Down the Shore (10 page)

I
n the parking lot at Newark Liberty International, Clare eased his mother's BMW into the sea of cars we had seen from the overpass. We hauled our things out of the trunk, and Clare lit out for the terminal, his oversized suitcase listing behind him from wheel to wheel.

“What about the car?” I called.

Clare stopped short.

The car came into our lives after Clare answered a call from a Connecticut area code. There was a woman on the other end whose name, when Clare parroted it back to her as a question, sounded Dutch. We were with Mike and Casey at the Tropicana in Atlantic City. When the blackjack dealer asked Clare to take his conversation somewhere else, I followed him into a food court, where the woman on the phone explained that she had an SUV belonging to his family at her home on Fishers Island, and asked Clare if he'd be so kind as to come and pick it up. Had Clare's parents been vacationing at someone's beach house when they heard the law was closing in? I imagined them boarding a ferry before dawn, ditching their vehicle, offering a cab driver a stack of hundreds for a lift to Teterboro and a waiting plane. I never learned what their car was doing there. If Clare knew, he didn't let on.

Two days later, a demure Eastern European woman—not one of the family's regular chauffeurs, judging by the jerky, overcautious way she handled the Mercedes wagon—met us at the Fishers Island ferry dock. The house, hidden by tall privets, ran along a slice of land between an unmarked street and a rocky beach. Our visit lasted under five minutes and followed a tight script: give the boys the car keys from a silver dish on the wet bar in the study, offer them a glass of water or a diet soda, suggest a nearby B&B where they can spend the night. We could hear a dinner party in some distant wing, but no invitation was forthcoming. I imagined someone scratching Clare's name off a to-do list as we sped down the narrow island roads in his mother's silver BMW X5, now stranded in Newark.

Clare turned to face me without setting down his bag. He would have left the car to rust if I had kept my mouth shut.

“It's long-term parking, right?” he said.

“I don't think a year is what they had in mind.”

“What should I do?”

“Just leave the keys on the back left tire. I'll have my mom come pick it up.”

The big airy terminal was full of sunlight and echoing boarding announcements. I was halfway through the check-in line when I sensed someone closing in on me; Clare was three steps away when I spun around. He stopped just short of the retractable nylon barrier and swallowed hard.

“They're charging me this fee,” he said. “My stuff weighs too much.”

Behind him, the attendant at the American Airlines counter was craning her neck to see where he had gone, waving his passport in the air.

“How much?” I asked.

“Three hundred. There's this fucking hold on all my cards.” Clare opened the backpack slung over his shoulder and took out a blue felt shoe bag. He bounced the shoes in his hand, as if trying to guess their weight for a prize at a fair. “Do you see a trash can?”

“Wait,” I said. “Slow down. You're gonna throw stuff away? Why don't I just spot you the money and you can pay me back when we get over there?”

“Can you do that?”

Maybe, I thought, balancing my checking account in my head. I handed Clare my card.

“Can you come over and sign?” he said. “They know I'm not you.”

A mother of three, eavesdropping behind us, agreed to hold my place in line.

“Hi,” the counter attendant said. “Is everything OK?”

Clare stood with his back to her while I paid his fee, pretending to keep an eye on my bags. I signed the receipt and she told Clare, over my shoulder, to enjoy his flight. It took me a second to understand that she was talking about the plane ride, and not making a joke at Clare's expense.

He was almost through security by the time I joined the line, and I watched the TSA agents stop and search him from my place at the back. They had him spread his legs and raise his arms like Da Vinci's
Vitruvian Man
while a woman in uniform traced the outline of his body with a plastic wand. Another agent flipped through his passport and riffled through his bag. I wondered if they knew him as his father's son, if the family name was now a big red flag.

I didn't get a second look on the way to my flight. When the captain announced that we'd be taking off shortly, I dug my phone out of my pocket and called my mother one last time.

“Hey,” I said. “It's me. You want a car?”

•   •   •

“What's your purpose here?” the customs officer asked.

She was my first British accent on foreign soil, but my excitement at this fact was not contagious. The sun had just risen over London, Heathrow. I had a connecting flight to Edinburgh. She did this all day.

“School,” I said. “St. Andrews University.”

“You're a first year?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“I need your matriculation letter.”

I handed her all the paperwork I had.

“None of this is any good,” she said.

I asked if she would mind checking again. She flipped quickly through the pile, but gave no sign that she had found what she was looking for.

“This is your visa,” she said, pounding a stamp into my passport. “You can come and go til June.”

•   •   •

Clare and I sat in a glass bus stop outside Edinburgh airport, watching double-decker coaches cough black exhaust into a darkening sky. The sun had set by the time the university's chartered bus pulled up and opened its doors. Everyone on board looked American and jet-lagged. A short stint on the highway was followed by a long ride on a country road that barely fit the bus, wet leaves brushing past my face behind the window. After about an hour a woman near the front stood up, tapped a microphone, and welcomed us to St. Andrews in a thick brogue. I saw the town through the windshield, its streetlights flaring and fading like fireflies, blotted out by high-pitched rooftops and towers and spires as the landscape spun in front of us with the winding of the road. On our left, the woman said, was the Old Course, where golf was first played. It was all low grassy hills in the darkness, a patchy expanse of black land. To our right was Andrew Melville Hall, where Clare and I were meant to live.

“One of the finest examples of new brutalist architecture in all of Scotland,” our guide said. “If you look closely, you'll see that it resembles two giant steamer ships crossing paths in the night.”

I saw what she meant about the building as we pulled up to the spot-lit entrance, situated where the bows of the glass and concrete “ships” met at an angle. Clare and I dragged our bags into a lobby full of plastic plants. In a far corner was the kind of store you find in hotel lobbies, selling magazines and medicine in single doses. Andrew Melville Hall functioned as a hotel in the summer, when the school rented rooms to golfers, and still felt like a hotel now—muffled, thick walled, sterile. The woman behind the reception desk summoned a porter to take our bags up to our rooms. Dinner, she informed us, would be ready in an hour in the top-floor catering hall. She handed us our keys.

Clare and I rode the elevator in silence, a thickset Scottish porter between us. We stopped on three to drop Clare off, and I pushed through fire door after fire door as we walked the long hall on the port side of the ship. Between each set of doors, an axe and an extinguisher were buried in the wall behind a pane of glass, signaling a fear of fire that seemed strange in a town where you spend most days expecting rain. Outside in the darkness, balls of rainfall were visible around the orange streetlights that ran along the empty road.

“Can you wake me up for dinner?” Clare asked, his key in the lock. “You have an alarm, right? Mine just died.”

The urgency in his voice was about more than missing a meal. He looked exhausted, and seemed afraid to close his eyes in a new place with no one there to wake him. I told him I would come by later. The porter showed me to my floor.

“This is your room,” he said, opening the door.

The porter waited in the hall while I dragged my bags inside. The rooms were small and square, the walls covered in corkboard to prevent the tacks in tie-dyed tapestries and Joy Division posters from ruining the sheetrock. I had my own bathroom for the first time in my life, which was something. But the disappointment I felt took me back to the first time my mother brought me to our house in Princeton, led me up the back stairs, and opened the first door on the second-story hallway. The room she showed me, my new room, was empty except for a wash of grime and loose change along the far wall, like something left by an outgoing tide. The paint was peeling and the windows looked over a small parking lot dotted with trashcans. This was not what I had imagined when she told me she had found the perfect place in Princeton. I wished that we had never left the shore.

“Everything in order, sir?” the porter called from the hall.

“Yeah, totally,” I said, tipping him ten pounds because I hadn't broken any bills.

When he was gone, I lay down on the blue duvet and stared at the reflection of my body in the dead screen of the TV aimed down at the bed—270 nights here, give or take.

D
inner was a barely edible British take on lasagna: boiled vegetables pressed like botany specimens between layers of overcooked noodle, topped with half an inch of mystery cheese. The plastic cups, smoky with scratches and fraying at the rims, reminded me of summer camp. Getting-to-know-you banter was swelling all around us. I had imagined—what? A more exotic and egalitarian version of my high school? I couldn't remember.

“Are you gonna finish that?” Clare asked me, pointing his fork at my plate.

He had been tucking into his food across the table. Either the twenty-minute power nap had done wonders for him, or this drab scenery and bad food were exactly what he'd hoped to find. I pushed my tray toward him. Finally, a girl in a red sweatshirt stood on a chair to say that she would take us out for the evening, that all we had to do was follow her.

After dinner, she walked backward toward the town, leading a parade of international students. She took questions from the people near the front, and recited facts as a light rain began to fall again. The population of the town doubles between orientation and exams, she said. There are three main streets in St. Andrews proper: North Street, South Street, and Market Street—four if you count the Scores Road, which runs along the water and ends at the Old Course Club House. There are more pubs per capita in St. Andrews than anywhere else in the world.

Our first stop was the Victoria, a second-story bar and lounge on Market Street. The parade became a mob as people crowded into the stairwell to get out of the weather. On the step above us, a boy and girl were doing their best to talk about us without seeming rude. The boy turned around after some audible prodding by his companion, and stuck out his hand.

“Clayton Jacks,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”

He wore the family name engraved on what looked like a medical ID bracelet, the links of which were as thick as his skinny fingers. He was well dressed and overeager. I tried to guess which boarding school he hailed from.

“I'm Tom. This is—”

Clare had fallen back and turned away.

“I think you were on my flight,” Clayton said, over my shoulder. “The seat behind me?”

Clare turned, and the two of them shook hands. I couldn't tell whether Clare recognized these people personally or recognized them as a type that he was eager to avoid.

“Clayton Jacks,” Clayton Jacks said again. “Pleased to meet you. And you know Tom?”

“We went to school together,” I said.

“So did Chantal and I. Chantal saw the two of you at dinner and said we had to meet you.”

Chantal had very white skin and small hands that shook slightly. A child's face, expensive clothes.

“Where were you at school?” she asked.

“Lawrenceville.”

“Lawrenceville, of course,” she said. “We were at Exeter together. And where are you from?”

Clare said he was from New Canaan, which was either a lie or not the answer to the question she had asked.

“It's nice to meet people from boarding school,” Chantal said.

They hadn't asked where I was from, and in the silence that followed, I realized that Clare hadn't really introduced himself.

“I didn't catch your name,” Chantal said to him.

“It's Clare.”

Chantal waited for the other name to drop.

“Hey, let's go somewhere else,” I said. “I know somebody here. Does anyone have change for a phone call?”

“Here,” Chantal said, producing a sleek silver cell phone from her bag, “use this. It works all over the world.”

Just before we parted ways in Princeton, Kelsey had torn a corner off a map of Ocean County, written down the number of her Scottish cell phone, and slipped it into my back pocket. I had been playing with the paper all night, and now it was as soft as cotton, the number illegible, which didn't matter because I had memorized it weeks before. I was eager to find Kelsey and lose these people both for Clare's sake and because I had a feeling they were also here because something had gone wrong in their lives. Pick up, I thought, after three single-note ring tones. The noise that broke through on the other end was deafening.

“Hello?”

“Kelsey. It's Tom.”

“Hi, Tom.”

“I'm here.”

“Be more specific.”

“This place called the Victoria.”

“Walk out the door and go straight until you hit the Scores. It's the one by the water. Turn left when you see the beach. Ask someone for Ma Bells.”

“We'll be right there.”

“I'll be right here.”

I led the way, and Clayton fell in step beside me. He was determined to find some common ground, and we managed to come up with the Gold and Silver Ball the year before, and a New Year's party at the Warwick in Manhattan that I had heard about but not actually attended. He wondered aloud how we had never met, while I split my attention and gave the other half to the conversation Clare was trying not to have behind me. He stuck to the New Canaan story, and implied that he had always been a boarder. Chantal mentioned people we had gone to school with, and Clare pretended not to know them, politely excusing himself from the life I was pretending to lead three steps ahead of him.

The scenery came to Clare's rescue as we hit the Scores. St. Andrews Bay was black in the darkness, and a white stripe of reflected moonlight ran perpendicular to a hundred yards of rolling breakers. The white of the surf became the white-sand beach that ringed in the Old Course and the bedrock foundation of the town. The smell of salt water took at least two time zones off my jet lag.

A group of girls tottered by, and one of them pointed backward over her shoulder when I asked her where Ma Bells was. The bar sat below the street, behind a sunken concrete courtyard filled with people clutching pints and smoking and talking at one another. The bouncer on the door wore an earpiece connected to a coiled wire that snaked down his thick neck, and beside him was a man in a long gray overcoat who was not here to pick up college girls, judging by his officious demeanor and the way he looked us over as we started down the stairs. Kelsey appeared in the doorway, wearing a low-cut white T-shirt with what looked like a little boy's tuxedo jacket. She whispered something to the bouncer, who waved us in as she disappeared.

Soft rock played on the jukebox inside, but the mood was frenzied and the room was packed. There was something prefatory about the noise people were making, like the atonal mess of an orchestra tuning up. Kelsey was waiting for us inside the door, a cigarette in one hand, a highball in the other. She came to me first, draped her arms over my shoulders, and crossed her full hands just behind my head. Holding her for those four seconds was like picking up a guitar to find it in a strange tuning, where nothing you play sounds the same. I tried and failed to catch her eye as she kissed Clare hello and introduced herself to Clayton and Chantal.

“Come sit down, you guys,” she said, taking Clare by the arm and heading for a table in the back. “Did you just get in?”

Before I could answer, I realized that Prince William was sitting at the table Kelsey was leading us to, talking to an older man dressed like he had just walked off the golf course. This explained the extra man on the door, and a second man, identically dressed, watching our table from the opposite wall. And this was more like it. Clare seemed as shocked as I was, but Chantal and Clayton gave me these weird congratulatory smiles, a show of appreciation for helping them fall in with the right crowd on their first night. William wore the uniform of my Catholic grammar school: blue button-down, pleated khakis, boat shoes. Sitting next to him was a boy dressed in a black belted racing jacket and a white dress shirt, the kind of thing you'd expect royalty to wear for a night out. He wore half his shoulder-length hair tied back in a kind of samurai pony tail, and had a navy ascot knotted at his throat, which told me that he took this British upper class thing very seriously, or not seriously at all. Kelsey made her way around the table and slid into the empty seat next to him. He turned as she sat down and I watched him cock his head and kiss her on the mouth. Her face followed his as he sat back and resumed his conversation with a dark-haired girl I couldn't see. Kelsey slapped his thigh.

“This is Julian, who can't be bothered to introduce himself.”

“Jules,” he said, shaking Clare's hand and then mine. “You're first years, then?”

“I met these two at my cousin's birthday,” Kelsey said.

Jules squinted at Clare.

“Looks a bit like Will, doesn't he?”

This was a good excuse to look at William, whom we had been pretending to ignore. Clare's nose was broader on the bridge, and his jaw was less angular, but the resemblance was astonishing when you saw them side by side. Jules hit the prince of England on the shoulder with the back of his hand.

“Mate, have a look. Your long lost twin's just turned up from America.”

William, laughing, shook Clare's hand.

“Great face,” he said.

“I'd lose the American accent if I were you,” Jules said to Clare. “Have your hair cut. Pass yourself off.”

The girl sitting across from Jules was named Mary. Her deep tan and her hair, which had the color and sheen of obsidian, made her look like Disney's Pocahontas. She barely turned her head when she was introduced to us, which made it seem like someone had told her to hold still in this shifting sea of bodies, although she didn't look like she took orders.

“Thanks so much for bringing us,” Clayton said, wiping gin off his mouth with his sleeve. Martinis had materialized around the table. Kelsey stuck her fingers in her boyfriend's drink, fishing for an olive, her hot pink nails magnified by the liquor and the convex glass.

“Cleveland,” Clayton said, in answer to a question that I didn't hear. “Shaker Heights.”

“No, which hall are you living in?” Jules asked.

“Oh, Andrew Melville.”

“Who lived there our first year?” Kelsey asked.

“Damien,” Jules told her. “Lasted a month. We should take this lot over to the Old Course and pay him a visit. He'd enjoy some company.”

“I don't know,” Kelsey said. “They just got here. Maybe save that for another night. Are you guys hungry? You're not eating hall food, are you?”

“I couldn't even tell what they served us tonight,” Chantal said. “I didn't touch it.”

“You must be starving,” Kelsey said. “Let's get you some Indian food, and then we can have a drink at my place.”

We all nodded, half drunk now, one appetite igniting another like a chain of flares. Kelsey checked her boyfriend's watch. She seemed dependent on him for small things—an olive, the time of day. Clare asked where the bathroom was, and I followed him when he stood up and shouldered through the crowd. I couldn't sit at that table anymore.

I found Clare at the bathroom sinks, leaning on the counter in a standing track start, staring down at the place where the mirror met the marble. I washed my hands at the sink next to him, and caught his eye in the glass. There was no relief for him in the crowd we had just fallen in with, and we had both looked at each other when it became clear that Jules and Kelsey were a couple. Clare's reflection laughed.

“So here we are,” he said.

In the street outside Ma Bells, Kelsey announced that we were going to Balaka, an Indian restaurant that served takeout until midnight. Clayton was imitating the man who had been talking to William—a Frenchman who had apparently been trying to get the prince to join him for breakfast. Kelsey, laughing, snaked her arm around Clayton's waist and said he must have known that guy for ages. I wished that I had found a way to leave Clayton and Chantal where we'd found them. In my fantasies about St. Andrews, I had imagined only me and Kelsey, with Clare somewhere in the periphery. Kelsey dug her phone out of her bag and called her flatmates to see if they had cigarettes and say that we were on our way.

“I'm with these precious first years,” she said. “I'm bringing them home.”

•   •   •

The chicken vindaloo that Clayton ordered, along with three bottles of champagne to go, was the hottest thing I had ever tasted. We took one bite at a time, huddled over takeout containers at Kelsey's kitchen table, and then raced each other to the fridge for vodka, lager, soy milk—anything to ease the burning before going back for more. Clare and Chantal tried to see who could stand the spice for longer, laughing through tears and stamping their feet as if the pain was music they were dancing to. Kelsey's flat was filling up as the bars emptied out. Her flatmates lit cigarettes and leaned against the kitchen walls and counters, watching us. The light from the naked fluorescents overhead cut through the smoke and hit their glossy lips and diamond studs and the whites of their eyes. Someone wondered aloud what we'd be like in six months, and I tried to imagine what kind of change they were anticipating. Clare put a hand on my shoulder, dabbing at his glistening forehead with the cuff of his shirt. “Enough,” he said. “Get that shit away from me.”

The stairwell coughed up visitors in twos and threes. Jules appeared behind a pair of twin boys I had seen at Ma Bells. I nodded to him, but he gave no sign that he recognized me. He was wearing scuffed-up velvet tuxedo slippers that I had seen men wear at the benefits we catered, and his jacket looked much older than he did. His clothes were threadbare in a way that looked not shabby, but aristocratic. No one in New Jersey dressed like that. Jules stepped aside to make way for two girls on their way out in a show of good and effortless manners.

Back in the kitchen, Chantal was getting hit on by the twins.

“You kids need some parents,” Kelsey said, as Clare and I walked in together. “Has anyone explained this to you?”

“No,” I said, warily.

“It's called academic parenting. It was about academics back in the 1400s, but it's more of a mentorship thing now. Third- and fourth-year boys adopt some first-year girls—that usually happens first—and girls adopt some first-year boys, and when someone has a suitable flock, they combine with someone they know or someone they sleep with to make an academic family.”