Down the Shore

by Stan Parish

  “It’s freezing,” I heard Kelsey say. “Tom, come back here.”

  I stopped just long enough to untie and shed my shoes, thinking back to the story Damien told at breakfast, wondering if a loss of footwear was a rite of passage. I dropped my phone into the sand.

  The water, when it hit my feet, felt like pinpricks. It soaked through and up my pant legs, swallowing my lower body. I didn’t feel the temperature until it hit my crotch, and suddenly I was sucking in air like my lungs had sprung a leak. I dove, my head breaking the surface of what felt like half-frozen cement. Crushing cold. I opened my eyes and kept them open.

  Come shopping w/ me?

  The text from Kelsey arrived just as I was heading to a lecture. Twenty minutes later she pulled up to Andrew Melville in a black Audi A3, a more expensive, European version of the car that Casey drove. It was the Wednesday after Raisin Sunday, and the sky had been threatening to unload on us all morning. Kelsey stepped out with the engine running and walked around to the passenger side.

  “You drive,” she said.

  The seats were cool and hard, and the interior was pristine—no spare change, no tangle of car chargers, nothing dangling from the rearview mirror. My car looked like that for about fifteen minutes after I drove it off the lot. I tested the clutch and shifted into first gear, which I had never done with my left hand. I wondered what would happen if I crashed gently enough that we both walked away unharmed, how Kelsey would explain it. I knew whose car this was.

  Kelsey turned on the stereo, but the CD changer was empty and the radio was mostly static. She turned it off.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Waitrose,” she said. “For groceries. It’s just outside town.”

  The rain started as we stepped out into the parking lot. Kelsey grabbed my hand and broke into a run for the doors.

  I still wasn’t used to British grocery stores with their champagne displays and shelves of unrefrigerated eggs. Near the entrance was a freezer case full of dead fish on ice.

  “Look at that one,” Kelsey said, pointing to a tuna that had been halved to show off the muddy, marbled flesh. “It’s so dense.”

  “They can kill you,” I said.

  “How?”

  “This fisherman from South Plainfield hooked one off of LBI and got his feet tangled in the line. The thing swam off and pulled him under.”

  “I can’t tell if you’re fucking with me or not.”

  “I’m completely serious.”

  “I thought you meant the mercury.”

  “The what?”

  “The meat is full of mercury. You’re not supposed to eat it if you’re pregnant. Your mother never told you that?”

  I shook my head. My mother hadn’t been pregnant in a long time, and she served tuna for a living.

  “What do you need here?” I asked.

  Kelsey shrugged. This was not, I realized, about grocery shopping. It was about getting out of town to a place where no one knew her—to see me and not be seen. A woman with two children in her cart was scanning a high shelf, talking to herself. An elderly couple shuffled by in rain gear and matching Velcro shoes. There was no one from St. Andrews here.

  In the produce section, Kelsey found a pair of decorative wine barrels, boosted herself onto one, and patted the surface of the other.

  “Thanks for coming with me,” she said. “I couldn’t face another day alone in the studio.”

  “How’s the collection coming?”

  “I think you’ll be into it. I can see you in all the men’s stuff. Where’s your other half?”

  “Clare? I don’t know. I haven’t talked to him today. Hey, thank you for not saying anything about his dad.”

  “You don’t have to thank me. It’s not like people are asking and I’m having to lie. I still can’t believe no one’s put two and two together. I guess it didn’t get the same coverage over here.”

  “He’s using his mom’s last name.”

  “I know. I’ve heard him. Do you think he regrets coming here?”

  “It’s hard to tell with him. Are you going home for the holidays?”

  “No,” she said. “I won’t be back in Jersey for a while. It’s hard for me, actually. To go back.”

  “Can’t keep you down on the farm, huh?”

  “No, that’s not it. I had a boyfriend in Ocean City who died right before I came over here. The summer that I graduated.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Fuck, I’m sorry. That must have been terrible.”

  “Some woman ran a stop sign and hit him on his bike at ten thirty in the morning. On her way to Dunkin’ Donuts. When I think of all the times he could have killed himself. He was a dealer, like you were. He had some ugly people in his life, but he had such a good heart, I can’t even tell you. He wore out his luck.”

  She stopped and shook her head. I was trying to decide if I believed that everyone came into the world with a fixed amount of luck that you tapped, periodically, like a commissary account.

  “What was his name?” I asked.

  “Why do you want to know that?”

  I shrugged.

  “Brandon Di Massi. Did you know him?”

  I shook my head, and wondered if Casey might.

  “Remember when you asked about my earrings at that bar in New York? He gave me those and I lost one the week after he died. That’s why I was only wearing one. Anyway, where did you live on LBI?”

  “Beach Haven. Do you know it?”

  “My aunt had a place in Harvey Cedars. That Ferris wheel in Beach Haven is the first place I got kissed. Why did you leave?”

  “My mom owns her own business, and things got slow after Labor Day until people started showing up again. She caters parties.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “He was a big fisherman. And he played guitar. They were never married. I mean, I don’t know him. We’ve never met.”

  “I bet he was handsome. Unless that’s all your mom.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I thought that’s what you were going to say. I saw the way you looked at me when Damien said that thing about girls who come here to get married. Is that what you think?”

  “I don’t think anything.”

  The stock boys were working around us as if we had some right to be here that superseded the need to do their job.

  “Tell me what you want to eat,” she said. “I’ll make us something. Let’s not go out to lunch.”

  “I’ll cook,” I said.

  “You cook?”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “Show me,” she said, as she jumped down.

  • • •

  Her flat was empty, her flatmates out of town. In the kitchen, I pulled a chef’s knife from the wooden knife block and tested the edge against my thumb. I minced a clove of garlic and mashed it to a pulp with the flat of the blade, adding rosemary, sage leaves, and sea salt that made a sound like sand between teeth as the knife steel crushed everything into a paste. I threw a handful of chopped pancetta into the cast-iron pan on the stove, and let it cook while I quartered plum tomatoes. Kelsey handed me a glass of cold white wine, but kept her fingers on the stem when I tried to take it from her. That was when I should have kissed her, hindsight being what it is. I could hear the pancetta crackling on the stove behind me, the snapping of the fat over the flame. I wanted to get this right. Kelsey let the glass go. I scraped the herbs and salt and garlic onto the hot pork, splashed wine from my glass into the pan, watched it turn to steam. I added the tomatoes, stirring as they cooked down. The butter and cream went in next, and when that had combined, I grated pecorino over the sauce and watched it melt into the surface. Kelsey had cooked the pasta, and had done some shopping
of her own at Waitrose: a bunch of kale, a bag of grapes, walnuts, paprika, more garlic, pears. I had figured she was stocking up, but now I saw that all of it was going into a salad, which seemed like a bad idea, a dish I’d have to pretend to enjoy. The walnuts were cooking in a pan with oil and spices while she shredded the kale with her hands. She set the table while I served our plates.

  “Needs black pepper,” I said, tasting a piece of pasta.

  “Why are you so tense?” she asked. “This is perfect.”

  The dish had turned out just shy of how it was supposed to. It felt like the first thing I had done right in a long time. The salad was a delicious mess, the kind of thing I’d never think to make. Kelsey stood up and leaned across the table to wipe a spot of sauce off my chin before she licked it off her thumb. I had that feeling you get on trains, when the doors close and you brace yourself for movement and it doesn’t come.

  “What am I going to do with you?” she said.

  All Damien had said in his voice mail was to be outside Andrew Melville Hall in fifteen minutes, ready to go. I got no answer when I called him back. The night was clear and unseasonably warm. I lit a cigarette and upset the early evening stillness with a stream of smoke.

  “Hey,” Clare said, coming up behind me. “I just stopped by your room. He called you too? Do you know what this is?”

  I shook my head.

  Fourteen minutes later a chauffeured black Mercedes pulled up to the curb. I climbed up front with the driver while Jules stepped out so Clare could sit bitch for whatever journey we were undertaking. Jules and Damien, loose jawed and smiley, had clearly been drinking.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Edinburgh,” Damien said.

  We had just killed a pint of Irish whiskey when the car turned down Princes Street, above the grassy valley that divides the city. Down in the valley was a spot-lit castle on a chunk of cliff, which I had figured for a photo-shop job or a theme park attraction when I saw it on the postcards sold in St. Andrews. The car stopped on a quiet residential block where a line of dark row houses faced an empty park. Damien told the driver that we wouldn’t be here very long. We walked to the corner, where Damien hit a buzzer for flat number 4C. Static, laughter. Damien leaned in.

  “Tell Nick it’s Johnny Rockets,” he said.

  The lock on the wrought-iron gate began to sing. This was a Boogie Nights party, Jules explained as we climbed the stairs. Which meant turntables, aviators, Afro wigs, roller skates, and short, short skirts. Nick was in the kitchen, someone said, pointing to a roomful of people at the end of a long hall, where someone on skates was spinning on a table like a figure skater, a blur with occasional limbs.

  “Nick,” Damien called from the doorway.

  The spinning column seemed to condense, and became a blond-haired boy in fresh-cut jean shorts, sunglasses, and a suit vest that hugged his lean, bare torso. He motioned for the people below him to make way and skated off the table, landing neatly on the floor.

  “This is Nick,” Damien said, as Nick toe-braked to a stop.

  “Boys,” Nick said. “What an honor. Please, follow me.”

  Two people stopped Nick as he skated down the hall in front of us, and expressed slurred admiration for his performance in a show that, judging from the photocopied programs scattered on the floor, was How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

  “We closed tonight,” he explained over his shoulder. “Hey, pardonnez-moi.”

  A girl was leaning on the door that he had stopped in front of.

  “Nick, you were fantastic,” she said, staring up at him. A stylized desert scene was printed on her pink T-shirt, the word Iraq scrawled in script underneath a palm tree.

  “I appreciate that,” Nick said, pounding on the door over her shoulder as she stepped aside. “Be decent!” he called into the wood, taking a key from his vest pocket and fitting it into the lock. Nick reached inside and hit the lights, which triggered a shriek and a string of profanity. There was a couple in the queen-sized bed, hiding themselves, using the top sheet as a shield. The boy, in boxer briefs and nothing else, squinted up at us while the girl rolled out from underneath him and pressed herself against the wall, her arm over her breasts. Her limbs seemed to multiply as she flailed in a tangle of clothes and bedclothes, and I realized it was not one girl, but two.

  “Mate,” the boy said, “are you taking the piss?”

  “I told you, no guarantees,” Nick said, skating across the hardwood. “Get dressed. This’ll take a minute. Hey, you found a third! That’s great!”

  The boy was hopping into his jeans while one of the girls, a blonde with thick ankles and narrow shoulders, snatched her shirt from the nightstand and stormed into the hall. The other girl was trying to get dressed under the billowing tent of the sheet. That was the first time I saw Jules laugh out loud.

  “Come in, come in,” Nick said, locking the door behind the last of his evicted guests. He produced a pair of jeans from deep in a mesh laundry hamper, pulled a wallet from a back pocket, and fished out a stack of homemade envelopes the size of business cards. He held one out to Damien, who made no move to take it.

  “That’s the garbage you sell to the drama club, but where’s the stuff I’m here for?”

  “Why don’t you try some before you cop a fucking attitude with me? Jesus, are you gonna be this big a dick your whole life?”

  “Tom,” Damien said, “play guinea pig.”

  Nick dipped his big brass key into the powder-filled valley of the folded paper, and held it to my face. Behind the mirrored lenses of his aviators, his pupils were flitting between my nose and the small mountain of coke coming toward me. He looked like someone trying to feed a child. I cleared a nostril and leaned in.

  “So how’s life on the water?” Nick said, as I winced.

  Jules asked after a friend, a sculptor who went to school down here. Nick said he was having people over later, that we could all find ourselves a threesome if we showed up at his flat around 5:00 a.m.

  “It’s coke,” I said, finally. “It’s nice.”

  Damien took out his wallet.

  “I’ll take whatever you’ve got there,” he said.

  Fits and starts of music were coming from the next room—the tuning of an electric guitar, a splash of low notes from a keyboard. The guitar player hit a minor chord, gave himself more volume, and launched into something by Nirvana.

  “Who’s that?” Clare asked Nick, pointing to the wall that the noise was coming through.

  “This band one of my flatmates plays in. They’re trying to get me to sing with them. What do you think?”

  “They’re terrible,” I said.

  Damien threw back his head and laughed. “Is this shit that good? Maybe we should all do some.”

  “Wait a goddamn second,” Nick said. “You thought you could just pick up your gear and be on your merry way? Do I look like some nigger from Bed-Stuy to you? Stick around. Have a drink.” He turned to me. “Let me guess: you play guitar.”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “He’s lying,” Clare said, blinking in the aftermath of an enormous bump. “Tom, I’ve never heard you play. Let’s sit in.”

  “No thanks,” I said. “It’s been too long.”

  “Believe me, it doesn’t get much worse than those guys,” Nick said. “Maybe Jules can explain why English people have no rhythm. The drummer’s good, but he’s from Wales.”

  “The drummer’s all right,” Clare said.

  “Can we do some more of that?” I asked.

  “If we’re staying,” Damien said, “then we’re all doing some.”

  • • •

  Nick rolled into the living room ahead of us, waving his arms like an umpire.

  “Enough!” he shouted. “Lay down your weapons! Out!”

  A boy in a sleeveless T
-shirt reluctantly gave up his guitar, which was cheap and not in tune. Clare was playing with the controls on the keyboard, testing the amp. The drummer stayed.

  “What do you play?” Nick asked me.

  “What do you sing?”

  “I make shit up. Play some blues.”

  “In E,” I said to Clare, tapping the distortion pedal with the toe of my sneaker. The red light popped on, the amp began to hum, and I stole a lick from B. B. King’s Live at the Regal. Nick spun on his skates, and started singing about a woman who used to make her own paychecks. He was down onto one knee, his chin on his chest, and I was staring at him in disbelief, not because he knew the words, but because he was channeling a black man twice his weight and three times his age—the barely contained screams, the best lines delivered like quick right jabs. The drummer was better than he had sounded through the wall, loose and never wrong. People were pouring through the door. Nick pressed his back up against mine, and skated in place while he sang some lyrics of his own:

  You know I’m so happy, baby,

  That my boy to came to see me

  I said I’m so happy, baby

  That he’s down here to see me

  It’s good to see his face, Lord

  But I wish he’d let these nice boys be

  “Lemme hear those keys,” he said to Clare.

  And Clare laid into it, his fingers hitting the notes and then pulling back as if the keys were scalding hot. It was amazing to me that we could just pick up and play like this, both of us high and flying. Two girls were dancing with Nick. I felt a rush of vaguely patriotic pride.

  We went on like that for a while, Nick making things up, Clare and I tossing the lead back and forth. My fingers were aching from playing rhythm, and while I could still feel my way through the pentatonic scale, I couldn’t improvise for shit as the coke faded, leaving only a bitter trail down the back of my throat. I gave up when Clare switched keys. He was shifting into jazz with the drummer as I wedged through the bottleneck of the doorway.

  “You’re not terrible,” Nick said, skating up behind me. “Your boy can play.”