Ate It Anyway

Celibacy-by-the-Atlantic

celibacyby -the-atlantic It was a clever idea, but the movie did nothing with it. The noncheerleader girls, wearing their boyfriends' leather jackets and popping gum in time to the music, swaggeredbetween rows of combination lockers and advanced toward the camera in a phalanx of lipsticked smiles. Phil Heath sat in his wooden folding chair, his rear end already getting sore. He kept noticing how the girls on the screen,with their bell-shaped hair set a little too high on their heads, looked as if their saddle shoes wouldn't be enough counterweight to keep them from tipping over. 12 "You want to leave after five minutes?" This was Phil's older sister, Gwen, her eyes widening in the screen's light, glaring at Phil with the same look of mock astonishment she had been giving him ever since they were teenagers, whenevershe thought he was being stupid. "This is dumb, Gwen. Fm bored." It wasthe weekend of the island's annual Winter Festival,when stores reopened and summer people flew back for three days of half-price shopping, along with concerts by the Providence Pops, guided tours of the island's oldest houses, and classic film festivals . For the Heaths it had become a family tradition: to browse for hours in soap-scented gift shops, to drive along the beaches and dune trails in the old four-wheel-drive Mazda Phil's parents kept year-round at the house they owned on the north shore of the island. The only problem with the house was that everybody had to sleep dormitory-style,family and houseguests crammed together upstairs in the unpartitioned loft, where even husbands and wives were expected to refrain from any activity whose overheard noise would embarrass the grown-ups and confuse the children. Thus the cottage had acquired such nicknames as Mariner's Monastery and Coed Convent. "You're bored?" Gwen said. "After five minutes?" "I was bored after one minute." "Well, I wish you'd been the one to stay home with the kids," she said. "Then Mom could have come with us." "I'm sorry." Phil had flown in byhimself this year, so the mandate about celibacy on the north shore didn't bother him. Usually his wife came along, but Beth wasup in Killington, Vermont, this weekend at celibacy-by-the-atlantic 13 a corporate retreat. General Electric was conducting a series of middle-management workshops combined with a program of ski clinics by Frantz Klammer and all this filled out by a cuisine supervised by an associate chef flown in from Spago. The last time Phil and his wife had been on the island together , Beth was in one of her unpredictable playful moods: she had kissed him good night about twenty times, there on the old-fashioned dormitory bed with the mattress resting on a mesh of steel springs, with Gwen's two kids in their bedfive feet away—whether asleep or not they couldn't tell—and on the other side the congested slumber of their father's old Princeton roommate. Phil had lain awakefor an hour after Beth had fallen asleep, her warm body gravitating against his in the centripetal sag of the bedspringsand the July breeze whistling through the screen and the beacon from Winnetuxet Light flashing in the window every twelveseconds. He couldn't get to sleep that night. He remembered even thinking that he might undertake the ultimate act of nostalgia, as he had so many times in this same house over so many summer vacations, silently, under the covers, hoping nobody heard him—but instead, finally, he went padding down the stairs for his Dalmane. On the film-festival screen, outside one of Springvale's three competing malt shops, the hero (differentiated from his companions by being neither pimply nor fat nor comically large in the Adam's apple) twisted his Marlboros in his T-shirt sleeve, leaned against the caramel fender of his '57 Chevy, and gave his hair two lubricated passes with a comb. Music swelled; the chrome points of the Chevy gleamed. The hero began to sing to his prospectivegirlfriend,in the old "Unchained Melody" chord rotation of tonic, sixth minor, fourth, dominant. The song he sang addressed the issue of what a paradise this world would be if shewould only allow him to kiss her lips. This wasthe point at 14 which Phil stood up, pulled his newwindbreaker...