Beach Trip (18 page)

Later, as they climbed the ridge in the moonlight and Mel pretended to twist her ankle so he would have to carry her, she had seen the look on Sara’s face. She had been intrigued. It was like a game. A game Mel knew she could win. And that first night, when he came over to watch a movie in their room and Sara was so quiet, Mel told herself it wouldn’t last. She thought,
I’ll go out with him once and that’s all. Just to prove I can.
He was
nice enough, good-looking and funny, but no guy was worth breaking up a friendship over.

After the movie in their room, Mel walked him out.

“I don’t think your roommate likes me very much,” he said as they stepped onto the elevator.

“What makes you say that?” Mel said. She liked him well enough but he had a quiet cockiness that she found instantly suspect. You could tell he was one of those guys women always find charming, and he knew it.

“Well, let’s see,” he said, leaning against the elevator wall. He grinned. A tiny scar curved below his right eyebrow like a piece of white thread. “She doesn’t say two words to me all evening. And on the way up here she reminds me that there’s a curfew.”

“There
is
a curfew.”

His grin faded slowly. “Yeah, I know that. But I hadn’t even gotten off the elevator before she was reminding me that it was time to go.” She didn’t say anything and he looked at his feet silently as the elevator made its lumbering descent.

When they reached the ground floor, the door slid open. She stepped out and he followed her down the hallway to the front desk. The monitor behind the desk looked up at them suspiciously, then went back to reading. J.T. leaned over to sign himself out. All along the brightly lit corridor the fluorescent lights flickered and hummed. “Walk me out?” he said, and Mel shrugged and nodded at the monitor.

“The doors will lock behind you,” she warned, without looking up.

“That’s okay, I’ve got my card,” Mel said.

She followed him out onto the porch. The quad was deserted. Frost shimmered on the moonlit grass. He took her hand and led her down the steps, and she followed him without a word. In the shadow of the portico he pulled her smoothly into his arms and kissed her.

Up until that kiss she could have stopped at any time. She could have sent him packing without so much as a backward glance and spent her whole life without ever thinking of him again. But the kiss changed all that.

When he let her go, she stood there swaying in the moonlight. There was a strange humming sound in her head, low-pitched and rhythmic. She put her hand up to her ear and said, “What’s that noise?”

He looked around the moonlit quad. “What noise?”

“That noise. Like water running in a sink. Like a flood through a sluice gate, like …” She stopped. The sound she was hearing was her own pulse pounding in her temples.

He grinned. “Are you cold?” he said.

“No.” She stood there like a narcoleptic on the verge of a seizure. In the sky beyond his shoulder, Perseus raised his shining bow. Or was it Orion who carried the bow? Mel couldn’t remember. Her head felt dense and thick. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess,” she said.

He opened his jacket as if to envelop her but she shook her head and stepped back. “I promise I won’t kiss you,” he said, and dropped his arms.

Pink Floyd drifted from an open window. After a moment, she stirred and said, “I should probably go in.”

He stood there looking at her with his hands pushed deep into the pockets of his jeans. “I’ll see you Friday night then. Friday at eight. I’ll call you tomorrow.” He backed away and grinned and walked off whistling in the moonlight.

She watched him go. Far off in the darkness a car door slammed. The moon sailed over the turrets of Amsterdam Hall, shining fitfully behind a line of swiftly moving clouds. The sound in her head gradually subsided. It had started out as a game and now everything had changed.

She hoped Sara would understand.

hey spent the whole morning lounging in the great room, too lazy and hungover to do anything else. When April came in around noon to check on their plans for dinner, they were still stretched out on the sofas in their pajamas. April looked tired and hungover herself, as if she hadn’t slept well, and it was no wonder, Mel thought dismally, remembering the sounds she had heard coming from the crofter in the wee hours of the morning.

“I can go by the market and pick up some fresh shrimp,” April said. She was wearing a tiny bikini and a pair of flip-flops with a towel draped around her narrow shoulders. “I can make shrimp scampi.”

They all agreed that that sounded wonderful.

“I’ll go to the market as soon as I get back from the beach.” She gathered her things and walked out the door, and they watched her through the long glass windows as she crossed the boardwalk and disappeared behind the dunes.

“Isn’t she lovely?” Lola said cheerfully. “Isn’t she sweet?”

“Sweet,” Mel said.

“She spends way too much time in the sun,” Annie said, staring ominously at the sunlight sparkling along the water. “She’ll have skin cancer before she’s fifty.”

Mel sighed, stood up, and walked over to the French doors, leaning against the glass and peering down at the beach. She watched April, curious whether she might be meeting Captain Mike on the beach. She appeared a few minutes later, a distant figure walking slowly. She was alone. Captain Mike apparently kept the hours of a vampire.

“So what does he do all day?” she asked, turning from the glass.

Lola frowned slightly and looked up. She was still wearing her glasses, and her eyes behind the thick lenses were wide and blue. “Who?” she asked.

“Captain Mike.” Mel went back to the sofa and slumped down with her feet resting on the edge and her knees stuck up in the air.

Lola smoothed the front of her zebra-skin pajamas with her hands. “He fishes,” she said. “Or works on the boat. But mostly he fishes.”

“I thought maybe he slept all day.”

“Oh, no.” She plucked at the red piping along her sleeve like she was picking lint from a sweater. “He leaves the house every morning at six-thirty to go fishing.”

Sara, who had sat for some time in a dazed state of suspended animation, picked up the TV remote and began to scroll aimlessly through the channels.

“Stop there,” Annie said, pointing at the TV. A women’s college basketball game was in full swing.

Sara yawned. “I played basketball in high school,” she said in a sleepy voice.

Mel folded her long legs under her. “All I can say is thank God for Title IX. Twenty-five years ago, only one in twenty-seven high school girls played sports; now it’s one in three.”

Annie flashed Mel an ominous look. Mel was getting ready to go off on some tirade—you could see it in her face—getting ready to monopolize the conversation like she always did when she felt that she had a point to make. The only thing Annie knew about Title IX was what she’d heard years ago at a Women of God convention speech given by Phyllis Schlafly entitled “Real Women Don’t Cry Over Title IX,” most of which she couldn’t even remember.

“Well, you know,” Annie said, waving her hand in a breezy manner, “if sixty percent of college graduates are women, then who are they going to marry?”

The truth of the matter was, Annie had lost faith in Phyllis Schlafly years ago, not long after she read an article by Schlafly contending that married woman cannot be raped by their husbands because, by the act of marriage, they consent to sexual intercourse forever. It was right about then that she began thinking of Schlafly as an idiot. Not that she was going to admit this to Mel, of course. It was too much fun watching her face bloat and her eyes bulge.

“What in the hell are you talking about?” Mel said.

The truth was, had they not been college roommates, she and Mel would never have been friends. Not that they had been friends in the beginning, of course. Mel was loud and flamboyant, and Annie was an only child used to having her own way. Their dislike of each other had been immediate and mutual. It was not until halfway through their freshman year, when they got drunk one night over a bottle of tequila, that they developed any kind of camaraderie.
A friendship founded in the devil’s drink cannot stand
, Reverend Reeves always said, but like so much else that he espoused, Annie had found this, too, to be wrong.

“There won’t be enough male college grads to go around,” Annie said. She wished now that she hadn’t begun this argument. She could see from Mel’s face that it was going to be a violent one.

Mel tapped two fingers against her forehead like she was trying to ward off a migraine. “Okay, I’m trying to follow this. Are we talking about marriage? And what does that have to do with Title IX?”

“Title IX ensures that there’ll be more female college grads in the future than male ones. It will affect marriage in this country by turning out more female grads than male ones.”

“Who says female college grads have to marry male college grads? Who says they have to marry anyone? Marriage is an archaic ritual.”

“That coming from someone who’s been down the aisle twice,” Sara said.

“See. I have experience. I know what I’m talking about.”

“Would anyone like another cup of coffee?” Lola asked. “How about some lunch?”

“I like the Rose Bowl,” Annie said. “Mitchell always watches it and so do I. I like the parades, and all the floats made with flower petals.”

At this, even Lola stopped trying to push refreshments and gave Annie her full attention. Mel breathed slowly through her mouth. She narrowed her eyes and said, “What in the hell does all this have to do with Title IX?”

“Well, Title IX is forcing colleges to close down football teams because feminists don’t want money going to male sports teams, and before long there won’t be any teams left to play in the Rose Bowl.”

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Where did you hear that?”

Annie hesitated before playing her trump card. “Phyllis Schlafly.”

Mel’s jaw sagged. One eye stuttered like a bad circuit. “Phyllis Schlafly?” she said, looking first at Sara and then at Lola. “Phyllis Schlafly?”

“Now, Mel,” Lola said.

Despite her resolve not to, Annie smiled. She couldn’t help it. Mel’s expression was just too funny. Lola, relieved, began to giggle.

“You bitch,” Mel said.

Annie rounded her shoulders up under her ears and showed her teeth in a wide grin.

“I think she had you going there,” Sara said.

“Explain to me again why we’re friends,” Mel said.

“Because I’m a patient and forgiving person,” Annie said.

The day was hot and humid, and the surf, frothing along the sandy beach, was the color of oatmeal. A haze hung over the landscape. Even the bees seemed lethargic, moving lazily among the potted geraniums on the deck. Inside the house, the women sprawled on the sofas watching the basketball game. When it went to a commercial break, Sara picked up the remote and began channel-surfing again. She stopped on a local channel that showed a couple getting married on the beach.

“I always wanted a beach wedding,” Lola said.

“Too late for that,” Mel said.

“What?” Lola stirred and looked at Mel. “Oh, right,” she said.

“I have this friend in New York,” Mel said. “And when her daughter got married, to a plastic surgeon by the way, the bridesmaids’ gifts were a series of Restylane injections from the groom. Can you believe that?”

“I can believe it,” Sara said flatly.

“This girl at our church was supposed to get married last March,” Annie said. “She invited six hundred people. She had
fourteen
bridesmaids and fourteen groomsmen.”

“My God, it must have cost a fortune,” Sara said.

“That’s outrageous,” Mel said. “Who would plan a wedding that big?”

“It gets better,” Annie said. “So the day of the big event dawns and everyone shows up. Everyone but the bride, that is.”

“Oh no,” Sara said. “She didn’t leave him standing at the altar, did she?”

Annie grimaced and nodded her head. “In front of six hundred people.”

“And twenty-eight bridesmaids and groomsmen,” Mel said. “It’s almost comical.”