Page 115 of Playworld

“Okay.”

“How do you take your coffee?”

We drove to town slowly, Al in no great rush, it seemed. Our windows were down, the sun made every color vibrant—who had seen such blues, such greens? When I glanced at him, he glanced at me, gladdened I too was gladdened by the day, since the both of us were sad, I was sure of it, that my mother was not with us to enjoy such weather. We descended a long hill, and the town of Montauk came into view, its streets mostly empty. When Al placed a cigarette in his mouth, I pushed in the car’s lighter; it popped and he removed it and pressed the lava-coils to his cigarette. He replaced it and thanked me as if I’d done him a great kindness, and we went back to regarding the lonely palette of this Hopper painting. At the bakery, Al bought me a bacon and egg sandwich and an orange juice. When we arrived at the train station, the platform was completely empty, an abandoned, desert-dry feeling rising from the gravel beneath the tracks, as if all of Montauk were, like Mom, sleeping off the previous night. On such a spectacular day, no one was headed toward the city.

“Don’t forget to buy your ticket before you board or it’s more expensive,” Al said.

We stared west down the rail line, which was already wobbling with heat haze.

“You got enough money?” Al asked. When I told him yes, he said, “Hold on,” and took out a business card.Al Moretti, LCSW and Hairstylist.“Call if you need anything,” he said. He consulted his watch again. “I’m going to the supermarket before it gets crazy.”

He kissed my forehead and turned to leave but then came back.

“Don’t worry about your mom,” he said. “I’ll take care of her.”

He turned to leave but came back again.

“Fuck it, I’ll wait with you,” he said.

He waited with me for five minutes.

“Actually, I’m leaving. But here.” He gave me a twenty. “Just in case.”

I thanked him and watched him walk to his car. I waited a few minutes, then I made my way to the station to purchase my ticket and then to the pay phone to call Amanda. On the phone’s stainless steel faceplate, next to the keypad, someone had etched a penis with several drops shooting out of it. I deposited my dime and dialed. I listened to the burr of the ringer quite a few times before Amanda answered. When I told her it was me, she sounded surprised again. When I told her I was headed her way, she said, “Really? When?” When I told her I was at the train station right now, she said, “You’re taking the train?” When I confirmed this, she said, “Does that mean we need to pick you up?” When I told her I guess it did, yes, she said, “Oh. I didn’t—” Then: “Hold on,” and covered the receiver. “What time do you get here?” she asked when she came back on the line. When I answered, she covered the receiver again and then after a moment said, “Okay, well, we might be a little late? But we’ll be there. At some point.”

A half hour later, when the train arrived at the station, it seemed as if ten thousand passengers issued from it. There was a sudden frenzy of activity—of cabs lining up with their trunks open, and friends of the arrived pulling up in full convertibles and honking and laughing, and people like me carrying only backpacks and wearing bathing shorts and impassively scanning the platform and then brightening and waving and hugging their people before departing together. I boarded the car, which smelled slightly of limes and diesel and the toilet’s blue deodorizer. The floor was sticky. The windows were green. The cabin was stiflingly hot. Not a single person was headed west but me. I took my seaside seat. The train lurched forward, and then the town slowly rolled past as if we’d taken our foot off the brake at the top of a hill. I was so nervous about seeing Amanda I had no appetite for my sandwich. The conductor appeared and punched my ticket, then walked away. My mind was as smoothed of thoughts as the ocean. As we got up to real speed and clacked alongside Highway 27, we whipped through the Napeague State Park’s scruffy barrens. I grew dreamy and dozed, and when I was occasionally shaken awake by the train’s shudder, the traffic that sped alongside us appeared to float, as if we were riding an unseen current,and for the several seconds beyond the foreground’s blur of pines, these cars hovered parallel to mine. I saw vividly into the passenger windows, saw the passengers’ and drivers’ silhouetted profiles, and when it happened that, during one of the moments of swift stillness, while the telephone wires rose and fell and rose in a continuous, creaturely ripple, a woman leaned out far enough for her face to catch the light, to stare at the train—to stare atme,since I was alone in the cabin—and then she smiled, and for an instant it seemed I could see her with such clarity I could count her teeth. She turned and said something to the man next to her, who replied with a laugh, and at that moment I thought of my father’s story about Millie, about their trip to the point, and the part he never told me about, which was their drive back, which must’ve felt, I imagined, bittersweet and, like my drive with Al this morning, full of silences; and in that moment I considered staying on the train all the way back to Manhattan, abandoning Amanda and this visit, since as the train raced ever closer to my destination, every part of my guts screamed,Flee.

We decelerated on our approach to the first station, slowing until theAmagansettsign drifted past. Maybe a couple of people boarded; the train’s engine idled. The conductor shouted, then the horn, the lurch, and we accelerated again, never getting up to the same speed as the previous stretch, my reverie interrupted by periodic slowing as theEast Hamptonstation sign appeared, soon replaced byBridgehamptonandSouthamptonandHampton Bays, and in what seemed like the shortest hop, theWesthamptonsign slid from my window’s right edge toward its left until it was perfectly centered. The train stopped, I stepped off the car, and everything after that continued at what felt like the same strange combination of slowness and rapidity, solipsism and silence, as if I were watching everything that weekend subsequently unfold through a diving bell.

The train station was a nondescript two-story building of yellow brick. Since no one awaited me on the platform, I walked to the parking lot on its other side, which was empty and hot. The train departed; birdsong replaced its production-line chugging and engine roar. The world, I figured, either was packing up to go to the beach or was there already,which made the now-deserted space seem even quieter. I thought about how to appear when Amanda arrived. I decided I wanted to seem indifferent, occupied, nottooexcited to see her, so I took a seat on a bench beneath the roof’s eave and looked through my book bag for my Walkman. I’d pose reading, with my earphones on, but I couldn’t find the machine and panicked, thinking I’d left it on the train. And while rummaging through myD&Dbooks andHeart of Darknessand underwear and toothbrush and bathing suit, the book bag tipped from the seat, its contents, including Amanda’s mixtape and several others I’d made, exploded from it, including the Walkman, which clattered on the ground, and that was when Amanda and her father pulled into the lot.

Dr. West was driving a blue convertible whose engine, when he came to a stop, snorted loudly. Amanda was in the passenger seat. She got out, noticed my mess, and said, “Did you have a spill?” By the time I’d stuffed everything back into my bag, she was out of the car and holding open the front door so that it was between us; and when, after a pause, I went to hug her, she hugged me formally in return, patting my back like an acquaintance might. “Nice to see you,” she said. “You ride up front with Dad.” She got in the seat behind me, and I reached to close my door.

Dr. West looked at me over his sunglasses and nodded politely. He was wearing a worn-in white button-down shirt, its sleeves rolled up past his biceps, its tails loosely tucked into peach-colored shorts. On his feet, a pair of Top-Siders. A half-empty bottle of Heineken sweated between his legs. The car had a four-speed stick, whose knob Dr. West gave a gentle side-to-side shake, revving the engine before dropping it into gear. We drifted toward the lot’s exit, then Dr. West took a left and gunned the accelerator, and I felt pinned to the seat’s black leather, as if Amanda had looped her Lasso of Truth around my torso and yanked. God forbid she ask me a question, like:Am I already breaking your heart?

Once again, my father spoke through me. “What’s the make and model?” I asked.

“This is a 1968 Buick GS 400.”

“My dad has a Buick too,” I offered, not knowing why.

“Manual?” he asked.

“LeSabre,” I said intentionally, thinking it was funny, and was relieved,because Dr. West chuckled. In the side mirror, I could see Amanda staring at the sky, deaf to my wit, her sunglasses on and eyes hidden, her hair Medusa’d in the wind. Dr. West, who was kind enough to talk to me, deserved, I figured, some entertainment.

“Ever driven a stick?” he asked.

“My grandfather’s Peugeot,” I said, as if my parking lot lesson with Dad this past winter counted for anything.

“Was it the 505?”

“Diesel.”

“Fantasticcar,” Dr. West said.

Because Amanda’s present absence unnerved me, I focused my attention on where we were going. We passed through the Westhampton township, which soon disappeared, and the engine roared through the soles of my feet to vibrate my spine. The Atlantic sparkled beyond the trees and hedges and beach houses. We took a left on Dune Road and then another onto a long, tight, sandy driveway that opened, broadly and dramatically, onto a circular plot of manicured lawn. At its center stood a two-story house with a gambrel roof, a single dormer stretching its entire length. Its windows, hazed with salt spray, were flanked by red shutters, tiny crescent moons carved into each. Its cedar shingles were noticeably warped and spalled. In the background, at once dwarfing the house but also making it seem majestic, was a bay pricked with sails, speeding pleasure boats distantly foaming the water’s iron-blue surface. It was a place, I thought, that seemed a direct expression of Dr. West’s character: a classy, almost refined brand of dilapidation, the money that built it as sturdy and as weather-beaten as the shingles, as many-layered and as chipped as the shutters’ paint. Maybe Dr. West was a millionaire; maybe he was nearly destitute. The car, I noticed as I came around the front, showed signs of rust at its fenders’ edges—corroded, if you looked closely, at the wheel wells. It wasnotmint, but the seats were soft as a well-worn saddle in spite of the tears where the foam protruded; and hidden beneath the hood, the machine had tremendous power he had clearly not even tapped. The man, I thought—overbrimming as I was with heartache and the lonely clarity it conferred—must drive his relatively impoverished daughter crazy.

Inside an Irish setter greeted us. “Hello, Hellie,” Dr. West said,grabbing her ears and giving her head a shake before she quickly disappeared. The house was wood-paneled and dark, although the windows were filled with light. There was a smell to the place of mothballs and, from the fireplace that dominated the living room, ash and creosote. The interior was a hodgepodge—a forgotten antique-store feeling to the decor, at once high-end and remaindered. In the living room, which looked out onto the bay, a pink fainting sofa with its fraying fabric and cigarette burns sat opposite a pair of giltwood chairs: a man and woman picnicking on the embroidered tableau of one; a pair of monkeys, the first standing atop the second’s back, on the other. Green-bound Harvard Classics on the narrow shelves framing the fireplace were mixed with popular novels and nonfiction—Fear of Flying,Chariots of the Gods?—that I’d also seen on Mom’s bedside table. The dining table, with its thick spiral legs, was surrounded by caned chairs, one of which had a fist-sized hole in its back.