On one of the off-the-coast sand bar beaches at Cape Cod, I came up with the idea for a story that I never wrote. The plot was simple, and it packed a clear moral lesson. A mid-aged couple—waspy, urbane, and always griping about changes to the Cape they knew as children—would take out their correspondingly old-money (read: dilapidated) whaler to a sandbar for a day at the beach. At the sand bar, the husband would anchor the boat incorrectly, and when they returned to go home, the boat would be gone. Tensions flare and the two get into one of their all-too-typical bouts of hostile passive-aggression. “Maybe if you’d tied down the boat correctly… Maybe if you’d put the other anchor in the boat, like I’d asked…” and so on. Both fear that they are stranded, and the sun is going down. Then, a loud, kind, gauche couple in a new-style massive speedboat with double engines spots the distressed pair. They bring the boat by to offer help, and say they’d be happy to offer them a ride home. As they get on the boat (and this is the conceit of the story), the gauche woman jocularly proclaims that the others are welcome aboard; their only rule is that everybody be nice to each other. All the distinctions are cut- and-dry: the stranded couple don’t want to talk about sports, the new-money couple can’t stop talking about their son’s baseball team; the stranded husband finds it hard to listen to the other man talk about his boat, partially because he looks down on such a possession, partially because he knows he can’t afford one like it; the speedboat couple is happy, the stranded couple is unhappy. Gradually, the stranded couple realizes that the only way they will make it home is by being nice to this new-money couple, and to each other, and when they get home to their dock, they are able to acknowledge that they love each other, if only because they aren’t like the couple who rescued them. I was going to write this kind of story for Valentine’s Day. But I realized I know about as little about marriage as I do about boat anchors. So, I sit down and begin and wonder, what kind of love story can I write? What kind of love, if any, do I know about?
I do not know about the embattled, hard-won love of long-time couples like my parents, and some of my friends who date, which I know requires selflessness, patience, and a gradual giving over of pride; and, if you commit yourself fully to this bond, your love develops into the strongest form of companionship; it is cool, sober, and characterized by mutual good-will, what one writer might have called “the opposite of loneliness.” Some six weeks before I got to Cape Cod, in 2012, a recent graduate named Marina Keegan died on the very same road, in a car accident. Her boyfriend was behind the wheel. I didn’t know her at Yale, and hadn’t read her famous article when I heard the news of her death, but the bare bones of the story struck me so deeply that, when I arrived at the Cape, and first drove on the winding coastal roads, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. If I lost control of the wheel, there would be no one in the passenger seat to live or die. It is just me, driving this notoriously leaky car, made by a manufacturer notorious for making cars that break down, overheat, fail to start, and generally stop working. I had convinced my father that it would be a better car for me, with all its probable difficulties, than anything that worked well. And surely, its difficulties have been connected with my greatest victories: an urgent stop in a stow-storm, when we were driving down from Vermont, led to one of the best meals I have ever had, in a small town diner, with excellent company. Twice, I have relied on strangers to help me fix it. And, generally, having to joke about and embrace the ever-present threat of engine failure gets across to my passengers exactly what I want it to (and there are a million clichéd ways to put it): that our journey is not about getting to where we are going. Car accidents, sudden deaths, are a reminder that we might not be going anywhere at all.
I am on Route 6, a two-line highway referred to as “Suicide Alley” because there are so many accidents. My car, for its foibles, feels reliable. I have driven so many people in it, and their presences continue to inhabit the passenger seat, like the CDs and articles which have been left, and are now piled on the back seat and in the glove compartment. I arrive safely, tired from a day of driving, and, as I pull into my friend Graham’s house in Chatham, Mass., he approaches the car with two beers in hand, and gives me a strong hug. It is warm, but not buggy, and there is a cool breeze from the water. The air is salty.
I enter their home: all wooden and covered with ivy and very old. After I drop my bags in the guest room, Graham’s mother points out the old wood, the lichened brick, and, most importantly, the eroding sea wall just beyond the yard. Her fear is that, in time—a matter of years—the house will be gone, vanished into the sea. Her husband seems to take more of a ‘come what may’ attitude to the sea wall, perhaps to change in general. (On the issue of the sea wall, the sons seem not to be concerned in the least.) While they hit croquet balls in the St. Augustine grass, Graham’s mother paces off the steps between the house and the void, with all the deliberateness of a line judge. Fifteen steps from the door. Twelve from the edge of the porch. At a yard per year, this means fifteen years until the whole place goes into the ocean, or, two or three big storms. “Where are the boys going to bring their kids?” She seems to blame her husband for the precariousness of the house, or at least his laissez-faire response. For his part (he is a restoration architect), he promises that the house can simply be moved back; it is not such a grave problem to him. And yet this solution seems insufficient to her, either improbable or somehow too easy. It doesn’t address the real underlying concern about time’s erosion: Graham’s mother contents herself to ironize the perspective of anyone unconcerned with loss, especially making fun of the decision not to put up sandbags during the last storm. “Yeah, why put up sand bags?” she scoffs. I am a guest in this house, and so am in no position to comment on whether or not it will fall into the ocean, or when.
GRAHAM AND I LOAD INTO MY CAR BECAUSE OUR next stop is a baseball game. The windows are down; the sun is not. With the sunroof open of this safari- looking vehicle, I feel suddenly very far away from New York, where I’ve just finished my summer internship. It is almost cold with the breeze blowing through every window, and certainly loud, but the feeling of both sun and breeze my skin feels so good that neither of us suggests rolling up the windows, nor does anyone suggest turning down the music. A classic rock station is on, and my car’s service engine light flashes and makes a noise almost to the rhythm of the beat. It does this every so often and I ignore it. We drive past a group of kids on the beach playing volleyball. They are so tan they must have already been here all summer. We drive through town, past the liquor store with almost old-enough kids hanging around outside, past the main pizza restaurant, and finally, closer to the city center and the church and town hall, past the ice-cream parlor and mom-and-pop shops peddling coastal kitsch. A child drops his entire ice-cream cone and this is almost unbearably funny in how harmless it is a tragedy.
Graham is my suitemate, and, having been away from him all summer, I feel like I love him now as much as I possibly can, shy of romantic love. He works for the Chatham A’s, and I let him out of the car to go to the ballpark early, where he hangs around with players our age, takes photos, updates the website, and generally performs whatever task the general manager asks of him. I am going to the game that night, but until I do, I waste time around town. I drive to the lighthouse, where I park and reflect on being alone, once again, in a car bearing the spectral presence of not one love, but many more. I can almost sense another person in the passenger seat, as I sit and watch the sun dip below the Atlantic Ocean. I am looking for sharks in the water, laughing to myself about the strange circumstances which have led to me sitting in a safari vehicle and looking for sharks. It’s the kind of joke that’s only funny to oneself; difficult to express should there actually be someone next me. As I say, there is almost this person with me, and I can communicate well enough with him or her, as I think these fleeting thoughts, whole understandings of the scene before me materialize and coalesce and disappear almost instantly, but this presence can understand me even before I forget what I’m saying. He or she is not a person I know or even a dead person, but an aggregate, the spirit of many. I have shared this car, music, and sun with him or her many times. He or she is very tanned and a bit sweaty from the beach. I am not alone.
Neither was Marina Keegan. She worried about graduation, about losing the feeling of love and togetherness which exists at Yale. In her piece, “The Opposite of Loneliness,” Keegan writes of her fear of losing this sense of community. More precisely, she writes, “It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are on your team.” She writes about the groups of people—societies, clubs, houses—that we surround ourselves with and in which we feel loved. But in the final moment of her piece she is alone, in an empty lecture hall, on a winter night:
It was quiet, the old wood creaking and the snow barely visible outside the stained glass. And I sat down. And I looked up. At this giant room I was in. At this place where thousands of people had sat before me. And alone, at night, in the middle of a New Haven storm, I felt so remarkably, unbelievably safe.
It corresponds to my feeling of un-loneliness that I feel it most, ironically, when I am by myself. In the car, in an empty lecture hall, when the ghostly presence of loved ones is almost there. This feeling of being alone, and being loved in that nothingness, is the happiness, peace, and warmth of a love abstracted from the love which you know others have had for you, refracted and internalized. The opposite of loneliness is really self-love. (See, for example, The Modern Lovers, “Roadrunner”: “I don’t feel so alone now that I’m in the car/ don’t feel so alone, I got the radio on.”) I didn’t understand that self-love can flood like the bay before the outer beach and swell in the sun, and that you can share it with others; this, I think, is what I didn’t understand about marriage.
But I am just sitting in the car and, as I have said, listening to a class rock station. One of the staples of this kind of station is Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer.” The refrain goes:
I can see you
Your brown skin shining in the sun
Who is it that Don Henley can see? A former girlfriend, is it her hair shining in the sun? A boy of summer? Himself? Who is this youthful figure so evocative to Henley of a summery vision of the world, innocence personified? The power of this song is that he will remain faithful (his love “strong”) to this figure, to himself, even after the first glow of youth is gone, when he’s old and withered, when it’s autumn, when nobody remains in this beach community (“nobody on the roads, nobody on the streets”), and nostalgia hangs “in the air,” like a thick fog rolling in off the water. Saying that his “love… will still be strong/ after the boys of summer are gone” not only means that he will continue to be attached to this image, to this vision which no longer exists, but also that he affirms his constancy and faithfulness to the person who was once young—the self, a girlfriend or boyfriend, it doesn’t matter; against time and change, he will still love that figure, his “hair slicked back,” and his “wayfarers on.” And of course Don Henley—who is old by the time this song is written, making music for dads wearing tennis shoes—was once this boy. It is hard not to see Don Henley’s faithfulness to that boy, his longing for him, as a kind of self-love.
Nostalgia is a sad, sad song. Apparently, “Boys of Summer” was originally recorded at a much slower tempo. According to Henley, it was just flat until, one day, he was tinkering in the studio and sped it up to twice its normal speed. He instantly knew that it was right. This is what gives the song its quality of being a little too mechanical, a little too fast—a formal contrast with its retrospective outlook and its sadness about the passage of time, making this nostalgia seem a little futile.
It is sad that the song wants to speed up, even as the singer wants to slow down, and cling to the past. It is the music itself that is the “little voice” in his head, which says, “Don’t look back, you can never look back.” Electronic drums and its too-fast tempo drive him forward into the future at an almost unbearable speed, even as an inner voice cautions against nostalgia. It is a message not out of sync with another of his songs, “The End of Innocence”: “Just lay your head back on the ground/ and let your hair fall all around me/ Offer up your best defense/ But this is the end of innocence.” How can I stop and take account of my time on the Cape, when summer is gone, my innocence is over? I have long since lost my virginity, if that matters, my friends are balding, I haven’t been to a baseball game in years, hair grows on my upper arms and lower back. My car that I drove to the Cape—on a two-lane highway informally called “Suicide Alley”—is broken and its engine smokes; it is sitting behind my apartment unable to start, streaked with yellow from having side swiped taxi cabs, stuck behind a snow bank should it even move. Apples are withered in the trunk from rugby season and I am too lazy to take them out, or perhaps still want to eat them. I did not use my winter tires this winter because I no longer have the courage to risk driving when it is so icy. I did not go to Tremblant and I paid for it. I missed out on Myrtle last year because I cannot bear to think that Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer” might play while I am on the beach; I cannot stand the premature nostalgia, my own or anyone else’s, but especially not those of the other seniors or recent graduates who warn: never graduate. College is the best four years of your life. Couples break up in advance of graduation, because they can’t enjoy something that they realize isn’t permanent. But what is? As Don Henley knew well, love ends when the summer does, and sometimes when it begins.
And yet you will love! It is indeed the summer, and I am up in the bleachers, watching Cape league baseball in Chatham. The boys of summer are here, already in Don Henley’s past tense, as the song plays on the P.A., and also on the field, living in their own present. The scene feels American. What is in this strong athlete’s head, other than dip and sunflower seeds? Thoughts of the beach? Memories of baseball games when he was even younger, brighter-eyed? A longing to have it be as it was before, when he was not professionally muscular, making the first overtures of sex toward his then-girlfriend. There is no way to say. The beer tastes good after a long day of driving. The air is salty and a cool breeze makes sitting in the stands bearable. Tanned local high schoolers crowd around each other in little groups, while slightly younger kids—too full of energy to confine themselves to the bleachers and actually watch the game—run around beyond the fences, occasionally jostling for foul balls. A few of the younger boys appear more interested in the game than using the game as an opportunity for socializing. These are the ones, I guess, who will make a bid to one day be as great as their college-aged heroes on the field.
I can tell you my love for you will still be strong After the boys of summer are gone.
What is it about the summer, about a baseball game, that is both so long and somehow never long enough? It is a game, and a time of year, which makes a point of being long, of trying to draw itself out over as many waning hours as possible. When the sun finally dips below the bleachers, we extend into extra innings, the insects crowding around stadium lights, until they, too, must sleep.
The next morning, we wake up and need to go to the beach. We walk down from the main house to the dock, a journey of about forty steps. Past the shaky flag pole, past some large bushes (hydrangeas), down some wooden steps covered with lichen and salt, past some low shrubs and flowers filled with bees, past the new dock house where we saw the neighbor’s son go with a girl, when he did not know we were on the dock, stargazing, and on a very steep walkway, as the tide is low. A neighbor—a fat man in madras, points to the dinghy and jokes, “Make sure not to make a wake with that thing, it’s a no-wake zone you know.” I don’t think Graham’s father is in the mood for this kind of joke, as the motorboats with two (two!) outboard engines zoom by in the sound. Out the dinghy goes, steered by Graham’s father, and passes the first buoy on the left. Graham’s mother corrects him—“You pass the first buoy on the right.” After some discussion, it is still unclear to me which side you are meant to take the first buoy on.
THERE ARE NEW HOMES AND EVERYTHING IS FASTER, bigger and more summery: more intense summer, more loveable summer, a summer getting you tanner than ever before and boats going so fast you’ll cry; Graham’s mother points out the stone sea walls of the new Cape houses on a nearby promontory; stone sea walls are no longer allowed in Chatham, as they actually accentuate the problem of erosion for the houses which don’t have them; it is too late for my friends’ home; not only are the new Cape Houses ugly and too big and made of stone sea walls, and driving up rents, they are literally destroying older houses, making erosion occur faster; faster loss, faster memory; it was not so when Graham’s mother was a girl on these beaches.
We are almost to the sandbar. In the dinghy, you feel the impact of each wave, the very same impacts which are eroding the seawalls, in a way that you couldn’t in a larger, newer boat. As we motor out to the sand bar, I watch this couple communicate in what can only be a practiced, lifelong, low-grade sarcasm, somehow essential, not antipathetic, to their relationship. I watch them argue about which buoy to pass, how fast to drive, how to anchor the boat, whether the house will crash into the water in fifteen years or twenty. Then, I see them spread out towels on the beach and absorb the sun. Completely at peace now, happy, the sun and sand calling up sentimental recollections of boyhood and girlhood, as children in the distance play and roughhouse in the water; we roughhouse in the water. I can tell they are in love. In love with the sun, the hydrangeas, the children, with their memories, with themselves, and thus with each other (is marriage not a giving over the self, a “union?”), with the swans in the bay which dip their snouts into the water, kissing their own reflection. After a swim, I return to the beach and try to channel that feeling that Marina Keegan talked about when she was alone, and yet felt loved. You can even do it when you are around others. I am learning to bask in the sun.