Little Beach House

I stood in the hallway outside Sal’s room.

The lights were out downstairs. Dishtowels hung on the oven door. A pitcher, mostly empty, of red wine, rum, and fruit cooled in the fridge. It wasn’t my beach house, and it wasn’t Sal’s. But it was Sal and I who had stayed up, cleaning the pots, the glasses, and the butcher-block counters.

We had sat across from each other during the long, drunk night, downing glass after glass of sangria and bowls of watermelon soaked in cheap vodka. Sweat beaded on Sal’s forehead and he wouldn’t meet my eyes. I couldn’t keep my hands still.

Now I stood in the little hallway that led to the enclosed porch where Sal slept. The door was ajar. My bare feet seemed to stick to the wood. I thought about going in, about saying something. I thought about how his hands should lift the hem of my shirt and find the burning skin above my shorts. About how his room was probably cool from the night breeze coming off the ocean. My knees shook, maybe from the vodka.

I’d bought the vodka because Quentin got us to come out to his parents’ place on the Rhode Island shore. He wanted to throw a party in the middle of the summer, after graduation but before everyone rushed to say goodbye.

Sal still hung out with us when he was in town, which some people thought was kind of weird. He was a couple of years older, born the same year as my brother. But he and Charlie couldn’t be more different.

He’d been a quiet kid, with no siblings, his parents away at work most of the time. I’d known him on and off as long as I could remember, a lonely presence on the edge of summer camps and school groups. Sal had two skills: a mediocre talent for soccer and a natural editor’s touch. We ran the paper together.

He taught me how to write. Not that I was alone. There were eight or nine of us he took in on the paper, teaching us prose style, reading good articles aloud, annotating bad ones, and editing our pieces together. It was how he got out of his shell.

After the janitors kicked us out at 10, we’d all go to the falafel shop around the corner, before the college students flooded it. It made me feel adult, writing, talking seriously, staying out late with him.

We were from the same sort of family. My mother came to the U.S. from Nicaragua in the 80s, when the Contras made the land unlivable. I didn’t speak much Spanish at home and looked as white as any of my friends.

Sal, with his thick black hair, big red lips, and soft brown eyes, looked like he could’ve been from anywhere from Santiago to Samarkand. His father was from Chile and had come to America after Sal’s grandparents died in a soccer stadium in the spring of 1973. His family also fled to the country that wrecked their homeland.

So we were two kids who spoke a little Spanish, both from the far eastern edge of town, across the river. Everyone else we had classes and clubs with came from the west and north, up on the hill. Sometimes they snickered when I spoke Spanish. Sometimes they fawned.

By the time he graduated, I’d taken over as his co-editor. I read every line in the paper before we put it out, red pen in hand, dictating the changes to him as he sat at the computer.

When Sal went to college, I wrote him letters and he wrote me back, about what we were doing, what it was like here and there.

I slept on a cot in the main bedroom. When the sun rose, it woke me up. It was our third and last day at the beach house. I tried not to disturb the silence as I rose, afraid to wake Quentin in his twin bed, or Philip and Elizabeth on their full-size mattress in the other corner.

I washed in the outdoor shower with the water on its coldest setting to keep the sound of the heater kicking on from waking people up. I put on some jean shorts, a shirt, and a loose cardigan that refused to stay on my shoulders, which had more to do with posture than with cut.

Elizabeth had left a pack of cigarettes lying on the kitchen table. I took one and went outside. The porch was in the deep shade of the house, facing the road. The cool of the wind off the sea made it feel fresh, almost like an autumn morning. The water was right there, less than a hundred yards away at high tide. I’d known Quentin since kindergarten. I’d come out here a few times. Year by year, the sea pushed back the sand and ate up the thin bank of dune grass between the beach and the road. It would take just one good storm to sweep away all the little beach houses.

Half a cigarette was about all I could handle at once on an empty stomach, so I stubbed it out on one of the posts and listened as someone stirred in the house, the stairs creaking under their feet.

“Filching cigs, Annie?” It was Sal.

“No one else is going to smoke them,” I said. “And that’s Anita to you.” “Cowards all.”

I picked up the cigarette and lit it again, waiting for Sal to say something more. But the silence dragged on too long, and the breeze blew bits of ash back at me. Everything I wanted to say felt trite and wouldn’t come out.

Sal put a hand on my shoulder for a moment. “I guess I don’t mean anyone’s all that cowardly. We’re just all much less than we expect of ourselves.”

“Did you change your major to philosophy?” I said. He withdrew his hand and smiled at me. I refused to look at him.

Someone stirred in the house. I handed Sal the cigarette. He finished it and flicked the butt into the middle of the street. It landed on our side of the double yellow line. The more I looked at it, the more it bothered me. I walked out into the street and kicked it across the line with my left foot.

Sal raised an eyebrow at me.

“I lit it with my left hand, so I had to get it on the left side of the street. Bad luck otherwise,” I said.

He laughed. I went inside. Liz was up first, while Philip slept in. She and Philip were pretending to have a very adult relationship, with long-term plans and commitments. I hated that about her. Liz, taller than me, blonde, with a plain face and narrow shoulders, looked at her pack of cigarettes. I watched to see if she would count them. She didn’t.

My brother always counted.

“You had breakfast yet?” she asked me as she crossed to the fridge.

I shook my head. “I’ll get the coffee on.”

“We’ve got eggs and toast and that’s about it,” she sighed. Liz and I started cooking. Sal came in from the porch. They exchanged greetings, and Liz said she’d make him two eggs.

“Salvador,” Liz said. “Q said you had a girlfriend. Why didn’t you tell us?” Liz looked at me, and I looked at Sal. A smile graced her thin lips. It looked more pained than real.

“That’s not true,” Sal said. His gaze flicked across me. “You shouldn’t believe everything Quentin says.”

“There’s a story there, sources say,” I added.

“There was, but we split, a while ago actually. I’m surprised you hadn’t heard.”

“It’s not my fault you never talk to us,” Liz said. I stayed quiet. Sal looked at me, and I met his eyes.

“Oh, all right,” he said. “She broke up with me because I wouldn’t go to her sorority formal.”

“That’s a silly reason. What was her name?”

“It’s not important. I was not a good match. It was bound to end.”

I went up to visit Sal in November of his freshman year, barely a month after Charlie’s funeral. The train runs up there. He met me at the station. We took a bus across the river.

That first night, we went to a party in a dorm room. He introduced me, and his friends roasted him, especially the girls. I drank a lot, pink-lemonade vodka, an obnoxious flavor. But it made me feel better. We got drenched in the rain on our way to a house party. Before that night, a house party meant like twenty kids, some bud, some vodka, a shitty speaker system. More often than that, it was me and Charlie and three of his friends.

But the party Sal took me to was different.

I’d never seen so many people drunk at the same time, all crammed into the basement and first floor of a shabby house. Steam rose off their bodies as they danced, enough that condensation dripped from the first-floor windows and the water pipes on the basement ceiling. I felt like I was watching something foreordained, like it would all pass whether or not I was there. The drinks wore off quick.

I thought about how some of them would vomit, how their sweat would dry and leave a salt residue you could feel with your fingers. At the end of the night, they would coat each other in sweat, in saliva, in cum. I kept my jacket on and my hands in my pockets.

At one point, I went up to the bathroom. It was a wreck. There was piss everywhere, fresh puke in the trash can. I remembered Charlie scrubbing his own vomit out of the rug in his room, trying to get it clean before our parents got home.

Someone knocked on the door.

I went back downstairs to find Sal. The music deafened me. The shouted conversations and the brassy laughter of a hundred kids rattled in my head like marbles.

They laughed. Then they danced, voices half a beat behind the music. Then they ground against each other, their faces open, gasping as they pressed together. Drunk fish mouths, I thought.

My skin felt like it was on fire, and I had to remind myself to inhale, hold, exhale. When Sal saw my face, he took my hand.

“Some fresh air,” he said.

Out in the cold, that burning feeling dissipated, and I felt like I could cry. He put his hand around my waist and gave me the grand campus tour, ignoring the crowds of drunks huddled in front of the off-campus houses.

I hadn’t booked a hotel room, so he let me have his bed. Sal slept on a leaking air mattress on his floor.

The next day, the rain was gone, and the whole valley was stripped of its leaves. We recovered from the night before and had breakfast with his friends.

In the afternoon, he turned down invitations. We walked around campus, just the two of us, the manicured grass, and the empty trees. Sal wore suede sneakers and dark jeans, a t-shirt, a flannel, and a winter coat.

“You go out a lot?”

He shrugged. “As much as anyone.”

“To dance? To meet people?”

“Both,” he said. I pictured him sweating through a button-up, breath stinking like gin and dining-hall slop, asking some girl for her number.

“You ever,” I let the question hang, but he didn’t pick it up. “Get laid from one of these parties?”

“Just once,” Sal said. “I still see her around sometimes.”

“You dating her?”

He shrugged. I laid off.

“How’s everybody?” he asked.

“My parents are doing what you’d expect,” I said, and shrugged. “I don’t want to talk about it. Liz treats me different. So does Quentin.”

“Cowards,” Sal said.

“They act like I’m tainted. Like somehow his dying stains me.” I paused, the cold hitting me all at once. I shivered and looked at my hands, unsure where I should put them. “All the drugs and shit.”

“You know, kids from their neighborhood sell more percs than just about anybody in the city. Quentin’s own brother, for one, and his brother’s girlfriend.” Sal looked at me and stopped talking.

“They just feel I’m not the same. Since it hit me,” I said. I kept looking behind us. “You know, you can always call me,” Sal said. “Anything you need. I’d like to help.”

“Thanks, Sal.”

“Anita,” he said. Then he took my hand. He hugged me. We were out on the quad. His embrace kept the wind off me.

We shared his bed, fully clothed. His hand barely touched mine.

Sal and I got to the beach a little before the rest. The surf came in higher than usual, and the waves broke with a strange power. We walked along the very edge of the wet sand, waiting for our sunscreen to soak in. He wore a short-sleeved button-up, open.

“Liz sure wanted to know about your breakup,” I said. “She was pretty hurt you kept that from her.”

“And you? Are you injured because you don’t know every detail of my life?”

“I at least knew you were seeing someone,” I said.

“Okay, but you come to see me now and again.”

“Right,” I said. “I mean, no. You come around in summertime and pick up where you left off with everybody. Then in the school year, for most of them, you’re a ghost.”

“That’s what coming home is,” Sal said. “And one day you come back and there’s nobody there for you. Everyone goes their own way in the end. The sooner you realize that, the easier it gets to leave and the easier it gets to come back.”

“Okay. But people want their friendships to mean something. You taught Liz and Philip how to write. You were there for all of us. If you disappear, it feels like all of that means nothing.”

“The end is evident from the start,” he said.

I pushed him toward the waves. He staggered off-balance.

Sal grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me into the ankle-deep water. He took his shirt off and threw it back to the sand. I stared at him.

He looked at me, his lips parted like he was going to say something. His big bushy eyebrows came together. And I knew that hungry, inquisitive gaze. The look of someone who knows that they want but wishes against themselves not to want.

I had looked at him with the same expression before, working on his last issue of the paper. The two of us were alone in the newspaper room. It was a hot June evening. The lights turned off, a box fan in the window running. Our foreheads touched. There was a charge in the air. Or maybe just the hum of the ancient monitors, giving their relentless light.

Sal ran forward and dove into the waves. I stood there a moment longer. The receding foam drew the sand from under my feet.

Then the others came. The sea ate out the land from under me. I swam out to meet him, out past the break.

I’m in the hallway in Philip’s house. His older brother put on the New Year’s Eve party my junior year. Sal and I drove together.

On the ride over, it was like old times. He told me about staying up all night to finish a Faulkner novella before finals, just as the first snow had started to fall. He told me about working for campus laundry service doing scheduled delivery, how kids handed him tips without looking him in the eye. I told him about my parents fighting, and how bad the paper was without him.

At the party, we didn’t say much to each other. He drank like a fish, rum over ice with a splash of club soda because he now eschewed sweet mixers.

“Bad hangovers,” he said.

I was the designated driver, which was unfortunate.

Then I didn’t see Sal for a couple hours, because he was downstairs, smoking cigarettes and debating the uprising from the previous summer. I was upstairs, sipping tonic, while my friends and the younger siblings of Sal’s classmates got smashed and played video games. It wasn’t until some seniors showed up, fashionably late, that Sal et al. came up to join us. He looked very collegiate in a cream sweater and light gray slacks, a pair of burnished brown oxfords on his feet, very unlike the strange boy I’d written a newspaper with.

“Glowed up, Salvador,” Quentin said to him. “College is treating you well.”

“It’s worse than it looks,” Sal said.

I excused myself.

Out in the hall, Liz was already drunk. She put her arms around my shoulders. We leaned against one wall, and I talked her into asking Philip to be her New Year’s kiss. All the while, I strained to hear Sal’s voice through the doorway.

“Well, it’s an epistolary novel,” I heard Sal say. “Yes. The Narrator has decided to go to war, to fight against Erdogan, only he hasn’t gotten there yet. He’s in Bucharest where I’ve written to. You get his backstory from the perspective of the letters he exchanges with this girl back home.”

I froze. It was the first I’d heard of the book. I heard Quentin ask, “To show how he came to that point?”

“Oh, is this the Melkonian book?” Philip’s brother cut in. “The one you were writing about Monte Melkonian?”

Sal laughed awkwardly. “I’ve combined it with a bildungsroman.” “Our talented boy,” Philip’s brother said.

“Can we read it?” Quentin asked.

“When it’s done,” Sal said. “When it’s done.”

When I visited Sal a couple of months after that New Year’s party, he gave me a printed copy of the book. I hadn’t expected him to finish it.

This time I slept on the air mattress. We got drunk each night and hung out with his friends. I could tell they thought we were fucking. I think my parents did too.

My brother taught me the best policy with people like that is to withhold as much information as possible. People don’t feel you keep secrets, he told me, if you never tell anyone anything to begin with.

Sal gave me the book at the Amtrak station. I was on the last southbound train.

He dressed even sharper now, tailored trousers and winter boots, a coat with peaked lapels. I wore a raincoat, one of those plastic sorts that adhere to bare skin when wet. It was March, and it rained so hard the water ran down the legs of my jeans.

“This is yours,” he said and pressed a plastic bag into my hands. “You’re more responsible for it than anyone else.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to lay on me, Sal.”

“Let me know what you think,” he said. “I wrote it, but there’s a person in there who thinks just like you.”

I hugged him. The sleeve of my coat stuck to his neck. There was more I wanted to say, but it stuck in my throat.

“I also emailed it to you, if that’s easier to read,” he said.

The train pulled into the station, the rain hissing when it struck the engine.

He had printed it out, hole punched it, and bound it with string so I could carry it around. The cover bore the title in a Swiss modernist font.

I was there on the page. Whole sentences I’d said, whole sentences I’d written in my letters, usually in the mouth of his narrator, mixed in with half-quotes from Castro.

For a while, I didn’t know what to do. I read and re-read the passages taken from my conversations with him, my letters to him. I half expected the narrator, a brooding journalist-turned-revolutionary, to end up with the academic of ambiguous ethnicity. At the end, the narrator died in a Turkish artillery strike. Couldn’t even get to it in fiction.

A few months after that, in the early summer, he asked everyone who’d read the thing to delete it. I deleted the email. The printed copy sat in a folder under my bed. I’d written annotations in the margins with the fountain pen my parents got for Charlie one birthday.

After the beach, Sal and I broke open a watermelon. Half of it went quick, the slices a cool snack. But I saved the other half, cut it into cubes, and put these into a bowl. I covered them in vodka because the hundred proof was almost too gross to drink straight. We put the bowl in the fridge.

“You learn that trick from Charlie?” he asked.

I nodded and looked Sal in the face.

“You know, he’s the first guy I ever got drunk with,” Sal said. “Or one of them. Philip’s brother had some sort of party, and Charlie brought the hard stuff.”

“How old were you?”

“Fifteen,” Sal said. Silence fell. I put the knife and the cutting board in the sink, rinsed them both off. Liz had been to the store, so I got out the ingredients for the big dinner, peppers, onions, stuff for a marinade, chicken breasts. I started cutting the onions. All the while, Sal watched me. I found this noble, that he felt no need to fill the silence. He would know when there was something good to say.

“Charlie was different,” Sal said. “He meant a lot to a lot of people.”

“He was a vicious bully and an alcoholic,” I said. “But he read a lot.”

Sal said nothing.

“I mean,” I said. “People liked him for a lot of reasons.” The more I thought about it, the angrier I got.

“Hell of a defender,” Sal said. “I always wondered what would’ve happened if he stuck with the varsity team.”

I nodded a little bit. “I’m glad you still think about him. That’s what I mean. I’ll be his age come January, then older. The closer I get, the more I realize how small he was. How small he will always be.”

Sal let me talk. I felt his hand on my back for a moment, a ghost of a touch. He took a knife from the block and started cutting up the chicken breasts.

“Did he know what any of it meant, did he feel any power to choose? Did he know how that would end? I wonder if I would’ve chosen any different,” I said. “I guess it doesn’t matter. Stuff like that. It’s all a game of odds.”

“You’re wrong,” Sal said. The onions got to him then, and I was glad. I didn’t want him to see how much I was crying.

For a long time after he gave me the book, I didn’t see Sal. It wasn’t until the New Year’s of my senior year that he came back and I saw him again, at a party. This time on our side of town, just across the river from my house. Neither of us drank because the host had quit drinking at sixteen. We walked home together, pausing on the big iron bridge. That night, the lights in the park glittered on the water’s still surface. The pilings from old shipping wharves stuck up out of the river mud, little fragments of a world that seemed so distant as to be unreal.

“I’m seeing someone,” Sal said. He leaned against the rail of the bridge. “But I don’t think it’s going to work out.”

I said nothing.

“She and I don’t value the same things,” he said. “Which I’m told is important.”

“Do you remember when we were editors?” I said.

“Of course.”

“And do you remember the summer after that, before you left for college?”

“You were working in the dining hall,” he said.

I nodded. “And you didn’t have a job. We all used to meet up after I got off work, you and me, Phil and Liz, the others. Walk around the city, park to park. Why did you spend so much time with us? You were like a real adult.”

“First time I felt like I had real friends,” Sal said. But he wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Is that all?”

“When I break up with her, I’ll call you.”

“And then what?”

“We’ll see, Anita.”

“Why didn’t you say this earlier?” I asked, the long minutes in the newsroom on my mind. “Why now?”

He sighed and looked down the river. “I expected more of myself.” I left it at that.

After the onions made Sal cry, everybody else pitched in. We made a big dinner. That’s when the drinking started. Sangria first, up on the deck facing the marshland. The breeze coming off the sea and the deepening shadows made it all feel much cooler, and I put a button-up over the t-shirt I was wearing. The boys wore light jackets.

We got to the harder liquor inside, where the heat of cooking turned the first floor of the house into an oven. We shed the layers. Everybody got drunk.

We played cards, and Quentin put a party playlist on his speaker. We all talked bullshit about who was going where, who was fucking who, who was secretly a Republican. Sal defended socialism. Liz knocked over a glass when she tried to get everyone to dance. Quentin kept losing, but he took it like a champ, even when Philip tried to rub it in.

Then it was time to clean up, the clock past midnight and the alcohol and heat getting unbearable. Everyone else went up to bed, one by one, almost like they could tell there was something that needed to be said without their hearing.

Sal and I cleaned up. I filled the basin with scalding water and scrubbed with steel wool. I kept dropping silverware in the sink when I tried to wash it. He dried stuff. Put the leftovers away.

When I had drained the basin for the last time, I turned the light off.
Sal lit a cigarette. The open windows let in the ocean wind. It was getting cool again. “You don’t smoke those things on the regular,” I asked. The room was black, Sal’s face dimly visible in the orange glow. Around us, the appliances and furniture took on the shapes of phantoms.

“Nope,” he said. He passed me the cigarette. “You’re going to California, in the fall.” His voice didn’t slur, but it fluttered.

I nodded.

“Do they know?”

“They think I’m going to UConn.”

“Why haven’t you told them?”
I shrugged, passed the cigarette back. “Better to leave it.”

“Yeah,” Sal said. “God forbid anyone in this group know anything for sure.”

I put my hand on his, pulled the cigarette out of his fingers. The brush of skin on skin was electrifying. I felt like I could see everything in the room.

He put his hand on my hip, and I was backed against the sink. I dropped the cigarette in the basin, blew a bit of smoke in his face.

“I’m not some kid anymore, Salvador.”

Our heads were together for the first time in years. “Not here,” he said. “It feels too public.”

“I need to brush my teeth.”

“You know where I sleep.”
I nodded.

“Doesn’t pay to wait . . .” he came to one of those alcoholic pauses. He’d outrun the sentence. “Forever.”

“Why not, then?” I asked. “Why now?”

“Didn’t want to feel like a creep,” he said.

“You weren’t a creep.”

“I loved you,” Sal said, one hand on the side of my face. “So many times I planned to say it. So many times. Even got to the point where I would almost say it, a word or two away.”

My breathing was shallow. “I loved you too.”

He nodded. Then he left me to brush my teeth. He got ready for bed. I heard him. It took me a couple minutes to get off the sink.

Then I was in that hallway, in front of his door, imagining his hands all over me. Imagining our mouths together with an issue of the paper on the computer screen in front of us, as I had imagined so many nights before. As it should have been then. I thought about the length of the summer yet. I thought about how hard it was to leave, and harder still to come back. There was a tension there, something that kept me ever on the threshold. If I passed it, if I lay down beside him, if I kissed him. All of it would matter. All of it would be true. The long desires and the secret, unspoken want realized all at once in a tangle of limbs, a packet of cellophane, a warm summer’s night beneath the cool ocean breeze.

I wanted so badly to go into that room, but more than that, I wanted Sal to take my hand, to pull me in. He could hear me breathing, ragged, uneven. I know because I could still hear his breath when the sun rose.