I recalled the events of the past few hours. Making love to Amy had cost me three thousand bucks, fifty dollars a minute. I could say I’d lost my wallet, call my bank and dispute the charge, which would temporarily restore our balance but leave me open to credit card fraud. Although the clerk had never asked for my ID, which meant that if the bank decided to investigate, I might win. It was safer to lie to Robin. On Tuesday, Carl would pay me. On the twenty-eighth, my salary would come through from the magazine.
In the pool house they had stacks of clean towels and a popcorn machine like at a movie theater. Dennis pointed out upgrades they’d made since last summer, the patio wider and longer on this side, stone benches with padded seats around a new stainless-steel outdoor kitchen, some guy in a chef’s hat stepping around it like a busy idiot. Warren Schultz, who ran the local theater troupe, banged out show tunes on a piano. Above him, moths bumped into the glass globe of a kerosene lantern. People joined in, but Warren’s voice was louder. Below the patio were gardens, a tennis court, and then the ocean. The breeze passed through me like a spirit. When the waiter passed by, I took another drink.
The house sat out on its own promontory, a little farther out than the houses downwind of us, which were huge and lit up like the Titanic, but not as nice. The sight of these digs always made my jaw fall open, although really I was fine until I walked up the driveway and started feeling bad about my own house, a small red bungalow with no shutters that our real estate agent had described as “charmless.” A ball of shame got lodged in my throat anytime I came here, I had trouble swallowing and kept picking at the thought, like if somebody gave me a bomb right now I’d drop it on that shitbox with my family inside: that kind of shame. This display of overkill sparked a rage of envy and extra shame for my awe, which I couldn’t control and was maybe why when I came here I drank like I did, or maybe because it was so beautiful—I drank to kill off whatever neurons grew from that brain activity, but I could feel it in the energy of people around us, the size and power of the place strengthening us as we grew to fill the scale of it, the rush of that mistaken idea, excitement and futility battling it out, making me dizzy.
“It’s a nice breeze.”
“Every time you inhale,” Dennis said, “you owe Azamanian sixty bucks.” He had what appeared to be a terrible sunburn.
“And what is this one again?” I asked.
“Negroni, sir.”
“And what’s this?”
“Boulevardier,” the bartender answered.
“What’s the difference?” I heard my own loud voice barking in my ear. The bartender poured me one of each. Tabitha clinked my two glasses with hers and said it was making her cross-eyed. Dennis turned to her, horrified and amazed. “You sold a TV show?” He had a redhead’s freakish freckled sunburn.
“Yeah, we got a pickup, or whatever it’s called.” The show would be based on some parts of her first book, about her crazy mother and her impoverished childhood in a Reno trailer park, and her second book, about the incest and her wild teens and twenties.
“I’ve got two hundred and fifty pages done on my book,” Dennis said, “and two hundred pages to go and two more years. I’m on track.” If he kept talking, he could keep his insecurities at bay, so he started lecturing us on his current subject, Coco Chanel, and the failings of lesser biographies, which his book would hopefully trounce.
Heather Hinman joined us. She taught in the English Department at a big university, and liked to complain that her former life as a bartender had paid twice as much and the drinks were free. She’d gone swimming in the bay and said it was beautiful, but warned us about sharp stuff you could cut your foot on where they anchored the boats.
Ilana Zimmer had gone in the ocean and said it was rough. “Lifeguards were running out in pairs—one had the buoy around his neck and the other had the bucket of rope.” As if to back up her story, her hair was still wet. Frederick Stugatz stood there, dry as a bone, staring at the side of Ilana’s head. Her voice was deep and smoky and reminded me of her one hit song from twenty-five years ago. I heard it on the radio about once a year, and every time, I imagined her cashing a royalty check for fifty-eight cents. She and Frederick made an effort to circulate so people wouldn’t think they were having an affair, but then she told us how her son had flunked tenth-grade biology, so he’d enrolled in summer school, but when she’d called home earlier tonight she’d heard the Xbox in the background, her husband didn’t care, and Frederick looked at her like he was about to have a stroke.
“That’s what happens,” he said, “when you drop everything to move to Bologna for six weeks.” Ilana stiffened and stared ahead.
All the jealousy and heartache and secret negotiations, all for a hidden spooge in the dark. I’d done it, I’d popped a stranger, it was time to get to work, to use my debasing experiences for the purposes of artistic advancement, in a half-true story imbued with the mysterious behavior of actual humans, their bad decisions and perverse yearnings that somehow delight us. I’d remember this night, bathed in kerosene lamplight, in the silky air.
And I’d return again to the vision of Amy, lying with her back to me, spooning, then moving my arm so her head rested on my chest, then facing her, our lips pressing, in what would become our best and favorite way, with her pale eyes that drew me in but told me nothing, her sorrow shifting gradually to something soulful, as she set aside those baffling values for this yielding, as I pushed until the softness resisted, as she craned her head up, eyes closed. I missed her. We hadn’t said goodbye.
I ate salted barbecued shrimp, peeling their jackets, and rinsed my hands in the swimming pool. The narcotics had been vaguely therapeutic, but now I was totally bombed. My confidence raged. I would immerse myself in comics, get interested in cross-hatching again, bang out half a page a day, and sell foreign rights in twenty-nine countries. I’d make millions.
I met a real estate agent named Happy Longworthy, who told me what the taxes were on a beachfront estate on sixteen acres. She introduced me to a little toad who owned the largest private collection of Greco-Roman statuary on earth, which he kept inside his house in eastern Tennessee. He invited me to come see it. Roberta explained that while finishing her film on corrupt black mayors of major American cities, she’d started her new project—a documentary about teenage hooker gangs of inner-city Philadelphia. The toad from Tennessee looked enthralled. Happy clutched her necklace. I tried to consider myself above all that, groveling before our donors, with their threat of mind-blowing patronage, them having a lot of it, me not having any. I tried not to care while slobbering all over everything. Waiters kept pushing through with trays. In the dim light, it was hard to see what they were passing around.
“I don’t know what I’m eating.”