Sex earmuffs. He tucked the phrase away, hoping to remember it later. Meanwhile, Danny had squirmed out from underneath him and was sitting on the edge of the bed, picking at a scab on his knee. “Look,” Dan muttered. “Maybe it’s okay if I just—you know—don’t.”
“Are you a homo?” Hal demanded.
“Fuck you,” said Danny, and shoved him with both hands, which was the minimum acceptable response to such a query. Hal didn’t actually think Danny was a homo. He wasn’t sure what Dan’s story was, if he was shy, or just picky or what, but it didn’t matter. Hal was the class president, he was Vice Admiral, and if he had to personally drag each one of his men between some girl’s spread legs, like a lieutenant hauling his wounded soldiers off the beaches of Normandy, he’d do it.
“Okay, then,” he said. “Tonight’s your night. You know that girl I’ve been talking to? Little chickie from the beach?”
Danny looked queasy, which Hal ascribed to either the afternoon’s beer or the epic amounts of Fireball whiskey they’d consumed the night before. Maybe both. “Isn’t she your…” Danny’s eyelashes, absurdly long for a boy, fluttered as he groped for a word, knowing that nothing like “girlfriend” could apply. Not to a local, a townie they’d met a few weeks ago.
Hal thumped Danny’s shoulders, grinning. “Lucky for you, I don’t mind sharing.” Hal had been flirting with her, chatting her up, cultivating the girl, like a farmer tending his fields, for just this purpose. She wasn’t his type, but she was a type: young for her age, and starry-eyed, a girl who’d be honored that these prep-school gods, these future masters of the universe, were even paying attention to her. A girl who’d do anything, with a little fifty-proof inducement. A break-glass-in-case-of-emergency girl, and Dan was an emergency, if ever there’d been one. Hal clapped him on the back, the way his own father had frequently clapped him on the back. It was the single gesture of affection Vernon Shoemaker was capable of deploying with his boys.
“Get ready, soldier. Tonight’s your night.”
* * *
Most of the other girls at the bonfire wore cutoffs and college sweatshirts and practical ponytails to keep the wind from whipping their hair in their faces, but the girl from the beach was floating around in a stupid white dress, like the angel on top of a Christmas tree, with her hair down around her shoulders. Worse, she was clinging to him, like a barnacle stuck to a ship’s bottom. Hal knew he’d have to get things going—obviously Danny was not going to take the lead—so he gave her his most charming smile and handed her a cup of punch, which was mostly vodka, with just enough juice mixed in to hide the taste. “Here you go, beautiful,” he said. “Bottoms up.” She gave him a shy smile, and drank. For the next hour he kept her cup full, being his most charming, solicitous self, even though he had his eye on a blonde who was filling out her cutoffs and her UMass sweatshirt in a way this girl never would.
She touched his arm. “I need to go for a li’l walk,” she whispered. Hal mentally kicked himself, wondering if he’d given her too much to drink, if she’d puke while Danny was fucking her. He’d had that happen a few times, plus one girl had gotten so drunk that she’d peed in his bed when they’d finished. Not fun.
Hal watched as she stumbled off into the dunes. When the girl had disappeared from view, he summoned Brad Burlingham, aka “Bubs,” to keep an eye on her. “You got it, chief,” said Bubs, and giggled his creepy giggle. Hal ignored him and went to find Danny, who was standing at the water’s edge, chucking shells into the waves, without even a beer or a flask to hand.
“Come on, fella,” he said, and recited the unofficial class motto. “No man left behind.”
* * *
Except Danny couldn’t do it. With Bubs watching, giggling, holding the girl’s wrists, and calling out encouragement, Danny kissed her neck and her chest and worked at removing her bra. He was pawing clumsily at the clasp when the girl woke up enough to slur out the words “I love you.” That had been the end of Danny. He’d backed away as if the girl was on fire, and crouched on his heels in the sand, looking sick.
“I… no. I can’t, man.”
“Come on,” Hal said, his voice impatient. “She wants it!”
Danny shook his head. “I’m not feeling so good.” He didn’t look very good, Hal had to admit. His face looked pale and sweaty, his eyes wide, the irises ringed with white.
“You want me to go first?” Hal asked, looking down at the girl. When the girl didn’t answer, he sighed, bidding a mental farewell to Miss Junk in the Trunk. “Fine.” He reached into his pocket for a condom, ripping the package open with his teeth, thinking about that old song, about how if you can’t be with the one you love, you’ve got to love the one you’re with. “Let me show you how it’s done.” Danny sat on the edge of the dune, watching, and Bubs held on to the girl’s arms as Hal bent to the task.
1990
“It catches up with you,” said the older man.
“What’s that?” asked Hal. The words came out sounding more like wass’at? His tongue tended to get mushy after his eighth or ninth beer, and his eighth and ninth beer had both been some time ago.
It was a beautiful night in New Hampshire, the first night of Emlen’s three-day-long reunions, and there were tents set up all along the quad, one for every class celebrating a reunion, all the way back to the Class of 1940. The sounds of a cover band playing “She Loves You” for the Class of 1960 competed with the DJ spinning “Push It” for the newest graduates in the Class of 1990. The spring air smelled of lilacs. The darkness softened the hard edges of the marble and granite buildings, and the trees were clothed in fresh, young green.
All afternoon and into the night, Hal had been reliving his glory days with his Emlen brothers. Remember that road trip to Foxwoods? Remember the R.E.M. concert? Remember that summer at the Cape? Some of the guys had brought girlfriends, and one, Dennis Hsiu, had even brought a wife, but as the night had progressed the women had peeled off, retreating back to the dorm rooms or to hotels in town.
At the sound of the other man’s sigh, Hal turned around. The alum—Hal thought he had to be forty-five, maybe even fifty—looked wistful as he peered out over the campus, and Hal remembered what he’d said. “What catches up?” he asked, taking time to form each word with care.
“Time,” said the man. He’d given the beer in his hand a rueful look. “And booze.” He’d drained the bottle and set it down. “All through college, all through law school, it was nothing but wine and lots of women. Monday mornings—and sometimes Tuesdays, and sometimes Fridays—I’d wake up, stick my finger down my throat, chew up a few breath mints, have a shot of vodka to keep my hands steady, and drive in to the office.”
Hal nodded. He’d had a few mornings like that himself since starting law school. Maybe more than a few.
“Then, one Monday morning, I’m at work. I’m on my knees in the corporate bathroom, praying to the porcelain god, and my boss walks in. He sees me, and says, ‘Walker, it’s time to put away childish things.’ Then he turns around and walks out the door.”
“Huh.” Hal wondered if Walker was going to give him some Alcoholics Anonymous–style speech, and tell him that the first step toward solving his problem was admitting he had one. “I don’t have a problem,” he said, aware that the slurred, sloppy sound of the words made him sound like a liar.
Walker shook his head, giving Hal a good-natured smile. “You’re still young. You can take it. But like I said, it catches up. Eventually, you have to find something to keep you grounded. Something to send you home before last call some of the time, or stay in instead of going out every once in a while. An anchor.”
Hal looked and saw the gold wedding band on the other man’s hand. So this wasn’t a pitch for AA; it was a pitch for marriage. He wondered if the man had a sister he was trying to unload, or maybe a sister-in-law.
“Wha’ ’appans…” Hal shut his mouth, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and started again. “What happens if you don’t
wanna?”
The man picked up his bottle and began picking at the corner of the label with his thumbnail. In the distance, Hal could hear the men of Emlen singing the alma mater, “This Happy Land.”
“There were fifty-four men in my class,” Walker said. “This is our twentieth, and we’re already down five.” He lifted a finger for each cause of death he named. “Liver cancer. Car accident. AIDS.”
Hal opened his mouth. He had a few things to say about that last one, but before he could get them out, Walker added, “And two suicides. One guy used a gun. The other one drank himself to death. Booze and cocaine. Took longer, but it got him to the same place.” The man had a half-smile on his face. Hal couldn’t see his eyes. “I wish there’d been someone to talk to me—to all of us—the way I’m talking to you. To tell us that’s what women are for. They ground us. They keep us in line.” He clapped Hal on the shoulder and said, “Find yourself a good woman. Go get yourself grounded.” And then, whistling the tune of “This Happy Land,” he walked off into the night.
1995
“Do you ever think about it?” asked Danny Rosen.
“Think about what?” asked Hal. It was Saturday night or, technically, Sunday morning, and Hal’s class had been assigned the school’s boathouse for the celebration of their tenth reunion. Hal and five or six others had taken cigars out to the dock, which wobbled slightly as Danny approached and came to sit beside him. Danny had put on a few pounds since his coxswain days, and he’d grown a beard, probably to compensate for his disappearing jawline. He no longer looked elfin. Now he looked like a hobbit. One of the old ones. Bilbo Baggins, or someone like that.
In the distance, Hal could hear Brad Burlingham, telling some joke. Voices carried, out here, over the water, and he could hear “… and she says, ‘That’s what the stick is for!’ ” followed by Brad’s loud, braying laugh. Brad sounded drunk. Brad always sounded drunk these days. Whenever Hal saw him, at reunions or at one of their summer weekends, he was always at least half in the bag, and he never made a move without a hip flask. It was getting to the point that Hal was starting to wonder if Brad had a problem. Hal himself had stopped drinking except for Friday and Saturday nights, and, even then, he tried to limit himself, stopping before he got to a point that would leave him impaired on Monday mornings.
He turned back to Danny Rosen. “Think about what?” he asked again.
“That summer,” said Danny. Hal looked at him, puzzled. “The party,” Danny prompted, and lowered his voice. “The girl. The one you…” His voice trailed off.
Hal still had no idea what Danny was talking about, but he could see that Dan the Man looked wretched. There were circles under his eyes, and Hal had noticed earlier that his fingernails were bitten to bloody nubs.
“There was a girl. A townie. A babysitter or an au pair or something. The last night, we had a party on the beach.”
“Oh, yeah!” The memory was cutting through the fog of Hal’s drunkenness. “She was s’posed to be for you!” Shit. What had her name been? Dana? Delores? “But then you couldn’t, so I did!”
“Hal, I’m gay.”
Hal blinked a few times. He peered at Danny, waiting for the punch line, as more laughter came drifting over the water. “Huh?”
“I’m gay,” Danny repeated. “I’m—I’m in a relationship. With a man. I’m in love.”
“Oh.” Hal blinked a few more times and rubbed his eyes. If Danny had dropped this bomb back when they’d been roommates at Emlen, Hal would have had a different response. At eighteen, there was no way he’d have been comfortable with some ass bandit sleeping six feet away, but now? “Good for you,” he said, a little dubiously. “If you’re happy, I’m happy.” Hal looked around. Cy Coffey and Eric Feinberg were sitting on the far edge of the dock, and, back on the land, four or five more guys were playing quarters.
As for Danny, he didn’t look happy, or like a man in love. He looked awful, Hal thought. Haunted. Miserable.
“Do people know?” he asked. “Your folks?”
“Not yet,” Danny said shortly. “And that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about what happened with that girl, that summer.”
Hal’s brain felt very foggy, like every thought required extra amounts of effort. “Okay.”
“Hal…” Danny rubbed the side of his face. “I think you raped her.”
Hal stared, trying to make sense of the words, trying to fit them into his memories of the night, before shaking his head. “Nah.”
“She was passed out! And Bubs was…” He lowered his voice, looking over his shoulder to make sure that Brad wasn’t listening. “Bubs was holding her down.”
“Nah,” Hal said again, even as he wondered if that was right, and exactly what had happened. The night in question, and the girl in question, had been many nights and many girls ago. “She was drunk. We all were drunk. But I didn’t force her to do anything. She didn’t tell me to stop.”
“I don’t think she could have told you anything,” Danny said, his voice cold. “I don’t think she could talk.”
Hal shook his head, trying to clear it. “Okay,” he said. “Say you’re right. Say I raped her. What’m I supposed to do about it now?”
“I don’t know!” Danny sounded anguished. “Do you know her name? Do you know how we can find her?”
Hal felt a trill of alarm at Danny’s “we.” Did Danny think they were in this together? Was Danny proposing some kind of joint confession? “I’m not sure I knew her name.” Except, just then, it popped up into his mind. Not Dana. Not Delores. Diana. But he was absolutely not sharing that particular factoid with Danny. “I know she worked as a mother’s helper…” Hal could picture the girl, though: her hair, long and brown, the silly sundress she’d worn. He felt another unfamiliar jolt of fear as he considered whether Danny was contemplating anything as stupid as going to the authorities.
“So what’re you going to do?” Hal asked.
“I don’t know,” said Danny, sounding hopeless. “I don’t know if there’s anything we can do. We’ve just got to live with it, I guess.”
Hal shrugged. If Dan wanted to eat himself up with guilt over something that had happened a decade ago, Hal wasn’t going to stop him. He supposed it explained Dan’s life. Working in that shitty public school in Trenton, taking in foster kids and stray puppies, all of it made sense. Dan’s entire life had been atonement, one long act of contrition. The same way, maybe, that Brad Burlingham, now coming off his second stint in rehab, at present trying to drown himself in whiskey, had turned his whole life into an attempt at escape. Which begged the question: What was Hal’s life going to be?
Hal clapped Danny on the shoulder and used the other man’s body to lever himself upright. “You know what we can do? We can clean up our acts. Go forth and sin no more,” he said, his voice loud and confident. As he spoke, he heard an echo of the man he’d met at his fifth reunion. It catches up with you. You need things to keep you on the straight and narrow. A wife, a family. Anchors. It’s time, Hal decided. Time to go forth and sin no more. Time to find some anchors and get his house in order, and claim the glorious future that he deserved.
2019
Hal had been expecting the call ever since Saturday night, and when, at ten in the morning the Monday after the party, his administrative assistant (you couldn’t call them secretaries anymore) said, “I have your brother-in-law on the line,” Hal sighed, mentally spat on his fists, and said, “Put him through.”
Danny sounded just as hysterical as Hal had imagined he would; just as panicked and dismayed. “What are we going to do?”
“About what?” Hal asked.
“About Diana!” Danny shouted. “About the fact that she thinks you raped her, and that I watched, and she’s found us!”
“True. But what can she do?” Hal asked. “Even if she’s got a case about being assaulted—which, legally speaking, is dubious—the statute of limitations in Massachusetts expired years ago. It would be her
word against ours.”
“Have you not been reading the news for the last year and a half?” Danny’s voice was shrill. He sounded, Hal thought, like his sister at her most infuriated, and he could feel a headache forming, like a cap tightening around his skull. “People believe women. They believe them more than men.”
“Not every time,” Hal said, but Danny talked right over him.
“What if she told someone? Or kept a diary? What if she had bruises, and took pictures? Jesus, what if she got pregnant?”
“Would you stop?” With two fingers, Hal pinched the bridge of his nose and ignored the prickles of sweat under his arms and above his lip. “If she wants to try to come forward, if she thinks she’s got a story, the first chapter involves her wandering down to the beach and getting shit-faced. How does that make her look?”
“You raped her, and Bubs held her down, and I watched. How does that make us look?” Danny countered. “She was fifteen years old, Hal. She was basically Beatrice’s age. Don’t you feel anything about this? Don’t you feel the tiniest little bit of remorse?”
Hal didn’t answer. He was remembering the speech his father had given him the morning they were set to depart for his first year at Emlen. Vernon had thumped him on the back, then reached into his pocket and tossed a box of condoms on top of the duffel bag on his bed.
“There’s going to be a lot of young ladies who are going to be looking to trap you as you get older,” his dad said. “So be good.” He’d topped off his speech with a broad wink. “And if you can’t be good, be careful.” Hal wondered if Diana’s mother had given her a speech, about not drinking, or going to parties alone, or throwing herself at boys. Or if maybe Diana had gotten a different kind of speech. Maybe she’d been given that yellow bikini the same way Hal had been given the condoms. Maybe, instead of Be careful, her mom had said, Be smart. There’re a lot of rich boys on the Cape in the summer, and maybe you’ll be able to get your hooks into one of them.
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