But all I said to Willa was, “It kind of stuck with me, Elizabeth herself of course, what happened to her, but more this sense that your mother was right.”
Now, this was a stupid thing to say, because her mother had behaved like a lunatic, but I couldn’t quite tell Willa that. And it also was stupid because by saying Willa’s mother was right, I was acknowledging that, as she had claimed, I was mentally ill. And I didn’t want Willa to think that, not for even a second, so in my practiced way, I allowed the box to remain buried and I switched gears. “I mean, I’ve lived a very normal life, and I get up and go to work every day and in the evening I write my songs….”
“Your songs are beautiful. ‘Heaven Right Here’ was amazing.”
“Thank you.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that “Heaven Right Here” was a cover, but I was so pleased that she’d like one of the songs I’d sung that I lost my train of thought for a moment. “Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yeah, I live a pretty normal life, I’m nice to my girlfriend, well, at least most of the time…”
“Nicer to her than she is to you, sounds like.”
“Yeah, I guess. Oh, you mean the eye. Yeah.”
“That was pretty radical.”
“I was forcing her to try to swim, even though I knew she was scared of it, and when I saw her flailing in the water with her mouth open, all those horrible feelings from what your mother said came rushing back.”
“How deep was the water, again?”
“Waist, maybe chest.”
She laughed. “She was in no danger of dying from anything other than severe over-dramatic-ness, if that’s a word.”
I laughed again. “If it isn’t, it should be. Anyway, my point is that ever since then, I mean since your mother, I guess I’ve been a little, I don’t know, I hate to kind of admit this, scared of women.”
“Scared how?”
“Not sexually.” I felt foolish about saying this so abruptly, as if Willa would think I wanted to reassure her on this score, and thus was attracted to her sexually, both of which were of course true. “And not in some anti-feminist, they need to stay in their place kind of way. More like just the opposite. I’m scared of their opinions, of what they think of me, of how they might judge me.”
“Are you scared of me?”
I looked, closely, at Willa, and I realized that just as I had loved her back then on the sidewalk when we were both eight, and before that at six, when I’d given her that green ring in those days before Elizabeth had even been born, I loved her just as much now.
3
It took a moment after I realized that I loved her still—or, rather, again—before I could say or do anything. I just kept on looking at her, and while I was looking, I was wondering whatever happened to that toy ring, and whether Willa still owned it. But then, without thinking about what I was doing—I was barely aware I was even doing it—I scooted over on the turquoise towel just a bit and kissed her. I’ve kissed a few women in my time where they really didn’t want to be kissed, or weren’t expecting it, and I knew it instantaneously; it’s a horrible feeling, those dry lips, and the cringing humiliation afterward. But this was the opposite: Her pink lips were warm and wet and soft, and she smelled faintly of the salt on our skins.
It was like we were swimming together again.
I pulled myself even closer to her and put my hand on the bare small of her back, which was hot to the touch, and we kissed some more. I looked into her soft brown eyes, which rarely blinked, but rather looked at me steadily and calmly and acceptingly, and I noticed she had rather remarkable eyelashes—brown at the tips, like her hair, but blonde near her eyelids, and it couldn’t have been mascara, because we had both just emerged from the water. It was as if her eyelashes were replicating, in miniature and in reverse, her journey from a little girl with blondish hair to her adulthood as a brunette, and this tiny reminder of her child self—suddenly, she blinked, just once!—was almost too touching and intimate for me to bear.
After a while, Willa said, “Let’s hope your girlfriend doesn’t change her mind about the water.”
“She won’t. She’s shopping. Willa, I’ve got a total of five performances here. That means three more days. Can I see you all three?”
She thought for a moment. Her lips moved infinitesimally, and then she said, “I’ve got to leave the day after tomorrow. But I promise you I’ll meet you here again tomorrow at the same time.”
“And tomorrow evening?”
She shook her head no. We both knew what my question, and her answer, really meant, though I didn’t know if her “no” was because Alisa was here in Hawaii with me, or because Alisa was still nominally my girlfriend, or whether there was a deeper reason. In any event, it wasn’t one of those definitive noes that shake you to the core.
As I walked back to the hotel with my towel, I realized, in fact, I had a smile on my face. I just couldn’t wait until tomorrow so that I could kiss Willa some more. I stopped in a little shop and bought a pair of black wraparound sunglasses, finally, and when I tried them on in the mirror, that smile was still there. Suddenly that night’s gig had become merely a task to accomplish on the way to something better.
That night in bed, after returning from the show (strong attendance, average performance) I got off on a weird mental tangent, maybe because I didn’t feel right about lying next to a still-wide-awake Alisa while I was thinking about Willa. What I did, instead, was to try to force myself to have another unbidden vision of the light switch in Alisa’s laundry room. Maybe I thought it would please her or something.
So I tried, and I tried, and the best analogy I could think of was trying to achieve an orgasm without being touched. I’d heard of some yogis who supposedly could do this, but I was no yogi. Alisa was switching back and forth between checking her mail on her iPad and reading Harper’s Bazaar, and every time her finger swiped across the iPad screen, and every time a page flipped, I lost concentration. She and I weren’t not speaking, but we didn’t have a lot to say to each other either, and after a while she sighed, tossed her magazine onto the floor, and put her iPad on the bedside table. She said, “Wanna order a movie or something?” and I was about to answer when the image I’d been searching for suddenly flashed, once again, into my mind: a woman’s bottom in a tiny white bikini, hovering above the laundry-room table. There was no question in my mind, at this moment, that this was Willa’s round bottom and Willa’s white bikini.
I became, suddenly, incredibly aroused and grabbed Alisa’s longer and sleeker legs and butt. She didn’t resist, and we made love really slowly and for an amazingly long time. There was something about it that was, for us, unusually tender and, I don’t know, sweet. That was the best word for it; it was, very evidently to me and probably to Alisa as well, like we were saying goodbye to each other.
But of course I couldn’t leave well enough alone, maybe because I wasn’t really sure if I was merely cheating on Alisa with Willa, which I was, or had just, somehow, also cheated on Willa with Alisa. Somehow? Suddenly, in fact, I was certain—certain and unambiguously ashamed—that I had indeed been cheating on Willa. I felt flushed and jittery and uncomfortable; it was now close to an hour since I’d first grabbed Alisa’s legs and, as we were both lying there naked, I said, “I had another mental image of the laundry room.”
“Just now, you mean? While we were having sex?”
“No. Just before. I guess it turned me on. Except the weird thing was, I saw this girl in a white bikini hovering over the laundry table, but it wasn’t you.”
Alisa said, rather cautiously, “Well, who was it?”
I collected myself, and lied. “Nobody.”
Alisa seemed oddly disappointed by this. “Nobody? You sure?” And then I knew with complete certainty that she was hoping it was someone else, though I didn’t understand why she would want this
to be the case.
“Not that it matters, because you’re not back home to flip the switch anyway, and I didn’t even see it. Anyway, I’m pretty sure it was nobody. Just a generic woman.”
Alisa laughed. “I know you, Charlie. There are no ‘generic women’ for you, are there? I’ve never even caught you using porn.” She was right—I didn’t. “Every woman you know you either love or you fear, and whoever you just saw in your image, you love her.” She paused. “And I know it isn’t me, and I’m okay with that.”
“And why are you okay with that? Is it because we’re officially breaking up?”
“I don’t know, you tell me, Charlie. Start by telling me who you were thinking of while we were having sex so intensely just now. I mean, we haven’t had sex like that since we first started going out, so try to tell me that something or someone wasn’t running through your mind the whole time, and I’ll call you a fucking liar.”
“So who was running through your mind just now? Frank?”
“I told you, Frank is in Cleveland.” Frank was in Cleveland? Yeah, she’d told me that, but what the hell did his present location have to do with anything? I turned away from her and stared out the window of the Hotel Eva at the lights of another hotel across the street, trying to collect my thoughts.
After a moment, Alisa spoke again. “I told you on the beach that everything I said was true. And it is true. Frank talks to me about what he’s going to do to me in the hotel room, except he really does do it, and I like it. And during the day, he rubs up against me just like I told you, and it just reminds me of what we did and what we’re going to do, and I like that, too. So, yeah, just like I said, it was all true.”
It didn’t really hurt as much as I thought it would have, maybe because I had Willa waiting for me. I suddenly understood why Alisa had been trying to get me to identify the girl in the white bikini; she’d been looking for “permission” to talk about her own relationship, and moral justification, or at least a form of moral equivalency, that she could cite in justifying her own betrayal.
I pictured Alisa looking at me, my bony back and my hunched shoulders, and I shrugged those shoulders for Alisa to see, and I said, “We’re not married. We’re not even living together. We knew we were coming to an end. It’s really fine.”
“I’m sorry I had to be cruel about it just now, but I needed you to know.”
“You weren’t that cruel. I mean, I knew it was Frank, and I saw the two of you together at dinner with Diane, so I knew that whatever the hell was happening between the two of you, it wasn’t harassment.”
“I’m not even sure I’m going to keep going on with him. It’s like he had me under a spell or something, and I don’t like it.”
“A spell?”
“He’s just really weird, like a hypnotist. I mean, it’s not like a sexual spell, if that’s what you are thinking.”
“Thank you for clarifying that.” I meant that rather more sincerely than sarcastically. “Not that it makes that much difference at this stage.”
She didn’t say anything, and of course I couldn’t see her face. Suddenly, I had a revelation. “Cleveland. I understand now about Cleveland.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, your not wanting under pain of death to fly to Hawaii with me, and then suddenly changing your mind. You didn’t want to go with me because you wanted to stay in Chicago and spend time with Frank without me around, am I right? And then, Frank found out he had to go to Cleveland on business, so you figured you might as well go with me after all since he wasn’t going to be around. Or maybe, because he wouldn’t be around anyway, that would give you an excuse to get as far away from him and his influence as possible, you know, his ‘spell,’ as you put it. Clear your mind.”
Alisa actually laughed. “You are amazing, Charlie. I mean, I can’t say you’re wrong about any of that.”
“I just feel badly for Diane in all this.”
“Well, Diane’s a piece of work in her own right. You don’t know her as well as you think you do.”
“Still.”
“Still, I know. Don’t go putting us in categories, okay? I hit you, but that doesn’t make me evil, and you forced me to swim when you know that’s my biggest fear, and that doesn’t make you evil either. And Diane is no fucking Saint Teresa herself, by the way. Can we just leave it at that?”
Yes, I thought, because of Willa, I can leave it at that. But I just said, “Sure.”
“So we can be civil?”
“Well, it’s a long plane ride back to Chicago, so yeah. Let’s actually be friends about it, Alisa. Can we do that? Not just civil, but you know, like the people in the row ahead of us won’t even know we’re ‘ex’ if they eavesdrop. Can we do that?”
“I’m fine with that, Charlie, if you are.”
“I totally am.”
“And I’ll be zonked on Xanax and vodka anyway, don’t forget.”
I turned back around to face her. “Good point. Come to my show tomorrow night?”
She said, nicely, “I will. You’re a good performer, Charlie, and I won’t forget you.”
And that was that. Except that, at that moment and again the next night as we were headed down to dinner before my show, I kind of mulled over what she meant when she said “performer.” Alisa was good with words, and well understood their multiple meanings, even if I had to teach her some of them, and I wondered to what extent she was trying to tell me she knew that I wasn’t telling the entire truth about who I’d been thinking about when we’d made love.
Willa and I did indeed meet one more time on the beach, and we kissed a bit more—not as much as I would have liked—and it felt a little strange to me for reasons I couldn’t quite pin down. Maybe I couldn’t quite make the connection between this young woman—who accepted me and was attracted to me even though I’d played an inadvertent role in her sister’s death—and her mother, who’d excoriated me and, in some ways, destroyed me. I was no more at fault than Willa had been, but I somehow expected her to be angry with me. Instead, she kissed me and talked to me about her life in Seattle, and joked about her lousy boyfriends and why it was I still wasn’t wearing my new sunglasses, and, as she packed up to head for the airport, even invited me to come and visit her.
4
My flight home was blessedly uneventful, and Alisa and I didn’t argue a bit, not even at the baggage claim back at O’Hare when her bag had somehow wheeled itself over to the wrong carousel. In fact, I even stayed over at her condo that night because we didn’t want the taxi driver to make two stops, albeit not for any more-compelling reasons than that. I wasn’t sure where we’d be a week or a month from now, but it suddenly didn’t seem urgent.
I caught up on my e-mail before work the next morning. There were seven messages from Gilbert hectoring me about work projects and none from my father, who in any event rarely e-mailed. None, either, from Willa, though e-mail would be a bit formal at this stage. There was one, however, from Dr. Nemerov. It read:
“Carlos, I hope you had a fine vacation. Hawaii is not quite my style. Please read the following snippet, from a French novel I read a few years back: ‘Do you know what an involuntary act signifies? Psychoanalysts say that it reflects the insidious maneuvering of one’s hidden unconscious. What a pointless theory, in fact. When we do something involuntarily, this is the most visible sign of the power of our conscious will, for our will, when opposed by emotion, makes use of all of its wiles to attain its ends.’ Reflect on this, if you would. Take care and keep in touch.”
After I’d settled in at my desk a couple of hours later, Gilbert sauntered by and said, “How were the islands?”
“Island, actually. We never left Honolulu.”
“Interesting story behind that, I’ll bet. And your eye, interesting too.”
“Nah, not as interestin
g as you might think. How’re things here?”
“Hawaii’s for beginners, you ought to try Sardinia sometime. Now that’s an island. In any event, Charles, let me congratulate myself on my thoughtfulness for not ruining your vacation.”
I wasn’t too worried, because I had gone to Paris with my previous girlfriend a year or so before meeting Alisa, and Gilbert had called my cell at 10:45 p.m. Paris time to remind me to come up with a good name for a client’s website, which was still in the wire frame stage and wouldn’t need a name for another month or two. Really, he was just calling to make sure I wasn’t defecting to another agency, which I figured out only after he’d insistently inquired on the view outside my hotel-room window, as if he were comparing it to what he could see on Google Street View. Maybe he thought I’d slip up and describe Third Avenue in Manhattan. But by the time I’d figured this out, my sole meunière, wine, and tarte tatin had done a complete wash and rinse cycle in my belly and what remained of my evening had been ruined. Point is, he hadn’t placed a single call or sent a single e-mail while I’d been in Honolulu, so how bad could it be?
But instead of reminding him of all of this history, I just said, “Bad?”
“Depends on how you define bad. Our billings? Let’s let that spin on its own axis for the moment. Let us focus, instead, on your own dire situation.”
“Dire?”
“Do I speak too plainly? So be it. Dire. You’re the only consultant in this firm who was directly responsible for losing a client in the past—”
“That wasn’t my responsibility. I got no cooperation from anyone on the budget.”
He held up his forefinger. “Let me finish. The only consultant directly responsible for losing a major client in the past six months. We cannot afford to lose even one client in this environment, and now ClickEver’s making funny noises.”
“Noises how?”
“How? Not clicking, that’s for goddamn sure. Noises like, ‘there’re plenty of marketing firms in New York, so why should we continue to do the tango with a Chicago firm that charges New York prices?’ ”
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