Page 119 of Playworld

With something nearing sympathy, he asked, “How are you getting home, Griffin? Do you need me to take you to the train?”

“I’ll call my mom,” I said.

In my bedroom, when I went to get Al Moretti’s business card, I spotted Amanda, from my window, walking her bike to the front of the house. There was a phone in the hallway, but first I paused at Amanda’s door, which was open. Out her window, I could see her now riding down the driveway. On her bed lay the dress she’d worn the previous evening, smoothed out, a pair of sandals on the floor. Above its straps, on the bedspread,The Great Gatsby—her summer reading, I figured—with its picture of a woman’s blue face. I dialed Al’s number, and he picked up after the third ring.

There was chatter in the background, several voices, my mother’s laugh among them, the sound of which was a relief. “What’s the address?” Al asked after I explained the situation.

I told him, and he sighed and then repeated it, writing, I could tell, and pressing the handset to his chin with his shoulder, because I also heard the sound of ice in a glass. “Hold on a second,” he said, and coveredthe receiver. His voice buzzed as he conferred. When he came back on the line he said, “Be ready by four,” and hung up.

The next several hours were uncanny. After Amanda returned from her ride, she managed, somehow, to be in any room I wasn’t, upstairs when I was down, outside when I was in. It felt like a magic trick. There were moments when I wasn’t sure how she got from one room to the next or by the dock—it was as if she’d teleported. She passed by windows across the room from me; she was a tiny figure in the distance, staring at the bay; I heard the creak of her footfalls along the ceiling as I sat at the dining table; from where I stood on the back lawn, I saw her disappear from her window. And then it was almost the appointed time. I had packed my bag and, from the foot of the stairs, said, “I’m leaving, thank you,” and when no one replied, I went to wait out front.

From the house, I heard Dr. West bark something and then Amanda appeared. I thought it was to say goodbye, but then Claire rode her bike up the driveway. She let it fall on the grass and then walked up the paving stones leading toward us. She said to me, “Thank you for getting us to the field house last night.” I tugged at my book bag’s strap and shrugged, disarmed by her sweetness. She walked toward the door and stopped and then spied something over my shoulder; and, before I turned, I heard her sigh, as softly as the reeds in the wind, at Vince Voelker, who was pedaling up the driveway on a bike too small for him. It struck me that we resembled each other, albeit with slight differences: there was a familiar chaotic curl in his corkscrewed ringlets, which he wore longer than I did; his eyes were similarly blue but not as near set. He was, in short, a hybrid who belonged to this world. Voelker seemed not the least bit surprised to see me. He nodded and leaned forward, draping his forearms over the banana handlebars, and said, “Hey, Griff,” as if we’d just worked out together this morning. He turned to the girls, and they greeted him warmly, they enclosed him, their backs to me, while they recounted last night’s escapades, but then all three turned to face the sound of a car coming up the driveway.

It was Naomi’s Mercedes. Sam was driving, and Naomi was in the passenger seat. Danny and Jackie sat next to each other in the back, all of them peering out the front windshield. Sam had on his driving gloves, and here, now, their ostentation seemed ridiculous; his chin wastilted upward, as if he were trying to make sure there was nothing he was about to hit with his fender. Naomi’s chin, meanwhile, was pressed to her chest; she wore a patterned sundress, and she stared at me over her tinted glasses with a look of such hope and vulnerability I recognized myself and was ashamed.

“Are those your parents?” Claire asked, the accusatory flintiness having returned to her tone.

“No,” I said, knowing that even if my parents had been the ones to arrive, the embarrassment I now felt would have been only slightly different in kind.

For no explicable reason, Sam stopped the car at some distance from us, as if he were unsure this was the correct address and he, perhaps lost, might inquire of us before turning around. When he stepped out, his suede slippers, absent socks, touched the gravel. His blue rayon shirt was shiny in the afternoon’s now overcast, graying light. His white pants bowed beneath his protuberant belly, his belt tracing it like a smile. He was tan, which made his dark skin even darker, and his high head of hair was bushier than usual, almost youthful in its unkempt state. His mustache was in need of a trim. He nodded at us and then opened the rear passenger door for me. Jackie slid across the seat, huddling against her sister. Already walking toward the car, passing the group, I waved to Amanda and her friends, who had yet to resume their conversation—this triumvirate, these seeming strangers—to take in the sight of the Shah family. Sam’s eyes, meanwhile, were fixed on them, but Naomi followed each of my steps, all the way to my seat, at which point Sam shut my door. While he eased in, Naomi considered me over her shoulder, eyeing me with an inquisitive expression I refused to meet. I could tell it pained her not to ask me what was wrong as much as it pained me that she knew to ask. Just as it pained me not to burst out and tell her everything then and there. Sam closed his door and fastened his seat belt. I could not help but resent the car’s luxurious silence. After Sam turned the ignition, he took a moment, while the car idled and his gloved hands gripped the wheel—he drummed all his fingers once, twice—to revel in the sight of Amanda, Claire, and Vince, his expression unabashedly wistful as the three chatted and laughed, not so much having forgotten us but seeming to have never noticed us in the first place. And while I could not sayexactly what Sam was thinking, what I did want to tell him, during those forever seconds, was that I knew exactly how he felt.

“Your mother says hi,” Naomi said once we were on the road. She spoke gingerly, as if her words risked loosening the shaky grip I had on my emotions. “We saw her and Al in Montauk today. They’re gonna wait till tonight to leave and then pick you up in Great Neck.” Danny and Jackie stared at me like a pair of baby birds. Sam sat more erect than normal, listening to us, and because he sensed my heartbreak and knew better than to make small talk, I felt a gratitude toward him that threatened to shatter my self-control. “We’re gonna stop by my brother’s place first,” Naomi explained. “It’s on the way.”

I don’t remember much about our short trip except that it seemed we had entered an entirely different world, one more densely forested than where I’d been all weekend. Here, smaller and older and more modest homes with brick entryways interrupted by siding were built very near one another, though as we got closer to the water there were newer builds, outliers in their modern design. Naomi’s brother’s place had a bay view; it was a pair of conjoined parallelograms with bubbled skylights blistering its roof. As we exited the car, music was audible from the house, punctuated occasionally by the reverberation, like an arrow striking its target, of someone bouncing off a diving board, followed by thewhoompand splash of people landing in a pool. In spite of all the home’s glass, it was shadowy and dark when we entered, though at the end of the hallway that connected the front to the back, the pool shone in bright relief. There were several guests: a pair of couples sitting on the living room couch, the men topless or with shirts unbuttoned. All of them wore bathing suits. The women were in sheer wraps and high heels, their hair dark and lustrous—and I knew I had returned to half my people.

Naomi’s brother greeted her; he was linebacker-large and shouted his welcome. He hugged Sam, brutally, and then stuck out his hand to me. “I’m Scott,” he said. He was burly, hirsute. He picked up both Danny and Jackie in his arms with a great groan and zero effort, and he remarked on how big they were getting and returned them both gently to the earth. He indicated the platters of food crammed on the table behind him, said that there were cookies and cake if they’d already eaten dinner, ice creamin the freezer if that was what they wanted, “whatever your precious little hearts desire,” he told them, as he walked down the dark hallway toward the back, and it was at this moment, as Naomi and I lagged behind her family, that she took my hand and, once we were outside, led me toward the shallow end of the pool.

Partly this was for privacy. Partly it was to not get wet while her brother and his friends played Jump or Dive. Several were beer-bellied and impressively athletic. Some of them made a high hop before landing on the springboard, bounced straight in the air to touch down on it a second time, so that its bent tip nearly tapped the water’s surface, and, depending on the call, jackknifed or cannonballed, followed by great, concussive splashes that seemed to reach the tops of the pines at the edge of the fence. My feet were in the pool, the water seemed to compose the glue that held my impassivity together. Naomi had taken off her shoes so she too could kick her feet in the cool chop that slapped the liner after each impact. Sam reappeared in his bathing suit, his chest shrunken and concave. He glanced at me and then caught Naomi’s eye. She gave him the slightest shrug, one with a hint of resignation in it, a gesture that I now consider the sneakiest and most devious I have ever witnessed, as if to say,I don’t know what’s wrong with this poor kid either,and he took his place in line, where someone reminded him to remove his eyeglasses before he stepped onto the board.

Naomi, still watching the men, touched her shoulder to mine and whispered, “You gonna tell me what’s going on?” and I shook my head.

She watched Sam take his turn. “Dive!” her brother screamed, so that he flailed spastically. He surfaced, laughing his silly laugh. He demanded a do-over. He swam to the ladder and raced back to the board.

“This has to do with one of those girls, doesn’t it?” Naomi said. And this was all it took. Sam leaped, bounced, and once again there came the shout, “Dive!” and the impact from his bellyflop may as well have come from my own guts, because I crumpled. All that I’d withheld since Amanda’s birthday, since Philadelphia, since mere minutes ago, burst forth, and my grief was torrential. I could not get myself under control. Naomi, initially taken aback, clutched me to her now. She spoke to me as if I were a child to be soothed. She said, “Oh, baby,” and put her arm around my shoulders. I soaked her shoulder’s skin; had I had more timeI’d have turned the space between her neck and clavicle into a bird bath. When nothing consoled me, she said, “Why don’t you take off your shirt and get in the pool? You’re more beautiful than any man here.” The flattery made things worse. At which point she took my wrist and said, “Come with me.”

We were in the Mercedes and driving, but it was difficult for me to tell for how long. My perception was overcast; the afternoon had turned thus as well. By the time I was cognizant enough to take in my surroundings, I noticed that the ocean, slowly being erased by a landbound mist, was on my left again, and we had entered what appeared to be a county park, passing through an asphalt lot several football fields long, its white lines faded and abraded, the blacktop disintegrated in places, pocked and, in some parts, cratered, as if it had taken mortar fire. It was late Sunday. The lot was emptied of cars, the evacuated feeling of weekenders heading home after those windy, chillier, sunset hours dragged out to near darkness. The road turned to hardpacked sand. There were no houses anywhere to be seen between the scrub brush and pine that edged this route. The weather was changing at a rapid clip: a fog was now muscling in across the sea, grayed by its haze; the sun, low on the horizon, was a dead fish’s white eye. I cycled between a state that mimicked tranquility and inconsolable tears, and as we drove, I was certain that I saw: a bobcat crouched in the undergrowth and about to spring; an osprey slicing low toward the bay with a fish in its talons; a woman walking parallel to the beach, holding hands with her two young boys, each with water wings on his arms. The mist grew heavier as we pulled into a large sandlot, a terminus, crisscrossed by tire treads and partially fenced. Naomi bumped the Mercedes into its farthest corner in spite of the fact that we were the only car here, her headlights aimed at the water. She killed the engine and said, “Come sit with me in back.”

I took my familiar place next to her. We closed the doors. We sat facing forward. Through the windshield I could see gaps here in the scrub that revealed the Atlantic, lines of wavebreak unzipping through the curtains of fog rolling to shore, the sea glittering and then obscured in the misty swirl. And then, suddenly, nothing was visible, just whiteness, which made the car even quieter; it sounded like winter, the gusts buffeting the glass. Naomi pressed the back of her hand to my cheek andlightly stroked my face. She cleared the hair from my eyes. She said, “Do you want to talk about it?” and I looked at her and shook my head. She asked, “How can I make it better?” When I shook my head again, she leaned in closer and said, “Let me make it better.” And then she kissed me. She kissed me, and I pictured her as Amanda and kissed her back: in the pitch-black elevator; in her apartment’s bedroom when I’d failed to kiss her; upstairs at her father’s beach house, in her room, in her blue dress, her book falling to the floor, the blue face on its cover watching us. I kissed her now, in the car, with my eyes closed. Naomi paused. I felt her arch her hips high off the seat. I heard a hiss of fabric. Gently, she pulled my swimsuit below my knees and with her sandal’s sole pushed it to the floor. And then she straddled me. In her fists she clutched my scruff while we kissed. She eased herself down; and when she sank, it was as if she were hooding me, as if she were spreading wings over me, so that I felt entirely covered by her. My nails bit into the skin where I clawed her legs; her legs tightened against my hips. I felt something rise up, not a wave but the pulse of one, far out at sea, gathering at great speed toward shore. The sound I made when it broke was closer to a roar. And when I finally opened my eyes, I was staring up through the car’s rear window, into the fog, into the sky, and I felt as if my bones had been hollowed, and I was soaring through clouds with no sense of the horizon.

Naomi and I walked to the beach together.

The mist was so thick that for bearings we relied on the surf’s sound.

The sand was darker than the air.

We walked to the water’s edge. It was only here that the ocean was visible.

Naomi asked me for my shirt, which I removed. She nodded toward the sea, whose waves lapped our feet.

She had taken off her shoes, and she held them by their straps. She entered up to her ankles. The foam kissed her calves, splashed to her knees, darkening her dress.

When it was deep enough, I sank below my chest, letting the breakers foam me. And when I emerged and turned to face Naomi, she was all I could see in the fog. She covered her mouth, nodding, her eyes bright with tears, and then she waved me in, circling her hand as if I were a boywho’d swum out too far. When I returned to her, she kissed my cold cheek and draped a towel over my shoulders, rubbing my back until her hand warmed it with the friction.

“There,” she whispered, and clutched me to her before we shambled back to her car, “you’re clean.”

Video Killed the Radio Star

When I recall how I spent that August, it is no surprise to me that I took refuge in the most surprising place of all, one I had never bothered to make my own over the past four summers but now went so far as to decorate: my dressing room. It was nearly as big as the bedroom Oren and I shared. It too had a bunk bed, the top and bottom with oval-shaped entrances that gave them a cozy, alcove feel. Parallel to this, and like our apartment’s dining room, there ran a wall-length set of mirrors, but with vanity bulbs. Beneath these, like my closet study, and also stretching its length, was a floating desk. Beneath this, a minifridge, stocked for guests (I had only two that month), with a whole assortment of sodas, snacks, and skim milk for my cereals, the boxes arrayed on the desk above. I had my own bathroom with a shower. A TV, suspended in the corner, above the fridge, with access to the major networks, and a live feed fromThe Nuclear Family’s taping sessions that I sometimes liked to watch, sound off. The best part: no windows. Along with my bunk bed, it gave the room a submarine feel, which I relished.