words running down.
Summer on the Cape, and she stood at the top of Newcomb Hollow Beach, running down the dunes, the sand biting her heels—
Becks.
Dove for the relief of the cold gray ocean—
Tell.
Who said that? The surf rushed at her, a big wave, bigger than she’d expected—
Something—
And the water took her.
IV BRIAN
(THEN AND NOW)
23
Charlottesville
Brian was taking it easy this winter.
No worries, he had eleven hundred bucks stuffed in the bottom of his duffel. Hadn’t touched it since he came to Virginia. He paid the rent running pizzas on weekends, sometimes with a special side order for frat boys who needed a hookup. Not often, and nothing harder than pot or Addys. No coke, even if they asked. He didn’t want a reputation. Didn’t want the cops looking for him. But if he could pick up fifty bucks in five minutes selling pills he wasn’t gonna say no.
Plus he could live on the cheap in this town. His rent was only four fifteen a month. A fourth-floor one bedroom, no elevator, mice in the walls. Sometimes they woke him up, pitter-patter behind his head. But the place was an easy walk to the bars on Main Street. Even had a round window that opened up to the hills west of town.
Brian liked Charlottesville. He had his laptop, his Nintendo, his Introduction to C manual. No more cold-enough-to-peel-skin midwestern winters, no more Seattle rain. And UVA deserved its rep as a party school. Especially during basketball season. When the games were done, the students poured out of the U Hall—the arena—and headed for the bars.
Of course, the grade A sorority sisters usually went straight to Frat Row. Even when they were at the bars, Brian didn’t hit on them. Up north, rich coeds might slum once in a while. Down here the class system was set in stone. Fine. Let the nose-job girls chase their BMW-driving princes. Sixes and sevens were more his wheelhouse anyway.
Over the years, Bri had developed a clinical attitude toward the game. He played the odds, didn’t take rejection personally, moved on if he wasn’t feeling a vibe.
He’d figured out he had a type. Quiet outsiders. Girls majoring in philosophy who wanted to spend a year in Tokyo after graduation. He stayed away from real artists. Those women were too in love with themselves to pay attention to him—and if they did, they saw through his crap because they were just as full of it as he was.
He played instead to the middle-class romantics, the ones who convinced themselves that he had special insight into the human condition because he’d driven an ambulance. That he was a poet because he hadn’t made it through his first year at Michigan State. They treated him with a seriousness he was pretty sure he didn’t deserve, but that he could pull off for a night of drinking.
He tilted his head and listened—kinda—as they told him how they hated the conformity of college. He didn’t have to push drinks on them. They got lit on their own, flushed with the excitement of talking to someone who wasn’t majoring in business. Their cool-headed friends tried to get them to leave, tugged their wrists, whispered warnings loud enough for Brian to overhear, You don’t even know who this dude is, he’s shady, too old for you, come on, let’s go. And the romantics shook their heads and stayed. Maybe they were genuinely into him, or the idea of him as a wanderer. Maybe they were just bored. Or drunk.
As for him?
He just wanted sex.
Brian was pretty much a realist, no illusions about the world or his place in it. He wasn’t dumb, and spending so much time by himself had given him a chance to read a lot. But he couldn’t stand doing any kind of intellectual work that didn’t grab his attention right away. Same thing with manual labor. He was clever and good with his hands. He could learn most jobs in a hurry. But he couldn’t make himself care enough to become great at any of them.
Jack of all trades, master of none.
What was true for work was doubly true for relationships. He was friendly to his neighbors, but he never got to know them past a Hey, how are you. He prized sensation over emotion. He’d tried practically every drug in existence. But if he felt himself wanting to use more than casually, he stopped. Stone-cold. Addiction was just a fancy word for need. More than anything in the world,