I looked around the restaurant, noting the dangling Edison bulb fixtures, tropical beach-shack decor, and chatty crowd of well-exfoliated young couples and sunburned families in khakis and sweaters and bracelets made of braided string. It was a familiar role for me, the loner observing the crowd, to all appearances part of the scene, but not quite. That was how I’d often gotten by while growing up in a tumultuous household, watching, conciliating, retreating, holding in all the tension while others set theirs free. It was also how I’d spent much of my time as a journalist, especially over the past several months on the hospitality beat: out among the patrons of the city’s hangouts but on the outside, watching snippets of other people’s lives unfold. But, I reminded myself, I was at the start of something new and pursuing a sport I’d never even considered before, and that was giving me hope: hope that there was still something out there for me, that I could find happiness again.
Things could be a lot worse, I thought as I surrendered my barstool and made my way to the car. This does not suck.
Twenty minutes later I was sitting in the darkened car across the street from the pub in Amagansett where the bride and groom and rehearsal-dinner folks were to meet up with the rest of us. The dinner was running late, so I was stalling before heading inside, worrying that I wouldn’t know anyone and wanting to avoid awkward small talk. Some little internal voice, though, was prodding me to just get out and face it. No amount of hesitating was going to change the fact that I had to navigate my life on my own, and I might as well get on with trying to enjoy it.
I was about to climb down from the driver’s seat and head into whatever awaited me when I saw Ben. He was getting out of a small red hatchback parked in front of me and stood for a few seconds until an attractive blonde appeared by his side. He casually draped his arm over her shoulders, and the two of them slowly crossed the street toward the bar. I was long over our dalliance and pretty sure I had no real interest in him, and yet that sight sent a shockwave through my system, a rolling sensation of sadness and longing and deprivation that pinned me to my seat.
Breathe, I told myself, just breathe. I don’t know how long I sat there—five minutes or twenty—before I felt I could go in and face them all. It wasn’t so much him that I was craving but what he and she and seemingly everyone at the wedding had except for Jen and me: someone else in their lives, someone to understand them, hold them, love them, listen to them, fuck them, advise them, help them, support them. I didn’t, and had no concrete reason to believe I ever would again. It was lousy to be single, and no matter how much I kept telling myself I was going to be okay on my own, and better that way than with the wrong man, no matter how many times I ran myself into a weeping, heaving exhaustion with Whitney Houston wailing into my earbuds “I’d rather be alone than unhappy,” I was so full of want right then I felt I could explode. I couldn’t help but wonder, When, when, when, when, WHEN do I get to be the girl on someone’s arm again?
* * *
Sunday morning I awakened to a raging hangover, my head throbbing, body sore, tongue sticky with paste. The wedding, at the bride’s oceanfront family estate at the end of a long driveway off an exclusive lane in East Hampton, had been a beautiful, elaborate affair and, despite my trepidation, a great time all around. People had been so interested to hear about my newfound obsession with surfing—and to share tales and frustrations about their own beloved activities—that I hadn’t had to talk about my relationship status at all. But there had been free-flowing champagne, which I, like Liz Imbrie, one of the journalist outsiders in The Philadelphia Story, had never had enough of, so I predictably drank way too much.
Now I climbed gingerly out of bed and looked at the ocean. The weather was overcast and misty, but I could just make out some rough, medium-sized waves. I was due at my surf lesson by nine, so I didn’t have much time. Jen was curled up on the sofa bed, reading, and said she’d be okay by herself there for a few hours before we went to the final brunch reception and then back to Brooklyn. I made some espresso, ate half a bowl of granola, grabbed some water, and got into the car.
I drove along the highway and through town, the road still damp in the heavy morning air. I turned right toward the beach, made my way to the East Deck Motel, and pulled into a driveway across the street, where I was to meet my instructor, John.
I walked past a long surfboard lying in the yard of a big brown split-level and knocked. “Hey,” a guy said, peering through the screen door. “You must be Diane.”
“Yes,” I said with a start, realizing that he was so hot I would have a hard time looking at him. I had noticed him teaching another student when I was out with Sean in Montauk earlier that summer but had been so freaked out in the water that I hadn’t registered quite how good-looking he was. He had thick sandy-brown hair pulled back in a short, low ponytail and broad, high cheekbones bronzed from a summer in the sun. He stood about my height, with brown eyes and a chiseled chin hovering above the mounds and hollows of his bare, heavily muscled shoulders and chest, all leading down to what seemed like a half-healed scrape on his rib cage, just above the waistband of his sweatpants.
Look away! I heard myself screaming in my head. Get ahold of yourself! I did, taking a deep breath, willing myself to focus on why I was there.
“Let me get you a suit and I’ll meet you outside.”
He came out and noticed the board in the grass. “Oh, wow, I didn’t realize he dropped it off!” he said, excited, handing me a wetsuit. He knelt over the board and picked it up, turning it this way and that, running his fingers over its shiny surface to land on a repaired spot that looked like a smudge of ivory in a pale-blue expanse on the bottom. “Wow, he did a great job. I can’t wait to get this back out in the water.”
John headed inside as I pulled off my T-shirt and cutoff denim skirt and began to struggle into the wetsuit. He was back out in what seemed like an instant, having traded the sweatpants for a gray wetsuit pulled up to the waist. We chatted as I tried with middling success to keep my eyes focused on my task and away from his chest. He was Kristin’s cousin and had grown up elsewhere on Long Island, a family friend of her partner, Corey from the surf school. The house was his grandmother’s, so he was able to spend summers there and had been surfing since childhood, he said as he pulled up the top of his suit. “We were just really lucky to have this,” he said more than once.
We walked across the street and through the dirt parking lot to the beach. He grabbed two big soft-top boards from an array leaning up against a dune and headed into the water, waiting for me about shin-deep to catch up and take one of them. The water was cold and choppy and I felt unstable on the rocks, but some combination of my hangover fog and the smidgen of progress I’d made at the lesson in Rockaway was dulling the edge of my fear.
“I know this was supposed to be a whitewater lesson,” he said as I tried to ferry the board out into the slop. “But I don’t believe in that. We’re going outside.”
I wasn’t well versed in surf terms, so I thought we were already outside, but I soon realized that he meant something other than outdoors: rather than stay closer to the beach and try to catch the foam from waves that had already broken, we would go beyond that, “outside,” to catch the waves as they peaked, as I had done with Kevin in Rockaway. But with John on a surfboard rather than standing in front of me in the water, I realized that I’d have to handle myself and the board on my own. The old dread-knot began to coil in my belly. The waves suddenly seemed bigger and more menacing than what I’d been on before, as if they could work me over as I tried to get through them. But before I had time to chicken out, I was flat on the board, following instructions to push up with my arms to get over the crests, and frantically paddling behind John, waves slapping my face as I went. Outside wasn’t too far, I was happy to realize, and before long I was sitting next to him in the water, wheezing, and definitely more alert than when I’d rolled out of bed.