The Marble Quilt by David Leavitt

Author:David Leavitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Speonk

I’ve never been to Speonk. To me it is just a stop on the train, a dot on a map. For all I know, it might be “Llanview,” or “Pine Valley,” or “Genoa City”—one of those imaginary towns that come to life an hour a day on soap operas. Probably, however, Speonk isn’t like any of those places. Probably it is a town full of satellite dishes.

This begins in traffic, on a summer Sunday evening on Long Island. After a comatose weekend spent in crowded houses on the wrong side of the Montauk Highway, three people are making their sleepy way back to New York. I am in the car, along with Naomi and her friend Jonathan, an actor who for the past two years has played Evan Malloy (dubbed “Evil Evan”) on The Light of Day. Recently Jonathan decided he’d had enough of rape, blackmail, drug peddling, larceny, and the like, and gave the producers of the show six weeks’ notice: just enough time for Evan to commit a murder, frame his good-as-gold brother, Julian, and at the eleventh hour get found out. Evan went to prison, and Jonathan, on the heels of his final taping, went to Penn Station, where he caught a train to Bridgehampton, relieved that their paths had finally diverged. He spent the weekend sleeping on the beach, and now, two days later, is sitting languid in the back seat of Naomi’s car, still looking a bit like the tough he’s become famous for playing, in a baseball cap and dirty white T-shirt.

“Even with this traffic, I think we should be back in the city by ten,” Naomi says.

He laughs. “That’ll still be less time than it took me to get out here.”

“You came by train, didn’t you?” I ask.

“Jonathan had a little trouble getting to Bridgehampton,” Naomi says. “It took him—how long was it, Jonathan? Six, seven hours?”

“Seven and a half.”

“What happened?”

He stretches his arms over his head, so that when I look over my shoulder, I catch a glimpse of the hair in his armpits. “Well, you know how in Jamaica you have to change trains,” he says. “I got on the train across the platform, and asked the conductor if it was going to Bridgehampton, and he said it was. So then I settled back and fell asleep, and when I woke up, a different conductor was shaking my shoulder, and saying, ‘Last stop, last stop.’ Only we weren’t in Montauk. We were in Speonk.”

“Speonk?”

“The lousy conductor in Jamaica lied to me. He put me on the wrong train.”

“I think,” Naomi interjects, “the conductor must have recognized you from the show and decided this was a perfect opportunity to get back at you for all the rotten things you did. Or rather, the rotten things Evan did. A woman spat at him once.”

“No.”

“Yes. She walked right up to him in the middle of Lincoln Center and spat in his face. Isn’t that right, Jonathan?”

He shrugs. “God knows why. The show is crap. God knows why people take it seriously.

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