Down the Shore (4 page)

“Me too,” I said. “Before this.”

“Right,” she said, her gaze drifting to the room around us. “So ‘this' is pretty new for you too. I didn't grow up like this either.”

That was what I had been wondering.

“You seem more relaxed than last night, but maybe that's the punch. Or maybe it's because I'm being nicer.”

“It's OK,” I said. “No big deal.”

“That wasn't an apology, sweetheart. Do you like being a day student? My cousin keeps trying to board, but her parents want to keep an eye on her.”

“It has its upsides.”

“Right,” she said. “I bet it does.”

“What does that mean?”

“When I was asking for your number, the first thing everybody told me was that you weren't dealing anymore. Like there was no other reason I'd be looking for you. My cousin did the same thing.”

“What else did she tell you?”

“She was complaining about how hard it is to get high with you being good.”

“I'm sure she'll figure something out. Why were you drawing in the bar last night?”

“I make clothes,” she said.

“Are you in school for that?”

“OK,” Kelsey said, after a deep breath. “This might seem strange to you. Or maybe not. It seemed a little strange to me when I figured it out. You're going to St. Andrews, right? I go to St. Andrews.”

“I can't tell if you're fucking with me,” I said, finally. “This is crazy.”

“Well, it's a very popular place to go these days, so it's not
that
crazy. But like I said, I was a little surprised. And no, I'm not fucking with you.”

I wondered whether she was more surprised than she was letting on, if she attached any real significance to this discovery, even if it was only a tenth of the significance I felt now that what she had said was sinking in.

“Anyway,” Kelsey said, “I make clothes and show them in the fashion show the school puts on. You'll be there next year. That's funny to think about. Everybody goes.”

She had made the shirt she was wearing, and she pulled it over her head to show me the French seams on the sides. A tattoo of the outline of New Jersey ran down her rib cage just below her armpit, the eastern coast bordering on the gentle swell of her right breast. She was almost boyishly flat chested, with smooth shoulders and strong arms. Her shirt sleeves were bunched up around her wrists and the sheer white fabric was stretched between her hands when I leaned forward and kissed her. Her mouth was stale from cigarettes and waxy with a coat of lip gloss that tasted like mint candy. She pulled back after a split second and gave me a warm glare. I panicked, wondering if I had read this wrong, but then she closed her eyes and leaned in. Later, she described her skirt to me as she unzipped it and worked it down her legs. She seemed to be giving off more heat now, and there was a new smell in the air around her, something sweet and heavy. What she was wearing under the skirt was black and barely anything at all.

“Stand up,” she said. “These pants are long on you. And so new.”

I had been meaning to cuff them. I pulled my shirt over my head and stood on the bed while Kelsey circled me on her knees, tugging and cuffing the denim, fitting it to my body. I had broken out in a light sweat despite the chill of the house, and I remembered a middle school D.A.R.E. instructor telling our class that the chemical in mushrooms was a mild toxin. To fill the silence, I described how Clare and I had gone shopping and cleaned up.

“Just two guys stripping down in a parking lot,” she said, pressing her mouth against my hip to tear away a loose thread with her teeth. “Welcome to New Jersey, right? There. That's how they should look.”

“I hate to ruin it.”

“You have to. We can't have denim bleeding on these nice white sheets.”

•   •   •

“No condom?”

I shook my head.

“You high school boys,” she said. “It's always amateur night, isn't it? I forgot what this was like.”

“Wait,” I said. “Hang on.”

I stood up and walked to the dresser in my boxers. The first drawer I tried was all socks—black and stacked in pairs like firewood. I felt between them with my fingers, but there was nothing underneath. The drawer below was full of Lacoste polo shirts, in black and teal and lavender, dozens of them, the shirts near the bottom still wrapped in cellophane. I tried to imagine where this man spent his mental energy so that there was none left for things like getting dressed on weekends. It seemed like a sickness, but maybe that's what it took to build a second home that took a high school party to fill. I wondered if I had that in me.

“What are you doing?” Kelsey said. “Stop that. Come here.”

I looked up at her. I thought: The difference between us is that she doesn't care what's in these drawers. Kelsey pulled me onto the bed by my wrist and pushed me hard enough that my head hit the wall of pillows stacked against the headboard.

“You're wasting your time,” she said.

It occurred to me that I hadn't showered since the day before as she crawled backward down the length of my body, her hair trailing behind her like a wedding train, hiding her face.

•   •   •

I kept breaking the surface of sleep, as if the drugs had made me too buoyant to stay under very long. I decided, finally, that the problem was my unbrushed teeth, that they were signaling my mind to stay awake. In the cabinet under the bathroom sink, I found a package of toothbrushes between a case of razor blades and a half-gallon of mouthwash. I stole a pink one and bit through the plastic backing.

“Can I do that?”

I looked up to find Kelsey reflected in the mirror in front of me, naked, leaning on the bathroom door.

“There's a whole mess of them,” I said, pointing to the cabinet, confused. “Lots of colors.”

“No,” she said, coming up behind me, sliding her right hand across my stomach, and placing her left hand gently over mine. “Let me do that for you.”

She fit her body against my back and loosened my grip on the brush.

“Can I?” she asked.

I dropped my hand, and made a wall of my front teeth. She started with gentle circles, and then switched to a back-and-forth motion, which seemed more difficult for her. I realized that she must be left-handed too. Her right hand held my hip to steady me, as if we were about to dance. The occasional click of hard plastic on enamel, the bruising my gums took when she slipped and punched them with the blunt end of the brush. She opened her mouth as a sign that I should open mine, and I held my breath as she worked her way back to my wisdom teeth. This required faith, and it was the first time I had really listened to my teeth being brushed, thanks to a heightened awareness that I recognized, finally, as fear. I was watching her in the mirror while she kept her eyes on the reflection of my mouth and the work she was doing. The bathroom lights were blinding, but her pupils looked like saucers. She hadn't let on that she was also high.

“Am I done?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Spit.”

I followed her into the blackness of the bedroom, where we lay on the bed, side by side. The room smelled like her now, and I could hear her breathing getting faster. My eyes were taking a long time to adjust.

“OK,” she said. “Come here before I change my mind.”

“Where?”

She reached across my body for the hand farthest from her, and slipped underneath me as she rolled me over. I felt her take my dick in her hand and guide it to the exact midpoint of her spread legs. She sucked in a breath as I slid into her with so little friction that I was almost certain I had missed. She gasped a little, and I froze.

“No,” she said.

I started to withdraw, but she caught me by the hips and pulled me all the way into her. I hadn't understood. I wanted to see her face, but my eyes still hadn't adjusted. I opened them wide as they would go, but even then there was nothing I could see.

•   •   •

I woke up to the sound of a siren from the street. Kelsey, sleeping on her stomach, looked like she was floating face down in calm waters, her hair spread out as if the creased white sheet was liquid, her breath rocking her body like waves. There was a shine to her shoulder where it met the sheet, a streak of sweat. I picked my watch up off the bedside table—4:50 a.m.—and closed my eyes again.

She was at the window when I woke up for good, flexing her calves by standing on her toes. As she steadied herself on the window frame, I saw daylight in a ripple at the edge of the blinds and wished that I had woken up sooner and stretched the night out with one more cycle of waking and sleeping here with her. She dressed quickly, and I was watching her clothes get reacquainted with her body when we heard someone playing the piano downstairs—a loud minor chord with a trickle of notes after it. Kelsey slipped out the door. I followed.

It was Clare at the piano, his back to us where we stood on the second-story landing that overlooked the living room. I had a feeling that he hadn't slept.

“God, he's good,” Kelsey said.

Downstairs, we joined the people who had gathered to listen. Clare was passing the lead from his left hand to his right and back again, like someone tossing a baseball between his bare hand and his glove. He shifted between jazz and blues, occasionally dropping the bridge from a pop song you didn't recognize until just after he'd moved on to something else. I was surprised that he would call this much attention to himself, but it seemed like he had resisted the temptation to play for as long as he could. There was applause when he stopped, and I followed Kelsey into the kitchen as the crowd broke up. I poured coffee for us while she went to the fridge for half and half.

“I'm not a morning person,” she said, holding the cup to her face.

“Me neither.”

Her phone was ringing.

“Excuse me,” she said, putting a hand on my arm before she walked away.

I found Clare on the deck, one hand cupped around a match that wouldn't light. The sky was the color of newsprint and I felt myself slow as I stepped out of the cool house into the heavy air outside.

“Nice set,” I said, handing him my lighter. “I lost you last night.”

“I went swimming.”

Clare ran his finger behind his ear and wiped sand on his jeans. He had been in the ocean, not the pool. I pointed to his thigh and he laughed when he saw the orange “irregular” sticker that had somehow survived the night. I wanted to talk to him—to anybody, really—about Kelsey, but what was there to say?

“Should we get going?” Clare asked.

“Yeah, lemme find a bathroom.”

I spotted her just before she walked through the front door, bag in hand.

“I was looking for you,” Kelsey said, which seemed like a lie.

“You're leaving?”

“I am. It was nice to meet you. I'll see you at school.”

She kissed my right cheek, then my left. Something had shifted in the intervening seven minutes, and whatever had prompted her to brush my teeth and sleep with me was inaccessible now. I stood there, waiting for something else, but she just waved and walked away. I found Clare standing by the car, drumming his fingers on the hood. I wanted to ask him what the rush was as I reached for my keys, but it was starting to make sense. St. Andrews was another exit for him. I was good for those, it seemed.

T
here was a problem with the oysters, because there was always a problem with the oysters.

“If Jack thinks I don't know the difference between Malpeques and this backwater Virginia shit . . .” my mother said, waving off the second half-shell I had shucked for her. She glared down at the waxy battered cardboard boxes that lined our walk-in refrigerator. I had come home from school to work a party after my Friday morning classes, something my mother rarely asked of me because Lawrenceville held a half day of classes on Saturday, mostly to keep the boarders out of trouble. I knocked back the oyster in my hand, and winced as the weak brine blotted out the aftertaste of stale hazelnut coffee.

“That bad?” my mother asked. “Jesus Christ. I'm calling Jack.”

“I'll call him. Did you send Ronnie for more parsley, or do you need me to go?”

“Shit. Can you stop on your way to Roger's?”

The oysters were for a Princeton real estate mogul named Roger Hokenson, who was throwing an eightieth birthday party for his mother and his aunt—twin sisters who had come to America from Norway in the 1950s with their husbands. The men were dead, but the Ladies, as people called them, were alive and well. They sat in on lectures at the university, did the flowers for some fancy restaurants, and shopped the Sunday farmer's market with their silver hair wrapped up in scarves. Both women were still over six feet tall, but Roger's mom was slightly hunched after a riding accident, which was the only reason I could tell the two of them apart. I called our seafood guy as I backed down the driveway, eager to get the oyster situation straightened out and calm my mother down.

“Jack, what the fuck are those oysters? Are you serious?”

“Who's this?”

“Tom Alison.”

“Are
you
serious?” Jack snorted when I didn't answer. “I didn't get my shipment today, homeboy. I had to send someone to my guy in Bridgewater for you, and that's all he could spare. I took care of you before I took care of me, you dig? If you'd been awake when I came by, I could have told you that to save you the trouble of calling me, like an asshole.”

“I was awake,” I said.

“Yeah, well, you weren't around. I told the cook who signed for them that I wasn't gonna charge you because I know what you ordered. How's that?”

“Thank you,” I said. “Listen, I'm sorry about the mix-up—”

Jack hung up.

Someone leaned on a horn in the line of cars behind me. The traffic light on Nassau Street had turned green at some point.

“Yeah, fuck you,” I said, feeling twitchy and shell-shocked as I hit the gas.

•   •   •

I got to Roger's early to walk through the space, a restored antique barn where a team of housekeepers was already at work, unfolding rented chairs and tables. Roger spent the early '80s managing bands in New York and buying up reams of farmland all around the county with his family's money. His second wife had just left town after what seemed like an amicable divorce. My mother's friend, who slept with Roger while he was still married, used to say that Roger's mom was the most important woman in his life, followed closely by his aunt, and that his ex-wife didn't understand that third place was as close as you could come.

“Looks like we got the weather,” Roger said, as he came through the barn doors. “How's your mom? Is she around?”

We shook hands. He smelled like turpentine and aftershave, and there were matching paint stains on his khaki shorts and worn polo shirt. I said my mom was on her way and doing fine.

“Are those Camels in your pocket, kiddo? Can you spare one?”

“You smoke?”

“Perk of divorce. I'll take two, if that's all right.”

I held out the pack, and Roger tucked a cigarette behind his ear while I lit the other for him. I was still working through the carton Clare had bought me in Fort Lee.

“I gotta freshen up,” he said. “You need anything, you let me know.”

Roger crossed the lawn toward the low-slung brick farmhouse he had redone from the ground up. He took his time, dragging on my cigarette, stopping to pick up and pocket something that he spotted in the grass. You would never mistake him for anyone but the man who owned this place. He lived alone now that his wife was gone; the Ladies occupied a large octagonal guesthouse near the stables where they kept their horses. Across the lawn, Roger leaned on one of the pillars that propped up his deep wraparound porch. He lifted one foot and, having smoked maybe half of it, ground out my cigarette against the bottom of his loafer before he disappeared inside. A man emerged from a side door with two women behind him and three highball glasses in his hands. I didn't recognize the women, who looked closer to my age than to Roger's. Another perk of his divorce.

“Hey,” my mother said, coming up behind me. “What are you doing? At least act like you're unloading. And wash your hands before you stick a tray in someone's face. You smell like cigarettes.”

“I know,” I said. “Relax.”

My mother flicked my ear.

“Don't tell me to relax,” she said. “You know how much I hate that.”

•   •   •

The guests showed up at sundown. Because the barn doors faced west, the new arrivals were backlit and indistinguishable until they came in from the hazy glare outside.

“Hey,” Roger called to me, slinging his arms around a young couple, “can we get these folks some food?”

I was on my way back to the kitchen when I saw Jocelyn, a classmate at Lawrenceville who was headed to NYU to study acting after four years of playing the female lead in every production the school put on. She was five foot five in four-inch heels, pretty in a sharp, aggressive way, with theatrically enormous breasts. She liked to get high, and once upon a time she had been good for an eighth every other week. Jocelyn was Roger's niece, I remembered now. Of course she would be here. The band was tuning up in a corner of the barn, and I cut behind them so as not to pass in front of her.

“What's it like out there?” my mother asked, hours later, as I walked back into the tented kitchen behind the barn. “Are people having fun?”

“They're getting hammered,” I said, scraping scorched and shattered lobster tails into the trash. “We're out of Amstel Light.”

“Good,” she said. “How are the Ladies?”

“The Ladies would die happy if they keeled over in their cake.”

“Jesus, take that back. I'll have Roger blaming those oysters if we kill his mom. He noticed, by the way. Remind me to tell Jack not to pull that shit again.”

“I talked to him,” I said. “He's not gonna charge you.”

“What? What happened?”

I was deciding how to answer that when something in the kitchen shifted. I turned around to find Jocelyn standing in the doorway.

“Tom!” she said. “I thought that was you.”

My mother hated when clients tried to poke around backstage, but her expression softened when Jocelyn wrapped her arms around me.

“Hey,” she said. “Is this your mom? Mrs. Alison, the food was so delicious. Wow, you two look so much alike.”

“Thanks, sweetie. I'm glad you're enjoying everything.”

“Hey, Tom, could you help me with something? My grandmother wants some of those little raspberry tarts. Is that them over there?”

I tried to head her off as she walked to the rack.

“Actually, I have kind of an awkward question for you,” Jocelyn said, as soon as we were out of earshot. “Are you holding? My brother wants to get a little stoned.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Not anymore.”

“Anyone else I can ask? The bartender with gauges in his ears looks promising.”

“Nothing doing there.”

“I'm a little disappointed,” she said, brushing something off my sleeve that may not have been there in the first place. “Are you off the clock?”

“I'm on probation.”

She took a step back and covered her mouth with her hand to show me how mortified she was. I had seen her do the same thing as Roxie Hart in
Chicago.

“Oh my God, I'm such an idiot,” she said. “I totally forgot. I swear I'll stop being so stupid someday. Listen, I'm not going to bother your bartender. Promise. I'll give my brother the bad news. Say good-bye before you leave, OK?”

•   •   •

Anyone still at the party had stayed too long. Jocelyn's little brother was tormenting the band by sitting in while the singer took a break, asking them to play one song after another while he struggled to come in on time, too drunk to stay upright without the mic stand. Roger chased him off when the singer finished smoking, and the band played “Free Bird” to celebrate their liberation from the wasted nephew of the host. Roger was red-faced and smiling, spinning his date around the dance floor with a glass of bourbon in one hand. The Ladies had been put to bed, which gave him an hour to cut loose and bask in the afterglow. Roger didn't have school in the morning.

We were packing up and hauling trash when he filled the barn's back doorway, blotting out the light from inside with five bottles of champagne in the circle of his arms, condensation soaking his shirtfront.

“Hey, can you kids finish this stuff for me? It's past my bedtime. Thank you, all of you. One of the great catering staffs right here. Tom, where's your mom?”

He spotted her before I had a chance to point her out. He seemed less drunk when he spoke to her, and I watched him press a bank envelope into her hand. They embraced for a long time. I had heard Jocelyn inviting people back to the house and figured she had found what she was looking for.

Someone passed me a coffee mug full of champagne, which I gulped down when I saw my mother coming toward me. I checked my watch—nine hours until my first class.

“Can you make sure that charcoal makes it back into the van?” my mother said to Todd, her captain.

“I got it,” Todd said. “Do you need a lift to the Ivy? We're all going for drinks.”

“That's exactly what I don't need,” she said. “Tom's driving me home. That champagne went straight to my head.”

•   •   •

“I'm having a smoke,” my mother announced, as I turned onto the empty country road. “As long as you don't mind.”

I shrugged. We did this dance where I gave her shit for smoking, even though we both knew I smoked too. The first time she saw me with a cigarette, she'd looked at me as if I carried one of those Canadian antitobacco labels with pictures of black hearts and half-amputated jaws. I tried not to smoke around her after that.

“Do you want one?” she asked me.

I shook my head.

“What's wrong with you tonight?”

“Can you watch out for deer?”

My mother lit her cigarette and took a long drag.

“Don't talk to me like some friend of yours because you're driving me around. Is it that girl from school?”

“What girl?”

“What did she really want?”

“Dessert,” I said, wondering if she could see my face flush in the dark.

“Did she ask you for pot?”

“No.”

My mother said nothing, so I turned to face her.

“She didn't.”

“Watch the road. Hold this.”

She passed me her cigarette and wrestled out of her chef whites, which she tossed into my backseat. She was wearing a gray Bruce Springsteen T-shirt underneath, a souvenir from some concert at Jones Beach before I was born, worn to transparency under the arms and torn around the collar. She took one last drag before she tossed her cigarette and rolled the window up. When I was little, she would come home from jobs like the one we'd just left, pay the baby-sitter, and then sit on my bed to tell me about the dessert she had saved for me, smelling like sweat and smoke and her conditioner, which was how she smelled now, sealed up with me inside the Ford Explorer I had paid for with the money I made selling drugs.

“Should I meet them at the Ivy for a beer?” she asked. “Should I pretend I don't know about your fake ID and take you with me? You know what? Let's go. I owe those guys. And then we're going home. And don't let me catch you with a drink in your hand.”

“You won't,” I said.

•   •   •

The Ivy Inn sounds like one of those Princeton establishments trying to siphon off some of the university's cache, but the squat ivy-green building had been a beer-and-a-shot joint since it opened in the '60s, a bar where servers from around town got drunk after their shifts. It was the last place I wanted to go right then.

“Where are you going?” my mother asked as I drove past the bar.

“I'm not parking out front. The cops watch that lot all night waiting for people to stumble out and get into cars.”

“Can you pretend that you don't know that stuff? I hate hearing you talk like that.”

“You asked.”

“Even if I ask, then.”

The bouncer looked up and down the street before he waved me in, but he held up his hand as my mother followed.

“Sorry, ma'am,” he said, smiling. “Need some ID.”

“Cute,” she said, brushing past him.

Things were slow inside, and the room was strangely bright without the usual pack of bodies to absorb the light from beer signs and the jukebox and illuminated coolers full of packaged goods. There were a few career alcoholics stationed at the bar, a Mexican crew running the pool table, and my mother's team at a table in the corner. Eric, the head bartender, had worked for us once upon a time, but he made more sense here, flipping bottles end over end, pouring blind, breaking up fights. He wore the Ivy's signature polo shirt, which read C
HARMED,
I
'M
S
URE
across the back. The armbands on his sleeves were notched to accommodate his biceps. Eric spent his days lifting at Gold's Gym on Route 1.