Marine Park: Stories (7 page)

He walked down the end of the wharf to the dock, which had a door over it, a chain-link door leading to nowhere, with triangular extensions on either side, like sails or ears, to prevent climbing around. Timothy did it anyway, swinging himself around the sail. He walked to the end of the dock, where all the lights died away.

No one called for him. Courtney was on the porch. The seafood restaurant built on pilings right off the shore was closed, or else nobody was out to bother him at this hour. No waiters or valets came running. He'd always wanted to do something unaccustomed in life, like jump into an open body of water with all his clothes on, his shoes even. He thought about this sometimes on planes coming into JFK for a landing, over Rockaway Beach. But as he knew he would, he took off his clothes methodically, his jacket first and then his shirt, waiting modestly for his jeans to be last, his best pair of dress jeans. He laid these all out on the edge of the wooden dock. When he fell backward into the water, it hardly felt cold; just a continuation of the air on his skin. He remembered, without meaning to, what it had felt like, as a child, to learn how to swim—the overchlorinated high school pool, the gray lockers off the gym, the bang of their swinging back and forth. He dove deep, resurfaced, realized he couldn't see the bottom, or anything close to the bottom, and for the first time in many times of swimming he felt scared, unsure of what was below the surface. Inadvertently he touched some driftwood, pulled his hand back in shock. It was so black, as far as he could see, and he couldn't lift himself up farther. The oily water opened around him like a mouth, the orifice as far as he could see of some face. He scrambled up the slimy old metal rungs of the dock ladder. He sat there on the edge, gasping for breath, though he hadn't realized he'd needed to. The hot air dried him after a while, and slowly his breathing calmed. He was shivering, leaning back, his arms hugging what they could of his body, and he felt entirely satiated.

T
his was when Hayden was living in graduate housing at Brandeis. He had a little room to himself and his own door with a lock on it, and he never put posters up. This was during the period of us-learning-to-be-better-communicators, which was something he felt strongly about.

Hayden had become good at talking about his feelings, even though that was something we hadn't done when we were first friends. He broke his wrist and was in a cast before high school and I helped him with that, but it doesn't count. I didn't talk about feelings with anyone, because Lorris was too young. Hayden lost his virginity to his girlfriend at the same time I did with mine, and we didn't talk about it until two months after. And even then I didn't bring it up, just said,
me too
, after he said his piece—I've got something to tell you, man. That was in the stands at Icahn Stadium in the spring, right after Hayden got knocked out of medaling at Cities in the 800-meter run. I'd done the mile, and broke 4:40 for the first time. He had long hair that season, and he was beginning to lose interest in track because of his girlfriend. A few months ago something incredible happened, he said.

They called the place where Hayden lived Grad, capital
G
, as if it were more than a place but also a state of mind. It was far from the rest of the dormitories and classroom buildings: the main campus was up a winding road at the top of a hill, where there was a corny little castle that someone had built in the 1950s. The type of thing that, at nighttime, looked amazing, lit up with red ramparts and a view of the Charles and the train tracks at the bottom of the hill. But in the daytime it looked like something that someone had built in the 1950s.

Hayden was happy to be living in Grad, as a junior, even though everyone gave him a hard time for it: complaining that it was too far away and that they never saw him anymore, because he always retreated there to his single room and the graduate students with their guitars, reading theory in their beds. He maintained that this wasn't true; that he, for instance, spent a lot of time in the Peace Room, which was in the place where the dungeon would be if the castle had a dungeon. He took me there once, although he opened the door first and peeked in to make sure no one was inside, because he said that the Peace Room regulars usually didn't like to be disturbed. Not that I was a disturbance at all, he said. I was a good influence on him, and he thanked me for that.

I'd always wanted to go to school away from home, but sometimes things don't work perfectly. CUNY takes just about anyone, and they promised they'd be opening dorms at Brooklyn College by my sophomore year. They didn't, of course. Brooklyn College is the type of place that hasn't changed since my parents went there—my dad on the GI Bill, my mother looking for a husband who wasn't Italian—and they didn't end up finishing those dorms just like they never built the swimming pool that my dad and his Navy friends were always asking for. What were they supposed to do to stay in shape? they asked the administration. The provost at the time was a running guru who had done Boston, New York, and Berlin, enough years after that other war, and he tried to get them to start a track team (they didn't), or at least go for runs with him all around Brooklyn. They did it once, but what they really wanted was to hit something or be completely covered by water, and running was a pretty poor exchange. I ended up living at home and saving my money, listening to my dad snicker about Brooklyn College. He'd stopped taking classes his senior year, and there wasn't really an explanation why. Some things just happen. It was a better experience for my mother. If I could stand to, I stayed at the Sugar Bowl after classes until dinner, avoiding watching Lorris get back from school and sit right down to his homework. Eventually I stayed longer and longer, even when I wasn't taking classes, looking at the captioned TV. I established once that the waitress knew my dad when he used to hang out there. After that she gave me the stale bagels, which I'd take home and let him eat.

Hayden was always trying to get me to come visit, and I did, more often than I should have. Academically, there hadn't been much of a difference between him and me, though I guess he wrote better essays. My mother said she didn't think it was worth it to go away to expensive private colleges when we had perfectly good ones here. We do, and what's the difference in the end, but Hayden seemed to enjoy living away. He said, even up to junior year, people had late-night conversations about the things they were studying, the books that classes assigned. Which sounds like bullshit to me, like one of the brochures that the private colleges send from random places in the South. Nobody was that earnest about it at Brooklyn, though if you kept your head down you could get an education. I was taking my math requirement that semester, even though the professor asked if I was sure I wanted to. I'd been in and out. He said, Are you staying this time? I said I was back for good. It was a survey: “Mathematical Topics.” Sometimes you learn some good things.

I promised myself I wouldn't spend more than two weekends a month up at Hayden's that year—though because he was a junior, I was starting to get anxious that I was losing the chance. When we talked about it, he said simply, Literally, whenever. He invited Lorris too, though it was mostly just to be nice. He said we could move a mattress in and he could get me someone's old Brandeis ID and a copy of his key. I did end up getting a copy of the key, for the nights when Hayden went off with a girl, although those were very rare: because when I was there, he said that it was more important that we spend time together, and catch up; girls would be around forever.

Hayden had taken a class last semester that he said had changed his life. He had started out majoring in business, like his father wanted. His dad studied econ and law in Tel Aviv and was a real estate broker here. But the class, called “Peace, Social Change, and a New Way of Viewing Human Interrelations,” made Hayden switch to sociology. You'd think those would have been difficult, stressful times for him, full of calls home and imploring his mother for support, but Hayden rarely called home, and actually didn't know too much about how his parents were doing—just like they didn't see much of him besides the semester's bill, which they immediately sent up to Hayden. Even I asked if it would be tough to graduate on time with requirements, and he said, Please. It's Brandeis.

“Peace, Social Change, Etc.” was a class taught by an elderly Iranian man named Yahya, who had converted to Judaism twenty-five years ago. He was one of a whole new host of Brandeis professors who were beginning to wear jackets without ties, and in the winter, under his blazer, a blue turtleneck that had sweat stains seeping from under the arms. You had to write multiple essays to get into the class, and it was only the most talented and dedicated who did—everyone wanted a spot because every other week they went on peace retreats to one of Yahya's numerous friends' cabins, in the Berkshires, or on the North Shore, or near Walden Pond. There, they cooked meals for each other, drank pinot grigio with Yahya, and practiced looking into each other's eyes when they conversed, while they listed one thing they appreciated about each and every member of the class. Yahya wouldn't smoke with them, but he said that it wasn't for him to set rules for them to go by, and when, on the first day of class, they put smoking pot into the legal section of their new social constitution, he said that this would be a good experiment in learning each other's boundaries.

This was after their trip to the Berkshires, and I was staying until Monday. Hayden was sitting at his desk, mixing songs on GarageBand, and I was lying on the mattress, trying to decide why it somehow worked that Hayden left all the walls blank in his room. Above his desk he had a quote—“We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living”—but that was it, with his computer and the wires of his speakers in a corner. It was barely ten when three of his friends came over, bringing with them their leftover dinner, which we ate on the floor, the new people sitting on the mattress and Hayden in his chair. He offered them a beer but passed on one himself. He had told me that he was beginning to feel that he had a small drinking problem and had made me promise that I wouldn't let him black out that night. He had a habit of doing so, back home when we'd go to bars in the East Village.

One of the girls got a text on her phone to say there was something going on in Gordon, which was a fifteen-minute walk away and just outside the main entrance to campus. There was a semi-famous DJ playing there who had been making the rounds of New England colleges. The walk was frigid, and when we arrived we found only six guys from the tennis team drinking pink champagne out of a bottle. They were sitting in a circle and passing the bottle to one another. Hayden seemed to know a few of them, and I was introduced, and we let the bottle go around maybe once or twice before it was empty. The tennis players were reminiscing about stories from their preseason camp, and Hayden was listening politely and asking clarifying questions here and there. For a while we passed around the empty bottle, taking a swig from it, as if there was some left at the bottom. There didn't seem to be any more bottles, or any newcomers, so we left.

There was a similar situation in the works at a frat house, and this was promised to be better. Hayden had met his last girlfriend at a frat house. We had been slotted next on the beer pong table, and he told me to wait a second, he had to run to the bathroom. I never felt so alone as when he disappeared while I was visiting at Brandeis. Everyone, the entire time, knew that I wasn't supposed to be around. The time he met his girlfriend he had disappeared, and when he came back, it was with two girls, one obviously his interest and one dragged along for my sake. That one, Gloria, had a perfectly diamond-shaped scar on her lower back. I traced the parallel lines later that night, in one of the upstairs rooms at the frat, once Hayden had brought his girl home. That lasted almost all semester, but she'd ended it after the Peace class started and he asked her to keep her eyes open during sex.

The frat party was in the basement, below a set of water-heating pipes, and every once in a while a particularly tall boy wearing a backward flat-brim cap would hit his head on the ceiling. We made our way over to the bar area to get drinks. Hayden gripped my outside shoulder and pulled my ear close.

Play along, he said.

We were next in line when Hayden started collecting cups and bottles and making two drinks himself, with the bartender frowning over him. One of the backward-hat kids stopped dancing and came over.

What's up, big guy? he said.

Making myself a drink, and one for Bob Dylan's grandson here. Backward-hat looked at me and then put a hand on the edge of the cup.

This is for Bob Dylan's grandson? he said.

That's right, said Hayden. This is him right here. We shook hands, his fingers clammy with sweat. He's doing front work before his grandpa's last concert, he said. Backward-cap nodded. Dylan's doing something big this time, Hayden added. It's a multivisual, audience-participation, varied-media project. He put his hand on my shoulder again.

It's called Project W, I said. Opens at House of Blues.

Backward-cap opened his eyes wide. Well, it's really great to have you here. Anything you need.

We'll keep you posted, Hayden said, as we walked toward the dance floor.

I never like dancing with a cup in my hand, but Hayden was a natural. It became just another appendage to his gyration. He told me once in that new phase of being completely open that the dance floor scared him, that he felt that there were fish-strings going from the place where his neck meets the back of his head, out to his various responsibilities: me (was I having fun?), the girl from class who had put her hand on his arm outside, other hangers-on. It was almost too much to think about while trying to look passable. But he made it look easy, and if he hadn't said it I never would have known. He was always doing interesting things with his arms in time to the music, mixing it up, keeping it light.

The friend from earlier who had brought leftover dinner had materialized here, and she was doing her best to edge closer and closer to Hayden. She'd told us earlier in the night that she didn't drink but smoked weed on Shabbat, as long as someone else lit it for her. Religious, Hayden whispered in my ear, with his eyes going up and down.

I could appreciate that she was making an effort, and I started to look around to see if there was anyone else I'd met before whom I could tag along with while they danced. Hayden was premiering for the night a toothbrushing move I'd seen him pull off to great success before. She mimicked the motion and stayed in sync with Hayden's twists, and got one hand on his hand, and twirled herself around.

They had both hands together now, and he was leading her in a sort of fake fox-trot even though the music was reggaeton, and she was laughing at the antics. I was pretending to be doing the same without a partner, so I was close enough to hear her say, leaning in, Let's go back to Grad.

Hayden cocked his head sideways and then he said, Look, really drawn out. He was making perfect eye contact with her and still holding her hands. He kept holding them for what seemed like a moment too long, like he was a child again and he was waiting for one of our parents or teachers to tell him what to do. This was fun and I'd love to dance with you again some other time, but tonight I can't, he said.

Then he patted her forearm and turned toward me and signaled the door.

 • • • 

It was snowing softly outside, but the wind with the snow on the ground was making sheet-fingers over the layer of frost. We crossed a street where I remember Hayden had told me about one time when he and a girl had kissed for fifteen minutes on the double yellow line. Cars went past them on both sides, but because the two of them were in the middle they never got close.