The Starboard Sea: A Novel (22 page)

The girls had a two-bedroom suite with a view of the Public Gardens. Though the hotel wouldn’t serve us alcohol in the restaurant, they were happy to send liquor up to the room. First we raided the mini-bar. Then we ordered a stash of top-shelf liquor.

Within moments of being in the suite, teams of crew jocks began flooding the room.
“This party’s a total sausage factory.” Kriffo insisted Flavia call up more girls.
I didn’t want to pass out and wind up billboarded with insults scrawled all over my face, so I switched from rum and Coke to just Coke. I anchored myself to a gold silk sofa. Dozens of people partied with us in that hotel room and all of them spent some small time with me hanging out on that gold barge. A very drunk Fernanda cozied up to me. “Everyone wants to kiss me,” she said. “But I want to kiss you.” Her lips felt as soft as they looked. I kissed her back and out of the corner of my eye, I caught Cakes watching us. Our makeout session was cut short when Flavia pulled Fernanda away. The girls spoke to each other in some urgent mixture of French, Portuguese, and English. In the meantime, Adriano showed up and offered me cocaine. I passed on the drugs and nodded as Adriano told me about his classes at Harvard and various investments and market opportunities. I told him, “You should meet my brother, Riegel.”
The air in the room grew thick with smoke and sweat. People were getting anxious. It was that point in the evening when everyone either wants to have sex or wants to break something. I pushed past a group of kids playing quarters and opened a window. Staring down at the Public Gardens, I could see the pond where tourists rode on the swan boats, but the swan boats were gone, retired for the season. I wondered how Cakes had managed to steal one. He was a strange guy and I couldn’t say that I liked him, but I was sad to hear about his sister. We all carried some private loss with us. This was something I’d learned, something I was trying to deal with. I turned around and saw Cakes standing near me, staring out a different window.
“Hey,” I said. “You know, I’m not that guy. I’m not the guy you think I am.”
He turned to me. “I saw you with Fernanda. You’re totally that guy.”
I’d lost track of Kriffo and Tazewell in the scrum of partygoers but late into the night, both guys came up to me and told me we had to bail. “What’s up?” I asked.
They brought me to the suite’s master bedroom and opened the door. Two figures in white bathrobes were passed out together on a king- sized bed. Fernanda and Flavia would have looked like sleeping beauties except for the fact that someone had drawn a moustache above Flavia’s lip. Someone else had drawn an arrow on Fernanada’s cheek pointing to her mouth and written, “Insert here.”
“Cakes wants to bail. He doesn’t want Adriano thinking he did this.”
I looked at the girls and wondered how they’d gotten into their robes. “How could you?” I asked.
“Trust me,” Tazewell smiled. “We’ve done a lot worse.” I went to the bathroom, ran a washcloth under the water, then returned quickly to the room and tried to wipe off the marker. The girls roused a little but neither woke. The marker faded slightly. It was going to take more than water to clean off the stain. The guys just stood around and watched me.
“Come on,” Kriffo said. “The car’s waiting.”

I tried to find Adriano but he was nowhere to be seen. We left the hotel. I thought Cakes would return to his townhouse on Newbury Street, but he asked to be driven out to his country home in Concord. It was totally out of our way, and I was surprised when Kriffo agreed. Though Cakes gave Gus directions, we mostly drove in silence. Every few minutes someone would say, “What a crazy night,” and the rest of us would murmur our agreement.

We drove by Walden Pond, then turned off the main road and into the woods. Cakes’s house was an imposing white Colonial. I thought we’d just drop him off, but Kriffo and Taze insisted on going for a swim. I didn’t want to be near the water. While Kriffo and Taze went up to Cakes’s room to borrow swimming trunks, I waited down in the kitchen. The house was rustic and homey. Cakes told me to help myself to some food, but the refrigerator only held a carton of milk, a jar of mayonnaise, and several boxes containing glass vials of something that looked like medicine. I closed the refrigerator door and a thin, bald girl appeared before me.

“There’s no food,” she said. “There’s never any food in this house.” Cake’s sister had large bulging eyes and gray, papery skin, but Kriffo was wrong about her being ugly. She looked like a spoiled child’s favorite doll, one that had been carried around and worn out. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’m not a ghost.”

We stood there together in the kitchen for a moment. I introduced myself and she told me her name was Grace. She asked about the regatta and the parties. She said, “You know, the Head of the Charles is a classic WASP mating ritual.” Then she asked whether or not Cakes had hooked up with Fernanda.

I told her he hadn’t but failed to mention that I had.
“He’s crazy about her,” she said. “But Fern’s a phony. All those Le Rosey kids are total Euro-trash. I should have gone and scared everybody away. Ruined their good time.”

Kriffo may have been wrong about Grace being ugly but he was right about her being cool as shit. She did an imitation of Fernanda smoking that was dead-on. I couldn’t stop laughing.

“Do you have a cigarette, for real?” Grace asked. “My brother hides them from me.”
I wished at that moment that I had a cigarette for her. “I’m sorry.”
“Could you tell my brother not to bother me tonight,” she said. “I’m going to sleep.”
I’d spent the day meeting people I’d probably never run into again. Though there was always the small chance I’d bump into Flavia or wind up at another party with Cakes, as Grace glided off to bed, I knew for certain I’d never see her again, not ever. Knowing this should have made me sad, but instead I wanted to run after Grace, to beg her to take me with her. I wasn’t sure that I believed in any sort of afterlife, but it made me jealous to think that soon Grace would be with Cal and Aidan. I wanted to tell her about them both, to be sure she looked out for my friends.

I left the house and went out to the car. Gus was sitting in the front seat reading
The Economist
.
“It’s been a long day,” I said.
“No kidding.”
I’d barely heard Gus speak. He had a deep, gravely voice.
While Kriffo, Taze, and Cakes cannonballed into Walden Pond, I unloaded on Gus. Told him about Tazewell’s meeting with the president of Harvard and the tour of Cakes’s three different homes. I mentioned the stolen swan boat, the Rodin sculpture, the dying twin sister. I catalogued our entire adventure. At the end of it all, I expected Gus to say something that would help me make sense of my day. He cleared his throat and said, “Look, kid, I just drive the car.”

We said good-bye to Cakes and drove back to Bellingham. Kriffo and Taze eventually fell asleep. As Taze snored beside me, I took out the marker I’d been given and considered writing “prick” or “douche” on his forehead. For Cal’s sake, I’d wanted to make amends with Tazewell. But as we approached Bellingham, I thought back to that mountainhiking trip Taze, Cal, and I had taken to Wyoming. I remembered how Tazewell had gone down the wrong trail and gotten us lost, how he ate the last of our food supplies, and left our sleeping bags out in the rain. In my rush to preserve our friendship, I’d forgotten that at the end of that trip, Cal had turned to me, pointed at Tazewell and said, “Never again.”

The next morning, Chester woke me up to play tennis. It was a gray, sunless day, the hazy light reflecting off the green painted court. I was surprised that I didn’t feel hungover. Mostly, I just felt flattened and stiff. I wasn’t much competition for Chester and though I could tell he was a little annoyed, Chester seemed committed to making the game fun, giving me pointers and taking it easy on me. I stupidly resented him for not playing his best. He asked me if I knew Aidan, what I thought of her suicide.

I told him that she was a friend and was surprised when he called her selfish. “That was a shitty thing to do to her parents,” he said. “I mean, I couldn’t do that to my mom no matter how bad things got.”

“Did you know Aidan?” I asked. “Do you know the first thing about her?” I smashed the ball across the court.
“Nice rally,” Chester said. “You play better when you’re pissed off.”
“You know,” I said, “she thought really highly of you.”
“That’s funny.” Chester served into the net. “I don’t remember her making much of an effort to be my friend. Can barely recall her even speaking to me.”
It began to rain lightly. I told Chester how Aidan had admired Chester, had talked about his strength. “She said you had to put up with a lot of hazing.”
“Is that what she called it? Hazing? That’s a bit of a sugarcoat.”
“That’s my word, not hers.”
Chester told me that I kept missing the ball because I kept dropping my head.
“Every time you look down to see the ball, you jerk your arm and miss making contact with the center of your racquet.”
“That’s Tennis 101,” I said.
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t mean you aren’t doing it.”
The rain began to come down in thick sheets. Chester didn’t want to risk playing on a slick court, didn’t want to injure himself, and so we called it quits. We stood under the clubhouse’s awning while Chester adjusted the strings on his racquet, realigning the squares.
I asked Chester, “So, if you weren’t hazed, what did happen?”
Chester zipped his racquet into its leather carrier. He slipped on a red track jacket and said, “You don’t want to know what those guys did to me.”
At that moment I realized that I did want to know. That I wanted to make something right. “Did you ever tell anyone?” I asked.
“I’m not a snitch,” he said.
“Telling the truth doesn’t make you a snitch.” I only half believed this. Hazing had its own self-regulating code, one that required secrecy and compliance but also the tacit understanding that certain lines shouldn’t be crossed.
Chester looked out at the rain. “My dad, he’s built his life around the idea that there’s this thing called justice. I know better. If I told Windsor or Warr, nothing would happen to Tazewell’s crew. But my life would be ruined.”

The tedium of boarding school could be broken down into stages of getting hazed and hazing. We took turns hurting one another not because we were mean or violent but because we were bored. “That’s why they call it boarding school,” Cal used to say. When Cal and I were freshmen at Kensington, we endured such noble traditions as having our bare asses beaten by belt lines of seniors, being forced to pound grain alcohol that may or may not have been laced with piss, having all of our textbooks glued shut, and being directed to sing and act out “I’m a Little Teapot” while wearing nothing but a jockstrap. One night a particularly dickish group of seniors busted in while we slept, held us down, and rolled each of us up into carpets that were then ducttaped shut and spun out onto the fifty-yard line.

Cal and I held different positions on hazing. He preferred pulling pranks like inflating a kiddie pool in the middle of someone’s room and loading it up with Jell-O and rubber ducks. “I like something that’s clever,” Cal explained as he covered the floor and every flat surface of our hall proctor’s suite with Dixie cups filled with india ink. It didn’t take long to set up those cups, but it took hours for our proctor to remove them one by one. I remember all of those little white cups and that dark black ink, how Cal squirted lemon juice over his hands to remove the incriminating stains. He didn’t even want credit for his pranks.

I admired his imagination, but this is where Cal and I differed. The whole time I was trapped out on that football field, suffocating inside that mildewy rug, unable to break free, I kept thinking, “I can’t wait to get even. I can’t wait to do this to someone else.”

At dinner that night, I sat alone at a long table by the window. There were almost no boats left in the harbor and I was oddly relieved to see it empty. I thought about the Shannon, the Formosa, and the Alden, wondering how badly the yachts had been damaged. If they were worth fixing. The only relief I’d had surrounding Aidan’s death was the realization that it had freed me, however briefly, from thinking about Cal. I’d been so overwhelmed by losing her that I hadn’t had time to feel the loss of Cal. This was how people recovered from love affairs. Replacing one lover with another. But here I was replacing one death with another. Maybe Cal’s suicide had prepared me for Aidan’s. It was possible that I would never again allow myself to feel close to anyone. I wondered why I was still alive when the people I’d felt closest to were dead. It was true that I had hurt Cal and destroyed our friendship, but I was trying very hard to make up for the pain I caused. Aidan had been my hope for redemption.

I tore the paper napkins on the table into strips, then twisted the pieces into ropes and then knots. A simple clove hitch, a sheet bend, a figure eight. I created a tattered mess of confetti and was about to leave it all piled up on the table when Leo came by. He had on his white uniform. The front of the apron stained with something that was probably tomato sauce but that smeared red like blood. Made him look like he was a butcher. Leo carried a round tray and was busy piling up the dishes students had abandoned on the tables. I said hello, and in a quiet voice Leo said, “If you’re not busy, I’d like to take you for a drive.”

According to Leo, Powder Point had a split personality. All the homes on the south end of the island were stone mansions with spectacular waterfront views, private docks, and beaches. “You can’t even see the houses from the road. You can only glimpse them if you’re out on the water.” Leo smelled like the dining hall, a not unpleasant mix of grease and garlic that filled up his Chevy Malibu. His cheeks were spotted with rubies of acne. “My mom’s cleaned all the houses on the South Side. She claims in the summertime, the South Siders use these high-frequency ultrasonic gadgets that chase all of the mosquitoes and bats over to the North Side.”

On the North Side, the homes looked like army barracks. They had views of scrub pines. We drove by a neighborhood of ranch houses and Leo pointed to a yellow house with green shutters. “That’s my family’s,” he said. The home was the size of a two-car garage.