Текст книги "The Vacationers"

Автор книги: Emma Straub

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Sylvia woke up with a dry, open mouth. She’d had four glasses of wine at dinner, and the jet lag made her feel like she had cinder blocks tied to her ankles. She rolled onto her stomach and reached for the clock—her own clock, also known as her watch, also known as her iPhone, was on permanent airplane mode, lacking all of its usual distractions and conveniences, and she found the separation from the object jarring, as if she’d woken up and found that she was missing a finger. A good finger. It was something she hadn’t considered when her parents presented her with the notion of a trip to Spain. Of course the Internet was still there, whoring away at all hours, and she could get access to everything on her laptop. If the sensation of loss hadn’t been so great, Sylvia might have liked having a little distance from the rest of the world. The problem was you never knew what people were saying about you when you were gone. It was an even bigger problem than knowing what people were saying about you when you were within earshot.

The photos were taken at a party, one of the first “last parties” of the year. There was the last party at the park the cops never checked, there was the last party at someone’s free house, then the last party at someone else’s free house. The party in question had taken place at an apartment on the sixth floor of the Apthorp, a giant building on 79th Street, only five blocks from the Post family manse. Sylvia hadn’t wanted to go, but she had, because she did like some of the people she was graduating with, if not very many of them. When the photos surfaced on Facebook the next day, her skin slick with sweat, her eyes blurry from too many plastic cups full of cheap beer, her tongue in one boy’s mouth and then another and another, boys she didn’t even remember speaking to, she vowed to herself that she would never go to a party ever again. Or on the Internet. Moving to Spain was sounding better and better.

“Shit!” she said, looking at the time. She had three minutes to get dressed and downstairs before Joan would arrive. Sylvia pulled on her jeans and a black T-shirt from the pile on the floor. She leaned against the mirror and looked at her pores. There were girls at school who spent hours in the ladies’ room putting on makeup expertly, as though they were each teaching their own YouTube tutorial, but Sylvia didn’t know how, nor did she want to learn. It was almost impossible to change anything about yourself at a school you’d been attending since you were five—with every tiny step away from your former shell, someone was bound to say, “Hey! That’s not you! You’re faking!” Sylvia lived in fear of such fakery. Going to college was going to be amazing for many reasons, the first of which being the simple fact that Sylvia planned to be a completely different person the moment she arrived, even before she made her bed and pushpinned stupid posters on the walls. This new person was going to know how to put on makeup, even eyeliner. She stretched her mouth open and peered into her throat, thinking, not for the first time, that it was all completely and utterly hopeless and that she was almost certainly going to die a sad, lonely virgin who had accidentally gotten drunk and made out with every single boy at a party her senior year of high school, a slattern without the added benefit of actual sex. She dug through the plastic baggie she used for makeup until she found a tube of strawberry ChapStick and slathered it across her lips. She’d try harder tomorrow.

Lawrence pulled Charles into their bedroom as quickly as he could.

“What are you doing, my strange little munchkin?” Charles was amused, despite having just left Franny’s soggy embrace.

In lieu of an answer, Lawrence opened his laptop and spun it in Charles’s direction.

“Give me the phone,” Charles said. “What time is it in New York?”

It was just before five p.m. in New York, and they managed to catch the social worker before she was out the door. Deborah read them the details off a form: the baby weighed five pounds, ten ounces and was seventeen inches long, born to a twenty-year-old African-American mother. The father was Puerto Rican, but he was out of the picture. The birth mother had chosen their letter out of the book at the agency. The baby’s name, which they would of course be welcome to change, was Alphonse.

“Are you interested in proceeding?” Deborah waited.

Charles and Lawrence held the phone between their faces, both leaning forward, so that together their bodies formed a steeple. They looked at each other, eyes wide. Lawrence spoke first.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, we are.”

Deborah explained what would happen next—they’d heard it before, but like everything important, the minute that it became a reality, they’d forgotten all the details. The birth mother could choose any number of families, and the agency would approach them all on her behalf. Once those families had said yes, the agency would go back to her with the list. The birth mother would then pick the winners, as it were. The choice was out of their hands.

“We’re in Spain,” Lawrence said. “Should we come home? Should we come home right now?” He glanced around their bedroom, calculating how long it would take them to pack and drive to the airport.

“Stay on vacation,” Deborah said. “Even if the birth mother does choose you, we’re looking at a couple of weeks before you’d be able to bring Alphonse home. If you can stay, stay. I’ll be in touch whenever I hear something, probably next week.” She hung up the phone, leaving Charles and Lawrence standing there, the precious object now silent between them.

“Do you want to go home?” Charles asked.

Flying back to New York and furiously buying cribs and bouncy seats and high chairs and then not being chosen would be even worse than staying where they were, Lawrence knew. Let Mallorca be a distraction. Let the Posts try to get him to think about anything else, when there was Alphonse, sweet Alphonse, a baby in a hospital somewhere in New York City, a boy who needed his fathers. Staying was better than rushing back and not being picked. Lawrence didn’t want to let himself get too excited or take anything for granted. He wished he knew if the birth mother had picked all gay couples, who else they were up against. He wanted to see photographs of smiling families, and then to strangle the competition.

“We can stay,” Lawrence said. “Let’s stay.”

Joan was waiting at the door. It took such self-confidence to just stand there, knowing that someone would let him in. Sylvia was sure that Joan had never worried about anything in his entire life. He probably wouldn’t have rung the bell for another ten minutes, content to breathe in the clear air, to watch packs of bicyclists zoom by, their spandex clothes blurring together. He probably would have written a poem about it in his head, just because, not even minding when it all vanished a moment later. Joan smiled when she opened the door, and kept smiling as he walked through the dark foyer. Sylvia looked at their reflection in the giant mirror hanging behind his head, and then followed him into the bright dining room. If Joan had a girlfriend, which he obviously did, she would know how to put on eyeliner. She would know how to give a perfect blowjob. She would know how to do everything.

“Tienes novia?” Sylvia asked, only half meaning to voice the question. “I mean, my mom was asking me. I told her I would ask you. She’s really nosy. What’s the word for nosy? You know, always in everyone else’s business?”

Joan sat down and crossed his legs. In New York, only the gay boys crossed their legs. The straight ones made a point (especially on the subway) to sit with their knees as far apart as possible, as if whatever was between their legs was so enormous that they couldn’t help it. Sylvia respected how little Joan seemed to care about seeming heterosexual. “Not really. When I’m in Barcelona.” Joan shrugged. It was easy for him to find girls, of course. Claro.

There was a shuffling sound, and laughter, and then Charles and Lawrence stumbled into the kitchen, one of them clearly chasing the other. Charles reached the kitchen first and stopped short when he saw Joan.

“Hola,” he said.

“Hola,” Joan said back.

“Hola, Sylvia,” Charles said again, his entire face a wink. He smoothed his forehead as if he were brushing bangs out of his eyes.

“Oh, Jesus, just leave us alone,” Sylvia said, which set them off again, giggling like prom dates. Charles and Lawrence zipped through the kitchen and out the back door, setting themselves up nicely in the sun. Charles held their books, and Lawrence held the towels. Somewhere in the pile there was some sunscreen, and a hat to protect Charles’s scalp from burning. Sylvia watched them settle in, feeling simultaneously envious and like love, in its best form, was something for comfortable adults, and something she might expect to find only decades down the road. “Let’s talk about the future,” she said to Joan, who was staring off into space, perhaps contemplating his own beautiful existence.

Even though Franny was the cook in the family, Bobby and Jim both had very particular feelings about grilling meat. If Franny had minded surrendering the tongs, or found it at all sexist that the men in her family enjoyed sticking things into the fire, as all men had since the cave, she would not have relinquished her position. As it was, she had never much liked getting a face full of smoke, and was quite happy to let someone else do the lion’s share for a change. Jim liked to make sure the grill was hot enough, to add newspaper or coals and occasionally douse the whole lot with a good squirt of lighter fluid. Bobby liked the cooking of the meat itself—the smell of the initial sear, the way the meat firmed up around his poking finger as it neared ready. Charles and Lawrence had no interest whatsoever and sat with the girls on the opposite end of the pool, Sylvia in the water doing somersaults.

They’d bought thin steaks (Franny had put a hand on her rib cage, along the diaphragm, at the butcher counter, a pantomime that seemed to have worked), and Jim had marinated them in some oily concoction all afternoon. The grill was fairly new, which made Jim grumble. It was the years of use that lent great flavor, like a cast-iron pan. He scraped the grill with a stiff metal brush he’d found, trying to generate some kind of friction that would elevate the meal. The day had started to cool—like clockwork, a western wind worked its way through the mountains every evening, forcing all but the most stubborn children out of their swimming pools and into their clothes.

The house was exactly what Franny liked: beautiful and in the middle of nowhere. It was the sort of quirk that used to be charming—they’d go to some exotic foreign land, or to a boundless state like Wyoming, but without fail, the rental Franny had chosen would always be just far enough away from everything else that it was exactly like being at home, only with a different backdrop strung behind them. Jim gave the grill another good scrape. It was nearly hot enough—the heat made the air above the slats go wavy.

“It’s ready,” Jim said. “Should be three or four minutes on each side. We don’t want to overcook them.”

Bobby appeared at Jim’s side. He peeled the first steak off the plate and lowered it onto the grill, where it let out a great hiss.

“That’s good,” Jim said. “We want that sear.” It was like talking to an invisible camera on the other side of the grill, someone doing a documentary on father-son small chat. Jim was no good at it, he knew. He wanted to ask Bobby about Carmen, about what the hell he was doing in Florida, that rancid pit of a place. He wanted to tell Bobby what he’d done, how fuzzy the future was, how he was sorry for letting them all down. Instead, Jim found he could talk only about their dinner.

Bobby lined up the other steaks, all in a neat row, and then stood back, beside his father. They were the same height, more or less, though Bobby still couldn’t seem to stand up straight. Bobby had broader shoulders, and larger biceps, but he’d never lost his ragdoll posture.

“Any interesting properties on the market?” Jim asked. He crossed his arms over his chest, keeping his eyes on the steaks.

“Sure, oh, yeah,” Bobby said. He’d been a real estate agent for years along Miami Beach, mostly renting but occasionally selling properties near where he and Carmen lived. They hadn’t always lived together, but it had been a few years now of what seemed like a good domestic situation—the bedroom had blackout shades and a ceiling fan whirred away in the living room, and they were just a few blocks from the ocean. Franny so wanted Bobby to have a child—he was almost thirty, and had spent most of his twenties with a woman who had now aged out of her childbearing years. When they were alone at night, after half a bottle of wine, that was often what Franny wanted to talk about, wondering how Bobby had gone off course, and whether it was her fault. Jim wasn’t sure the boy was ready. He might be, some years down the road, but not yet. Privately, Jim assumed that the blessed event would occur quite out of the blue, when some girl called him up some time after the fact and produced a very Post-like baby, his or her mounting bills tucked into the back of their adorable onesie. “I’ve got a really sweet two-bedroom on Collins and Forty-fourth, right across from the Fontainebleau. Travertine, glass, everything. Brand-new bathroom—it has one of those crazy Japanese toilets, you know, with the sprays and the heat? It’s a nice one. And then there are a couple of houses over on the other side, in the city. Good stuff.”

“And the prices? Coming back up?” Jim nudged one of the steaks with the end of his tongs.

Bobby shrugged. “Not much. You know, it’s still pretty rough. Not everywhere is like Manhattan. I mean, like, your house is worth, what, six times what you paid for it? Five times what you paid? That’s amazing. It’s not like that in Florida.”

“You could always move back, you know. You want to sell our house?” Jim laughed at the thought of it; he wasn’t serious. Who sold a limestone on the Upper West Side? Even if it was too big? Even if they got a divorce? Jim thought they would ride it all out, he was almost positive, and if they were going to ride it all out, they were going to do it in their house. Feet first, that’s what they liked to say. Every time they repainted a ceiling or fixed the crumbling 1895 wires in the basement—feet first, that was the only way they were leaving the house. Now Jim didn’t know. Franny had mentioned selling the house a dozen times, sometimes at full volume, and he had started to look at rentals in the neighborhood, but no, they wouldn’t sell the house, they couldn’t. It made Jim feel like his knees might buckle.

“Wow, I mean, that would be an incredible opportunity, Dad.” Bobby looked at him through the fallen curls on his forehead. Jim hated it when Bobby had long hair—it made him look too soft, too young, like a goddamn baby deer. Just like Franny when she was in her twenties, only without the spitfire spirit that had made him fall in love with her.

“Oh, I wasn’t . . . Moving back, yes. That would be lovely. I don’t think we’re quite ready to hand over the keys to the house, though, chum.” Jim hoped his voice sounded light.

“Right, no, of course.” Bobby pushed his hair out of his eyes and reached for the tongs. “Mind if I flip?”

“Of course,” Jim said, taking a step back, and then another, until he felt something prickly on his neck. He turned around and was surprised to find that he’d made it all the way to the trees at the edge of the manicured section of the yard, before the land dropped down steeply and led, eventually, to an ancient-looking town, where Spanish fathers and sons had tended olive trees and raised sheep together for centuries, working in tandem, like two parts of the same organism.

Bobby had retired quickly after dinner, claiming a headache, and Jim, Sylvia, and Charles had settled into the living room sofa for their umpteenth viewing of Charade, which Gemma happened to have on DVD. It was one of Sylvia’s favorites. Cary Grant was sort of like her dad, plus or minus the chin cleft—high-waisted pants and a way of talking that was both flirtatious and belittling at the same time. It was what stupid girls in her grade liked to classify as “like, sexist,” and she would have argued with them, but now she wasn’t sure, maybe they were right. Sylvia sat in the middle, with her head on Charles’s lap and her feet tucked up into her chest so that they didn’t quite hit her father’s thighs. It was a rare moment when Sylvia  thought she might miss living at home, but they did exist, even when she was already so many thousands of miles away. Walter Matthau was chasing Audrey Hepburn, his droopy dog face the saddest thing for miles. Sylvia closed her eyes and listened to the rest of the movie, kept awake by the chuckles and exclamations of her two companions.

Part of the fun of going on vacation with so many people was supposed to be that you didn’t all have to be together all the time—that was what Franny had imagined. She was clearing up the kitchen and the pool area—Carmen seemed to have been raised by actual humans, and put things away and helped wash dishes, but Franny couldn’t say the same for her children. The pool was a mess—discarded plates with nubs of fatty steak left behind, all the better to coerce coyotes or dingoes or whatever the local wild dogs were out of their hiding places.

“Let me help,” Lawrence said, pulling the door to the kitchen closed behind him. They were in sweaters now. In New York, they would still be shvitzing, the concrete of the sidewalk and the buildings acting as heat conductors, keeping everyone glistening from June through September. It was a lovely night in Pigpen, clear and dark. Once the sun went down, the only lights were the ones in the house across the way and down the mountain’s slopes. It reminded Lawrence of Los Angeles, only with a quarter as many houses and actual oxygen.

“Oh, thanks,” Franny said. “My children are animals.”

“Mine, too,” Lawrence said, projecting into the future, his arms already wrapped around a small body swaddled in cotton. A tiny thrill shot up his spine. “I mean, you should see Charles’s studio.”

“Oh, I know,” Franny said. “All ancient pad thai affixed to paper plates. It’s his response to post-1980s expressionism excess, I think.”

Franny sat down on one of the lounge chairs and picked up a pile of napkins and magazines and orange peels, Sylvia’s detritus. “She’s going to college. Ivy League. You’d think that she could throw something away.”

Lawrence reached out for the garbage, and then held it against his chest. He stood between Franny and the house. If Sylvia and the boys were to get up, in search of more to eat, they would see only his silhouette against the rest of the dark.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m really sorry about earlier. About saying something about the magazine, to Jim. I honestly don’t know what happened, but I do know that I put my foot in my mouth.”

Franny leaned back, drawing her legs up beneath her. She stretched her arms over her head, and then lowered them until they were blocking her eyes. She groaned. Franny had never felt older than she had in the last six months. It was true, of course, that was always true, that you’d never been older than you were at precisely this moment, but Franny had gone from feeling youngish to wizened and crumpled in record time. She could feel the knots in her back tighten, and her sciatic nerve begin to send out little waves of distress to the sides of her hips.

“I’m sorry,” Lawrence said, not sure if he was apologizing for worsening Franny’s mood or for whatever had happened with Jim at the magazine, or both.

“It’s okay,” Franny said, her eyes still hidden behind her arms. “I’m surprised Charles didn’t tell you.”

Lawrence sat down on the lounge chair next to Franny’s and waited.

“He fucked an intern.” She moved her hands and waved them around, as if to say “Abracadabra!” “I know, that’s it. Jim fucked an intern. A girl at the magazine, barely older than Sylvia. Twenty-three years old. Her father is on the board, and I guess she told him, and so here we are.”

“Oh, Franny,” Lawrence said, but she was already sitting up and shaking her head. He had imagined many scenarios for Jim’s sudden leave from Gallant, and for the tension in the Post family—prostate cancer, early-onset dementia, an ill-timed conversion to the Jehovah’s Witnesses—but not this one. Jim and Franny had always seemed happily solid, still capable of goosing each other in the kitchen, as off-putting as it sometimes was.

“No, it’s fine. I mean, it’s not fine, we’ve been married for thirty-five years, it is not fine for him to have sex with a twenty-year-old. A twenty-three-year-old. As if there’s a difference. I don’t know. Thank you. Sylvia knows some, but Bobby doesn’t know anything about it, I’m pretty sure, and I’m trying to keep it that way for as long as possible. Maybe forever.”

It was strange that Charles hadn’t told him. Lawrence felt his cheeks flush with embarrassment, his own, not on Franny’s behalf. How could Charles not have told him? Lawrence quickly imagined all the ways he could have mortified Jim and Franny over the next two weeks, without ever knowing what he was doing, all the ways he could have said the wrong thing.

Lawrence reached out and put his hand on Franny’s shoulder. “I’m really sorry, Fran. I won’t say a word to the kids, of course. And I’m sure Charles would be delighted to murder him for you, if you just say the word.”

That made her smile. “Yes, I think so.” She stood up. “At least one of us has a good husband. Come on, let’s finish cleaning up before it’s morning and the cretins destroy everything all over again. It’s not the worst thing in the world not to have children, you know. Makes your life a terrible mess.” And with that, Franny kissed Lawrence on the cheek, almost tenderly, and walked back inside. Lawrence turned and watched her through the window as she turned on the faucet and squirted soap onto the offending pile of dishes. Lawrence was still holding a stack of garbage on his lap, including a magazine left over from the airplane full of “Sex Tips He Won’t Believe” and “What You REALLY Need to Know About Going Downtown.” He couldn’t believe Jim and Franny let Sylvia buy trash like that—it seemed as bad as openly reading an issue of Hustler. He thumbed through to the article about oral sex, which was really more like a list, complete with reader suggestions. Straight girls really just needed to watch one or two gay porn movies in order to learn everything they needed to know, Lawrence thought. Maybe he’d tell Sylvia that one of these days. Something moved in the corner of his eye, and Lawrence looked upstairs. Carmen was staring back at him from her open bedroom window. They made eye contact, and Carmen put a finger to her ear, as if to say, I didn’t hear anything, and then the light was out and the curtain was drawn and she was gone.