by Mark Sampson
“Oh, wait till you see,” she said with childlike exuberance, and set the case down on the sand. She squatted before it and undid the brass latches. The case popped open to reveal itself to be — oh dear reader! — a portable bar. When she raised the large lid, a mechanized sideboard came up and out. On the case’s inner top half, strapped down with leather, were 500 ml bottles of gin, vodka, whiskey, and vermouth, plus juices and simple syrup. On the bottom half, encased in grey foam, were martini and shot glasses, a shaker, little jars of cherries and olives and cocktail onions.
“Girl after my own heart!” I cried out.
She looked back at us over her shoulder, grinning. “You guys want a drink?”
So the four of us sipped Gibsons there on the red mud, watching the tide come in and chatting about all manner of amiable topics. Grace mentioned what a “good drinker” I was, and I described for them the marvel that was the Bloody Joseph. “It really is my signature cocktail,” I said. When we finished our drinks, Jacob dug a foam football out of his beach bag and suggested we play catch in the water. We ditched our footwear and other accessories and waded out into the sea, arranging ourselves into a spread-out square. With the hand-eye coordination of an inebriated chimp, I managed to fumble or outright miss each toss that sailed my way. At one point, the ball slammed into my temple like the bullet that killed JFK, sending my comb-over flying off my head like a shattered skull and knocking me into the water. “Sorry, Philip!” Hilary called over after I re-emerged. At another point, the ball slipped as I gave it a toss, and it wobbled through the air and landed weakly on the water between Jacob and Grace. They both dashed and leaped for it, and Jacob got there first by a split second, and Grace went tumbling into the foam. I watched as Jacob laughed and apologized, then extended a hand to my wife, hauling her out of the sea with a sturdy tug. His muscular shoulders then pivoted as he threw the ball with perfect precision toward my waiting hands, but I still managed to drop it.
We came in after a bit, bodies chilled and sinuses burning from the salt water, and flopped down around Hilary’s briefcase. She made us another cocktail — Manhattans this time — and we drank to our good health. Jacob asked if Grace and I were interested in joining them for their activity this evening. “There’s a cèilidh at the village playhouse,” he said. “I think there are still tickets. Do you guys want to come?” And Grace said, “Absolutely,” and I said, “Sure, let’s do it,” even though I had planned to spend at least part of the night proofreading. But we beamed over this brilliant idea and did another cheers, our martini glasses tinkling in the open air.
A few hours later, now dressed for a rapidly cooling PEI night, the four of us met up outside the playhouse, located right in the middle of the village, an old white-painted church now renovated for plays. We went in, bought tickets, and found some seats in the middle of the theatre. The place was soon packed, the chatter of eager tourists filling the air. Before long a seven-man band took to the stage with instruments — guitar, accordion, fiddle, mandolin, Celtic drum, bass, tin flute — and lined up in a straight row in front of us. The lead singer, behind his guitar, welcomed us all and then mentioned that the theatre’s aisles were open for dancing. They then broke into their first song, a jaunty little Irish number, and a few people clapped along. After the song wrapped up, the leader once again reminded us of the open aisles; and during the second tune, equally brisk, a few people did get up to jig and flail around. By the third song, even more people headed for the aisles, but not enough for the band’s liking. During a long instrumental section, the Celtic drummer, a short, snouty man, yelled out, “Get up and dance, ye sissies!” and that seemed to shake our group from its bashfulness. Grace, Jacob, and Hilary took to their feet. Grace motioned for me to join them, but I demurred. I was happy to just sit and listen — and besides, nobody wanted to see Philip Sharpe try to dance. I instead watched as my wife and our two new friends rushed to the aisle and then threw their arms into the air and bounced around each other in tight, joyous orbits. During a fiery fiddle solo, the three of them linked hands and began jumping up and down, their six feet pounding at the floor.
By song five, the other shy types and I, encamped in our theatre seats, were in the minority, and Hilary had had enough. Youthful face glowing, hips swinging in her summer dress, she danced back through our row to grab me by the wrists and pull me to my feet. “Please join us, Philip!” she yelled over the music, and I was powerless to resist her. So there I was, stiffly reunited with them and “dancing” — a kind of shuffle that looked like an attempt to scrape gum off the soles of my Payless. Don’t get me wrong, reader: I was having a blast. When the music got manic, I did my best to join the jig. During a slower, more contemplative folk song, the four of us linked arms and swayed like teenagers. At one point, Jacob pulled out his phone to take our picture, and the girls encroached on my face and kissed my bearded cheeks just as the flash danced in our eyes.
When the cèilidh wrapped up, we poured with the crowd into the lobby, and there was vague, fragmented talk of what the four of us might do next. Was there a pub nearby? Did they want to come back to our cottage for a nightcap? But we emerged outside to discover a pluvial torrent pounding the street. When had this come on? We screamed a little as our heads and clothes got soaked. The downpour was so harsh it couldn’t help but quash any undeveloped plans we had and drive us apart. There was a quick, desperate exchange between the girls. “Afternoon … tomorrow … the beach!” exclaimed Hilary. “Yeah, yeah,” Grace replied. Jacob and Hilary then linked arms and darted through the sheets of rain back to the Orient Hotel while we cowered under a small umbrella that Grace pulled from her handbag and hustled back to our own shoreline cottage.
The next afternoon, the pathway to the beach was still pockmarked with large puddles of the previous night’s rain, and low tide had brought with it a feral and not entirely unpleasant funk from the sea. Grace and I were walking hand-in-hand and soon spotted Hilary’s silver briefcase resting on a red macadam of sediment. We looked out over the water and, sure enough, there they were, playing catch among the waves once more. They saw us and beckoned, and we stripped down to our bathing suits and waded out to be with them. But as we did, Hilary broke away and came sploshing through the water toward us in large, animated strides. She seized me by the arm and said, “Grace, take my place. Philip — come with me. I’ve got something for you!” So Grace waded out excitedly toward Jacob while Hilary brought me in and led me to her briefcase. We squatted in the sand and she began digging through their beach bag. To my delight, she brought up a bottle of tomato juice, a stalk of celery, some Tabasco.
“I went shopping for you this morning,” she said, popping open her portable bar to get at the whiskey. “I figured you might want to have your usual.”
“Oh, wow, you’re sweet,” I replied.
I watched as she intently mixed us a couple of competent Bloody Josephs, her blond hair hanging in wet, tangled ropes around the sides of her face. She handed me my drink, and we reclined together on the sand to watch Grace and Jacob play catch in the distance, their tosses growing short as they drifted closer together.
“So are you guys really starting back to Toronto tomorrow?” Hilary asked.
“Yeah, unfortunately.” I sighed.
She nodded, equally disappointed. Then she looked at me, her chin and forehead still shining with seawater. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Does it bother you that I was one of Jacob’s students?”
I looked away, back toward the horizon. “I don’t,” I said, “tend to judge.”
“Have you ever slept with a student?” she asked. “Or thought about it?”
My ears lit up like lanterns. “Every prof thinks about it,” I stammered. “They’re lying if they say otherwise. And sometimes it seems like one of my young charges might be coming on to me. But in seventeen years, I’ve never had the …” and
here chose my word carefully, “confidence to confirm it.”
She licked her lips. “I find that hard to believe.” She looked at me, and I looked at her, and we smirked awkwardly. Then we turned back to the sea, and found that Grace and Jacob had given up on catch, and were now standing waist-deep in the water together, talking. They held the football between them — his hand on one end and hers on the other.
“Hey, guys — come in for drinks!” Hilary yelled, and in a way that reminded me of how young, and possibly immature, she was. But the two obeyed, and before long Hilary had mixed the four of us a round of very stiff Gibsons. We downed them quickly as we chatted. She mixed up a second round, and we downed those fast, too. The alcohol must have gone to Jacob’s head, because he burst out then with:
“I don’t mean to get all ‘frat boy’ on you guys, but I think it’s high time the four of us had a chicken fight.”
“Oh God, yes!” Grace exclaimed, and climbed to her feet.
“A chicken — a chicken what?” I asked. But the girls were already hauling me up, one arm each, off the red mud. We all staggered into the water then, and Jacob stooped, and Hilary swung herself onto his shoulders, her legs around his ears, and up she went. Ah, I got it. I did the same, and Grace manoeuvred herself, with some difficulty, onto my narrow shoulders. Once she did, I attempted to raise us both. Oof, dear, I thought, you’re certainly on the south side of thirty. Seeing me struggle, Jacob said, “Here, let’s trade.” He lowered himself and Hilary climbed down and splashed over to me. Grace splashed over to Jacob. He got my wife up, got her up with no effort at all. I was a bit bothered by this, but then Hilary’s thighs came draping over my ears, her crotch at the back of my head. There was something seedy about it, my hands now holding her smooth, cool shins, but she was, I had to admit, quite a bit lighter than Grace. I got her in the air, and Jacob was upon me in an instant. The girls enmeshed their hands and Grace promptly pitched us into the water. “Hey, no fair — we weren’t ready!” Hilary yelled once we surfaced. She climbed aboard me once more, but once more the other team sent us into the sea after a brief tussle. On the third try, I finally got a good footing, and we settled for a draw — the four of us tumbling into the surf together, the girls squealing in delight as we did. We all thrashed around in the foam briefly, and I felt someone’s backside brush against the front of my trunks.
The girls decided to go for a swim, and Jacob and I returned to shore to lounge on the sand. We watched as Grace and Hilary went out and out and out, farther than we’d yet been, farther than I thought advisable. I grew nervous at that.
“Do you think they’re too —” I began.
“They’ll be fine,” he said.
And sure enough, they soon swam back in and climbed out of the surf together, their bathing suits full of the sea. Hilary called over, “Jacob — come swim with me,” and he got up to go to her. He and Grace brushed past each other for a second as Grace trotted up to be at my side. She flung herself down and nuzzled her face into my chest, and I patted her wet hair as I watched our friends swim out together.
Grace stayed like that for a bit, but then looked up at me, her eyes a touch wild, her lips pressed into an unwieldy half-grin. “So this is a bit awkward,” she said.
“What is?”
Instead of answering, she pressed her face into my chest again — hid it there, really, as if she were embarrassed to go on — and laughed.
“Grace, what is it?”
Without looking at me she said, “So Hilary wants to know if we’d like to see their room up at the Orient.”
“Really?” I asked, dumbly. “Why? Is there something special about their hotel room?”
“Well, that’s what I asked,” Grace replied, glancing up at me. Her cheeks were now flush. “And she said, no. No, not really. Other than its king-size bed. A huge bed, she said. A bed that’s practically, you know,” and here cringed her face into my shoulder. “Big enough for four people.”
I gasped a little. And Grace gasped a little.
“Oh my gawd,” I said.
“Oh my God,” she exclaimed.
I chuckled awkwardly. “Can you imagine?”
She bit her lip and shrugged. “Actually, I can imagine.” At first I thought she meant, Yeah, I can imagine it — those two crazy cads, those wild Texans, suggesting such a thing. But then I realized: No, no. What my wife meant was, Yeah, I can imagine it.
She looked up at me. Saw the expression on my face. “It’s just so ridiculous,” she said, backpedalling. “So scandalous. I mean, sure, the four of us get along really well. And yes, we’ll probably never see these people again after tonight. But still. We couldn’t. We couldn’t.” And she raised her face to mine. “Could we?”
I just looked at her. “Grace, it’s our honeymoon.”
“Oh, I know, of course,” she said, wrapping an arm around my soft belly. Out on the water, we could see that Jacob and Hilary had gone out far, and were now just turning around and bobbing their way back toward us. “Except, not really,” Grace went on, cautiously. “I mean, it’s been over a year since our wedding. And you’ve spent a lot of this trip working on your book. So it’s not really a honeymoon — is it?”
My mouth slackened under my rapidly widening gaze, and she lowered her head. “Grace, I am profoundly uncomfortable right now.”
“No, of course. It’s stupid. It’s stupid.”
“I suppose Jacob’s into this idea?”
“Oh, yes, he’s very into it,” she said — too quickly. She went beet red then. And that’s when I realized: I was not one-fourth of this discussion, this decision. I was maybe one-eighth, or one-sixteenth — a small hurdle to be overcome in an idea that the three of them had already, somehow, floated together. I thought, then, of the experimentation that Grace regularly brought to our sex life, and how I always tried to run with it. The role-playing, the gymnastical positions, her collection of toys — all used to create a little voyeur-exhibitionist combo, a little simulated candaulism. But this was a bridge too far.
“Anyway, I could never go through with it,” she lied. “I would just freeze up. I would just die.”
I gaped at her, silently, for a long time.
Jacob and Hilary came splashing out of the water then and walked, hand in hand, back toward us. They smiled at first but then realized the mood had changed. Realized that the conversation they knew Grace had been having with me did not go well.
“Listen,” Jacob said, looking to change the subject, “we’re thinking about going for an early supper. You guys want to come?”
No, get the fuck away from me, I thought.
“Sure, that would be lovely,” Grace answered for us.
Jacob nodded, and then gave my wife a slight, barely perceptible shrug of resignation. Hilary, meanwhile, crouched in the sand and began gathering up the contents of her portable bar. She looked over at me, sadly, the thwarted allumeuse. I suppose I should have been flattered by her disappointment. But I wasn’t. I was revolted.
We returned to our respective nests to get cleaned up but then reconvened at a patio restaurant near the village’s playhouse. The dinner conversation was stilted, cold. I was monosyllabic for the entire meal. When it was over, we exchanged a series of bland goodbyes. Grace and Hilary promised to find each other on the Facebook, and Jacob told me to drive safely tomorrow on our trek back.
“I don’t drive,” I informed him. “I’ve never even had my licence. She does all the driving in this relationship.”
“Ah,” he replied, nodding without quite believing.
That night, in our cabin, Grace and I made love. I didn’t want to, but it felt necessary to clear the air between us. It was good, industrious, missionary-position sex; and upon its detumescence I promptly rolled over and fell asleep. It was a great sleep — deep and solitary and dreamless. It was like I floated in some nowhere-place a million
miles away from the unpleasantness of that afternoon.
But then I woke, later on, to a sound I mistook for the surf’s arrhythmia outside our window, its pulse and squeak, its pulse and squeak. I sat up and looked over at that window, at the moonlight blazing through it. But the sound was not coming from there. So I glanced to where my wife lay, well over on her side of the bed. She was naked and on her back, her knees up, her torso arched, the sheets swirling like eddies around her ankles. She must have gotten out of bed at some point (slinked out really, while I snored on my side of the mattress), and fetched two of her silicone friends from the pocket of her suitcase. Because there they were, long and large and very lifelike. She pressed one between her legs, her wrist like a metronome beyond the crest of her raised thighs. Her other arm was curled lightly, sensuously, around her head, with the second silicone friend moving in and out and around her open mouth, her pawing tongue. Grace’s eyes were squeezed shut in rapture, and she released soft, starved cries of pleasure each time the toy moved out of her mouth.
“Grace —”
She sprang bolt upright then, like a jack-in-the-box. “Philip — oh my God!” The two toys went rolling off the bed and thudding onto the floor. Her sexual flush turned to a flush of embarrassment.
“Grace.”
She let out a little gasp then, or a gasp-laugh, and waited for me to return it. I didn’t. So we both hovered there, in space and time, not moving. Then she lowered herself slowly back onto her pillow, her eyes wide, her face burning. I stared down at her, own face aflame, but then settled back onto my side of the bed. We both lay there, doing an excellent job of examining the ceiling, there in the darkness above us.
“Grace, it’s our honeymoon,” I said finally.
A quick rustle of the sheets and her forehead was pressed into my shoulder, her hip hooked around mine. “Do you … want … want to … help me out here —”
“No.”
So she moved back to her side and went stiff as a plank. The truth of what she’d been doing — what she’d been fantasizing about — draped over us like a canopy. It felt as if every cell in my body had died at once, wiped out by the images dancing in Grace’s head. Images of me and Jacob — together. But mostly, probably, just Jacob. My wife had been lying next to me as I slept thinking of somebody else. And on our honeymoon, no less.