At the next beach I see the woman in the sheer black cover-up and big sunglasses who earlier stood on the balcony of her perfect villa and now stands ankle-deep in the calm ocean water, wineglass in hand, staring at the horizon. I pause and I watch her watch the water because she looks like she’s standing in a painting and this painting is having the calming effect that eluded me moments ago.
I want to be someone like that—someone who exudes control, elegance and an aura of I don’t give a shit. This is what I attempted last night at the dinner table upon Peter’s return from the mystery phone call, but instead I came off as jealous and small with an aura of shrew.
This woman would never feel threatened by her husband’s assistant. She can’t be bothered with such clichés. When her husband returns from a phone call taken in another room, on another floor, she does not question his need for privacy. She runs a hand through his thick hair and kisses him. He pulls back and looks at her and says, loud enough for everyone to hear: “How did I get so lucky?”
Why can’t I be this woman? Is it too late to be this woman? When did I let my life get overrun by the devil grass of domestic obligation and worry?
The woman turns her back to the horizon and starts up toward her perfect villa. I am standing right in her path.
“Hello,” she says to me. “It is beautiful, no?” She has sized me up immediately. Tourist. American. No grasp of basic, conversational Spanish.
“Yes,” I say to her. It is beautiful: the beach, the sea, this woman and the perfect villa she is renting. “It’s lovely.”
She lifts her black sunglasses to the top of her head. She has large, dark, bottomless eyes. In her stare I feel tiny. “You’ve been to the service?”
“I’m sorry?”
She gestures to the palm fronds in my hand. The kids left them behind and I picked them up, because even for items I understand to be compostable, I can’t tolerate littering.
“Oh, no. I just—”
“It is okay. I did not go either. But I still pray I may be worthy of His love.”
“Me, too,” I say because I’m not sure what else one is supposed to say in this situation. It doesn’t seem like the right moment to preach my brand of atheism.
“Do you stay here?” She points to the villa next to hers, Villa Tacky.
“No,” I respond, trying to hide the sting that she could believe I have such dreadful taste. Maybe it’s my pink cover-up. Maybe she can see right through me, clear across the ocean and into the juniors department at Nordstrom. “I’m staying at the villa around the bend. Villa Azul Paraiso?”
“Yes,” she says. “I know this villa. It is rumored to have once belonged to Carlos Salinas de Gortari. He was the president, but he was very greedy, and also corrupt. He was . . . a disgrace.”
“Richard Nixon stayed there, too. And Martha Stewart. I guess it’s like a luxury haven for disgraced people.”
“This is funny,” she says and she smiles, but she is too in control, too composed, for real laughter. “Now it is owned by an old couple from the United States. They call it Villa Azul Paraiso when it should be called Villa Paraiso Azul. This is the proper Spanish. This couple, they live in Wyoming, so maybe they do not know.”
“Wyoming? That’s strange.”
“Yes. I had never heard of this place. But most of the owners of these villas now, they are from somewhere in the United States. There are restrictions for foreigners buying properties, but investors from the US have learned to work around these restrictions. Fewer and fewer of these homes are owned by the Mexican people.”
I worried about the weather, about the exchange rate and time change, I tracked the paths of hurricanes, but I did not think to factor in the socioeconomic implications of renting property from a nonlocal owner. My impulse is to apologize but I had no idea who owned the villa. We went through a rental company, and anyway, if I had known that the owners were two old people from Wyoming it wouldn’t have made any difference.
“Who owns the villa where you’re staying?” I don’t want to admit I saw her standing on the balcony of her enviable rental.
She makes a sweeping gesture toward Villa Perfect. “I do.”
“You do?”
“Yes. Do you think the only people who live here cook and clean for rich Americans?”
“Oh, God. No. That is not what I meant at all. I—”
“I am only making a joke with you.” She smiles again and this time, she laughs.
“Your house is . . . gorgeous,” I tell her. “Truly. It’s perfect.”
“Thank you. You are very kind.” She takes the final sip from her wineglass and then shakes the last drops into the sand. “Now I must go back inside. Please. Enjoy your time here in Puerto Vallarta.”
* * *
• • •
I HAVEN’T CHECKED CLEM’S TEXTS since we arrived in Mexico. I haven’t seen the point. It’s not like I have no respect for her privacy, but I believe it’s my job to keep her safe, to know the dangers she might be exposing herself to and to protect her from, or at least help her navigate her way around those dangers.
So maybe there’s no justification for me to open up my laptop now and load the app that lets me see her texts. We’re twelve hundred miles from her life back home, and we are under the same roof for the entire week—there are no dangers. But I look anyway, because I’m curious. I’m curious what she’s telling Sean about Malcolm. I’m curious what she’s telling him about our vacation in general. And curiosity, specifically the kind of curiosity a mother has with regard to her daughter, is a mighty force.
When Clem was in third grade, long before the days of iPhones and texting and Instagram and Snapchat, I found an envelope on her desk. I was straightening up for her; she’s never been particularly neat or organized. The envelope was sealed and stuck between two books. On the outside she’d written: PRIVATE. DO NOT READ. PERSONAL PROPERTY OF CLEMENTINE CARLSON. Underneath, she’d drawn a skull and crossbones.
I managed to hold out for nearly twenty-four hours before I opened that envelope. First I shook it. I held it up to the window. I placed it flat on her desk and shone a light on it. Nothing gave me the slightest clue about what skull-and-crossbones secret that envelope protected.
That night, when I put her to bed, I asked if there was anything she wanted to talk about. She said no. I asked if anything was bothering her. She said no. I asked if there was something she felt she couldn’t say out loud, something it might be easier to write down on a piece of paper and then put away someplace safe. She didn’t bite.
In the morning she boarded the school bus. I made myself a second cup of coffee. I poached myself an egg and read the news online. Then I went back up to her room, took out the envelope and tore it open.
Inside I found an itemized list of her Halloween candy.
It was three months past Halloween and all that candy had long since been devoured. I threw the envelope away and Clem never asked about it once.
If that should have taught me a lesson, I’m not sure what that lesson was meant to be, because here I am, sitting in one of the extra living rooms nobody ever uses, scrolling through Clem’s texts.
She’s mostly been texting Sean. There are a few exchanges with Ariella, who is still peeved about her parents’ kilim runner, and with her friend Sadie about some new song that just dropped on iTunes.
I scroll back to yesterday and our arrival at the house.
CLEM: this place is sick. massive. even bigger than Jasmine’s mansion.
SEAN: lol
CLEM: we’re right on the beach. ugh. wish you were here.
SEAN: me too
I whip quickly through volumes and volumes and volumes of texts and a full rainbow of heart emojis. I see spots where Sean redirects their conversation away from texting to FaceTime or Snapchat.
SEAN: check
ur snap
SEAN: FT?
Those are the places I cannot see. They are the mediums of communication to which I have no access. Texting shows me only part of the picture. It’s like standing on the beach and peering into someone’s open villa—you may think you can see everything from your spot outside in the sand, but there are corners hidden from view, there are rooms with doors that shut.
I continue scrolling up to this afternoon and a long string of texts from an increasingly agitated Sean.
SEAN: where r u?
SEAN: hello?
SEAN: WTF?
Finally, at 4:30, right around the time Clem and Malcolm returned to the villa, she texted him back.
CLEM: sry! i was w my parents. made me go to town to see a church and leave my phone—so annoying.
* * *
• • •
WHEN WE SIT DOWN to dinner that night, I notice that Clem chooses a place next to Malcolm. I sit next to her, across from Peter, whose beard is softer now, and with all the color he’s getting from the sun, it looks like it’s coming in extra white. He’s handsome, my husband. I don’t say that because I’ve already had two margaritas (mango-orange); it’s just a fact. He’s tall with broad shoulders and he has strong cheekbones, kind eyes and a warm smile.
I pretty much won the husband lottery. I know this. I know this because that’s what everyone tells me, but also, I can see this for myself even if I sometimes forget to look. I know plenty of wives in addition to Maureen whose husbands left them for younger women. I know wives whose husbands won’t come to events at their children’s schools or who would never set foot in a grocery store or who can’t be bothered to pick their underwear up off the bathroom floor. Husbands who have gotten fat and bald, not that one can be blamed for the latter (or even the former—and shame on me for even mentioning it as I’m the one who has gained fifteen pounds in the twenty years we’ve been together, not Peter). I know wives whose husbands have taken up expensive, boring hobbies. Husbands who have become drinkers. Or worse: excessive watchers of college sports.
Peter had the perfect model for the husband he wanted to be: his father. Young Pete understood from back when he paid more attention to Dungeons & Dragons than girls that if he wanted to be a good husband he simply had to do the opposite of everything his father did. His father was a temperamental, distant, philandering, boorish bastard. Peter can sometimes be a little smug and dismissive, and he can retreat into his own dark moods, but he’s steady and loyal, and that he’s as sweet and loving as he is, well—it’s nothing short of a genetic miracle.
Instead of questioning his relationship with his young assistant, instead of punishing Peter for the small things he does to annoy me or even to occasionally undercut me, I should drop to my knees and pray like my new friend did today on the beach that I may be worthy of his love.
And did I already mention that he’s handsome? Especially tonight with the sun on his cheeks and wearing the blue shirt I bought him for Christmas. The terribly unfair truth is that Peter and I are on opposite trajectories—he gets better-looking with each passing year while my own attractiveness trends downward. I find that this is true of men and women across the board, which only goes to prove that God is cruel. And probably a man.
I catch Peter’s eye. He shoots me a grin. I point to him. He points at me. It’s something we’ve been doing across crowded rooms across our many years together, it’s our private sign language, our way of saying we belong to each other.
I look over at Solly. He isn’t classically good-looking like Peter. He’s shorter and stockier and, at nearly fifty, he’s starting to get some gray in the thick head of black curls he wears long and slicked back. Even though his face is getting heavier and drooping like a basset hound’s, he doesn’t seem to be losing any of his sex appeal.
I know people who see Solly and Ingrid together wonder about their Beauty and the Beast situation, and they probably jump to the same erroneous conclusion I did initially—that it’s all about his money. But they’d be wrong. Not about the money, because Solly does have a shit ton of money. But they’d be wrong if they believed that’s all that attracts women to Solly. Sexiness can be hard to quantify, but Solly is a bona fide member of the 1 percent. It’s a strange alchemy, some powerful brew of his charisma and confidence and intelligence and sense of humor, and the way he flirts. It doesn’t matter if you’re male or female, young or old, beautiful or hideous, when Solly is talking to you he is flirting with you. Who doesn’t enjoy that kind of attention?
Solly looks at the dish Enrique is holding out and makes a face. “What the fuck is this?”
Enrique laughs. He isn’t taken aback. Solly can even hurl an insult with a certain degree of charm.
We’ve all served ourselves the fish already. My piece is dark brown in spots and does not have an appetizing smell despite being smothered in onions and peppers and sprinkled with cilantro.
“It’s bonito,” says Enrique. “It is not a nice fish.”
Solly frowns. “I thought Luisa said it was beautiful.”
“No,” Enrique says. “It is bonito. It is not good.”
“Dad,” Malcolm says. “Bonit-a means beautiful. Not bonit-o.”
“Well, shit.” Solly throws his head back and cackles.
“Well, shit,” Ivan says. “Shitshitshitshitshit.”
MONDAY
Ingrid’s manuscript is waiting for me in my inbox when I wake up. The time stamp says 1:21 A.M., so I guess I’m not the only lousy sleeper in the house, although last night I slept like the dead. I hate the grimness of that expression, but it’s far more apt than saying I slept like a baby. I’ve had a baby, so I know firsthand that babies wake many times a night screaming and crying, having shat their pants, and thus are not the sleepers I aim to emulate, not that I aim to emulate the dead.
The note she’s sent along with the attachment says:
J-
I know when you offered to read this, you weren’t necessarily offering to read this NOW on our vacation, but I also know that if I don’t send it, I might very well lose my nerve. So here it is. For whenever the mood strikes. Your opinion means the world to me, but please: be brutally honest. No good will come from trying to protect my feelings.
xx
I
I don’t open the file, but I move it to my desktop. I can tell by the number of kilobytes that her work in progress already far exceeds the length of anything I’ve ever written. My manuscripts usually clock in between 45,000 to 55,000 words, or 195 to 225 pages. They’re slim volumes, yes, but I don’t believe this means they lack depth.
Right now I’m stuck around page 120 on a draft of a novel I’ve owed my editor for weeks. She’s kind enough to give me breathing room, which might have something to do with the fact that I told her the radiation made me tired, when in fact it didn’t at all, it just provided an ironclad excuse for my lack of productivity. She’ll occasionally send me the cheerful email—with news of a mutual acquaintance, or a video about cats she thinks I’ll like because I have a cat and our relationship isn’t close enough for her to know that just because I have a cat does not mean I am a cat person—but she does not ask about my progress. I keep telling myself that the words will come, that the second half of this story will reveal itself to me. I’ve done the work of giving a voice to my narrator, developing the secondary characters, setting up the central conflict, the love interest, but I just can’t seem to keep the story moving toward any kind of satisfying denouement. I go back and I go back, tweaking sentences, adding details to earlier scenes, but there is no doubt about it: I am lost in the thicket. I do not know how this ends.
Whatever the reason for my lack of progress, the file itself has become like a virus on my desktop. Something I’m afraid to touch. A little white rectangular icon of a reminder that there is something wrong with me, something wrong with ever
ything, and clicking on it will only shine a bright, unforgiving light onto all of my shortcomings and struggles. So instead I avoid it. This is easy to do and even expected when one is on a dream vacation, but I’ve had no such excuse for the past several months.
The title of Ingrid’s completed manuscript: Lost in Space. I wonder about this. Does the fifteen-year age gap between us mean she’s never heard of the television show? I’m too young to have watched Lost in Space in its heyday, and when it came to those unsupervised afternoons we children of the seventies enjoyed, where we’d come home from school, gorge ourselves on junk food and watch reruns of old TV shows, I was more of a Gilligan’s Island and I Dream of Jeannie kind of girl. But even if I’ve never seen a single episode of Lost in Space, I’m certainly aware of its existence, and anyway, I think it’s been remade several times in the intervening decades.
I try to imagine what shows were on when Ingrid returned home from a day at school, and I realize that by then I was already an adult with a job, so I have no idea what was going on in the world of afternoon television reruns.
She’s up before me. Already at the dining room table with a mug of tea, reading a book to Ivan while he eats a breakfast of sliced mango and tortillas slathered in butter.
“Good morning,” I say.
“Shhhhh,” Ivan says. “We’re reading.”
“Oops”—I put my hands up—“Sorry.”
“Ivan. That’s not polite,” Ingrid scolds. “You need to say good morning to Jenna. And then you can say, ‘Excuse me, but we’re in the middle of reading a book.’”
Ivan looks at me with his little brow furrowed. “Ding dong,” he says.
“Ivan.” Ingrid closes the book. He reaches over and opens it again.
“Read,” he orders.
“First say good morning to Jenna.”
Tomorrow There Will Be Sun Page 7