The October trip to the Jonathan Club beach is a deceptively quiet turning point: an effort by a small group of Buckley students to resume ordinary social life after Robert Mallory’s breakdown becomes a study in secrecy, unease, and the limits of their apparent safety. At a deserted private beach, news of recent break-ins and harassment shadows the outing, while the narrator watches Robert and Thom Wright speak alone by the water and recognizes a troubling echo of Robert’s earlier conversation with Matt Kellner.

Causes and Background

In October 1981, the narrator identifies an afternoon at the Jonathan Club as the beginning of the end of the group’s former world. The secret surrounding Matt’s fate has already marked a loss of innocence, and the narrator understands that the friends are approaching events they cannot control. In retrospect, this beach outing becomes a hinge in the story: what precedes it leads toward the group’s exposure to violence, while what follows is shaped by that exposure.

The outing follows Robert’s crisis at Susan’s party. Only a small group of friends witnessed his erratic behavior, and they agreed not to tell their classmates. Robert remembered the party only up to a point; after hearing what had happened, he was humiliated and cried. Susan reassured him that the witnesses would keep it private. The trip to the beach club was therefore not simply a social excursion: it took place under a shared promise of silence, while Robert himself had no complete memory of the episode that prompted the group’s concern.

The group left Buckley during lunch and drove through the Sepulveda Pass toward Santa Monica. Susan and Thom took the Corvette; Debbie Schaffer had picked up the narrator in her BMW, and Robert followed in a Porsche. The destination carried its own history and contradictions. The Jonathan Club was an invitation-only institution whose discriminatory reputation—particularly its exclusion of Black and Jewish people and its refusal to admit women as members—had become an open joke to the teenagers. Their social world treated such exclusion as distant and abstract, a posture the retrospective narrator connects to their broader numbness.

The Empty Club and Its Warning

The club’s near-empty parking lot immediately unsettled the group. A valet explained that the Riders of the Afterlife had broken in two nights earlier, vandalized the property, taken food from the cafeteria, and continued to harass people leaving the lot. He added that the group had been active around Santa Monica and Venice, where there had been break-ins, vandalism, and missing pets. With no other cars in the lot and the club considering an early closure, the report made the supposed refuge feel exposed.

Debbie insisted that they had already come too far to turn back. When the narrator recalled an earlier attack at the space on Melrose, Debbie dismissed the danger as the work of a foolish hippie. Susan then signed the group in using Donald’s account number; that day, the staff did not check identification against the membership roster. Their entry depended less on security than on the ordinary assumptions that usually made the club feel protected.

The wind, the deserted courts, and the silence between the friends changed the mood as they crossed toward the locker rooms. The narrator noticed that Susan and Thom had become distant during the short drive from Buckley, though the reason was not stated. Robert followed Debbie, carrying a large black duffel bag, and thanked the others for bringing him. Thom, meanwhile, complained about the cold and the possibility of encountering members of the cult. Their different responses—Robert’s eagerness, Thom’s irritation, and the narrator’s growing alertness—made the group’s unease visible without resolving what had happened between Susan and Thom.

An Outing Without Its Usual Ease

The customary comforts of the beach club were present, but the scene was stripped of its usual crowd. The friends changed in the otherwise quiet locker room, then collected towels, chairs, and an umbrella from the staff. They chose a spot between the shore and the club. The beach was nearly empty in both directions, and a lifeguard booth stood unmanned nearby. Though the sun was out, gusts from the Pacific made the group complain of the cold.

They sat in a row facing the ocean: Thom and Susan at one end, Robert between them and the narrator, and Debbie beside the narrator at the other end. KROQ played as the group settled beneath the umbrella, which Susan and Robert preferred. Thom and Susan barely acknowledged one another. The narrator tried to ask Thom about his upcoming college visits, but Thom answered dismissively, deepening the narrator’s sense of distance. Robert was the one who repeatedly got up, saying he might visit the indoor pool and joking that he could be left unsupervised. The joke went unanswered.

The afternoon’s small details underline how little the group manages to reconnect. Thom read Sports Illustrated; Debbie leafed through Interview; the narrator returned to Joan Didion’s The White Album; Susan stared out to sea. The radio played subdued songs, and the cold kept interrupting the expected pleasures of a day at the beach. When Thom went to the café for food, Debbie accompanied him and brought Susan iced tea on their return. The narrator and Susan said nothing to each other while they were gone, and Robert did not return to his chair. The narrator thought of Audrey Barbour, who was missing, and wondered what Robert’s duffel bag contained, but did not see it.

Robert and Thom at the Water’s Edge

When the narrator looked up again, the light had changed and someone was approaching across the shore. At first the narrator feared it might be a member of the Riders of the Afterlife; then the figure’s purple swimsuit identified him as Robert. Thom met him by the water. From a distance, the two stood facing one another as the waves reached their ankles, with Thom listening and nodding while Robert spoke. The narrator could not hear their conversation.

The meeting recalled a scene the narrator had previously witnessed at Buckley: Robert speaking with Matt Kellner in the school parking lot. The location and participants had changed, but Robert’s position and Thom’s attentive response seemed to repeat the earlier pattern. The narrator felt sickened by the resemblance and experienced it as a premonition, not as proof of what the boys discussed. Susan also watched them, lowering her sunglasses; the narrator sensed her fear, though its cause remained unclear. She eventually turned away with a curt remark.

The beach outing thus closes not with a confrontation or an explanation but with an image that rearranges the group’s quiet afternoon into something ominous. Its empty setting, the cult’s reported activity, the friends’ guarded silences, and the echo of Robert’s earlier contact with Matt accumulate without delivering certainty. In the larger narrative, the day marks the point at which the narrator begins to see more clearly what may be coming, while the young people remain inside a social world that has taught them to treat danger as distant, manageable, or not worth discussing.