The Last Refuge (17 page)

“Yeah, right.”

When she settled us into a small pocket of air up next to the band, I moved in and got her into a standard dance grip. Right away I felt safer.

“I have never in my life danced to this kind of music,” I yelled in her ear.

“Could have fooled me. What kind of dance can you do?”

“Waltz. I thought you couldn’t get laid in college if you didn’t know how to waltz.”

I spun her around a little to demonstrate my waltzing skills. The lack of relevance to the actual rhythm didn’t seem to trouble her.

“I hope waltzing talent wasn’t the deciding factor.”

Our waltz turned into a type of slow dance that might have looked out of place, but felt a lot nicer than that other stuff. It didn’t deter the crowd on the dance floor. In fact, some big kid in a baggy sweater and his girlfriend were getting more frenzied by the minute. Everyone else sort of cleared out of their way, but I liked it where we were. They bashed into us a few times, forcing me to close in on Amanda, which was okay with me. I tried to look more nonchalant than I was feeling.

Amanda danced with her eyes cast slightly downward, and every once in a while would look up at me and smile shyly through those thick Italian lashes.

“Don’t do that,” I said to her.

“What?”

“That thing you’re doing with your eyes. It’s making me lose my balance.”

I spun her around again, right into the dopey kid. It seemed to annoy him, and she winced when he dug his heel into her foot. I spun her back again.

“Sorry,” I said to her.

“Gee, some people.”

I waited until I felt him push into me again. Then as I twirled Amanda I hooked my foot around his ankle and pulled hard, and without missing a beat sent the kid face down into the dance floor. His date rushed over and helped him up. We had our little space back to ourselves. I caught the bass player grinning at me.

“What happened to him?” Amanda asked me.

“Must’ve lost his balance.”

I distracted her with another spin. When she closed back in I added a half spin and caught her around the waist. Her head fell back on my shoulder and her eyes were closed. I was close enough to smell her perfume and the wine on her breath.

The dancing kid’s date was helping him to the bathroom. He was holding a bloody nose, though he was able to say “Fuck you, man” clearly enough as he went by. Not a half-hour in the first club I’d been to in years and already I’d drawn blood. I was glad Amanda hadn’t realized what happened. Abby always wanted me to defend her from the dangers of the world, and always got mad at me when I did.

The band ended the song and immediately took up another, this one nice and slow, matching our tempo. The bass player was still grinning at me. I’d made a friend.

“Isn’t that nice,” said Amanda.

“They’ll do anything to keep you on the dance floor.”

Amanda moved in closer and I pulled her tight. Now my face was all the way buried in that dense mass of auburn hair. I could feel the perfect contours of her body fit into mine, the slim, muscular smoothness beneath her dark blue blouse, open at the neck and collar pulled up, fresh to the touch. The air was thick with pheromones and amplified music, filling up all the space inside the Playhouse, leaving no room for time or fears or regrets to intrude or interfere.

I didn’t know what was really going on with her, but right then I didn’t much care.

Eventually the band took a break and all the clocks started up again and we went over to say hi to her friends.

The brassy blond looked pleased. The other woman was her morphological opposite—tall and thin and dark haired. She looked a lot smarter, but less fun. She wore a white hand-knit sweater and tiny pieces of jewelry around her neck and fingers. Her hair was spun into large, highlighted ringlets. Her complexion was rough, but cared for. I liked her eyes, but not her pinched little mouth—it was too well designed for disapproval.

I had the feeling the two of them had spent much of their adult years together, locked in continuous, unsuccessful quests for romantic involvement. Holding on to
each other through shared heartaches and unrequited obsessions.

“Robin and Laura. Sam, my favorite customer.”

“Robin,” said Robin, the one with the blond hair.

“Laura,” said Laura.

“Hello.”

“Out for the weekend?” Robin asked. “People are doing that a lot now—coming out in the fall.”

“Here full time. I live on Oak Point.”

“Used to come on weekends, right?” said Amanda.

“It was my parents’ place. I inherited it.”

“Some nice rentals up in North Sea. We do well up there,” said Laura.

“We do well up there,” Robin repeated.

Laura picked up her glass with two hands and sucked on the straw. I noticed she had a pack of cigarettes and a pretty white porcelain lighter. I dug out the Camels and offered them around. Laura took me up on it.

“Walk a mile.”

“If you don’t run out of breath first,” said Robin. Laura swatted her.

We lit up anyway. Robin had her eyes on me, flagrantly assessing. I hoped my grooming was up to it. She seemed like one of those wide-open women who liked to guess something about you to prove her powers of perception. She was drinking red wine—it went well with her hair. Laura luxuriated over the Camel and looked out at the crowded room, counting the house.

“You’re in real estate?” I asked them.

“Yup. Partners for over ten years. House Hunters of the Hamptons. The old triple H. You’ve seen our signs.”

I had.

“You do a lot of rentals?”

“Half and half,” said Robin. “There’s plenty of both. Do you ever rent your place?”

“No. My mother lived there until a few years ago, then I moved in. Never had the chance.”

“You’d be amazed at what you can get. A lot of year-rounders rent and go someplace else for the summer. Or rent something cheaper. Can pay the whole year’s mortgage. You’d be amazed at what everything is worth out here. Most locals are.”

“Even in North Sea?”

“Especially—tend to have lower mortgages, and in this market, you can still get incredible rentals with lesser properties. No offense or anything. I love North Sea myself. Last of the real Hamptons, if you ask me.”

“I guess I would be amazed,” I said, truthfully.

“What do you get when there’s more demand than supply, and the demanders have more money than God and all His angels put together?”

“Inflated property values?”

“The man’s a genius,” Robin said to Amanda.

“Isn’t yours on the water?” asked Amanda, with innocent sincerity.

“Oh, well,” said Robin, “that’s a whole ’nother kettle of fish. Waterfront you double or triple.”

“Do you rent a lot on Oak Point?” I asked.

The two real-estate women looked at each other and shook their heads.

“I always figured there were mostly year-rounders out on the peninsula. Locals,” said Laura.

“That’s what I thought.”

“Hm,” said Robin.

Amanda was sitting next to me, so I couldn’t see her very well. I could, however, feel the backs of her fingers brushing lightly across my thigh under the table. I let my hand drop to my lap so I could squeeze her hand.

“Ever heard of Bay Side Holdings?” I asked.

They looked at each other again. Exchanging telepathic messages.

“Weren’t they trying for some variances a few years ago?” asked Robin.

Laura nodded. “Yeah, they wanted to reconfigure some of the lot sizes on stuff they owned over there. They were trying to reshape pre-existing boundaries. We didn’t pay much attention to it. I don’t think the Appeals Board let them do it. The Town’s a bitch on non-conformance. Though I don’t remember anybody from what’s-its-nose, Bay Side, pushing real hard. The only reason I remember anything is ’cause the lawyer they brought in from the City was so adorable.”

“If you like tall, dark and loaded,” said Robin.

“It just sort of went away,” said Laura, ignoring her. “I have to admit I was a little curious. I get into that stuff more than Robin—spend enough time in those damned hearings and you turn into a zoning junkie.”

“High drama,” said Robin, sarcastically.

“It can be,” Laura shot back, a little insulted.

“I thought their lawyer was a woman,” I said to the pair of them.

Laura examined her drink before taking a sip. “You sayin’ I’m a dyke?” she said, in an awkward way.

“Jacqueline something—Polish name?”

The two of them rolled their eyes in unison.

“Jackie Swaitkowski,” said Robin.

“She’s a local. Lawyers from out of the City usually like to have a hometown connection. Cutie-pants had Jackie fronting the thing.”

“Fronting’s a good word for it,” said Robin.

“Robin, really.”

“I’m not saying anything.”

“Jackie’s a little flaky. That puts some people off,” Laura explained.

“Some people?” Robin asked, rhetorically.

“She’s actually very nice,” said Laura.

“Not a big career planned in rocket science,” said Robin, with a forced smile.

“She’s a lawyer, Robin, how dumb can you be?”

“In this case, very.”

I was relieved when Laura decided to drop it. Amanda seemed even more uncomfortable than me with the turn of the conversation. Bickering, especially between adults, always makes me tense. I feel like I’m back in the office, struggling to restrain the human compulsion to rend and eviscerate each other. Or back in the dining room with my father glaring down the long table, trying to bait a reaction out of me so he’d have someone to contend with, someone to put up a little resistance against his relentless fury. It always makes me want to be somewhere else.

“I gotta hit the head,” I said to the group. I gave Amanda’s hand a final squeeze and stood up. I wove my way through the mass of clubgoers, avoiding collisions and eye contact, passing unnoticed through clusters of friends and sexual prospectors.

The window was wide open in the men’s room, chilling down the sticky urine smell. A rough queue had formed right outside a separate room for the urinals. There was only room in there for two, so I waited my turn. Once inside the room, you had to step up on a short platform to take a leak, which I was halfway through when I heard the door behind me snap shut. I was about to turn to look when somebody shoved me forward into the wall. Piss sprayed off the back of the porcelain and splattered my pant leg.

It wasn’t an accidental shove. It had plenty of real meat on it. I assumed it was the kid I’d sent into the dance floor. My sphincter had already cut me off midstream, so my next thought was to get myself back into my pants. As I zipped, I hunched my shoulders and braced for the kid’s sucker punch.

Instead, a hole opened up in the universe and a piece of heavy artillery poked through. It fired off at point-blank range into the side of my head.

I’d been hit a lot of times as a regular fighter, but I’d never seen stars. I was a little surprised you actually could. They popped in front of my eyes like a fireworks display. I put my forearms in front of my face to block the next blow, which came from the other direction. It ripped off my head and bounced it against the far wall. Then a fist caught me above the belly button, lifting me right off my feet. I ended up on my knees down on the floor. Red fuzz filled up my eyes but I could just make out a pair of black motorcycle boots. I looked up from there into the eyes of the big trained bear that had been hanging around our cars at the beach.

“You don’t know what you’re fuckin’ with,” he said in his clearest trained-bear voice—as dead and hollow as his eyes.

I was trying to think of a way to insult his BMW when one of those black motorcycle boots came up off the floor and caught me under the chin, snapping my mouth shut and sending my head for another spin around the galaxy.

This time the stars were talking. Or maybe it was the voices of the people coming through the door. I didn’t care. I was on my hands and knees watching my blood puddle on the floor. The bear squatted down next to me and patted me on the cheek.

He left after that, I think. I heard him bust through a group of guys clogging the doorway. They said things like, “Hey man, what the fuck?” I didn’t care. I was hoping to see some more colorful stars, though all I got were these wiggly red balls, framed in darkness that closed in on the red until that’s all there was and I went down into this gooey black hole wondering if this is how my old man felt—watching his life drip out onto the floor of a piss-soaked bathroom at the back of the bar.

FOUR

M
Y OFFICE HAD
a sprawling overgrown schefflera that filled the space in front of two huge sheets of plate glass that formed one corner of the room. Right next to the plant was a steel desk Abby bought me soon after we were married. I used to sit on top of the desk cross-legged, yogi style, and talk on the phone. Of the thirty-five-thousand people worldwide in our ten-billion-dollar corporation, I was the only one who did this.

I was sitting there looking through the leaves of the schefflera at a resplendent spring day when a call came in from the chairman of a corporate sub-committee. I’d never heard of it before, but this was nothing new. Big corporations are like gas giants—huge swirling balls of toxic, overheated gas held together by gravity, and controlled by a form of planetary tectonics that
forces the entire mass into endless cycles of expansion and collapse. The energy unleashed throws off institutional debris that recombines as tiny sub-spheres of frantic activity. They drift free for a while before getting snagged by the gravitational field and sucked back into the body of the organization. But along the way there was always the danger that one of them would call you on the phone.