That Old Cape Magic

insult, and Griffin was pretty sure Peter and Mr. Browning, after watching his father’s daily struggles to unfold his beach chair, had sized him up as physically ungifted. “Your dad’s quite a reader, I see,” Peter’s father remarked one day, perhaps searching for a compliment that would have some basis in reality, and Griffin nodded, again glowing with shame.
    By the end of their two weeks together, he and Peter had developed an intimacy that was wholly foreign to his experience and made him wonder if this was what love was like. It wasn’t a sexual feeling, though it constricted his heart with a strange, purposeless urgency he didn’t comprehend. When he wasn’t with Peter, he needed to talk about him and, no surprise, his parents tired of this subject quickly, especially when Griffin began to lobby them about renting one of these same cottages next summer, so he and Peter could be together again. Having already sounded him out about the owners’ rotation, he knew that the Brownings would be on the Cape in July. Please,
please
, he begged, couldn’t they book a cottage right now? If they couldn’t afford the whole month, at least take it for the first two weeks of July, so they’d all arrive together. Otherwise, Peter might develop some new summer friendship before Griffin could get there.
    The reason he was so certain his attraction to Peter wasn’t sexual was that his feelings for the boy’s mother were
precisely
that. When Mrs. Browning wore a two-piece bathing suit, he had to lie on his stomach in the hot sand to conceal his erection. He didn’t let on to Peter, of course, not even daring to say something innocentlike “Your mom’s really pretty,” but somehow he seemed to know anyway. Was it possible Peter harbored similar feelings for his own mother? Did that happen? Mr. Browning also noticed Griffin’s admiration, but instead of being annoyed or even angry, as Griffin imagined he might be, all he did was smile, as if he understood his wife’s charms all too well and couldn’t blame the boy for being taken with them. In fact, his kindness so shamed Griffin that for a day or two he tried his best to banish any dirty thoughts (as he’d characterized them) about Mrs. Browning, but it was no use. One afternoon, lying on her stomach in the warm sand, she untied her bathing suit top to take full advantage of the sun and then fell asleep. The waves were perfect that day, but Griffin told Peter he was tired of bodysurfing, whereas in truth he was intoxicated by the possibility that when Peter’s mother woke up she might momentarily forget the untying and rise up, bare-breasted. She didn’t, of course, but again Griffin felt that his friend knew what he was up to.
    Had he ever again felt quite so sick at heart as at the end of their Cape vacation that summer? Not in adult life, surely. During the first of their two weeks he’d fallen in love, however improbably, with the whole Browning family, and every day, even the rainy ones, was radiant. During the second week, though, everything pivoted, as each passing day moved relentlessly toward the conclusion of their stay. The thought of leaving the Cape and never seeing Peter or any of the Brownings again engendered in Griffin a dark, complex emotion every bit as powerful as love. Part of it he recognized as despair, a panicked anxiety that left him breathless and weak, certain that things would never again return to normal or, worse, that normal was no longer enough, that his previous life amounted to starvation. But there was something else that scared him even more than despair: the desire to … what? To harm himself. To hurt even worse than he was already hurting. To ensure that whateverhad been broken was beyond repair. Though there was a word for it
—perversity—
he didn’t know it yet, wouldn’t for many years. He knew only the feeling, but that was full and sufficient.
    The evening before the Griffins were to leave, the Brownings invited him over for hamburgers and ice cream. Mr. Browning had some sparklers they were saving for their own last night, but since their new friend and his parents were departing, they’d decided to break them out early. Wanting desperately to accept their invitation, he instead told Peter that he and his parents were going out for a fancy dinner at the Blue Martini. It was very expensive, he said, but his parents had promised him he could order whatever he wanted, no matter what it cost, so he’d have