Property

by Lionel Shriver

  When she’d finished showing him around, the stout head honcho stood in the foyer with her eyebrows arched, looking expectant. A beat too late, he realized he was supposed to effuse. “It’s great,” he said dutifully. When she clearly wanted more, he embellished, “I mean, really great.”

  He’d meant it was great, too. Yet as she left him to get settled, the tiniest worm in his mind niggled, Is this all? He suppressed an ugly apprehension that the worm could grow to a snake.

  Thereafter ensued a blowout party for one. Barry began a typical day by ravaging the breakfast buffet, mounding his plate with pain au chocolat and gnarly, unearthly fruit labeled mangosteens and rambutans. He complemented made-to-order omelets with the locally smoked marlin-and-salmon combo. A bit of loitering over a latte would see him through to eleven a.m., when he’d hit the poolside bar, throwing down a beer or two before warming up to lychee martinis, cloudy concoctions with a blobby albino olive at the bottom to which he took quite a shine. The Japanese restaurant was next door, so he could glide to lunch with his buzz on; he’d never quite seen the point of raw fish, but he dug the prawn tempura. After dispatching the green tea ice cream with its fan-shaped cookie shard, Barry drifted the afternoon away on a fat canvas beanbag in the pool, occasionally signaling for a mojito.

  By five, it was back to his villa to freshen up. While undressing for his shower, drying off with a blindingly white bath sheet that he left on the floor, and slathering top to toe in orange-blossom moisturizer, he kept CNN yammering in the background. Yet whatever was happening elsewhere seemed muffled and far away, as if the ructions were occurring on another planet. He’d gather that something had blown up, but couldn’t have said whether the misfortune had occurred in Iran or Texas. By the second week, he started short-shrifting the news for Jennifer Aniston movies on the Romance Channel.

  Dinner was a suitably elaborate affair, with delicate seed-coated breadsticks, heart of palm salad or mango-dotted ceviche (which didn’t seem like raw fish), and imported Scottish rib eye or New Zealand lamb shanks—all washed down with zingy South African Sauvignon blancs and chewy Chilean Malbecs. A little unsteady, he’d be whizzed by buggy to his villa, where he could crack open the Hennessy and find out whether Jennifer got her guy. Unfortunately, he usually fell asleep before the couple got their act together, so that his experience of the Romance Channel was one of ceaseless heartbreak.

  Rarely finishing a film before he passed out was, alas, only one of several flies in his orange-blossom ointment. Having long prided himself on his Mediterranean genes, Barry hadn’t taken the equatorial sun into account, and at this latitude even his swarthy melanin-rich skin could singe. When by the end of the third week he’d started to peel, vanity demanded wearing his robe at the poolside bar. In the shower, rinsing off molting brown shreds made the ablution feel rather grubby.

  Obviously he’d have to dial back the alcohol a bit in the fullness of time, an expression that imparted grandeur to his good intentions while not binding him to forthcoming virtue with any disagreeable specificity. The blur to his edges from rarely being completely sober lent the palms and the blooms and the coastline a vagueness that was probably wasteful. In all honesty, he missed the blissful entitlement of slogging through the office day on the forty-third floor in Midtown and enduring yet another bottlenecked commute across the bridge to Paterson, finally to take that first glorious chug of a new craft beer. He didn’t think of himself as one of those work ethic saps who had to earn their happiness, but reward wasn’t, well, as rewarding when all you were being compensated for was getting out of bed.

  Some mornings, of course, getting out of bed ought to have earned him a medal. All those ill-gotten gains in an offshore account couldn’t buy him out of a hangover.

  Yet the biggest challenge was sewing indulgences end to end without any gaps, through which uninvited reflection was wont to seep. A lapsed Catholic, Barry recalled that the very word indulgence applied not only to a midafternoon Balinese massage, but also to the church’s official grants of reprieve from stints in purgatory for one’s sins—stays of execution, if you will. There’d been some sort of scandal way back when about indulgences of the theological sort being bought and sold. He had therefore purchased from Eternal Rest indulgences of both the secular and religious varieties, and panicked when they ran out.

  Nevertheless, it was tough to eat, drink, and be merry every minute of the day. Unextended by chitchat, dining solo was too efficient, even when he padded the meal with soup and cappuccino. Cocktails in solitude, too, had a tendency to evaporate. Waiting for another bill to sign, drumming his fingers between refills, or idling his feet in a pool hot as the air, Barry would find himself muttering, “Assholes got what they deserved. Divaggio and Hobson’ll make another billion in no time anyway. Get to keep the whole pile, too, with me out of the picture. Ten percent. Can you believe it? Love to see their faces first time they get a look at the books. Took me for a fool.”

  Only once the largely one-way conversation had dwindled did he realize that he was a fool—for not keeping his trap shut with one of the wives waiting for her husband at the bar on the beach. Her face was creased from too much sun, but he was a sucker for any woman who could still get away with a bikini in her forties. So he’d explained expansively about having founded a company that installed motion-activated lighting systems, “to spare the consumer the exhaustion of turning on a switch.” That line had always earned him a chuckle before, and he should have pulled up short when she didn’t crack a smile. “Gave us green credentials,” he went on instead. “Having lights come on when you enter a room and fade off when you leave conserves electricity and cuts bills. Oh, MADCIS has done whole office buildings, coast to coast. Our systems can also power down computer and AV equipment that would otherwise keep purring away on standby. The savings add up.”

  “Mad kiss?” she asked hazily.

  “Motion-Activated Domestic and Commercial Illumination Systems,” he spelled out like an idiot. Did he have to name the company? What if the story made the papers? “Whole concept was my idea. The tech side’s pretty simple. Motion activation has been around for decades.”

  Fortunately her husband showed up, or he’d no doubt have loose-lipped about how his partners, roommates from college he’d known for twenty years, had inserted some conniving fine print in the incorporation documents, the upshot of which was that the guy who came up with the whole concept—“The whole concept!” he’d come to grumble repeatedly to no one in particular—was due not an even-Steven third but a mere tenth of the profits. If she’d stuck around, too, he might even have blubbered about leaving his wife behind. “You can’t believe the stress of the last few months. I mean,” he might have shared, lifting his glass, “why do you think I’m on my third one of these? The secrecy was murder on my nerves. And there was a load of complicated finance to master. Tiffany didn’t understand, and naturally I couldn’t explain why I was so, you know, tense, hard to live with. But I couldn’t tell her, see, unless I could be ironclad certain she’d come with. And I bet she wouldn’t have. Has all these friends, you know, golf buddies. I was hoping till the last minute … But I couldn’t take the chance. What if she ratted me out instead?”

  No, he didn’t blab to well-preserved bikini lady about Tiffany, but the encounter still shook him. He needed to shut up. He needed more to do.

  From then on, Barry threw himself into Eternal Rest’s organized diversions, which he had previously spurned as too summer camp. He took up snorkeling, though breathing through the tube with his head submerged induced an anxious drowning sensation that was embarrassing in two feet of water. He went on the boat trips, which made him vomit. He taught himself backgammon, though by then the muttering aloud had gotten sufficiently out of hand that soon no one would play with him. (“Right, sure, Divaggio and Hobson were the ‘brains.’ They were the ‘tech savvy’ ones,” he’d sneer alone in the game room. “But the technology was Tinkertoy! Who came up with the whole concept?” S
ince no one was listening, he could non sequitur to, “And nobody reads contracts. I only did what everyone does: flipped through the incorporation documents looking for the signature lines.” He often rounded on the more sorrowful incantation, “But I couldn’t take the chance. What if she ratted me out instead?”) He entered the Ping-Pong competition, but got so worked up declaring, “Ten percent! Can you believe it?” that he failed to keep the ball on the table. Besides, he couldn’t kid himself. He wasn’t really busy. He was occupied.

  Extracurricular activities having never seriously interfered with the rigors of hedonism, the inevitable day came, too, when Barry was toweling down in preparation for another four-course dinner and caught an unguarded glimpse of himself in the dressing room’s mirror. His face might have been drawn on a balloon that was then inflated to bursting point. His body always had a squareness about it, which Tiffany claimed to like; she said his strong right angles gave him a masculine bearishness, and as an object he appeared “impossible to knock over.” But now his corners were round.

  Nuts. He talked to himself incessantly. He was a drunk. And did this ever happen to those suave antiheroes who absconded with the loot in the movies? He was getting—he wasn’t even getting. He was fat.

  Thus was born Rod Perez, Reformed Character. (Alas, no one ever called him Rod. The resort imposed an atavistic respectfulness, and it was all Meester Perez this, Meester Perez that.) He foreswore the pastries, the parathas, the petits four. He renounced lunch. He trained waiters to bring him Perrier and cucumber sticks, or occasional bowls of consommé, no croutons. He hit the weights and stationary bicycle in the fitness suite, which was always deserted, and which he came to regard as his personal fiefdom. While the other guests dawdled on the sidelines with wine and sunblock, he swam laps. Resolved to walk everywhere, he was incessantly badgered by well-meaning buggy drivers insistent on giving him a lift, and saying no took so much energy—energy that no one on a cucumber diet could spare—that most of the time he gave in.

  Turned leaf or no, the slimming was slight and slow. Moreover, becoming a fitness paragon made him even more of a pariah at a luxury resort in the Indian Ocean than talking to himself like a homeless person. Once when reclining poolside next to a fetching young woman in a lavender one-piece after ninety minutes of breaststroke—the only breast he’d stroked in this joint being his own—he began doing crunches in his lounge chair. Obviously, the lady was impressed. He’d seen her noticing him while he was still swimming, and now she was cutting eyes in his direction when she thought he wasn’t looking. But after a couple of minutes, she put her book down. “Could you please take that somewhere else?” she requested in an American accent. “Some of us are trying to relax here.”

  In the end, his corners still not restored, Barry was miserable, and he couldn’t continue to sanction a life of unremitting denial in paradise. Breakfast was a torture: sawing a single wedge of honeydew into translucent slices amid platters mounded with bacon, the while enticed by the aroma of toasting brioche and melted butter. This was the worst place in the world to go on a diet. With a clientele of honeymooning couples, families with hardworking parents on breaks they’d saved for years to afford, and Middle Eastern sheiks and Russian oligarchs whose cultures didn’t run to exertion, Eternal Rest was also the worst place in the world for exercise freakery, which his fellow guests found not only strange or irrelevant but actively repellent. What was he paying all this money for—to suffer?

  Yet once he restored a civilized lunch and allowed himself a bread roll at dinner, Barry discovered the real slimming secret of the filthy rich: fastidiousness. Persnicketiness. The upturned nose. Interestingly, this was a form of abstemiousness with which the staff was clearly familiar, and clearly more comfortable. And he wasn’t feigning the fussbudgetry, either. The glut of food and drink had seemed so fabulous at the beginning. But now he wondered if the chefs had changed, or the personnel who ordered provisions had been replaced by more stinting procurers. Nothing tasted nearly as good as it had when he arrived. So he sent back breadbaskets for being stale or overbaked. He complained that the jackfish had been seasoned too heavily with cumin, and left three-quarters of his dauphinoise potatoes because he “wasn’t keen on the nutmeg.” He rejected countless bottles of wine for being too tannic, too thin, or too fruity, and abandoned ordering lychee martinis at the poolside bar; besides being a bit cloying, they’d developed a tinny aftertaste. He’d ceased to eat or drink to excess, but discipline didn’t enter into it. Everything that grazed his palate was disappointing.

  At length, however, what he grew truly starved for at Eternal Rest wasn’t a coconut custard that lived up to expectations. It was resistance. No matter how many times he insulted the cooks and waiters to their faces about how the roasted vegetables were burned to a cinder, or how the prawn and garlic stir-fry was spiked with so much chili as to be roundly inedible, all that came back was Yes, Meester Perez. So sorry, Meester Perez. We always grateful for suggestions to improve our service, Meester Perez. Desperate to get a rise out of these amenable minions, Barry began lambasting dishes that had in fact been prepared impeccably. He accused the red snapper of being “a month old if it was a day.” Though the waiter assured him that the fish was meant to have been caught that morning—which was surely the case—the bastard still apologized, explaining “there must have been some meestake in the keetchen.” There was no mistake in the kitchen! Why couldn’t he hurl back, “Look, you son of a bitch, you won’t get fresher fish without diving into the sea and chomping down on that snapper while it’s still swimming!” Or at the pool, when he tossed his towel back to the attendant snarling that it stank of mildew, he yearned for the guy to give it a sniff and say, “You crazy. Nothing wrong with thees towel. Something wrong with you.” But no. Many apologies, Meester Perez. New towel right away, please forgive delay of your sweem today.

  No matter how much abuse he chucked at these people, they absorbed the blows. It was like sparring with a punching bag filled with pudding. Now the drowning sensation wasn’t from snorkeling in the shallows, but from being eternally submerged in a warm bath of hospitality. Every day was one long can-I-help-you-sir. He was choking on all this geniality, obligingness, and turning of cheek; he was suffocating under the plumped pillows of everlasting pampering. In what he had begun to think of as real life, Barry had been a combative man who relished trading good-natured insults with colleagues over a beer, and now he was flailing from a deficiency of friction, as if every surface in his surround had been sprayed with silicon and he couldn’t get enough traction to walk across the floor. He yearned for quarrel, back talk, and contradiction. Sure, the customer was always right, but when you claimed two and two made five and you were right, there was no such thing as right. He had landed himself in a world of goo, where he was slathered with affirmation, flattery, and affable comments about the weather like the pink-smelling liniments of those never-ending spa treatments. It was a world in which he was never held accountable—where all that mattered was not what he thought or what he’d done but what he wanted.

  What he wanted was to go home. Abruptly on an arbitrary Thursday afternoon, he showed up at reception with his packed bags, announcing that his flight to the main island left at five thirty. Within the hour, he was through the farcical airport security and seated in the waiting room. For once he was glad that this hop had no business class, hence no business class lounge, with its open bar, its free Wi-Fi, its buffet of miniature quiches, stuffed vine leaves, and ripe cheeses. He was glad of the hardness of this slatted bench, its lack of poofy cushions. He was glad to have to move over to accommodate shy local schoolgirls and pecan-colored professional travelers in dopey hats—to not be treated as if he were special. He was already looking forward to the invigoration of the prison yard, in which a man couldn’t buy a place at the top of the pecking order, but had to struggle to establish himself in the hierarchy of other men; where if he so much as looked sideways at one of his fellow convicts he’d earn
a sock in the jaw. In a cellblock, yes, but he still looked forward to folding his own clothes, matching his own socks, and changing his own sheets, the whole concept. He looked forward to celebrating the fact that this was the day of the week the penitentiary canteen served individual frozen pizzas, and that pizza, with a bland, congealed sauce of tomato soup concentrate, would taste more sumptuous than the Mediterranean focaccia with rosemary, anchovies, and kalamatas at Eternal Rest. Cinematically, this ending may have hewed to an old-fashioned plotline, but Barry had always liked those black-and-white noirs.

  The flight was delayed by a tropical downpour, which crashed against the terminal’s tin roof like an audience of several hundred breaking into applause. The dark beams crisscrossing overhead provided the snug, muggy room the atmosphere of a hunting lodge. Delicate wooden Xs over the upper windows stitched the building like an edging of crochet. He wished Tiffany were here. This airport really was adorable, and somebody should say so.

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