The streetlights had come on. The town looked soft in purple shadows. I rode my bike past the bay at high tide, bonfires along the beach. Bright paintings hung on the walls of a gallery, the noise from a crowd wafting out the door, the balcony above it crammed with guys. I smelled ketchup in the air, burgers on a grill, spilled beer, mussels in garlic, the clean, funky seaweed of the bay. Showered, tanned people smoked along the railing of an outdoor bar. I sensed the collective rhythm and mayhem, the double macchiatos, broken diets, and reckless spending, Mastercard bills one swipe away from disaster, romantic failures and STDs that would trail them for months or years.
The road split at the end of town. I rolled down a quiet street and looked back across the harbor at the old church steeple against a faded blue with flame-tipped clouds, strawberry streaks in Creamsicle light. The air itself was purple.
Over a little bridge, the land narrowed to a reef of dunes and scrub. On the right, the bay was shallow and weedy and flowed out to the sea. On the ocean side, high up on the dunes, were fancy houses with panoramic views. Every year I passed by here and wondered why I didn’t make $4 billion flipping media companies.
A vast modern thing, mostly glass, lit up at night like a shopping mall. A Nantucket-style house on steroids, under construction and still growing. A red brick house with tall columns that made it look like a plantation. Were they that much smarter than me? Was their flesh worth that much more? Actually, yes. A slutty-looking Spanish deal with squirting mermaid sculptures, a sprawling colonial with twelve chimneys, a hulking gray stone thing that looked like it could’ve withstood a bombardment…
Behind them, the sun kept falling through a glorious heaven.
The effect of the narcotics had faded into softly lifting waves, as thoughts flitted painlessly by. I had been held by a one-armed bandit who’d stolen my heart. By a lovely Christian housewife, a stranger really, reeking of midlife boredom and an overpowering daily sorrow mediated only by superstition, lower urges, parental terror, and religious mania. In some other world it could’ve worked.
I wondered if Beanie was asleep and whether Kaya had eaten dinner. If I’d been there, my daughter would now be glued to my lap, tired and sweaty, and I’d carry her around like a sack of flour while I brushed my teeth. Other than her traumatic premature birth, this was maybe the worst thing that had ever happened to her. I pictured her noodle arms and silken shoulder blades, which fluttered under my hands, and imagined the torn-up skin that covered them now. The cut on her hip was the worst of it. A hellish night of reactive co-sleeping lay ahead. If I’d brought them with me, none of this would’ve happened. We worry our heads off. The dread is universal. Let nothing happen to my kid. Let her be the one to not suffer. It starts off so simply, and you assume you’ll be spared.
I came upon a family of deer, silently cropping manicured grass along the edge of the road in front of a fieldstone manor, a mother and two white-speckled fawns, until a silver Range Rover barreled toward us; as they shot into the scrub, the car almost blew me off the road. Between the nutso mansions were some regular houses from a bygone era when middle-class people could still buy land on this beach. Far ahead, where the road dead-ended, surrounded by water on three sides, was a national park where anybody could rent space for trailers or put up tents, and on the other side of the road, the town’s tiny airport, a paved runway that cut through the dunes. I rode by places hidden behind a massive hedge or a gate with a glowing security panel, and turned at a big white one that looked like the Getty Museum.
Three valets stood at the end of the driveway with flashlights. I walked my bike because the gravel was too deep to ride on. Sea grasses blew delicately in the breeze. People dressed in white headed back down the driveway, already leaving. I wore a clean plaid shirt and the canvas shorts I’d had on since this morning. I was hoping to make it to Wednesday without doing laundry.
I heard clattering dishes and music and the low rumble of a crowd, and wound through a maze of parked cars, and heard the roar of the ocean a few dunes away. I’d been to this party three years in a row, and last year, at the end of the conference, there was a smaller party for just a few faculty and the director and his wife, up in the pool house, real swanky, and I got invited. A couple of us stayed late and borrowed swimsuits from our hosts, and after they went to bed we made margaritas, and accidentally broke this glass pitcher shaped like a pineapple, and flung ourselves naked from the hot tub into the pool, and someone barfed on the delicate meandering sidewalk that wound through the dunes. I ended up sleeping in one of the maids’ empty rooms, and in the morning got blasted in the face by the unobstructed sunrise, and walked out into the day to discover bagels and hot coffee, and cigarette butts floating in the pool.
In the garage at the top of the driveway a caterer had set up his operation, with steel prep tables and waiters in white coats. I said hello to some of the staff I’d met last year or the year before, standing by a golf cart: a young guy with Elvis sideburns and tattooed arms; a big black guy named Clyde, with a walkie-talkie, who’d given me a lift back into town last summer after I’d spent the night; and an old lady named Peggy, with reading glasses hanging down on her bazooms and a worried look on her face, who somehow remembered my name.
“The ice machine broke,” she said.
Clyde said, “You bring any ice?” I said no, but he laughed and said, “Oh, we got another machine at the pool.” Then he and the lady hopped into the golf cart and sped across the driveway, into a brightly lit hole in the dunes, a tunnel so wide you could drive through it, into a garage full of gardening tools, golf carts, inflatable pool toys, umbrellas, and kayaks. Above that were guest cottages, offices, and a disco. It was their weekend place.