Authors: Rick Moody
A
limbo bar festooned with streamers, by the bathhouse entrance. Tuna on shish kebab and pineapple slices in large stainless-steel
serving cisterns arranged on a buffet table. At the edge of the snack bar, the undergrad who gave golf lessons, in chefs hat
and lei, carving a roast pig. The carcass had menaced the staff from the walk-in kitchen fridge for
upwards of five days.
The Olson kid, chaperoned on either side by his parents, in the moment of asking if they had
cooked, you know, the pig on a spit.
Logical inquiry under the circumstances, on Hawaiian Night. No evidence, however, of a spit. Polynesian slide guitar drifted
across the patio, from a concealed speaker. Don Ho.
Lena Beechwood, at Table No. 1 (my table, though she was no relation of mine), worried aloud about her crew for the Round
Island Race, peppering her sentences with fine acerbities:
Pete Evans got his jib twisted in the middle of the Memorial Day course, just let the sheet right out of his hands.
They’d placed second, when they could very well have won, and so
He wont do, wont do at all, you just can’t trust him.
They could take Evans’s wife, Hunter, but she was sluggish from having the twins and might not have the energy or the reflexes.
Second place goes to the weary, to the inert.
Northeastern sun, that pink hatbox, drifted into a margin of haze as the kids of Hawaiian Night threw off their regulation
jackets and ties or their cardigan sweaters and flats and began to caper on the lawn. The Costellos, Dan and Pete and Gretchen;
the appallingly smart Sam Harvey, who intimidated everybody else’s towheads; little Rene Hennessy, with the platinum-blond
crewcut and the French accent —his parents had been transferred to the Paris office, but they made it back across the pond
for August; Marilyn Wendell, who would almost certainly get as stout as her mom, and, like her mom, be the consort of all
local boys
until that day.
Two dozen kids, maybe, interchangeable, by virtue of their long-standing acquaintance; interchangeable, by virtue of the
physical resemblances each to each; interchangeable, by virtue of the hidden entanglements of their parents over the years,
or by virtue of these times. Perhaps it was simply that all children were one phylum, one kingdom, one species, one throbbing,
pulsating corpus of velocity, language, and enthusiasm.
Andrew Grimms boy and girl were thick in the stew, though Andrews wife had died the summer before. The Grimms had taken the
cigarette boat out, at dusk, with Ellen Moss and a shaker of cocktails, to pick up house guests who’d missed the last ferry.
In the course of demonstrating for Ellen just how fast the
Pretty Young Thing
could go —she on the wheel, he the throttle, Andy’s wife, Debby,
gazing pacifically upon the action —they had jumped a large wake. One engine failed, the craft lifted up into the air, and
they began to spiral to port, to be thrown into the magnificent bay. Outboards exposed in the shadows above the three of them.
Here comes tragedy. As Andy and Debby and Ellen bobbed and ducked and breaststroked, laughed nervously at first, their unmanned
boat embarked on its repetitive circular course, leftward, sinisterly, coming around and bearing down again on the three swimmers,
who couldn’t match its forty-nine miles per hour (fifty if you tilted the engines just so), who couldn’t get out of its way.
The boat struck Andy’s wife decisively and crushed a plurality of vertebrae. Andy Grimm served as distraught witness, with
the craft circling ominously between himself and the afflicted woman. Ellen Moss called out to Debby across the water, having
just sidestroked inside the perimeter of the concentric rings that the
Pretty Young Thing
made in chop and spray.
Don’t move!
Then Ellen Moss, of Foyle, Decker, Greenwood and Peacock, Management Consultants, Ellen Moss of the size-four tennis skirts,
of the collection of antique porcelain miniatures, Ellen Moss risked heavily insured life and limb to swim back to Debby Grimm,
to remove Debby from harm’s way, to hold her as she lost consciousness, Ellen Moss whispering endearments as best she could,
Just a minute or two, huh?,
while Andy watched, immobilized by the menace of events. At last, a passing speedboat threw out its coils, hauled them from
the sea, and the trouble really began. Debby’s pulse fibrillated and then quit. The Coast Guard spent a couple of hours trying
to figure out how to put a stop to the circular imperatives, the
eternal return at forty-nine miles per hour of the
Pretty Young Thing.
Then they tangled its prop in a drift net.
Yet here were Debby’s kids on the lawn with the others, and it was proof that you could vanish from this sweet, colorful existence
one summer, and the next summer Hawaiian Night would go off without a hitch, as with the Thursday-night dances, so with the
annual complaints about club dues, and so forth. The tennis instructor, Maria, chased Robby Pigeon out of the ice-cream line,
from which he had swiped a stainless-steel scoop and was now tongue-bathing it, consuming its strawberry delights, defiling
the clubs make-your-own-sundae apparatus with his infantile contagions, the Grimm children right behind him, giggling. Maria,
it appeared, wore plastic green palm fronds, a South Pacific plumage, over U.S.T.A.-approved whites, as she chased them past
the beverage table.
Collectively the children of Hawaiian Night next divined that the leis, which had been bunched, folded, and gathered on an
assembly line in Edison, New Jersey, could be untwisted, stretched, and retooled to resemble antique ticker tape, expanding
to a length of nearly sixteen feet, something like the footage of Lena Beechwood’s small, sleek round-the-island sailing vessel.
Andy Grimm’s son, last seen wearing khakis, blue-and-white-striped button-down Oxford shirt, beige corduroy jacket, and white
bucks, now clad only in his trousers, emerged from a swelling population of kids carrying the orange streamer that had been
his lei, like a banner proclaiming this club, this lawn, this evening, this way of life his own, where minutes before only
the present had been his concern, as he raced from the end of
Court No. 3
over to the Adirondack chairs by the swimming pool, staking his claim at the site marked
Shallow water, no diving.
I confess that I held my breath as I tried, through the incantation of worry, to stave off further Grimm calamity, in which
little Drew toppled over the Adirondack chairs, hovered briefly in the air, gathered gravitational freight, broke the surface
of the wading end of the pool, struck bottom, cracked his skull, and then bobbed in the shallows, deceased, as Andrew Grimm,
insurance executive, recited his next canto of loss. But nothing horrible would happen on this voluptuous Hawaiian Night as
five, ten, twelve, fifteen kids chased each other with tropical decorations in the stiff, humid preliminaries of a late-summer
storm.
The automatic sprinklers that watered the Har-Tru courts were engaged by the coming of twilight.
The children began to wet themselves down.
Ghostly, a grandfather, from a neglected constituency of grandfathers, appeared at the top of the step where I sat with a
camera that I would never remove from its case. Whose grandfather I don’t know, though it would not have been hard to discern
convictions, familial traits, resemblances, in the salt-and-pepper fringe around back and sides, upright posture, absence
of socks, cable-knit sweater in
Franconia green
ordered from one of the larger catalogues. I recognized him, of course, as it hadn’t been more than a week since I had espied
him in the midst of a practice swing on the first fairway, just as he dislodged, in a manner so vulnerable it provoked a yelp
in me, his entire top bridge, so that golf ball and false teeth, in different directions, tumbled into that large, humiliating
sand trap just over the lip of the hill.
Look at them,
the grandfather said with oratorical authority. As the kids sported in tennis-court fountains.
Look at them. Thankful for nothing, not for the sprinklers, not for the moon, not for the salty wind that blows around the
mist, not for the way these events get arranged. When I was their age, I had a teacher in school whose car had lost its old
rusty fender. Used to see her driving back and forth from school. She always waved, was always cheerful, but it was obvious
that she couldn’t afford to get a new fender for her car, who the hell knows why. I think it was a Pontiac. What I did was
as follows: I took up a collection among my fellow-classmates. It wasn’t Christmas or Be Nice to Your Teacher Day or anything
else, nor was I trying to avert punishment or suck up to my teacher or any such thing. Everyone chipped in a dollar, or maybe
their parents chipped in a dollar, whatever it took. My father knew a good mechanic who in turn knew a good spare-parts man,
and one thing led to another, and next day at school we presented Mrs. Pendleton with a new fender for her Pontiac. I was
the same age as those kids out there, not a day older. I went through plenty of difficult times myself, times when the red
ink was more plentiful around our house than the black ink, that’s about how old I am, but I could still afford to help Mrs.
Pendleton when I was their age.
Hurricane coming up the coast. Almost certain now. In the coming hours, we would board up our large windows and secure our
powerboats. Eternally, in this late-summer moment, Debby Grimm seemed to fall delicately out of the western sky, somewhere
between here and the mainland, the
Pretty Young Thing
plunging after her, and we felt what we could bear to feel and sought refuge in our gardens or on our patios, firing up propane
barbecues, lacquering ribs,
shucking genetically engineered corn hybrids.
Pretty Young Thing
appeared out of the fog, and I chronicled its progress —rising up to port, skidding up on beach debris, tumbling end over
end, and bursting into flames.
I felt a strong need to corner the chef, before repairing to any
limbo entertainment.
What was the recipe for that cala-mari? As I stole toward the club ballroom, Andy Grimm himself passed silently by, in his
wake the faint but unmistakable pungencies of
remorse and survival
Immediately, I noticed the following, catalogued on the bulletin board by the water fountain:
Eric Pigeon, fourteen-and-under tennis, gold ribbon. Handmaid’s Shoppe, designer items 50% off now until Columbus Day. Lost:
Male Wedding Band, call Nick Fox.
Who would come closest to the floor, as Afro-Cuban jazz began to summon, through its familiars, all my summers past as well
as the last days of the Batista regime, gambling, prostitution, Catholic heresies. Families gathered, mothers laid their arms
on the shoulders of their sons, and damp infants played underneath an old grand piano that had been rolled into a corner behind
draperies. Sterling McGeeney, matriculating at Yale in ten days, as had her old man and his old man, elbows flush against
hips, rocked like a religious convert and slipped under the limbo bar. Married men averted their gazes. Sterling’s sister,
Eveline, tripped the bar, catching it on a billowing sleeve, and was disqualified. Alice Pigeon, her party dress so wet it
was practically translucent, snuck under. There was a braying of wind instruments. The club manager removed pegs, lowered
the bar. It was close enough to the dusty ballroom floor as to permit no passage to
the other side,
to the warehouse of infinite childhoods. Claire Barnaby, sunflower of a girl, in under
stated flannel skirt and pullover sweater, intent on getting under, was denied. Sterling McGeeney, despite early successes,
was now also turned back. The limbo bar reverberated and the needle was lifted from the old record player and Dave, the golf
manager, feigned a good-natured frustration. The next contestant was the Grimms’ melancholy daughter, Celine.
Need I point out that I had no children myself, that in the tidal flux of the generations I no longer voted
with the kids,
on that side of the ballroom. Twenty-odd years of lessons in deportment and racket sports, twenty-odd years of suing for
the affections of Cary Evans and Nina Oxford, twenty-odd years of stolen drinks and brain fevers and fender benders, all behind
me, though I still attempted to shuffle to the Latin rhythms that accompanied this particular soiree. Neither was I among
the fathers and mothers, whose free time was given over to the private-school applications of their kids, adjustable-rate
mortgages, loopholes in the capital-gains tax, or the privations of long-standing marriages.
My role was to watch. I was not bad at it.
Celine Grimm, laughing, at the threshold. If she passed under, made her body narrower than a first-class envelope filled with
bad news, perhaps she would be swept into a flock of gulls or cormorants, and it would be the last we saw of her as she headed
toward a first-class cabin in the heavens. I was happy therefore when she, too, stirred the limbo bar, as had her brother
before her, as had we all
in our day.
There was no winner. Hawaiian Night hurtled toward repose. We of the northeast Atlantic returned to the Pacific Islanders
their paradisal heritage, returned to them this imagery of travel advertisements. Had I ever been more surfeited by a
simple falling into darkness? We gathered up lost children, we looked for stray garments, a blue ribbon draped across the
tennis net on
Court No. 3,
a pair of cross-training sneakers separated one from the other, we restored the beach balls to the closet in the clubhouse,
plucked up that doll sprawled haphazardly in the gravel parking lot beyond the pool. Somebody’s cocker spaniel fetched a mossy
tennis ball, left it at my feet, and would not be placated until I tossed it for him again. Moments later the hound was back.
S
he called it an
armoire,
which was the problem, which was why he had dragged it onto the beach behind the house, and surveyed its progress over the
course of a week, the elements driving down their varieties upon her
armoire,
their drama of erosion upon her
armoire,
a winter of steady rain, and had she been willing to call the
armoire
a
chest of drawers
like anybody else maybe they never would have arrived at this moment, or maybe
he
would never have arrived at this moment, he would not have found himself on the deck, in the rain, overlooking the beach,
overlooking the
armoire
buried in sand up to the bottommost drawer (the work of tides), strands of kelp like accessories arranged around it, gray
driftwood, lobster buoys, a Clorox bottle, a red plastic shovel, the pink detached arm of a chubby doll, plovers piping there,
alone on the wet deck with a stiff drink despite the newness of the day, with a Sears deluxe crowbar with lifetime warranty
he intended to use on the
armoire,
if you
want to know the goddamned truth, specifically the top drawer of the
armoire,
which was locked now as it had always been locked in his presence, though when they bought the imitation
18th century, Sheraton-style armoire
at a flea market in the city, it hadn’t bothered him then that the drawer was locked and that she had taken control of the
little antique key, with its pair of teeth,
Anyone should have been able to pick that goddamned lock,
open that drawer, and yet, for all his accomplishments in the world of
franchise merchandising,
he couldn’t do it, though maybe he had picked it and had forgotten, plenty to forget in these last few days, maybe he’d asked
the boys with the cooler and the Frisbee who’d chanced along the shoreline, maybe he’d asked if they’d give a hand opening
this
armoire,
using her word when he said it, but they had backed away, politely at first, then vehemently into a temporarily radiant dusk,
even when he called after them,
Show a neighbor a little good cheer! I got a thousand and one jokes!
Hadn’t bothered him at first that he had no key to her
armoire,
had no tongue to share the word with her, the tongue which calls an
armoire
an
armoire,
not a
dresser,
not a
chest of drawers,
as his father and his father had said it, hadn’t bothered him when the
armoire
was damaged in the
relocation
to the seaside,
just a chip off the side, just a dent,
but she’d gotten
apoplectic,
she’d taken photographs of the
armoire,
poorly lit Polaroids, she’d called the dispatcher at the van lines
demanding compensation,
though they had a hundred other pieces of furniture, deck chairs, poster beds, and a
joint bank account,
and she had her own room to work in (painted a stifling blue), and he’d left her alone, he’d walked upon the beach whistling
lullabies, but he’d never learned how to say the word
armoire
with any
conviction at all, and he would have included
demitasse
and
taffeta
and
sconce
and
minuet,
actually, he’d gone gray trying to learn all these words, he’d become an
old unteachable dog
trying to learn how to say these things, how to say
I
love you
he supposed, an isolated backyard hound in bare feet upon the coastal sand the goodly heft of a crowbar and the way wood
gives under such an attack he would burn the damned thing plank by plank and heat the house with the past tense of her, would
burn her diaries, leaf by leaf, in the
antique potbelly stove,
weather descriptions, breezy accounts of society functions, he would consume her secrets and her reserve so hidden as to
be hidden even from herself, Lord, these people who never gave a goddamned thing.