The pleasure of seeing my experience represented here came at me in a rush and my pen moved fast, zip, zip, no guessing, no stopping, everything where it should be, extraneous details excised, coastline neatened and simplified. A little wooden biplane flew in the vast expanse over the ball field, towing a banner: FLOOPSTEIN COLLEGE SUMMER ARTS CONFERENCE.
I started a comic strip, thumbnailing panels, this woman, this man, they meet, have a fling, fall in love. A year later they’re back. Ideas came pouring out and I worked sure and fast, the way I had when I’d first started drawing comics, before I knew what I was doing, when everything came easily, in one draft, and there were no consequences, or there were but I didn’t know it yet. I wanted to tell the story of my affair and, in the process, explain how I’d lost my way, what I’d done for love, for fatherhood, for the sake of good material. This comic would retroactively validate my years of making nothing. I could work on it in my free time, and surprise my publisher, and in four or five months I’d push thirty-two pages out into the world, and Robin would read it and throw me out of the house. In a year, I’d be halfway done. In three years, I’d have a book. I’d cough it up—the ugly, urgent truth—and deal with the fallout later.
I sketched the cover and titled it “What I Did at Summer Camp,” in a woodsy font made of logs, and along the margin I drew a quick approximation of my own disembodied head, inside a sunburst, a corona with lines radiating, and beneath that I drew Marilyn Michnick’s face, smiling, cockeyed with crooked glasses, and Mohammad Khan, sweaty and pleading for relief, and Tabitha Portenlee, and Vicky Capodanno, and Alicia Hernandez Roulet’s ugly little dog, and gave each character a new name and a brief bio: “Vivian Friedman, expert on Florentine sculpture,” “Ali El-Amir, prone to heat rashes,” “Magdalene Tonsilman, interested in gambling and incest,” “Emily Carbona, can’t quit smoking,” and “Sméagol, the walleyed goblin.”
I made some notes about my doppelg?nger—a cranky art director—his constraints and encumbrances, his seascape painting hobby, his family back home, with a vague similitude to Robin and my kids, changed their names, flipped their sexes, older boy, younger girl. In a box beneath the notes I scribbled, “The Adventures of Clark Kornblatt, Advertising Executive, Artist, Lover, Sportsman, Husband, Father, Adulterer,” and “Costarring Natasha Monaghan-Rinaldi, Rich Lady from Connecticut, Hasn’t Had Sex Since the Mesozoic Period.”
Then I sat there and rested, and looked it over. An encounter at an arts conference. A woman of means and her dingbat boyfriend. Underlying theme: monogamy blows. Jeezum, how bold. I lay back against the sand and thought about cheating, until it became unbearable.
Back in town I walked my bike along the pier, past tugboats, by the ferry landing, and took in the stench of the commercial fleet, game-fishing boats, rusty trawlers. I fiddled with my phone, hoping for a text from Amy, and dropped it in the street. I hadn’t gotten a signal in two days. I wished they’d put up some cell towers in this stinking fishy hellhole.
Sometimes out here it seemed that the wind would blow a signal into your phone, and suddenly you had messages from hours or days ago. I squinted down into my hand, holding it at a delicate angle. Had she been carrying her phone? Please text me already, goddammit! Fuck. I walked my bike down Main Street because it was too crowded to ride, gawking and depressed, staring too hard at everything.
The town in summer was many things. It had beautiful light. The sky always changing. The breeze softly luffing. The sun like a hand resting gently on your shoulder. The buildings old and practically falling into the ocean, the streets narrow and crooked, walled in by Victorian B&Bs with fancy paint jobs and front yards heaving with wildflowers. Rainbow flags on every corner celebrated tolerance and diversity, the freedom to love. This place had been known at one time or another for whale hunting, Portuguese immigrants, sand dunes, herring shoals, shipwrecks off the point, but also for a certain kind of seeker or desperate kook, Puritans, dropouts, communists, frazzled intellectuals, painters from New York, experimental-theater types, alcoholic fishermen, sailors stationed here between the wars, stubborn or demented individuals hoping to escape persecution. It was seen as a haven for artists, a place of open-mindedness, and throughout the world for the last hundred years as a center of unconventional living, as a gay summer resort.
Two men ate ice cream cones in booty shorts under a sign advertising a drag show, beside a store selling taffy, a store selling kitchen gadgets. A guy in tight teal jeans drank coffee with a woman with jingly gypsy sandals outside a bar smelling of fried oysters. An elderly woman with gray dreadlocks buzzed by in an electric wheelchair led by dogs in rainbow collars. In this town even dogs could be gay. A massive shirtless guy with gold nipple rings in a Viking helmet wove through pedestrians on a booming Harley with a ferret in a crate wearing little goggles. Where did they come from? Would they ever go home? If I stood here forever, and the human traffic never ended, I could let it pass through me and live as a ghost and never have to think about myself again.
I locked my bike next to a cluster of bikes and followed the flow of traffic through a covered arcade, past a children’s boutique, and entered a jewelry shop behind two men with matching sunglasses, matching sideburns, matching pectorals. I put my hands all over everything. I thought Robin would like one of these bracelets, and with the help of an easygoing and solicitous clerk, I found the exact one on black leather twine with a waxy finish, strung through a half dozen large, metallic, shimmering black pearls.
The men walked out and the older woman who’d been helping them joined the clerk beside me. From this distance, Robin couldn’t do anything to stop me. I’d worked hard to earn these precious funds to buy a gift she didn’t want or need, to signify my love.