by Martin Clark
“I saw the bottle of champagne. I think that’ll be perfect.”
While Brett was paying the waiter, an elderly couple passed their table, and the woman, immaculate and sweetly proper, her hat fastened with fabric strips that knotted beneath her chin, paused to speak to them and told them they were a lovely pair. Such pretty people. “And you both look so happy,” she said. Her husband nodded, agreed. He was carrying a cane with a carved knob but didn’t seem to need it, appeared able to stand and move around on his own. “How long have you been married?” she asked Lisa. “My Gary and I have been together for fifty-three wonderful years,” she quickly added.
Lisa instinctively lifted and spread her fingers. She’d seen no reason to remove her wedding ring. She was married, and Brett knew she was married, and she was planning to stay married, and taking her ring off struck her as both pointless and naïve, akin to pretending the last two decades could be quarantined in a velveteen jeweler’s box. “Twenty years this summer,” she said. “My husband and I have quite a ways to go to catch you and Gary.”
The lady beamed. “Are you in the movies? You’re so attractive. We hear a lot of famous people vacation here. We really don’t follow the culture as much as we should.”
“She does look like a movie star, doesn’t she?” Brett said. Jovial and relaxed, he didn’t appear at all upset by Lisa’s reply.
“Well, honey, you’re no slouch yourself,” the lady told Brett, a harmless flirt from a woman who’d no doubt been a beauty in her time. Pushing eighty, she still delivered the line stylishly.
Brett and Lisa didn’t make it to the champagne, not immediately. They began kissing a step or so inside the open patio doors, slightly under roof but still a part of the lawn and ocean and the epilogue hues—blues, oranges, pinkish reds—saturating the sky. Buzzed and light-headed, she hardened her choice there, divided off her house and dog and mom-and-pop law practice, ditched the threadbare routines and millstone schedules for a needle full of passion, flew toward an obviously pernicious flame, chose a two-day jolt over her for-as-long-as-I-live promise, decided for real what she’d already decided in theory before leaving the farm, and the fact the affair was corrupt and off-limits only added to the lure, notched it higher.
Soon they were twined together on the king bed, and the run-up to sex was completely unmapped, all the particulars a glorious blank, each button or zipper or hook deliberate and joyous, every squeeze and rub loaded, nothing wasted, nothing overlooked, nothing discounted. It had been years and years since she was seventeen in a car’s backseat or upstairs in a sneaked bedroom during a sorority bash, forever since she’d wanted to have sex and knew she would but had no idea what the details might bring. The sensations, touches, rhythms, all of it was foreign, erotic, the strange cologne, the unfamiliar skin, how he pieced into her. They spent half an hour taking off clothes, unwrapping, side by side, Lisa on top, Brett on top, and he removed her modest emerald-and-diamond necklace and then asked if he could put it back on her, pinched the clasp and encircled her neck after she collected her hair to keep it from interfering.
“Birth control?” he asked.
“Pills.”
With the doors still apart and the curtains gathered so she could see the beach, and the night scents hinting and thickening and electric lights turning on around the property, she rolled to the edge of the bed and, naked except for her bikini panties, paraded across to the champagne and fetched it for them, and Brett uncorked it and they took pulls straight from the bottle, and while she was drinking, taking her turn, he kissed her neck and her breasts and before long he slipped his hand inside her underwear and she lay back against a bank of pillows, half-ass tried to set the bottle on the floor but didn’t, so that the Dom Pérignon spilled on the covers and quickly lost its chill and wet the duvet and sheets, dampened the mattress.
They’d tracked sand into the bed, and those fine grains were wet, too, and all of a sudden the sand was underneath her calves and ankles, and she couldn’t get rid of it, and it started bothering her, just a little irritating at first, then a drumbeat problem, bad enough that she thought about getting up for a towel, or maybe pulling the duvet off the bed, and she shifted and wiggled and caused Brett to accidentally nick her with his watchband. The metal bit into the soft skin high on her rib cage and distracted her more, and she lost her place and sort of had to start over, and then her conscience wasn’t so smothered, resurfaced, and she began thinking and worrying and fretting, her own voice magpie-chattering in her head, no damn good for sex. Twenty years. A vow.
She couldn’t settle her mind, couldn’t cut herself free, wasn’t so sure she should keep to her choice, and she decided she needed to wait, almost felt panicked. There were still two days left, plenty of time, and now she mostly wanted to be finished with what they were doing and put on warm-weather clothes and leave the room, so when Brett slid his finger inside her again, she reached down and touched him and rubbed and spit on her hand and kept rubbing and working until he was done. A ceiling fan circled above her, a tasteful lamp shone on a nightstand, a wisp of sea air curled through the curtains, and the crystal in an unused champagne flute trapped the lamplight and prismed it into low, subtle color.
“Are you okay?” he asked her. “I think we lost a little ground after the champagne spilled. Sorry.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “It’s just…a lot. Even perfect, even here, it’s not going to be easy. I’m, well…let’s not dwell on it. It was exactly where I needed to be. Not too much.” She caught herself wondering about an earlier flight home, the fee to change her ticket. “But I can’t help…the guilt.”
“I understand. We can move at your pace. No pressure. I’m for sure not complaining about a pretty amazing evening, but I feel bad. That was kind of one-sided. You sure there’s nothing I can do for you?”
“Not for now.” She was on her back, watching the fan. It moved slowly enough that she could see the four blades clearly. “Other than taking me somewhere to eat.” She turned toward him. “I probably should be apologizing to you. I know we didn’t come here for me to deal with my issues on your vacation.” She smiled. “Let’s get out of here and have some fun.” She picked up the Dom bottle and there was a sip that hadn’t been lost, and she downed the very bottom of the champagne, sitting there naked except for her necklace.
They showered and dressed and hopped into the resort’s Range Rover, and an affable fellow wearing a pressed tropical shirt drove them to Atlantis. It was almost ten o’clock when they finally ate a meal, and they kept right on drinking, ordered a bottle of wine with their dinner. Afterward, they spotted a sign and followed an arrow and strolled on a labyrinthine path past wall after wall of huge aquariums filled with fish, eels, sharks, rays and sea turtles. The rooms were kept dim, the aquariums, some nearly as big as a city bus, were brightly lit. Lisa and Brett held hands and occasionally stopped to watch the goings-on in the tanks.
The walkway wound them back to the casino floor, where they posed for a cheesy photo seated together in an oversize prop throne, the king and queen of this gaudy paradise. They both laughed at the picture and bought it from the hotel vendor, who asked them, while he was fitting it into a cardboard frame, if they had any children and if they were enjoying their vacation on the island.
As they were leaving, Lisa was waylaid by a Wheel of Fortune slot machine. She studied it and squinted at the payout lines, and Brett asked if she wanted to give it a try.
“Yes. Do you have a dollar?” She set her cosmopolitan on a ledge in front of the machine.
“I do, but you need to bet all three lines. If you were to hit a jackpot, a buck wouldn’t win you the best money.”
“I’m not sure I completely understand, but I’ll take your advice,” she said.
“Here’s a twenty.” Brett handed her a bill.
“I want to pull the handle,” she remarked. “That’s half the fun.”
“It’ll be a test for us,” Brett said, “to see if we’re lucky together.”
She fed the twenty into the slot. “We’ll probably win a car or a humongous check and have to pose for a publicity photo in order to claim it.” She grinned at him. “So I push this button?” she asked.
“Yep. Hit Bet Max.”
The third time she played, she landed on the Spin-the-Wheel gimmick, and a recorded audience singsonged “Wheel of Fortune” through the machine’s tiny speaker. Brett had her mash another button, and a colorful wheel of chance on top whirled around and slowed and the pointer barely ticked into a three-hundred-dollar space, and she shrieked “Oh, damn, Brett, we won three hundred dollars.” The same fake audience clapped and cheered from inside the machine.
“Yeah. More important, we evidently have some pretty prime luck operating for us.”
To her amazement, they returned to a dry, repaired bed with fresh linens and chocolates on the pillows. They kissed some more, and he took off her top and bra, but it was uncomfortable when he touched between her legs and she made him quit. Then they fell asleep half-naked and drunk, with her makeup still in place, the photograph from the casino set nearby on the nightstand, their jackpot—three crisp hundred-dollar bills—folded in half and tossed beside the goof of a picture, the paper money and silly throne shot the last image she recalled before shutting her eyes.
—
Regardless of how late she went to sleep, Lisa usually awoke at the same time, no clock or alarm needed, and she was up at six-thirty the next morning, the day just starting to take shape, the sky still bland and listless, the light subdued. She felt sketchy. The sides of her head ached. Her mouth was dry and stale. The coffeemaker was far too involved and complicated in the murky room, so she drank some bottled water and scrubbed her face with a white washcloth and brushed her teeth.
Yesterday, she’d called Joe from the airport while waiting in the immigration line, and an hour later she’d phoned to let him know she’d arrived safely at the hotel, the room under her name if he needed her for an emergency. She finished the water and checked her messages, discovered he’d left a voice mail at 10:33 last night, telling her to have fun and sleep well. She walked outside and shut the patio doors and used M.J.’s cell to call the farm. Brett was sleeping, his cheek flush against a pillow, his hair in a riot, still wearing the dress shirt he’d put on for their evening at Atlantis.
“What’s the word, M.J.?” Joe said when he answered, his voice alert and chipper despite the hour. “You’re up and at ’em awfully early for a girl on vacation.”
“It’s me, Joe,” Lisa said. “My stupid cell is on the fritz. I’m using M.J.’s. She’s still sleeping.”
“Oh,” he said, “even better. How’s my wife?”
“Fine,” she answered. “How are things there?”
“My man Brownie and I are in total command. We watched some pro hoops and busted out Zombieland. Polished off the spaghetti you left for me. Probably the gym and a horse ride today. I might try to replace that bad sheet of tin on the barn roof too. How are the Bahamas?”
“Fun. It’s warm and sunny, and that counts for a lot. We had a nice dinner and a few drinks. Went to the casino. By the way, Zombieland was made for stoners and teenage boys.”
“Well, I’m neither, but I have to find movies Brownie can enjoy.”
Lisa laughed. “Of course.”
“The casino, huh? Don’t get tangled up with some high roller and run away on a yacht, okay? I imagine you and M.J. strolling through a gambling hall at night probably set off alarms and turned more than a few heads. Especially since I’m guessing M.J. was very short-skirted and you were the hottest woman in the joint.”
“That’s sweet,” she told him and suddenly felt very affectionate toward him. She was wearing her white hotel robe and cloth slippers. The sun was rising, the ocean stirring. “But as best I can tell, we didn’t attract any admirers.”
“Oh, yeah, damn, I do have one gripe. I hate that friggin’ Pampered Chef can opener. It’s worthless. I thought you were going to buy a normal one, one I could use.”
“I showed you how it works, okay? It’s actually an improvement. Neat as a pin.”
“Could be. But it’s not an improvement over my pocketknife, which is what I used to gouge open a can of pears last night.”
She laughed again. “I’m headed to find some coffee.”
“Hang on. Wait a minute.” She heard him moving through their house. “Now we’re ready. Speak, Brownie, speak!”
The dog barked, stopped, barked some more. “You guys be careful and steer clear of shady Rasta men and time-share hucksters,” Joe said when he came back on the phone. “Hey—remember when we were, what, a year out of law school and suffered through that condo presentation in Mexico so we could earn a free extra night and a breakfast coupon?”
“Yeah,” she said. “The good old days.”
“See you soon. I love you.”
“I love you too. Give the mutt a hug for me.”
She felt melancholy after she ended the call, a bit too unencumbered and rootless, hungover in another country, an honest to god adulterer of sorts, her companion a charming, handsome man with whom she shared a casino visit and a bar show in Roanoke as her main common denominators, but she’d struck that bargain and understood there’d be a Saturday morning with far less luster than the night before, and she hadn’t traveled to Nassau to be even more pensive and gloomy than she already was in Henry County, and yesterday was textbook blue-sky romance, exactly why she’d flown away to the Bahamas, so she papered over the second thoughts and misgivings, smiled at the vast ocean and the swath of perfect green yard and the palm trees and hibiscus hedges, raised her hands as high as she could and stretched out the kinks, sins and booze-aches into surroundings that seemed quite capable of absorbing them, no problem.
She slipped back inside, checked to make certain Brett was still asleep, carefully picked and sorted through her suitcase, found her hat and sunglasses, and scrawled a note to him, wrote that she was hunting for coffee and then planning on some beachcombing; she’d see him later. She glanced at her watch before she left. The sky was lit now, and the beach was vacant, the sand smooth, not a single footprint.
She stayed gone until around nine-thirty. She and Brett had room service bring them breakfast on the patio, and even at the beginning of his morning, diminished by a night of steady carousing, he was talkative and attentive. After the young man from the hotel had set their plates and poured their coffee, Brett courteously pulled a chair from the table so she could take a seat, and he told her he wished they had more days together. She said the hotel was beautiful and thanked him for making the arrangements and mentioned that the pineapple looked like it had just been picked. He smiled and teased her about taking such a long beach walk; she’d been away for nearly three hours.
They spent the morning at the pool, and she ordered a mimosa for lunch, Brett a rum and Coke. They took a cab into Nassau and toured the town and stopped for an early dinner in the Fish Fry area, sat on a balcony and spent an hour drinking and sharing a plate of conch, fried grouper and homemade coleslaw. As they were leaving the restaurant, they laughed off a couple local drug dealers and a guy in a Toyota with tinted windows who wanted, at barely six o’clock, to take them to “the most happening club in the Caribbean.” They returned to the resort, swam in the ocean and sat on the sand shivering under towels for a few brief moments until they dried.
“So what comes next?” Brett asked.
“This might sound dull, but I wonder if we could drag chairs down here and have them bring us a bottle of wine? Put on some dry clothes and sit at the edge of the water.”
“I’m all for it,” Brett said. “I’ll start to work on the chairs.” He stared out at the ocean, wasn’t looking at her. There was still daylight left. “To tell the truth, I was kind of referring to longer-term plans. If that doesn’t ruin the evening for you. Fine with me if we just take the rest of Nassau as it comes and worry with the details later.”
“Yeah,”
she said, and she didn’t focus on him, either. “Let’s not complicate such a nice vacation.”
“Sure,” he told her. “Okay. But let me say one thing: I want you to understand I wouldn’t jump in the middle of a twenty-year marriage for a quick party trip, even with the amazing Lisa Stone. I’ve never, ever been with a married woman. You’re a spectacular lady—I’m guessing you’ve heard that for most of your life—and I wouldn’t be doing this if I wasn’t thinking about more than a weekend. Of course, who the hell can predict how things will or could turn out for us, and I don’t want to sound like some infatuated teenager, but I realize how much you have invested. I’ve had a great time so far, and you’re better than I imagined you’d be…and I had large, high expectations. So there you go. For what it’s worth, I’d like to think we can manage to keep seeing each other.”
“Thank you,” she answered. “You’re sweet to say all that. I don’t guess I planned to dump twenty years for a weekend, either. But I’d rather not start exploring that road, trying to see around the bend, not here, not now.” She felt another stab of remorse, and it was harder to tamp down, especially since she had only this last night remaining before her plane boarded and she’d be returned to Martinsville and her permanent address and a much sterner landscape, the butlers, fresh flowers, pool drinks, high tides and gorgeous vistas utterly and completely gone, behind her, not even saved and tucked away in snapshots.
—
Three, three, three. 3:33. The digital red numbers on the clock all matched, and when Lisa awoke several hours later and saw them, she was addled, disoriented, and for a moment there were echoes of the slot machines and casino games, and it was as if the wheels had spun to another winner and she was due a jackpot, triples in the pay window, all lined up. But there was also something spooky about the sequence, the row of fiery threes—they almost menaced the unfamiliar room, like Lucifer’s signature at half strength. She rubbed her eyes. Blinked. The end number flashed to a 4.
As she came to herself and faded into her surroundings, she had to pee, that’s why she wasn’t sleeping, and damn if it wasn’t pressing and urgent, and she realized right then it was going to sting and her bladder would vex her for at least a week, and the Azo pills and cranberry juice probably wouldn’t be heavy-duty enough to remedy the infection, so she’d have to visit the women’s health center in Roanoke and endure the PA’s clipboard questions and Marcus Welby shtick, a steep price for a simple prescription. She scurried to the restroom and sat on the toilet, didn’t bother with the light, closed her eyes and bit her lip as the urine streamed into the bowl.