Manhattan Beach

by Jennifer Egan

“It only hurts at first,” she said. “After a while you can’t feel anything.” Mr. Styles grinned as if her reply were a ball he’d taken physical pleasure in catching. “Words to live by,” he said, then rose again to his immense height.

Sure enough, the toughness he’d sensed coiled in Ed Kerrigan had flowered into magnificence in the dark-eyed daughter. Proof of what he’d always believed: men’s children gave them away.

Maybe standing was what made the difference. Whatever it was, from the instant she pushed down on the pedals and the bike began to bump over the bricks, Anna felt as though lightning had touched her.

For months his absence had remained volatile and alive, as if he were in the next room or down the block. Anna had awaited him acutely. She would sit on the fire escape, grinding her gaze over the street below, thinking she saw him—trusting that thinking so would force him to appear. How could he stay away when she was waiting so hard?

She had never cried. When she’d believed he was about to return, there had been nothing to cry about, and when at last she’d stopped believing, it was too late. His absence had calcified.

No one who really knew clothes would be fooled by these enhancements, but their sewing wasn’t meant for scrutiny. As Pearl Gratzky liked to say, rather grandly, “We work in the realm of the impression.”

All those Puritans, God help him. If you had to spend an hour in church, let it be gory, incense-drenched Catholicism.

The Berringers were wearing top hats to the opera when Dexter’s people were still copulating behind hay bales in the old land. He liked the thought that his own power would one day be refined into translucence, with no memory of the blood and earth that had generated it.

Mackey’s mention of a daughter elicited no pity from him—the opposite. A family man was doubly reckless to have broken rules that everyone in the shadow world knew like a catechism. There were no exceptions. Amazing what trouble men had, believing that. Everyone thought he was the exception.

In the dark paddock, she slipped from her life like a pin dropping between floorboards.

Besides, she thought, looking into Rose’s relieved and joyful face, people practically told you the lies they wanted to hear.

She wanted to tell him, to have it out in the open. But that wasn’t true—she dreaded telling him. What she wanted was already to have told him.

He could not repress his impatience. Problems he couldn’t solve made him angry.

Three minutes after her yapping commenced, Mr. Q. opened the door and sealed Dexter in his warm, fruit-smelling embrace. He was hulking and cavernous at once, browned to mahogany. Time had enlarged him in an organic, mineral way, like a tree trunk, or salts accreting in a cave.

Anna glanced at Bascombe’s face. For the first time, his scowling impatience and fuming concentration were legible as striving.

She’d remembered the fact of this weight but not the brutal sensation of being crushed by it. Could she sustain it? She could. And now? Yes. It was like someone knocking continually at a door, awaiting a new reply. And now?

He’d fewer divers than he needed. Of his two irreconcilable wishes—to amass a robust diving program and sack every diver in it—the latter had gained an edge.

Her guide had left, shutting the door behind him. Anna watched the handsome gangster in his beautifully cut suit and felt their day with Lydia at Manhattan Beach dissolving like an aspirin into a tumbler of water.

Lust made an idiot of everyone it touched—Dexter

“Let’s look,” she said, and he realized she meant the sea, noticing only then how loud it was. They walked to the dead end and looked out at a ghostly procession of waves, like rows of people in white hats holding hands as they dove into oblivion.

Old salts partook of an origin myth, being close to the root of all things, including language. Eddie had never noticed how much of his own speech derived from the sea, from “keeled over” to “learning the ropes” to “catching the drift” to “freeloader” to “gripe” to “brace up” to “taken aback” to “leeway” to “low profile” to “the bitter end,” or the very last link on a chain.

Luck was the single thing that could rearrange facts. It could open a door where there was no door. A crooked game was worse than unfair; it was a cosmic violation.

“Melville put it best: ‘Nothing will content men but the extremest limit of the land’—but that’s not it, I can’t recall the quote. It’s in our nature to seek out the edge. Even on a golf course.”

“It’s a pity we’re forced to make the choices that govern the whole of our lives when we’re so goddamn young.” “If they’re the wrong choices, then we have to make new ones,” Dexter said. “Even late in the day.”

He woke at sunrise to an unfamiliar perfume on his sheets. Disgust and desolation closed around him. It doesn’t matter, he told himself. Men do it all the time. No one will ever know. But these bromides made him feel as though he were being soothed by a idiot.

Dexter watched his boys powering the air machine like figures on a clock. He was struggling, as he had from the start of this ride, to do the single thing he was worst at: nothing.

I feel seen

“I wish he was dead,” Anna shouted. “I liked it better.” “If wishing could make men die, there’d be nary a live one left.”

Relieved of the need to hide her condition, Anna relaxed, letting her sweater fall open so her belly protruded. Apparently, that was enough to tip a balance, for she sensed her fellow passengers prising apart her circumstances until they located her wedding band. The satisfaction of their curiosity was like a sigh. There was magic in that ring. She was offered a fan, a newspaper, a glass of water. So much power in one slim band.

Anna pictured all this with wistful resignation; so quickly, she had consigned that life to the past. Its telescopic fading was the price of hurtling forward into whatever smoldering promise issued from that orange blaze. She hungered toward it, longing for the future it contained. As the train roared west, Anna bolted upright. She had thought of her father. At last she understood: This is how he did it.

His sister’s transformation from aging tart to fussing nanny seemed almost instantaneous, like the flick of a kaleidoscope.

One thing was certain: Rose had been wrong about the world becoming small again. Or at least it would not be the same small world it had been. Too much had changed. And amid those shifts and realignments, Anna had slipped through a crack and escaped.

Foghorns lowed in the distance. They sounded deeper and louder than the foghorns Anna had heard all her life. But then, this fog was different, solid-looking enough to mold with your hands. It gushed in overnight, engulfing whole cities like amnesia.