Hawaiian Night
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. 3over 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. Everyo
ne 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.
Drawer
She 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 Ilove 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.
Pan’s Fair Throng
Fairest monarch of our em
pire, great king, conduce in me, lowly tanner of hides, a righteous song as I embark to tell the tale of your origins, spinning for townsfolk the narratives of the province whence you come, that savage northern province of brigands upon highways who accost travelers with blunt, crusted foils called, in those lands, squeegees, or in due course how you came from the prolific farms of Jersey to rule over all this principality of scribes and divers musicians, how you brought probity to scoundrels of disputatious cast. Lead me as you have led others, eternal administrator, make your tongue my tongue as my inscriptions cover this stone and I tell of your reign, to those in the crib, to those upon sickbeds rank and odiferous; let it be me, the tanner, who paints your masterpieces, paints your portraits in tongues of men, as if tales were altarpieces of historical churches, let me be as a butterfly with your paintbrushes, as you climb down from your folding chair.