The Romantics (15 page)

“Oh God,” said Weesie. She was the only one to acknowledge the implicit peril in this statement.

The others shrugged her off. It was their knee-jerk response to pessimism and, in some ways, to everything Weesie said.

“But why would he bolt without saying good-bye?” Annie asked. Once in a while, the girls maintained a minimum level of loyalty, furthering one another’s assertions even if they didn’t support them outright.

“Did it occur to anybody that he ran away,” Tripler asked. But it was more a declaration than a question.

“Why the hell would he run away,” snapped Pete.

“Because he’s having second thoughts,” said Tripler. She punctuated her thesis with an arched eyebrow that functioned like an ellipsis.

“Second thoughts about what? Marrying this?” He gestured at the surrounding property with an expansive flick of the wrist.

Tripler sent her husband a disapproving look, as though he had finally crossed the line between decorum and poor taste, a line that she alone had managed to straddle.

“About what?” Jake asked, taking Tripler’s bait.

“About the trade-off,” Tripler replied. She manufactured a frown designed to display her reluctance to continue.

“Between what and what?” Pete demanded. Unsubstantiated assertions just like this caused most of the fights in their household, and he was happy for the opportunity to try his wife in the court of public opinion.

“Love and money?” Oscar volunteered. He was, after Tripler, the
least guarded—and the most confrontational. But he was a more skilled conversationalist; he shared Tripler’s thirst for controversy but not her need to be at its center.

“Between Laura and Lila,” Tripler corrected.

“Oh come on, you don’t honestly think—” Annie snapped. “What has it been? Ten years?”

“He said it himself,” Tripler snapped back. “I’m not making this shit up.” She scanned the group proudly as though she had just proposed a solution for world hunger. “That whole thing about not showing up to his own wedding. I mean, come on! What more do you want, people?”

Finally, Weesie lost her battle for composure. She meant to reply firmly but found herself yelling instead. “What you’re saying is that the imminent wedding of our best friends, Tom and Lila, has been threatened by the home-wrecking of—”

“Mansion-wrecking,” Jake interrupted.

“Whatever,” sniffed Weesie. “Of our other best friend, Laura.”

Tripler seemed to consider Weesie’s rejoinder in earnest. “Well, yeah,” she said finally. “That’s what I’m saying.”

“That’s really inappropriate,” Weesie snapped. She turned away, disgusted. It was disgraceful for Tripler to let her need for attention taint something as sacred as a wedding.

“Weez, don’t let her get to you,” Pete said. “I just tune her out. Isn’t that right, sweetheart?” Pete punctuated this question with an exaggerated pucker, a request for a kiss that Tripler summarily rejected.

Weesie nodded, noting the unmistakable sting of Tripler and Pete’s teasing. Now, she felt even more confused. Despite her anger at Tripler, she was too benign to derive any pleasure from Pete’s disloyalty.

“This is outrageous,” Annie piped in. “What are we even discussing? They went out in college, for Christ’s sake. I barely remember the names of my college boyfriends.”

“Honey,” said Tripler, mock patronizing, “that says more about your dating history.”

“This whole thing is preposterous,” Jake interrupted. “And it’s poor taste to discuss it here. You girls should know better.”

“What’s disgraceful,” said Tripler, “is the way she carries on when he’s around. She’s Lila’s maid of honor, for Christ’s sake.”

“Ah,” said Pete. “So that’s what this is about. You wanted Lila to ask you.”

Tripler turned to her husband with profound loathing. To say such a thing in private was criminal, but to say it in front of all of their friends was an unforgivable betrayal.

“What’s disgraceful is the way you trash your friends. Talk about vicious,” Jake said. Ironically, he was, by all accounts, the most unscrupulous among them.

“You’re all full of it,” Oscar declared. He had been conspicuously quiet up to this point. “Has anyone considered something really bad?”

“Like what,” said Annie.

“I don’t know.” Oscar shrugged. “That he drowned or something worse.” He paused, reluctant to voice the next thought.

“What would be worse?”

“I don’t know. Drowning. On purpose.”

Annie turned to Weesie suddenly like an outraged customer demanding service. “Oh my God. What if he’s dead?”

“Now we’re just being dramatic,” said Jake.

“Dramatic or realistic?” asked Oscar. “It’s irresponsible not to ask the question.”

“You always have to stir shit up,” Pete snapped. Tensions between the boys were slower to flare than those between the girls but were more heated when they did.

“Someone had to say it,” said Oscar. “We’re not all as callous as Tripler.”

Tripler’s eyes widened at the attack—its cruelty and unexpectedness.

The group took this as their cue to disperse, anxious to part before the tiff turned into a brawl.

L
aura began to breathe again as she reached the end of the lawn. She stopped just before the grass ended in a ledge, surprised by the distance to the sand. It was a drop of at least six feet, and she had no recollection of descending this height when she had trudged down on her way to the dock. But perhaps this was a function of her distractedness. Of course, she knew the tide was a constant in coastal life, but she had never bothered to think much about it. She only knew, on some vague level, that the tide went in and out, that the schedule of these two things meant it was either high or low, and that one was of great importance to the boats that speckled the horizon.

Standing now, she could only imagine that the ledge was at its highest point—and the tide at its lowest. A sturdy cliff plumbed the ninety-degree drop to the rocky beach. The water lapped every several seconds without managing to touch it. The feat of the cliff’s construction was even more impressive considering the force of the tide. It was less a tide and more a gentle pulse that increased and decreased with the wind and weather, a lovely contribution to ambient noise, a decorative facet.

Aesthetics aside, it paled in comparison to real, formidable waves. It would surely have failed to impress those who expected drama and recreation from their ocean, just as Gardner’s Bay elicited scoffs from hard-core Hamptonites, and the ripples of the Gulf of Mexico amused true Atlantic surfers. But the height and solidity of the cliff succeeded in impressing Laura. It broadcast the formidable power of the water just beyond the bay, boasting its ability to construct and destruct with unerring consistency. It was as though the tide had been sent as the emissary of the ocean, to convey its power, when appropriate, to wreak devastation.

Undaunted, Laura lowered herself to sit with her feet hanging off the ledge, then jumped the remaining distance from the grass to the sand. She walked into an approaching ripple, emboldened by her recent dip, and stood like this, waiting for the next wave, staring into the darkness. As she waited, she kicked herself for her lack of originality—all she needed was a penny to throw into the bay, then to make a heartfelt wish. But she forgave herself for staring as she confronted the enormity of water. It never ceased to awe and terrify.

Perhaps it reflected poorly on her that her first association with the ocean was death. Surely, this was a clear indication of pathological pessimism. But, she couldn’t suppress the sentiment. It was a reflex, like some people’s aversion to snakes. Perhaps she could blame her lack of exposure to the water at a very young age. Unlike her friends, she had not grown up frolicking in a bay, tying and untying sailing knots, buttoning well-starched shorts. She had no basis for the common association between water and pleasure. When she swam in the ocean, she felt agitated, exposed. She was braced for contact with jellyfish—was there a more repugnant, slimy creature in the world? And this awareness took all the fun out of swimming, forcing her to
keep constant watch on the shore, should she need to make a quick escape. What was the fun of that?

It was not long before she began to indulge yet more morbid thoughts. As she stared at the black water, she imagined Tom floating underneath, his eyes wide with the shock of a sudden gruesome death. In her hideous apparition, a fluorescent jellyfish floated past, blinking with a cadaverous green light. It was outlandish, to be sure, but it wasn’t as though she thought he’d been mauled by sharks—were there even sharks in Maine? But there was a lurking possibility in her mind that Tom had come to some harm. And it was pure hubris on her friends’ part, she felt, not to entertain this possibility. Tom had been comprehensively smashed when they saw him last, had long surpassed the level of intoxication that would impair his ability to walk or swim in reasonably rough water. And even worse, though he was known to drink with some frequency and intensity, alcohol had always had a strange impact on him, acting on his moods as both a tonic and a poison.

In fact, it was this that scared Laura more than any of the earlier considerations. It was not that he drank more than most, but rather that it affected him more potently, making him intermittently deliriously happy or suicidally depressed. Once, freshman year, after a particularly wild bender, he had hoisted himself through her dormitory window and onto her fire escape, claiming that he would jump if she didn’t swear to marry him right then and there. And then, there were the countless soggy nights they’d passed together at house parties and Brooklyn dive bars during which he betrayed slightly more weakness for whiskey than the average guy. It’s not that she ever believed he would make good on his threats to use his necktie as a noose, more that she was alarmed by the speed of his transition from reason to recklessness.

Laura did her best to curb her negative thinking. Tom was fine, she decided. He was an intercollegiate champion. She had cheered for him at countless victorious swim meets in school, that is, until Lila supplanted her as his number one fan. She pictured him now, hurtling toward the shore, swimming his unbeatable butterfly like some sort of mythological beast, half-man, half-porpoise. But he would not have swum the butterfly tonight. He would have swum the crawl. And his crawl, though reliable, was his least favorite stroke. Water in his ears, he used to say—a strange complaint for a swimmer—always tripped him up.

But this was nonsense, catastrophic thinking—and she told herself as much. She was certainly prone to letting her imagination run rampant, but she knew better than to give too much weight to improbable notions. She harbored one other yet-more-implausible idea, a theory so absurd and far-fetched she shuddered to acknowledge it. Even so, she allowed it to take shape in its full, grotesque glory. Somewhere, deep within, she hoped and wondered and, yes, in some way, suspected that the brief time she and Tom had spent together tonight—to be fair, it was not true time together, just time in each other’s presence—had been as cataclysmic for him as it had been for her and that it had suddenly and completely toppled his worldview, necessitating that he stop in his tracks and change the course of his life forever.

They had not exchanged many words before she walked away from their conversation. And surely, awareness of the group’s curiosity had kept them from speaking freely. But it was clear, even in this short time, from the desperate look in his eyes—she could not have hallucinated it—that he was wild with terror and that she had provided a small source of comfort. The coexistence of these two things—terror and comfort—would drive anyone crazy. It was
equivalent to being prisoner in a locked cell and spotting a key just beyond the bars. Though it pained her to see Tom in this state, it gave her some satisfaction, not because she wanted Tom to suffer, but because it verified that her own suffering had perhaps been merited. If there was any better definition of true love, she had yet to hear it.

Still, she subjected her theory to a thorough analysis, reviewing every coded moment of their time together—every syllable exchanged, every eyelash fluttered, every repressed desire. And, of course, there was his strange declaration, his contribution to the drinking game. Had he meant it as a warning, or was it just eerily prophetic that less than an hour before vanishing into the bay he had informed the group of his reluctance to attend his own wedding? Laura’s spirit improved wildly with every new consideration. Smiling now, she experienced an entirely foreign sensation. This one felt nothing like the familiar constriction in her chest. Now, she felt utterly weightless, as though her brain had distilled into smoke that hovered above her body, instructing it to move and feel but from a comfortable distance.

And rather than shun this bizarre sensation—her hazy recollection of freshman psychology yielded the word “depersonalization”—she focused on it, courted it as a monk courts meditation. Hope, she realized, felt unlike any other emotion. And traveling from fear to hope in the span of thirty seconds felt something like flying. It was so intense—at once so exhilarating and unnerving—that she instinctively sought to curb it. She walked towards the bay and stepped into the water as though to extinguish a fire. The temperature brought her back into her body and ostensibly back to earth just in time for her to brace for a new arrival.

“This must be really hard for you,” said Chip. He lay on the
beach, a few feet from the ledge, propped up as though preparing to watch a movie.

Laura deepened her gaze at the water. She entertained an idle and unlikely thought: Perhaps a triumph over blinking would somehow amount to triumph over Chip.

“You drive halfway up to the North Pole to watch the love of your life marry the bane of your existence, and this is how they thank you.”

Laura closed her eyes, shook her head.

“It’s ironic,” said Chip, sitting up. “Asking you, of all people, to find the groom and convince him to show up for his wedding.”

Finally, Laura blinked. Better to blink than scream.