Slightly Engaged

by Wendy Markham

  “Here’s your key,” she says, and hands us…a key. The old-fashioned metal kind that any crazed serial killer can duplicate before turning it in at the end of his stay, and save for future murderous purposes.

  I glance over at Jack, wondering if he saw the same Dateline NBC special I did.

  “Ready?” he asks, picking up our bags, all set to march off to our doom.

  “No! It isn’t really safe to stay in a room that has that kind of key,” I whisper as the woman behind the desk pretends to ignore me.

  Or maybe she really is ignoring me.

  Because when I say, “Um, excuse me, do you have any rooms that use electronic card keys?” she doesn’t even look up.

  “Excuse me?” I say again, getting pissed.

  Jack shakes his head, “Tracey, come on, it’s fine.”

  “Is this the only kind of key you have here?” I persist, in part just because her attitude is getting on my nerves, and in part I’m holding out hope that she’s put us in the old wing when she could just as easily have put us in the new wing with king-size beds and those electronic card keys with the codes that are changed after every guest.

  “What do you mean, only key?” she finally responds. “There’s only one door. That’s the key to open it.”

  It seems that her work here is done, and she isn’t the least bit concerned about hotel security.

  “I know, but—”

  “Tracey, come on.”

  Oh, I give up.

  But I’m barricading the door to the room with that useless second bed before we go to sleep tonight.

  We head back out into the downpour that blows beneath the covered walkway lined with tropical foliage. It’s semi-familiar from the online pictures, but there, the landscaping seemed more lush than overgrown and unkempt. Maybe that’s just because of the oppressive gloom.

  “Do you think this will turn out to be a beach day?” I call to Jack, then wince as a wind-whipped overhanging palm frond slaps against my face.

  “A beach day? I doubt it, but that’s okay.”

  It is? I thought we were eager to sink our bare feet into sugary sand and loll about in tranquil tropical waters.

  I was certainly eager to do that.

  “This is it,” Jack says, putting the key into the lock.

  I arrive just in time for him to open the door…and see something scurry out.

  Naturally, I shriek, “Was that a cockroach?”

  I thought this place was bug free, God help us.

  “A cockroach? Tracey, it wasn’t a bug. It was the size of a squirrel.”

  “Oh my God! It was a squirrel?”

  “No!” He’s laughing at me. “It was an iguana.”

  As if that’s better than a squirrel, or a squirrel-size bug.

  “We’re in the islands now,” he reminds me. “Things are different here.”

  Yeah, no kidding. We might have bugs in New York, but at least we keep our scary reptiles in the Bronx Zoo where they belong, not running wild in the streets.

  You know, I’m beginning to think Jack and I aren’t on the same page.

  Not for this vacation, anyway.

  Maybe not for life in general.

  How can I be in a relationship with somebody who thinks it’s fine to share our room not just with potential serial killers, but with a creature that looks like a miniature dinosaur?

  He looks at me.

  I can tell he thinks I’m overreacting, and maybe I am. But I can’t help it. This isn’t going the way it was supposed to. None of it. And I’m not just talking about the vacation.

  “Are you okay?” he asks, softening. “You really look upset.”

  “I am upset,” I say, on the verge of tears. “This is awful.”

  “It’ll be fine, you’ll see. I mean, come on. We just got here.”

  He’s talking about the vacation. Not the relationship. He thinks the relationship is fine.

  I used to think that, too.

  But now I think there’s something wrong with us. Or, at the very least, with me. Why are we not moving ahead, the way everybody else does? Why is he reluctant to commit to me?

  I could understand if it were about not having a diamond, or the means to get one on his salary. But he already took that step. What’s keeping him from following through with the rest of it?

  Jack holds the door wide open. “Come on, let’s go in and change into dry clothes. You’ll feel better.”

  I doubt it, but what choice do I have?

  Maybe this really is just about the vacation.

  After the post-Christmas letdown of these past few weeks, I really wanted this trip to be perfect—whether or not Jack uses it to finally pop the question.

  Mental note: be in the moment. Stop overanalyzing everything.

  To my surprise, the room is typical hotel fare—slippery quilted floral bedspreads, generic art, tile bathroom, Mr. Coffee. Not that I was expecting the Ritz. To the contrary, I was expecting an unsanitary dump.

  But this isn’t bad…as long as there are no iguanas lurking in the tub. I make Jack check, and he reassuringly gives the all clear. Then he turns the air-conditioning on full blast.

  “What should we do now?” I ask him, after unpacking my bag into the small dresser, which takes all of sixty seconds.

  All I brought is the few pairs of shorts and T-shirts that still fit me, and an old bathing suit that probably doesn’t—I couldn’t bring myself to try it on back home.

  Jack told me to at least add a cute sundress in case we wanted to get dressed up for dinner, which I would have done, if I owned one. I substituted an ancient pair of linen pants and a cute sleeveless black top that makes my upper arms look fleshy, but it was my only option.

  He also told me to bring a sweatshirt, because I’m always cold. Needing to prove him wrong—and prove to myself and to him that the weather in Anguilla is perfect at this time of year, as the guidebook claims—I declined.

  Now I wish I at least had a jacket with a hood. No, not my mountain guide parka, though the splashy hue is some-what tropical. A tasteful slicker would be nice; too bad I don’t own one.

  “Do you think there’s someplace where we can get a rum drink?” Jack asks, tossing his duffel bag on the floor of the surprisingly large walk-in closet, still packed.

  “I don’t know…I doubt it,” I say dubiously. “I mean, this isn’t really a resort. More like just a beach hotel.”

  “Beach hotels have lobby bars.”

  “‘Lobby’ is the key word there, Jack. I think a tiki bar tucked into that reception area would have been hard to miss, don’t you?”

  He laughs. “Then let’s go out and walk around. I’m sure we’ll find a place where we can get a couple of piña coladas and wait for the storm to pass.”

  We do just that…except we have dirty bananas instead, and more than a couple—each—and the storm doesn’t seem to be passing.

  A good few hours later, we’re still lounging on stools in a beachside dive bar called the Wet Dog. A burnt-out mainland transplant in a Hawaiian shirt is playing a guitar and singing Jimmy Buffett tunes. When we first got here, I remember thinking he was off-key, but now he’s sounding pretty good.

  Maybe it’s the booze.

  Whatever.

  All I know is that I’m having a grand old time belting out “Changes in Attitudes, Changes in Latitudes” with my new best friends Gregory and Daniel, a matching-tank-top-wearing, mustachioed, platinum-blond middle-aged gay couple from New Jersey.

  “I love you guys!” I tell them warmly as the guitarist takes a break to duck outside in the rain and smoke what doesn’t look like a regular cigarette.

  Which I could definitely use right now.

  I know, I know…and the cravings have pretty much subsided over the last few weeks, except when I have a drink. Or four.

  Gazing out the window, watching the guitarist exhale smoke through his nostrils, I momentarily debate sneaking away to bum a smoke—from somebody other than hi
m, as I just want good old-fashioned tobacco.

  The only thing that stops me is that down here, you can’t be too careful. What looks like a regular cigarette might be laced with, I don’t know, whatever it is predatory crackheads lace innocent people’s cigarettes with.

  What? It could happen. I think I saw it on Dateline once.

  No, really.

  “We love you, too! And honey, you are such the parrot-head!” Gregory exclaims to me, and I could be mistaken, but I think it’s a compliment, so I thank him.

  “Oh! I know I know I know! We should request ‘Let’s Get Drunk and Screw’ when the guitar guy comes back!” That’s Daniel, bouncing around on his stool in excitement. Either he’s overcaffeinated, or he’s a little hyper by nature.

  “Yeah, or we could just get drunk and screw,” Gregory says, and we all scream with laughter.

  All of us except Jack, who visibly winces.

  “Hey, you know what, guys?” I say—mostly to the Fab Two. “I have an idea! We should all get together in Manhattan after we get back home!”

  Jack promptly kicks me under the bar.

  I shoot him a dirty look. What’s his problem? Maybe Gregory and Daniel aren’t the most masculine guys we’ve ever met—all right, they make Raphael seem butch—but I like them.

  “We’d love to get together! How does your February look?” Gregory lisps.

  “Actually, we have a wedding in February,” Jack tells him.

  “All month?” Daniel asks, and the three of us crack up.

  Jack doesn’t seem to think it’s that funny.

  I think it’s because he’s not drinking enough.

  “Oh, barkeep!” I call good-naturedly. “Another round for the table, with an extra Kahlúa floater for my friend Jack here.”

  No response from the surly male bartender, who might very well be related to the front-desk clerk at our hotel.

  “It’s okay.” Jack gestures at our still half-full glasses. “I don’t need another drink yet, and neither do you.”

  “But we’re on vacation, party pooper!” I tell him.

  “But this isn’t a party,” he replies.

  “All right then…dive-bar pooper,” I amend, and the boyfriends are convulsed with laughter.

  Jack shakes his head. I can’t tell what he’s thinking, but I’m sure he doesn’t appreciate being called a pooper of any sort.

  C’est la vie.

  I’m not going to let him rain on my…uh, rainy day.

  I turn back to Gregory and Daniel and pick up where we left off. “So anyway, it’s a gay wedding,” I say, because that makes all the difference to them, I’m sure.

  “When is it?”

  “It’s on Valentine’s Day.”

  Gregory exclaims, “Oh-my-God-that-is-so-romantic!”

  “You guys really should come.”

  Why, I don’t know. It just seems like a great idea.

  But not to Jack.

  “Tracey,” he says in a warning voice, and kicks me again.

  “Jack!” I say, and kick him back.

  He says, “They don’t even know Raphael.”

  “Come on, Jack, do you honestly think Raphael would care?”

  “Is Raphael the blushing-bride-to-be?” Daniel asks.

  “Yup.” I proceed to tell them all about Raphael and Donatello and their upcoming nuptials as Jack glowers at me over the rim of his glass.

  When he excuses himself to go to the bathroom, Gregory asks, “What’s up his butt?”

  “Hello, I could make such a comment right now,” Daniel announces, throwing up his hands, “but I won’t even go there!”

  Ew.

  “Danielle!” That, of course, is Gregory’s pet name for him. “Please don’t go there!” “Yes, please don’t,” I say. “Jack’s really a great guy. I think it’s just jet lag.”

  “I don’t know about that.” Daniel leans in and says in a singsong lisp, “I think somebody’s got a bad case of the homophobic blues.”

  “Jack? Oh, he’s not homophobic.”

  “Honey, my hand brushed his arm by accident and he jumped out of his chair,” Gregory tells me.

  “Maybe he thought it was an iguana,” I say, and crack myself up all over again, though somewhere in the back of my head, I’m thinking it might not be all that funny. Maybe I’m a little tipsier than I thought.

  Then again, it feels damn good to be slaphappy for a change, so I giggle away.

  Until Daniel says, “Maybe we’re cramping your boyfriend’s style and he just wants to be alone with you.”

  Hmm. I didn’t think of that. I guess double-dating with a strange—all right, in the most literal sense—couple isn’t the most romantic way to spend an evening. Still…

  “If Jack wants to be alone with me so badly,” I ponder aloud, “then why won’t he engage me?”

  “Engage you in what?” Gregory and Daniel ask in unison, then laugh and say, “Jinx!”

  “You know…in an engagement.” I tell them about Wilma and the diamond, and they’re suitably sympathetic.

  When Jack comes back, they glare at him over the fresh drinks I defiantly ordered while he was gone.

  Our guitar player is back, too, a little wild-eyed as he does a cover of “Brown Eyed Girl,” dedicated from Gregory to Daniel. They get up to dance, leaving me alone with Jack.

  “I wish you could just loosen up and have fun,” I tell him.

  “I am loose.”

  I snort into my yummy, strong drink. “You’re about as loose as…as…”

  “As the banana hammock Gregory’s wearing?” he supplies.

  “That’s not a banana hammock,” I protest, laughing. I gesture at the elevator-size dance floor, where our pals are cavorting to the music. “See? Those are shorts.”

  “Well, if he does that high kick again, his dirty banana is going to fall out the leg hole.”

  Laughing together seems to heal all wounds.

  “Come on,” Jack says, holding my hand and pulling me up off the bar stool, “it’s getting late. Let’s go back to the hotel and change so we can go out for a nice dinner.”

  “Okay, but I just want to say goodbye to Gregory and Daniel.”

  The only way to do that is to shimmy over to the dance floor, where I find myself instantly roped into their outrageous dance moves as Jack watches from the sidelines.

  “You go, brown-eyed girl!” Gregory twirls me around and around, then passes me to Daniel before I can throw up.

  “Woo-hoo!” Daniel shouts. “Come on, honey, now do-si-do!”

  Do-si-do? I think dizzily, trying to recall my fourth-grade square-dance moves.

  Too late.

  Daniel is already mincing around me, arms folded across his chest, head bobbing maniacally.

  I glance over at Jack, whose arms are also folded, but who is not do-si-do-ing to “Brown Eyed Girl.”

  He actually looks like he might start tapping his foot any second now—in impatience, rather than in time to the music—so I finally holler, “Boyfriends, I have to leave now! See you on the beach!”

  “When?” Gregory wants to know, as they do-si-do around each other, and Daniel asks, “Where?”

  “Tomorrow at noon, behind the Sea Plantation. It’s down the road!”

  “Sounds good,” Gregory says, “and afterward, we’ll all go to dinner together somewhere.”

  “Great!”

  Jack’s going to kill me!

  I look over at him. He gestures for me to hurry up, for God’s sake.

  “Toodle-ooh, Tracey! Bye, Jack!” Daniel calls energetically.

  “It’s been real,” Jack responds dryly, with a Miss America wave.

  It’s still drizzling out as we walk the short distance back to the hotel, and so humid that everything about me is damp/limp in moments: linen shorts, T-shirt, hair and all.

  Now that we’re away from the noise and music, I’m feeling conspicuously tipsy. You know, I probably should have eaten the box lunch they handed out on the pl
ane earlier. Despite the turbulence, Jack ate his meal, and then mine. No wonder those drinks didn’t affect him as much as they did me.

  Anyway, I would have eaten on the plane if I hadn’t just watched the guy three rows up gobble down his meal, then promptly upchuck it into his airsickness bag.

  “That was fun, wasn’t it?” I say to Jack far more loudly than I intended. I hope I’m not slurring.

  “Pretty much. Those guys were just a little too over the top for me.”

  “Over the top? Gregory and Daniel?”

  “Tracey—” He looks at me and sees that I’m grinning.

  “They were fun, though,” I say.

  “I would have rather been alone with you.”

  “Really?” That’s sweet. No wonder he was so grouchy. “Well, we can be alone all night.”

  “I’ll take a shower first,” he says, unlocking the door to our room, where we’re greeted by a refreshing blast of A.C., “and then I’ll go scout out some good restaurants and make a reservation.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  The only problem with the plan is that there’s too much lag time built in. I sit down on the bed to wait while Jack’s in the shower, then lie down because I’m a little sleepy, and the next thing I know, I’m out.

  Jack wakes me up as he’s getting dressed, and I promise him I’ll get right on it, but the second he leaves to go scout out restaurants, I’m asleep again.

  Maybe it’s more like passed out, because when he returns to wake me up again and tell me all about this great seafood place he found by the water, and how we can have a good table if I can be ready in fifteen minutes, I can’t seem to rouse myself.

  “Do you just want to stay in tonight?” Jack asks, clearly disappointed.

  I’m too out of it to do more than nod before drifting back into unconsciousness.

  I wake up at three in the morning to find the air-conditioning blasting and the room an icebox. Jack is snoring blissfully beside me in the double bed, hogging the thin bedspread same as he hogs our comforter back home.

  For a few minutes, I do my best to repeatedly tug it away from him and get back to sleep.

  Then I fool around with the air-conditioning control, but it turns out it’s already on the lowest setting. A moment’s exploration reveals that the windows are hermetically sealed, so turning the A.C. off and opening them isn’t an option. Turning the A.C. off and going back to sleep is also not an option, as it will be a thousand degrees in here in no time.