Driving Mrs. Emerz

Toni gave Emerz a split-heart pendant for Valentine's Day, 14 karats. Awkward, I gave him nearly the same thing. A chain of broken-heart-shaped charms around Emerz' neck, one soon to green after a shower or two. "Semi-charmed kind of life," says Emerz.

Emerz wants me to teach him to drive. He's got a new S4; a triumphant, sneaky purple, with a tight gearbox that Emerz can't make heads or tails of without wince-inducing grinding noises and knee-bruising stop shorts after stalling out. We take to the streets. I'm driving, he's riding shotgun, fiddling with the balance and fade. I take the corners hard, squealing, fishtails and exhaust and skid marks marring the quiet of the vacant summer neighborhoods dotting the Connecticut coast. "You see that?" I say, pushing and pushing, feeling the G-force settle in my stomach. Shuttered clapboard houses blur out the tinted windows. "You see that? That's how you do it." Emerz grips his seatbelt, rethinking the purchase. Maybe next he'll get the Mini-Cooper. He hears they are surprisingly roomy and spry.

Later, we watch Days of Thunder in the den, dazzled by the careening curls of Kidman, tight and sprawling and golden in the dusty light of the hospital, in the clinical light of the racetrack.

"That's a woman in love," says Emerz, after she issues another ultimatum to Cruise; young, dumb and full of...himself.

"You're the expert," I say.

Toni's in Southampton with her godfather, admiring the cold winter surf, discussing a possible summer position at Christie's, overhearing two twenty-something male assistants canoodling on a back porch. Emerz and I prefer the shapely and shiftless Long Island Sound to the endless expanse of the Atlantic. Call us pragmatists--we like to see what comes next, what's speeding around the corner. We like to know we're not alone. We like to be able to water-ski most anywhere, shredding over ferry wakes, twisting between lobster buoys, skipping over schools of blue fish. We forgive the oily sand, the murky beaches, the possible Plum Island fall-out, the yahoos on jet skis, the occasional power plant. The preemptive penicillin makes my skin sensitive to sunlight. Good thing the sky is dust gray, empty and dull through the moon roof.

Emerz climbs into the driver's seat, pops the clutch and we stutter back towards home. We watch The Door in the Floor, Something's Gotta Give and Cruel Intentions, admiring the colors; the green of the high hedges and rolling lawns, the blue of the ocean and sky, the crisp white of Bridges' and Keaton's and Philippe's untucked Oxfords, but telling ourselves we've made the right decision. To celebrate I drive us to Dairy Queen. It's closed, which we suddenly realize we knew it would be.