February gave on to March. Now that wrestling season had concluded, and the terms of my agreement with Dad had been met, I was auditioning again. That month, I booked a Pop Rocks radio spot (There’s bang to the bite was my line), which was followed by an on-camera Lipton Cup-a-Soup commercial. The shoot required I miss a full day of school. It had five actors in it: me and two older guys, Ricky Febliss and Jeff Riddell. Also Rusty Feinberg, a kid I’d been seeing at auditions since I was ten. When we boarded the van at five a.m. and headed to the shoot, the actress playing our mother, Diane, was already seated in back, smelling fresh and lovely but entirely absent makeup. “Diane,” said Ricky in greeting; “Diane,” echoed Jeff, mocking Ricky.
“Oh,” she said, “you two palookas.”
They talked and laughed during the entire hour-long ride, heckling one another about their recent evening out at Studio 54.
“It’s nothing but a bunch of private school kids,” said Ricky.
“Which is just how I like it,” said Jeff.
“You are both so bad,” Diane kept saying to them.
Because of the way they talked—their level of snark and jaded know-how—Ricky and Jeff seemed like grown-ups. But once we were in costume—Diane donning her wig and her mom sweater and slacks, with her lashes added and makeup done, and Ricky in his football jersey and Jeff with the sweatbands on his head and wrists—it was as if Diane had aged ten years and Jeff and Ricky were suddenly younger than Rusty and me. This happened regularly on jobs like this. It got to the point where it seemed as if more than lighting or makeup or costuming, age itself was something you inhabited long enough to get the take, until you took it off and put an adult face back on.
We shot the commercial on location, at a house in Ramsey, New Jersey. The four of us were instructed to play basketball—there was a hoop and backboard above the garage—while Rusty’s mom made lunch. We could only be seen through the kitchen window in the shot, and we were off mic, so Jeff and Ricky seized the opportunity to say the nastiest things they could to Rusty and me, trying to crack us up during takes. “I’m gonna fuck you in the ass, Griffin,” Jeff hissed while I drove to the basket, smashing his crotch into my butt as he guarded me. During the next take, he said, “I’m gonna give Rusty a Dirty Sanchez.” Rusty pulled up and drained another shot. He passed to Ricky, who checked back to him.
“What’s a Dirty Sanchez?” he asked as he dribbled.
Ricky feigned surprise, staggering backward and clutching his chest. He said to Jeff, “Let’s get Mikey to try it.”
“Yeah,” Jeff said. “He won’t eat it. He hates everything.”
From the kitchen window, Diane called us in. “Boys, lunch is ready!”
Jeff waved to her. “We’ll eat your pussy in a second, Mrs. Bancroft.” Then, leaning in conspiratorially to Rusty, said, “Your mom gives the best blow jobs.”
In the commercial’s main scene, the three of us burst into the kitchen, our cheeks rosy with the cold. Rusty is already seated at the table. Jeff’s line was “I’m starving.” Then Ricky said, “What smells so good?” And Rusty’s mom replied, “Lipton Cup-a-Soup.” And I looked at Rusty in amazement, since he was already drinking the last drops from his mug. “Hey,” I said, “Harley’s already finished!” I must’ve said the line a hundred times. After each take, the director removed his headphones to consult with the four suits seated in the row of canvas chairs behind him. Then he’d turn to us and correct our delivery: “Up more” or “Not so bright”; “Heavy on the ‘good’ ” or “Easy on the ‘so’ ”; or “It’s starving, not stahvin’.” When they shot close-ups of the soup, which were in four coffee mugs and semicircled by all the boxes of flavors, the set designer used a dropper to add some chemicals to the broth that smelled like ammonia and made the soup produce a wisp of steam. It was all very boring and isolating, to be somewhere for an entire day taking orders but never really talking to anyone, and at the shoot’s conclusion I remember catching a glimpse of Diane, seated before the makeup artist’s mirror. After they’d removed her wig and the clips from her hair, her lashes and rouge, her face possessed the unique tabula rasa quality certain women are either gifted with or cursed by—they are so entirely transfigured by eyeshadow and eyeliner, by lipstick and blush, they could rob a bank in one face and disappear into obscurity in the other. She sat there blankly and buffed clean, drinking a cup of coffee, and perused the newspaper, her tired eyes enlarged by a set of reading glasses, and my thoughts turned to Naomi, since it was by now the afternoon, when we’d normally meet, and I wondered if she was driving home from work right now. And I remember being strangely certain she was, and I thought that if I were to see her, I would tell her about how, amid so much chatter, my overwhelming feeling was one of remoteness, and she would have a better word for the sentiment. Or at least help me find one. Which is to say that I missed her.
Dad liked to check in with me after these workdays. “How’d it go?” he asked at dinner. When I said fine, he said, “Well, tell me about it.” I said there was nothing to tell. “What was your line?” he asked, and I repeated it like I’d been hypnotized. “Is that how you said it?” he said, a bit ticked. “I said it,” I said, “times a million.” My lack of enthusiasm annoyed him. “That goes national and you’ll be singing another tune.” When I told him, “It’s not like I see a dime of it,” he bristled. “You do every day you walk into that fancy school of yours.” When I told him I wanted to go to wrestling camp over the summer, he said, “It depends on your shooting schedule.” When I stared him down and then asked what he was talking about, he said, “They’re renewing your contract for The Nuclear Family.” When I said I hadn’t signed anything yet he said, “That’s correct.” When I asked if I had to sign the contract, he said, “We’ll talk about it.” When I asked, “When?” the phone rang, as if on cue. “That’s probably the agency,” Dad said, bunching his napkin and tossing it on the table, and even though he was only half finished with his food, he hurried to his bedroom to answer the call. And once again I had no leverage.
Oren, eyeing his departure, turned to Mom and said, “I have a question.”
She eyeballed him back but did not speak.
“Does Griffin pay my tuition?”
“No,” she said. “Your father does.”
Oren was visibly relieved at this. “Does Griffin pay your tuition?”
“I pay for mine with the money I make. And for the record, Griffin only pays a portion of his tuition.”
“Like a fixed percentage?”
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“Circumstances.”
“So basically what sort of year Dad is having.”
“Plus how much we put away for Griffin’s college.”
“What about my college?”
Mom took a sip of wine, nodded, and then placed her glass back on the table and refilled it. “We have extra time to save for yours because you’re younger.”
“But nothing’s in the kitty yet.”
“We’re doing the best we can,” Mom said.
Oren whistled.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Mom asked.
“That I’m definitely getting a job this summer,” Oren said.
“Maybe you should start acting,” I said. I was half needling. I also thought it would be fun if we went on go-sees together.
“Maybe I’d like to have some dignity,” Oren said.
“Money can’t buy you that,” Mom said to him.
“It can help.”
“I’m not getting into this with you.”
“We can’t even afford to go on a vacation,” Oren said.
“What is this new obsession of yours with a vacation?” Mom asked.
“I want to come back from break with a tan. Like the other kids. I want to go on a trip, for Chrissakes.”
“I’ll pay for vacation,” I said. “And wrestling camp too.”
Oren brightened. “Yes,” he said to me. To Mom: “Yes, let’s live a little.”
“You’re not old enough to make that decision,” Mom said to me.
“But he’s old enough to work!” Oren replied.
“He’s still a minor, and we decide how the money is spent.”
“What sort of slave-labor shit is this?” my brother said.
“Oren, your language.”
“When do I get to decide what to do with my money?” I asked.
“When you’re eighteen.”
“What if it’s gone by then?” Oren said.
“It won’t be,” she said to him; then to me, since I was looking at her with alarm: “Just like there’ll be money saved for your college. And since you’re looking for a job,” she added, turning back to Oren and getting up from the table, “you can do the dishes.”
After Mom left, Oren shook his head and sat brooding for a time. “You’re going about this wrong,” he said finally.
“How’s that?”
“You want to get out of show business, you need to go all in.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Get rich, retard. Then buy your way out.”
Did I really miss Naomi? I wondered. Later that evening, I kept thinking about how I’d describe to her other random things I’d noticed during the shoot. That afternoon, in between takes, one of the executives had said to Diane, so that the entire cast and crew could hear, “I think we made a mistake casting a woman as beautiful as you.” To which Diane—her back was to him and she was facing me—said, “Is that right, Gerald?” To which Gerald replied, “I think you’re hotter than the soup.” Diane raised an eyebrow at me and said, “Better not take a sip then, you might burn your lips.” To which Gerald replied, “Not if I blow on it first.” And while the crew and the other execs chuckled, Diane looked at me with an expression of such slit-eyed exhaustion and embarrassment, I swore I’d never speak to a woman like that in my life. And now, when I recall her tiny privacy with me, her bid for corroboration, an effort at a sort of education—woman to young man—I am reminded that someone is always eyeing someone eyeing someone who isn’t eyeing them.
And what about love? One night, when I emerged from my room, I spied Dad just back from rehearsal—they’d just started doing read-throughs of the musical’s book—his coat still on but unbuttoned at the throat. He seemed electrically happy, enlarged somehow, and he greeted my mother at the dining table with an expression that was decidedly hungry. She sat facing the mirrored wall, and he reached around her chairback to cup one of her breasts, which froze me, and then bent to kiss her full on the mouth—another thing I’d never seen in my life. She raised both her arms and looped them around his neck. When their lips parted, she grabbed his scruff in her fist and pulled his cheek to hers and held it there. She looked at him in the mirror’s reflection, and he looked at her, and then Mom spotted me, reflected too, and her expression did not change. I felt that she’d rent some sort of veil to reveal her true face. It was suddenly clear to me that I knew her as my mother but not as a woman, a distinction I’d never previously thought to make; and that in our family’s food chain, Dad was her apex and Oren and I were at the bottom.
My inability to tell Elliott about this, or any of these things—he was dozing now as I sat across from him in his office—was, I suddenly felt acutely, the very failure of mine that put him to sleep.
“It’s like I’m a mute!” I said, which startled him awake.
“Whoosis?” Elliott said, and grabbed his chair’s arms.
“Like I see but I can’t say.”
He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. He shook his head so hard his lips flapped. “Let’s take a walk,” he said, and, donning our heavy coats, we left his office.
As we crossed the street toward Gramercy Park, he swung his arms in front of him and clapped his gloved hands several times. We walked up to the park’s gate, and Elliott rummaged in his overcoat’s pocket. “The most coveted key in New York,” he said, holding it up for me to behold, and then opened the lock. He pulled the gate shut behind him, and we entered the tiny one-block-by-one-block rectangular space. Snow crunched under our feet as we cut through its path. Pigeons snapped their wings and rose like ash. On the fence’s perimeter, the bundled pedestrians were smokestacks, were steam engines.
“You know who that is?” Elliott said, and thumbed at the statue to his right. I didn’t answer. “Edwin Booth.” When I shrugged, he explained: “The actor. He founded the Players club. Right there”—Elliott pointed at the mansion across the street: wrought-iron guarding the balconies, gas lanterns flickering, a purple flag limp in the cold. “Older brother of John Wilkes Booth, who…” he said, and waited.
“Assassinated Abraham Lincoln?”
“Correct. Now, Edwin Booth, like his father before him and both his brothers, was an actor. I read an article about the family a few days ago. They hated each other, by the way.”
“Who?”
“The brothers did. Well, John Wilkes hated Edwin. Their father died when John was thirteen but he was clearly haunted by him. Wanted their dead dad’s love so bad he tore himself up fighting for it—Junius Brutus Booth was the father’s name. They don’t make names like that anymore! If your father had a name like that, it would give you an inferiority complex too. Anyway, he desperately wants Pop’s approval, so what does he do?”
“Assassinates Abraham Lincoln?”
Elliott shook his head. “He goes into the family business. Brother Edwin’s already made a reputation for himself as Hamlet, by the way. Becomes the ne plus ultra of the Prince of Denmark. You know what that means?”
“The best?”
“Better than that. The ultimate.”
“Like Brando in Streetcar.”
“Exactly. Now, John, he’s considered the handsomest man in America. But he isn’t getting anywhere near the cachet as his big brother. You know what cachet is?”
“Is it French for money?”
“It’s prestige. As in admiration. So what’s his solution to this dilemma, you think?”
“He assassinates Abraham Lincoln?”
“He defines himself over against his brother. Edwin’s a great Shakespearean actor, John Wilkes becomes a naturalist. Brother won’t take sides in the war, John Wilkes allies himself with the Confederates. Brother wants to abolish slavery, John Wilkes goes all in for antimiscegenation.”
“What’s antimiscegenation?”
Elliott stopped and smiled. He placed one hand on my shoulder and, with the other, patted my chest in approval. Then he took my elbow and we continued to walk. “It means he was against interracial marriage.”
“Do you agree with that?”
Elliott shrugged. “If my daughter were to bring home a Black guy, I’d prefer it were Sidney Poitier, but to each his own. My point: John Wilkes is entangled, understand? He sees one path to love blocked and does the opposite. But there’s no freedom in doing the opposite, okay, because always doing the opposite is automatic. It binds you to the person you’re trying to break away from. It intertwines you with the very thing you profess you don’t want to be. And John Wilkes knows this. On some precognitive level, he realizes he’ll never out-fame his brother and win his father’s approval, that his path to eros is obstructed.”
“What’s eros?”
“Love,” Elliott said. “The life force. The engine of our best actions.” He smiled because I was smiling as he waxed poetic, and this encouraged him to be hammy. “The flower opening its petals to the sun.”
“Ah,” I said.
“So what’s John Wilkes’s solution to this predicament?”
“He assassinates Abraham Lincoln!”
Elliott gravely shook his head. “That’s just the means. He does what his brother couldn’t. He enters history.”
Elliott had a bit of the actor in him too. Most times, I didn’t mind.
“Who had the better life?” Elliott asked me. We had exited the park by now and began looping around its fence back to the office. “Edwin plays Hamlet all over the world. Manages the Winter Garden Theatre. Has a daughter by his first wife. Names her Edwina, by the way. How’s that for narcissism?”
“So who had the better life?” I asked.
Elliott shrugged. “It’s pretty obvious, but here’s my point. Back in the office you said you felt like you were speechless. That you had things you saw but struggled to communicate. Those are the two most heartfelt things you’ve ever shared with me. So maybe that’s what you’ve been put on the earth for. To come up with a language for your life.”
Admittedly, I had no idea what Elliott meant. Was finding a language for my life like a job? So far as I could tell, I had three of those. Fall through spring, I was a student, which I figured was just a way for me to do my real job, wrestling. But since I was spending the summer playing Peter Proton, and this funded the other two, maybe all of them were under the umbrella of “actor.” I did have hobbies. Since third grade I’d drawn superheroes. I’d collected comics for as long as I could remember, and I’d been working on my own comic book for nearly three years that was more than a hundred paneled pages long, contained in a binder that sat on my desk, one I sometimes caught Oren leafing through with an expression between envy and amazement. Mom called it my “magnum opus.” That Sunday, at a party at Elliott and Lynn’s house, standing before the buffet with Al Moretti and his new boyfriend, Tony, he asked me, while he loaded his plate with smoked fish and bagels and cold cuts, “So, Griffin, what do you want to be when you grow up? You gonna become a famous actor and make millions?”
“I want to be an artist for Marvel Comics,” I said.
Al frowned. “You’ll get over that,” he said.
Oren came up to me, miffed. “Sam Shah said he’d bring his Ferrari, but it doesn’t look like he’s coming.”
“When’d you talk to Sam Shah?”
“I call him for advice sometimes about my career.”
“What career?”
“Precisely,” Oren said. He had made himself the most beautiful bagel: the lox draped over vegetable cream cheese with a tomato and red onion, these topped with capers and layered with sprigs of dill. “That guy is super smart,” Oren continued, and took a bite. “He was telling me that the greatest inventors and entrepreneurs, like Thomas Edison and Michelangelo, they recognize a thing before it exists and then make what people didn’t know they wanted.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Walkmans,” Oren said, and then shrugged. “Parachutes.”
“Who invented the parachute?”
“Michelangelo, idiot.”
“That sounds like something Elliott would say.”
“Actually, I ran that by Elliott last week. He told me the American Indians have a name for this: a ‘vision quest.’ And he said that imagination is the true form of time travel. Which makes sense, when you think about it. That you dream up something in the present and it lives in the future until you build it. Which was also the first time Elliott and I ever really talked about anything worth a shit.”
“I’m glad Elliott has more of your cachet.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Approval, idiot.”
“Yeah, well, Elliott also said that if I didn’t bring up my grades, the only job I’d be qualified for would be one replaced by androids.”
“Do androids actually exist?”
“Not yet, but according to Sam Shah, the future’s in automation. Also free trade.”
“What’s free trade?”
Oren held up his bagel. “Cheaper Nova.”
I felt a twinge of disappointment that I wouldn’t be seeing Naomi, but it was eclipsed by a feeling of relief that she wasn’t coming, which was replaced by the same feeling I’d felt during the commercial, being around all those people and invisible at the same time. It was so intense I wanted to hug Oren when he checked his watch and said, “Let’s go to Elliott’s bedroom and watch In Search Of.” Because he was my brother, he was always there; ever since the fire, he was my once-upon-a-timer, and I loved him maybe more than anyone else in my life.
We were going to Captiva.
Our parents’ announcement about our spring break travel plans was unexpected, which only created that much more excitement between my brother and me. Oren said he knew a couple of “fly chicas” from his school who went every year and that we had to get buff for these ladies, so before bed we moved the dining table toward the windows and did push-ups in front of the mirrors and some Jack LaLanne calisthenics and also dug out the dumbbells Dad had stored in the back of his closet—“curls for girls,” Oren called our sets. “You know what washboard abs are?” Oren said, doing his best flex. “Male cleavage.” The week before we left, Oren and I went to Brooks Brothers to buy new bathing suits with the fifty dollars Dad gave me to spend from my commercial money. “The red Speedo,” Oren said to me, “no question.” And then, in what I wasn’t sure was an imitation of Dad, added, “Very European.” That night, from his bunk below me, Oren fantasized about all the activities he’d do when we were at the resort.
“I want to jet-ski and go snorkeling and play tennis,” he said. “Or maybe sailing. I’m gonna get a Saint-Tropez tan. And I want to collect seashells and make a whole necklace of them, like puka beads but bigger. Do you want me to make you a necklace? Because I will.”
And on certain evenings when Oren was done with it, he lent me his copy of the Swimsuit Issue. “It really gives you a feel for the place,” Oren said. The articles were boring, but there was an ad that caught my eye. It read like a public service announcement and reminded me of the sorts of conversations I overheard the adults having at Elliott and Lynn’s get-togethers:
The Reunited States of America
At Time Incorporated, we happen to believe that Americans united can solve any problems America faces.
That’s why, in late February, our seven magazines will speak to their 68 million readers on a common theme—“American Renewal.”
Today most people see nothing but crisis around them. Inflation. Energy. Declining productivity. Weakness abroad and a breakdown of the political machinery at home.
There is a spreading sense of powerlessness…a feeling that, as individuals, we can’t make a difference anymore.
Time Incorporated disagrees.
But I mostly looked at the pictures. And while Oren preferred Christie Brinkley to all the other models; while he could not help draping page fifty-two over his face, what with her nipple discreetly poking against her red suit’s fabric, or pressing the two-page spread of her against the bottom of my mattress slats, as if he were benching the entire top bunk (Christie sat with her nearly naked back to the camera, on the shell-covered sand, at sunset, while terns wheeled and swooped over the Gulf), I crushed on Carol Alt, that slender, angular, wolf-eyed brunette, whose wavy hair for some reason the editors chose to corral in a bathing cap for most of her pictures, but who, in my favorite photo, let it be blown freely in the prevailing breeze as she lay supine among the sea oats, propped on her elbows in a brown-and-white snakeskin bathing suit. Clenched in her teeth was a single reed, its firm stalk slightly indenting her glossy lower lip. There were captions to all these shots, partly advertorial, that I pored over as if they contained secret information:
On the beach on Shell Island, a boat to match one’s suit is nothing to skiff at, and lucky Carol’s handsomely harmonized ensemble includes a maillot by Moi ($60).
“It’s not mail-lot,” Oren said when he heard me practicing the word. “It’s pronounced may-yo. And it just means one-piece.”
Our suite at the ’Tween Waters Inn was on the second floor of the Gumbo Limbo building—a long, blue-roofed stucco building with two floors—and it had a view of Manatee Cove, Roosevelt Channel, and Pine Island Sound. “I figured it would be like this,” Oren said with amazement, “but I didn’t know it would be better!” We stood in the walkway’s shade and leaned on the railing, feeling the wet-warm breezes. We each had a map of the resort the concierge had given us, and pointing to our left, Oren shouted back into the room, “Dad! I can see Adventure Sea Kayak Rental. Can we rent kayaks today?” To which Dad said, “We just got here, cool your jets!” And then Oren said, “I can see Captiva Watersports too! Can we rent Jet Skis today?” To which Mom said, “First you can unpack your clothes and put on your bathing suit.” But now Oren was pointing out past the sailboat slips at the humped backs and dorsal fins of a pod of dolphins wheeling far off on the water. “Look,” he said, “there really are dolphins at Dolphin Lookout!” And then he raced off—“I’m going to go swim with them,” he shouted. When I shouted back, “Wait for me,” he said, “Look who’s talking,” and disappeared. Left to my own devices, I put on my swimsuit and slathered myself in tanning oil, since Tanner, who spent every spring break in Barbados, said the worst thing you could do on the first day of a tropical vacation was get badly sunburned. I grabbed a towel from the bathroom, took my map, told my parents I was going to have a look around, and then left our room.
Tweenie’s Pass looped through the resort, and I walked it past the dock at Manatee Cove, down among sailboats’ masts that gonged and pinged in the marina, and eyed the price lists at Captiva Watersports, which offered waterskiing instruction and catamaran rentals, and since Dad had been in the navy, I figured that he could maybe take us all sailing to save some money. I peeked in at the Pelican Roost Boutique and Snack Center, which had diamond-encrusted seashells and dolphins in jewelry cases, sunsets airbrushed on coral, Kadima paddles, and baseball caps and sunhats that read Captiva Is for Lovers or My Parents Went to Captiva and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt. I spotted the Gulf twinkling in the distance. I crossed Captiva Drive, a busy two-lane road whose noise, I realized, I’d mistaken for the surf. I admired the palms that lined the beach, their leaves clacking in the wind. The umbrellas set up by the shore were a darker turquoise than the water, the water an opal I had never beheld in person. The waves were more wavelets when I got to where they broke, and after taking off my flip-flops, I let them lap and purl at my feet. The only ocean I’d ever been in was the Atlantic, which, even in late summer, held beneath its waves a threat of cold. But the Gulf’s waters were the temperature of a warm bath. And considering this contrast, one I’d liked to have shared with Oren, with Mom or Dad, with anyone—a pair of twin boys built a sandcastle to my left—I thought, There it is again. That feeling I’d had at the commercial shoot. I decided to go find my brother.
On my way back to the resort, I ran into my parents on their way to the beach. My father, who hated to take off his shirt because of his chubby breasts, was wearing his khakis rolled up well above his ankles and a shell-pink polo. He was also carrying his leather satchel, as if he’d just been teleported from an audition in Manhattan. Mom wore a bikini with a floral wrap around her waist, her bug-eye sunglasses, and a big, floppy sun hat, which she clutched to keep on her head; in her free arm she carried a pair of novels and a yellow legal pad with notes for her master’s thesis. “Where’re you going?” she asked me, to which Dad, with some annoyance, said, “Let him go.” I crossed Captiva Drive again and then took the path toward the Crow’s Nest Bar & Grille. I wondered, as I always did, if the e in “grille” was pronounced; I figured that Oren would know. As I walked toward the tennis courts, I thought I heard my brother’s voice, and when I spotted two boys playing, I was sure one of them was Oren. But when I walked up to the windscreen that surrounded it, I saw this girl instead.
She was a brunette like Carol Alt, but her hair was straight and slicked back in a wet ponytail. She was tan, like she’d already been here several weeks, and was wearing a white tank top, which revealed two pink circles on each of her shoulders where she’d been sunburned and had already peeled, but looked like scars where wings had been torn off. Her long legs were lustrous and brown down to her ankles, which were delicate and pretty, cupped by her blue pom-pom socks. She was playing with a woman I guessed was her mother because they so strongly resembled each other. What was even more impressive about both of them, the whole time I hung on the chain-link fence, which I soon realized was probably long enough to be creepy, was that during their cross-court rally, they not only managed to keep a single ball in play but, even after I’d left them to go find Oren—someone, anyone—to tell of what I’d just seen, I could still hear the ball tocking regularly behind me on the Har-Tru like the beating of my heart.
“Griffin!” Oren shouted as I walked by the pool.
He was sitting at the bar with another boy. Two years younger than me, and he had no problem getting served. Oren wore a bucket hat with a palm tree insignia stitched into it. On his face: a pair of Ray-Ban Aviators that he’d bought for the trip. His friend was a hulking kid with long hair almost down to his shoulders that half covered his eyes and who was wearing a T-shirt with cut-off sleeves and basketball shorts. When I got a little closer, I noticed that his diminutive right hand was curled violently at the wrist, and his fingers stuck out stiff and pinched together at the tips, so that elbow to digits the appendage resembled the inverted neck and head of the Loch Ness Monster. Both of them were drinking piña coladas.
“Cocktail?” Oren said.
“Sure,” I said.
“Virgin or regular?”
“What’s the difference?”
Oren looked at his friend. “A cherry,” he said. And they laughed.
“My brother, Griffin,” Oren said to his friend. “He goes to the best private school in New York City. How he got in and I didn’t is a complete mystery. Although Mom says his grades were so bad, they probably didn’t think I could cut the mustard.”
“Frazier,” Frazier said to me, and stuck out his Plesiosaur hand, which I, stung by Oren’s jab, pulled at twice in greeting.
“Frazier’s from Dallas,” Oren said. “His family comes here every year.” Then Oren said to the bartender, “Hey, Kessler,” who looked up from the glass he was cleaning. “A Bacardi colada for my brother, please.”
“I just saw the most excellent girl,” I said.
“Where?” Oren said.
“Tennis courts.”
Oren squinted like he knew something. “What was she wearing?” he asked.
I told him.
“What color hair did she have?” he asked.
I described it.
“She could really play, right?”
“Like Chris Evert, but if she looked like Brooke Shields.”
Oren glanced at Frazier, then nodded seriously. “I saw her too. That’s Regina Goodman,” Oren said, “she goes to my school.”
I got my drink, took a long suck on the straw.
“Go slow,” Oren said, “those are one-fifty-one proof.”
I waved him off and said, “Tell me everything.”
To Kessler the bartender, Oren said, “Gumbo Limbo 225, please,” and then slid him a five-spot. “Take care of me this week,” he added, to which Kessler winked back; and then we three went to sit by the pool under the blazing sun and cloudless sky and the log-drumming of the palm leaves, and Oren, who was covering himself in Coppertone, told me all about Regina Goodman, with whom I was falling utterly and completely in love. I took off my shirt as he spoke, squirted some more Hawaiian Tropic on myself, which pooled in my belly button and made my pasty skin look like it had been rubbed in chicken grease. “You missed a spot,” said Frazier, pointing at my shoulder. I hung on my brother’s every word. Regina was a sophomore at Ferren and a tennis star. She was from a really rich family. “You know Bergdorf Goodman?” Oren said.
“You mean across from FAO Schwarz?” I said.
“She’s that one,” Oren said.
“What grade is she?”
“Sophomore. But here’s the thing about her,” he continued. “This is top secret, okay?”
“All right,” I said.
“I mean if you’re looking to get with her,” he said.
“I’m listening,” I said.
“She likes younger guys.” She’d even dated his best friend Matt this year.
“But he’s in eighth grade,” I said.
“No shit, Sherlock,” Oren said. “And she always makes the first move.” In fact, he explained, she only made the first move. “Don’t even bother asking her out if she doesn’t ask you. Maybe it’s a rich-girl thing,” Oren figured, “who knows? But if she approaches you, you’re in like Flynn. She wrote Matt a letter. He found it in his locker. ‘Maybe sometime we could get milkshakes,’ she said, ‘and by sometime I mean tonight.’ ” They met up at Baskin-Robbins that day, Oren said. Matt got a cookies and cream shake, Regina got cherry vanilla, they walked straight back to her apartment in the Dakota, and then bingo: “Matt lost his virginity to her that night.”
“Cherry vanilla.” Frazier chuckled and shook his head.
“This is unbelievable,” I said.
We each drank two more Bacardi coladas, during which time I thought about how Bridget had that funny run but was fun to talk to, while Deb Peryton and I could barely carry on a conversation but she was a good kisser, whereas Regina was clearly a great athlete and I was a John McEnroe fan, so probably we had plenty to talk about between wrestling and tennis while we held hands and walked along the Gulf, once I got her to notice me. This was the last thing I remember thinking before I woke up to discover Oren and Frazier were gone, the pool’s surface was littered with palm leaves, and my skin, pink as uncooked pork, felt like the heating element under a stovetop’s glass.
The next few days were miserable. My sunburn was so bad that by the first evening my nose, chest, and shoulders had blistered. That night, Mom made me take a cold shower and then slathered me in Solarcaine. “Stops sunburn pain,” Dad said, peeking in my bedroom, “when someone you love is hurting.” The next day, Mom insisted that if I wanted to go to the beach or pool, I had to don a long-sleeved shirt and a hat and apply zinc oxide to my nose and lips. The tops of my feet were so badly burned they hurt too much to wear flip-flops. “Maybe he should wear socks,” Oren suggested, a little cruelly. I couldn’t do any of the things the rest of the family was doing.
Or, in the case of my father, wasn’t doing. He could not bring himself to sit still on the beach. When he joined Mom and me—I had to remain in the cabana’s shade—he did not read like her or even swim with his shirt on, like I had to, because he never took his shirt off. “The sand gets stuck between my toes,” he said to Mom. His black bathing trunks showed off his pelican legs. He nodded at the water. “Beautiful view,” he said, rattling the ice cubes in his plastic ’Tween Waters Inn cup. “What are you reading?” he asked Mom.
“The Portrait of a Lady,” she said.
He said, “Hemingway loved Captiva, didn’t he?”
“That was Key West,” Mom said, “and this is Henry James.”
He sang a few notes from his new musical.
Mom said, “Why don’t you go get your tape recorder and flash cards. You can put on your headphones and learn your songs.”
Dad said, “Think I’ll go for a walk instead.” To which Mom, resting her open book on her belly and folding her hands over it, said, “Why don’t I join you?” To which Dad said, “You stay. Relax.”
Then he marched down the beach until he was inches tall, until he disappeared. He stayed gone for a while. Then I saw him returning, his mite-sized silhouette growing like Ant-Man. When he got back, he said, “Fabulous shells,” and then fell asleep on a chaise with a towel over his face. When he woke, he said, “Think I’ll go back to the room and check my service.”
“What are you going to do if you get a booking,” Mom said, “fly home?”
My father shrugged. “Think I’ll go for a drive then,” he said.
“Why don’t I come with you?” Mom said.
“Get some reading done. Enjoy yourself.”
“Why don’t you take a ride with your father?” Mom said to me.
“I’m gonna find Oren,” I said, and hurried after Dad, who was trudging across the sand to the resort’s parking lot. He didn’t notice me until he was in the driver’s seat of our rental car.
“Sure you don’t want to come?” he asked.
I told him no thanks and went exploring.
It was midday and the tennis courts were being watered.
Our room, whose terrace curtains ballooned in the warm breeze, was chillier because of my sunburn.
The fishing boats had long ago abandoned their slips for their day trips.
Neither Oren nor Frazier nor Regina were anywhere to be found.
Over those several days, when I wasn’t dreaming of Regina (as we sailed on a catamaran, when we caught a sailfish, when we went to a clam bake, when I bought her a necklace with a diamond-studded dolphin pendant), I stalked her all over the resort. I followed her if I saw her headed somewhere. I sometimes ran around buildings so that I might walk directly toward her and catch her eye. When I did, I’d nod. If she nodded back, which she did, occasionally, and giggled, I figured maybe it was because there was an attraction, but it also could’ve been my zinc-slathered face. Either way, I was encouraged. I spied her once leaving her room, which was, to my surprise, in the Sea Grape, which had a view of the Gulf but was also right on the road. Once I saw her and her mother exiting the spa—a typical rich-girl thing to do. It was on this occasion that she looked at me and really smiled, and when I told Oren about it that night he said, “I don’t believe you.”
“Why?”
“You’re not her type.”
“What’s her type?” I asked.
“Not sunburned,” he said.
And on these recon missions I often found Oren and Frazier doing everything Oren had hoped to on vacation. From the room’s walkway, I spotted them jet-skiing on Roosevelt Sound. I could hear Oren scream, “Woooohooooo!” as the machine punt punt punted atop the water. How did he get so good so fast? And it was amazing to watch Frazier balance on the machine, his hand like a trained pet riding alongside him, while he used the other to clutch the handlebars. In my broad-brimmed hat and sunglasses, my long-sleeved shirt and sweatpants, my socks and laceless sneakers, my nose and lips zinced, I might stop by the courts to watch Oren and Frazier play tennis. Frazier’s forehand was a cannon. His one-handed backhand was a thing of beauty too, finishing his swing with both arms outflung. When he served, he pinched both the ball and racquet handle in his good hand and, with the wrist of his bad one, brushed his bangs from his eyes. He tossed the ball in the air, and as it hung above him at its arc’s zenith, he readjusted his grip, twisted with all his big-bodied torque, and sent a kicking serve into Oren’s court. Somewhere, somehow, and without my knowledge, Oren had managed to learn to hit very respectable strokes in return. He and Frazier could not kayak, but they did take out a catamaran, which Dad had said he knew how to sail but maybe next year. And on the second-to-last day, just when my burn had healed enough that I could wear shorts and short sleeves and hang with my brother, Frazier and Oren departed at the crack of dawn for an all-day deep-sea fishing trip with Frazier’s father.
That was when I got the note from Regina.
I was applying sunblock in the bathroom. Mom was out collecting seashells. Dad, who was listening to the music for his show’s songs and singing the verses, stopped and said, “This came for you.” It was a pink ’Tween Waters Inn envelope with my named double underlined, and inside, on ’Tween Waters Inn stationery—also pink—in a bubbly, girly-girl script of fat g’s and b’s and hearts dotting the i’s, read:
Dear Griffin,
Your brother and I go to the same school and he suggested I write. I have a tennis lesson at ten this morning but was thinking you could meet me when it’s finished and we could take a walk down the beach? Maybe go for a swim? Explore Manatee Cove? I’ll wear my bathing suit underneath my skirt. Maybe you could bring the towels and the tanning oil?
OXOXOX,
Regina
“Oh my God!” I said to my reflection, to the air.
“What is it?” Dad said. “Did you get a part in a movie?”
“I have to take another shower,” I said, and closed the door on him.
I bathed again in order to remove the zinc from my face. After I toweled the steam from the mirror, I noticed there was a bright pink stripe from my nose’s bridge to its tip. But the peeling wasn’t so bad, especially on my shoulders and across my chest after I used Mom’s Oil of Olay. From the kitchenette, Dad sang a song from his show, “You’re the birdsong, you’re my morning, you’re the sun on the leaves…” Then he rewound the tape, consulted his flash cards, and sang the same three lines again while adding another. I brushed my teeth twice to get rid of my coffee breath. From my father’s Dopp kit I borrowed his dental excavator, scraped some plaque from between my bottom teeth, and then, after rinsing the tip carefully, used it to pop an unripe zit on my chin. I spent the next fifteen minutes dealing with this crisis, since a perfect globule of blood kept forming atop the puncture no matter how much pressure I applied to its crater. Dad sang, “You’re the flowers, you’re the pollen, you’re the buzzing of the bees…” and then rewound the tape. I put on my Jensen’s Marina & Cottages T-shirt that Dad had bought me on one of his jaunts, which had a giant tarpon on its front. I pulled my cutoff jeans over my Speedo and slid into my flip-flops, despite the lingering pain. I tucked two ’Tween Waters Inn towels under my arm and, sandwiched between them, my bottle of Hawaiian Tropic dark tanning oil.
What did I think would happen? What did I imagine Regina and I would do? What would she and I talk about? I flip-flopped toward the tennis court, wondering. Like the pelicans gliding effortlessly toward the Gulf, I felt so light and hopeful. I heard the ringing sound of Regina’s strings as they contacted the ball. I spotted her lovely form divided into diamonds behind the chain link fence, and I watched her shadow play against the windscreen. She was finishing up her lesson with a volleying drill. The pro, whose face was as tan as Naugahyde, said, with each ball he fed her, “Step on the bug,” and every time she stamped her foot, she kicked up a small cloud of dust. To conclude he said, “Finish on a good one.” Which Regina did—a sharp crosscourt stab, which the pro watched and then nodded at approvingly.
Afterward, Regina sat on the court’s bench, facing me for a while, drinking her water and toweling off. I waited, towels in hand; I waved to her once. Indicated: No rush. A couple entered the court. The pro said, “David, Alice, I was just finishing up.” Regina waved goodbye to the pro and, racquet pinched under her arm and a towel wrapped around her neck, walked toward me. She opened the gate, smiled, and then, as she closed it, said, “Hello.”
“Hello,” I said.
As she turned and began to walk toward the beach, I said, “I brought some towels.”
She smiled. “I have one, but thanks.”
When I said, “Okay,” she started to walk toward Captiva Drive. The Gulf sparkled in the distance. My mouth was so dry I couldn’t swallow. I was about to speak, but at the Sea Grape suites, Regina turned and began to walk up the steps leading to the building’s second floor.
“Should I come with you or wait down here?” I asked.
She turned to face me and smiled. “Do I know you?” she said.
“I’m Griffin, Oren’s brother.”
Silence.
“You wrote me a note,” I said. “To meet you after your lesson and go to the beach together.”
“I think you have me confused with someone else.”
“You’re not Regina?”
“I’m Meredith,” she said. “And I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Then she hurried upstairs, her sneaker soles scuffing each slightly sandy step with the sound of a struck match.
I found Oren and Frazier at the bar later that afternoon. They were celebrating their last day together and their fishing trip. Oren was wearing a shell necklace he’d made on the ride back; his aviator sunglasses hung at the bottom of his collar’s V. He and Frazier were drinking daiquiris. When I joined them, Oren said, “I caught a sand shark! It’s almost four feet long. It’s in a cooler by the dock if you want to see it.”
“Congratulations,” I said.
“I’m gonna release it later if you want to come.” When I didn’t answer, he said, “I could use your help. Because it’s so big.”
“I’ll bet it’s a whopper,” I said.
Frazier took a long pull at his drink. “How was your date?” he asked.
“Ha-ha,” I said. “Very funny.”
“Admit it,” Frazier said, “your brother got you hook, line, and sinker.”
Were it not for his hand, I’d have punched him square in the mouth.
Oren could tell I was crushed. “We have to meet my parents at the Crow’s Nest Grille for dinner,” he told his friend. So, I thought, no e.
Frazier got up. “See you next year,” he said.
“Yeah,” Oren said, and poured his daiquiri’s remainder down his throat, “don’t count on it.” Then he knuckle-bumped Frazier, and they parted. Oren watched him go and then said to me, “Want to see the shark?”
We settled up and left. To my dismay we walked past Meredith and her mother on the way toward the docks. “Hi, Griffin,” she said. “Hi, Oren.”
As we passed the sailboats, Oren couldn’t stand the silence any longer. “It was Frazier’s idea. At least the part about the note.”
“Whatever,” I said.
“You’ve got to admit the handwriting was convincing.”
I was so mad my eyes were welling up. “Who’d have thought Frazier was such a good forger,” I said.
“His sister did it,” Oren said, as if this were a consolation.
The sailboats’ masts clanged when a gust kicked up. Kerosene rainbows slicked around the fishing boats. A stray cat crossed our path. An osprey flew low over the bay. I looked around. So far as I could tell, we were alone. Oren noticed this too. At the end of the dock, beneath a winch for weighing fish, with a huge hook attached to a rope, was a large cooler.
Oren opened it.
The sand shark lay half submerged in the water. It was big enough that it could not completely straighten out but was curled uncomfortably, like a cramped muscle. When the sunlight hit it, as if sensing the bay beyond its confines, the fish thwapped and thumped its tail against the cooler’s walls, swung its head, and sent its saving element splashing. We stood looking at the fish as it struggled, and then it stopped.
Oren said, “I’m really sorry.”
I said nothing in response.
“Please,” he whispered.
I grabbed him by the collar and foot swept him. I followed him down to the deck, so that his head slammed against the dock. I pinned his biceps beneath my shin so he couldn’t cover up, and I grabbed his throat. I pulled his necklace’s fishing line till it snapped; when it did, the shells skittered. I punched his aviators on his chest once, twice, until both lenses shattered. I grabbed his hat and chucked it into the bay. I grabbed a fist of my brother’s hair, right at the forelock, lifting him until he stood. Then I pushed him off the dock, into the water. There was a splash. And when he surfaced—he was coughing—I lifted the cooler over my head and flung it at him, the shark, midair, flung from its confines, landing with a great smack, the cooler’s base donking Oren directly on the head. And then the creature disappeared into the depths while Oren treaded water and stared at me, red-eyed, but did not cry.
It was pouring on the day we returned. The cab from LaGuardia Airport smelled like wet wool and cigarettes, and the sky was gray as soot. The windows were opaque with droplets of rain, reflecting everyone’s terrible mood. So little had been said on the flight home. Oren had sat with Mom, I with Dad. We both had window seats, and the entire flight Oren was either staring out his or had his face in his book on cars. He refused to acknowledge me. It had been thus since I’d beaten him, and I wanted to get on my knees and beg his forgiveness, I felt so much shame at my eruption. Because it was a good prank, I thought, credit where credit is due, I wanted to tell him that. Even now, in the cab, as Dad chatted up the driver, a behavior of his that drove us both crazy, Oren sat staring at the wet mess that was Grand Central Parkway.
Back home, Oren immediately left for Matt’s, and Mom and Dad went to their room and shut the door. When I called Cliffnotes to tell him I was back, he said that he was taking his Intellivision console to Tanner’s house. Mr. Potts had just gotten a forty-five-inch TV, and they were going to play Sea Battle on it. Did I want to come?
On the bus ride across town, we watched the rain. It was one of those downpours that seemed to have caught people unawares. Pedestrians ran down the streets with newspapers over their heads. Others, hatless, walked soaked, disconsolately. Lightning flashed, strobe-like, a rare event in March. Thunder clapped.
When we ran into Tanner’s building, Sean the doorman said to us, “Someone shot the president!” He had a small closet off his desk and, on a shelf inside, a tiny black-and-white TV.
“Shot him as in killed him?” Cliff asked.
“Shot as in shot at,” Sean said.
Tanner’s elevator opened onto two apartments, and his parents always left their front door unlocked. In spite of this, Cliff and I made a point to ring the bell before entering. Tanner greeted us topless and in a bathing suit, like he’d just gone swimming. He was as dark as a mug of Ovaltine but his hair, normally brownish blond, was as white as his puka-shell necklace.
“You bleached your hair,” Cliff said.
“Fuck you,” Tanner said. “It was the sun.”
Cliff was laughing. “What’d you use, hydrogen peroxide?”
“Lemon juice and beer.”
“And chemicals,” Cliff said.
“Strictly speaking, citric acid and alcohol are chemicals.” Wanting to change the subject, he took in my pink-streaked nose and shook his head. “I warned you,” he said.
On the Pottses’ new television, Frank Reynolds was reporting live from the ABC newsroom. He was stiff-backed and wooden in his delivery. He had a deep voice like my dad’s, but it was absent human feeling and toneless, though he was clearly shaken: …and shots were fired apparently at President Reagan as he was coming out of the Washington Hilton this afternoon. The president was not hit. He was pushed into his limousine and immediately taken away to safety. However, three persons were hit. We believe they are two Secret Service agents and the president’s press secretary, James Brady.
Tanner said, “How many presidents were assassinated?”
“Kennedy, Lincoln,” I said, “probably more.”
“Yes, probably more, brainiac, but how many?”
“Garfield and McKinley also,” Cliffnotes said.
“How do you remember so much?” Tanner said.
“I don’t shampoo with antiseptic.”
Tanner dead-armed him. Cliff, pissed, rubbed his shoulder. “Let’s set up the Intellivision,” Tanner said.
The TV was easily the size of a dresser, the giant screen set in a walnut housing with the speakers hidden behind a black cloth grille at its base. It had a remote control, really futuristic, even smaller than a Walkman, which Tanner let me hold while he began to slide the TV back from the built-in cabinets.
Cliff asked, “What are the specs on this thing?”
It was the difference between Cliff and Tanner and me that they could talk this sort of tech.
“It’s got a three-tube, three-lens system for super high definition. You can only see the dots up close. Check it,” Tanner said.
Cliff and Tanner put their faces right next to the screen. The static electricity made their hair stand up and adhere to the glass. “Whoa,” Cliff said. “Look at all those pixels.”
“Plus four two-way speakers,” Tanner said.
“Crank it up, man.”
Tanner aimed the remote at the screen until the sound blasted.
We now have the videotape.
Reagan is walking out of the Hilton.
Here you see the president coming out now. We just have to watch.
Reagan waves to his right, smiling. A Secret Service agent is right behind him and there are police all over.
I don’t know if I can hear this or not.
Reagan turns to his left and, facing the camera, waves again. Shots are fired.
There, there! Shots…God!
Clap clap clap clap clap clap, and the camera dives to the right, to a pileup, a scrum of Secret Service agents and police against the building’s brick.
Tanner said, “That guy said ‘motherfucker.’ Did you hear him? He said it on TV.”
The Black Secret Service agent screamed, “Get him out! Get him out!” which I figured meant Reagan.
“Dang!” Cliffnotes said. “That guy is like G.I. Joe!”
“Check out that Uzi!” Tanner said. “Do you see the Uzi that guy’s got?”
There was a bald man, facedown, blood pooling at his head. Behind him, a pair of other men were being tended to. Then, with much shouting, the scrum hustled the assailant into a squad car.
Then they replayed it from the beginning.
Reagan comes out. He waves. This time, I watched one of the Secret Service agents turn, stick out his arms, take a bullet, and then spin to the ground.
We all sat down on Tanner’s couch.
Then they replayed the shooting.
“That one Secret Service guy took a bullet for the president,” Tanner said.
“He just spread his arms and blam,” Cliff said.
“That’s what I’d do,” Tanner said. He stood to the side of the screen, spread his arms, winced from the bullet, and then leaped into the air, doubled over, and fell.
“People start shooting and most people freeze,” Cliff said. “Others start crying. And others start shitting, literally. But only a few take a bullet.”
“What makes you such an expert?” Tanner said from where he now lay on the floor.
“That’s what my father said,” Cliff said.
Then they replayed the shooting.
Reynolds said, Mr. Reagan was not hit, he was bounced around as the Secret Service agents maneuvered or flung I think is probably the right word—flung him into the car. To get him out of there. The president then went to George Washington University Hospital, where those who were hit were taken. They include Jim Brady, who is the president’s press secretary; a Secret Service agent; and a policeman. We don’t know their condition, but quite obviously as soon as we find out anything…
Tanner’s father walked into the apartment. He was just back from grocery shopping, still in vacation mode but wearing a blazer beneath his raincoat, the latter dotted with droplets.
“Dad!” Tanner said. “Someone—”
“Put a shirt on, you little faggot.”
“Someone tried to shoot the president!”
“Hey, Mr. Potts,” we said.
“Griffin,” said Mr. Potts. “Cliff.”
“He hit—”
“Turn down the volume, you’re going to destroy my new speakers.”
“He hit three other people,” Tanner said.
“Go put a shirt on right now or you can kiss your friends goodbye.”
Tanner left the room to put on a shirt.
“You should’ve seen it,” I said to Mr. Potts. “One of the Secret Service agents had an Uzi.”
“He said ‘motherfucker’ on TV,” Cliff said.
Mr. Potts got a big kick out of this.
Tanner came back in wearing a T-shirt. “One of the Secret Service said ‘motherfucker.’ ”
“Watch your language,” Mr. Potts said, and winked at me.
I said, “The new TV is really awesome, Mr. Potts.”
“Thank you, Griffin,” Mr. Potts said. “How about that picture? Tanner, what the hell are you doing?”
Tanner had gone back to sliding the giant unit out from the cabinets. “I’m setting up Cliff’s Intellivision.”
“You’ll do no such thing.”
“What’s the point of having a nice TV if we can’t play video games on it?”
“Keep it on the news, this is important.”
Mrs. Potts walked in. She was wearing pearls and black heels; her tan raincoat was also beaded and her cheeks were flushed.
“I heard someone shot the president,” she said.
“No one shot the president, Sharon. He missed.”
“I said they shot him,” she said, “not hit him.” The Pottses had sudden spats like this all the time, though now Mrs. Potts doubted herself. “At least that was what Sean said downstairs.”
Sam Donaldson had joined Frank Reynolds. He had a phone next to him, and all the cubed lights on it were flashing. He picked up the receiver, placed it to his ear, hung it up.
I said, “Sam Donaldson sort of looks like Martin Landau from Space: 1999.”
Mr. Potts chuckled at this. “He does, doesn’t he?”
“Hey, Mrs. Potts,” I said, “you kind of look like Barbara Bain.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“He’s right,” Mr. Potts said, “but you’re prettier.”
“Is that an apology or a compliment?”
“It’s both,” said Mr. Potts.
Lyn Nofziger has told reporters at the hospital that the president was not wounded…
Mr. Potts said, “Griffin, is your dad the voice on that Schlitz commercial? With the guy from Get Smart?”
“No one does it like the bull,” I said.
“Bet he made a lot of shekels on that.”
“Ay caramba,” Cliff muttered.
Off camera, another reporter spoke to Frank Reynolds, after which Reynolds’s shoulders slumped.
He was wounded!
“Turn it up, please,” Mr. Potts said.
My God…he was…the president was hit…he is in stable condition. All this information— The pages Reynolds was holding in his hands shook. The president was hit. He was hit in the left chest. According to this…
“Can you hear that?” Mrs. Potts said.
“Hear what?” Tanner said.
“Exactly,” she said, and nodded at the screen. “All the typing in the newsroom has stopped.”
She was right. Off camera and off mic, someone in the newsroom said to Donaldson and Reynolds, One shot. Stable condition.
Reynolds, furious, pointed at the reporter off camera. Speak up!
The reporter repeated himself.
Reynolds said, The president was hit…One…My God…The president was hit…All this that we’ve been telling you is incorrect. He took a long beat to gather himself. We now must…redraw this entire tragedy in different terms.
Softly, Mrs. Potts said to her husband, “Drink?”
“Thank you,” he said, his voiced lowered too. “Martini, please.”
“Good idea,” Mrs. Potts said.
Before she could walk away, Mr. Potts gently took her elbow, pulled her to him, and, keeping his eyes on the television, kissed her half on the mouth. She half-kissed him back.
Now we have been told—ABC News has been told by a doctor at the hospital—that one lung of the president has partially collapsed.
Over Reynolds speaking, the image crosscut to the shooting, but this time in slow motion. Now that I’d seen it so many times, there were several things I noticed that I hadn’t before. An old man, a bystander, in a red cardigan, leaned into the scrum as they subdued the shooter, helping the Secret Service agents pin him against the hotel’s decorative stone wall. The blood around James Brady’s head was diffused at its edges by the rain. In slow motion you could see the agent who took the bullet raise his eyebrow in the millisecond before impact, the muscle twitching first at the shot’s sound, and who did, upon being struck, something like a scissor kick as he leaped in the air, as if the momentary separation from the planet allowed the bullet’s force to pass through him. The cop in front of him, who, even with bullets flying, pinched the brim of his hat with both hands so that it would not fall off. And there was a roughhouse quality that approximated care as the agents formed a testudo around the shooter and hustled to a nearby police car. Which was to say that every time they showed the event, I realized that in several seconds so many things occurred you could spend a lifetime trying to understand just how everything converges on the now. And I reflected that men like John Wilkes Booth, Mark David Chapman, and this unnamed shooter were entirely committed to the role they’d decided to play. It was the unspoken aspect of what Elliott had observed in Gramercy Park.
I’m going to give you the name of this, uh, man that has been reported to us as the assailant, simply because everyone else has been reporting his name. He is John W. Hinckley Jr. That is the report we have. John W. Hinckley Jr. And it is understood that he is from Evergreen, Colorado…
Without a shred of self-consciousness, with no space between the mask and your face, you enter history.