How I Spent My Summer Vacation (2 page)

Sasha ate the last of the biscotti. I couldn’t protest or complain, given that she was offering a vacation in exchange.

An imagined sun warmed my head—but I willingly accepted a bleak beach as well. Deserted and overcast, heavy with clouds or fog—it sounded wonderful. The silence, the waves, the chance to think and breathe deeply…bliss. “Thank you,” I said. “I gratefully accept.”

“Thank the saltwater taffy consortium.”

“Saltwater taffy? Where is this job?”

“Where else?”

Atlantic City. Of all the beaches in all the world. My good fairy had arrived with a whole lot of small print. Sand and water, yes, but Atlantic City! Casinos and slums and junk food and all-night lights and noise. More high rollers than breakers. More pigeons than sea gulls. Not the point at all.

“Atlantic City is America’s Number One Vacation Destination,” Sasha said. “Pure adventure, one hour away. Would you honestly rather clean closets? And by the way, my car’s acting weird. I don’t need it—I hired an assistant in A.C. and she’s renting all the equipment there. So could you drive?”

* * *

And that’s why on Monday morning, while in search of the soothing touch of nature, I instead wound up parking my Mustang in a labyrinth below several stories of steel, concrete, and glitz.

Sasha and I walked through a lobby done in Eclectic Excess, a potpourri of design history. Greek columns separated Renaissance-style murals beside equatorial waterfalls near an Ozlike yellow-brick walkway. Everything was highlighted with tiny white lights. Our bellman’s outfit was Mittel European Operetta. A neo-something marble statue in a toga pointed the way to the registration area. I tried in vain to find a theme, a connecting thread—aside from blatant expensiveness.

Outside, the sky had been tight and sallow, but now we were hermetically sealed in eternal, nuclear day lit by a thousand suns. The eye-tearing indoor season had nothing to do with the existence of the clock or the solar system.

“Why a casino, Sash? Atlantic City has normal hotels. Why’d the saltwater people put you here?”

“I asked them to. I thought I’d be alone, and a place like this is more alive. No matter what hour. I was here once.…” We passed the entrance to a cavelike side room called the Hideaway. Sasha dropped her suitcase, said, “Just a sec,” and ducked in.

I was close to the casino entrance. I waited for Sasha, listening to the siren sounds of silvery music and money.

“He’s still working here,” she said when she returned a minute or so later. “The bartender, Frankie. One of the good guys.”

Which probably meant she had no interest in him. It’s women like Sasha who—unintentionally but just as lethally—make men think they have to be rotten with the rest of us. Nice guys do not finish last with me—unless you’re being semantically sloppy and equating
nice
with bland or dull. But Sasha’s different. Her dials are set for challenge, which often translates into danger or misery.

However, at this point in our long friendship, I was trying not to editorialize about Sasha’s fondness for losers. As she was overly fond of pointing out, my own off-again, on-again relationship with the detective was no shining example of brilliant selection.

“I was here before,” she now said. “Couple of years ago.”

“With Frankie the bartender?”

“No, no. This other guy. Dimples. A genuine louse. Frankie the bartender saved the day, and maybe me—from jail. I didn’t think he’d still be here.”

“From jail? Why? Or do I want to know?”

“Because Dimples was a little bit of a criminal, and the police thought I was his accomplice.” She laughed at the thought. I found it less humorous.

We had reached our destination, the registration desk, decorated in the style of medieval French palaces. I wondered which era, theme, and climatological zone our room would feature. Art Deco Romanesque? Tropical French? Greek Chalet?

It turned out to be Basic Brothel. The room was small, its walls covered with silver foil. The bedspread, drapes, and carpeting were as silvery as fabric can get, shot through with metallic threads. Where there wasn’t foil or silver cloth, there were mirrors. Including the ceiling. Cigarettes still sealed in their foil-lined boxes must feel the way I did.

“A money motif, do you think?” Sasha asked.

“I’d prefer the greenbacks room, then.”

“The room I had with Dimples was nothing like this. But then, we had an ocean view.”

We viewed neither ocean nor bay. Instead, we faced the rooftops and fire escapes of yellow-brick buildings that clashed with our color scheme. I closed the drapes. “I’ll take the right-hand drawers, right side of the closet.”

Sasha nodded, but before either of us began to unpack, our phone rang and she picked it up. “Sasha
Berg,”
she said midway through the conversation. “The photographer. Are you talking to the right person?” And: “The saltwater taffy association isn’t going to pay for any—” Then she just listened.

She hung up. “They’re moving us to a suite.” She sounded bemused. “No extra charge. I thought they only did that for really high rollers.”

“It isn’t possible that this upgrade is in honor of the guy you were here with, is it? The criminal? That maybe they think you’re still involved with him?”

“They didn’t comp him a suite then, so why now, when he’s dead? And it’s not like they don’t know. It was in all the papers.”

“Tell me the man died of natural causes. Please.”

“The man died of natural causes.”

I sighed with relief.

“After all,” Sasha continued, “it’s pretty natural to die when there’s a bullet in the back of your skull.”

I’ve often wondered why Sasha’s incredible bad luck with men doesn’t deter or sour her—or leave her with the slightest trace of post-traumatic shock. She’s no dummy or masochist. Maybe it’s because she has so much fun until each adventure sours. Maybe she’s the world’s last great optimist.

“We’re not supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth,” she now said.

I hoped that neither the horse nor his teeth nor the walls were capped in silver. One ounce more and I’d start mining it.

* * *

The suite was exquisite, leaving me wondering. Were nickel-and-dime gamblers mirrored-ceiling types, while the major players—a group I wouldn’t expect to be particularly elegant—connoisseurs of all that was fine?

The living and bedrooms were decorated with Asian tansu chests, porcelain, jade carvings, Chinese rugs in soft pastels, and cushiony contemporary furniture. Shoji screens covered the windows. A six-paneled gilded screen filled the wall behind two oversized beds.

“A Jacuzzi!” Sasha called from the bathroom. “What a shame to be here with
you
!”

Understated and quiet, the rooms were the antithesis of the world downstairs. Things were definitely looking up. This in itself could be my retreat. I unpacked in record time, like a creature nervously establishing her turf.

Sasha dawdled. She arranged her cameras and equipment. She switched to another pocketbook and slowly decided what she’d need. She emptied half her suitcase onto the bed, then worried over the condition of her travel kit. She decided her nails needed polishing and wondered whether she could include a manicure on her expense account. “Did I tell you I’m going out tonight?” she asked.

I didn’t mind. This was a place in which to vacate, to luxuriate. This was a style to which I wanted to become accustomed.

I had a four-day vacation and a choice of three books.
War and Peace
, which has been on every summer reading list of my life, because every autumn has arrived without my having read it.
Gift from the Sea,
one of my all-time favorites. And a threadbare paperback with negative literary value and a title like
Lust and Sleaze.
A student had left it behind when she galloped off to summer vacation. Of course, I was reading it purely as research into adolescent interests. But all the same, it might go well with a Jacuzzi.

“I met this guy three weeks ago, when I was down here. At Trump’s, the bar in Trump Plaza. We made a date for when I’d be back on this job. If he remembers, and I hope so. He reminds me of Cary Grant.”

In what way, I didn’t dare ask. More dimpled chins? An English accent? A face to die for? A gift for comedy—or, more likely, a lot of wives?

“He’s elegant. Continental. A gentleman.” She examined her hand, first with fingers curled toward her, then held straight, nails up. “But not stuffy, the way that might sound.” She stood and tossed the nail file back onto the bed.

She pushed back the shoji screens for a view of a chilly—but inviting-looking—beach and ocean, sighed, and looked likely to stay awhile.

I suddenly found the room and the situation less comforting. It was too peaceful, too deliberately serene, too incomprehensible and overrich a setting for the facts of my life.

What am I doing? I don’t belong here. This is wrong.

This Asian palace was no place to figure things out. Which I felt incapable of doing, anyway.

What am I doing? What am I going to do?

The angst itch began between my shoulder blades and rose through my spinal column into my brain. At such times, it’s hard to sit still and impossible to endure Sasha’s glacially slow progress. “How about I meet you somewhere later?” I asked. “Downstairs. Maybe in that bar we passed? I have to…I have to move around.”

“Going up to the health club?”

“No. The beach, I think. See you.” I pulled on a sweater and headed out.

In the living room of the suite there was an odd woodcut. A mythical beast, mostly equine, but rearing on thick bird legs. It had thick-lashed almond eyes that seemed to ask me directly,
Do you have any idea what you’re doing?
and its mouth was open wide, revealing not horse teeth, but long and lethal fangs.

I looked at that mouth, those fangs. “Tell me you’re not the gift horse,” I whispered.

MAYBE I SHOULDN’T HAVE COME at all. This was most definitely not the beachscape I’d had in mind.

For starters, there wasn’t a hint of salt and sea in the air. When I was a child, sitting in the backseat of the family car, a unique scent gave advance notice that the separate universe of the ocean was close. A mix of salt, fish, seaweed, and something indefinable, it was my favorite perfume.

Nowadays, from far off, the seashore doesn’t smell of anything unless it’s massively polluted. I don’t know what’s happened to that aroma. Either it’s been overwhelmed by concrete and competing scents, or my nose has grown old and insensitive, or, according to my most Pollyannaish hypothesis, the childhood fragrance I miss was pollutants that have been removed. Unfortunately, that is also my least plausible theory.

Despite the homogenized smell of the wind, and its chill, and even this early in the season, when only private schools like Philly Prep had disbanded for summer, the boardwalk was well-populated. People eating pretzels, cotton candy, fudge, and saltwater taffy. People wearing floppy hats and bare tattooed potbellies and faded T-shirts advertising last year’s action adventure movie. Muumuus over flip-flops, and baggy pants over unlaced high-tops. Instead of an ocean flavor in the air, there was the pungency of peanuts, pizza, and hot dogs. Instead of the rhythmic crashing of waves, there were the pop-pops of an electronic arcade, the solicitations of tarot and palm readers, and the repeated warning “Make way, comin’ through” from the Atlantic City coolies—men pushing canopied wicker chairs, oversized porch furniture on wheels. The occupants of the rolling chairs looked mildly embarrassed, but happy to be off their feet.

Nonetheless, there was an ocean a few yards off. I hurried across the boards and down the steps onto the beach, imagining the time when this stretch of marshland belonged to the Lenni Lenape Indians and wild ducks.

If I’d been the first outsider to discover the long, windswept sand-edged marsh, would I too have said, “Hey, this is
great
! Let’s build a resort here and spoil it!”

“Ocean, emotion, promotion.” Somebody’s choice of motto for the city built on hucksterism.

Philadelphia was settled by people looking for a new life, new freedom, greater dignity. Atlantic City was settled by people looking for a buck. History shows.

The marsh was gone, but the beach was still there, slowly eroding, slowly choking on pollutants—but still there. And on this chilly day, I shared it with only one man, who made his stooped way across the horizon with a metal detecting rod. He, too, was still there, a familiar piece of my childhood landscape, the beachcomber searching for lost rings and left-behind coins.

A haze of wind-agitated sand gave the tan ground a gauzy edge. Nonetheless, I pulled off my shoes and socks, rolled up my jeans, and headed for the ocean. The sand stung my ankles and was chilly under my feet, and the surf was pure ice.

On the plus side, the beach was relatively clean. No red-bag medical waste floating down from New York’s hospitals, no untreated sewage visibly pouring out of storm drains, and none of the heartrending dead dolphins of a few years back. I took a deep breath and, with some relief, watched minuscule crabs diligently wait for the foamy surf to recede, then pock the wet sand with their burrows. Years ago, along with every other child, I had dug up the tiny crabs by the bucketful, and I was comforted that they had survived all of us, that a beach was still a beach, and, even slightly compromised, still good medicine.

I made my way back to the boardwalk stairs and paused to watch a silhouetted seabird dip and swoop.

Something hissed. Loudly, distinctly. The bird was too far up in the sky, and I couldn’t see anything else to account for the sound—no cat, snake, leaky steampipe, or deflating balloon.

The sibilant exhale repeated. The metal-detector man had long since moved on to the next section of beach, and there was no one left except a man in a warm-up suit and a golden retriever in a kerchief, both jogging by the water’s edge.

Hsssss.

Was this the fabled singing sand? Another example of poetic hyperbole?