Down the Shore (9 page)

Six months before, when I was arrested for selling drugs at Lawrenceville, I gave Casey up in a Lawrence Township Precinct interrogation room that smelled faintly of bleach. I allowed myself to remember it now, locked in a car with a gun in my hands. The police asked me for the name of my supplier and I gave it without hesitation, praying it would buy me time or leverage, as scared as I had been when an older kid had held my head underwater at the public pool. A female cop with a ponytail asked me for the spelling and jotted it down on a notepad. Later, she told me I had done a good thing, that there was still time for both of us to straighten out our lives. Casey never asked if I had given him up because it was inconceivable to him that I would do that. I tried not to think about it, but there were days when it was the first thing in my mind when I opened my eyes. Was it possible that I'd inherited, instead of my mother's fierce, unyielding sense of right and wrong, the kind of moral compass that compels a man to never see his kid or sell out his friends for nothing? I wiped the gun down with my shirt and slid it back under the seat.

The bartender had taken the pot by the time I got back to the boat. The tension of the game had dissipated, and Clare was walking toward me, running his tongue across his teeth.

“Where'd you go? Everyone was asking.”

“Just out for some air.”

“We're staying here, right? That's the other thing everyone was asking.”

“You don't seem ready for bed, but yeah, we're staying at Casey's place.”

Clare blew a long breath through pursed lips. I didn't touch coke, mostly because Casey didn't. Casey used to say that people cut the shit out of the stuff he sold, and I figured that whatever Clare was doing was as good as it got.

“This place is great,” Clare said. “I don't want to leave. Your friends are amazing. Are you upset? Is something wrong?”

“No,” I said. “I'm fine.”

“Are you sure? You seem kind of down. Hey, can I ask you something? I feel like you spend all this time looking out for me and I never do anything for you. I'm not a shitty friend, am I?”

“No. Not at all. You'd do the same thing.”

I wondered if that was true.

“Yo,” Mike said, slapping both of us on the back. “Should I leave you two alone? We're getting outta here.”

The boat cleared out, and the whole party took a walk down to the bank. We all packed into the blinding, air-conditioned ATM vestibule, and people started chanting at the bartender as he entered his PIN and stuffed the bills into an envelope. What would you like to do? the machine asked. Make a deposit. Amount? $4,700. The slot popped open, and the whirring gears inside almost ground to a stop as they tried to swallow the brick of cash. A yell went up when it went through. The bartender held up the receipt. He was sweating, smiling at the floor, talking about the game, like this was an Olympic victory interview just after his event. Outside, a cop banged the butt end of his Maglite on the glass, pointing at the bartender.

“At least I know who's buying at Nardi's tomorrow,” he said. “Now go home, you motherfuckers. You're disturbing my peace.”

T
he seafood market in downtown Princeton was packed with people picking out tuna steaks and yelling into cell phones about dinner plans and lobster tails. Clare and I had just come from a job at a country club in East Brunswick, which Clare had insisted on working, even after my mother told him that we had plenty of hands. She had asked us to pick up scallops on our way home. I watched the guy behind the counter pop a scrap of Nova Scotia salmon into his mouth before he called for the next customer to please step up.

“Hello?” Clare said, cupping his hand over his mouth as he spoke into his phone. “Yeah, hang on. He's right here.”

Clare passed me his phone, mouthing to me that I should just give her my number already.

“Hi, Kelsey,” I said.

“How are you?”

“Great,” I said, shouldering through the door so we could understand each other.

“So I'm in Princeton with my cousin and she's not feeling so hot. I was thinking we could have dinner. Are you free?”

•   •   •

Kelsey had said 8:00, and just after 8:15 the hostess at the restaurant assured me again that no one had come asking for me, that she had three parties on dessert, that she couldn't seat me by myself. I crossed the street and sat on the stoop of a framing shop to wait. I wondered if Kelsey was going to show, or if I would end up back at the house with Clare and my mother and the bottle of sauvignon blanc that was sweating through the paper bag at my feet. A big Japanese tour group stopped at the restaurant's door to read the menu, and sent a runner in to ask about a table for fifteen, which the restaurant didn't have. I saw Kelsey as they moved on, checking her reflection in the glass, looking up and down the street, waiting for me. She saw me as I stood on the double yellow line, gauging the gaps between a string of eastbound cars.

“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.”