Two lifeguards sat high up on a lifeguard chair, in hats that looked Australian, with chin straps cinched up, binoculars raised, noses painted white, in long-sleeved shirts. They flew the yellow flag. A man below them on a towel in the shadow of the chair wore his own wide-brimmed hat and long sleeves. It was Dennis Fleigel, still pink, his face painted white. He looked like the property of a civilization of larger beings, throned above him, imprisoned for later use as a ritual sacrifice. When I got close, he exploded in anguish.
Tom McLaughlin’s German TV crew had commandeered Dennis’s well-lit, wood-paneled classroom, so Dennis had been shoved into a windowless closet. Carl didn’t care who he humiliated. Worse, tonight’s featured event, a reading by Dennis from the Coco Chanel bio in progress, had been shifted to a dead zone tomorrow afternoon in the basement of Stinson. “It’s not fair,” he said. “You know I’m right.” He wasn’t asking. I didn’t feel like being yelled at. He didn’t know how to get along. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I moved on.
A piece of what looked like a telephone pole lay among some sunbathers. A red industrial fishing buoy had washed up, like a beach ball, covered in rusty slime. Whatever had happened here last night had left crap all over the place. The destruction felt true to me, a manifestation of bad thoughts. Farther down, Frederick Stugatz seemed to be meditating, elbows on his knees, hair combed, shirtless, muscled, tanned, thin, a flat middle sucked in as though he’d been holding his breath all day. He raised his chin and examined me from behind sunglasses. And even though it was clear that he’d been waiting for someone else, he was friendly.
We sat and watched the water. I’d never seen so many surfers so close to shore, skimming and flying across the waves. I’d never seen kiteboarding. There were aerial acrobatics and fantastic wipeouts. The lifeguards were busy. It was a strong surf with riptide conditions. Now that Amy was gone I felt saner, but I also hoped I’d see someone drown.
We talked about last night’s party. Frederick had the latest gossip. He and I were friends to the extent that we’d shared brief, odd, intense experiences over the years, like a flight crew who’d come through bad turbulence with a full load of drunks. Marty Azamanian had poured a bottle of Pellegrino on Bonnie Raitt’s boyfriend’s head for blowing the punch line to his joke. Later he’d slapped Carl across the face for interrupting him, a light, fun smack Carl hadn’t appreciated. At one time or another, we’d seen Marty leaning out an upstairs window of the pool house with his younger son, armed with powerful water-pistol machine guns, scattering the crowd. We took it, because we liked to eat lobster at his beachfront showplace. After the party, Burt had needed fourteen stitches in his head.
I lay back and slept with the thrum of the ocean beneath me, and woke sometime later to a family of cretins who’d spread out their blanket inches away from us. Next to them were two men under a Bolla wine umbrella. They were dark, hairy, and muscular and looked like Mafia killers who’d slap you for kissing their sister, then leave your bullet-riddled body in the town square. I felt the constant slamming of the surf through the ground. I wanted a wave to come up so it blotted out the sun and blasted our bodies to pieces that washed up miles away. Down the coast I noticed three modern white windmills, so huge in the distance they looked like something in a dream.
A whistle blew. A lifeguard pulled hard in the surf, with a yellow rope around his shoulder, as another guard paid out rope from a garbage can.
It was hot but too dangerous to swim, so we left our towels and walked down the beach toward the state park. Farther down, there were pitted areas of wet sand, puddles, logs, garbage, a Fritos bag, a Mylar graduation balloon, a depression full of large, smooth rocks dug into the beach. The crowd thinned. Cigar butt, cigarettes, a big dead bird laid out like an Egyptian mummy. Beyond the cordon of lifeguard protection, the beach was almost empty.
A woman came toward us, in a wifebeater and bikini bottoms with big black sunglasses. It wasn’t Amy. A little girl walked along the water, holding a smaller boy’s hand. They were nobody I knew.
Frederick looked ahead and said, “How’s her arm?” He lifted his chin and pushed his lips together, as though he were patiently adding small numbers, then made an expression of contempt or boredom, as though he’d been forced to sigh and explain that he knew, or everyone knew.
“It hurts.”
“I’m sure.”
“She’s gone. Went home.”
“I guess it’s no fun to be here with a broken arm.”
“I told her to get the hell out.” He turned his head. “I’m kidding. I’m being an asshole. She wanted to go.”
Our last one had been the longest, the deepest, the most loving, the most kissing, the saddest and most tearful. And when I came inside her I felt healed, and finally began to forgive her.
“You’re trying to do the decent thing.”
“Not really.”
“Do you have plans to see her again?”
“No.”
“Maybe it’s not over.”
“It’s over.”
“Is it?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “You’ll write.” He smiled. “Can you imagine, twenty years ago, writing a letter and walking it down to the mailbox five times a day? Calling her at home at midnight and hanging up if he answers? Do you say you love her?”
“No.”
“It’s not over. You’ll see. Winter comes, you get sentimental. So much time goes by you figure it must be love. It gets stronger. Every second, it’s right there in the palm of your hand. A few words are all you need to start again. Who will pull the other one in after a period of silence, who will draw the other one out. Who cracks first and begs for attention, who shows greater disregard for their sanity. You have that to look forward to.”
“No.”
“I can’t write a three-word text to Ilana I haven’t already sent a thousand times, because nothing ever changes and I’ve already said it all. I’ve already heard her same goddamned bullshit complaints. Stick around for that. Stick around for the times when you’d rather be fucking your wife but you do it anyway, when you feel guilty for loving your wife more than the one you’re supposed to be so hot for. This is five years I can’t get back, when I should’ve been saving money, planning a family vacation, thinking of something else. I guess it’s a trap. I don’t regret it. I didn’t hurt anybody.”
“We couldn’t even make it through a year.”
“And when you run out of stuff to say, you send photos of yourself as a baby, or tell her things that put your humanity on display—you helped an old lady wheel her groceries out, whatever. She’ll respond to that, that works for a while. You talk about your kids and she’ll pretend to love them, too. Or someone has some big event, my father died, she had cancer. Just wait. Stuff happens. You’ll turn to each other.”
“Ilana has cancer?”
“She did.”
“She talked to you about it?”