“Let’s see what we can find,” Doyle said.
Ethan selected a pair of khaki pants and two pairs of American jeans. He held them up to the light of the street.
The vendor named a price and Ethan paid it.
“You’re supposed to haggle,” Doyle said. “You know that.”
“I don’t feel like haggling.”
“That’s not the point. If you don’t haggle you’ll look like a mark. You’ll look like some lost gringo. Anybody’s punch.”
“Sounds about right,” Ethan said.
At the next stall, they bought Ethan a belt and some new mirrored sunglasses. They walked on and a teenager standing on the roof of a white van called to them on a megaphone.
“Welcome tourists, welcome tourists. Let’s everyone welcome the brave American tourists.”
“I see that kid every goddamn day,” Doyle said. “He knows I’m not a tourist.”
They walked on, the kid called again from his drunken perch atop the broken-down van. A taxi cab honked and weaved and honked again through the crowded street.
“Yeah, you fit right in,” Ethan said. Guaro-drunk and mean, he felt the ocean rot of the nearby pier in his mouth, the brackish salt smell of land’s end.
“I’m not a mark,” said Doyle. “I’m not an errand boy for a two-bit Mexican whore.”
They went on, they came to a wide open array of stalls selling t-shirts and backpacks covered in all manner of English lettering.
“They receive boatloads of used American clothes,” Doyle said. “Or they make them themselves. Check it out. The English doesn’t make that much sense.”
Ethan bought a black hooded sweatshirt. Printed on its back was a picture of a silver spaceship flying, it seemed, straight into a milky green sun. Below the picture IN TIMES OF NEED was written in blue and silver letters. Doyle handed him two tee-shirts and two polo shirts. They were each solid colors with stripes, like an admiral’s epaulets, across the shoulders. Over the left breast of each was sewn a little black rubber insignia—TOM CRUISE ACTIONWEAR. Beneath it was a blue lightning bolt.
“You want to play hero,” Doyle said. “These should do nicely.”
“I’ve never known an eighteen-year-old girl to say no to Tom Cruise Actionwear,” Ethan said.
Doyle turned away to face the raucous market, the screaming hawkers and revving cars, Indians carrying dead ocelots over their shoulders.
“The girl’s going to be the least of your problems,” he said.
Ethan haggled and bought the shirts and a black backpack for the equivalent of three dollars apiece, and as he stood in the thrumming market amidst the shouting in Spanish and Garifuna and Mestizo dialects, he felt he’d lost all hold on language. It seemed strange, a tenuous, fleeting thing: the beggar in the square mumbling in his own garbled tongues, whores calling to him from Boystown’s shadowy corridors, the strange array of meaningless English emblazoned on all the clothes around him. He turned and for a moment he didn’t see Doyle—Doyle was gone into the maelstrom of sound, and then, turning again, he saw him moving off, just ahead of him, toward the far end of the market. Ethan followed and wiped his brow and his skin felt wet, clammy. He remembered Samantha shivering into a hangover fever with the bed sheet pulled up around her chin, soaked through with sweat.
“You need to take some Tylenol, Sam,” he’d said. “Look at you, you’re burning up.”
“My liver hates Tylenol,” she said, and touched her fingers to her forehead. “Besides, I don’t feel hot. I feel normal.”
He crossed the room and sat down in the bed next to her, lay his lips against her skin, wiped her sweaty hair out of her face.
“You can’t take your own temperature. You’ll feel the same all over.”
“Says you,” Samantha said. “I never feel the same. Not anywhere.”
Ethan went on to where Doyle waited for him beyond the market on the empty pier. As he walked, women took his picture with camera phones, called and whistled through their teeth. They smiled and stared at him and he could not hold their gaze. He felt for his wallet in his back pocket. It was still there. He put on his new sunglasses and looked up, away from the women, at the far horizon. The tide was all the way in. Past Doyle, he saw the sea hissing up against the coconut palm pylons, a lone cormorant flushing at one of a thousand noises, breaking into the dimensionless sky.
On Sunday mornings, before they were married, they’d wake in Samantha’s apartment to bright sun through the skylight and the smell and hiss of coffee coming on in the kitchen. The first time this happened it surprised Ethan: he was drawn from a dream where someone played ugly music on a piano in his grandfather’s barn. As he woke, the music thinned out into the regimented suck of water, the percolating drip and sizzle about the warming plate. He rolled over and pulled Samantha’s hair out of her face. She was already awake.
“Why do you set it overnight?” he said. “You know I like to make coffee.”
The sun through the skylight fell palely on her throat and her hair, her exposed face. Without makeup, lying on purple sheets under direct light, her skin looked soft and pink as undercooked chicken. He rolled away from her, onto his back.
“I like the coffee already made,” she said. “This way I have coffee when I want it.”
She shifted up against him and he turned and looked at her, her skin still strangely pink, her lips wide and dry. In that instant he did not recognize Samantha. Her hair was lighter, auburn or red, her mouth opened about saliva-strung teeth, her eyelids flickered as if she too had just been roused from nightmare. He reached and pulled her toward him, on top of him, out of the falling slash of sunlight. There it was. The light changed everything. He knew this, knew it beyond any other thing. He pulled her head down to his, buried his face in her hair that smelled of sweat and sleep. The coffee pot silent now, her t-shirt peeling off—both their hands working—over her head. Now, I could hold you through anything, he thought. Here in the silent shadow of morning where one right choice could serve as every remedy.
THE WEEK AFTER THEY RETURNED from Key West, they went to an after-hours function for Samantha’s ad agency. The lounge they’d rented was lit with low purple neon lights. Under the lights, the row of black leather couches that hugged the far wall glinted as slick and wet as greased seals. Between the couches and the bar stood a series of round, dull metal cocktail tables filled with bowls of black olives and platters of meats and cheeses and cheeses wrapped in meats. The couches were empty and the food untouched; everybody stood around the open bar. It was a small crowd, not a great turnout, perhaps, or maybe, Ethan thought, intentionally small: an intimate gathering—staged, dark, and well lubricated. People stood in crowded circles and drank and, as they talked, waved their free hands at each other with the meaningless freneticism of a cuckoo bursting from a clock. Pretty soon, Ethan thought, a lot of people would start to spill.
“Ethan, you remember Jack,” Samantha said.
“Sure.” Ethan reached out, over several drinks, to shake his hand. “Good to see you again, Jack.”
Jack was Samantha’s boss and stood shorter than her by several inches. He kept his coal-gray hair in a military brush cut and he wore all his shirts at least a size too small to allow him the semblance of a larger man. His arms hung almost past his knees, a much bigger man’s arms. The last time Ethan had met him he had tried to demonstrate wrestling moves.
“Hey, E,” he said. His face was already sweating and there was an empty glass by his right arm on the bar. The ugly purple light muddied the vodka tonic in his hand. “How was the honeymoon?” he said. “Really appreciate you guys going to KW for us. Sam said she checked out the clientele.”
“Sure,” Ethan said. “It was nice. Got some sun.”
“Well, we appreciate it. Not many people would want to go to KW for their honeymoon. Queer heaven, I hear.”
Jack gave him a little fake punch in the arm, took a boxer’s stance.
“Hope their vibes didn’t mess u
p your game.”
“No,” Ethan said. “Thanks, Jack. We managed fine.”
“Yeah,” Samantha said, turning away from the bar with a Cosmo in her hand. “We managed sportingly.”
“Great,” Jack said. “Who wouldn’t, right?”
Ethan wondered why Samantha hadn’t ordered a drink for him. Right now, he thought, it was pretty clear that he could use a drink. Impossibly, Samantha’s cocktail was already half empty. So it wasn’t just Key West. She was laughing and touching Jack’s arm. Under the lights her plum lipstick looked like drawn tar.
“Well, still,” Jack was saying, “good of you guys to go down there. I mean, fuck, it was your honeymoon. You only get three or four of those, right?”
“Hey, man,” Samantha said. “Lay off. I’m a newlywed. I’m all aswoon.”
“You look it,” Jack said.
What she looked, Ethan thought, was drunk. Her face was mottled with rising color, her hair was down—when had she taken it down?—and falling in light waves around her face. She licked her lips twice and her tongue twisted like an eel darting from amidst coral.
“Honey, could you get me another Cosmo?” she said.
Ethan stepped up to the bar. Jack still seemed to be talking about their honeymoon.
“Goddamn nice of you all,” he said. “But hey, you know me. You know what I’ve always said. Two birds, one bone.”
Ethan handed Samantha her Cosmo and waited on his martini.
“Hey,” Jack shouted, “did I say bone? I mean did I say that?”
“Yeah, you sure did,” Ethan said.
“Ha! Calling Dr. Freud. Gotta get my head out of the gutter. You know what they say about advertising. Sex sells.”
“I’ve heard that,” Ethan said.
LATER, AFTER ETHAN WANDERED over to one of the empty cocktail tables and gathered a plate of food to slow Samantha down, they all stood in a circle by the bar. Rodney, a man from Samantha’s office whom Ethan had never heard of before, had joined them. So had Paolo and his lunatic wife, Anne.
“I forgot you were going to be here,” Ethan said to him.
“I’ve been filing copy for the firm,” Paolo said. “Producing some text, you know?”
“Say, Ethan, can I get you a drink?” asked Rodney.
Ethan shook his head and popped an olive into his mouth.
“Drinks for everyone but Mr. No Fun?” Rodney said. “Does everyone else want some drinks?”
“Oh dear, honey,” Samantha said. “It is very purple in here, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. The light is something.”
“Perhaps,” Rodney said, “it just looks purple because you’ve been drinking Cosmos all night?”
“Cosmos are red,” Anne said.
“That’s a good one, Rod,” Jack said. “Wonder if we could use that for our vodka account. Color Your Night.”
“Paint Your Night,” Rodney said.
“Drink Yourself to Death,” Ethan said.
“Hey, this guy is Mr. Morbid.”
“I thought he was Mr. No Fun?”
“Those olives look like a bowl of rabbit turds,” Samantha said.
“Any news about Doyle?” Paolo asked.
“No. Nothing at all. Not a thing.”
“This guy,” Rodney said, pointing at Ethan. “This guy is an artist. I mean a real one. Not like us. He’s a photographer. Am I right?”
Ethan placed his empty glass on the table.
“I do brochure shoots. Billboards. Catalogs.”
Samantha’s cheeks were flushed like a spreading bruise. She smiled at Rodney.
“It’s mostly computers,” she said.
Anne pointed at the empty leather couches.
“Don’t those couches look just like reptiles?” she said. “Big slithering nigger reptiles.”
“Like, fuck, Anne,” Paolo said.
“Totally,” Rodney said.
“Am I the only one here who realizes that this woman is totally fucking insane?” Ethan said.
Samantha wiped his lips like he had crumbs there.
“Don’t swear, dear,” she said. “You sound all faggoty when you swear.”
“Not a swear man,” Rodney said.
“Ethan thinks in pictures. He’s made of light. Words aren’t his thing.”
“As usual, you’re being a drunken bitch,” Ethan said.
“It’s true,” Rodney said. “I find that there are men who can swear and men who cannot swear.”
“I want another one of these children’s drinks,” Anne said.
“That is definitely not a children’s drink,” Paolo said. “It’s a goddamn gimlet.”
“It’s another little baby drink. A Lime Rickey. All mashed up.”
“Fashion photography,” said Rodney, who was suddenly touching Samantha’s arm to punctuate every sentence. “Must take quite a man to not be turned on by that. All those models.”
“I’ve been doing hand shots recently,” Ethan said. “Fingernails. Sometimes we don’t even use real hands.”
“If Anne gets another drink,” Samantha said, “so do I.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, Anne is a human disaster. And besides, you still have half a drink.”
Samantha tipped her glass back and emptied the Cosmo into her mouth. Ethan watched her eyes wince closed in something like pleasure. He felt suddenly like he wanted to sit down and cry.
“Hey, baby!” Jack said.
“Samantha,” Ethan said.
“Mr. Judgmental,” she said. “Mr. I’m-too-sober-to-fuck-my-wife.”
“Hey now,” Rodney said. “What ho?”
“Look,” Ethan said. “I’m not jealous. I am not covetous. If you think it’s okay to keep touching my wife’s arm like that, just go ahead. It’s not at all creepy.”
“Hey, man, don’t horde. Don’t snag what you don’t want. That could be a slogan, right?”
“God,” Ethan said. “Advertising people. This is the problem with failed writers. You’re all such assholes.”
“Like, shit,” Rodney said.
“Admittedly,” Paolo said, “I am not in advertising.”
Ethan took Samantha’s hand.
“Let’s go, Sam.”
“You can go, Ethan,” she said. “I’m going to stay and eat olives.”
THE NEXT MORNING he sat at the kitchen table and waited for Samantha to come home. He had stayed up the night before pacing the apartment in some mix of anger and growing fear. He had hurried back from the event, he checked his cell phone—perhaps she called while he was on the subway. He checked it again and again. He poured a drink, he sat down and turned on the television, and then he was standing again, this time at the balcony window. The noodle vendors were gone for the night and the bug-light glow of the shop signs flickered into empty streets. Samantha was out there somewhere: still drinking at the party, or in a bed with Rodney, or maybe, most likely, she had hailed a cab—she slouched in the green fake leather seats, her forehead rested against the cool window glass, she was coming home. He opened his phone and then closed it again. He would not call her. She had treated him, it seemed, with infinite derision. Ethan is made of light, words aren’t his thing. Ethan is too sober to fuck his wife. As if he’d want to. Always now, her desire, which, when he first met her, seemed a grace he’d never deserve, appeared both indiscriminate and grotesque. She wanted and wanted and wanted but her need was beyond sounding.
And her mention of his work and Rodney’s cruel reference to him as an artist—surely Rodney learned that from her. Yes, he capitulated to the world, to money and comfort and everything else. Who didn’t? He was not Doyle, he did not want to let the world ruin him; and he wasn’t Paolo, either. He was a working photographer, he lived well, he did not thrash through some parody of his desires. It was her own fear she scorned, and her fear was ugly. With her money she could do what she wanted, she could write and illustrate her children’s books, she could spend her life drafting pictures of little girls being ea
ten by wolves—she didn’t need to work. But she did work. She settled into a safety she begrudged more than anything else. He saw it now, standing at the window with the still night falling away into dawn and her out there somewhere, certainly not coming home, but moving, he felt sure, into some other damage. She hated the safety she’d built for herself and she would flay it from her life if she could. It was the most pitiful of self-destructive urges. At some point, to some degree, everyone abandoned their charmed life and lived as best they could in the world. What did it matter? There was purity in light but not in illumination. The light touched the world and the world appeared sullied. Get over it. We mold our own scars, we make our own mercy.
He turned away from the window, walked back into the kitchen, and poured three fingers of rye into his empty glass. He felt his heart coming hard in his chest, and when he raised the glass to his lips he saw that his hand was shaking. The drink wouldn’t help; he was hours from sleep. How quickly certainty abandoned him. He had been married three weeks and he felt suddenly on the threshold of catastrophe. In Key West it had been different—there was drinking, certainly too much drinking, but also they had snorkeled under cypress mangroves, they had spent an afternoon sleeping beneath shade palms, holding each other through the green dapple of swaying tropical light. Tonight she had gazed at him first with a drowned girl’s glazed eyes, and then, as he left, with something colder, a slithering anger, a reptile’s uncomprehending obsidian stare.
He added some water to his whiskey to slow himself down, and immediately wished he hadn’t. If there was a night for your own private bender, this was it. He stood at the counter, he stood again at the window, he put on Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain and stared out through the glass and watched the rain that was beginning to fleck at the outer window. He opened his phone and closed it again—the desire to call Paolo and see if he knew what had become of Samantha almost overwhelmed him. He saw her then in a room of dark leather furniture, twisting dull-metal floor lamps, slick, obscene light. He saw Rodney bending over her, moving his thick idiot lips across her body. How banal were his fantasies, how obvious. It was late. She was too drunk to come home. One should not resort to his simplest fears.
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