Page 116 of Playworld

“Show Griffin his bedroom,” Dr. West ordered.

Amanda looked at him, surprised, and said to me, “Are you staying?”

Dr. West frowned at her, equally surprised, and said, “Are you daft?”

He finished his beer and shook his head, then disappeared into the kitchen. Amanda watched him go. Then she smiled at me, emptily, and trudged upstairs. I noticedIwas smiling, but it was partly an injury or an infliction. I realized if I stopped smiling, I might cry.

“That’s your room,” Amanda said on the landing, opening the first door to her right.

I looked inside; I could see the bay through its window. A breeze bellied the thin curtains.

“Did you bring a bathing suit?” When I nodded, she said, “Claire’s coming over.” And then, as if on cue, Claire, the strawberry blonde I’d met auditioning at Nightingale, called out Amanda’s name from downstairs. “We’re going to the beach club if you want to come.”

I did, knowing she would not have cared if I didn’t, would have probably preferred it, and changed and grabbed my book bag and then joined them outside. Amanda and Claire stood, holding their handlebars, waiting for me on the driveway. “Oh,” Amanda said of her bicycle, “I guess you need one too.”

They were wearing bikini tops and shorts, and each had a rolled towel in her bike’s basket. Claire’s sunglasses were perched above her forehead,her hair wild as wheat. She sneered at me with such pure disgust for slowing their progress, for simply being here, that I was both shocked at and appreciative of the honesty.

“Hold on,” Amanda said, and walked past me into the house.

I realized neither of us had even looked at each other yet, had not trulyacknowledgedeach other yet. The screen door banged against its frame twice. Amanda appeared with Dr. West in tow—following so close and so clearly frustrated he looked as if he might grab her by the ear. He then said, for what I could tell was my benefit, “Of course he needs a bike. What’s he going to do,jog?” He disappeared around the side of the house and shortly returned, walking a bike toward me with a towel under his arm, Hellie heeling alongside him, a long pink training bumper in her mouth. I thanked him and turned the rust-splotched handlebars toward the driveway that the girls, who had already mounted their bikes, were vigorously pedaling down. Dr. West said to me, cordially, “One moment please, Griffin,” and then shouted, viciously, “Amanda,” which stopped her cold. She dismounted, almost falling off her seat between the bike’s sloped frame. She and Claire glanced over their shoulders as Dr. West marched toward them. The wind was up, so I couldn’t hear what he said, but whatever it was, it was not pretty: it arched Amanda’s eyebrows while Claire zoned out, staring at a point somewhere between the lawn and the bay, and then Dr. West, after grabbing the hand pump clipped to Amanda’s frame, turned and marched back toward me. Now that his back was to them, Claire’s stunned expression morphed into a sly smile, Amanda’s into afflicted embarrassment. Dr. West filled both my tires, squeezing each tread for good measure when he was done. “Apologies,” he said, “for my daughter’s total lack of manners.” He snapped the instrument back into place on my bike.

We rode in single file down Dune Road. For a moment I considered slowing, and then stopping, and then returning to Amanda’s, it was all so hopeless. I did not so much rally as keep up. And the late morning light everywhere was so evenly diffused that the ocean’s cobalt stood in tiled contrast to the sky’s arctic cyan, that by deeply contemplating these colors I noticed I eased my pain. After a mile or so we turned right, into a vast parking lot, past a sign at the entrance that readQuogue Beach Club, its main building perched atop the dunes. The midday sirensounded as we entered the lot, and the girls parked their bikes among hundreds of others, these lined before the clubhouse in a great tangle of chrome and rubber, kickstanded, daring to be dominoed, I trailing Amanda and Claire as if I were their page boy.

There were kids everywhere and of all ages ascending the walkway toward the beach or descending from it, disappearing into doorways or emerging from them in packs, so that it felt, on the one hand, like the rush between class bells and, in a strange sense, like entering the home of a gigantic extended family. Amanda looked over her shoulder, either to make sure that I was following her or to see if she’d lost her tail. The older kids were a breed apart, the boys in swim trunks as entirely comfortable and unselfconscious among the bikini-clad girls as if among cousins, the girls here and there as astonishingly beautiful as Amanda, the ease of their fraternizing, their sly familiarity, regressing me, so that I felt the same shyness as on the first day of high school. There was an unspoken and alluring knowledge in the way these kids greeted one another that carried all the glamour of the word “older.” The younger children also seemed so at ease here, running after each other without regard to the strangers they slalomed, shouting each other’s names with no respect for volume, with outside voices in this private space that by dint of their piercing insistence sounded both wild and warding. Their baked-in tans conferred on their eyes an aquatic opalescence, this summer in the sun streaking their damp, ocean-darkened hair with lemon, the same sundown shade of yellow that striped the umbrellas rippling and snapping on the restaurant’s patio. All the tables were taken, the moms in sun hats and sunglasses, in smart shorts or tennis skirts, the dads in bright pastel golf shirts with the collars popped, in seersucker and loafers or Sperry Stripers, laughing at their children’s jokes, at their ice-cream-smeared mouths before their wives wiped these clean—a world, I recognized, of Adlers and Wexworths, of Binks and Buffys. A clan, then, with which I associated certain characteristic markers: L.L.Bean and puka beads; pearl chokers and striped canvas belts; a love for boats and bird dogs, martinis and Manhattans; an abiding silence at the mention of politics; a proficiency in country club sports; mismatched pastels, socks to ascots, like a box of broken crayons; and their effortless projection of an ever-present, albeit invisible, force field that was at once detectable and repellent tooutsiders—that if I were carrying a Geiger counter right now would set it clicking like a pod of dolphins.

“Griffin,” someone said.

Tanner was walking toward me. His dirty-blond hair was late-summer long, and he was shirtless, his whole body wet, just out of the ocean and air drying. He seemed in a rush to get somewhere. He’d greeted me with enough surprise that it mimicked warmth but immediately called attention to my out-of-placeness, beating me to the punch with the question I wished to ask. “What are you doing here?” he said. He hadn’t alerted me he was back from counseling at camp. Without waiting for an answer, he jerked his head in the direction I’d come and then hung a right. I followed him down a passageway to a set of narrow changing rooms. In his family’s locker were a pair of boogie boards and rusting beach chairs. Stacked in the corner were kids’ pails and shovels and sandcastle molds. Some swim goggles with disintegrating rubber straps hung from a salt-rusted hook by the door. An umbrella with one of its ribs chicken-winged, punched through its canvas, was propped against the back wall. Tanner stepped out of his bathing suit and, from a hanger, removed a white Lacoste shirt. When he pulled it over his head, it was instantly dotted with moisture. He stepped into boxers and pink shorts and affixed a belt with ducks on it. He sat and brushed the sand from the soles of his feet. His hair, parted to the side, was like a creek bottom full of gold to be panned. He tugged on a pair of ankle socks and sneakers and grabbed his golf spikes—their laces tied to each other so that he was able to drape the pair over his shoulder—then he waved me to follow him again.

“Who are you here with?” he asked.

“Amanda West.”

He seemed puzzled. “Isn’t she dating Rob Dolinski?”

“I think so.”

This cleared up nothing for him. “Are you coming to the field house tonight? There’s a party.”

I shrugged. “I guess,” I said, not knowing where he meant.

“What’ve you been doing all summer?”

“The show,” I said. “When did you get back?”

“A couple of weeks ago,” he said. He removed a watch from his pocket and then fastened it to his wrist. “I’ve got a one o’clock tee time with mydad.” By now we were back at the parking lot and, as if plucking a single fish from a bait ball, Tanner yanked his bike free. “See you later, man.” Then he rode off, one hand on the handlebars, the other pumping his leg at the knee. When he turned right onto Dune Road, a passing car honked at him, then slowed down until he caught up; he took hold of the passenger door’s handle, and the driver pulled him along at speed.

I went back to find Amanda and Claire. I walked past the outdoor patio to the stairs leading to the beach. Two lifeguard stands. A yellow flag day. Big surf, bathers everywhere. Families. The umbrellas’ abstract pointillism. No sign of Amanda. I think back on this moment now and, if you’d asked any random member on that strand to pick out the one person who did not belong, they’d have scanned that scene for less than ten seconds and spotted me trudging down the beach, book bag over one shoulder, like someone selling knicknacks to tourists. So that it was to my credit that I decided to leave.

I found my borrowed bike and proceeded east down Dune Road, with no destination in mind and no intention beyond the fact thatthis was what I chose to do with my afternoon.Like Tanner, I rode like I belonged. My route was dense with houses at first, these intermittently spectacular, lining the road or perched atop the dunes. I passed named beaches to my right—Quogue Village Beach,Hot Dog Beach—their parking lots full of luxury cars. Every person on the island, I imagined, was ocean-facing, the beachgoers’ chairs and towels ticking clockwise after the sun. When I passedTiana Beach, the landscape turned more barren, the telephone poles bleached and lonely. The wind combed the dunes’ shrubs with a hiss, brushed the sea grass back, like a mother a child’s hair; a wide bay was visible to my left, and I could feel the same stupid smile on my face I’d worn since I’d arrived. I thought,I am having an adventure.I am seeing new places.What I wanted: Amanda’s company. What I had: the wind at my back. A long wooden drawbridge came into view, stretching across the bay. It sagged in places, tumbledown and slightly humped at its center, like some Leviathan breaching. I passedPonquogue Town Beach, Dune Road became Beach Road, a marina appeared on my left. I had come to a point of sorts, to the bay’s mouth. There was more land across the channel, but I couldn’t keep going. A harbormaster’s small outbuilding had a soda machine out front and Ibought a Coke. I remembered that I still had an egg sandwich in my book bag, so I parked my bike and sat on one of the benches facing the water. Fishing boats prowled toward open ocean, their outriggers like a cricket’s antennae. My sandwich, in spite of the cold eggs and congealed cheese, was the best I’d ever eaten. The Coke’s sugar was a gift to my blood. The food restored my optimism. I really believed some sort of reset was possible. Like this was a video game and the destroyed avatar that had arrived at this place would return to Amanda’s reconstituted, ready to triumph over her disapproval and disdain; that whatever discomfort she was suffering—now that I had so generously granted her some space—would be dissipated.

On the return, the brutal headwind slowed my pace. Despite the straight road, the extra effort made me paranoid I was lost. Over the low dunes, after I passed a jetty, a deserted beach came into view, and I stopped to consider it. I shouldered the bike’s frame and walked across the sandy path toward the water. I placed the bike on its side and, from my basket, removed my towel. I took off my shirt and shoes. At the water’s edge, I watched the breakers for a while. I entered the ocean slowly at first and then swam out. The water was chilly and revivifying. I bodysurfed several waves. Their lines were very clean. I imagined Amanda watching me from the shore. I swam out far—farther, perhaps, than I’d ever allowed myself in my life—sprinting, to exhaustion, well beyond the breakers. The silence was profound. I was a good hundred yards out. To the northwest, crowded Ponquogue Beach, full of umbrellas, appeared covered in rainbow sprinkles. There came a low burble: in the sky, a single-prop plane pulling a banner inched west:Melinda Marry Me?I felt a strange pulse beneath my feet; I dunked my head. Below, between the green bars of sunlight, I thought I saw a shadow far bigger than my own. It might be days before they found Dr. West’s bike and put the pieces of my disappearance together. Spooked, I swam in, pausing occasionally to tread water and look beneath the surface. Did the shadow, reappearing, now have a more discernible length and form? I caught the first wave in to shore that I could and ran back to my towel. I scanned the horizon. Relieved, I lay on my back, closed my eyes, and let the sun warm my body. I thought of the other shadows that had lurked beneath me this past year: Kepplemen, Fistly, Damiano. Now, in someways, Dad. I did not include Naomi among this shiver. Nor Amanda, who, I figured, had probably not given me a single thought since we’d parted. And once again I was seized by fantasy. It required we be alone. I imagined her lying beside me. She visored her eyes and smiled, and when I woke up from this dream, I realized I had slept deeply and for a long time. I was cottonmouthed. The sun was lower in the sky. My body was covered in a fine layer of sand. It came off only when I brushed it with my shirt’s fabric, and even then some of its glimmer adhered.

Amanda’s house, upon my return, was quiet. The clock over the mantel read just past six. I entered the kitchen, and there on the counter lay a plate of roasted bluefish covered in sour cream and herbs, asparagus and olives in a bowl. In a sheet pan with aluminum foil, red potatoes sprinkled with rosemary, roasted almost to burned. A pair of martini glasses, each with a lemon twist at the cup’s bottom, stood next to a sweaty cocktail shaker. Not hearing anyone inside, not sure what I could help myself to, I drank water from the faucet until it sloshed in my belly. Through the window over the sink, I saw Dr. West and a woman eating dinner on the lawn’s bayside, Hellie seated beneath their small wrought-iron table, its tablecloth astir in the breeze. When I walked out to say hello to them, Hellie hopped up and nosed my hand and then returned to lie at the couple’s feet. Dr. West wiped his mouth with his napkin and stood to greet me. He introduced me to his wife, Sylvia, who wore her golden hair in a hived bouffant. Her shoulders, exposed by her sleeveless blouse, were browned and peeling, the dead skin like dried Elmer’s glue. Because she faced the setting sun, she covered her eyes when she greeted me.

“Please, Griffin, sit,” Sylvia said.

“I’ll make you a plate,” Dr. West said. “Do you want a beer? A glass of wine, perhaps?” Sylvia poured the last of the chardonnay and tapped the bottle with her fingernail before he walked off, and when he returned it was with a plate for me and a fresh bottle under his arm.