One
On the eve of her thirty-ninth birthday, on the bleakest day of the worst February in memory, Janie made what would turn out to be the pivotal decision of her life: she decided to take a vacation.
Trinidad was not the best choice, maybe; if she was going that far she should really have gone to Tobago or Venezuela, but she liked the sound of it, Trin-i-dad, its musicality like a promise. She bought the cheapest ticket she could find and got there just as the carnival revelers were all going home, the gutters filled with the most beautiful trash she’d ever seen. The streets were empty, people sleeping off the party. The cleanup crew moved slowly, in a contented, underwater shuffle. She’d scooped up handfuls of confetti and stray glittery feathers and plastic jewelry from the curb and stuffed them in her pockets, trying to absorb frivolity by osmosis.
There was a wedding going on in her hotel, an American woman marrying a Trinidadian man, and most of the guests were there for it. She watched them circling one another, the aunts and uncles and cousins wilting in the heat, their cheeks daubed with a smear of red sunburn that made them seem happier than they were, and the bemused Trinis, who were always in groups, laughing and talking in fast Trini slang.
The humidity was intense, but the warm embrace of the sea made up for it, like a consolation prize for the loveless. The beach was exactly like its picture, all palm trees and blue water and green hills, with sandflies that brushed and stung your ankles to remind you that it was real, and little shacks planted here and there that sold bake ’n’ shark—deep-fried shark in a pocket of fried fresh dough that tasted better than anything she’d ever eaten. The hotel shower sometimes had hot water and sometimes cold and sometimes it had no water at all.
The days passed easily. She lay on the beach with the kind of glossy magazine she never usually allowed herself, soaking in the sun on her legs and the spray of the sea. It had been such a long winter, snowstorms falling one after the other like a series of calamities that New York was ill prepared to meet. She had been assigned the bathrooms of a museum her firm was designing, and often she had fallen asleep at her desk, dreaming of blue tiles, or taken a car home after midnight to her silent apartment, collapsing into bed before she could wonder how her life had turned out this way.
She turned thirty-nine on her second-to-last night in Trinidad. She sat by herself at the bar on the veranda, listening to the rehearsal dinner in the open banquet hall next door. She was happy to have avoided the requisite “birthday brunch” back home, those throngs of friends with their husbands and children and their enthusiastic cards assuring her that “This is the year!”
The year for what? she’d always wanted to ask.
She knew what they meant, though: the year for a man. It seemed unlikely. Since her mother had died, she hadn’t had the heart to go on dates the two of them couldn’t analyze afterward, moment by moment, over the phone; those endless, necessary conversations that sometimes went on longer than the dates themselves. Men had always come and gone in her life; she’d felt them slipping away months before they actually did. Her mom, though, had always been there, her love as basic and necessary as gravity, until one day she wasn’t.
Now Janie ordered a drink and glanced at the bar menu, choosing the goat curry because she’d never had it before.
“You sure about that?” the barman said. He was a boy, really, no more than twenty, with a slim body and huge, laughing eyes. “It’s spicy.”
“I can take it,” she said, smiling at him, wondering if she might pull an adventure out of her hat on her next-to-last night, and what it would be like to touch another body again. But the boy simply nodded and brought her the dish a short time later, not even watching to see how she fared with it.
The goat curry roared in her mouth.
“I’m impressed. I don’t think I could eat that stuff,” remarked the man sitting two seats down from her. He was somewhere in the midst of middle age, a bust of a man, all chest and shoulders, with a ring of blond, bristling hair circling his head like the laurels of Julius Caesar and a boxer’s nose beneath bold, undefeated eyes. He was the only other guest that wasn’t with the wedding party. She’d seen him around the hotel and on the beach and had been uninspired by his business magazines, his wedding ring.
She nodded back at him and took an especially large spoonful of curry, feeling the heat oozing from every pore.
“Is it good?”
“It is, actually,” she admitted, “in a crazy, burn-your-mouth-out kind of way.” She took a sip of the rum and Coke she’d ordered; it was cold and startling after all that fire.
“Yeah?” He looked from her plate to her face. The tops of his cheeks and his head were bright pink, as if he’d flown right up to the sun and gotten away with it. “Mind if I have a taste?”
She stared at him, a bit nonplussed, and shrugged. What the hell.
“Be my guest.”
He moved quickly over to the seat next to hers. He picked up her spoon and she watched as it hovered over her plate and then dove down and scooped a mouthful of her curry, depositing it between his lips.
“Jee-sus,” he said. He downed a glass of water. “Jee-sus Christ.” But he was laughing as he said it, and his brown eyes were admiring her frankly over the rim of his water glass. He’d probably noticed her smiling at the bar boy and decided she was up for something.
But was she? She looked at him and saw it all instantaneously: the interest in his eyes, the smooth, easy way he moved his left hand slightly behind the roti basket, temporarily obscuring the finger with the wedding ring.
He was in Port of Spain on business, a corporate man who had done something lucrative with a franchise, and he’d decided to give himself a little “vacay” to celebrate the deal. He said it like that, “Vacay,” and she had to stifle a wince—who said things like that? No one she knew. He was from Houston, where she’d never been and had never felt the need to go. He had a white gold Rolex watch on his tanned wrist, the first one she’d ever seen up close. When she told him, he took it off and put it on her own small moist one, and the thing dangled there, heavy and sparkling. She liked the feel of it, liked its strangeness on the same freckled hand she’d always had, liked watching it hover like a diamond helicopter over her goat curry. “It looks good on you,” he said, and he glanced up from her wrist to her face with such directness of intent that she blushed and handed him back the watch. What was she doing?
“I guess I should get going.” Her words sounded reluctant even to her own ears.
“Stay and talk with me some more.” His voice had a note of pleading in it, but his eyes remained bold. “Come on. I haven’t had a decent conversation in a week. And you’re so…”
“I’m so … what?”
“Unusual.” He flashed a smile at her then, the ingratiating grin of a man who knew how and when to use his charms, a tool in that arsenal that nevertheless flared, as he looked at her, like metal in the sun, shining with something genuine—real affection coming right at her in a blast of heat.
“Oh, I’m very usual.”
“No.” He considered her. “Where are you from?”
She took another sip of her drink; it fuzzed her edges a bit. “Oh, who cares about that?” Her lips were cool and burning.
“I do.” Another grin: quick, engaging. There and gone. But … effective.
“Okay, then I live in New York.”
“But you’re not a New Yorker originally.” He said it as a statement of fact.
She bristled. “Why? You think I’m not tough enough to be a New Yorker?”
She felt his eyes lingering on her face and tried to withhold any evidence of the rising warmth in her cheeks. “You’re tough, all right,” he drawled, “but your vulnerability is showing. That’s not a New York trait.”
Her vulnerability was showing? This was news to her. She wanted to ask where, so she could tuck it back where it belonged.
“So?” He leaned closer to her. He smelled like coconut sun lotion and curry and sweat. “Where are you really from?”
It was a tricky question. She usually demurred. The Midwest, she’d say. Or: Wisconsin, because she’d spent the longest time there, if you included college. She hadn’t been back, though, since.
She never told anyone the truth. Except, for some reason, now. “I’m not from anywhere.”
He shifted in his seat, frowning. “What do you mean? Where’d you grow up?”
“I don’t—” She shook her head. “You don’t want to hear about all this.”
“I’m listening.”
She glanced up at him. He was. He was listening.
But listening was not the word. Or maybe it was: a word usually used passively, suggesting a kind of muted receptiveness, the acceptance of the sound that comes from another person, I hear you, whereas what he was doing now with her felt shockingly muscular and intimate: listening with force, the way animals listen to survive in the woods.
“Well…” She took a breath. “My dad had one of those regional sales jobs where they kept moving us around. Four years here, two years there. Michigan, Massachusetts, Washington State, Wisconsin. It was just the three of us. Then he kind of … kept on moving—I don’t know where he went. Someplace without us. My mom and I lived in Wisconsin until I was out of college and then she moved to New Jersey until she died.” It still felt strange to say it; she tried to look away from his intent eyes, but it was impossible. “Anyway, then I moved to New York, because most people there don’t belong anywhere, either. So I have no particular allegiance to any place. I’m from nowhere. Isn’t that funny?”
She shrugged. The words had bubbled up from inside of her. She hadn’t really meant to say them.
“It sounds pretty fucking lonely,” he said, still frowning, and the word was like a tiny toothpick pricking that soft part of her she hadn’t meant to show. “Don’t you have family somewhere?”
“Well, there’s an aunt in Hawaii, but—” What was she doing? Why was she saying this to him? She stopped talking, appalled. She shook her head. “I don’t do this. I’m sorry.”
“But we haven’t done anything,” he said. There was no mistaking the wolfish shadow that crossed his face. A line from Shakespeare came to her, something her mother used to whisper to Janie when they passed teenage boys at the mall: “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.” Her mother was always saying things like that.
“I mean,” Janie stammered, “I don’t talk like this. I don’t know why I’m telling you this now. It must be the rum.”
“Why shouldn’t you tell me?”
She glanced at him. She couldn’t believe she had opened herself up to him—that she was falling under the admittedly considerable charms of this businessman from Houston who wore a wedding ring.
“Well, you’re a—”
“A what?”
A stranger. But that sounded too childlike. She grabbed the first word she could think of: “A Republican?” She laughed lightly, trying to make a joke out of it. She didn’t even know if it was true.
Irritation spread like brushfire across his face.
“And that makes me what? Some kind of philistine?”
“What? No. Not at all.”
“You think that, though. I can see it plain as day on your face.” He was sitting up straight now. “You think we don’t feel the same things you do?” His brown eyes, which had been so admiring, bore into her with a kind of wounded fury.
“Can we go back to talking about the curry?”
“You think we don’t get our hearts broken, or break down crying when our children are born, or wonder about our place in the grand scheme of things?”
“Okay, okay. I get it. You bleed when pricked.” He was still staring at her. “‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’It’s from the Merchant of—”
“Do you get it, Shylock? Do you, really? ’Cause I’m not so sure you do.”
“Watch who you’re calling Shylock.”
“Okay. Shylock.”
“Hey.”
“Whatever you say, Shylock.”
“Hey!” They were grinning at each other now.
“So.” She glanced at him sideways. “Children, huh?”
He waved away the question with one large, pink hand.
“Anyway,” she added, “what’s it matter what I think about anything?”
“Of course, it matters.”
“Does it? Why?”
“Because you’re smart, and you’re a human being, and you’re here right now at this moment and we’re having this conversation,” he said, leaning toward her earnestly and touching her lightly on the knee in a way that should have been slimy by any rights but wasn’t. She felt a tremor pass through her quickly, outrunning her will to squelch it.
She looked down at her ravaged plate.
He probably lived in a McMansion and had three kids and a wife who played tennis, she thought.
She’d known men like this, of course, but she’d never flirted with one before—a country club man, a man who had a gift for sales. And women. At the same time she could feel that there was something else in him that drew her—it was in the quickness of his glance and the volatility of his emotions and the sense she had that there were thoughts blowing through him at a million miles a minute.
“Listen. I’m going to check out the Asa Wright Nature Centre tomorrow,” he said. “Want to come along?”
“What’s that?”
He jiggled his leg impatiently. “It’s a nature center.”
“Is it far?”
He shrugged. “I’m renting a motorcycle.”
“I don’t know.”
“Suit yourself.” He signaled for the check. She felt his energy swiftly changing course, pulling away; she wanted it back.
“All right,” she said. “Why not?”
* * *
The center was hours away, but she didn’t mind. She clung tightly to his back on the motorcycle and reveled in the speed, taking in the lushness of the landscape and the chaotic tumble of the towns, the new concrete houses abutting ramshackly wooden ones, their metal roofs shining side by side in the sun. They got there by midday and, having settled into a companionable silence, followed a tour guide through the rain forest, giggling at the names of the birds he pointed out: the bananaquit and oilbirds, the bearded bellbird and blue-crowned motmot, the squirrel cuckoo and boat-billed flycatcher. An ease had set in by the time they were having high tea on the wide veranda of the former plantation house, watching the copper-rumped hummingbirds hover at the feeders dangling from the porch: four, five, six hummingbirds bobbing and whirring in the air, like a magic trick.
“It feels so colonial,” Janie said, leaning back into her wicker chair.
“The good old days, huh?” He squinted at her inscrutably.
“You’re being facetious, right?”
“I don’t know. They were good for some people.” He kept his face blank for a moment, then burst out laughing. “What kind of an asshole do you think I am? I was a Rhodes Scholar, you know.” He said it lightly, but she knew he was trying to impress her. And had succeeded.
“You were?”
He nodded slowly, his quick eyes filling up with bemusement.
“Got me a master’s in eco-no-mics from Bal-li-ol College. Oxford, England.” He spread out the syllables, playing the rube.
He wanted a laugh and she gave it to him. “So shouldn’t you be teaching at Harvard or something?”
“For one thing, I make about twenty times what I’d make teaching, even at Harvard. And I’m not beholden to anyone. Not some head of the department, or president of the university, or spoiled-ass son of a major donor.” He shook his head.
“Lone wolf, huh?”
He faux-pouted. “Lonely wolf.”
They laughed together. Complicit laughter. She felt something between her shoulders loosening, a muscle she’d mistaken for bone, and a lightness came over her. Her scone crumbled to pieces in her hands and she licked the stray bits on her fingertips.
“You are just too fucking cute,” he said.
“Cute.” She made a face.
He recalibrated quickly. “Beautiful.”
“Right.”
“No, really.”
She shrugged.
“You don’t know, do you?” He shook his head. “You know a lot of things, but you don’t know that.”
She cast about for something sardonic to say and decided instead on the truth.
“No,” she admitted, sighing, “I don’t. Sadly. ’Cause now—” She was going to say that she was almost forty and fast on the road to losing whatever it was she’d had, she was all but ready to point out the three gray hairs and the deepening wrinkle between her eyebrows, but he waved all that away with a hand.
“You could be a hundred years old and still be beautiful,” he said, as if he meant it, and she couldn’t help it, it was such a good line—she smiled at him, soaking it all up with a queasy feeling that she was being swept along toward a shore she hadn’t envisioned and needed to do some serious paddling in the other direction if she wanted to get home safe.
She held tightly to his waist again on the way back. It was too loud for either of them to say anything, for which she was grateful, no decisions to be made, nothing to worry over, only the palm trees and tin roofs spinning out behind her, the wind whipping her hair across her face and the warm body close to hers; this moment, then the next. Happiness began to burble in the base of her spine and rise, giddily, up her body. So this was what it was like: the present moment. She felt it like a revelation.
And wasn’t this what she’d been after—this lightness that came galloping through, grabbing you by the waist and hauling you along with it? How could you not surrender yourself to it, even if you knew you’d end up sitting bruised in the dirt? She supposed there must be another way to experience that breathless rush of being alive—something inward, perhaps?—but she didn’t know what it was or how to get there on her own.
Then the ride was over, and they were standing there awkwardly, outside the hotel. It was late; they were tired. Her hair was coated with grime from the wind. A bumpy moment, and nothing to speed them over it. I should go inside and pack, she thought, but the wedding reception was going on in the banquet hall, and now they could hear the steel pan drums starting up, the sound rippling out across the night, carrying its own distinct, watery beat—drums invented years ago from the discarded cans of the oil companies, music from garbage. Who was she to resist? The humid air cradled her body like a large damp hand. “Want to go for a walk?” They said it both at the same time, as if it was meant to be.
* * *
Trouble, trouble, trouble, she said to herself as they walked, but his hand was warm in hers and she thought maybe she’d give herself this. Maybe it was all right. The wife was probably one of those women with hard, perfect faces, blond hair that gleamed around huge diamond studs. She wore short white skirts and flirted with the tennis instructor. So why should Janie care? But, no, that wasn’t right, was it? This man’s eyes were warm, genuine, even, if you can be calculating and genuine at the same time, which maybe you couldn’t be. And he liked her, Janie, with her imperfect face, her pretty blue eyes and slightly hooked nose and curly hair. So probably—probably the wife was lovely. She had long, swinging brown hair and kind eyes. She used to be a teacher but stayed home now, caring for the little ones, patient and gentle and too smart for the brutality of that life, it was sucking the lifeblood out of her and yet feeding her at the same time—she was loving, that’s what it was, this man was well loved (something in the relaxed way he moved, the shine on his face) and right now the wife was sleeping with all of their little ones in their big bed because it was easier that way, and she liked the warmth of their small bodies nestled against her, and she missed him so very much, and maybe she thought that sometimes on those long, long trips he was up to something but she trusted him because she wanted to because he had that boldness in his eyes, that life—
Why do this to herself? Can’t she let herself have anything?
He was pointing out the shells scattered across the beach while she was stuck there in her thoughts.
She nodded absently.
“No, look,” he said, taking her head in his big warm hands and pointing it toward the shore. “You need to look.”
The shells were scuttling across the beach to the water, as if the sea was drawing them in with the power of its charm.
“But—how?”
“Sand crabs,” he said. His hands were still on her face, so it wasn’t hard for him to turn it toward him and kiss her once, twice, only twice, she was thinking, just a little taste and then they’d turn right back, but then he kissed her a third time and this time she felt all of her hunger rise up like a perfumed plume of smoke from a genie that had been locked in a bottle for a hundred years, encircling this man she barely knew—though her body knew him, it wrapped itself around him fiercely and kissed him as if he was the dearest of the dear. Their defenses fell away, like their clothes. And maybe it was some uncanny combination of chemicals triggering pheromones, and maybe they’d been lovers back among the pharaohs and had just now found each other, and who knew why, really? Who fucking knew?
“Jee-sus,” he said. He pulled back from her a little, and she was pleased to see that all the confidence was rubbed clean away from his face and he was as stunned by it as she was—by the force of this passion that had no business being there but was there just the same, shocking the bejesus out of both of them, as if some Ouija board hijinks at a slumber party had summoned an actual ghost.
To have sex on the beach (Wasn’t that a drink? Was this really her life, a cheesy cocktail?) with a man she didn’t know, who fooled around with women, without using a condom, was a very, very, very bad idea. But her body didn’t think so. And she’d never surrendered fully to anything in her life and perhaps it was time. She could hear the steel pan drums ringing like metallic bubbles loop de looping in the air, and the happy shouts of the revelers who were dancing, and the laughter of the bride and groom who were dancing, too, under that high, thatched roof. And she was almost forty and might never marry. And there was that lovely wife sleeping in that big bed with all those rosy-cheeked children and she had no one she was going back to, no house and no children and no husband, there was no one to love her at all except this warm body with its quick steady heartbeats and its burning life force. It was as if the page she’d been living on had been suddenly ripped from the binding, and she was on the loose side now, the torn, free side, fluttering down to the sandy shore, the moon rearing up high overhead.
When their bodies had had their fill at last they clung to each other on the beach, gasping.
“You…” He shook his head, smiling wonderingly, those alive and admiring eyes taking in her white, sand-abraded body glowing on the beach. He didn’t finish the thought; he stopped himself before finishing, having had an adult lifetime of just such discipline, and she didn’t know what it was he was going to say about her, though she knew she’d have the rest of her life to consider the possibilities. She had a sudden impulse to tell him something—to tell him everything, all her secrets, quickly, now, before the warmth began to fade, in the hope that there might be something she could continue to hang on to, a connection she might keep—
Keep? She almost laughed at herself. Even with the present moment grinning in her face, she couldn’t help turning the other way.
The end unraveled quickly. She was still processing what had happened, still replaying it in her mind as they walked slowly back to the hotel in silence, side by side, his hand touching her lightly on her back as they walked in a gesture that was part caress and part moving her onward.
“Guess this is it, then.” He stood outside his door. “It was a real pleasure spending time with you.”
His face was appropriately tender and somber, but she could feel the wind in him kicking up, this urgency running through him that was the opposite of what was running through her, and knew without saying anything that her desire to entangle and to linger had no chance against his need to get the hell out of the hallway and back on his own again.
“Should we … exchange e-mail or something? Hey, you ever come to New York on business?” She tried to keep her voice light, but he looked at her sadly.
She bit her lip.
“All right, then,” she said. She could do this. She did do this. He leaned down and kissed her, a dry husbandly kiss that still took away a tiny part of her.
* * *
She didn’t know his last name. She realized that later. She hadn’t needed to know, the limits of the thing being so clear that they hardly needed to be described. She’d wished, later, though, that she had it—not for the birth certificate, nor through any wish to reach out to him and complicate his life, but simply for the story itself, so that she could say to Noah someday, “One night I met this man, and it was the most beautiful night that ever was. And his name was—”
Jeff. Jeff Something.
But maybe she had wanted it that way. Maybe she had planned it that way. Because there was no finding Jeff Something from Houston, and it had only bound Noah to her more closely, made him even more hers.
Copyright © 2016 by Sharon Guskin
