Текст книги "The Vacationers"

Автор книги: Emma Straub

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “Too bad his name is Joan,” pronouncing it like an American, rhyming with groan, a woman’s name. His mother socked him in the arm.

“Joe-ahhhhhn. And you’re getting awfully muscly,” she said. It wasn’t a compliment.

Bobby and Charles began to order by pointing—an overflowing plate of blistered green peppers covered with wide flakes of salt, toasted pieces of bread with dollops of whipped cod, grilled octopus on a stick. Plates appeared and were passed around the table with great moans of pleasure. Franny looked at the menu and ordered more—albóndigas, little meatballs swimming in tomato sauce; patatas bravas, fried potatoes with a ribbon of cream run back and forth over the top; pa amb oli, the Mallorcan answer to Italy’s bruschetta.

“This does not suck,” Sylvia said, her mouth half full.

“Pass the meatballs,” Bobby said, reaching across her.

“Más rioja!” Charles said, raising his glass toward the center of the table, clinking glasses with no one, because everyone else was too busy eating. Franny and Jim sat next to each other on the far side of the table, the backs of their chairs wedged against the wall. Charles and Lawrence got up to go look at the tapas in the glass cases along the bar, and the children were occupied with the food still in front of them. A sizzling plate of steak landed on the table, and Bobby speared an enormous piece with his fork and then dangled it over his mouth like a caveman.

“So?” Franny said. Jim rested his arm on her chair, and she let it stay, just to see how it felt.

“I think it’s a success.” Jim’s face was only a few inches away, the closest it had been in what felt like months. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and he looked the way he’d looked as a young man, blond and scruffy and handsome. Franny was caught off guard, and jerked her chair forward, knocking his arm away. Jim recovered quickly and knit his hands together on the table. “At least, I think so.”

“The kids are good,” Franny said. “Though I really don’t know about that girl.” Carmen had eaten only the peppers, which she complained were too oily.

“Have you seen her powders?”

“What does that mean?”

Jim smiled a very small smile and lowered his voice. “She has baggies full of powder, and she puts it in everything she eats. In water, in her yogurt. I think it might be Soylent Green.”

Franny surprised herself by laughing, and fell a few inches closer to Jim’s chest. “Stop,” she said. “I’m not ready to laugh with you.” She thought of the girl, younger than Bobby, her baby boy. Her jaw stiffened so quickly that she thought it might crack.

Jim raised his hands in surrender, and they both turned back to the far end of the table. Charles and Lawrence were on their way back, each carrying two plates of tiny, gorgeous bites.

“Get that over here,” Franny said, patting the empty table space in front of her. “I’m starving.”

Day Six

JIM DRANK HIS COFFEE BY THE POOL. IT WAS ALREADY warm outside, and the tall, narrow pine trees stood static against the backdrop of the mountains on the other side of the village. It had been almost a full week, and he was still tiptoeing around Franny, still breathing quietly, still doing whatever she said. If she had wanted him to sleep on the floor, he would have. If she wanted him to turn off the light when she was tired, he did. They had been married for thirty-five years and three months.

The first divorces happened quickly—a year or two into an ill-planned marriage, and they were done. The second wave happened a decade later, when the children were small and problematic. That was the one that the child psychologists and playground moms fretted about, the kind of divorce that caused the most damage. It was the third wave that Jim hadn’t seen coming—the empty-nester crises of faith. Couples like him and Franny were splitting up all over the Upper West Side, couples with grown children and several decades of life together behind them. It had to do with life expectancy, and with delayed midlife meltdowns. No one wanted to believe they were midlife when they hit forty anymore, and so now it was the sixty-year-olds buying the sports cars and seducing the younger women. At least that’s what Franny would have called it. Clear as day, a simple case. But of course nothing was ever simple when the lech in question was your own husband.

The back door clanged shut. Jim looked over his shoulder and was surprised to see Carmen heading over to join him. She was wearing her workout clothes, which she seemed to have in place of pajamas or blue jeans, whatever else one would wear casually around the house. Carmen always looked ready to drop to the ground and do fifty sit-ups, which Jim supposed was the point.

“Morning,” she said, setting her tall glass of green liquid down next to his mug on the concrete. “Mind if I join you?”

“Of course not,” Jim said. He tried to remember a moment when they had been alone together, but couldn’t. It was possible that they’d been left alone in a room while Bobby went to the bathroom, maybe, but even that seemed unlikely. He gestured to the chaise longue beside his, and she sat, knitting her fingers together and stretching her palms away. Her knuckles cracked loudly.

“Sorry,” she said. “Bad habit.”

They both took sips of their drinks and stared out at the mountains, which had taken on a bluish tint from the cloudless sky above.

“So,” Carmen said. “I’m sorry about what’s been going on with you and Franny.” She placed one hand flat over her glass. Jim wondered if it tasted like sawdust, or if it had the flavor of chemicals, a thousand vitamins ground to dirt. “It must be hard on both of you.”

Jim ran a quick hand over his hair, and then did it again. He pursed his lips, unsure of how to proceed. “Huh,” he finally said. “I’m sorry, did Fran talk to you?”

“She didn’t have to,” Carmen said, lowering her eyes. “The same thing happened with my parents. Bobby doesn’t know, but I can see it. Don’t worry, I won’t say anything to him.”

“Huh,” Jim said, still at a loss. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” she said, the words coming out faster now. “I mean, I was in high school, just a little bit younger than Sylvia, and it was really hard. My parents were going through this really tough time, but didn’t want us to know, but of course we knew, and my brothers and I were all in the middle of it, even though they thought we had no idea.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” His coffee was getting cold. Jim looked back toward the house, hopeful that someone else was stirring, but there was no sign of life.

“If you ever need to talk to anyone about it, you can talk to me,” Carmen said. She put her hand on Jim’s shoulder. “Just between us.”

“Thank you,” Jim said. He wasn’t sure what he was thanking her for, or what she knew. All Jim was sure of was that he wanted to be rescued by a small plane. They didn’t even have to stop, they could just swing by and lower a rope. He would climb up all on his own.

There was no food left in the house. Franny had forgotten how much food her children could consume, and everyone else, too, always nicking little pieces of the bread she was saving for the next day’s panzanella.

“Who wants to come grocery shopping with me? I’ll throw in lunch. Who’s with me?” she asked the room at large—Charles and Lawrence were off exploring a nearby beach, and Carmen and Bobby were off running up and down the mountain. Jim was reading in the living room. Only Sylvia was standing near enough to hear, directly in front of the open refrigerator door.

“God, yes. Please.”

Franny hadn’t driven a stick in several decades, but those muscle memories never really went away. Jim offered a three-minute refresher course, slightly alarmed at the thought of Franny driving on foreign roads, but she insisted that she knew what she was doing. Sylvia crossed herself as she lowered her body into the car. “Just get me back alive in time for Joan.”

“As if I’d kill you without giving you the chance to see him again,” Franny said, and turned the key in the ignition. She put her left foot down on the clutch, and her right on the gas, but the movement was not as fluid as it had once been, so many years out of practice, and the car lurched forward. Franny’s face purpled, and Sylvia screamed. Jim was still standing outside the car, his hands gripping tightly at his elbows. Gallant men always drove stick, and taught their children. It was an important life skill, like having good knives and speaking a foreign language. Franny waved Jim off and backed out slowly, her spleen somewhere in her throat. “It’s fine,” she said, more to herself than to Sylvia. “I know what I’m doing. Everyone relax.”

According to Gemma’s notes, there was a super-sized grocery store about thirty minutes away, closer to the center of the island, larger and better stocked than the one Franny and Charles had gone to in Palma. Franny felt better once they were on the highway—there had been a few gentle stalls at stop signs on the road through Pigpen, but so what, no one was grading her. Once they were moving at a good clip, she felt her legs relax into a good rhythm, this one down, this one up. Sylvia hit buttons on the radio, which seemed to play only dance music and seventies American pop—Franny cried out for Sylvia to stop when she got to a station playing Elton John.

“It’s like the land that time forgot,” Sylvia said.

“I think you mean it’s like the land that forgot time. This is the way it should be—Elton John on the radio and the best ham in the world. And family.”

“Nice afterthought, Mom.” Sylvia rolled her eyes and stared out the window.

The highway downgraded when they hit the outskirts of Palma, slowing to a one-lane road with stoplights, which meant that Franny had more opportunities to make the car stutter, die a little death, and then be revived. They were sitting at a red light, just a few miles before they were to hit the grocery store, when Franny noticed a large compound to their right—the Nando Filani International Tennis Centre. Without thinking, she made the turn.

“Pretty sure this isn’t the grocery store,” Sylvia said.

“Oh, zip it. We’re having an adventure.” Franny slowly pulled through the tennis center’s open gate and into the parking lot.

Nando Filani was Mallorca’s best and only hope at a grand slam or a gold medal. Twenty-five and surly, he stalked the edges of the court like Agassi or Sampras, hitting enormous serves that aced his opponents more often than not. He’d gotten in trouble a bit on the tour—someone’s teeth had been knocked out, which he swore was an accident with an errant ball—and this tennis school was his way of paying reparations. Tennis players, after all, were supposed to be ambassadors of goodness, all white shorts and silver platters. It was a sport for the civilized, not merely the athletic. Franny had played a bit in high school, though she’d never been much good, but it was the only sport that all four Posts could stand to watch, which in turn meant that it was the one sport they could talk about with one another. Sylvia cared about it the least, of course, but every few years there was a player handsome enough to keep her minimally engaged.

The air was full of thwacks and grunts—the sounds of balls hitting racquets, of tennis stars in the making. Franny hurried around from the driver’s side of the car to a fence just beside the main buildings. Through the fence, she could see a dozen rows of tennis courts, many of them filled by children. Franny murmured appreciation for a diminutive brunette’s excellent serve, and then hurried back across the parking lot. Sylvia leaned against the side of the car.

“Mom.”

Franny grasped the fence on the other side, which hid another row of courts, these less populated by children.

“Mom!”

Franny turned, her face open and confused, as if Sylvia had woken her from a dream. “What is it?”

“What are we doing here?” Sylvia slowly peeled herself off the car and trudged over to her mother’s side. It was warmer at the bottom of the mountain, and the sun was shining directly overhead. “It’s too hot.”

“We’re looking for Nando, of course!” It was smack between Wimbledon (which Nando had won the previous year, though this year he was runner-up to the Serb) and the US Open (which he hadn’t ever won, being better on both clay and grass), and so it seemed possible that he actually might be at home, training. “Come on, I want to go inside.”

Sylvia slumped onto Franny’s shoulder. She’d been taller than her mother since she was eleven. “Only if you promise that if, for some ungodly reason, Nando Filani is standing directly inside that door, you will not speak to him, and we can turn around and go directly to the grocery store.”

Franny lifted a hand to her heart. “I swear.” They both knew that she was lying.

The office was clean and modern, with a large dry-erase schedule on one wall and a pretty young woman sitting behind a counter. Franny grabbed Sylvia by the elbow and marched straight up. “Hola,” she said.

“Hola. Qué tal?” said the woman.

“Habla inglés? My daughter and I are enormous fans of Filani’s, and we were wondering about lessons. Is it possible to sign up? We’re in Mallorca for about ten days, and we’d just love the chance to play where he played. You must be so proud of him.” Franny nodded at the idea of all that national pride, wrinkling her nose for all the mothers in Mallorca.

“Lessons for two?” The woman held up two fingers. “Dos?”

“Oh, no,” Franny said. “I haven’t played since I was a teenager.”

“One?” The woman held up a single finger. “Lessons for one?”

Sylvia twisted her body into a pretzel. “Mom,” she said. “I respect that you’re trying to do something here, but I’m not exactly sure what it is, and I’m pretty sure that I have no interest. Or sneakers.” She pointed to her flip-flops and waggled her slightly dusty-looking toes.

“Do you have a list of instructors?” Franny put her elbows on the counter. “Or any reading material? About the center?”

The woman slid a brochure across the counter. Franny picked it up, pretending to read the Spanish until she realized the reverse was printed in English. Her eyes skimmed the short paragraphs and the glossy photographs of Nando Filani until the very bottom of the page. In a large photo, Nando had his arm thrown around the shoulder of an older man. They were both wearing baseball hats and squinting into the sun, but Franny could make out the other man’s features clearly enough.

“I’m sorry, perdón, is this Antoni Vert?”

The woman nodded. “Sí.”

“Does he still live in Mallorca?”

“Sí.” The woman pointed north. “Three kilometers.”

“Mom, who is that?”

Franny fanned herself with the brochure. “Does he offer lessons? Here? By any chance?”

The woman shrugged. “Sí. More expensive, but yes.” She turned her chair toward her computer screen and hit a few buttons. “He had a cancellation tomorrow afternoon, four p.m.?”

Sylvia watched her mother quickly dig through her purse, swearing a few times before finally landing on her wallet. “Yes,” Franny said, not looking at Sylvia or the receptionist, only the photo in the brochure. “Yes, that will do.” After she signed her name, she turned around and walked calmly out the door, leaving Sylvia standing at the counter with an open mouth. “Weren’t you in a hurry?” she called from outside. Sylvia made a face at the woman behind the counter and hurried back to the car, unsure of what she’d just witnessed, but positive it was something she could tease her mother about for decades to come.

Franny refused to say anything about Antoni Vert other than that he’d been a tennis player in her day, Spain’s last best hope before Nando’s aggressive rise, but Joan was more forthcoming. He and Sylvia were theoretically working by the pool, but really they were just eating a giant bowl of grapes and an equally giant bowl of Franny’s homemade guacamole, despite the fact that Sylvia had teased her for making Mexican food in Spain, as if all Spanish-speaking cultures were the same. Joan sat with his legs crossed, his sunglasses perched on the top of his head. Sylvia sat with her feet in the pool.

“He was very famous,” Joan said. “All the women loved him. My mother, she loved him. Everyone. He was not as good as Filani, but he was more handsome. In the early eighties. Very long hair.”

“Huh.” Sylvia kicked her legs back and forth. “I mean, how interesting. My mother basically had a heart attack, but not as much of a heart attack as she’s going to have when she tries to actually play tennis.” The pool water splashed onto her legs, which she hoped looked carefree, like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit shot, and not like she had just peed down her thigh.

Joan laughed, and then tossed a grape into his mouth. “What about you, Sylvia? No boyfriend at home in New York?”

Sylvia dunked a chip into the guacamole and then lowered it gently onto her tongue. It was hard to try to be seductive when they were talking about her actual life. She shook her head and chewed. “Everyone in New York sucks. Or at least everyone at my school. Do you say that, sucks? What’s the word for that?” She swallowed.

“Me tienen hasta los huevos. It means I’ve had it up to my balls. Same idea.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Me tienen hasta los huevos.”

A small airplane flew across the sky, a trail of white smoke behind it, a blank skywritten message. Sylvia watched as the thin white line bisected the otherwise perfectly clear blue sky. It looked like a math equation—x plus y equals z. Avocado plus onion plus cilantro equaled guacamole. Skin plus sun equaled burn. Her father plus her mother equaled her.

It had been a weird spring at home. Franny was Franny, like always, the central figure in her own solar system, the maypole around which the rest of the world had to dance and twirl. It was Jim who had been acting strange. It didn’t make any sense when he’d suddenly retired. Gallant was his oxygen, his entertainment, his everything. Sylvia would wander through the house and find him sitting in a new room, or in the garden, staring off into space. Instead of interrupting him, as she normally would, she would avoid him. He looked so deep in thought that disturbing him seemed as dangerous as waking a sleepwalker. That was before she knew. The longer he was home, the more conversations she could hear through the hundred-year-old walls and floors. It came in pieces at first, a few words louder than the rest, and then all at once, when her mother decided that it was too hard to pretend that things were hunky-dory. Franny had put it like this: Her father had slept with someone, and it was a Problem that they were trying to figure out, as if the whole thing could be solved with a giant calculator. Sylvia didn’t know who the woman was, but she knew that she was young. Of course, they were always young. Jim had not been present for the conversation—it was better that way for everyone.

Parents got stranger when you got older, that was obvious. You could no longer take for granted that everyone else’s family worked exactly as yours did, with the bathroom doors open or shut, with the pinch of sugar in the tomato sauce, with the off-key but effective bedtime lullaby. Sylvia had spent the last few months watching her mother ignore her father unless she was scolding him, and Jim was not someone who took well to scolding. Sylvia sat in her chair at the kitchen table and watched them silently spar. She wondered if it had always been this way, or whether it was only her more mature eyes that recognized the cold breeze between her mother and father. Sometimes in books she would come across a mention of his-and-hers bedrooms—old movies, too; TCM was full of women waking up alone in their dressing gowns—and think that maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea. What were parents anyway, except two people who had once thought they were the smartest people in the world? They were a delusional species, as tiny-brained as dinosaurs. Sylvia didn’t think she ever wanted to get married or have children. Forget about the ozone layer, and tsunamis—what about dinner? It was all too much.

“Let’s go inside,” she said. “I’m finding all this sunshine very depressing.” She pulled one leg out of the pool and then the other, watching them drip dark spots onto the concrete.

Joan picked up the bowls of food and followed her into the dining room.

It was siesta time. They’d all been delighted to acclimate to the custom, and now everyone dragged themselves to their separate corners right after lunch, eyelids already heavy. Carmen slept on her back, while Bobby curled up like a seashell next to her, his mouth open. Jim fell asleep on the sofa in the living room, a book on his chest. Sylvia slept on her stomach, her face turned to one side like a swimmer. Lawrence slept like a child, with the covers up to his neck. Only Charles and Franny were still awake, and they were in the master bathroom, Franny in the tub and Charles on the closed lid of the toilet.

Gemma had all the best bath products, of course: shampoos and conditioners, exfoliating scrubs, bars of soap with sprigs of French lavender embedded in them, bath gels, bubbles, loofahs, pumice stones, the works. Franny planned to soak for an hour, even if it meant using all the hot water in Pigpen. The tub wasn’t very long, but neither was Franny, and her straight legs just barely touched the far end.

“So?” Charles said. He was flipping through a magazine, one of Sylvia’s trashy ones from the airplane. “How’s it been?”

Franny had a washcloth over her eyes. “You’ve seen it.”

“I mean when it’s just the two of you.” He turned the page to a spread of women in sequined evening gowns.

“It’s like this,” Franny said, and then kept her mouth shut for a beat. “It’s like nothing. It’s like I want to punch him in the eyeball almost as much as I want him to actually apologize. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve truly considered murdering him in his sleep.”

“So you’re not mad?” The next page was the entire contents of an actress’s purse, spilled out and identified piece by piece. Chewing gum, a nail file, some makeup, a mirror, another pair of shoes, headphones, a BlackBerry. “What does she read when she gets bored?” he said to himself.

Franny explored the drain with her big toe. “I’m beyond mad. I truly didn’t know this space existed, where he could do something so terrible that the word mad wouldn’t begin to cover it. Do we really do it? Do we sell the house? Does Sylvia become totally unstable and crazy because the minute she goes to college, her parents get a divorce?” She shook the washcloth off into the water, and it made a little splash. “What would you do if Lawrence cheated on you? Would you get a divorce?” She turned around to look at him.

Friendships were tricky things, especially friendships as old as theirs was. Nudity was nothing more than a collection of hard-earned scars and marks. Love was a given, uncomplicated by sex or vows, but honesty was always waiting there, ready to capsize the steady boat. Charles closed the magazine.

“I cheated on him once. With one person, I mean. More than one time.”

Franny sat up and swiveled ungracefully in the tub so that she was facing Charles directly. Her breasts were half above the water, half below, her heavy flesh settled into tidy rolls underneath. Charles wanted to ask her if he could take a photo to paint from later—she would say yes, she always said yes—but realized it was not the time.

“Excuse me?”

Charles leaned back against the toilet tank. There was a small square window on the short wall of the bathroom, and Charles looked through it onto the mountains, which seemed to wave through the ancient glass. “It was in the beginning. Almost ten years ago. We were already living together, but it wasn’t that serious. It wasn’t that serious to me, I should say. Lawrence, bless his little heart, he always thought we were in it for the long haul. He’s the settling-down type, you know, with his real job and his supportive parents. He always wanted to get married, even before it was legal. Whatever documents we could get, he wanted them.

“This was when I was with Johnson Strunk Gallery, remember, on Twenty-fourth? And Selena Strunk always had the cutest boys working for her, the art handlers, kids who looked straight out of some gym-bunny porno, all beefed up and adorable, with little beards they’d just learned how to grow. I don’t know why they liked me—I was already, what, forty-five? But some of them wanted to be painters, I suppose. Anyway, one of them, Jason, he started hanging around the gallery when he knew I’d be there, and he was a nice kid, so I took him out for coffee. When we sat down, he grabbed my dick under the table. Lawrence is such a WASP, he would rather die than admit he even had a dick in public. So I was, you know, surprised. It only happened a few times, over the next few months, at my studio.”

Franny made a noise. “Involuntary,” she said, then covered her mouth with the washcloth and waved him on.

“Lawrence was so young, I didn’t think it could really be it. I didn’t even know if I believed in it. So I fucked around. I felt terrible about it, of course, and the whole thing was over quickly, but I never told him. So.”

“So? So? So you never plan on telling your husband that you had sex with someone else? What the fuck, Charlie?” Franny crossed her arms over her chest, which had a lesser effect than it might have, due to her nakedness, and that she slipped a bit into the tub, and had to pull herself back upright.

“No,” Charles said. “And I’m not telling you because I think that what Jim did wasn’t awful, because it was. I’m just telling you because you asked. I wouldn’t want to know. And if he did, and I found out, I would probably forgive him.”

Franny rolled her eyes. “Well, obviously you would, now.” The water in the tub had cooled, and she turned the hot water back on, refilling the room with a warm steam.

“Even if I hadn’t, Fran, that’s the truth. Marriage is hard. Relationships are hard. You know that I’m on your side, whatever your side is, but that’s the truth. We’ve all done things.”

“That is bullshit. Yes, we’ve all done things. I’ve done things like put on thirty pounds. He’s done things like put his penis inside a twenty-three-year-old. Don’t you think one of those is significantly worse?” Franny stood up, her body dripping, and grabbed a towel. She stayed put, the now dingy water sloshing against her calves.

“I am on your side, sweetie,” Charles repeated. He walked over to the side of the tub and put his hand out, which Franny accepted, stepping over the lip like Elizabeth Taylor playing Cleopatra, her chin lifted from her shoulders, her dark hair wet against her neck.

“Well,” she said, once she was safely on dry land. “Secrets are no fun for anyone. Keep that in mind.” She kissed him on the cheek and padded into the bedroom, listening for the sounds of snoring coming from all the other rooms.