Down the Shore

by Stan Parish

  “Hi,” she said. “Thanks for meeting me. Sorry I’m late.”

  “Thanks for calling,” I said. “Do you want my number so you don’t have to keep calling Clare?”

  “Not really,” she said. “What’s the point? You’ll have a UK phone the next time I need to talk to you.”

  The hostess sat us right away, but there was a moment where we stood awkwardly across from each other while a busboy wiped our table down, both of us passing our eyes over the people around us and the plates in front of them, searching for something to say. I wondered if this had been a bad idea, but Kelsey smiled as soon as we sat down, and asked if I had been getting down the shore. She had cut off most of her hair, and wore what was left at an even length of a few inches, the spiky points echoing her petite nose and the points of her ears. The kitchen sent out a dozen oysters, courtesy of a cook who used to work for us. Kelsey didn’t seem to notice, too caught up in a story about a snapper she had caught the week before on someone’s sailboat off Mustique, a Caribbean island that I had to look up later. The rich bronze of her skin seemed to suck up the buzzy yellow light of the dining room. She slurped an oyster from its shell, and I wondered who she had been with on the boat. We were drinking fast, and the bottle was empty and upended in the ice bucket by the time our entrees dropped. Luckily the table next to us had gotten carried away with the BYO policy; they offered us an open, untouched Chardonnay as they swayed and struggled with their blazers and their purse straps. Kelsey thanked them, and a woman asked her where she’d found the coffee-colored linen jacket she was wearing. Kelsey told her it was something she had made herself.

  “How’s your friend Clare doing?” she asked me.

  “He’s good,” I said. “You heard about his dad?”

  “That’s why I asked.”

  “I mean, he’s a little weird, but I think he’s doing fine. He’s staying at my place, actually. Shit, I meant to tell you: he’s coming to St. Andrews. He just got in last week.”

  “I love how it’s everyone’s plan B,” she said, brushing capers off a piece of lake trout with her fork. “What made you decide to go there?”

  “My guidance counselor said I should hang out there for a year, lie low, maybe transfer.”

  “That’s what she told you? Lie low?”

  “Yeah. I think that’s exactly what she said.”

  “I don’t think she knew what she was getting you into.”

  “What do you mean? It sounds like you hate it.”

  “No. I love it. It’s not for everyone. It works for me. Why do you think Clare is going? Is it because of you?”

  “No,” I said, shifting in my seat, remembering Mike’s reaction when I told him Clare was staying with us. “He didn’t really have another option. Maybe he wants to get out of the states for a while.”

  “He picked the wrong place to escape what happened to his dad, if that’s what you’re saying. Anyway, I’m sure you’ll both do fine. Is there anything you want to know?”

  There was nothing about her that I didn’t want to know, but I realized she was talking about the school, which I had barely thought about since I mailed my deposit.

  “How long is the flight?” I asked.

  “The flight’s not bad. You take a sleeping pill and wake up there.”

  “How about academics?”

  “They’re amazing.”

  “I was kidding.”

  “I know.”

  “How’s your fish?”

  “It’s great,” she said. “I’m not kidding about that. I guess you have good taste.”

  • • •

  After dinner, I walked her to her car, a blue Lexus SUV that Mike would have called a mom mobile, parked just off the Princeton campus. She was digging for her keys and I was trying to think of some way to keep her there when someone called my name. The voice seemed to come from the illuminated rectangle of an open door in a long windowless brick wall. I looked harder and saw three men in white waiter jackets taking a cigarette break just outside the light.

  “Who’s that?” Kelsey asked.

  They worked for my mother on and off, and they were waving me over. I heard music as we drew closer, the strains of a live band taking “Brick House” too fast and too hard somewhere inside.

  “Good to see you, bro,” said a cook nicknamed Pollo for his skinny legs.

  “Nice to meet you,” Kelsey said to them.

  “What’s the job?” I asked.

  “Party,” Pollo said. “Some lady turning sixty. You two should check it out. Night’s young, you know?”

  “Yeah?” Kelsey said. “You think we could pull it off?”

  “No,” I said. “Not a good idea.”

  “Cute white kids like you?” Pollo said. “Come on, man. Who’s gonna tell you no?”

  Kelsey took my hand as we crossed the kitchen and stopped at the twin windows on the swinging doors that opened into the ballroom. Pollo looked over my shoulder and gave us the lay of the land.

  “Yeah, that’s the birthday girl,” he said, pointing to a woman with a helmet of graying hair and geometrically precise bangs. “There she is. Been in that spot all night. Long as you steer clear of her, you’re fine. Her name’s Marla. She works here; she’s a dean or something. She likes her champagne not too cold, you know?”

  Kelsey and I pushed through the doors onto the dance floor, and as I spun her away and pulled her close to “Wild Horses,” we hammered out a quick history, talking in each other’s ears. She tugged a ring off the middle finger of her left hand and slipped it onto her ring finger.

  When the song was over, we sat down at an empty table, and were immediately joined by two couples at least twice our age. A server came over to take our order, and winked at me when I asked for two glasses of champagne. He had been outside with us, I realized. He knew who we were.

  “So, how did you two end up here?” a woman asked, spinning a lock of hair around her finger, while her husband’s eyes moved slowly over Kelsey’s face as if he were cataloguing her features.

  “I’m a friend of Marla’s cousin John,” I explained.

  “I’m his fiancée,” Kelsey said.

  They asked how long we had been together (almost four years), and Kelsey told the story of how we’d gotten engaged two months earlier on a sailboat in Mustique. The wedding would be in Spring Lake, she added. Another couple joined us. I was a second-year analyst in fixed income at Lehman Brothers, I told them. Kelsey was going back to school for design.

  “Where has Marla been hiding you two?” someone asked.

  Kelsey laughed, took my face in both her hands, and kissed me on the mouth.

  “We’ll have to ask her to invite us to these things,” she said.

  We made a lot of friends during the hour or hours that I experienced as noise and liquor aftertaste and color-saturated snapshots. Kelsey snapped a flower off a centerpiece, and was tucking it behind my ear when someone threw open a side door that led straight out into the night. I took a small step back, unsettled by the block of darkness fifty feet away, the inverse of the bright hole that had brought us here. Of course it’s dark outside, I thought, because there’s nothing out there now. I wanted to believe that our fabricated life had supplanted our reality, that we would go on like this when the bar closed and the lights came up. I wanted to slow down and sober up a little. My thoughts felt like water rushing down the hallway of a ship.

  A man from our table had asked us to show him how one took tequila shots with the salt, the lime, the whole nine yards. I was wincing into the back of my hand when a woman standing at my shoulder asked me how we wound up here.

  “I’m a friend of Marla’s cousin John,” I said, turning around. “And this—”

  “I’m Marla,” the woman said.

  And there she was. How dare you, I thought, too drunk to be embarrassed at
how comfortable I had been inside a lie. Marla wasn’t finished.

  “I’d call security, but everyone thinks that you’re cherished family friends. People asked why they weren’t seated at your table. So why don’t you just say your goodnights, and leave on your own.”

  “Happy birthday,” I said. “Thanks for everything.”

  Kelsey and I stumbled back to her car.

  “OK,” she said. “This is where I leave you. Jesus, wish me luck driving to Courtney’s.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I can’t sleep in the car.”

  “You can crash with me. You can’t drive home right now.”

  “You have company already,” she said, meaning Clare.

  I felt the sharp foil corner of a condom wrapper prick my thigh through the thin pocket of my chinos. I moved in to kiss her, but Kelsey turned her head away. She kissed me on one cheek, and then the other.

  “You better get used to that,” she said, after her second kiss missed my face as I pulled back to ask her a question with my eyes. “It’s always two where we’re going.”

  PART II

  In the parking lot at Newark Liberty International, Clare eased his mother’s BMW into the sea of cars we had seen from the overpass. We hauled our things out of the trunk, and Clare lit out for the terminal, his oversized suitcase listing behind him from wheel to wheel.

  “What about the car?” I called.

  Clare stopped short.

  The car came into our lives after Clare answered a call from a Connecticut area code. There was a woman on the other end whose name, when Clare parroted it back to her as a question, sounded Dutch. We were with Mike and Casey at the Tropicana in Atlantic City. When the blackjack dealer asked Clare to take his conversation somewhere else, I followed him into a food court, where the woman on the phone explained that she had an SUV belonging to his family at her home on Fishers Island, and asked Clare if he’d be so kind as to come and pick it up. Had Clare’s parents been vacationing at someone’s beach house when they heard the law was closing in? I imagined them boarding a ferry before dawn, ditching their vehicle, offering a cab driver a stack of hundreds for a lift to Teterboro and a waiting plane. I never learned what their car was doing there. If Clare knew, he didn’t let on.

  Two days later, a demure Eastern European woman—not one of the family’s regular chauffeurs, judging by the jerky, overcautious way she handled the Mercedes wagon—met us at the Fishers Island ferry dock. The house, hidden by tall privets, ran along a slice of land between an unmarked street and a rocky beach. Our visit lasted under five minutes and followed a tight script: give the boys the car keys from a silver dish on the wet bar in the study, offer them a glass of water or a diet soda, suggest a nearby B&B where they can spend the night. We could hear a dinner party in some distant wing, but no invitation was forthcoming. I imagined someone scratching Clare’s name off a to-do list as we sped down the narrow island roads in his mother’s silver BMW X5, now stranded in Newark.

  Clare turned to face me without setting down his bag. He would have left the car to rust if I had kept my mouth shut.

  “It’s long-term parking, right?” he said.

  “I don’t think a year is what they had in mind.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Just leave the keys on the back left tire. I’ll have my mom come pick it up.”

  The big airy terminal was full of sunlight and echoing boarding announcements. I was halfway through the check-in line when I sensed someone closing in on me; Clare was three steps away when I spun around. He stopped just short of the retractable nylon barrier and swallowed hard.

  “They’re charging me this fee,” he said. “My stuff weighs too much.”

  Behind him, the attendant at the American Airlines counter was craning her neck to see where he had gone, waving his passport in the air.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Three hundred. There’s this fucking hold on all my cards.” Clare opened the backpack slung over his shoulder and took out a blue felt shoe bag. He bounced the shoes in his hand, as if trying to guess their weight for a prize at a fair. “Do you see a trash can?”

  “Wait,” I said. “Slow down. You’re gonna throw stuff away? Why don’t I just spot you the money and you can pay me back when we get over there?”

  “Can you do that?”

  Maybe, I thought, balancing my checking account in my head. I handed Clare my card.

  “Can you come over and sign?” he said. “They know I’m not you.”

  A mother of three, eavesdropping behind us, agreed to hold my place in line.

  “Hi,” the counter attendant said. “Is everything OK?”

  Clare stood with his back to her while I paid his fee, pretending to keep an eye on my bags. I signed the receipt and she told Clare, over my shoulder, to enjoy his flight. It took me a second to understand that she was talking about the plane ride, and not making a joke at Clare’s expense.

  He was almost through security by the time I joined the line, and I watched the TSA agents stop and search him from my place at the back. They had him spread his legs and raise his arms like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man while a woman in uniform traced the outline of his body with a plastic wand. Another agent flipped through his passport and riffled through his bag. I wondered if they knew him as his father’s son, if the family name was now a big red flag.

  I didn’t get a second look on the way to my flight. When the captain announced that we’d be taking off shortly, I dug my phone out of my pocket and called my mother one last time.

  “Hey,” I said. “It’s me. You want a car?”

  • • •

  “What’s your purpose here?” the customs officer asked.

  She was my first British accent on foreign soil, but my excitement at this fact was not contagious. The sun had just risen over London, Heathrow. I had a connecting flight to Edinburgh. She did this all day.

  “School,” I said. “St. Andrews University.”

  “You’re a first year?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I need your matriculation letter.”

  I handed her all the paperwork I had.

  “None of this is any good,” she said.

  I asked if she would mind checking again. She flipped quickly through the pile, but gave no sign that she had found what she was looking for.

  “This is your visa,” she said, pounding a stamp into my passport. “You can come and go til June.”

  • • •

  Clare and I sat in a glass bus stop outside Edinburgh airport, watching double-decker coaches cough black exhaust into a darkening sky. The sun had set by the time the university’s chartered bus pulled up and opened its doors. Everyone on board looked American and jet-lagged. A short stint on the highway was followed by a long ride on a country road that barely fit the bus, wet leaves brushing past my face behind the window. After about an hour a woman near the front stood up, tapped a microphone, and welcomed us to St. Andrews in a thick brogue. I saw the town through the windshield, its streetlights flaring and fading like fireflies, blotted out by high-pitched rooftops and towers and spires as the landscape spun in front of us with the winding of the road. On our left, the woman said, was the Old Course, where golf was first played. It was all low grassy hills in the darkness, a patchy expanse of black land. To our right was Andrew Melville Hall, where Clare and I were meant to live.

  “One of the finest examples of new brutalist architecture in all of Scotland,” our guide said. “If you look closely, you’ll see that it resembles two giant steamer ships crossing paths in the night.”

  I saw what she meant about the building as we pulled up to the spot-lit entrance, situated where the bows of the glass and concrete “ships” met at an angle. Clare and I dragged our bags into a lobby full of plastic plants. In a far corner was the kind
of store you find in hotel lobbies, selling magazines and medicine in single doses. Andrew Melville Hall functioned as a hotel in the summer, when the school rented rooms to golfers, and still felt like a hotel now—muffled, thick walled, sterile. The woman behind the reception desk summoned a porter to take our bags up to our rooms. Dinner, she informed us, would be ready in an hour in the top-floor catering hall. She handed us our keys.

  Clare and I rode the elevator in silence, a thickset Scottish porter between us. We stopped on three to drop Clare off, and I pushed through fire door after fire door as we walked the long hall on the port side of the ship. Between each set of doors, an axe and an extinguisher were buried in the wall behind a pane of glass, signaling a fear of fire that seemed strange in a town where you spend most days expecting rain. Outside in the darkness, balls of rainfall were visible around the orange streetlights that ran along the empty road.

  “Can you wake me up for dinner?” Clare asked, his key in the lock. “You have an alarm, right? Mine just died.”

  The urgency in his voice was about more than missing a meal. He looked exhausted, and seemed afraid to close his eyes in a new place with no one there to wake him. I told him I would come by later. The porter showed me to my floor.

  “This is your room,” he said, opening the door.

  The porter waited in the hall while I dragged my bags inside. The rooms were small and square, the walls covered in corkboard to prevent the tacks in tie-dyed tapestries and Joy Division posters from ruining the sheetrock. I had my own bathroom for the first time in my life, which was something. But the disappointment I felt took me back to the first time my mother brought me to our house in Princeton, led me up the back stairs, and opened the first door on the second-story hallway. The room she showed me, my new room, was empty except for a wash of grime and loose change along the far wall, like something left by an outgoing tide. The paint was peeling and the windows looked over a small parking lot dotted with trashcans. This was not what I had imagined when she told me she had found the perfect place in Princeton. I wished that we had never left the shore.