Ian, Coley, and Scott all drive down to Provincetown ahead of me in a rented Lincoln Town Car. Coley always rents Lincoln Town Cars and they are always dark blue. He is rich and has never ever worked. Never.
Coley has rented a beach hut for us, and it is, just as I remember from my childhood, directly on the beach like those we used to go to with my brother. Where we would walk the long lazy in the day and loud at night boardwalk, only here there is no boardwalk.
It is hot and humid and we take to the beach, even though I am ginger-haired/blonde and too fair for this American sun, I go anyway. Dr. Caviness had told me not to go in the sun. That if I had to “walk about in the sun” he said, that I was to “wear a hat.” I think of him, like it’s an echo as we’re driving to the beach, but it seems unimportant at the moment, or perhaps I am in some form of denial.
I just want to be like everyone else.
Nobody else is dead white. Nobody else is wearing a big floppy hat or sunscreen and a big oxford shirt. I leave everything in the car and head to the beach where we stay for several hours and emerge later, walking over the dunes and back to the car, we settle in to watch the sun-set, drink a bottle of Cliquot that Coley had ready in the car, and then go home and rest and shower. Though I am terribly red, so red in fact, that it is painful when Ian and I attempt to make love that we eventually feel that we are searing the flesh off of each other and stop. We sleep, then shower and we all head out for the night, driving our big Lincoln Town Car that Coley insisted on renting and heading into the heart of Provincetown.
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As we get to town though, I find myself becoming moodier and dark. My head hurts more than it ever has before and I’m seeing double (this is called diplopia, they will tell me) . I have missed four of the pink Tegretol pills because I was on the beach and it didn’t seem that important. A few would be okay, I reasoned, only now, I feel confused and strange and out of control.
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