Letting the shirts sway in response, she remembers the day before she left for vacation, how Craig rubbed her head, static electricity on his fingers sending her long hairs everywhere. “Wear lots of sunscreen, Red,” he warned her. “Pale folks don’t do so well in the tropics.”
From a wooden bench in St. Thomas’s shopping district, Jack watches a grimy unattractive bird spastically peck a groove in the worn cobblestone streets—like a desk ornament his father had kept in his office. Up and down, up and down, stupid but fascinating.
And, all at once, Jack recalls the last time he spoke to his father about anything consequential. It had been winter break when Jack was a high school senior and working at the firm. Jack had been proofing a memo in his father’s big leathery office when, apropos of nothing, he’d asked: “Should I go to Penn?”
“It’s the best school you got into.” His father had looked at him as if Jack had suggested the world was flat or the Indians would win the pennant. “Why would you go anywhere else?”
Jack had meant to say something then about Anna Fram and how the two of them had talked about going to Carnegie Mellon together, but realized that if it was something he really wanted, he wouldn’t have mentioned it to his father in the first place, he would have just done it. He’d also realized that over the past few summers and holiday breaks he’d grown to like working with his father, to like his father’s life.
But now Jack wonders if his father was happy. Happy in that big leathery office just like the one Jack has now, in the big brick colonial that Jack lives in now, with a pretty woman to warm the bed and take to functions—like the woman Jack has now.
And then Mona is standing in front of his bench on the streets of St. Thomas, removing yards of lacy white material from a shopping bag. Because the ship’s doctor—who actually sighed when she saw Mona and Jack again—insisted Mona not expose her charred skin to more sun, they’d had to pass on the postcard-beautiful Magens Bay with the Steins. And despite the mercury kissing ninety-five degrees, Mona is wearing jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt with the ship’s logo that Jack got her from the gift shop.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” she asks, and Jack folds the upper corner of a page in the book he wasn’t reading.
“What is it?” He sets the book on the bench next to the things Mona’s already bought—perfume for her mother, a marble hunting knife for her father, polished rocks she picked out for his brother, rolled tubes of prints by some island artist that they will never hang on the walls of his house—all “duty free,” all charged to his American Express.
“It’s a tablecloth.” Holding one end to her sternum with her chin, Mona unfolds layer after layer of seemingly endless delicate fabric. “St. Thomas is famous for its lace.”
“According to the guy who sold it to you?”
“No, Craig lived here for two years after college.”
“Can we not talk about Craig?” Something dark rumbles in his chest. “How much was it?”
“I told you I was going to get one earlier, and you said it was fine.” There’s an edge in Mona’s voice that wasn’t there five years ago. It makes Jack very tired. “You never listen to anything I tell you.”
“How much was it?” he asks again, blankly eyeing the material.
“It’s not like we can’t afford it.”
“I can afford it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means the paper pays you like ten bucks an hour.” Jack watches her face fall and can’t believe that some crucial filter between his brain and mouth failed and he actually said it. So much will have to be done to get things back to normal.
“I’m sorry I’m not a corporate whore.” Bunching the cloth back into the bag, she throws it at his feet.
He picks up the bag and thinks about telling her a giant corporation owns the paper she works for, but decides against it.
“You’re right, we need a tablecloth,” he says, even though he can’t remember a single time they used the dining room table as anything other than a place to put mail.
“No. I’ll just take it back.”
She looks so defeated and so red and so ridiculous that he just wants to hold her. But he can’t because she’s sunburned, because he doesn’t hold her anymore. In the distance their ship is anchored to the ocean floor, and Jack is overwhelmed by the desire to go back to the cabin for a nap before the boat leaves port and starts rocking again. Standing up, he tries to take her hand, but she shakes him away. Still, she follows when he picks up her packages and starts walking.
“This is a great tablecloth.” Looking in the bag, he feigns interest. “Now we just need to make some friends so they can come over and eat things off our tablecloth. And you can start cooking so we can serve things on our tablecloth.”
A sound between a laugh and a sigh comes out of her nose. “We can return it. And we can return the one we got for Helen and George.”
“We got them a tablecloth, too?” Jack smiles. “For their anniversary?”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. I love you,” he says, because it’s easier than apologizing.
“I love you, too.”
The first night she told him she loved him, he hadn’t felt ready to say it back. He said it anyway. Her body had been soft and comfortable in his arms; he didn’t want to discuss it. Looking back, he was too much of a coward to tell her the truth. But he wonders if he really feels any differently now than he did five years ago, wonders if he ever did or ever could, flashes back to the fall fifteen years earlier, when his father helped him pack a U-Haul for college. Anna Fram had crossed the cul-de-sac to say good-bye, her eyes dry but her voice holding all the gravel and hurt of the truly betrayed.
And then Jack sees the jewelry store. The kind of overpriced place littering every island where they’ve docked, it’s designed to prey on tourists looking to create memories. Like everything else in town, the store is pink, as if it were dunked in Pepto-Bismol. In its window, earrings and chains are propped against glossy shells, driftwood, and draped velvet, a tennis bracelet spills out of a large conch shell. Above a display of engagement rings, square-shaped, pear-shaped, and emerald-cut diamonds in little red boxes, a sign, in decadent cursive writing, offers the slogan When the islands make you realize it’s right. And maybe it is right with Mona, at least as right as it is ever going to be with her or anyone. In Cleveland Anna’s father could give him a deal, but Jack can’t remember why things like that matter—it’s not as though his parents won a prize for dying with money in the bank.
“Is this what you want?” he asks, gesturing to the store. “Do you want to get married?” Even as he says the words, he knows that that isn’t what she wants. She wants candles and roses and a bended knee. She wants poetry and love songs and dancing.
It must be close enough, though, because her whole face rises in a way he hasn’t seen in the past year.
“Are you asking?” The rushed excitement in her words makes him think of their first date at the coffee shop, after the courthouse, when she spilled her hot chocolate.
Because he can’t think of a reason not to, he nods.
“Are you serious?”
“Sure.”
And she’s on tiptoes, arms knotted around his neck like the life jackets on the ship.
Happy or sad? he asks himself as she braids his fingers with hers and leads him into the store.
When they get back to Ohio, the ring they got in St. Thomas won’t fit and will have to be resized. Mona realizes this at the ball on the Promenade Deck, as she leans against the ship’s railing, the Atlantic at her back. Here her fingers are swollen from sea salt, but in Cleveland, the two-carat solitaire will be too big.
The deck chairs have been cleared from the floor, and in their place three dozen couples make slow circles in time to melodies from a band comprised of three middle-aged men in tuxes and a woman singer in gold sequins. Christmas lights shaped like stars and moons dangle from the railin
gs and flaming torches, while the real moon looms overhead, full and pocked like greasy skin.
A tuxedo-clad waiter comes by with a tray of champagne flutes. Mona takes two and hands one to Jack. He looks at it hesitantly before clinking his glass against hers.
“Cheers,” Jack says. “To the most beautiful woman on the ship.”
She looks down at the full-skirted black dress from Saks, tries to remember the last time he told her she was attractive. The first time was at the coffee shop on their first date, when she spilled hot chocolate in his lap. She said she was a klutz, and he said she was a beautiful klutz. The next day at work she tried typing “Mona Reed” as her byline.
Murmuring a fat thank-you that gets caught in her throat, tears burn her eyes, and she’s not sure why. “You look nice, too.” It isn’t a lie. But then, she always thought so, from that first day at the courthouse when she noticed his dark eyes arched like crescent moons when he smiled and that the bones of his face were almost fragile, too pretty for someone like her. Suddenly she can’t look at him anymore.
“I guess if we’re here, we should dance?” he says uncertainly.
Even as she nods, she realizes something is horribly wrong, so wrong Jack is trying everything he can to fix it. They make their way onto the floor with cautious steps. His palms go to her hips, and she encircles his neck with bare arms, her skin shuddering with the faint echo of the electricity she used to get when he touched her. She tries to let him lead, but he’s not very good, and they’re really just rocking, her own feet following haplessly behind his. Jack feels and smells so familiar as she rests her head against his suit jacket, it makes her want to cry, but then there’s a tap on her shoulder, and Mona sniffles back a sob.
“You kids look great,” says Helen Stein, in a pink chiffon dress, smiling as though she’ll never stop. “I don’t know what you were afraid of.”
“Yeah, we’re okay, when we try,” Jack says, and Mona realizes she and Jack haven’t told the Steins or anyone else about their engagement; that she hasn’t called her parents or her sisters.
“Would you like to see what we learned in the ballroom classes?” Helen asks; Mona nods absently.
With a grace that seems impossible for their sagging bodies, Helen and George swirl and step in perfect time with the music. Like something from an old movie with Ginger Rogers, Helen’s skirt billows out as she follows George’s steps. And then Mona can’t look at them, because she and Jack are nothing like them. Burying her head in the silk fabric of Jack’s jacket, Mona cries, no longer caring if her eyeliner smudges or if Helen and George see.
“What’s wrong?” Jack’s hands caress her hair.
“I don’t know,” she murmurs into his chest. “I want something.”
“Whatever you want, I’ll get it for you. Just, just don’t cry, okay?”
“I’m sad.” She gasps for air, salt from tears and the ocean biting her eyes and nose.
“Mona.” There’s all the tragedy of Shakespeare or Bosnia in the way he says her name. “Don’t cry, please.”
“Jack, I want to be happy,” she says, and feels more than sees his face crumble as he pulls her body tight against his.
They’ve stopped dancing, but their hips still sway to the song. Jack makes cooing sounds into her hair. When she looks up, his brow is creased and his eyes, eyes that aren’t crinkled into confident half-moons, are full of something closer to understanding than pain. His dark hair has fallen into his face, and he looks very, very young, years younger than she is—so young it makes her stomach shudder to know she’s hurting him. Jack’s fingertips press hard against her skull, and he grips her so tightly she can feel all the contractions of his torso muscles. The wood deck is slippery and her black heels so high, she isn’t sure she could stand on her own if he let her go now. So she clings to his lapels, which smell faintly of shrimp scampi, even though she knows that she should let go, that if this were a book or a movie, she would let go. But it’s not, so she doesn’t. The boat continues to rock, and they continue to shuffle, out of time, with the music.
the next
generation of
dead kennedys
Jumping out of an airplane is the best way for Jack to get over Mona, according to his brother.
“When you’re up there, you can just let everything go,” Connor says, right hand easy on the Sentra’s steering wheel, left arm, disproportionately tan, resting on the open window. “Everything’s quiet and loud at the same time. Skydiving will clear your head right up.”
“I don’t know.” Jack leans back into the worn vinyl passenger seat. His flight from Cleveland got into Logan ninety minutes ago, and, since finding Connor at passenger pickup, the two have been stuck in rush-hour traffic en route to a vegetarian restaurant in Cambridge, where they were supposed to have met Connor’s girlfriend a half hour ago. “I’m not so great with moving recreation. I don’t get along so well with boats and roller coasters.”
“Naw, it’s free-fall, totally different experience.” Connor inches the car up and turns down a less crowded side street, cutting off a minivan with the license plate “It’s Bev” and receiving the long blast of a horn. “Those giant cars should be illegal.”
Not since trying to teach Connor to drive six years earlier can Jack remember being in a car his brother was driving. Nostalgia, like a too-sweet cake, leaves a film on the back of his throat, even though teaching Connor to drive had truly been one of the most miserable experiences in his life—one of the few times they ever really fought, one of the few times he may have come close to death—nothing to get choked up about. But then everything has made Jack choked up and nostalgic since Mona moved to Chicago three weeks ago.
Boston rolls past, gray and soggy, just how Jack envisioned it would look. It’s his first time there, having shunned the city fifteen years earlier when he got the skinny letter from Harvard—something he credits with ending his delusions of doing anything remotely noble (politics, public defense, ACLU) and starting his descent into the smarmy lucrative world of corporate litigation. Now his brother is at Harvard for graduate school in government—his brother who got a C in high school geometry and scored two hundred points lower than Jack did on the SAT.
“Anyway, I’m too old to skydive,” Jack says. “They’ll check my driver’s license, see I’m over thirty, and won’t let me. I’ll have to find some sixteen-year-old kid to buy my jump for me.”
Connor laughs. To Jack, he always seemed skinny and young. Connor still looks skinny—thin legs lost in corduroy pants, torso broad and flat in layers of long- and short-sleeved T-shirts—but he looks his age. At twenty-three, he’s no younger than the BU and Emerson students shuffling through puddles with backpacks and raincoats.
“You’ll love it,” Connor says, scanning the narrow street for a spot. “I’ve got a pilot friend who flies for one of the schools. He’ll probably let you jump with me, so you won’t have to hold on to a total stranger.”
Lurching the car backward into a space, Connor kills the engine and checks his watch as they speed-walk down the streets. “Laine is gonna be pissed,” he says.
The words are still hanging in the air when a tall blonde, presumably Connor’s girlfriend, steps out from under a green awning with lettering designed to look like vegetables.
“You’re fucking forty-five minutes late,” she says, rolling bored gray eyes at Connor, who mumbles an apology and something about traffic, rain, and the Big Dig. Then, easy as sleep, the blonde smiles at Jack, extends her hand for him to shake, and introduces herself as Laine Rosen.
“Laine” is probably really “Elaine.” Jack is willing to bet she shortened it to create mystery, make her seem more unusual and important than she is. But she’s the kind of girl who can get away with it. The kind of rope-thin Harvard girl who can get away with lots of things, like messy pigtails, not wearing a bra, raunchy language.
She just seems like such a type to Jack. Like girls he knew at Penn, and even some lawyerettes a
t his firm. She’s the kind of girl who makes him tired, tired for Connor and tired at the prospect of dating again. And, like words to a catchy pop song or a prayer drilled through repetition at Sunday school, Jack finds Mona’s name on his lips, and bites his tongue to keep from saying it out loud.
Nothing on the World’s Harvest menu looked particularly appealing when the three of them made small talk in the tapering rain while they waited for a table, nor does it look particularly appealing twenty minutes later in an uncomfortable wooden booth—Jack on one side, Laine and Connor, thighs touching, on the other. About half the dishes are foods Jack has never heard of, the other half involve tofu, which he knows about but doesn’t want to eat.
“Don’t worry,” Connor says, setting down his menu and nodding at Jack. “Tomorrow Lainey’s gonna visit her ma, and I’ll take you to Union Oyster House for chowder, the real Beantown experience.”
“No, this is great.” Jack smiles. Of course Laine is a vegetarian, they all are. “Should we get wine?”
He doesn’t even like wine. When he and Mona ordered a bottle at restaurants, he’d sniff the cork, taste the sample, and then leave his own glass half full so the waiters wouldn’t ask to refill it. Jack raises the question to be polite more than anything, because wine gives you something to do.
“Wine sounds good,” Connor says, and both men turn to Laine.
“I probably shouldn’t.” She blinks and briefly looks at Connor under lowered eyelids. The exchange takes a hair-fracture of a second, but it’s enough for Jack to realize three things: first, that Laine is pregnant; second, that Connor knows Laine is pregnant; finally, that Connor and Laine have discussed said pregnancy and were waiting for a good time to tell him, and the present is not the time.
“Oh, God,” Jack says before he even realizes he’s saying it. Once it has been said, there’s no taking it back. Laine and Connor look at him, then back at each other, their faces dotty as if they’re in a Seurat painting. “I’ll be right back.”
Family and Other Accidents Page 7