Emerald City

by Jennifer Egan

  On a warm island whose name I can’t remember, my husband and his wife have taken Penny on vacation. I imagine the sweet smell the air must have. Pineapple, is it? Flowers? I recall the sticky buds that sprout from the stalks of tough, sappy plants. I can feel their texture as though I were holding one now.

  In the churchyard, there are mostly shadows, though sunlight still grazes the tile roofs. I imagine Jake packing his things for Morocco. Was he actually working with the thieves, I wonder, or did he merely see an exit and take it? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. He’s gone, my possessions are gone, and I am one step nearer a point I’ve been longing for, it seems: the point of giving up. Yet my mind keeps drifting to Jake—his panicked belief that his life is over—and this seems so sweet, so melodramatic. He’s thirty-two, for God’s sake. And it strikes me, then, that I’m no older than he is.

  Just then he totters from a side street. There is a long tear down one trouser leg, and his shirttails flap in the breeze. He smiles the way I remember him smiling in college, a big sly grin like cartoon foxes have. He raises my leather bag toward the sky. “Nailed the bastards,” he pants, handing it to me with care. “Haven’t run like that since track.”

  I pull back the zipper and see my things: familiar, insignificant. I stare at the jumble of shapes and feel my eyes grow wet. “You saved it,” I tell him.

  Jake’s face is red. He clenches and unclenches his fists, running his hands through his hair. He looks at me several times without speaking. “Ever been to Morocco?” he finally asks.

  I imagine beaches, crowded cafés, that smell of tanning lotion. From what seems a great distance, these summer things come wafting back. I look around me. Blue shadows sprawl across the stones, and dusk thickens and chills the air. A last stop, I think, before I go back home to begin again. I’m young, headed to Morocco on vacation. In Morocco it is summertime.

  LETTER TO JOSEPHINE

  Parker has dragged his lounge chair into the sea, and water washes over his knees and belly. He holds The History of the Crimean War above the splashing. The sun burns overhead.

  Lucy has never understood how he can read in the sun this way. Especially that sort of book: heavy, hardbound, dull. When he finishes he will begin another instantly. He has brought a dozen books on their vacation, and the Crimean War is the subject of each.

  Lucy sits beneath a palm tree, so that the sun touches her fair skin only in small patches. There was a time when she would not let any sun touch her at all, for her white skin became mottled with freckles and she thought they made her look cheap. But as she grows older she doesn’t mind the freckles so much, and the sun feels good in small doses.

  Lucy sits with a magazine in her lap and watches people. She has only recently begun to know the pleasure of watching others. For many years she could only worry that she herself was being watched, and would hide beneath wide hats and sunglasses and lipstick to avoid people’s stares. But lately she has grown more curious, less self-conscious.

  The island of Bora Bora attracts a diverse crowd. This is the best hotel on Bora Bora, many say in all of the islands around Tahiti. It is certainly very expensive, though Lucy does not know how expensive, exactly, because Parker handles that. On the beach there are tanned men in their late forties with hairy stomachs and thin gold chains around their necks. Their companions tend to be much younger women with exercise-hardened bodies and light blond streaks in their hair. There are families, too: docile fair-haired children; teenagers who still lie splayed on their deck chairs at high noon like creatures stranded by the receding tide.

  A young woman with long blond hair follows her luggage to a bungalow on stilts above the water at the far end of the beach. The bungalows over the water are the very best at the hotel; Lucy and Parker are staying in one as well. The woman wears a Polynesian dress and a flower in her hair. She and the bellboy enter the bungalow, where the bellboy will explain about towels and meals and the woman will marvel at the vivid red flowers that have been tucked into the room’s every crevice. She will breathe deeply to savor their perfume. This is what Lucy did when she and Parker arrived eight days before.

  The sun is growing quite hot, and Lucy shifts her chair farther into the shade of the palm. She looks forward to lunchtime, when she and Parker will sit in the cool dining room and eat crab salads as they watch the sea. So far, Parker shows no signs of moving. The water splashes gently over his soft belly. He turns another page.

  Glancing back down the beach, Lucy spots the blond woman whom she just saw arriving. Now the woman is standing on the deck of her bungalow, wearing a bikini and looking down at the water, which laps at the bungalow’s stilts. Lucy watches her climb onto the railing that surrounds the deck and then dive into the sea in a perfect arc. There is hardly a splash. Lucy stares at the spot where the woman disappeared and waits for her to surface. It seems to take a long time, and she reappears some distance from where she landed. Lucy has not seen anyone else dive off the railing of a bungalow that way. It looks very daring—the sort of thing she imagines doing herself, but would never try.

  The woman swims parallel with the beach, then emerges from the water not far from where Parker is sitting. She has the delicate slenderness of the very young, a smooth stomach, and long, narrow legs. Her skin is a rich, even brown. She wears a sparkling turquoise bikini, cut high above her hips to emphasize the fluid curve of her waist. The top wraps her tightly. Lucy glances around the beach and sees that many people have noticed the woman; even Parker has looked up from his book. The blonde turns and begins walking back toward her bungalow. Lucy watches her, noting the slim ankles, the golden tint of her skin against the white sand.

  “Did you see her?” she says to Parker when finally he joins her under the palm tree.

  “Who?” he asks, carefully shaking sand from his book before replacing it in the beach bag.

  “The girl!”

  He looks at her without expression.

  “The one in the water. That beauty. You must have seen.”

  “Oh, right,” he says, rubbing sand from his ankles. “Pretty.”

  “But did you really look at her? She was perfect! I’ve never seen anything like it!”

  Parker stands up and looks at Lucy. “I said. Pretty.”

  For some reason Lucy is excited. She wants to talk about this girl. They walk toward the dining room in their beach shifts, Parker carrying his leather sandals in one hand.

  “There was something about her. I think she’s a movie star or a model or something.”

  “Really?”

  “You just are when you look like that. She’s probably someone famous we just aren’t recognizing.”

  “It’s possible. We missed Gerald Ford on the golf course in Palm Springs, remember that?” he says.

  “I wonder why she’s here. I wonder if she’s making a film or something. I wonder if she’s alone.”

  “I doubt it.” Parker snickers.

  They have reached the dining room, and the Polynesian hostess seats them at their usual table. Lucy suppresses her urge to talk even more about the woman. She can see Parker isn’t interested.

  “How’s the war coming?” she asks, patting his hand, which is very brown against her own.

  “Not bad, not bad. Russia’s having a hard time, but its her own fault.”

  “Well, make sure things work out for the best,” she says, giving him a wink.

  It is their joke that Parker presides over whichever war he studies. It seems to Lucy that he has read exhaustively on every war that has ever taken place: the Korean, the World Wars, the War of 1812, the American and French Revolutions, Vietnam. She knows nothing about wars and doesn’t really care to, but she always tries to sound interested. Parker is careful to tell her just enough.

  As they wait for their salads, Lucy looks out over the terrace. The water is a very pale blue. The shore curls gently, a smooth strip of white sand and shifting palm leaves. She sighs. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  Parker lo
oks up. He has been studying the menu, though they have already ordered their usual meal. “We should try the mahimahi sometime,” he says. “What did you say?”

  “The view …”

  It is a hot, lazy day. They are becoming torpid from so many days of lying in the sun. They will be ready to go back to Chicago tomorrow.

  “It reminds me of that place in France two years ago,” Lucy says. “What was that hotel?”

  “Can’t remember,” Parker says. “Never can remember that stuff.”

  They have been all over the world, Lucy thinks, watching the sea. Yet so little of it has stuck with her. She clings to names, to snapshots and matchbooks, but the many seasons have mingled hopelessly. She used to arrange their photographs according to which bathing suit she was wearing—the polka-dotted one in Cannes, the striped red in Spain. But the sand and water around the bathing suits all look the same.

  Full from lunch and wobbling in the heat, they make their way back down the beach. Parker walks slightly ahead, and Lucy can see he is anxious to return to his war. She wonders what to do with her afternoon. She is tired of magazines, tired of swimming over that strangely colored coral she is afraid to step on.

  About ten paces from her chair Lucy stops and shields her eyes. The blond woman she saw before lunch is walking along the beach, holding hands with a man. They swing their arms. Lucy lowers herself into her chair without taking her eyes from them.

  As they come closer, Lucy sees that the man wears a camera around his neck. He stops suddenly and takes a step away from the woman, raising the camera to his eyes and looking at her through the lens. At first she pretends to cower, then swipes at his shin with a brown foot. Lucy hears the shutter clicking. The woman stops protesting and smiles, raising one arm to lift the hair away from her face and neck. She rests a hand on her hip, shifting her weight. She is laughing. The man pulls her onto the sand and kisses her until she wriggles away and runs into the sea. He follows.

  Lucy forces herself to look away, but after several moments she finds herself watching the swimming couple again. She watches almost without seeing them, her thoughts meandering in the heat.

  She thinks of her best friend, Josephine, whom she hasn’t seen in many years. She remembers a night when she and Josephine sat on the back porch of Lucy’s house, laughing and gossiping into the darkness. A train approached along the nearby tracks, and they were silent as the long chain of cars gashed past. When the last sounds had faded, Lucy took a breath and said, “Parker asked me to marry him.”

  Josephine had elastic features that could twist and bend into more drastic expressions than most people’s. Her mouth popped open. “My God!” she said, and Lucy sighed with relief at the crooked smile and flash of white teeth.

  Neither of them said anything for a moment, and then Josephine’s low, mischievous giggle filled the night. “You’ll be so rich!” She laughed softly.

  “Josephine!” It sounded cheap to hear her say it.

  “But come on,” Josephine said, seeming puzzled by Lucy’s hesitation. “The guy’s a millionaire.”

  “I know, but …”

  “Well, admit it, for God’s sake.”

  There was an awkward pause. Lucy felt she must say something, that it must be the right thing.

  “Will you help me pull it off?” she timidly asked, and they laughed together at that.

  The following weekend, Josephine dragged Lucy from one shopping mall to the next, buying bathing suits for her honeymoon. Josephine brought a tattered Glamour along, and would haul it out everywhere they went, pointing to some photo of a pouting girl in a spandex and asking the salesperson, “Have you got this one?”

  In the dressing room Lucy would blush at the sight of her pale, skinny figure in the mirror. But Josephine would say, “Fantastic, couldn’t be better!” and add yet another suit to the pile. Occasionally Lucy would glance at Josephine’s own figure behind her in the mirror, her full breasts and curved hips, and think that Josephine would look far better in these bathing suits than she herself did. Later, writing to Josephine from Barbados, Lucy could not bring herself to admit that she’d been too timid to wear any of the suits they had selected. In the hotel lobby boutique she had purchased a simple one-piece, navy blue. “Sensible,” Parker said, and Lucy felt a flash of joy, of relief, standing in the soaring white lobby with her new husband. He was perfect.

  Lucy decides she will spend the afternoon writing Josephine a letter. It has been six years since they have spoken, and Lucy rarely thinks of her friend anymore. Yet every now and then she will pause and for an instant will remember Josephine exactly, her bawdy laugh and tangled hair, her passion for magazines. When she thinks of Josephine, Lucy will look around her, at the gleaming piano and shelves of glass figurines if she is in her living room, at the polished floor, and for an instant she will wonder if she is in somebody else’s house.

  Lucy feels a shadow overhead and looks up. She is still staring at the water, but no one is swimming anymore. Parker looms overhead with his book.

  “Finished already?” she asks.

  “You bet,” he says, rustling through the beach bag. “Whizzed through that one.”

  “Interesting?” Lucy asks. It isn’t often that Parker looks so excited over one of his books.

  “I’ve got lots of ideas about this,” he says. “I don’t agree with any of these guys, none I’ve read so far.”

  “Is that good?”

  “It’s good if I can come up with an argument of my own and prove it,” Parker says. “We’ll see.” He has fished a pad of paper from the beach bag and holds it against the trunk of the palm tree, scribbling notes.

  “So what will you do?”

  “Keep reading,” he says, preoccupied. He snaps the pad shut and wedges it into the top of his bathing suit, so that it makes a depression in his stomach. Lucy reaches up and pats him there.

  Parker returns to their bungalow to get another book. Lucy wonders if he was always so animated at Yale, where as a young man he’d begun a Ph.D. in history. His father, who was grooming Parker to take over the family business, had been apoplectic. Apparently the vision of a massive pharmaceutical company looming at his elbow added just the right frisson to Parker’s endeavor, and from what Lucy has gathered, his two years at Yale were deliriously happy. He still talks about it sometimes, usually after a few drinks, hashing out his ideas for dissertation topics and reminiscing about the late-night arguments over Macaulay and Gibbon and Michelet. He has never explained why he quit with only a master’s, but it is obvious. Parker is a man of creature comforts. He grew up rich, and it is hard to imagine him living any other way.

  Because Parker has taken the writing pad, Lucy cannot begin her letter to Josephine. She hoists herself from her chair and stands in the sun for a moment, wavering from the exertion of standing suddenly in the heat. She stumbles to the edge of the sea and wades in, savoring the relief of the cool water as it climbs her body in stages. Then she plunges in and surfaces, staying close to shore to avoid the frightening waves.

  The blond woman and the dark-haired man are lying on the sand. From the water Lucy watches them stand up slowly, like sleepwalkers. The man picks up their towels, and the woman begins collecting their beach things. She leans down straight-legged, so limber she does not have to bend her knees. Maybe she’s a dancer, Lucy thinks.

  The two begin to wander toward their bungalow, stumbling a little in the heat. The woman puts her hand on the man’s neck and pulls him toward her. They stop walking and kiss. When they move again, the woman’s fingers are hooked in his swimming trunks. They walk quickly now, despite the heat.

  Lucy has been treading water. Now she notices that the current is wafting her gently down the beach toward the bungalows on stilts above the water. She drifts parallel with the walking couple, all the while telling herself she should begin swimming the other way. The man and woman have reached the door to their bungalow and are wiping sand from their bodies and hanging up their towels
. He runs his hand over her stomach. Lucy knows she should swim back. The man draws the woman to him and opens the bungalow door with his other hand. Lucy cannot make herself swim away.

  She has floated behind their bungalow now, and can see its sliding glass door through the railing that surrounds its back deck. It is too shadowy for her to see inside the room, but she thinks she can make out two figures there. She hovers, treading water. The current continues to move her, so that she is almost beyond this bungalow and on to the next. Her own is only yards away, and Parker will be reading on the deck. Lucy paddles against the current now, her eyes fixed on the glass door, trying to make out the shapes in the room.

  The curtain opens. Lucy sees the blond woman standing in the doorway, her bare breasts vividly white against her tan. She leans there for just a moment, looking over Lucy’s head toward the horizon. Lucy freezes, bobbing in the water, praying the woman will not see her. Her gaze hovers on the white breasts and the slim flare of waist. Then, with a flash of brown arms, the curtain shuts and Lucy is alone again.

  She paddles numbly toward shore and heaves herself onto the sand. She weaves among sunbathers and collapses into her chair. She tries to catch her breath. Her heart is thumping. The beach is very quiet, nothing moves. The palm rustles softly.

  A strange, anticipatory thrill flickers up and down Lucy’s spine. She watches the couple’s bungalow and thinks of how, right now, in the middle of the day, the two of them are making love. To distract herself, she opens a magazine, but cannot keep from trying to imagine them. She wishes she herself adored lovemaking as she knows some people do, wishes she were daring, risqué, all the things she has never been and will never be.

  For a long time Lucy had believed that money came between herself and Josephine—that her friend couldn’t stand her being rich. But it wasn’t that. Whatever it was began one afternoon a year after she and Parker were married. Lucy was in town visiting her parents, and she and Josephine met at the same Howard Johnson’s where they used to go for banana splits as kids. Rain poured down the plateglass window beside the table where Lucy waited. She remembers hugging Josephine and smelling freshness and rain, seeing her vivid face grow frantic with delight.