“Look, man,” the guy is shouting to Calvin above a synth-pop song that Ruby recognizes as the theme to St. Elmo’s Fire (“Wanna be a man in motion, all I need is a pair of wheels”)—the likely trigger for this entire pointless conversation—“I’m not saying I like this reality, okay? But after college, man, life is gonna force us to make tough choices.”
“That—” Calvin cries, rising up off the couch a few inches, “is exactly the brainwashing bullshit I’m talking about! This movie makes you think your only real option is to fucking settle down.” His arm goes wide for emphasis, and for a split second Ruby sees a twinkle of sunlight on the silver bracelet at his wrist. Then—wham—his elbow smashes into her beer cup just as she’s taking a sip.
The cup crunches into a ring around her nose. Alcohol floods her sinuses, rushes down her throat. She gags and spits, shakes her head. It’s like being jabbed inside her brain by two fat, wet fingers. Beer splatters her glasses, blurring her vision. The flattened cup lands in her lap. Her skirt is soaked.
“What happened?” Calvin asks, almost scolding her.
“Your arm happened,” she says, rising to her feet, coughing, flinging droplets from her hands.
“Hey! How about a towel?” he calls out to no one in particular, to the room at large. She recognizes the tone of his voice, rank with the confidence of someone whose needs have always been attended to, by parents, by his sister, by tutors and hired help.
She removes her sunglasses. Everything sharpens, becomes more defined, as if up until now it had all been a grainy movie on a far-off screen. Faces turn in her direction. A guy staggering nearby gets a look at her and says, “Nasty!” All of a sudden she is nine instead of nineteen. Small, confused, angry. These kids all around her, most of whom are younger than her, seem cool and worldly compared to the public mess she is.
She wipes wet snot from her nose and looks up at Calvin, nearly a foot taller than she is. Calvin, who has more or less ignored her since they got here, who hasn’t yet introduced her to his sister, who made her fill her own cup from the keg, the very same cup he’s just rammed in her face. He reaches his hand around her back and rubs her shoulder in little circles, asking, “Are you okay?”
She finally hears genuine concern in his voice, but he still hasn’t found her a towel. She doesn’t even know where the bathroom is, because they haven’t gotten past the couch since they arrived.
Another guy steps up, a solid, jocky man-boy with a button nose, thick neck, and dark, wavy hair. “I got ya,” he says. He yanks his football jersey up and over his head. “Use this.”
“Look, she’s with me. I’ll take care of it,” Calvin says.
She takes the shirt and runs it across her cheeks and neck, dabbing at the excess, but she’s so wet it doesn’t really help. Her gaze lands on the guy’s bare torso, rippled with dark curls, as muscular a body as she’s ever seen this close up. She feels heat flare in her neck—she imagines he can see her blush. “Thanks,” she says. “Where’s the bathroom?”
“Through the kitchen,” Calvin interjects, a long arm pointing through the crowd. “That’s my guess.”
“Stay here,” she tells Calvin.
Shirtless Guy steps closer. “Want me to show you, baby?”
He wobbles a bit, clearly buzzed, but he has her attention. His lips are red as punch and probably taste like wine. She imagines saying yes—yes, show me the way—and once there, pulling him in with her, closing the door and kissing him on the lips. He’s a fantastic kisser, experienced, sensitive, the kind of guy who holds your head carefully in his palms while his tongue spreads your lips, the kind of guy with soft curls on his chest, soft like the fur on a big, gentle dog.
But Calvin’s standing between them. Calvin whose chest is smooth as a girl’s, a baby-soft surface too much like her own.
Last night, back in Manhattan, getting ready for the weekend but already regretting it, she found herself rehearsing a breakup speech. It had been months since she first understood that something was off. Something physical. She had started pulling away from his kisses—his tongue too hard, like a lollipop in her mouth, his lips too dry, like bread crust. She’d been offering instead her neck, her bare shoulder, any patch of flesh to satisfy him while she looked away and fretted. Last night, she’d looked into the bathroom mirror and mouthed the words, “I don’t need a boyfriend, I need a lover.” It was a word her brother used about the guy he was dating. Peter was Robin’s lover. They were in love, they were having a love affair. She liked the sound of “affair,” the way it held the word “air” inside it—lovers carried upon the air in a private chamber for two, whisked away to somewhere exotic. Calvin was the opposite of that, Calvin was earthbound and too familiar.
She pushes past the stained sofa, past a TV cabinet covered by a plastic tablecloth dotted with puddles of beer and melting ice. Into a dining room, where a noisy drinking game is in full force around a circular wooden table. Then a crowded kitchen. She has to knock into people to get past, muttering, “Excuse you, excuse you.”
From behind her she overhears two girls she’s just blazed past:
“That goth chick just totaled her beer.”
“Do you know her?”
“I think her boyfriend is Alice’s brother.”
“Alice has a brother?”
“Yeah, that tall freak?”
She steps into a dark hallway, mostly empty, no windows. She tries a door on either side—a linen closet with nothing on its shelves except frayed contact paper, then a bedroom with overnight bags piled chaotically along the walls.
She opens another door. Another bedroom. A handful of guys and girls are huddled over a small mound of what looks like cocaine. A half-dozen faces pivot toward her, like button-eyed lemurs in the Central Park Zoo. “Oh, sorry.” She pulls the door shut again.
At the end of the hall, a guy and a girl are making out in front of what must be the bathroom door. She takes her place behind them, leans against the wall, waits for her turn. She wills herself not to cry, she can feel something welling up. I’m stronger than this, she thinks. She’s sticky all over.
She blames Calvin for this mess, but really it’s herself she’s angry at. Calvin told her Alice was renting a house down the shore, and that she was having “a few friends” over for “a little party.” A perfect way for Ruby and him to escape the June humidity for the weekend, he said. But hadn’t she pictured exactly what this party would look like—pictured herself in the midst of not a few friends but a big crowd? She knows the Jersey Shore. Her family spent the occasional summer weekend in towns like Seaside Heights, where they are now, and Wildwood. Boardwalks and packed beaches. Motel rooms with icy air conditioning that carried the whiff of mildew. She used to gaze out the window of their Plymouth at teenagers draped over the porches of rental houses. Longhaired guys air-guitaring to amplified music, girls in bikini tops and cut-off denim shorts, all of them glugging from plastic cups like the one that just smashed her in the face. Her mother disapproved of these people, which was enough of a reason, as a young girl, to be fascinated by them. But she hasn’t been that girl for a long time.
Still, she let herself be persuaded by Calvin. Pressured by his constant need to be told he was right. Always right.
When she first started dating Calvin, she liked that he too felt alienated from other teenagers, their so-called peers. He was the tall guy in the ratty overcoat, hiding his Nordic bone structure and gray eyes behind messy, greasy, white-blond hair. The one who smoked British cigarettes while arguing over coffee at midnight after a film at the Bleecker Street Cinema. He got easily upset about politics—nuclear winter, Third World intervention, anything to do with Ronald Reagan—and he said the way to dissent was not at the voting booth but through “cultural production.” He reminded her a bit of her brother in his outspokenness, though Robin had a daring side that Calvin only imagined he possessed. He railed against “the new morality” but didn’t seem especially interested in sex, and this was fin
e with Ruby. She had made it clear she wasn’t ready to go all the way, thankful that in this one area, he didn’t put pressure on her. She wasn’t really sure why. She might even give over to her suspicion that he might be gay, if he weren’t so fixated on her breasts.
At Columbia he’d made a couple of short films—“critiquing the seduction of advertising,” he said. She’d starred in a scene for him, sitting on a toilet seat under a single high-watt clamp-light in only her bra and tights, brushing her hair while reciting Foucault. She’d had fun doing it—the whole shoot felt stupid and glamorous—but she couldn’t really defend the film when students in Calvin’s workshop accused him of being pretentious. (And maybe the criticism made an impact. Calvin was now working on a more traditional script, set in the world of downtown nightlife. He hadn’t yet shown it to her, though he’d mailed her brother a copy. She wasn’t sure if she felt insulted by that or not.) She never pointed out to him the contradiction of a so-called anticapitalist living off the dividends of his family’s stock portfolio. The problem with Calvin, she had finally figured out, was that underneath it all he was just a spoiled boy. Unable to pick up after himself, used to having things done for him, always expecting. Expecting her to agree with him when he got worked up about a particular topic—and if she disagreed, expecting that she’d eventually be persuaded, or least stymied, by his arguments. It had begun to wear her out. Spending time with your boyfriend isn’t supposed to feel like a battle.
And so last night, she had rehearsed that sentence about needing a lover, but she didn’t say the words out loud. Didn’t want to hurt his feelings. She told herself a weekend down the shore might be a fun vacation. She could ignore the party and play in the surf, like she used to with her brothers when she was little, salt water on her lips, her skin turning pink in the sun.
And that’s what they did, for a little while this morning. She and Calvin went to the beach first. Calvin found parking near the boardwalk in one of those lots where an old retiree in a lawn chair collects the money and keeps an eye on the cars while deepening his lifelong leathery tan. They paid for their beach badges at a wooden stall that reminded her of the one Lucy sat in, in the Peanuts cartoons, with her sign announcing “The Psychiatrist is In. Five Cents.” On the sand, they found a spot amid the endless sprawl of bodies—bodies on blankets, in fold-up chairs, under umbrellas or exposed to the sun, baking their oily flesh. Kids ran in every direction, radios blared the local “hits” station, and the occasional piece of garbage—a soda cup or a Doritos bag—tumbled along the sand, sometimes chased by a conscientious bather but often just carried by on the breeze, ignored by all as someone else’s problem. Seagulls whined, circling above garbage pails stuffed with scraps from lunches.
She stripped down to a bikini, black and relatively modest, bought just for this weekend. Calvin told her she looked like Bettie Page. He peeled off his jeans to reveal old, plaid Bermuda shorts underneath. He left his long-sleeved shirt on and sat up, knees bent, a book balanced there. Eros and Civilization. She knew Calvin wouldn’t go in the water, so she wandered in by herself. She was cautious, afraid of getting knocked over by a wave—aware of her childhood fear of riptides, of a sudden injury. She kept herself in proximity to a family, a young father and mother wrangling a handful of kids diving in and out of the crashing waves. But when she looked back she saw that Calvin had indeed kept her in his sights, peering out over the top of his book.
When she got back to the blanket, she asked him to rub sunblock on her, but he said he didn’t have any, even though she was sure he’d said earlier that he’d packed some, and then they both sulked for a bit. She lay on her back, feeling the sun heating the exposed flesh between her bikini top and bottom. In the sky above, a flock of sea birds flew by in V-formation. An unseasonal migration. A sign that everything shifts and moves, nothing stays in place. She swatted the thought away, squashing the urge to attach meaning—a leftover from the influence of her Catholic Nana, who found “signs and wonders” everywhere, proof of God’s intentions, answers to her prayers. A lot of superstition, or so it seemed now, though back then she saw life that way, too. So she closed her eyes and pretended that she was somewhere more exotic, and that she wasn’t with Calvin. She thought about how she’d have to wait out the rest of the weekend before she broke up with him.
And now, in the hallway, she wonders again why she didn’t just get it over with the night before in New York. Now, instead, her skin feels sunburned and her clothes are covered with beer, and how is she going to get through the rest of this hellish party? Why did she wait? When has waiting ever solved anything?
“Ruby! Right? It’s you? Oh, my God.” She turns around to see a flatchested girl in a pale orange bikini, two tiny triangles of fabric, as if a single slice of Kraft American cheese had been cut in half along the diagonal. Her body is long and lean. She’s nearly as tall as Calvin and has his same thin-boned features. Same shocking whiteness to her hair, though her hair looks clean. So of course this must be Alice. She exclaims, “I can’t believe we haven’t met before!”
“I’ve been here for half an hour,” Ruby says dryly—wondering where Alice has been all this time. “I’m covered in beer.”
“I heard my brother just spazzed out on you. It’s the talk of the party.” Alice holds out to Ruby a brandy snifter with an inch of amber jiggling in its bulb.
“Spaz” suits Calvin, though Ruby could never get away with calling him that. She takes the snifter, which might be leaded crystal—another unlikely object that Alice has brought along for the summer.
“Oh, my God,” Alice repeats. “Come with me.” She pivots and moves down the hall, talking over her shoulder in a jittery stream. “Are you having fun? Do you like the house? We rented last year but closer to the ocean, but it’s totally crazy there, so we decided to rent on this side of Central, but you know it’s too many families over here, so someone’s always calling the cops on us. Nightmare!” She reaches a door and pauses before entering, as if to impart secret rules to Ruby before they step inside. “We’re keeping this room off limits except for me and Cicely and Dorian. They’re the other renters. Have you met them? Cicely is gorgeous, with the biggest breasts you’ve ever seen—she’s probably going to get a reduction, I mean, I would if it were me, but I’m as flat as they come, and between you and me I like it that way. I’m a perfect size two. And Dorian’s just a lush, but she’s sweet. I’ve known her for years, we go to Dalton—I mean we went, we’re graduates now! Free! We have a bathroom off my bedroom that’s strictly entre nous. Comprendéz? I’m not letting all these trashy people, whoever they are, puke in my toilet. Plus, I have like $150 worth of Estée Lauder cosmetics in there, so—”
She pushes open the door, and they enter the room with the coke mirror. “Help yourself,” Alice says. She gestures toward the same group of faces Ruby had barged in on just moments ago. “Attention, all you beautiful people. This is Ruby. She’s from Manhattan, too.”
Ruby waves feebly toward the group, three guys and two girls, a wild-eyed bunch dressed several notches less trashy than the beach bums in the living room and kitchen. The inner circle. She identifies gorgeous Cicely, on the bed in a black-satin Chinese robe, which hangs open, highlighting her remarkable cleavage. She has the kind of trendy, teased-up hair—curly all over, with ironed-straight bangs over her forehead—that defies both gravity and taste. She smiles sweetly and waves at Ruby. Sprawled next to her is a sweaty, red-faced guy wearing a linen blazer over a tank top, wiping a frantic finger across his gums. This guy says, “Fuckin’ welcome and shit.”
There’s a guy next to him wearing only a pink oxford shirt, unbuttoned, a pair of white briefs, and a paisley-patterned necktie wrapped around his forehead.
Necktie Guy sits up straight, legs dangling off the edge of the mattress, thighs spread. He checks Ruby out from head to toe. “Fantastic legs,” he remarks. He then jabs a rolled bill into his right nostril and, in a single, seamless gesture, vacuums up an inch of whit
e from the mirror.
The third girl—this must be Dorian—is the crimped-haired brunette in the pink bikini who Ruby saw shrieking through the living room. Dorian whacks Necktie Guy on the arm—it’s not clear to Ruby if the swat is because he took more than his share of the coke, or because he paid her a compliment. Maybe the latter. Dorian addresses Ruby through a sneer: “What brought you and your fantastic legs to our party?”
“I came with Calvin.”
“Calvino?” says Necktie Guy. “Where is he?”
“I left him in the front room,” Ruby says, “after he totaled his beer all over me.”
“That explains the wet look,” Dorian says. “For sure.”
Ruby forces a smile, as if the spill were merely a bother and not a public humiliation. As if Dorian wasn’t being rude but just clever. In her gesture is an attempt to conjure the blasé sophistication she knows runs through the veins of this crowd. Since moving to Manhattan, she’s been surrounded by kids like these. Adopting their nonchalant manner is a way to blend in, especially when you don’t have the money they do. Besides, she does have nice legs—her mother says her legs are her best feature—but she doesn’t need any coke-wired guy getting all worked up about them. Not in front of his girlfriend. Not here, not now.
But Dorian isn’t done with her yet. “Calvin,” she says, rolling her eyes. “He’s so tedious.”
“You’re tedious, Dorian, especially on coke,” says Necktie Guy. “You should stick to drinking.” This sounds like an insult, but Dorian lifts her mouth to his and they commence a particularly wet tongue kiss.
“Is Calvin your boyfriend?” This comes from the third boy in the room, speaking from the corner, where a sunny window behind him casts him in silhouette.
Ruby senses that this guy been silently watching her all this time. She stares back toward him, wanting a look. After she says yes, he drops his gaze.
Robin and Ruby Page 11
