PART I
2003
The birthday girl kicked off her heels and boosted herself onto a barstool to propose a toast. Courtney swayed as she stood up, digging her toes into the cracked vinyl of the cushion, bare arms outstretched. There was no fear in her expression once she’d found her balance—four years of extracurricular opera had taught her how to hold a crowd. Her dress, a loose white sheath, was opalescent in the thin light from the neon signs. It was just after 2:00 a.m. on Memorial Day, the Monday of a three-day weekend. The bar’s AC was either dead or overpowered by a cloud of body heat, and the air inside the long room felt like something you could swim through. I peeled off the top half of my tux as Courtney raised her glass and called for silence. She reminded us that we had nothing to do today, tomorrow, whatever this was. A cheer went up from the crowd, and I whistled through my teeth even though I had the sense, with exams looming, that we were all on borrowed time.
The bar was packed with high school kids in formal wear, most of us from the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, sixty miles southwest of Manhattan. Courtney’s official eighteenth birthday party, dry and closely chaperoned, had been thrown by her parents at the Plaza Hotel. This was the after party: Kildare’s Irish Pub, six blocks south of the Plaza, and not particular about the age of its patrons. We looked less young all dressed up, but we did not look old enough. A knot of regulars had holed up by the bar’s blacked-out front window, nursing Harp and Cutty Sark, keeping to themselves.
I was waiting on an ice water, thinking through the drive back to New Jersey, when I saw a girl sitting alone at a table by a blinking arcade game. She was sketching in a notebook with a pencil, her eyes flitting from the page to the crowd. She discovered something unpleasant in her mouth just then—a strand of hair, a fleck of loose tobacco—and spent the next few seconds trying to extract it, pinching the tip of her tongue, going slightly cross-eyed as she stared down at her fingertips, spitting as gently and politely as she could. She looked like a courtesy invite who had run out of conversation, but that probably had more to do with my feelings than any signals she was giving off. She swept her brown hair back to reveal an earring in her right ear, something long and delicate and gold, but nothing in her left. I left my water on the bar and walked toward her. She saw me coming and snapped her notebook shut.
“Hi,” I said.
A tight smile, nothing else.
“What were you drawing?”
“Boys in jackets.”
“You don’t go to Lawrenceville.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
She was fingering the elastic strap that held her notebook closed, anxious to get back to work. Up close, her earring looked like wind chimes.
“Did you lose the other one?” I asked, tapping my earlobe.
“Yeah,” she said. “Three years ago.”
“How do you know the birthday girl?”
“I’m Courtney’s cousin.”
“I’m in her class. At Lawrenceville. Can I get you a drink?”
“I’m fine,” she said, “but thank you.”
“Where do you go to school?”
“Far away.”
“I’m Tom.”
We shook hands, awkwardly. She didn’t give her name, but she did turn my hand over as I was about to take it back.
“You have nice hands,” she said, as if considering them for her sketch. She caught herself then, realizing she had given me an in, but she was saved by some commotion from across the room. I turned to find a crush of people at the men’s room door.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, pulling her hair back into a ponytail, a hair tie between her teeth. “You’ll have to go see.”
I nodded and smiled, dismissed. But just before I’d turned completely, she looked up from her book and smiled back, thanking me, I guessed, for leaving right on cue.
By the time I shouldered through the crowd, two boys were struggling through the narrow door, propping up a girl who had been sick before she passed out in the stall. A freshman from some other boarding school, she had been throwing herself at someone from my class at Lawrenceville all night. I had seen her in the men’s room at the Plaza, where a plastic surgeon’s son was holding court with a film canister of Molly, powdered and ostensibly pure Ecstasy, shipped in from Oahu, which he was doling out with the wet end of his little finger. I saw the girl again, later, standing on the dance floor, running her bottom lip between her teeth so that it seemed to come out fuller every time. Then she was making out with my classmate in a back corner of Kildare’s, and now she was too far gone to stand.
A bartender hopped the bar. He hoisted the girl into his arms, shaking his head at her, at all of us. His forearms were wiry under blurred tattoos as she squirmed against him.
“She with you?” the bartender asked one of the boys, who shook his head. “Who’s she with?” he called out over the heads of the people who were inching backward, distancing themselves.
The answer to his question was standing by the bar: Clare Savage, tall, lean, nationally ranked in squash, and almost as blond as the very blond girl. A senior at Lawrenceville, like me. Our relationship had been mostly transactional; he smoked more pot than you might think to look at him, and I had been his regular supplier. Clare and I had both been day students at Lawrenceville, but there was a rumor that he had just become a boarder and moved into a dorm, which was unheard of this late in the year. I knew more about his father, a famous money manager, than I did about Clare, who was inching backward now, along with everyone else.
“She’s with him,” I said, pointing. “Clare, give this guy a hand?”
“Yeah, sure,” Clare said, looking anything but sure as he took stock of all the eyes trained on him.
“She your date?” the bartender asked.
“I guess so,” Clare said.
“Good for you.”
He dumped the girl on Clare, who held out his arms to catch her, and eased her onto her feet with an arm around her back.
“What should I do with her?” Clare asked.
“Get her the fuck out of my bar, for starters.”
The bartender opened the door and jerked his head toward the traffic on Third Avenue. Clare stared at him in disbelief, unused to taking orders from the help. As the bartender turned his back, I recalled my mother telling me to look out for a particularly wasted woman at a party we were catering to make sure that whoever took her home seemed like a Good Samaritan and not a sex offender. I had wanted to stick Clare with this mess, but I had overstepped, which made the girl my problem too. Clare was trying to coax and carry her through the door when I came up behind him.
“Here,” I said, “put your arm under hers, like this. I’ve got her. Ready?”
She was limp but light. We eased her down onto the warm sidewalk outside and propped her up against Kildare’s. Her eyes fell open and she seemed to register Clare’s face before she slipped away again.
“She’ll be fine,” I said. “Does she live in the city?”
“She lives in Jersey. In Far Hills, I think. Fuck, I barely know this girl. How did she get like this?”
“Molly,” I said.
“Molly McPherson?”
“The other Molly. Molly from Hawaii.”
“Oh, right,” Clare said. “Jesus. What do we do now?”
“Just wait here. My car’s down the street. Far Hills is pretty close.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. Stay put.”
I wasn’t sure. I checked my watch as I drove west on Forty-third Street and wondered if I should forget this, hit the road, and tell Clare when I saw him back at school that something had come up. It was almost 3:00 a.m., and I had a strong urge to take the Holland Tunnel and fly over the marshland on the southbound turnpike with the wind beating through my open windows. I kept looking at my hands on the steering wheel, thinking about what the girl in Kildare’s had said. The last knuckle on my right ring finger was bent and fat, the result of a wipeout on a head-high wave, a collision with a sandbar. My hands had always looked weak to me. I hit a yellow light on Lexington, which made for an easy left in the direction of the bar.
Clare was squatting next to his new friend when I pulled up to the curb. He gave me a wave and then turned his attention to the girl, who had come to again while I was gone. My hazard lights turned her pale skin orange as Clare helped her into the backseat of my Explorer where she stretched out and closed her eyes. He had rescued her white leather clutch somehow, and we found her address on the New Jersey learner’s permit folded up inside. Her full name was Paige Alexandra Baldwin; she lived in Ridgewood, not Far Hills. I drove south and took Forty-second to the West Side.
“Thanks for doing this,” Clare said. “I’d be fucked if you had taken off.”
That was generous, and I wondered why he wasn’t pissed at me for calling him out back at the bar. He seemed uncomfortable and unsure of himself in a way I hadn’t seen at Lawrenceville. Something else was on his mind. We were in the Lincoln Tunnel, the reflections of the overhead lights sliding rhythmically across the finish of the hood, when Clare reclined his seat a few degrees and tossed his cummerbund onto the dashboard. Make yourself at home, I thought. He was staring up at the tile ceiling, his eyes skipping slightly in their sockets, fixing on each light for a split second as it passed.
“How do you know her?” I asked.
“I don’t. I wasn’t kidding about that. She walked up to me at the Plaza and asked me for a cigarette.”
No approach required. Good for him.
We stopped for gas outside Fort Lee. In the Speedy Mart, I took a map off a rack and spread it out to find her street. Clare was leaning on the counter, his black and white clothes framed by boxes of candy, packs of cigarettes, rolls of scratch-off Lotto tickets, his blond hair already bleached by the sun. He had draped his jacket over Paige, and I could see now that he was all long muscle after years of pulling in sails hand over hand and countless hours on the squash court. A body built in recreation. The cashier was ringing up the gas and a bag of Skittles that Clare had plucked from the candy rack. I was trying to remember who had told me that a sweet tooth is a sign of weakness.
“You smoke, right?” he called to me. “Camel Lights?”
I nodded.
“And a carton of Camel Lights, please,” he said to the cashier.
The cashier scrutinized his license, and Clare tossed me the carton, which I caught with the open map.
“Thanks,” I said. “You didn’t have to do that. Here’s her street. I’m not that good with maps.”
Clare tore into the Skittles with his teeth and tipped the bag into his mouth, chewing slowly as he scanned the tangle of rivers and roads. He looked up at me and nodded to say that he could get us there.
As we pulled out of the gas station, I thought back to the last time Clare and I had occupied the front seat of a car. Most of the people I sold to at Lawrenceville seemed to get off on the ritual buys, the overly clandestine meetings, the inane questions about quality and provenance. And most of them understood that waiting was part of the game. But then one day I showed up an hour late to meet Clare, who stared straight ahead when I collapsed into the passenger seat of his black Saab, parked behind the pizza joint across the street from campus. I apologized and asked how he was doing.
“What took so long?” he said.
I had been glancing at my watch so often that I could have answered with the precision of a ship’s log: eleven minutes on the road from Lawrenceville to the brick blocks of low-income housing behind Mercer Mall once I realized that I was a quarter ounce short. This was in the two days between winter trimester finals and Christmas break, when demand always outstripped supply. I spent four minutes ringing the buzzer of number 147 before the door buzzed back and I shot across the living room, past Eduardo’s grandmother, installed like a gargoyle at one end of the sofa, a bath towel draped over her knees as a blanket. Fourteen minutes up in Eduardo’s room after he held up an Xbox controller in greeting and insisted that I play some Grand Theft Auto III with him, because I only called him in emergencies and he knew that I was scrambling. Twenty minutes back to campus, the traffic thickening as cars coursed out of the office parks that lined Route 1. I had been shuttling between two worlds, which takes time. I let Clare’s question hang between us, overcharged him, and went home.
A winding county road ran past darkened strip malls and sprawling public schools once we were off the highway. Clare was staring out at nothing, giving me occasional directions in a voice that sounded either bored or tired.
“You’re not worried about this?” I asked him. “You don’t think they’ll be pissed?”
Clare shook his head. He was the clean-cut kid you’d want to bring your daughter home if she got sick in the city. There was nothing for him to be afraid of. I turned to look at Paige, hoping for additional assurances, but Paige had left the building.
“Take the next left,” Clare said. “No, wait, it’s this one. Turn here.”
A new development, with massive houses stacked on both sides of an unlined street. The first one we passed looked like an Italian villa with adolescent trees scattered across the lawn. The granite curbs that lined the road were high and clean.
“What should we tell these people?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Clare said. “We can’t leave her on the lawn, though. This is it. This one on the right.”
The house had a soaring brick façade. I stepped out of the car while Clare tucked in his shirt and smoothed his hair. His movements were sharper now, but he seemed relaxed and purposeful as he rolled his sleeves back down his forearms and dug through his pockets for a pair of silver cuff links. I stared up at the floodlights trained on us as we walked the flagstone path to the front door. Gnats formed a haze around the fixtures, swarming, crashing into the glass. Clare rang the bell.
A flash of light from an upstairs window, and then a long pause broken by a deadbolt’s heavy click, and the scream of new hinges as the door swung open. The man behind it wore pleated suit pants, a wrinkled undershirt, and salt-stained boat shoes that seemed to be on the verge of exploding as the weight of his body strained the stitching and squashed the rubber soles against the marble floor. He looked wide awake, ready to take on both of us, if that was what it came to. This was exactly what I had been afraid of.
“Can I help you?” he asked, one hand on the doorknob, the other half clenched at his side.
“Hi, Mr. Baldwin,” Clare said. “Clare Savage. Sorry to wake you up like this, but Paige got a little sick at this thing in the city and we wanted to make sure she got home.”
“It’s Mr. Quinn, actually. I’m her stepdad.” Then: “Clare Savage? Are you Michael’s son?”
There was a ripple in Clare’s clothes as his entire body tensed. The shock of Mr. Quinn’s recognition reminded me of the way lightning was described in my sixth-grade science textbook: a bright upstroke that changes the temperature around it.
“Tom Alison,” I said, offering my hand, which Mr. Quinn shook without looking at me.
“Where’s Paige?” he asked, coming back into himself, remembering his duties as a guardian. “In the car?”
“In the back,” I said. “Asleep.”
“You drove?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, at least you made it. Let’s get her inside.”
I hung back as we headed for my car, trying to get Clare’s attention and to understand why this man was interested in anything besides his semiconscious stepdaughter. Mr. Quinn took Paige in his arms and crossed the lawn with her head against his chest, one high-heeled shoe swinging from her foot by the strap across her toes. Paige stirred and her stepfather whispered something to her as he turned and paused for me to get the door. He raised a finger on the hand under her knees, and mouthed “wait here” before he climbed the stairs.
“Clare,” I said, when Mr. Quinn was out of earshot.
Clare was watching the place where he had disappeared.
“Hey, do you two know each other?”
“Do you know who he is?” Clare asked.
“He’s her stepdad. He said that.”
“We have to leave.”
Clare took a step toward the door, just as Mr. Quinn appeared on the landing above us.
“I have beds for you two,” he said, as he descended. “I appreciate you bringing her home, but I don’t want you back on the road tonight. Sleep it off, take off in the morning. Can I get you some water?”
I looked at Clare, whose eyes were flitting between my face and the door as if he were contemplating a twenty-five-yard dash for the car.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“OK,” Mr. Quinn said, as he shot the deadbolt back into place. “Follow me.”
I glanced over my shoulder to make sure Clare was still with us as we started up the stairs. Our room for the evening was halfway down the hall. Mr. Quinn waved us inside.
“You boys need anything else?”
“Thanks,” I said. “We’re good.”
He said goodnight and closed the door. There were two beds against the far wall, both covered in madras pillows. Clare sat down on a window seat as if someone had kicked out his knees.
“Clare, what the fuck is going on?”
Clare stood up and cased the room, looking for a way out. It was a sheer drop from all the windows, and what might have been another exit led only to an empty closet. There was a crisp knock on the thinnest panel of the door.
“Come in,” I said.
Mr. Quinn did not come in. He stood in the hall, and shook a big watch down his wrist.
“Let’s talk,” he said to Clare.
Clare followed him down the hallway and the stairs. Suddenly I could hear them again, and I realized that they were on the deck behind the house, just below the guest room. I slid the window open very gently so that the only thing between us was a screen. Clare sat on the edge of a lounge chair facing the yard, Mr. Quinn in a rocker beside him.
“He left Lehman way before I did,” Mr. Quinn was saying. “We know a lot of the same people, which is how I heard.”
Clare said nothing. Mr. Quinn dug into his pocket, produced a soft pack of Marlboro Lights, and shook one loose. He offered it to Clare, who shook his head.
“You doing OK?” he asked, his teeth clamped down on the filter. “You’re not going to get sick on me, right?”
“I’m fine,” Clare said.
“Look, I’m sorry for what your family’s going through. I wasn’t trying to embarrass you. You look a hell of a lot like your dad.”
“I know,” Clare said.
A door opened down the hall, and I planted my ass on the bed, pretending to untie my shoe. Someone took the stairs very slowly, listening, assessing. I went back to the window in time to hear Mr. Quinn say: “Who knows how these things start. It’s funny, we used to give him shit about that French passport he got through your mom. I’m sure he’s having the last laugh, wherever he is. So where are you—”
A door opened behind them, and Mr. Quinn flicked his cigarette into the yard as Paige’s mother stepped onto the deck, cinching her robe around her body.
“Alan, who’s in the guest room? Do you know what time it is? What the hell is going on?”
“Go back to bed,” Mr. Quinn said. “Everything’s fine. You remember Clare Savage, Michael’s son. Paige got sick in New York and he brought her home. Him and his friend. They’re spending the night.”
Mrs. Baldwin stared at Clare in naked shock, and then looked back at her husband.
“It’s OK,” Mr. Quinn said to her. “We’re talking. I’ll be up soon.”
“Is Paige all right? What happened?”
“She got a little carried away. She’s fine. She told me she left without saying her good-byes when I put her to bed. Go back to sleep, I’ll be right up.”
“Sorry, hi,” Mrs. Baldwin said to Clare, offering her hand. “Nice to see you. Thank you for bringing Paige home.” She turned back to her husband. “It’s four o’clock in the morning,” she said, and walked away.
“She’s a handful,” Mr. Quinn said, lighting another cigarette. “Paige, not Lydia. She’s a sweetheart when she wants to be, but you have to watch her every minute. How do you two know each other?”
“We don’t,” Clare said. “I just met her tonight.”
“Hell of a first date. You’re a senior, right? Following your dad to Yale?”
“I was on the wait list, but he managed some of their endowment. That probably won’t help.”
Mr. Quinn took a long breath.
“You’ll be fine, OK? You’re what, seventeen? Eighteen? I know this looks like the end of everything, but it’s not. Not even for your dad. Look, I’ve got a car coming in two hours, but tell Michael I say hello if you talk to him.”
“I will,” Clare said, as Mr. Quinn stood up.
I kicked off my shoes and pulled my shirt over my head while someone shut the door to the deck. When Clare came in, he stood in the middle of the room in the darkness before he undressed. I was in bed by then, facing the wall, feigning sleep. Clare shut the window and pulled back the sheets. They were soft and clean, and I imagined I’d have all kinds of pleasant dreams between them, but nothing came after I drifted off.
It was bright as hell when I woke up, a hot rectangle of sunlight draped over my legs. Clare was sitting on the bed across from mine, already dressed.
“Hey,” he said. “You’re up.”
I wondered how long he’d been awake, trapped up here in the air-conditioning, afraid to show his face downstairs. The front door slammed, an engine started in the driveway. Clare walked to the window and stared out at the yard while I stepped into my pants and pulled on my jacket. This was the most mileage I’d ever gotten out of a tuxedo rental. Clare’s tux looked like something he owned.
Judging by the boxes and the sparseness of the built-in bookshelves, the Quinn-Baldwin family hadn’t lived here long. We walked softly on the ground floor, through the entryway and empty dining room, unsure what to expect. I had worked parties at dozens of new houses like this one with grandiose exteriors borrowed from another period and layouts with no imagination brought to bear, just a series of boxes to move through. A breakfast spread was laid out on the marble island in the kitchen. Between a plate of pastries and a bowl of sliced fruit was a note from Mrs. Baldwin informing us that she was at the gym. The coffee she had made was bitter, burnt.
“Let’s go before they get back,” Clare said.
“Relax,” I said. “I’m starving.”
I wondered if Mrs. Baldwin had dragged Paige to the gym as punishment, which is what my mother would have done. Clare kept an eye on the front door and the foot of the stairs while I scarfed down some honeydew balls and half a corn muffin.
“Ready?” he asked as I brushed crumbs off my lapels.
We cut across the lawn, making for my car. The electronic lock chirped over the distant whine of a mower.
“So how long before you call her?” I asked as I backed down the driveway.
“Ha ha.”
“Look,” I said, punching the cigarette lighter into the dash and smacking a fresh pack of Camel Lights against my hand. “Even her stepdad says she’s a full-time job. Sometimes the fucking you’re getting ain’t worth the fucking you’re getting, as the saying goes.”
“I’ve never heard that before,” Clare said, laughing.
I’d never said that before; it was something that my mother’s produce supplier used to say about sleeping with his ex-wife.
“So you heard us talking,” Clare said.
“The window was open.”
“The window was open, or you opened the window?”
“The window was open,” I said. “Take it easy. You had no idea who her stepdad was?”
Clare shook his head and said: “Small world.”
No, I thought, it’s not. But after four years at Lawrenceville, I was used to everybody in this circle knowing everybody else.
“Are you on campus for the weekend?” I asked. “I heard you’re a boarder now.”
“I switched over a week ago. That’s when my parents left. They gave me Harrison’s room like two hours after they expelled him. The deans don’t really know what to do with me.”
The new music building was named for Clare’s mother; I was pretty sure the deans would figure something out, but I didn’t know what to do with him either. I had written him off after our Christmas break encounter, and now we were rolling through the suburbs of New Jersey on a sunny Monday morning with nowhere to be. Tuesday was our senior skip day, twenty-four hours of school-sanctioned rebellion. I searched for some tactful way to ask Clare how his father had gone from a man listed under “Angels” in Princeton symphony programs to a man on the run. Did Clare try to reconcile those versions of his father, or did this mess make him realize that he didn’t really know the man at all? We probably had that in common. I didn’t know three things about my dad.
My mother had a catering company in downtown Princeton. The first floor of our house held a commercial kitchen and a market that sold breakfast and coffee and ready-made meals. One night in January, a woman came in, bought dinner, and then asked for our trash, the empty packaging from the ingredients, to leave on the counter of her kitchen as if she had made the meal herself. She offered to pay for it. My mother told her that the garbage was out at the curb, but she was welcome to dig through it at no extra charge. I had been studying in a corner of the kitchen, which is what I had planned to do before Clare and I got sidetracked. My mother had a hard-ass catering captain she brought in for big jobs, and watching Clare drum his fingers on my dashboard reminded me of a line he used on lazy staff. “You know what you look like?” he would say, walking up on someone’s third cigarette break. “You look like my money just standing around.” It was actually the client’s money, but people felt like they owed him something when they heard that, which got them back to work. You know what you look like? I thought, glancing sideways at Clare. You look like my AP econ score going down. Clare was staring out the window at a man and a boy who were pushing a mower into the bed of a dirty red pickup, a striped and shining lawn behind them. The lighter popped out of the dash and I passed it to Clare, who lit his cigarette and dug his buzzing phone out of his pocket. I glanced at the caller ID, which read: UNKNOWN. His father calling from some undisclosed location to check in?
“Hello? Yeah, hang on. He’s right here. It’s for you,” Clare said, handing me the phone.
“What?”
“Some girl,” he mouthed.
“This is Tom.”
“Hi. It’s Kelsey. We met last night before you ran out. I was drawing.”
“Right,” I said, trying to sound calm. “I remember you.”
“Good thing you two are still together. Everyone had this
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