The Children(75)
If her relationship with Hart & Crane was through. If her memoir (per NPR, “a secondhand take on the creative life, boiled down into some pretty thin gruel”) was, by this time next year, on its way to being remaindered. If—she touched the idea, brief as a licked finger checking a pan—Hank was coming over tonight to end their engagement. If all these things were going, were gone. What would her life be?
She would survive it, whatever it was. That she knew with empirical certainty. No matter the shock, the heartbreak, the loneliness. No matter how the mind might scrabble for a return to before.
This time would be easier. The loss, if it came, would be a lighter one. She had already lost her life twice. The first time she was eleven and watched it burn. The second, though. The second time Guin’s life as she knew it ended, she was eighteen years old and she never saw it coming.
* * *
It was a Saturday in summer, the city in the despotic grip of a heat wave. The sky was the hard chrome blue of a muscle car, clapped like a lid over Manhattan. Sirens wailed from every direction, everyone knew someone who’d just been mugged.
Guinevere was sick of being inside. Sick of the apartment, the movies, the Met. The gridlocked traffic, all the hoods mobile frying pans. In just over a month she was heading to her freshman year at Vassar—Bitsy’s alma mater—but that didn’t seem real. It was too hot to believe in the future.
When her best friend, Nick, suggested they go to Coney Island, it snapped to life in her mind. Not the rides, but the glittery sidewalks and worn boards that intersected them, leading to a beach strewn with basking bodies and broken glass, then on to the ocean. She pictured it from above, widening stripes of white, mint, green, black. Her mouth watered with the anticipation of salt.
Nick was the gentle son of a classics professor and a landscape architect. Sad-eyed and darkly funny, possessing the interiority of a child. He and Guin had always understood each other. Both observers, both capable of sudden feats of physical fearlessness, both seen by their friends as something akin to collectibles: welcome, if obscure in purpose, with an air of the ornamental.
Within a year Nick would understand these traits—combined with his indie-rocker hair, his knobby quarrier’s hands—to be reliable sexual currency. Today he was sweet, and, like Guinevere, a virgin. He’d been in love with her since they were fourteen.
They rode the Cyclone and the Steeplechase, ate hot dogs, bought candy and pizza and paper fortunes on Surf Avenue. A great change is upon you. Ride the winds of destiny! They kicked the froth at the edge of the ocean, which turned into wading to their knees, which became Guinevere bowling him over, under, both of them salted and electrified.
The sun went down and the twin galaxies of the amusement parks burned against the dark. Dizzily Guin thought of her other self, her Ninth City self, running through a carnival like this one. Following her brother, who in turn followed a little boy turned Hollow, drawn to the jittery bulbs.
Her fake ID got them Icees sluggish with vodka, sweating in plastic cups. They carried them down to the water. After the lights of Luna Park, the ocean was a staggering nothing. Shush and brine and flashes of moon on surf, sodium white. She held a hand up to block the lights of the only ship she could see.
All day—through speed and sugar and sun-hot metal, the famished rising of an ache she hadn’t yet named as lust—she’d been pricked repeatedly by a premonition. That soon her life would break into pieces around her, and everything she counted on would dissolve like a dream.
It was because she was leaving, she told herself, bound for college. Maybe the facts of her past meant she would always be a little paranoid. Overcome at intervals by nostalgia and anxiety, a sense of transformation rushing toward her like a breaker.
She turned to say a version of this to Nick. He was turning too, arms rising, to seize and kiss her with the salty desperation of a doomed mariner.
Her body responded with a speed that loosened her knees. They dropped to the sand. Neither could remember why they hadn’t done this already, why they hadn’t been doing this all along. What a terrible waste of time. How impossible to wait another second.
The sand was warm as a palm and the water licked their feet. A piece of glass trailing a raggedy pennant of Miller gold tore at Guinevere’s hip. Nick tossed it away then leaned to kiss the cut, to press the blood back with his fingertips. Over the sand came the hooting of adult drunks, lecherous, jealous. Guinevere rose onto her knees to salute them with two middle fingers.
They stood, carrying their shoes and a towel they’d found, striped pink and orange. Lust made them drunker, made them weave over the sand, laughing at nothing. Then, on the stolen towel, laid over a softish place guarded by rocks, it made them stare at each other in mute astonishment. They couldn’t know how many people had done exactly this, exactly here.
Even when she’d forgotten the sound of his voice and the precise shape of his features, Guin would recall with perfect clarity the shape of Nick above her, picked out in a haze of light pollution. The sigh he made, as if laying down a heavy load. Gentling himself as he slid inside her, breath gone short, night draped tenderly over his shoulders.
When it was over they clung to each other. They’d felt so grown before, had spent all of high school pretending to an age they weren’t. Now that the last gate to adulthood had fallen they felt very young, bonded like littermates by the strange enormity of what they’d done.