Sag Harbor (35 page)

Marv's mother still came out. She'd probably covered his DJ
tables with second-home basement crap, old sewing machines and spiderwebbed boogie boards. The stuff you keep around because you convince yourself that one day you might use it again. We all know how that ends. Melanie remembered Marv from the old days and I told her that he didn't come out anymore because he thought Sag was for kids. She told me about her cousin, who was a big DJ at some clubs in the Bronx, and then said she remembered when Marv's mother threw a birthday for him and invited all the kids. One of the big kids started chasing Marcus around the picnic table trying to noogie him, and Marcus slipped and crashed into it, sending the birthday cake flying. “It went all over the place.”

I remembered that day. Everybody wearing some form of multicolored striped article of clothing, that was the rule. Reggie attempted to salvage a clean chunk of cake from the ground. It was something he might do, gather what he could from the mess. Make sure he got his. But I didn't remember Melanie. I tried to put the scene back together, picture the faces under the cardboard party hats. I couldn't see hers. But she had to be there. Was that the day she kissed me? Hovering at my side all afternoon, brushing her arms against me by accident. Then leaning over. I was her husband. It must have happened. Where did it go?

That fucking song scrabbled in the cage of my head, shaking the bars:

Like I said, I'd been dinged, but good. Now it stirred up all the silt at the bottom. Bringing me around. It was my first kiss I was remembering, that lost day I recovered. I saw it clearly. The song must have come through the kitchen window that day, the radio set on
WLNG when Marv's mother checked the weather report. She left it there at 92.1 and the enchantments followed. The big kid tormenting Marcus was Big Bobby, no, it was Neil, Neil the pervert who one time climbed up the roof of our porch to peep on Elena and got caught. My parents and his parents didn't talk for two summers. He was premed at Morehouse now, that was the word. Marcus smashed his skull into the table and things went into slow motion as the Carvel cake and Dixie plates and Hi-C tumbled through the air. Someone pulled on my arm, whispering, “Benji.”

It seemed impossible not to remember something like that. The first time a girl put her lips on yours. What kind of chump forgot being a five-year-old mack? I would've coasted on that for years if I'd known. But I did know. I was there. What put it out of my mind? I looked at Melanie's profile, the coast of her nose and mouth and chin. She was one of us. A Sag Harbor Baby.

We were at the corner, the end of Richards Drive. The natural destination was town. Where we'd run into somebody and then it wouldn't be just me and her anymore. There was nowhere else to go.

Melanie said, “There it is.” I turned and saw the old place up the street and I knew it wasn't her at all.

I will take the world at its word and allow that there are those who have experienced great love in their lives. This must be so. So much fuss is made over it. It follows that there are others who have loved but came to realize over time that what they had was merely the shadow of a greater possibility. These settled, and made do, or broke things off to continue the search. There are those who have never loved, and they walk through their days grasping after true connection. And then there is me. Ladies and gentlemen and all of you at home just tuning in, the angel of my heart, my long lost love, was a house.

There she was, my Sweet Lollipop. Posing coyly behind the old hedges, just a wedge, a bit of thigh, visible behind the trees. When people were inside at night, the light from the windows splashed through the leaves and branches, diluting the darkness. It was always
a comfort rounding the corner and seeing that after you'd been running around all day. Soon you'd be inside with everyone else.

The windows were black. Since the swap, where we got the beach house and my aunt kept the Hempstead House, she rarely came out. Occasionally she gave the keys to friends for the weekend, and it was disturbing to see an
alien vehicle
in our driveway. Ours, even though it wasn't anymore. My mother would call her sister to double-check that everything was okay. I hadn't seen anyone there all summer.

“Let's go see,” I said. She walked with me without hesitating. The house my grandparents built was a small Cape Cod, white with dark shingles on the roof and red wood bracing the second story. It was made of cinder block, stacks of it hauled out on the back of my grandfather's truck. Every weekend he brought out a load, rattling down the highway. This was before they put in the Long Island Expressway, you understand. It took a while. Every weekend, he and the local talent put up what they could before he had to get back to his business on Monday. Eventually he and my grandmother had their house. Their piece of Sag Harbor.

The hedges out front were scraggly and disreputable, but the lawn was grazed down to regulation height. The house looked like it did at the start of every season, ready for us to open it up. “Do you want to go inside?” I asked.

“Will we get in trouble?”

“No one's using it.”

She said, “Okay,” and the way she said it zapped my groin, pushing my dick up against my jeans. It was almost dark.

The driveway led to the back patio. Weeds and low flowers sneaked through the cracks in the decaying concrete between the paving stones, and it was still light enough to see some anthills in there, too, the telltale volcanoes of orange dirt. In former days Reggie and me knelt over them with a magnifying glass from the Wharf Shop, tilting the incinerating beam on any unfortunate critters popping out for a hive errand. It was where we had arranged the
doomed radio men and bazooka guys from our plastic platoons into the path of Tonka bulldozers, and, farther back, filled bright plastic buckets with water from the hose. The toddler games we found meaning in. We spent drawn-out afternoons transferring water from container to container, spilling some each time until the cement was drenched and we were all out and we cried for a refill. Crawling around like ants ourselves, doing nonsense things like that. Behind the patio, the backyard sloped up, and the pump still stood there like a rusted scarecrow, its underground pipes leading nowhere. I don't know if they ever led anywhere.

The patio furniture was piled on the screened-in porch, a rickety contraption that kept the sun off us on hot days and the rain off us on cloudy ones, the water rolling off the roof into worn-away hollows as we swung on the old rocking couch, watching this and kicking our feet out. The roof of the porch was directly under the upstairs windows and Reggie and me used to sneak out onto the tarpaper in Alcatraz breakouts. Not that we had anywhere to go. Eventually we got big and bold enough to jump over the side, that long seven-foot drop. We wasted a lot of time doing that. Wishing, Maybe this time we'll break something.

I told Melanie to wait there and scuttled through the furniture. We left the window to the junk room unlocked when we lived there. Maybe my aunt did, too. What was there to steal? We were more likely to be accidentally locked out than robbed. I shoved the window open, clambering onto the lumpy guest bed, which was covered with our old board games and my aunt's spy thrillers. Stained shades from thrown-out lamps and busted Weedwackers, fishing poles and plastic boxes full of screws. I walked around to the back door and let her in.

The house looked small from the outside. That was its trick. Step inside and it went on for miles. We were in the kitchen, where the pale green General Electric appliances hummed, the matching dishwasher and fridge and range nestled among the pink Formica countertops. The electricity was turned on and they sparked to life; the electricity was turned off and they shuddered into comas for nine
months. The door creaked as I closed it, as it always did. You never forget your first creak. It was the original creak, the creak standard that I would compare all other creaks to. Everything in that house was my model for things out in the world. This is what a doorknob looks like. This is what a drain looks like. The first chair I called a chair was there in the living room, next to my one and only and ever lamp. My feet dangled for years until the floor finally reached up to meet them. Window. Couch. Coffee table. My everlasting objects.

“Cobwebs,” Melanie said, scraping her face.

A seafaring sort, my grandfather had paneled the living room in broad, brown planks of knotty pine that made it look like the belly of a ship. A buoy from his old sailboat hung over the couch, the name arcing across it in weathered black paint:
MY GLORY
. The old horseshoe crab was still there, the dried shell hanging on the nail my father had hammered into the wall after I brought it back from the beach. The only thing I noticed that was different was the TV, but I couldn't believe that the old black-and-white still worked, so I forgave its replacement. It took five minutes to warm up, making all sorts of frantic sounds, like you'd startled the people inside from their dozing. A white dot finally materialized in the middle of the screen. A white dot in a sea of blackness. The first star in the universe on the first day. It grew and spread and the sound came on and eventually the comedian hit his punch line, the weatherman told the future, the monster stepped out of the fog. You had to wait for it to come around.

“Nick's working tonight you said.”

“I'm not his keeper,” she said.

“Do you want to go upstairs?” I asked. Our eyes were getting used to the dark and a car came up Hempstead, illuminating the room and us in a lighthouse sweep.

“Okay.”

This was my old house where all the good things still lived even though we had moved on. Everything as it was. Even the boy, the one who always seemed happy. He had to be here. This was where he lived. Haunting the place in his polyester pants and fucked-up Afro.

Was the same bottle of hydrogen peroxide sitting in the medicine cabinet? The grisly white foam. He was always running around and not looking where he was going. It all bubbled up. I saw it clearly. I thought it had been the kiss that the song retrieved, but it was this place. My lost love's face was the two windows facing the street, the front door for a nose, and the three brick steps for a mouth. Darling. I hummed the chorus and I didn't care if Melanie heard. Certain songs got you like that. You could make fun of them, ignore them, try to tune them out, but the verses still got inside. People you'd never meet offered the words you were unable to shove past your lips, saying what you felt about someone once, or might become capable of feeling one day. If you were lucky. They spoke for you. Gathering the small, rough things you recognized in yourself.

The kids' rooms were on the second floor. I walked up ahead of her, my fingers lighting on the banister made smooth by all our hands, finding the nail heads raised by the settling wood. I anticipated each one before my fingers discovered it. I'd fallen down the stairs plenty when I was learning how to go down stairs. Slamming my stupid head across the steps and finishing in a bruised heap at the bottom. This was the place where I learned to pick myself up, because when I fell the house was always empty.

Elena's room was on the left, me and Reggie's was on the right. The shades at the back of our room were open, enough ambient light sneaking in for us to make out the two beds, the dresser, and the weird vanity table that had been moved up there before I was born, for lack of a better place. The mirror of the vanity was flanked by two mirrored wings on hinges—if you moved them into a triangle, leaving a slot for you to peek inside, the mirrors retreated into endlessness, tossing images of themselves back to themselves in a narcissistic loop. It looked like a tunnel burrowing through the back of the vanity, through the wall, and into an extradimensional beyond. It was amazing how long I could stare at that. The shouts of my friends playing with Reggie came up through the window, or my sister yukking it up with her girlfriends in the next room and I stood there staring.

“This was my bed,” I said. I sat down and spread my palm out. The bloom of rusted springs spotted the mattress. She sat down next to me. She said something and I responded, drawing up sentences from a reservoir. I hadn't been on my bed for years. The last time I slept in it—the night of that summer's Labor Day party—I hadn't known it was going to be the final time. A car crept up Hempstead, the headlights casting a window-shaped trapezoid across the ceiling. I knew the circuit—the light traversing the wall next to the vanity, creeping up the white ceiling tiles, then elongating and disappearing in the middle of the room. If the trapezoid blinked off there, the car contained strangers, revving up to 114. If it continued across the ceiling, it was my parents returning after a night out, turning into the driveway, driving the diamond into its home berth above my bed before my father shut off the engine. When that happened, I was safe from all the night sounds that had unsettled me since we were sent to bed. I couldn't sleep, even then. I followed each transit of light, hoping. When the light hovered and stopped, my parents were home and everything would be okay.

“It's quiet up here,” she said. Her knuckles rested against my thigh.

“It is, isn't it,” I said. She looked into my face. Her eyes glistened in the dark. Then she shut them, screwing them down like she was concentrating very hard, and she pursed her lips.

Why me? She was going out with Nick, but maybe she wasn't anymore. Certainly all the evidence pointed to the conclusion that she wanted me to kiss her. The tale of the childhood smooch, the phone call yesterday, her current pose—oh, let's stop there, I think we have what they call a preponderance, good people of the jury But why? I reviewed our recent encounters. Had I been cool or said something funny? Accidentally brought forth the winning parts of me? I couldn't think of anything outside of my usual shtick. Maybe my Bauhaus T-shirt was finally kicking in, advertising my sophisticated musical tastes. Did she like Bauhaus, too? It was unlikely. She seemed pretty New Edition. It occurred to me that Nick looked a lot like Bobby Brown. Was she trying to get back at Nick for something?
I wasn't the person you made out with to make someone jealous. I was the person you made out with to make someone pity you, like, look how far I've fallen since you left me, what with the far-off stare and general air of degradation. I was missing something. My braces were off. But that seemed such a trivial thing. I was a dummy for skipping my appointments. I could have been doing stuff like this all the time, apparently. I thought of Emily Dorfman sliding her long fingers around mine and now Melanie Downey perched on my bed like a nymph in a painting by one of the Old Masters or like one of the buxom camp counselors in
Friday the 13th
, about to burst out of her cherry hot pants. The girls had to reach out to me. I was too involuted. They had to pull me out of myself. Pull me where? As if it were better outside, with the rest of the world. I needed people to be able to see past my creaky facade in order to prove their worth, but when they did see past it, I refused to accept it. If people looked inside, surely they'd quickly discover there wasn't much to see.