My family, newly arrived at our vacation rental in the Hamptons, is going to the beach. We drive over to Amagansett, to a beach that takes our temporary permit, and unload. Two of us get dropped off near the sand, take everything and set off in search of a spot on the beach, while two of us head off to park the car.
My teenage daughter and I are in the forward expedition. After that first moment at the entrance spent regarding the tableau of sand and sea, all the beachgoers and their umbrellas, we decide to go to the right. It’s not too crowded, and it takes only a couple of minutes to get to where it’s even less crowded. When we come to what seems like an acceptably vacant spot, I drop everything and begin to set up the umbrella.
Then I hear a man’s voice behind me. “I don’t believe it,” he says.
The tone is not warm.
My daughter and I are setting up in a gap between other people who are perched on the ridge overlooking the ocean. Following the voice, I now see that there is a couple sitting in chairs higher up on the beach, behind us.
As a lifelong New Yorker, I’m used to the tiny, unspoken negotiations over space: on the subway, on a park bench, on the sidewalk waiting for the light to change. But I wasn’t expecting it on the beach.
“You have miles of beach, and you decide on the spot right here,” the guy says. “Right in front of me.” He is shirtless, wearing a white bucket hat, and has zinc on his nose. A woman around his age, which is approximately my age, is seated beside him, also in a beach chair. They are under an umbrella. I stare at him dumbly because I am still unclear if he is kidding and being friendly or not kidding and not being friendly.
“It happens every time,” he continues, in an irate tone that suggests he is not kidding.
“It’s because you are so attractive,” I say. “People are drawn to you and want to be in your orbit.” I smile, trying to situate the somewhat obnoxious remark I just made in the quadrant of amiability.
“You could go anywhere on this beach!”
“Are you being serious? We could move,” I say.
In response to this, the woman sitting next to him, presumably his wife, starts shaking her head, no, and gesturing with her hands in the manner of an umpire calling a base runner safe. The implication: Don’t move, don’t worry about it, ignore him, it’s fine. But I am flustered and don’t trust my interpretation of her gestures. Better to cut our losses; you don’t come to the beach to get in a shouting match.
“Spatial awareness!” he continues. “You have to have some! Otherwise …”
The phrase “spatial awareness” makes me want to call back, “You mean situational awareness?” but I refrain. I had read about the collapse of a hedge fund of that name, Situational Awareness, just the previous day. The fund was focused on investments in artificial intelligence. The drama was partly that it had collapsed, and partly that the billionaire investor Ken Griffin had made a middle-of-the-night deal to bail it out. Previously, Mr. Griffin had been in my thoughts because he had bought an apartment in 2019 in one of those buildings along Central Park South — the ones that look like they’re giving the whole city the finger — that is the most expensive apartment in New York. I had thought about how that apartment, and so many others in those buildings, must be empty for most of the year, and how nice it would be to be able to set up a laptop at a desk and work there in solitude for a few days. I had recently read a profile of Mr. Griffin in The New Yorker, and the other detail about Mr. Griffin that stayed with me from that piece is that apparently he rarely blinks.
I stare at this guy on the beach who has been yelling at me in a mode of incredulity. I blink, but not that often. “It’s not a big deal to move,” I say. The fact is, his irritability has lent him a slight aura of integrity, even if I think he is essentially being a jerk. In a different context, I think we could even be friends. I always feel that fights have the seeds of friendship within them. Not always. But sometimes.
I’ve long felt that the corollary to my New York-bred appetite for confrontation is a kind of excessive gallantry: giving up your seat on the subway; holding the door of a bus for a rushing fellow commuter; generally letting other people go first, often with a slight gesture of the hand and a nod, as though we all take turns being a maitre d’ showing a regular customer to his or her favorite table. There is pleasure in being generous, and it also feels like a way of maintaining karmic equilibrium.
I pick up the bag and chairs and umbrella and obligingly take a few steps to the left. In our new spot, three feet away from the old spot, we are slightly closer to a big group of 20-somethings. A modern tent thing is flapping above them. Their voices are slightly louder than they would have been in our old spot, but this, I tell myself, is part of the music of the beach. One must live among other people.
“Is that better?” I yell back at the previously obstructed man. He stares forward, not responding.
Satisfied that we have moved out of his view enough so that I don’t have to talk to him or think about him, I finish with the umbrella, set up the chairs and plop down on our newly claimed patch of beach. My daughter and I agree to suppress the news of this encounter when the wife and brother pair show up, on the grounds that what was amusing about it is likely to get lost in the telling, while what was stressful and annoying about it will probably remain.
So I forget about them, and later, when I come back from the water, I see they have left.
Whether they left because of our presence or because they’d had enough of the sun and surf, I will never know. There is a 50-50 chance that our exchange felt so rancorous to them that it ruined their moment on the beach, so they left in a mood. And yet, admitting that I will never know also invites the opposite scenario: Perhaps he left feeling a grudging respect, even admiration, for me. There was something so familiar about the guy. He seemed like someone I could or would know, and even come to like. I will not be entirely surprised if one day — tomorrow or next year — he appears in some random place, when we’re all back in the crush of the city, and says, “Hey. You’re the jerk on the beach!”
And then we will look at each other, unblinking, and I will wonder whether or not he is joking.
Thomas Beller is the director of Tulane University’s creative writing program and the author, most recently, of “Degas at the Gas Station,” a collection of essays.
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