by Angie Abdou
is deformed by a lump of foetus head. She digs a toe into the cool
damp sand below the scorching hot layer and sips on a Dirty Monkey.
Vero would like to think it’s just “Monkey”—no trace of the rum that
makes it “Dirty”—but Hedonism is not the kind of place where one
judges another’s parenting choices.
Check your judgment at the door here, Vero Baby!
A thick pink lina nigra runs from the woman’s breast bone to her
pubic bone. Vero imagines tracing a sharp scalpel down the line and
pulling the baby free of the pollution.
To the pregnant woman, Vero says only, “Dirty Monkey, that’s
more of a breakfast drink, isn’t it?” And then to Shane, “I guess I’ll
have something with tequila. It is Happy fucking Hour. After all.”
Shane’s right: once he and Vero find their group, things move
quickly. He’s wrong about the choosing, though, deluded to
think they might have had some kind of control. As with so
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much of life, “their group” just happens as a matter of timing and
coincidence.
Jamaica blurs. Hazy on the horizon, hazy in the foreground, hazy
in Vero’s mind. Just when the vacation should be coming to a quick
close, time rolls over and stretches out in the sun, puts its head down
for a rest in the warm sand. The rules in this booze-sodden place twist
and bend and morph until Vero forgets there was ever such a thing
as rules.
That surprises you? That’s so Sprucedale.
That surprises you? That’s so Tuesday.
That surprises you? That’s so nine p.m.
“Their group” is made up of non-English speakers—a Swiss couple
and a French one—and they work their trades in broken phrases and
awkward hand gestures, keeping small talk to a minimum.
Shane and Vero agree: no names. They don’t want to turn the
Hedonists into real people who might exist beyond this holiday.
They refer only to FrenchMan, FrenchWoman, SwissMan, and
SwissWoman. Vero started by calling SwissWoman “PregnantLady.”
Shane glared. He’s chosen to ignore what he does not like.
Vero wishes she could mix and match the couples. She likes
FrenchWoman—the splash of freckles across her slightly flattened
nose, her pink-tinged, fleshy shoulders in her evening sundresses at
dinner, the way she smells of coconut even after she’s left the beach
and washed off the tanning oil. FrenchWoman wears no makeup
around her eyes, which are nearly black and remind Vero of LiLi’s,
but her plump lips are always painted the colour of Merlot. Perhaps
it’s the power of Shane’s suggestion, but Vero finds herself wondering
what it would be like to kiss those lips. She imagines them pressed
against the curve where neck meets shoulder, and imagines running
her tongue along FrenchWoman’s small, sharp teeth.
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Although Vero calls her FrenchWoman when she and Shane speak,
she thinks of her by her real name. Danielle. She puts a French spin
on it, as best as she can with her English tongue.
Vero’s mouth stretches into an involuntarily smile when Danielle
calls her Veronique, the syllables acrobatic, rolling, sliding, leaping on
Danielle’s foreign tongue. “For this week,” Vero says to Shane, “I am
Veronique.”
But FrenchMan—with his sunken chest and squinty eyes that never
rise to meet Vero’s face—he creeps her out. He speaks no English and
lurks behind Danielle, eager for her translations, leaning forward, his
long muscles tensed with desperation for Danielle to close a deal, com-
plete some transaction he has directed her to conduct on his behalf.
SwissMan, on the other hand, seems likeable. He laughs at the
end of each of his limping sentences. It’s okay, his tone says. This place
is merely a joke. We are only joking here. “I am,” he tells them in a slow
thick accent, “an orthopedic surgeon.” He punctuates the sentence
with a deep laugh rumbling up from his chest, as if nothing could
be funnier than any of them, even for one second, pretending that
his statement might be true, pretending that anything here might
be true.
He has hints of grey in his dark curls. “It is silver highlights,” he tells
them. And laughs. Vero enjoys spending time with him; his flippancy
suits the place, but his wife, one cannot help but notice, is very, very
pregnant. SwissMan’s laughter allows Vero to sink comfortably into
the alternate reality of Hedonism, but his wife’s pregnancy is enough
to pull her out of it.
“What is it you want?” FrenchWoman puts the question to Vero
bluntly. “Why are you here for?” The bluntness doesn’t bother Vero.
Vero would tell Danielle: This is not my idea, she would say, I want
only to survive. She would hold up her hand, peeling it off her chilled
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plastic cup of booze, spread her fingers wide. I’m too old for this, she would say. Look. See these wrinkles? Dishpan hands! I have old-people
skin.
“My husband, he want the mouth of another woman. On him. You
do that?” FrenchWoman sucks on the arm of her sunglasses, twirls it
between her eye teeth. “If yes, I will do for your husband.” She makes
the proposition with her freckled nose wrinkled in a laugh, a deep
dimple cratering her right cheek. Her face grants this discussion no
significance, no seriousness. They could be deciding what afternoon
matinee to see. What’s better for you, Thursday or Wednesday? Or: Your
boys, they like scary movies or only funny? “Maybe the husbands, they
like that. Two women. You understand men: they love the mouth.
When the week over, we leave for home. To a normal. Yes?”
One day hazes into the next. Vero and Shane hover at the periph-
ery of the poolside debauchery, spectators only, and then take that
energy back to their room. Vero grows accustomed to the soreness.
“Does it hurt?” Shane asks. “Are you too sore?”
“Of course,” Vero says, pulling him deeper.
As they run out of days, they edge their way closer to the action.
First, Shane takes Vero from behind, her body pushed up against the
sliding doors. Anyone at the pool below could look up and see her
breasts pressed flat into the glass. Next, they have sex on the beach,
Shane curled behind her in a shady hammock. Vero can’t quite
manage an orgasm, too distracted by the DogCouple floating on a
mattress just off shore, casting furtive glances back to her and Shane.
But she breathes quick and fast as the hammock swings, and Shane
doesn’t seem to miss her climax. He kisses her neck afterward, push-
ing his foot against the palm tree so the hammock sways gently. “God,
that was good.”
That night, she takes him in her mouth behind a plant pot near
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the wild tub, both of them pr
etending to be unaware of the bathers
watching them from the steam.
“Well,” she says, wiping her lips and smiling up at him. “This is
what we’re here for.” But she knows that if they were here only for
exhibitionist acts, they could’ve stayed home in bed with the baby
monitor on in LiLi’s basement.
At first, Shane and Vero keep a comfortable distance from the
other Hedonists. Their need for each other is constant, insistent. They
drink, fuck, and smoke, drink, fuck, and smoke until there’s no dis-
tinction: drinkfucksmokedrinkfucksmokedrinkfuck.
As the week limps on, they’re never far from the resort bar. “Don’t
let the hangover catch up with you,” Shane says, passing Vero a Dirty
Monkey with a slice of breakfast pineapple. “Drink fast before you
sober up.”
By Thursday, the wild hot tub no longer seems wild. It’s just games
and more games. The bodies only bodies.
You can touch here, if I can do that.
I’ll put my mouth there, if you’ll put yours here.
The hot tub antics would be more comfortable in a bed, but the
couples stay at the hot tub, bare bottoms pressing into rough concrete,
rather than retreating to private rooms where they might be in danger
of real intimacy. The impossibility of these acts happening in public
makes the nights seem unreal. They don’t count. Shane and Vero will
get home and remember the exchanges only faintly, an erotic dream
that steps beyond their grasp just before they wake, leaving nothing
but a warm tingle, a desire to fall back into that sleep, and stay there.
And then they’ll forget.
This blindfold’s chafing me, Vero thinks on more than one occasion
but never says it aloud. Like so much else that comes to mind, the
statement deviates too far from the script of Hedonism, the place
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that sells pure pleasure. Pleasure doesn’t chafe. Vero sucks hard on her
tequila and melted ice cubes, smiles drunkenly. That the script allows.
The conversations she and Shane have in their room, surrounded by
the towel swans with their long twisted necks, are more real, but only
slightly. They negotiate details, plan for what they hope to achieve
down in the marketplace, what they’re willing to barter.
“We have to be on the same team,” Shane says, so high that his eyes
are nearly swollen shut. Vero tries to picture him with his eyes clear
and bright and open, tries to remember the eyes of Sprucedale’s favou-
rite pharmacist. She can’t. “We need to agree on where we draw our
lines,” he says. “Present a united front. Agree on where we won’t go.”
Vero flops across the mattress, studying the painting of the yel-
low-breasted woman above the bed. This art’s not so bad, she decides,
once you ignore proportion. “We should get one of these for our room at
home, mount it above our bed.” She imagines LiLi averting her gaze
from the naked woman during her weekly changing of the sheets. “The
yellow skin is perfect: suntan meets liver poisoning. Very Hedonism.”
“Vero. Focus. Lines.” Shane’s looking at himself in the mirror,
studying a mole under his armpit for melanoma’s deformation.
“Sure,” she slurs until the word has three lazy syllables. “Definitely,
let’s agree on our lines.” She can’t imagine why it could possibly matter,
these lines of Shane’s. “Sure,” she says, “whatever.” She’s surprised, in
a stoned and hollow way, by Shane’s naiveté. He doesn’t understand
the barter system.
“No men,” he says, lifting his eyes to meet hers in the mirror. “I
couldn’t stomach seeing you with another man.”
When she says nothing, he adds, “Because I love you.”
A swan towel perches on Vero’s belly, its beak pointed toward her
chin. She has tried to make one herself, but can’t get it to stay stiff
and upright. Theanna, the cleaning lady, turns a towel into a swan in
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ninety seconds flat. It’s the only thing she does fast. She’s often still
in the room when Vero and Shane return for their siesta, moving as if
each step is a favour to them, one she grants grudgingly. Vero chatters,
playing the enthusiastic tourist, filling the heavy silences. One day,
she points down the beach at loose rubble along the shoreline. “What
happened there?”
“Oh, that’s the tornado, done that. Tornado dohn give a dodo ’ow
much money you ’ave. It go everywhere just the same.” Theanna bends
over the bed, smoothing imaginary wrinkles in the comforter, making
no move to hurry her work for Shane and Vero’s sake. I’ll leave when I
leave. An’ you? You can just sidung your pretty white batty an’ wait.
LiLi has never claimed a space like Theanna does. Not at the home
of the Sprucedale Nanton-Schoemans. In watching Theanna, Vero
sees LiLi’s submissiveness. Vero tries to pull LiLi’s image clearly to
mind. Fails. Even Jamal and Eliot have faded. She could dig her wallet
out of the closet safe, look at their pictures, refresh her memory. But
she chooses not to.
“So no men,” she says to Shane, hearing a floating quality to her
words. She deepens her voice to bring them down, pull them into her
body. “But you’d like to be with one of the women, maybe?” She lobs
the question at Shane gently, wondering if he’ll recognize his own
hypocrisy. “Maybe with me and another woman?”
His mouth smears into a slow grin. “Well, if one offered…” He lies
beside her on the bed and puts his head on her chest, avoiding what-
ever it is he sees in her face. “If your FrenchWoman offered.”
“Shane. An offer? Nothing is free here. An offer is a request.
Accepting an offer—that’s a commitment.”
“Baby,” he twirls his finger in slow circles around the perimeter of
her bellybutton. “Relax. We’re not signing any contracts. Nobody can
make us do anything. Somebody wants to give something, I’ll take it.”
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“Shane.” The extent of Shane’s naïveté takes all the wind out of
Vero. That one word is an effort. “Don’t let Danielle do anything
to you that you don’t want me doing with another man.” Vero can’t
believe she has to explain this to Shane. Hearing herself say it aloud,
she’s embarrassed, as if she’s just had to point to the stove element, as
she would caution Jamal, and warn Shane: Hot! Hot!
“She likes you,” Shane says, “I can tell.”
Once, Vero thinks, we are here only once. She puts a nervous twitter
in her voice, a tease, and says, “I don’t know what to do with a girl.”
She says these words only to hear them aloud. She wonders if they
will sound true.
The truth is that she would like to get Danielle alone in their room,
with no Shane and no FrenchMan. She is curious about that. But she
knows that when she and Danielle meet, it will be a public perfor-
>
mance. It will be more about Shane watching than it is about Danielle
and Vero responding.
“Just do what you like,” Shane says, breathing the words into Vero’s
stomach. “If you like it, she’ll like it too.” He rolls over to face Vero,
his chin tracing a line up the centre of her body, and pulls the sheet
over their heads. “Let me remind you what you like,” he says with his
mouth open at her neck, ready to take a bite.
◊◊◊
In the mornings, there’s much to ignore—the grey ring of scum
around the hot tub, the joint butts floating in the pool, the vomit in
the ceramic plant pots. Vero thinks of Roger in his hot-pink Bikram
shorts. “Paradise is a state of mind.” Crotch bulging under Lycra.
Waistband stained with sweat. “Nobody controls your happiness but
you. Only you create happiness, from within.”
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It’s something Joss would say. Her Bikram instructor she can dis-
miss. Roger knows nothing. There’s no such thing as paradise. But Joss.
Joss she wants to believe.
“Well, it ain’t Beaches!” The Hedonists laugh from behind their
oversized sunglasses. “I might have told my babysitter I’d be at
Breezes Luxury Resort, but I’m here, getting just what I signed up
for. Anyone want a toke?”
Vero nods at her own reflection in the strangers’ sunglasses and
takes a toke. Hedonism is not at its best before breakfast.
She and Shane speak less and less of Eliot, of Jamal, of LiLi, unable
to reconcile their roles as mother and father with the Hedonist ver-
sion of Vero and Shane. They’ll leave the real Vero and Shane back in
the airport until this week ends. Nothing from home fits. For dinner,
Vero picks a dress that was sexy in Sprucedale. Here, it looks like one
of Cheryl’s gardening smocks. She does not want to look like, or think
of, her mother here. Hedonism makes her nobody’s mother, nobody’s
child. She buys a dress from the resort boutique—thin, transparent
fabric, all slits and holes. “This costs more than my nanny makes in a
week,” she says to the clerk. “And where would I ever wear this outfit
again? Nowhere.”
The teller rings in her purchase without meeting her eyes. “Nanny?”
She rolls the dress in tissue paper, careful not to tear it with her sharp