduced prices. But the taxes were monstrous and nobody could afford the upkeep of so many rooms; they were taken over by squatters or converted into housing for welfare recipients.

After everyone deserted Elephant Beach, stores went out of business and the once prosperous Buoy Boulevard became shabby and mean. People blamed the Negroes who’d come up from Georgia and Alabama to work as chambermaids and butlers and drivers at the hotels and now had nothing to do but loaf in front of Brown’s Liquor Store, right across the street from the railroad station. People said it didn’t look good, black faces the first thing you saw when coming off the train or driving in from the Meadowbrook Parkway, and the town’s seedy glamour faded even further.

Just when we were running out of people to blame for Elephant Beach’s slide from a playland paradise to just another seaside town on the skids, the County Asylum let all the patients out for some kind of experiment in community living and it was decided that the abandoned hotels on the boardwalk would make wonderful communal residencies. There would be on-site psychiatrists and doctors and medical workers, and medicine and jobs, and families who lived nearby to help take care of the mental patients and streamline them back into society. But whoever was in charge of the experiment dumped them in Elephant Beach before figuring out schedules and staffing and meals and all the things
that might make the experiment a success. What followed caused an uproar that lasted through the fall and winter until the spring thaw, when the sweet scent of melting snow sifted through the air and the streets filled with water and rainbows.

At first, it seemed that a lot of the mental patients ran out of medication or simply stopped taking it, to the bafflement of everyone we hung around with. (“Free drugs, man! Free drugs and they’re turning them down? Shit, they really must be crazy.”) Or they forgot where the clinic was where they were supposed to refill their prescriptions. Or they couldn’t remember the names of the medications. Or the whole thing about family proximity had been greatly exaggerated and there were no family members living close enough to help take care of them. Or the family members got fed up and didn’t want to deal with them. Or there wasn’t sufficient on-site medical staff at the new residencies to supervise them or see to their well-being. Or the staff that was there didn’t really want to be, and instead of taking care of the patients, they got drunk or ran card games out of the residencies in rooms with the doors locked, playing loud music to drown out any requests and outright pleas for assistance. Or it was all of the above combined, and so, not getting any cooperation or compassion or any of the things they should have received under the circumstances, the ghost people took to the streets.

We called them the ghost people because their eyes always looked haunted. They wandered into traffic, dazed and confused, smiling or sobbing hysterically, or laughing maniacally at the top of their lungs. Or they sat in Leo’s Luncheonette mumbling over cups of tea, stuffing packets of Sweet’N Low into their pockets, spilling them onto the tables. Sometimes Leo himself would come out from behind the counter and say sternly, “Okay, all right now, move it along, you can’t just sit here all day playing with the sugar, go,
go
,” and they’d just look up at him and ask numbly, “Where?” as if they really wanted to know. Then Leo would sigh and shake his head and go back behind the counter, muttering. When they forgot where they lived, they’d stop us on the street and ask,
or they’d spend the night on the beach, or in empty swimming pools, or in back of Jackson’s Lumber Yard, down by the bay. Suddenly, the town seemed overrun with stray, scary strangers, and it wasn’t as if these were our own local lunatics, like the ones who lived in The Starlight Hotel and were as harmless and familiar as the children who ran laughing through puddles after the rain. Adults tried to avoid the ghost people whenever possible, and when children looked up into their faces, they began crying. It seemed you couldn’t turn a corner in town without running up against their great haunted eyes.

Raven loved it; he thought the ghost people were the coolest thing on earth. “Man, it’s like living in a Fellini movie,” he marveled. He wanted to make them his portfolio project at the Photography Institute in the city, where he was taking classes. He wanted to call the project “Adventures in Zombie Land,” and thought it could win an award or at least a scholarship to cover his next year’s tuition. He tried hanging out with some of them, but it was difficult. He spoke to a man wearing a crown made of newspapers who said the crown kept his thoughts inside his head. “I wouldn’t want them getting out and about,” he told Raven gravely. He tried speaking to a small woman with a button mouth and pearl-gray eyes, who scolded him, “Quiet! I’m listening.” When Raven asked if she was hearing voices, the woman threw back her head and barked a laugh. But then she turned wistful. “I wish,” she said, gazing out toward the ocean. He watched a man burning dollar bills, frantically lighting match after match as the wind blew them out. “Burn, baby, burn,” the man cried ecstatically when a bill caught fire, his eyes rolling upward. He told Raven burning the money made him feel prosperous. But mostly, the ghost people shielded their faces and ran away when they saw Raven coming, frightened by his camera. He begged his girlfriend, Rita, who got along with everyone and could talk to anybody, to come with him and help crack the ice, but she said no, shaking her head so hard that her long, blond curls bounced off her shoulders. “I got enough of that in the city, man,” she told him. “We moved down here to escape
the nut jobs, remember?” He tried enlisting Mitch, because some of the ghost people were war veterans who had flipped out in the jungle. But when he asked, Mitch’s eyes turned cold, and his voice sounded the way it must have when he was barking orders at the men in his platoon as they stumbled over minefields and bodies. “Give it a rest, hippie boy,” he said. “This ain’t no fucking freak show. It’s their lives, man. Their
lives
.”

Still, Raven kept trying. He ate his entire stash of black beauties and started hanging around the boardwalk at night, watching the residencies. He kept his pockets full of Jolly Ranchers and miniature Chunky chocolates but the ghost people never came close enough to take anything from his outstretched hand. “It’s like they think I’m the crazy one,” he said. “They sit out on those big porches under those tattered awnings or drape themselves over the stone lions at the old Sea Lion Inn, and sometimes nobody says a word for hours. And then when it starts getting dark, the workers or whoever they are come out and kind of corral them all in at the same time, and you see the lights go on in their rooms and this, like, moan goes up, right, this, like, raging, righteous moan. Man, I wish I could photograph it. I wish I could get a picture of that moan.” The words danced out of his mouth as though they were jitterbugging. “Shit, I wish I could afford a new flash, the one where the light doesn’t burst so much and wouldn’t scare them away. I bet I could get them on the cover of
Life
magazine.”

But the ghost people were already famous. They were regulars on the front page of the
Elephant Beach Gazette
, and had been in
Newsday
and even
The New York Times
. Words like “outrage” and “unsightly” and “Goddamned dumping ground” were used to describe the situation; you couldn’t go anywhere in town without hearing people talk about it. At Nanny’s house, her mother would be screaming into the phone, “I spent my honeymoon at the Prince Albert, and now look; you can’t even go up there between the spics and the psychos.” Our neighbor Mr. Zinc almost ran one of them down on his way home from buying milk at the Dairy
Barn. “Goddamned zombies, go back where you came from!” he yelled out the window.

Once, after I got my license, my brother and I were driving aimlessly through the side streets, listening to Cousin Brucie, when we stopped at a light on Filmore Avenue. An elderly man with stringy white hair began crossing the street, then suddenly dropped his pants, squatted down and began defecating. When he couldn’t get up again, he began weeping, his face crumpling like a wrinkled magazine. He knelt in the middle of the street, naked from the waist down, huge tears making dirty tracks down his weathered face. My brother jumped out of the car, helped him pull up his trousers, and walked him across the street. The man insisted on shaking my brother’s hand, and when he got back in the car, my brother rode the rest of the way with his arms stretched straight out in front of him, careful not to touch anything until he got home and was able to wash.

“If you could have seen this town when we first moved here,” my mother said, sighing and staring out the car window at a young woman twirling on the corner of Buoy Boulevard as though she were on top of a music box. My parents had our house appraised because everyone on our block was looking to sell and flee Elephant Beach, even the McIvers, who had a grape arbor and nineteen grandchildren and had been there forever. The appraisal hadn’t gone well; after the real estate lady left, my mother locked herself in the bathroom and cried. I was happy, though; I didn’t want to move away, to an anonymous town with malls and split-level houses and no beach, no Comanche Street.

But everyone else was freaking out. They felt that Elephant Beach had been invaded and that it wasn’t fair, really, the best ocean views in town going to mental patients who were too crazy to know their value or appreciate them. The people who lived farther uptown, near the residencies, started complaining about the sound of that same moan Raven had described, saying that it swelled and carried out over the water and across town toward the bay. They said it was unbearable, keeping them
up at night, like a foghorn that just wouldn’t quit. The cops tried locking some of the ghost people up for disturbing the peace, but once they put them in cells, Sergeant Ray Duffy told my father, the moan was an awful, terrible thing to hear. “Like they have the D.T.’s and someone’s eating them alive at the same time,” he said, shuddering. “Hell with disturbing the peace; I had to let ’em go before I went on a bender and got the D.T.’s myself.” At town meetings, our parents and their friends and the few merchants left raved on about plummeting property values and safety, but so far the most dangerous thing that happened was that a woman wearing a shawl made of wet panty-hose jumped into Bertha Levine the librarian’s car when she forgot to lock the doors and wouldn’t leave, just sat there with her arms folded across her chest, staring out the window and speaking in a wheedling tone that drove Bertha nuts. “Just take me for a little spin, someplace nice,” she begged Bertha, who drove straight to the police station and honked her horn for someone to come out and take the woman away. During a slight scuffle, the woman’s panty-hose shawl fell on the floor of Bertha’s Toyota, where Bertha said it looked like a nest of dead snakes. She kicked the coiled mess out of the car, locked all the doors, then laid her head down on the steering wheel and wept.

Just when things were reaching a fever pitch and people seemed ready to storm the boardwalk with blazing torches, something happened. One of the ghost people died. He was a young man, believed to be in his twenties, dressed in an overcoat that was too big and didn’t keep him warm enough because he froze to death under the boardwalk one bitter night, beneath the icicles that hung down from the splintered wood. His body was frozen in the shape of a human question mark, and his eyes were open wide, as if focused on some distant dream. He carried no identification and, after the police asked around, it was determined that his name might have been Chuck.

Hunker Moran, editor of the
Elephant Beach Gazette
, wrote an editorial about it. He said that Chuck’s death put a face to the whole
issue of criminalizing craziness. “Lock them away! Out of our sight!” he wrote in the paper. “Until one of them dies on a cold night in February, alone, thrown into an anonymous grave in Potter’s Field, unmarked because nobody knows his real name. Where is our compassion? Buried beneath fear and worry over property values? What about the real values, the ones that matter?” The
Nassau County Press
and the
Long Island Reader
picked up the story, as well as
Newsday
and the
Times
. People turned it over in their minds and decided that Hunker was right. After all, it wasn’t the fault of the ghost people that they were too crazy to fend for themselves; the politicians and professionals who released them should have known better. And property values had been in the toilet long before they’d come to town; why take it out on them? In fact, you could even say they were the real victims of the whole situation but were too messed up to know it. Or maybe they did, and that was what all the crying and singing and moaning were about.