by Angie Abdou
and Vero on the other side of the pool. She bends her knees as she
walks so she’s mostly covered in water. All the women at Hedonism
walk like this. What’s hidden is more alluring.
When Danielle gets close she smiles, but it is the smile of a door-to-
door salesperson, with no happiness in it. Vero wonders how Danielle
has managed to reapply her lipstick. Where do you carry lipstick when
you’re naked? Her hair is wet but artfully tussled, framing her face,
highlighting her sharp cheekbones dusted with freckles.
She’s cute.
“You’re cute.” Vero says it aloud almost as soon as she thinks it. Bass
booms from the speakers above the pool and the water ripples with
each note. When Vero’s high, she feels everything.
Danielle pulls her aside, nodding at Shane, pretending to be unable
to find the words. Danielle’s hands are soft but insistent against Vero’s
arms. Vero feels each of Danielle’s fingernails against her skin—long
and shaped, unlike Vero’s cut quick to the skin.
“My husband, he want to take his turn. He want the mouths of
two women, too.” Anxiety shows itself in the wrinkles around her eyes
when she speaks. She’s no longer a tourist on a fun holiday. She’s a
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tired mother arguing with a bank teller who has given her the wrong
exchange rate. “He says to me, he has the right. I told you this, when
we did first meet.” She wraps her hand around the back of her own
neck, and pulls until Vero can see a line of definition in her arm. It’s
the only accusatory thing Danielle says. She doesn’t reach out to touch
Vero now.
Vero feels the itch of tears. “I can’t, Danielle. I can’t.” Vero works on
her excuses, feels them pool inside her, intends to release them in a long
fast stream, leaving no room for objection. But Danielle drops her arm
to her side and nods. She bites her lip and then rubs her hand hard
against her chin. Nods again. “Don’t worry. You did never promise. I
told him that. He says because I did it to your husband, you must do it
with mine. I tell him there was no promise. He says—are they stupid?”
Danielle holds the back of her fingers to Vero’s cheek for a second,
drops them, and smiles her sad smile again. “I will say to him, yes, they
are stupid.” Danielle laughs now.
Vero notices the bathers watching them from every corner of the
pool, from the patio chairs. People walking by on deck look. Everyone
will recognize Vero and Danielle from their performance near the wild
pool. They watch for more of the same. “You and your husband did not
promise. But me, I promised. Before we were here. To my husband, I
promise.” She shrugs. “I find someone else.” She points at the cup in
Vero’s hand. “What is this drink?” Without waiting for an answer, she
takes the cup from Vero and downs all the liquid in four long gulps.
She wipes her mouth on the back of her hand—the same fingers she’d
held up to Vero’s cheek—and hands the empty cup back to Vero as if
it’s filled with something precious. Then she breaststrokes off toward
the wild hot tub.
◊◊◊
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“It’s our last night. We can sleep when we get back to sleepy old Sprucedale. We can sleep when I’m Shane the pharmacist, Jamal and
Eliot’s daddy.” Shane pulls Vero into his lap and orders another round
of drinks. Vero is saturated—with alcohol, with water, with sex. Her
whole body is wrinkled like a raisin and she can’t bear to think about
what germs live in these tubs. But it’s almost over, and she has survived
this much, so she stays.
It’s somewhere on the fulcrum between night and morning when
Vero sees Danielle. She’s heading toward the rooms with FrenchMan
and DogCouple. DogMan’s jaw muscle is flexed and he pulls his woman
along with him, the leash strained tight. The muscle in his face is rigid
and his eyes are cruel when he smiles at Vero. He wants me to come with
them, she thinks. Not Shane, just me. He must’ve seen Vero and Danielle
together. Everyone saw that. Vero is cold and tired and longs for home.
Danielle smiles at Vero as they pass. I’d rather be with you, the smile says.
Sorry, the smile says. Vero looks for blame in her expression— You forced
me to stoop to this, to these DogPeople— but finds none.
FrenchMan refuses to look their way. He has a hand on Danielle’s
lower back and another on DogWoman’s. He looks almost happy, the
closest to it since Vero has met him. The tension in his face has released,
his scrawny shoulders sit lower. He will finally get what he has come
for. What he has paid for.
Vero says nothing to any of them as they pass, just lifts her hand
above the water and wiggles her fingers in a wave at Danielle. How
could she save a person like that? In a place like this? Shane rests his
hand on the back of her neck. “We decided on our lines, Vero. We’re
doing the right thing.”
Let’s go to bed, she wants to say, but now she can’t leave. She holds
watch for Danielle, her eyes on the walkway where they’ve disappeared
into the rooms. Shane lights another joint. “We’re closing this party
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down tonight, Vero Baby. No sense taking it back with us.” So Vero sits
and watches and helps Shane smoke it all.
The sun is threatening to rise when she finally spots Danielle. This
time, there’s no graceful movement as Danielle slinks through the pool
half covered by water. This time, she thrashes through the water, big
boobs swinging, arms waving. FrenchMan watches from the edge as
Danielle throws herself into Vero’s arms, and then he disappears back
toward the rooms. Vero tries to calm Danielle, stroking her arms. She’s
no longer soft. Her muscles are rigid, and her body jerks violently. Vero
squeezes her tight, trying to hold her in one piece, until the loudest
sobs subside.
When Danielle has calmed, Vero holds her like a baby, one arm cra-
dling her neck and head, the other looped beneath her knees, waving
her gently so water sloshes around their bodies. Danielle tucks her face
into Vero’s shoulder. “I did not want to,” Danielle cries, her whole body
shaking. “I did not want to. He said we would not do it,” she cries. “Not
that.”
“Shh, honey, shh.” Vero rocks her body in time with the waves of the
pool and kisses the top of her hair. It smells of coconut.
Vero waves her head at Shane— go away, the wave says—and he
sidles up to the bar to order a breakfast drink from Mike. Vero ignores
everyone else—the gawking breakfast crowd. She waves an angry arm
at Hal when he comes close to them.
“She’s drunk too much,” he says, jowls jiggling. “Get her somewhere
private. This is not that kind of place.”
Vero won’t look at him. She just pushes her hand toward his fat,
&n
bsp; hairy chest. Go. She’s ready to punch him right in his fat red nose if he
doesn’t. But she knows her anger is not about him. For some reason she
cannot understand, Hedonism is Hal’s home and Vero and her group
have broken some house rules. Maybe it’s something about making
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spectacles at breakfast or something about forgetting to leave emotions
at home or pushing the line into fantasy too far. Maybe there is some
honour in Hal and his insistence about what kind of place Hedonism
should be.
But Vero does not care to understand him right now. She does not
want to understand what he needs from a place like this. What Vero
needs is for everyone to leave her and Danielle alone. She strokes
Danielle’s hair. Shh. Shh. Shh. Up close, in the light of day, Danielle is
covered with freckles, her upper lip, her eyelids, her earlobes.
Eventually, Danielle tells her. She and her husband had drawn their
lines too. No intercourse with strangers. Not that far. But as soon as
they were in the room, DogWoman took the bed with Danielle’s hus-
band, and DogMan pulled Danielle onto the other. Danielle looked to
her husband for help, to reinforce their lines, but he had DogWoman
straddling his face while he pulled on her leash. He was busy. DogMan
pushed Danielle to her knees, forcing himself behind her, wrapping a
bathrobe belt around her neck. “It didn’t hurt,” she tells Vero, “he just
pulled it lightly. But still.”
Still.
Between sobs, Danielle gives her story to Vero. “‘It’s fun,’ he kept
saying. That’s what we’re here for. ‘It’s fun.’ But this word, it sounded
ugly on his tongue.” He wrapped both arms around Danielle’s waist,
roughly pushing himself into her from behind. “‘Your husband’s doing
it. He’s fucking my wife. Right there. Look. Look!’ He said we wouldn’t.
Not that.”
Vero lets Danielle talk and cry. She rests her face against Danielle’s
hair. “It’s okay, It’s okay. It’s okay, ” she whispers.
What is okay? What could possibly be okay about this?
When Danielle has cried herself dry, she tells Vero that she and
her husband came on the trip to save their marriage. “He does not
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want me as much since we have the children,” she shrugs. Even the
movement of her shoulders is sad. “I get these ridiculous things,” she
points at her breasts. “I come on this…this…this…’oliday? I do
everything.” Danielle tries to smile, but her lips just bunch together
and quiver as if she might start crying again. “Maybe he does not love
me anymore. What I do makes no difference.”
Vero wants to comfort her, to tell her she deserves better. But she
knows the words carry no weight coming from her. She too is here.
Danielle is out of words and out of tears, nearly asleep, when Vero
walks her back to her room. Other tourists fill the path, walking lazily
toward the pool and beach, but Danielle and Vero push in the other
direction against the traffic, smiling and nodding their apology the
whole way.
There are palm trees in a straight line along the path. They don’t
give Vero the sense that she’s travelling through a foreign landscape—
one she has flown far to experience. Each is so artfully arranged that
it could just as easily be planted in a mall in Edmonton. The place is
plastic. She could be in Cuba, in Mexico, in Whistler, at any resort.
Hedonism, Vero realizes, is not Jamaica. It’s nowhere. And everywhere
at the same time.
After Vero gets some sleep, she pulls a Sprucedale sundress over
her head, its cotton sensible and solid against her skin. She slowly
untwists a swan, swings it loose until it’s just a bath towel, and spreads
it out over her legs, pressing it flat.
“Let’s go home,” she says to Shane. In her mouth, the pronounce-
ment feels existential. Home.
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FIVE
Habang may bahay, may pag-asa.
Where there is home, there is hope.
—Filipino proverb
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CHAPTER FIFTEEN
At home, Vero sees her world as if refracted through water—the
fridge, the stove, the dishwasher—none of it looks quite right, quite
real. None of it belongs to her. She cups her palms around the solid
swell of a teapot. It waves in her vision as if she could push her hands
right through it. “It’s a teapot,” she says aloud to nobody, “for making
tea.” Even the clunk of the pot when it meets the counter sounds
hollow and far off. It’s a clunk in somebody else’s life.
A clunk in the life of some woman who doesn’t go down on a man’s
wife in a public swimming pool.
“You all right, Vero? I make you tea.” LiLi loosens the teapot from
Vero’s grip. Vero squints at her, makes no effort to hide her confusion.
She’s nearly forgotten LiLi’s face, the plump lips that rarely smile,
the dark hair that lifts toward a curl at her shoulders, the nearly black
eyes, sinkholes into a soul that Vero will never know. The resemblance
between LiLi’s eyes and Danielle’s eyes is more striking than Vero
had thought.
“Yes, tea, please,” Vero says in her new strangled voice. Her fin-
gers brush LiLi’s palm as the teapot changes hands. “No. I mean, no,
thank you. No tea, Ligaya.” Something like fear crosses LiLi’s face. It
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embarrasses Vero. “I meant to say LiLi. No tea, LiLi. I think I’ll just
go lie down. For a bit.” Vero has been lying down a lot since she and
Shane returned from their holiday last week. She can’t face people.
She wants to tell the clerk at the grocery store, the engineers at the
plant, the investment salesman at the bank—this is all a lie. Such a
lie. Vero guessed as much before their visit to Hedonism, but now
she knows.
“Maybe you catch sickness, Vero. You rest. I bring the tea to your
room.” LiLi sets a hand, tentatively, on Vero’s shoulder and steers her
toward her bedroom as if she thinks Vero has forgotten the way. The
boys sit, impossibly quiet, on the couch, holding hands, their four legs
braided. They’re scared of their own mother.
Vero would say they look like twins, their expressions and postures
of discomfort so precisely alike, but they’re too different in every other
way—Jamal dark and slight and wiry, Eliot fair and hulking and soft.
Vero and LiLi look more like twins, both small and dark and unhappy.
◊◊◊
Vero would like to fall into deep, dreamless sleeps, but she does not.
She dreams and dreams and dreams until nothing seems real but her
dreams. S
he dreams of a dozen hands roaming her body, of cham-
pagne falling like rain from Jamaican skies, of disembodied tongues
licking the champagne rain from her belly. She dreams that her body
is a table covered in sliced fruit, sticky against her sunbaked skin.
Henri and Danielle face each other over her ribcage, forks poised.
Somber-faced, they pick at the strawberries. Vero tries to whisper.
Run, Danielle, run! Then she tries to scream. The strawberries: they’re
poison! But her dry mouth sticks. She has no tongue. She dreams of
Shane with her in a hammock shaded from the Jamaican sun, their
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bodies swinging wildly with each thrust, but this time Vero is the one
with the penis. In the middle of all the skin and friction and thrusting
and licking, she dreams of Edward. His belt buckle fills her field of
vision, his voice booming from its golden centre. “You, Vero Baby, can
consider yourself canned,” the belt buckle says. Big knuckled hands
clench the worn leather belt on either side of the shiny buckle. “That’s
the way she rolls, Vero Baby!” Vero’s line of vision pans out until she
sees that Edward is straddling a light armoured vehicle, the phallic
cannon pointed straight for Vero’s heart.
Sometimes Shane slides into Vero’s dreams—real or imagined, she
never knows—and she moans and writhes and comes, all without
opening her eyes, and then she turns away to sleep again, Shane’s
heavy leg flung over her squashed thigh.
◊◊◊
Vero tries. Nobody can say that she does not try. One must try. She
pulls herself from bed. You need some movement, Cheryl would say. An
object at rest stays at rest. Lethargy breeds lethargy. With Cheryl’s voice
pushing her forward, Vero drags herself down to the Bikram studio,
determined to sweat her way out of her funk. She will sweat until she
is Vero again. She will sweat until her old life fits, until once again she
is a pharmacist’s wife who gets paid to fix engineers’ grammar.
But there is no peace at the Bikram studio. Dreadlocks, plac-
ards, and ripped jeans fill the sidewalk, barring her way. “SWEAT!”
screams one half of the crowd. “KILLS!” replies the other. Vero raises
her hands to her face. Her skin feels real, smooth at the cheek, rough