The Last Life (17 page)

We were shown to our rooms, Becky, Rachel and I to one broad square downstairs, a wall of windows, with twin beds and a truckle, all made up for us. Isaac and Chad were in the next room, and our windows and theirs opened onto a shared patio, from which steps led down to a dirt path to the beach. Lily and Charlotte shared a bigger room across the hall. Next to that was a playroom, graveyard of discarded toys, a tangle of bats and nets and life jackets. The grown-ups resided two floors up, on the far side of the house, out of the way.

"You're on the little bed," Becky said to Rachel, "because you're the littlest."

Rachel didn't complain. She opened the door to the patio and went to knock on the boys' window.

"Ike," she was saying, "open up. Let's take Anchor down to the beach for frisbee!"

"It's almost dinnertime," Becky called.

Rachel stuck her head back in. "Buzz off, you. If they say we can, then it's okay. You can't boss me here."

"Whaddaya think?" Becky asked me, bouncing on the edge of her bed. "Cool, huh?"

I concurred.

"We can come and go and they don't care. It's great." She sighed. "I wish we had a house like this."

"At home, in France, we live by the sea," I said. "Not quite so close as this, but close."

Becky didn't seem interested. She rummaged in her suitcase and pulled out a bathing suit. "I wish I'd made Mom buy me a new one," she said. "I look like the Hindenburg in this."

"I'm sure you don't." The suit was light blue, with little yellow flowers on it. "I bet the color really suits you."

"I want a bikini, y'know? Something that gets you noticed, that's sexy. Or even a different color. Mom wouldn't let me have black."

I had two suits in my case: a flowered bikini and a black tank. "You can borrow one of mine if you like."

"As if," Becky snorted. "Like it would fit me."

"I'm sure it would."

She sighed again. "What do you think, of them? Really?"

"They seem nice."

"The parents, yeah. They make Mom nicer, too. She's so busy trying to prove that we're as well-adjusted as they are that she stops being a freak. More or less. But what about, y'know, them?"

"I didn't get much of a sense yet. They all seem very friendly. And the blond girl—which one is she?"

"Lily."

"She's beautiful, like a model."

Becky made a noise in her nose. "I guess. They're in college, those two. They treat me like I'm about twelve. Most of the time. But, y'know, Chad?"

"He seems nice too."

"So, do you think he's cute?"

"Yeah, sure. I guess so."

"Maybe you should sleep with him, don't you think?"

"What?"

"For the first time. Like we talked about, remember? He has really nice arms, and great hair, don't you think? And he wouldn't, y'know, make fun of you or anything."

"Why don't you sleep with him? I don't even know him. And you're the one who's so eager to do it."

"Yeah, well." She turned back to her bathing suit. "This suit is gross. I hate it."

I should have guessed that Chad was Becky's Thibaud. That she had pined for him for years, played games hoping he would notice. I'm sure that if I saw us all now, today, from afar, I would recognize it at once. At the beach, at meals, the afternoon we spent wandering the streets of the nearest town (along, it seemed, with a full half of America's well-heeled youth and many of their parents), Becky joked and pressed Chad on my attention, and his on me. It was her way of allowing herself conversation with him, and her way of forcing his value upon me; but I took her at her word, and flirted as best I could with this dappled representative of American boy-manhood, on his way to his final year at St. Paul's, and thence to the impressive college (Princeton, as it happened) that the Spongs did not, like Ron and Eleanor, hope, but rather knew, their child would attend. From there the steps into freedom were actually steps into the same good-natured imprisonment as his father: the coveted MBA, the family firm, a premature enrobement in grey suiting and suspenders, the Apollonian locks shorn sufficiently to suggest a touch of the madcap behind the reassuring veneer of fiscal responsibility. But all that was in the future, a future so unquestioned and unexamined that Chad, at seventeen, was wholly without anxiety, his sleepy movements so ripe with entitlement that he could afford to be generous, and patient, with everyone around him, from his father to little Ike, to the Robertsons and me.

For Chad, I was novel in ways Becky simply could not be. He, like me, could feel the liberating irrelevance of my presence (I did-n't have to be borne, lived with; I was there but soon wouldn't be; I was something different), and, I suppose, without flattering myself, that he found me attractive. On Saturday night, the third night, when we barbecued en masse on the beach and sat (exactly like something out of an American film; I could not have planned it better), after our gritty pork chops and blackened corn cobs had been discarded, young and old alike around the fire with a guitar, he offered me, not Becky, his sweatshirt against the night breeze, and he wanted to show me, further along the sand at a point of total darkness, the configuration of the stars: Orion's Belt; the Dippers, big and little; reclining Cassiopeia; the Pleiades, in their tiny clustered twinkle.

We strayed for only a few minutes from the fireside, and never more than a hundred feet, but it was enough for even Rachel to assume that something was up.

"Do you really like him?" she asked later, in bed, her knees to her chest and her eyes alight. "Will you go with him?"

"We leave on Monday, silly," I said. "He was just showing me the stars."

"Yeah, right," said Becky, from her bed against the far wall. "Sure. You're such a tease, Sagesse."

"A what?"

"A cock-tease. You lead guys on."

"I do not."

"Puh-lease. You make out you couldn't care less, and then you're all over him." She batted her eyelashes in sarcastic imitation and put on a strong French accent. "Oh
oui,
Chad. Yes please, Chad, take me avay and show me ze starrs."

Rachel hooted.

"That's just mean. You know that's not fair."

"Oh, ze French darling iz not 'appy. Poor leede zing."

"Come on, Becky. Don't be so ... don't."

Becky's smile was not entirely friendly. Her freckles looked like spots.

"Well," she said, "I just think you should know, if you're doing that innocent French girl act, that this is America, and here you either put up or shut up. You can't go around leading guys on and then not, y'know, deliver."

"You're making a big fuss about nothing. What was I supposed to do, say I didn't want to see the stars?"

"I wanted to see them too," said Rachel.

"There," Becky said, "you could've asked if anyone else wanted to come along. So he wouldn't get the wrong idea. And you didn't need to take his sweatshirt."

"I was cold. I gave it back."

"Ze leede zing vas cold. Poor leede zing."

"I don't get what you're so angry about. It doesn't matter. Surely it doesn't matter?"

"Well, Shirley, it does. Because Chad's a really nice guy."

"I know that."

"And I can tell he has a crush on you."

"He does, Sagesse," Rachel said. "It's totally obvious."

"And I don't want him to get hurt. That's all."

"You guys, we leave the day after tomorrow."

"Tomorrow, actually," said Rachel. "It's after midnight."

"Whatever. But it doesn't matter, is my point."

"What about the party tomorrow night?" Becky said.

"Tonight," Rachel corrected.

"What about it?"

"Yeah, well." Becky slid under the sheets and turned to face the wall.

"You're not really mad at me, are you?"

"Of course she's not," said Rachel, getting up to turn out the light. "I wish we could sleep with Anchor in here."

"Gross," said Becky, into her pillow but loudly. "You're totally gross, Rach. Anchor stinks. And he's always trying to lick your face."

"I love him."

"You're totally gross."

I laughed at them both and thought myself forgiven.

The party the next evening was, like the Robertsons' visit, an annual event. At once cookout and cocktail party, it gathered the summer residents (or at least those of a certain stature) and sprinkled them on the shore and in the house and on the various decks. It was a party for all ages, their hair still wet from the sea, their summer cottons mysteriously crisp. According to Eleanor, we were mingling with senators and policy makers and even a writer or two, although none of the names she mentioned meant anything to me. Ron, I could tell, was nervous about the party: his laughter was almost constant, almost frightening, and then in the moments when he stood alone, his face lapsed into the slackness of utter desolation, and he even neglected to pluck at his beard in the delicate manner he usually affected to evoke thoughtfulness.

There were white-haired and hairless men, and women weathered and not, made-up and not, all laughing earnestly and reaching out to brush Amity Spongs mandarin gauze arm as she slipped among them, the consummate hostess, to rescue the fallen: the husbands and wives abandoned only to each other, or the bespectacled, academic-looking men whose very demeanor flashed "conversational death" as surely as if it had been spelled in neon over their heads. There were young couples, too, in their late twenties or thirties, whose central preoccupation was with their children—so many of these latter fair, all of them under seven or so. The women of this set contrived to appear both glamorous and exhausted, their crows' feet a badge of maternal loveliness, their tolerance for the clutching and pummeling and wailing of their toddlers infinite.

There were, for me, further revelations of the Spongs' floated world. I spent some time in conversation with a robust, freckled young woman named Abby who, while stoking her square frame with canapés from a tray that she had all but sequestered to ensure private consumption, and in between licking her fingers and quaffing her gin and tonics as if they were water, assured me that her whole life had changed since, the previous winter, at just sixteen, she had finagled her way into the circuit of adult cocktail parties in Boston, on the Cape and, upon occasion, as far afield as the Hamptons. I did not know what or where the Hamptons were, and long afterwards imagined them to be a supremely elegant couple living in rural Massachusetts, and an invitation to their home the very acme of Boston society.

I suffered Abby for as long as I was able, my proximity to the punch bowl a soothing compensation for her company, and by the time I escaped to search for Becky the party and its guests had taken on a roseate glow, a benevolent softness attributable not solely to the twilight but also to the ease of my drink-warmed limbs.

I wandered smilingly, glass in hand, from scene to scene, past Ron, who had not seen either of his daughters in some time, past Amity Spong, who directed me down to the shore. I was then briefly waylaid by Eleanor, eager to introduce me to the Harvard French professor with whom she was conversing, but she released me almost immediately when it became clear that neither he—who saw a virtual child before him—nor I—who saw a schoolteacher—could muster the will to discuss France, that bloated, vague myth of France which meant too much but different things to both of us; and that, this aside, we had nothing in common.

Becky I found some way along the sand, at the edge of the trees, sitting cross-legged with her blue cotton dress hiked up into a small pond around her. She was surrounded by several teenagers I did not know, and as I approached I caught the now familiar acrid-sweet waft of marijuana smoke. Only as I dropped down beside her did I realize that I had taken up a place between her and Chad: his back had been to me, and I hadn't recognized his dark blazered form.

"Hey." He put his arm around my back and passed a pilfered bourbon bottle, half empty already, into my lap. "We wondered where you'd got to. I told Becky to go find you, 'cause you were missing all the fun—"

"And I told him to go find you himself." Becky's cheeks were flushed, and her ringlets trailed at the edges of her face. Her lips were moist. She emanated disarray.

"Had a few?" I asked. "I'll need to catch up."

"Go on then." Chad's hand, still on the bottle and in my lap, jiggled it back and forth. "Drink up."

Conversation in the group was idle. Several strands, all involving escapades of illicit alcohol or drug consumption and ensuing run-ins with parents or the law, seemed to weave in and out around me, overlapping and too effortful to follow. I took a swig from the bottle and moved to pass it on to Becky.

"Again. You've gotta catch up. Drink double."

I drank again. "What about the parents?" I asked.

"They don't care," Chad said, his attention on the joint that was following the bottle around the circle. "They're doing their thing, and we're doing ours. Relax."

"Yeah, Sagesse. Relax." Becky, passing the bottle, had the bitter tone of the night before. "They aren't even your parents. So chill. 'I ahm so vorreed, ze parents might puneesh moi.' You can't do anything wrong, so just have fun. Let Chad here show you a good time." She winked, grotesquely.

What followed I still consider an American initiation. It could never have been part of my familiar—my former—circle by the pool at the Bellevue. Given the choice, I would have cleaved to Becky, rather than lose her friendship over Chad, in whom my fancy was only passingly, and passively, engaged; but I could not make this clear, in the seaside huddle, and still remain the girl Becky had decided I was, who I wanted to be: cool, indifferent and selfish. Chad put his hand on my knee to attract my attention (the bottle coming round again); Becky was jealous. I turned initially towards her, not him, and saw her features distorted by a narrowed glare.

I should perhaps have stood and ambled off, back to Eleanor and her French professor, or even to the odious Abby. I might have found Rachel and Isaac, the safe shore of childhood. But it wasn't possible. I still hoped to prove my friendship for Becky, to show that I wasn't a tease or a drip. So I stayed, planted on the edge of the gathering, half-smiling, attuned only to the rhythm of the circling bottle (when it was empty, another appeared miraculously in its stead, and travelled, albeit more slowly, around and around again), and its minion, the glowing ember of marijuana, which, likewise, replenished itself and kept circulating.