Page 125 of Playworld

It was now Sam who drove me home in the evenings. I admit this too was a relief: to be under his surveillance, to lose the window of opportunity with Naomi, since within his sight I could do little wrong. But the silence brought on by this change in routine was for me almost unbearable. Here, I sometimes grew most paranoid, I expected an accusation at any moment, and on that first drive home together the actor in my soul made his appearance almost immediately.

“Can I get your advice about something?” I asked, and, after a beat, added: “It’s a girl problem.”

Sam downshifted, kept his eyes on the road. “I’ll be happy to help if I can,” he replied.

I told him the story of Amanda, from our meeting at Nightingale through the school year, from babysitting to the dinner with her dad, the kiss on the night of her birthday, culminating, of course, with that dreadful weekend in Westhampton—“Ah,” Sam said, “now I get why you were so upset that day”—and concluding with my question: “What do you think I should do?”

We’d arrived in Great Neck; we were on Saddle Rock’s residential roads. Sam pulled over. “For starters,” he said, proving he had been listening to at least part of my story, “you need to learn to drive a stick.”

This was how we spent those final evenings together. With me, driving the Ferrari all over Great Neck, wending our way down to University Gardens, then up to Kings Point, along East Shore Road, the nighttime vistas of Manhasset Bay ripping alongside us. Other nights, we crossed over to Port Washington and Sands Point, and then pushed east to Hempstead Bay, driving with the windows down, the salt in the air so heavy at times it was like eating an oyster again, the automobile exhaust carried on the eastbound breezes from Manhattan, whose glowon the horizon blotted the stars. I got the hang of finding each gear’s sweet spot, a conversation in resistance and inertia, between the road and the V12, always seeking that balanced feel, that zone where the car was never redlining but holding power in abeyance. “Accelerate into the turn,” Sam said as we leaned to the right. “Trust the suspension to claw the road.” We headed south again, to Greenvale, bearing east on 25A to East Norwich—Perfect names,I thought,for Griffynweld—continuing on to Oyster Bay, Sam and me driving for hours, all the way east to Stony Brook, where we parked and could spot, to the west, the Eatons Neck Lighthouse, its beam’s flash and revolution fingering the sound while Connecticut’s shore twinkled across the water. We got pulled over twice during these lessons, Sam producing his Police Benevolent Association card and badge for the officer, who considered it and, after disappearing briefly to call in the plates, said only, “Thanks, Mr. Shah, just make sure that next time your son has his permit with him.”

“My son?” Sam chuckled when we were back on the road. “Makes you wonder who’s your mother.”

And oh, the houses I saw on these long drives. Mansions with columns and verandas, their crow’s nests looking out over the waterfront. Their foyers lit by gargantuan chandeliers. Their old-world masonry and landscaping, their limestone and copper flashing mottled with the sea spray’s patina, their ivy-covered chimneys and two-boat slips. Their lawns for lawn’s sake, as if grass were a staple crop. The millions of ways there were in America to make millions. The beguiling edifices of the rich that proclaimedmore, more, more.What to do with such plenty? What to make of such wealth? How to live your life? Why did Sam bring me here? Is it possible that he simply wanted the company? Was he planning to shoot me and dump my body in the Sound? Or did he want to justify?

“The middle class grows,” Sam said, “the middle class needs cheap clothes. When I was your age, when it was time for me to go into the family business, this fact was as bright as that lighthouse’s lantern back there. But of this, I was sure: open up the borders, get rid of the tariffs, manufacture overseas to reduce your labor costs and increase your margins. Deregulate all of it, and then it’s just an equation. You, the government, you cut my taxes to swell the middle, even if the middle isn’t whatit used to be, and guess what? The middle’s less will become my more, and the only solution when the economy tanks will be to tax me even less, while I laugh all the way to the bank. These next few decades—it’s going to be like having a bucket when it rains. Because if you’re rich in this great country, you’re in like Flynn. You’re rich,first.You’re not Jewish or Muslim or yellow or brown. You’re rich, and you’resafe.Safe from the very place you call home.”

I touched 110 on the straightway.

“The truth of it is I knew there was no risk in this business when I started. When the game’s gamed it’s game over. I knew that if I just put in my time, there was mostly only reward. But risk,” Sam said. “Balls. Nerve. No safety net. That, my boy, is the provenance of your father. Maybe it’s your provenance too.”

—

I’d lost count of the days since Naomi had last found her way to my bed. Something had happened. She seemed chastened, wary in Sam’s presence, cool and formal toward me. She avoided eye contact. She mumbled nonsensically. On the nights Sam and I did not drive together, she excused herself after dinner and retired to her bed, leaving Danny, Jackie, and me to do the dishes and then spend the rest of the evening watching MTV. It had premiered at the beginning of August and it was all the girls did, it seemed. Naomi sometimes joined us, though she sat as far apart from me in the room as she could manage.

But on the last night we spent together, when Sam and I arrived from Manhattan, Naomi seemed back to being her old self. She greeted me warmly, kissed her husband with an exaggerated pucker on the lips, and, after the big smack, said, “Have I got a surprise for you.” She led us to the kitchen. “From Marvin Himmelfarb at Ralph Lauren.” She held up a bottle of Nolet’s Reserve and then, with a flourish, a bottle of Petrus Pomerol.

Sam brightened, considering the label. “Nineteen sixty-one!” he said. “What did you do to deserve this?”

“Let me fix you a martini, and I’ll tell you all about it.” She gave Sam another big flirty smooch. “I brought home some steaks. They had a great price on the filet at the butcher.”

“Fantastic,” Sam said. “I’ll decant the bottle.”

Later, after Danny, Jackie, and I had scraped the fat into the koi pond, we came back inside to find Sam asleep at the dinner table.

“You two,” Naomi said to her daughters, “go start your bath. I’m going to give your father another antihistamine.” Then to me: “So he doesn’t snore from the sulfites.”

Did Naomi know it was her last chance to show me that this was what we shared? As I watched her above me, it seemed, at times, as if I were only incidental, a bystander to her performance. She wanted to be unforgettable. She wantedus,I am certain now, to be something she might never forget, that she might tend henceforth, like embers. She slapped me occasionally; she stiff-armed my face, leaning with all her weight, palm to my cheek, and held me there. She pulled her own hair, gathering fists of it by her temples, and shook her head. And for a long time, at the very end, she just kissed me, and I kissed her back, and this kissing felt like a free fall in pitch-darkness, felt like something endless.

It was sometime in the middle of the night, but, waking, I knew I was not the only one awake. Like a dog’s ear for high pitch, I heard a sound, one I could barely discern or distinguish, and I got out of bed to find the source.

Naomi was seated in the middle of the front hall’s staircase, in her slip, crying.

She looked up and wiped her eyes and waved for me to join her, then took my hand and turned me around, so that I was seated with my back to her, between her legs, which formed chair arms as if she were my young king’s throne. She pressed her face to my neck and nuzzled me there and cried, silently, her body shaking. Her forehead was hot. She calmed down, finally, and for a long time just sat with her arms weaved around my neck.

“I don’t want to go upstairs,” she said. Then: “I don’t want you to ever leave.” Then: “I don’t want to lose my family.” Then: “I don’t want to be with Sam anymore.” Then: “I want to wake up in your bed one morning.” Then: “I don’t want my daughters to ever be this unhappy.” Then: “I don’t want to be scared anymore.” Then: “I don’t want to keep hating myself.” Then: “I’m so sorry for what I’ve done to you.”

She kissed the back of my neck, at the very base, and rose to her feet and left me there.

Adults, I think now, were the ocean in which I swam.

—

There comes a point, even in the summer, when you want the season to end.

That evening, Danny, Jackie, and I were in the living room, watching MTV. If you watched the channel for long enough, the programming cycled through the same set of videos, but that did not (as yet) blunt our fascination with any of them, our determination to memorize every close-up of the climactic drum fills and guitar solos, these teaching a whole generation how to play air guitar and how to vogue. Nor did it diminish every tiny pleasure we took in certain moments we’d memorized. Of Stevie Nicks, for instance, blatantly blowing her lyrics as she lip-synced with Tom Petty in “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” the duo dressed in black, and Nicks, with her witchy frizzy blond hair, reminding me of Naomi. Like Sam, the lead singer of the Buggles (“Video Killed the Radio Star”) wore Elton John glasses, and his keyboard player made it appear that the height of virtuosity was to play two synthesizers at once—“We can’t rewind,”I sang, to Danny and Jackie’s delight,“we’ve gone too far!”During the guitar solo on “You Better Run,” Pat Benatar would shake her head and rake fingers through her hair, and it was part and parcel of my transformation that nearly every rock song was so obviously about sex that I wanted to cover Danny’s and Jackie’s still-innocent ears. As for “In the Air Tonight,” whatdidthe lyrics mean? Where was Mom? Dad? Oren?“The hurt doesn’t show,”sang Jackie, a thumb to her mouth in place of a mic,“But the pain still grows,”Danny sang, picking up the line.“It’s no stranger to you and me,”I roared. And while they played the air drums and danced like little go-go girls, I went outside to feed the fish.

It was dark in the yard, and after feeding the koi I walked to the lawn’s center and faced toward Manhattan, which I missed, which like my heartsickness glowed above the hedges and killed the sight of the stars. And then I heard Sam and Naomi fighting. The back of the Shahs’ home, as I have mentioned, was more glass than brick, and at night it wasa tableau vivant. I turned around to see the girls dancing to The Who’s “You Better You Bet,” and then looked up to the Shahs’ bedroom on the second floor.