If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go (28 page)

Our forfeited garden of Eden,

Joyous I yield up for thee my sad life

And were it far brighter,

Young or rose-strewn, still would I give it.

Vision I followed from afar,

Desire that spurred on and consumed me,

Beautiful it is to fall,

That the vision may rise to fulfillment.

Little will matter, my country,

That thou shouldst forget me.

I shall be speech in thy ears, fragrance and color,

Light and shout and loved song

O crown and deep of my sorrows,

I am leaving all with thee, my friends, my love,

Where I go are no tyrants. . . .

She trailed off and bowed her head. You could hear weeping in the crowd. Something about the words, the high, sure timbre of her voice, had
been deeply affecting, and she was right. It was totally fitting. I heard someone murmur, “Beautiful, man,” and then Luke turned and climbed up on the jetties and began walking out to the farthest point, where the waves licked the sides of the rocks and all you could hear was the surf pounding. The rest of us followed. He opened the urn, took a handful of ashes, stared out for a long moment at light pouring down from behind a pink cloud, and threw the ashes into the roiling water. He turned and handed me the urn. We looked at each other, unsmiling. I took a small handful of ashes and flung them into the ocean. One by one, everybody took a turn, except Bennie, who had held out as long as he could and now could barely hold his head up and nobody wanted him dropping the urn. “So long, pal,” Conor murmured, gently tossing his ashes into the ocean. Mitch’s wife was last. She took the urn and tipped it upside down so that the remaining ashes rained into the wind until the urn was empty. She stared out at the horizon, a slight smile playing on her lips, and began walking back down the jetties, balancing carefully on the jagged rocks.

Slowly, everybody filed off the jetties, jumping down to the wet shoreline. I looked backward, once, but it was too dark to see anything. Someone in the crowd began singing “Dead Flowers,” off the Stones’
Sticky Fingers
album, and soon everyone was taking it up: “Send me dead flowers to my wedding / And I won’t forget to put roses on your grave . . .” It had started softly, then dipped and swelled until we were one voice practically shouting the words, raucously, joyously, in peculiar but definite harmony, as we made our way off the beach toward the bright lights of the lounge at The Starlight Hotel.

•   •   •

T
hat was a beautiful poem,” Nanny said. We were jammed up in the ladies’ room, which had only two stalls. Rosemary, Mitch’s wife, was examining her face in the mirror as she washed her hands. It was hard to pinpoint her looks; at first glance on the beach, with her long dress and
flyaway shawl, she looked like she could have been one of the girls from the Dunes, and I was surprised because I had never pictured Mitch with a Dunes girl. But now, even in this dim lighting, the hard lines around her mouth were evident. She looked around for paper towels to dry her hands and of course couldn’t find any; the holder was always empty. We usually dried our hands with toilet paper, but the stalls were both full, so she began shaking her hands to dry them. She stood facing us and smiled. “There are other, longer versions, but that one was from the Tillie Olsen story ‘Hey Sailor, What Ship?’ From
Tell Me a Riddle.
Have you read it?”

“Never heard of it,” Liz said.

“Mitch loved it,” Rosemary said. “He used to like for me to read it at night, before we went to bed.” She stopped shaking her hands and crossed her arms so that they held her elbows. The fringes of her shawl hung down to her waist. She was telling us something, but I wasn’t sure what. There were things she might have known, but she didn’t know how girls from the Trunk could be when it came to outsiders. Nanny had only been trying to be polite under the circumstances.

“Yeah, Mitch used to tell some great stories,” Rita said into the stony silence. Her voice sounded very loud in the tiny bathroom. Her face was slack from drinking. She hadn’t liked the way Raven had been glancing at Rosemary. “Never told us he had a wife, though. Must have slipped his mind.”

Rosemary was lighting a clove cigarette. She crossed her ankles and leaned back against the wall, exhaling. “Really,” she said, her voice bright with interest. “Did he tell you the one about how he built a fort out of beer cans in the living room and refused to come out, even to use the bathroom? Or how he made a pyramid of empty whiskey bottles in the dining room and shot them up, one by one, with his trusty Colt 1911? And how one of the bullets went through the open window and almost hit a two-year-old sitting in a stroller?” She spoke with the same low, musical lilt she had while reciting the poem on the beach. “Have you ever tried cleaning shit out of a shag carpet?”

It was dead quiet in the bathroom. The stalls were empty, but none of us moved. It was as if our bladders had frozen.

Liz shrugged. “For better or worse, man.”

Rosemary looked down and shook her head. The same small smile played on her lips. She took a drag from the cigarette and then ran the butt under cold water. She threw it in the overflowing trash can and turned to leave. She turned back once, though, with her hand on the doorknob. “He wanted to go,” she said. “He enlisted, he wasn’t drafted.” She looked at all of us, her eyes like low-beam searchlights. Then she hugged the shawl closer to her body and went through the door, closing it quietly behind her.

•   •   •

T
he night wore on, like so many other nights, but different. A long table had been set up against the wall with a buffet of deli cold-cut platters, plastic dishes of pickles and coleslaw, aluminum-foiled pans of baked ziti and tossed salad, and a platter of party cookies tied in orange cellophane from Renzi’s Bakery. Maybe because of the food no one seemed quite as wasted as usual, except for Bennie of course, who was passed out underneath the pool table. Toward midnight, there were more shot glasses lining the bar and Len rigged the jukebox to play a long Rolling Stones riff. Everyone was dancing up a storm. I danced with Billy and Conor and Liz and Nanny and Voodoo and even Len came out from behind the bar, to great cheering, and boogied down to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Brown Sugar.” Rosemary had been sitting most of the night in a corner of the bar, primly sipping cranberry juice, but Cha-Cha and Conor surrounded her and soon she was downing tequila shots and laughing hysterically at anything anyone said. Now Ray Mackey was twirling her around the dance floor. She was a very good dancer. I wondered if she and Mitch had gone out dancing before he lost his leg, to clubs, maybe, or divey bars with good jukeboxes, or maybe they just
danced around their living room while people passing by peered into their windows and watched. Now I knew what Len had meant when he said he kept expecting Mitch to show up; every time I looked at the corner of the bar by the jukebox, I kept expecting to see him sitting there, talking, laughing, his amazing eyes taking everything in until the booze made the click happen and he zoned out to his own private hemisphere.

Looking around the lounge was like looking at one of those freeze-frame photographs. People were laughing and singing and dancing and, whenever there was a jukebox lull, raising their glasses in a toast to Mitch. His wife, Rosemary, was weaving toward the door that led to the rooms above the lounge, surrounded by Ray and Raven and Cha-Cha, her arms around Rita, who’d decided to love her after many shots of tequila. Rosemary turned in the doorway and her shawl slid to the floor as she lowered her head and held out her arms and announced, “Now I am home, and you are my family.” Everyone applauded and she blew a kiss to the crowd and then she was gone, floating up the stairs to her dead husband’s bed. Raven and Cha-Cha went out to the piazza to smoke a joint. Nanny and Voodoo were wrapped around each other, their eyes closed, their lips locked, as though they were alone someplace, a desert maybe, trying to stay warm. Outside, Rita was getting sick in the clump of sea grass behind the patio. Angie had left long ago, and now Desi, wearing a lopsided smile, was making his unsteady way home to the rooms above Eddy’s, probably dreaming of unbuttoning a thousand tiny buttons on a sky-blue sweater. Liz was swaying against the bar with a happy look on her face, maybe thinking about the pile of dog shit she’d left on the driver’s seat of Cory’s Triumph TR6 on Tuesday night. Billy and Conor had run out of money and were begging Len to let them run a tab. Ray Mackey was sitting outside at an abandoned table on the patio, his head resting on his arms, a lit cigarette falling from his fingers. I looked around and felt like crying, not from being sad but because everything went by so quickly and I wanted it back, even my days of being an outsider, trying so hard to belong. Even the days of longing for
Luke, because they had all led up to this, this night, so thick with stars and music and ashes. I wanted it to last, but it was late and soon the lounge would be closing. And some little bit of something would be lost, even though we’d probably be here again on another night very soon.

I felt a light touch on my arm and turned to see Luke standing next to me. He’d been drinking as long as everyone else had, maybe doing other things, too, but his eyes looked clear. “That was cool, what you said on the beach,” he said. “That was very cool, man. He would have liked that.” He put his hand underneath my elbow.

“Yeah, I think he would have,” I said. Over Luke’s shoulder, I watched the photo freeze-frame one more time and then the picture became clear and fluid and all the colors came together and for that exact moment, I had the feeling that everything would be all right. That even after the music stopped, we’d all still go on dancing.

if i knew you were going to be this beautiful, i never would have let you go

S
teps from the ocean!” “Waterfront views!” That was how the ad in the local yellow pages described The Starlight Hotel, that late great fleabag that enjoyed its real heyday during the twenties and thirties, before everything went to hell. Oh, it was never like the grand palaces that lined the boardwalk farther uptown, with their stained glass windows facing the water, the sounds of their orchestras drifting out over the ocean. No, The Starlight Hotel was the crown jewel of the honky-tonk part of town, a pink stucco building that stood out from the weathered bungalows that lined Comanche Street, jalousied windows covered with sateen awnings, tasseled umbrellas shielding the cocktail tables on the small piazza, where people of interest came in taxis under cover of darkness and never signed their real names to the register. It was a discreet location where bellboys could be bribed to bring back a bottle of gin
fresh off the boats during the Prohibition years, where (local legend had it) Starr Ames, the silent-screen actress, ended her life after Franco Giselli told her she had been a Goddamned fool to think that he, a practicing Catholic with six kids, would ever leave his family for an over-the-hill hussy such as herself. They found Starr in the bathtub, eyes staring up at the tin ceiling, polished toes peeking out from the bloodied water, palms lank but curiously turned upward, as though waiting for a fortune-teller to come along and read her life line. It was this faded tragedy that started The Starlight Hotel’s slow decline, so that by the seventies, like the rest of Elephant Beach, it stood drenched in decay, the stucco walls flaked and chipped under coats of white paint used to deflect the sun, sateen awnings shredded or sold, jalousied windows missing panes, art deco screens scratched and shattered, and the once festive piazza now a weed-choked vacant lot with a few rusted patio tables that once held gaily striped umbrellas. It was said that even the ghost of Starr Ames, glamour gal of the silent stage and screen, done in by talkies and brandy Alexanders, wouldn’t deign to haunt the penthouse on the top floor, where she’d taken her final bath; it chose, instead, to walk the shoreline in bare feet, holding a pair of Ferragamos in one hand and a white fox fur (a gift from Franco Giselli) in the other, singing at the top of her lungs, “I got something, something, something, for my baby and he for me, / We got something, something, something, yeah! / My baby and me.”

But over the years they never did change the ad in the yellow pages, and we used to scream with laughter, wondering what would happen if some family from Elmhurst or Philadelphia, even, lured by the promise of waterfront views and proximity to the beach, pulled up in their station wagon expecting a brief respite from the city heat and found instead—well, The Starlight Hotel. What would they think, we wondered, seeing the collection of funky losers sitting out front in their sagging beach chairs, with their fifty-cent sunglasses and torn visors, the cracked and calloused soles of their yellowed feet tipped toward the sun? There was
Silvester, palsied from some unknown malady, who would stutter into the lounge after a day at the track, waving a fistful of bills, crowing, “It was a cool, cool, pigeon blue, and my baby rode it all the way home”; Jay, a retired English teacher who could read tea leaves and write letters of recommendation for the price of a Schlitz; and Amos, a leathery specimen who, when drunk, would give away his silver rings and then stagger up Comanche Street, screeching, “Which one of you Goddamn bedbugs stole my jewels?”

And if the family was brave enough to venture inside, what would they make of the nameless waitress who wandered the halls hoisting an empty tray high in the air with one arm, stopping random visitors to ask, “May I take your order?” and then turning abruptly to continue her solitary sojourn? Or the young mother with three children who lived on the ground floor and would go out at night, leaving her babies asleep in one bed underneath an open window, their bare bottoms dotted with mosquito bites the shapes of tiny half-moons, as if waiting for someone to walk up Starfish Alley and steal them? And Roof Dog, the mangy German shepherd who lived in the hotel and would make his way up to the roof if someone left the door open, howling long and loudly as he galloped from one end to the other?

Well, where else were they all going to live in such sordid splendor for three dollars and fifty cents a night? The Starlight may have been little more than a flophouse, but the rooms were saved by the water views and the smell of the ocean crouched right outside the windows, and the gaily colored Japanese lanterns strung around the ceilings, whose dim glow provided reading light and hid the true crustiness of the surroundings. Because of its proximity to the Comanche Street beach entrance, it seemed somehow less sinister than it would have in the city, say, or on a more isolated stretch of road. And because of that proximity, and the cool, dim lounge with its long mahogany bar, and the cheap drinks, and Len, the bartender, who was generous with buybacks, and a jukebox that played an eclectic mix of Santana, Frank Sinatra, the Doors, and the
Wild Irish Tenors, among others, and because of some bizarre notion we had that hanging around a seedy dive with marginal lunatics made us somehow superior to our high school counterparts, with their pastel, split-level palaces and Velveeta lives, that last summer before everyone left, The Starlight Hotel became our headquarters, our nocturnal home away from home. It was where Billy Mackey stayed when his parents discovered the stash of quaaludes beneath the loose floorboard in his bedroom and threw him out; where Kenny and Joanie Kramer held their wedding reception when it became clear her parents wouldn’t contribute a nickel after finding out she was three months pregnant; where Carlie Slattery slept the night of her miscarriage so that she could bleed safely on the hotel’s moth-torn sheets without her mother finding out. It was where I thought I might find my mother, not the one who stood in the doorway of the bathroom while I applied lip gloss before heading out to Comanche Street, screaming that someday I’d regret this attraction to the seedy side of life, my father had a master’s degree, for God’s sake, but the mother who had given me up for adoption when she was sixteen years old, younger than I was that final summer. The Starlight Hotel seemed exactly like the kind of place a woman who’d given birth to an illegitimate daughter would be living, and on graduation night, while everyone was dropping acid or smoking angel dust or snorting heroin in the men’s bathroom, I wandered, lightly stoned, through the vacant hallways, dreamily pushing open doors to empty rooms, imagining my mother lying down on one of the lumpy double beds, her long hair fanning down the stained chenille bedspread, her flesh smooth and uncurdled against the flimsy slip she was wearing, gazing up at the ceiling while the smoke from her cigarette curled out the open window. I would be standing at the foot of the bed, and she would rise slowly and stare at me, at my hair, my face, the shape of my nose, and then she’d smile wide and hold out her arms, and say, “If I knew you were going to be this beautiful, I never would have let you go.”

•   •   •

T
hat night of Mitch’s wake, standing next to Luke, I grew tired of waiting, and when Frank Sinatra began singing “My Way,” I took his hand and led him out to the patio and said, “Dance with me,” and we moved into the music, our faces so close I could kiss the small scar on his left eyebrow, but I didn’t. I had my arms around his neck and he held me around my waist, pressing lightly against the small of my back. At one point I thought there were tears on his face, or they could have been my tears leaking onto him, or maybe they were stars casting shadows, it was a bright night, the exact kind of night I’d pictured a thousand times over, Luke and I slow dancing, then breaking slightly, sneaking up the back stairway, Luke’s hand cupping my ass as we climbed up to an empty room and finally closed the door on the rest of the world. The next morning, the waitress who wandered the halls would fill her empty tray with chocolate cake and orange slices and bring it to us for breakfast, and in late afternoon, Jay would read our tea leaves and we’d spend our nights swaying to the music, to the sound of the ocean practically on the doorstep, and on nights when the clouds hid the moon, we would lie under the patchwork quilts that smelled of salt water and mildew and tell bedtime stories against each other’s skin.

I could see it all so clearly that I thought it had already happened, and when the song ended and we broke apart, it took me a minute to understand that this was Luke,
Luke
, and nothing had happened, we had barely kissed yet. He stood there, suddenly looking so lost, so empty, that again it was I who took his hand, and led him up the hotel’s back stairwell to the floor where the rooms were sometimes unlocked, and I found one and went in and opened the window, and we lay down together on the stained chenille bedspread, and for a moment I could smell my mother, what I thought she smelled like—cigarette smoke and lilies of the valley. I turned toward Luke and smiled, relieved that we were
finally here, and I closed my eyes and waited for him to kiss me, hold me, waited for it to begin. But then I heard a strangled sound, and my eyes flew open and it was Luke, leaning against me, sobbing, tearing at his hair, and I didn’t know what to do, I had no idea what to do. I tried to lift his tee shirt and kiss his scar, but he pulled it back down again. “No, no, please don’t,” he choked out, so I put my arms around different parts of his body through his turbulent thrashing until he felt dead in my embrace. I leaned in close, to make sure he was breathing, and when I saw his shoulders rising and falling, I settled back and held him, through the night sweats that soaked the bed while he slept.

It was a long night. A thousand thoughts ran through my head but I couldn’t tell you what they were; I don’t remember. I was too conscious of Luke, of thinking he might wake up any minute and want to talk to me about things. I thought maybe he’d wake up and we could go for a walk on the beach and watch the sunrise. My arm was becoming numb, electric pinpricks all over, but the whole time I was hoping he’d get up, I still wouldn’t move for fear of waking him. I tried lighting cigarettes with one arm and almost set the sheets on fire. Still, I smoked an entire pack of Marlboros and longed to go downstairs and buy more from the temperamental machine in the lobby, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, but still I wouldn’t move away from Luke. My arms were beyond tired, and Luke’s tee shirt was as wet as if he’d stood out in the rain, but his face looked peaceful and his breathing was even and his occasional whimper never rose to a scream. At one point I tried turning so that I was facing him, so that I could watch his face while he slept, and I heard a soft rustling beneath me. I reached down and felt the lonely weight of the crumpled condoms I’d bought at Coffey’s Drugs in the pocket of my jeans.

It was a very long night. Below us, I heard the jukebox stop playing. I heard Len telling everyone, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” I heard everyone moving out of the bar and onto Comanche Street. I heard voices fading. Above us, I heard Roof Dog bark twice
before settling down to sleep. I heard Len closing up downstairs, bottles banging, the clang of the cash register as he counted out for the night. I heard him lock up, start his car and begin driving back to Rockaway. I heard the silence on Comanche Street, interrupted by a muffled cough somewhere in the hotel, a lone cry from a child’s nightmare in the bungalow across the street from the bar. But then the quiet completely covered everything, and right before I finally fell into a short, dreamless slumber, with Luke’s breath warm on my neck, I heard faintly, through the window, a woman’s whiskey voice, playful, almost laughing, singing: “. . . something, something, something, yeah! / My baby and, my baby and, my baby and me.”

When I woke up shortly after daybreak, Luke was gone, the sheets still damp from his night sweats. I hadn’t felt him slip from the bed or heard him walk across the room. I hadn’t heard the door close. Two days later, I learned that he’d left town. He’d told Conor that he needed time away from everyone, everything, that until he was at home again in his own skin he couldn’t be at home anyplace else. He was heading west, and he might stop in Boulder to see Maggie and Matty, or he might just keep going until he found a place he’d never been before, where he didn’t know anyone. Conor, perpetually stoned or drunk or both, shrugged his shoulders, heading for the beach, his surfboard hooked under his arm. “It’s cool, man,” he said. “My parents are, like, freaking out. But I can wait until he’s ready to be my brother again.”

But I was done waiting. I was ready, now, ready for those arms that had tried to hold me before Luke came back and went away again, ready to embrace someone, something that would hold me through the night when I needed to be held. But then Labor Day came and summer was over and everyone was talking about leaving, taking off for communes in California and New Mexico, moving to the city to get better-paying jobs, to Canada to avoid another draft lottery. Time to get real, man, people were saying, which made me sad and anxious, because all along I thought it
had
been real, that the whole point of being together was that
we wouldn’t be like everyone else and that for all our summers we would lie next to one another on the sand at Comanche Beach, a chain of sun-kissed flesh that would never break. And years later, Liz, like a sister to me, only better because our blood didn’t get in the way, said half scornfully, half pitying, “It’s like we all knew it was this big myth, but you were the only one who really believed it.”

And I did,
I had
, I’d bought the myth, even when I finally left I still thought I was leaving something behind and kept coming back to find it, and a few years later, when they started pouring federal funds into dissipated seaside towns on the East Coast and Elephant Beach received its fair share, and The Starlight Hotel was sold to developers and its ragtag crew of tenants cast out, and Conor and Billy, winos in waiting, tried petitioning Comanche Street residents to keep it open so that the crew of funky losers would have a place to live, or perhaps concerned about their own hazy futures, the neighbors slammed the door in their faces, saying, “What are you, crazy? Let that Goddamned rattrap burn to the ground!” Which it almost did, the blaze set by someone’s careless cigarette or the phantom owner’s hankering for insurance money, no one ever found out. And when I brought a sun-bleached boyfriend home from school, and insisted on driving past it, charred and boarded now, waiting to convert to luxury condos—Steps from the ocean! Waterfront views!—and selling for less because they never could quite get the smell of funk and mildew out of the walls, because I wanted my new love to know something of my past and be charmed and delighted by it, when we parked and, after looking around, the only thing he had to say was, “If we get out of the car, do I need to lock the doors in this neighborhood?” I knew then that it was over, and I chose, instead of him I chose the part of me that was trapped forever inside The Starlight Hotel, along with all the dreams that never came true, and some that did.