“I did, I did.”
The pusher tapped at his keyboard and then smiled at Gerald. “My apologies. I’ve updated your wife’s information in the system.”
Marian had deferred to the “Mr. & Mrs.” sign that Gerald’s mom had picked out for the sweetheart table. After all, Jacky had kindly helped fund their wedding. Marian even let the pastor introduce them as husband and wife, using Gerald’s last name alone. After the wedding, Gerald was to let his mother know that they’d decided against the name change. Marian had agreed to entwine the purposes of their lives, but when she said yes, she had not envisioned how “Mrs. Gerald Moore” would feel. When cards arrived from new relatives addressed to his name, but with the Mrs. tacked on, she felt suddenly like a commodity, a potential child bearer, an extension of his holdings. Was she perpetuating an unnecessary institution? she had wondered, not for the first time. Had this even been necessary? At the very least, she had decided, she would continue to be “Ms.” Grace, the lips pressing for the M and then sliding into that pleasant, husky zee. “Gerald,” she had asked several times, often when she was spooning him before sleep, “you’ll make sure she understands, right?” And she would say “right” as a plea, over and over, until he murmured back in the affirmative.
In the elevator, on the way to their room, Gerald squeezed her elbow. “I’m sorry,” he said. “She must have put our names down when she used the points to book the room.”
“It’s been five months.” They had delayed the honeymoon. Their winter wedding and their school schedules had not allowed enough time for the grand exit and immediate departure. They had spent the day after their wedding at Jacky’s, watching a sitcom she couldn’t remember, packing, and eating leftovers. Then they had driven back to Philly so Gerald could teach and Marian could review her favorites from Reading Magic Enterprise’s recommended reading list.
In the room, there was a card on the bed — a menu listing voice commands and introducing them to the hotel’s AI program, “Rhonda,” with the silhouette of a small-waisted woman in a pencil skirt embossed on the thick cardstock.
“Rhonda, dim the lights,” Gerald said. The lights dimmed.
“I don’t like it,” Marian said.
“Brighten the lights,” he said, but the lights remained dim. “That’s not what I meant. Besides, you have to say Rhonda for it to work.”
“I do not understand that request,” a voice emanated from the walls.
“Is there a way to opt out of this?” Marian whispered. “I don’t want the hotel listening.”
Gerald shrugged and unwrapped a coffee disk for the sleek steel machine on the desk. “It’s not like we’re doing anything illegal.”
“No, but I don’t want some prick, like the guy at the front desk, listening to us having sex later.”
“Oh,” Gerald said, his finger hovering over the coffeemaker’s power button. “Rhonda, stop listening.”
“I do not understand that request.”
“I don’t know what to do.” Gerald slumped into the desk chair and watched his coffee brew.
He was defeated so easily, Marian thought, exasperated. Like when they moved across country and only a third of the way into packing their pod he became overwhelmed by trying to make everything fit and had simply slumped into a lawn chair, staring forlornly at the piles of boxes. It had been left to her to orchestrate a plan. She’d quickly listed the furniture they could sell without losing too much value, including the end table she’d bought with her dad from a dusty secondhand shop run by a pastor who’d forced his son to deliver it for free. She’d cried and cried when it sold, like she’d betrayed her still-living father, because a part of her knew she’d eventually regret letting go of any object that could serve as a totem of the ephemeral connection she had felt to another living being. After she’d sold a few more pieces and braced herself against further displays of sentimentality, they’d managed to pack the rest. Gerald had been grateful. She’d felt needed. Sometimes she marveled at the tight-jawed resentment she could feel for something she also deeply desired.
She picked up the phone and called the front desk. A man answered with a snooty tone. The pusher, she thought. She asked to turn off the Rhonda program.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but many of the room’s amenities will not function without Rhonda.”
Marian hung up on him. Gerald stared expectantly as he blew on his latte.
“Now what?” he said.
“Rhonda, please list room service options for lunch.”
The voice began with a lobster roll that cost more than their daily food budget, and the subsequent items were no better: white truffle pizza, caviar, a shockingly expensive seafood bisque.
“Rhonda, stop.”
Marian pulled a box of meal bars out of her suitcase and tossed one to Gerald.
“You’re a goddess,” he said, already tearing into the foil.
She watched him chomp on the granola, pausing only to sip his coffee, and felt that familiar blend of fondness and annoyance: her love for his childlike zeal and her irritation that she usually shouldered the burden of each decision. She had planned nearly all of their wedding, and so she had decided not to plan any of the honeymoon, to leave that responsibility entirely on him. She was already regretting that choice.
“What are we doing for dinner?”
“There are five restaurants in the resort, so I just figured we’d stick around here,” he said, allowing a mangled raisin to spill over his lips.
“Did you make a reservation?”
He took forever to swallow. “It’s a resort.”
“That doesn’t mean you don’t need a reservation.” Marian lay back in the bed, exhausted. “Rhonda, which restaurants on the resort have availability tonight?”
“One moment as I compile results.”
Marian listened to Gerald licking the sticky corn syrup off his fingers and then slurping his drink.
Rhonda’s voice returned with a quick blip of white noise. “There are two restaurants available tonight. The Blue Lagoon and Casablanca. Would you like me to make a reservation?”
“Rhonda, what is the cheapest entrée at the Blue Lagoon?”
“The Blue Lagoon uses seasonal ingredients that change daily. There are no set prices on the menu.”
Marian rolled her eyes at Gerald, then added, “Rhonda, what is the cheapest entrée at Casablanca?”
“I’m sorry. Casablanca does not list prices on their menu.”
“Fuck you, Rhonda.”
“I do not understand that request.”
Gerald asked the ceiling, “Rhonda, which restaurants have availability near the resort?”
“I’m sorry. My services do not extend to external properties.”
“Fuck you, Rhonda,” they said.
“I do not — ”
“Rhonda, stop!” Marian yelled.
Gerald shifted to the bed and reached for Marian’s hand. “I’m sorry, love. I’ll figure it out.”
He always means well, Marian thought. He just had no idea what it took to plan something like this. She gave him a modest smile so as not to overly reassure him. Still, she thought, he should have researched the way she always did, for work, for the move, for their groceries.
They nodded off. When they awoke, Rhonda told them the time was seventeen hundred. Marian felt a heaviness in her chest. Nearly fifteen percent of their honeymoon was already over. She had thought this would feel like an escape, like they’d been freed from their usual worries and obligations and this new chapter of their life was finally beginning, but everything felt the same.
She caught Gerald staring at her, his face still creased by the stitching of the pillowcase.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“We’ve already lost a day.”
“We still have the entire evening.”
“But we didn’t see the water when it was bright and turquoise.” Suddenly she could smell cheap coconut-scented sunscreen, and she reca
lled her mother rubbing it into her shoulders. At least, she thought it was her mother. It had been so long ago. Whoever was rubbing her shoulders, she remembered the wholesome absence of worry, and her father, soon after, carrying her into the surf, always keeping her head above the water. She could spend her whole life chasing that feeling.
“We’ll see the water tomorrow,” Gerald said. “And the next day. And the next.”
“I just don’t want to waste any more time.”
She wanted Gerald to pull her to him, like he sometimes did when he was feeling tolerant of her melancholy, and to run his fingers across her scalp. Instead, she could see that this was not one of his sympathetic moods. He was tired of her spells of grieving. And she knew he deserved to be. She was her father’s daughter, with his somber view on the transience of the world. Before he’d died three years ago, he talked incessantly about the likelihood that he would succumb to a complication from his diabetes. He had turned his will and his plans for his burial into a casual topic of Sunday afternoon phone calls. He had two dogs, and he would carry around a wrist bracelet that had Marian’s number on it with the engraved phrase emergency caretaker for dogs. Although he’d been right to worry about his untimely demise — a fulfillment of paranoia that she knew Gerald deeply resented, largely because it confirmed all of Marian’s inherited neuroses — the diabetes was not what did him in. It was a coyote attack. Not that the coyotes had harmed her dad personally, but they went after his dogs, as best as anyone could tell, based on the carcass of Doodles and the wounds on Ginger — who’d miraculously escaped and now lived with them, lumpily scarred and pumped full of Prozac, in their tiny apartment in Philly. Marian’s father was found in a ravine near a creek bed, his neck broken, not far from what remained of the Goldendoodle. When the emergency responders arrived, tipped off by a startled hiker, they saw the bracelet and called Marian. Thinking that she was just a dog sitter per the engraved label, they broke the news in a brash manner, asking without preamble if she could watch the dogs for their deceased owner. Still, they’d found her immediately. Her father had been right.
Now Marian was wincing at the ceiling fan like it was going to break off and hack her into pieces. She could feel Gerald assessing the situation, assessing her. Suddenly he leapt from the bed and loomed over her with fingers energetically splayed into jazz hands.
“You’re succumbing to mawkishness,” Gerald said. “Let’s go to the pool bar.”
“It’s too expensive.” She was snuggling into her pillow. He yanked it away.
“Hey — ”
“Just one,” he promised.
With a bit more coaxing, Marian pulled her hair into a bun and they left the room. They took a few wrong turns, but there were always employees eager to intercept and give directions. At one point they passed a robotic crab carrying a tray of dirty dishes to an automated sanitation cart. Its ommatophores swiveled to assess the couple’s trajectory, tracking them with green unwavering eyes.
They passed through a wide hallway that had been staged as an art gallery. Marian was no artist, but she found herself embarrassed for the cluster of portraits that used sequins and glitter to depict evening gowns on women with unnaturally configured teeth. Then she gasped at the sight of a brilliantly rendered bird, its wings a jewel-bright rainbow. Its eyes looked sad and stricken to her, full lucid circles peering over a severe black beak. She stepped closer, trying to detect the brush strokes. A curator in a shiny black blazer descended on them.
“It’s a Martin Devino original,” the curator bragged. “And that is an extremely rare scarlet macaw, a clone he had made before they steepened penalties for the ban. They’ll probably go extinct again soon, but we have replicas in the nature preserve. They talk and everything, just like the originals.”
“Sounds expensive,” Gerald said.
“How awful,” Marian said. She hated to think of the bird’s resurrection, only to exist as a model for a two-dimensional image that would be sold to a rich tourist at a resort — how it would die, the last of its kind, a second time.
“There’s nothing we can do about it.” Gerald linked his fingers with hers and squeezed her hand.
They crossed a skywalk. A lazy river wound its way beneath them, carrying along a sunburnt man sipping Corona in his inner tube. On the other side, in the west wing of the building, they found the beachfront portion of the property. The evening sun glittered off the sea, golden flecks masking the blue water.
They found a table at the beach bar, a patio with a crisp white awning. Marian pulled the hem of her skirt down so she could sit on the metal chair without burning her thighs. She watched as Gerald fetched two beers and gestured enthusiastically with the bartender. Both alternated pointing and pantomiming a series of turns.
Gerald returned, heroic. “So Joe, the bartender, told me his favorite restaurant is just a mile or two up the road. An Indian-Caribbean place. Totally affordable. And,” his smile grew, “get this! It’s next to a mini-mart. We can pick up some things for breakfast to keep in the room.”
“Great,” Marian said, already picturing the limitations of their minifridge and compiling a list of reasonable food products. String cheese. Apples. Instant oatmeal prepackaged in cups. Perhaps some kind of beef jerky — although she still struggled with the synthetic texture of most packaged meat. A few farms still raised cows the old-fashioned way for elite restaurants — the resort probably had grass-fed, pasture-raised beef on their priceless menus — but it was rare to see a field of cattle along the road. Maybe someday they’d have fields of replicas fake munching on fake grass — a way to feed nostalgia spawned by western films and old dairy ads. We no longer need the cows, she thought, but we need their ghosts. Then she thought of the Botanical Preserve and its mechanical beasts. She didn’t want to see the fake macaws. That would mean validating the preserve’s decision to buy the cheap spectacle, the simulacrum of the inefficiently organic creature. Her stomach lurched, and she turned to find Gerald staring at her.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Food,” she said.
He smiled, relieved, like he could solve that problem.
Marian changed into a little black dress. She liked to pack light, and the dress was a way to account for the majority of sartorial demands that could arise on any vacation. She could feel the hunger, the acid pooling in her stomach and starting to climb its way back up her throat. She pinned her hair into a French twist without looking in the mirror. She caught Gerald appraising her.
“Did you turn off your earrings?”
A couple years ago, she had bought earrings that would co vertly track her commute. If she deviated from her preset paths, or if she took too long to reach her destination, it would notify him. The device was programmed to allow for stagnant spells at the library and the school, but if she became immobile outside of her preset safe zones, Gerald would be notified. He could then escalate the warning to the police. If he failed to dismiss the alert within fifteen minutes, the police would come anyway.
“I set them to allow movement within five miles of the resort,” she said, checking her lobes for the small synthetic sapphires that hid the necessary hardware. “That makes them a bit worthless, doesn’t it? That’s over half the island.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“Maybe on our way out we should tell the front desk where we’re going. Have them look for us if we don’t come back by, I don’t know, ten? Eleven?”
“That seems unnecessary.”
“Fine. I’ll call.”
Although Gerald was usually easygoing, talking to strangers rattled him. When they had barely begun dating, he told her about his first office job — how he’d made an elaborate flowchart of all the possible standard responses he would need when discussing business with his boss’s clients. For years, he would write a script before placing a call of any importance. Now he avoided phone calls and scripts as much as possible. And now he was sidestepping to block her path to the phone.
“I’d rather you didn’t,” he said. “I told you I’d plan the dinner. Hurry up and finish getting ready. Let me handle it.”
He picked up the phone and explained the restaurant choice with unusual bravado and ended with his request that someone “notify the authorities” if they hadn’t returned by eleven. When he placed the phone back in its cradle, she’d felt pleased that he would brave such discomfort for her.
They could have had the valet hail a cab for them, but Gerald was adamant about walking. She watched as he hurried past the resort’s roundabout and knew it was to avoid the valet, to avoid the awkwardness of refusing a cab when his wife was clearly dressed for a date.
“It’ll be a nice stroll, and then we can maybe take a cab back,” he said. “I bet it’s cheaper to book a cab off property.”
They walked to the end of the drive, past a grove of palm trees, and emerged on a surprisingly narrow street, largely degraded to gravel. The sidewalk disappeared suddenly into the dirt shoulder of the road.
“Maybe we need the cab,” Marian said, pausing to look back at the valet stand, which she could only dimly make out in the dusky shadows of the portico.
“It’ll be fine,” Gerald said, already marching ahead.
They had to walk single file. Marian glared at the back of his head, the glistening wave where he’d failed to comb through his hair gel. He should have let me go first, she thought, glancing over her shoulder, listening for signs of traffic. The sky was deepening, and she worried about her dark dress. It would be easy to go unnoticed. What if some drunk tourist swiped her? Her marriage had barely started; there were no children, and Gerald would die with her, and she’d read fewer books than she could have ever admitted publicly, given her profession. When her father died, there were stacks of unused Spanish workbooks in his office. He always had some sort of self-improvement hobby that never reached its full potential: learning a few chords and songs on guitar when he was forty, then a years-long obsession with making imprecise stained-glass windows, ballroom dancing until his partner-slash-girlfriend dumped him, and so on and so forth. Then he tried to learn Spanish, with the intention of going to Mexico soon after he’d mastered the intermediate-level Rosetta Stone lessons. He never got that far with any of it. Even her mother had a habit of leaving projects unfinished. She’d willingly left Marian when she was only seven to drive to Los Angeles for a career that never took off — Marian knew, she’d Googled her.
What Makes You Think You're Awake? Page 19