Page 35 of Playworld
Mr. Bauer sat back, his expression a vengeful cousin to pleased.
I looked at Cliff and then back at Mr. Bauer. “So, but—what happened to him?” I asked.
Cliff bunched his hair in his fists and shook his head. “Oy,” he said, which made Mr. Bauer chuckle.
The kitchen phone rang. Shira had her own line, so Mrs. Bauer got up to answer it. When she returned to the table, she said, “That was Tanner. He wants you to know he’s leaving his apartment right now.”
—
Like Oren, I too could be a fearless explorer of other people’s rooms—or in the case of our wrestling captain Roy Adler’s town house, where tonight’s party was being held, other people’s floors. It was one of a conjoined trio of four-story homes on Eighty-Fifth and Central Park West, distinguished, primarily, by their colors of brick (Adler’s was red, the other pair a shade of off-white) and also for their comparatively dwarfish size, standing uncowed beneath their much taller neighboring apartment buildings, so that with the city grown up around them, they reminded me of Virginia Lee Burton’sThe Little House.Adler’s place was on the corner, and it had what I would come to learn were the classic architectural details of the Romanesque revival (oriel windows separated by acanthus friezes, decorative pediment arches above these and the doors, elaborate ironwork everywhere); however, what made it more magical than the others was its cone-shaped roof. I meant to see the room beneath it with my own eyes.
Hindsight reveals several important things about our social lives as city children in a city that, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists. Monied parents like the Adlers left town on the weekends for second homes in Litchfield or the Hamptons, but in their mildly dissociative and benignly neglectful fashion they neither insisted their children join them nor cared much what they did in their absence. Their kids might, as they not entirely untruthfully warned their parents, have “a few people over”; these gatherings might, as was the case of Roy’s party, swell to a number closer to a hundred. However, the fact that these parties were tacitly condoned often gave them a distinctly adult feel. They were sedate, intimate: music played but wasn’t blasting; several pizzas had been ordered and sat atop the vast kitchen’s island, but with paper plates and napkins provided. “Beer,” as Roy indicated to Cliff, Tanner, and me when we entered this vast space, “is in the fridge and the cooler”—the former double-doored and restaurant-sized, the latter an ice-filled galvanized steel tub. No one was hell-bent on property destruction or put their shoes on the furniture. There was a fire going in theMasterpieceTheatreliving room. It was all more Apollonian than Dionysian, and it exemplified the distinctly Neverland quality to how we partied. As was the case with Gwyneth, spending all night out at Studio 54, we were impersonating the adults it seemed we knew only from afar.
Which didn’t mean I didn’t have an agenda. I snooped, but not inappropriately. I was determined to see the top floor. I was hung up on this, I cannot say why, perhaps because the building was as famous to me as any Upper West Side landmark: the Beresford, for instance, with its three octagonal towers overlooking Central Park, where Oren was now, at the apartment of his new best friend, Matt; or the Dakota, with its decorative iron railing surrounding it, of the bearded Wise Man framed by two dragons, the figures repeating at intervals like sentries. But given the fact that Roy was a senior and our wrestling team’s captain, I asked for his permission, to which he replied, after clinking beer cans with me, “I think there are already people up there.” So as not to appear overeager, I took my time. Juniors and seniors were gathered in the wood-paneled living room, grouped in loose cliques around the fire, standing by the mantel, seated on the couch and accent chairs. I spotted the members of the lacrosse team, also the preppy swimmers. Wrestling captain Santoro, who sat with Lisa Mullins on his lap, raised his beer in greeting, and I raised mine in response. Seated around the dining room table, as if they were having a work meeting, were the techies, a group of computer lab regulars and math geeks and drama stagehands: Marc Mason, Todd Wexworth, and Hogi Hyun, plus middle schoolers Chip Colson and Jason Taylor. The walnut staircase I ascended was magnificent, its decorative newel an eagle, its banisters and railings as brown as braised beef, its thick runner a deep green, as soft beneath my feet as the treads were solid. Worthy of note and attributable to a combination of my dimness and youth: I did not associate such palatial digs with wealth any greater than what the Pottses possessed, I being no Oren and entirely incurious about how the world worked. I just thought such domiciles—with their abstract paintings of three colorful lines or sculptures of men so long-legged and long-torsoed they looked like upside-down Ys—were a lot bigger than my own. The second floor’s hallways were dark, though light shined from a room with pocket doors, revealing a dedicated TV room as well as a second fireplace (this even more magical than theexistence of a first one) in which a fire was also roaring. Roaring on the floor, a lion skin rug. Rob Dolinski, one of Boyd’s most popular seniors, was seated on the couch. If he’d had even a scintilla of interest in acting he’d have been a star, his wattage was that powerful. He wore a blazer and a sharp pair of corduroys. His hair was slicked back with sculpting gel and caught the firelight. On his left and right were the pair of gorgeous senior girls from whom he was inseparable: Andrea Oppenheimer and Sophie Evans. The trio passed a joint among themselves. “Are you lost?” Dolinski asked, and pointing to myself, I replied, “Just taking the tour.” “You want a hit?” he offered, and held out the roach. “No thank you,” I said. “Well,” he said, “if you change your mind,” and then, with the spliff, indicated the pair of ladies, as if he were offering them instead of the dope: “There’s plenty to go around.” In response, I continued my tour, pretending to admire the photographs on the mantel, the painting of black-and-white squiggles, sprays, and splashes above the fireplace, excusing myself immediately afterward for fear of getting contact high. “Be seeing you,” Dolinski said, with a confidence approaching certitude.
Roy’s room was on the third floor.
It was no bigger than the one I shared with Oren, but it did have its own bathroom and a view of Central Park. From this height, and through the leafless trees, the reservoir—dotted by the light poles palely illuminating its cinder track—was its own bluey emptiness on this almost moonless night, while the park’s winding walkways and roadways, lit by the same white lights, appeared streaked with incandescent bands that resembled snow. Beyond it, as brilliantly orange as the fireplace’s embers, glowed the great wall of Fifth Avenue’s facades. Still, it was not the vantage that impressed me so much as the decor—the incontrovertible Royness of the space that I studied. Atop his dresser, he had repurposed a shopping crate to stand his multiple wrestling trophies and hang his many medals, and like Gwyneth’s collage, I coveted theideafor the case—that someone so young might commemorate himself thus—as much as the hardware. Above his desk, framed posters forApocalypse NowandThe Warriors,which I also associated with Roy, he being possessed of a cool toughness to which I aspired. Like Mom, Roy also had an impressive bookshelf; however, his was tall and narrow and organized, sofar as I could tell, by genre, blocks of science fiction and fantasy, none of which I had read (The Man in the High Castle,A Canticle for Leibowitz,a ton of Carlos Castaneda). Included among these was a cluster of Stephen King, Tolkien, theDunetrilogy, these giving on toSlaughterhouse-Five, Catch-22, The Crying of Lot 49,plusFranny and Zooey,Nine Stories, andThe Catcher in the Rye. Such a library shamed me. These books were like tickets for entry to a club to which it seemed I was somehow not intelligent enough to be admitted, that demanded concentration I did not seem to have at my disposal. My mother looked up at me from such books and then back to the page. I felt this lack. This failure. (Last summer, Cliff had tackled the Lord of the Rings trilogy andThe Hobbit,by choice.) I wanted to be someone like Roy, for whom these books seemed like bricks on which his self was built; whose identity was fashioned of the same stone as his home’s cantilevered corbels, of the same brass of his wrestling medals; refined in the same fires whose smoke filled these chimneys and that forged the silver and gold of his picture frames. In one such photograph, I picked out Roy, on a dock somewhere, during a recent late-summer idyll, behind which a stately country house sat, Roy standing amid his enormous family—cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents—who seemed, in spite of their sprawling Deuteronomy, to be straight out of central casting. Put another way, they appeared the opposite of actors, enjoying, in their unposed and unselfconscious cohesion, a closeness I feared that my family did not.
I heard girls’ voices in the hallway.
From the base of the stairs, I could see the room I’d sought to visit. But several girls from my class were congregated in a bedroom adjacent to where I now stood, most notably my lab partner, Deb Peryton, who smiled at me, invitingly, so I smiled back and then joined her. They had the forty-five of The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” playing and were chatting over the music.
“We were talking about the scariest movie we’ve ever seen,” she said to me. “Mine wasJaws.”
Deb was wearing a black turtleneck and the same lip gloss as the night we’d kissed.
“My dad took my brother and me to seeDressed to Kill.”
“I thought that had an X rating.”
“It was R,” I said. “My brother and I were holding hands by the end of it.”
“If you take me to seeThe Shining,” Deb said, “I’ll hold your hand.”
“I’ll hold your hand now if you come upstairs and see the top floor.”
“Oh my gosh,” Deb said. “It’s like an aerie up there—”
But now Cliffnotes, who appeared out of nowhere, grabbed my wrist and yanked me into the hallway.
“Pilchard is here,” he said, and pulled me after him. On the first floor, Cliff banged on the closet door beneath the stairs and to the occupants inside said, “Pilchard is here,” and Tanner emerged with flush-faced Justine Keaton, who smoothed out her sweater and hurried past us.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
“Pilchard’s in the kitchen,” Cliff said to Tanner, as if that also answered my question.
Tanner rubbed his hands together like he was about to eat a meal.
In the kitchen, Cliff made a beeline for the fridge while Tanner, who had spotted Pilchard by the island, grabbed him by the back of the neck, pushed him into the corner of the dining nook, and took the seat next to him. Cliff placed a six-pack on the table and shouldered up next to Pilchard on the other side. He nodded that I join him, and I hesitated. He smacked the bench and I sat. When Tanner and Cliff snowballed like this, there was no stopping them. At which point Roy Adler appeared with two rocks glasses: one brimmed with Scotch, another contained a single quarter. He had a cigar in his mouth. “It’s my understanding,” he said, “you boys have a matter to resolve.”
“We do?” Pilchard asked.
“Oh yes,” Tanner said, as if Pilchard’s father had sued his family too. He was a big believer in blind loyalty, especially if it ended in violence.
Roy placed the empty glass with the quarter in the middle of the table. Seated higher than all of us on a barstool, he ashed from this purchase into a golden tray, tapping the cigar so forcefully it sounded like a doctor percussing a chest. He took on, I thought, a princely sort of appearance, wetly sucking at the head till the tip glowed and then sending out three perfect white rings, which I watched widen until, with what smoke was left in his lungs, he blew a tight stream through their tornadic outline so that they disappeared.
“You start,” Cliff said to Pilchard. He had already cracked a beer and was filling the glass.