Between

by Angie Abdou

  is deformed by a lump of foetus head. She digs a toe into the cool

  damp sand below the scorching hot layer and sips on a Dirty Monkey.

  Vero would like to think it’s just “Monkey”—no trace of the rum that

  makes it “Dirty”—but Hedonism is not the kind of place where one

  judges another’s parenting choices.

  Check your judgment at the door here, Vero Baby!

  A thick pink lina nigra runs from the woman’s breast bone to her

  pubic bone. Vero imagines tracing a sharp scalpel down the line and

  pulling the baby free of the pollution.

  To the pregnant woman, Vero says only, “Dirty Monkey, that’s

  more of a breakfast drink, isn’t it?” And then to Shane, “I guess I’ll

  have something with tequila. It is Happy fucking Hour. After all.”

  Shane’s right: once he and Vero find their group, things move

  quickly. He’s wrong about the choosing, though, deluded to

  think they might have had some kind of control. As with so

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  much of life, “their group” just happens as a matter of timing and

  coincidence.

  Jamaica blurs. Hazy on the horizon, hazy in the foreground, hazy

  in Vero’s mind. Just when the vacation should be coming to a quick

  close, time rolls over and stretches out in the sun, puts its head down

  for a rest in the warm sand. The rules in this booze-sodden place twist

  and bend and morph until Vero forgets there was ever such a thing

  as rules.

  That surprises you? That’s so Sprucedale.

  That surprises you? That’s so Tuesday.

  That surprises you? That’s so nine p.m.

  “Their group” is made up of non-English speakers—a Swiss couple

  and a French one—and they work their trades in broken phrases and

  awkward hand gestures, keeping small talk to a minimum.

  Shane and Vero agree: no names. They don’t want to turn the

  Hedonists into real people who might exist beyond this holiday.

  They refer only to FrenchMan, FrenchWoman, SwissMan, and

  SwissWoman. Vero started by calling SwissWoman “PregnantLady.”

  Shane glared. He’s chosen to ignore what he does not like.

  Vero wishes she could mix and match the couples. She likes

  FrenchWoman—the splash of freckles across her slightly flattened

  nose, her pink-tinged, fleshy shoulders in her evening sundresses at

  dinner, the way she smells of coconut even after she’s left the beach

  and washed off the tanning oil. FrenchWoman wears no makeup

  around her eyes, which are nearly black and remind Vero of LiLi’s,

  but her plump lips are always painted the colour of Merlot. Perhaps

  it’s the power of Shane’s suggestion, but Vero finds herself wondering

  what it would be like to kiss those lips. She imagines them pressed

  against the curve where neck meets shoulder, and imagines running

  her tongue along FrenchWoman’s small, sharp teeth.

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  Although Vero calls her FrenchWoman when she and Shane speak,

  she thinks of her by her real name. Danielle. She puts a French spin

  on it, as best as she can with her English tongue.

  Vero’s mouth stretches into an involuntarily smile when Danielle

  calls her Veronique, the syllables acrobatic, rolling, sliding, leaping on

  Danielle’s foreign tongue. “For this week,” Vero says to Shane, “I am

  Veronique.”

  But FrenchMan—with his sunken chest and squinty eyes that never

  rise to meet Vero’s face—he creeps her out. He speaks no English and

  lurks behind Danielle, eager for her translations, leaning forward, his

  long muscles tensed with desperation for Danielle to close a deal, com-

  plete some transaction he has directed her to conduct on his behalf.

  SwissMan, on the other hand, seems likeable. He laughs at the

  end of each of his limping sentences. It’s okay, his tone says. This place

  is merely a joke. We are only joking here. “I am,” he tells them in a slow

  thick accent, “an orthopedic surgeon.” He punctuates the sentence

  with a deep laugh rumbling up from his chest, as if nothing could

  be funnier than any of them, even for one second, pretending that

  his statement might be true, pretending that anything here might

  be true.

  He has hints of grey in his dark curls. “It is silver highlights,” he tells

  them. And laughs. Vero enjoys spending time with him; his flippancy

  suits the place, but his wife, one cannot help but notice, is very, very

  pregnant. SwissMan’s laughter allows Vero to sink comfortably into

  the alternate reality of Hedonism, but his wife’s pregnancy is enough

  to pull her out of it.

  “What is it you want?” FrenchWoman puts the question to Vero

  bluntly. “Why are you here for?” The bluntness doesn’t bother Vero.

  Vero would tell Danielle: This is not my idea, she would say, I want

  only to survive. She would hold up her hand, peeling it off her chilled

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  plastic cup of booze, spread her fingers wide. I’m too old for this, she would say. Look. See these wrinkles? Dishpan hands! I have old-people

  skin.

  “My husband, he want the mouth of another woman. On him. You

  do that?” FrenchWoman sucks on the arm of her sunglasses, twirls it

  between her eye teeth. “If yes, I will do for your husband.” She makes

  the proposition with her freckled nose wrinkled in a laugh, a deep

  dimple cratering her right cheek. Her face grants this discussion no

  significance, no seriousness. They could be deciding what afternoon

  matinee to see. What’s better for you, Thursday or Wednesday? Or: Your

  boys, they like scary movies or only funny? “Maybe the husbands, they

  like that. Two women. You understand men: they love the mouth.

  When the week over, we leave for home. To a normal. Yes?”

  One day hazes into the next. Vero and Shane hover at the periph-

  ery of the poolside debauchery, spectators only, and then take that

  energy back to their room. Vero grows accustomed to the soreness.

  “Does it hurt?” Shane asks. “Are you too sore?”

  “Of course,” Vero says, pulling him deeper.

  As they run out of days, they edge their way closer to the action.

  First, Shane takes Vero from behind, her body pushed up against the

  sliding doors. Anyone at the pool below could look up and see her

  breasts pressed flat into the glass. Next, they have sex on the beach,

  Shane curled behind her in a shady hammock. Vero can’t quite

  manage an orgasm, too distracted by the DogCouple floating on a

  mattress just off shore, casting furtive glances back to her and Shane.

  But she breathes quick and fast as the hammock swings, and Shane

  doesn’t seem to miss her climax. He kisses her neck afterward, push-

  ing his foot against the palm tree so the hammock sways gently. “God,

  that was good.”

  That night, she takes him in her mouth behind a plant pot near

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  the wild tub, both of them pr
etending to be unaware of the bathers

  watching them from the steam.

  “Well,” she says, wiping her lips and smiling up at him. “This is

  what we’re here for.” But she knows that if they were here only for

  exhibitionist acts, they could’ve stayed home in bed with the baby

  monitor on in LiLi’s basement.

  At first, Shane and Vero keep a comfortable distance from the

  other Hedonists. Their need for each other is constant, insistent. They

  drink, fuck, and smoke, drink, fuck, and smoke until there’s no dis-

  tinction: drinkfucksmokedrinkfucksmokedrinkfuck.

  As the week limps on, they’re never far from the resort bar. “Don’t

  let the hangover catch up with you,” Shane says, passing Vero a Dirty

  Monkey with a slice of breakfast pineapple. “Drink fast before you

  sober up.”

  By Thursday, the wild hot tub no longer seems wild. It’s just games

  and more games. The bodies only bodies.

  You can touch here, if I can do that.

  I’ll put my mouth there, if you’ll put yours here.

  The hot tub antics would be more comfortable in a bed, but the

  couples stay at the hot tub, bare bottoms pressing into rough concrete,

  rather than retreating to private rooms where they might be in danger

  of real intimacy. The impossibility of these acts happening in public

  makes the nights seem unreal. They don’t count. Shane and Vero will

  get home and remember the exchanges only faintly, an erotic dream

  that steps beyond their grasp just before they wake, leaving nothing

  but a warm tingle, a desire to fall back into that sleep, and stay there.

  And then they’ll forget.

  This blindfold’s chafing me, Vero thinks on more than one occasion

  but never says it aloud. Like so much else that comes to mind, the

  statement deviates too far from the script of Hedonism, the place

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  that sells pure pleasure. Pleasure doesn’t chafe. Vero sucks hard on her

  tequila and melted ice cubes, smiles drunkenly. That the script allows.

  The conversations she and Shane have in their room, surrounded by

  the towel swans with their long twisted necks, are more real, but only

  slightly. They negotiate details, plan for what they hope to achieve

  down in the marketplace, what they’re willing to barter.

  “We have to be on the same team,” Shane says, so high that his eyes

  are nearly swollen shut. Vero tries to picture him with his eyes clear

  and bright and open, tries to remember the eyes of Sprucedale’s favou-

  rite pharmacist. She can’t. “We need to agree on where we draw our

  lines,” he says. “Present a united front. Agree on where we won’t go.”

  Vero flops across the mattress, studying the painting of the yel-

  low-breasted woman above the bed. This art’s not so bad, she decides,

  once you ignore proportion. “We should get one of these for our room at

  home, mount it above our bed.” She imagines LiLi averting her gaze

  from the naked woman during her weekly changing of the sheets. “The

  yellow skin is perfect: suntan meets liver poisoning. Very Hedonism.”

  “Vero. Focus. Lines.” Shane’s looking at himself in the mirror,

  studying a mole under his armpit for melanoma’s deformation.

  “Sure,” she slurs until the word has three lazy syllables. “Definitely,

  let’s agree on our lines.” She can’t imagine why it could possibly matter,

  these lines of Shane’s. “Sure,” she says, “whatever.” She’s surprised, in

  a stoned and hollow way, by Shane’s naiveté. He doesn’t understand

  the barter system.

  “No men,” he says, lifting his eyes to meet hers in the mirror. “I

  couldn’t stomach seeing you with another man.”

  When she says nothing, he adds, “Because I love you.”

  A swan towel perches on Vero’s belly, its beak pointed toward her

  chin. She has tried to make one herself, but can’t get it to stay stiff

  and upright. Theanna, the cleaning lady, turns a towel into a swan in

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  ninety seconds flat. It’s the only thing she does fast. She’s often still

  in the room when Vero and Shane return for their siesta, moving as if

  each step is a favour to them, one she grants grudgingly. Vero chatters,

  playing the enthusiastic tourist, filling the heavy silences. One day,

  she points down the beach at loose rubble along the shoreline. “What

  happened there?”

  “Oh, that’s the tornado, done that. Tornado dohn give a dodo ’ow

  much money you ’ave. It go everywhere just the same.” Theanna bends

  over the bed, smoothing imaginary wrinkles in the comforter, making

  no move to hurry her work for Shane and Vero’s sake. I’ll leave when I

  leave. An’ you? You can just sidung your pretty white batty an’ wait.

  LiLi has never claimed a space like Theanna does. Not at the home

  of the Sprucedale Nanton-Schoemans. In watching Theanna, Vero

  sees LiLi’s submissiveness. Vero tries to pull LiLi’s image clearly to

  mind. Fails. Even Jamal and Eliot have faded. She could dig her wallet

  out of the closet safe, look at their pictures, refresh her memory. But

  she chooses not to.

  “So no men,” she says to Shane, hearing a floating quality to her

  words. She deepens her voice to bring them down, pull them into her

  body. “But you’d like to be with one of the women, maybe?” She lobs

  the question at Shane gently, wondering if he’ll recognize his own

  hypocrisy. “Maybe with me and another woman?”

  His mouth smears into a slow grin. “Well, if one offered…” He lies

  beside her on the bed and puts his head on her chest, avoiding what-

  ever it is he sees in her face. “If your FrenchWoman offered.”

  “Shane. An offer? Nothing is free here. An offer is a request.

  Accepting an offer—that’s a commitment.”

  “Baby,” he twirls his finger in slow circles around the perimeter of

  her bellybutton. “Relax. We’re not signing any contracts. Nobody can

  make us do anything. Somebody wants to give something, I’ll take it.”

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  “Shane.” The extent of Shane’s naïveté takes all the wind out of

  Vero. That one word is an effort. “Don’t let Danielle do anything

  to you that you don’t want me doing with another man.” Vero can’t

  believe she has to explain this to Shane. Hearing herself say it aloud,

  she’s embarrassed, as if she’s just had to point to the stove element, as

  she would caution Jamal, and warn Shane: Hot! Hot!

  “She likes you,” Shane says, “I can tell.”

  Once, Vero thinks, we are here only once. She puts a nervous twitter

  in her voice, a tease, and says, “I don’t know what to do with a girl.”

  She says these words only to hear them aloud. She wonders if they

  will sound true.

  The truth is that she would like to get Danielle alone in their room,

  with no Shane and no FrenchMan. She is curious about that. But she

  knows that when she and Danielle meet, it will be a public perfor-
>
  mance. It will be more about Shane watching than it is about Danielle

  and Vero responding.

  “Just do what you like,” Shane says, breathing the words into Vero’s

  stomach. “If you like it, she’ll like it too.” He rolls over to face Vero,

  his chin tracing a line up the centre of her body, and pulls the sheet

  over their heads. “Let me remind you what you like,” he says with his

  mouth open at her neck, ready to take a bite.

  ◊◊◊

  In the mornings, there’s much to ignore—the grey ring of scum

  around the hot tub, the joint butts floating in the pool, the vomit in

  the ceramic plant pots. Vero thinks of Roger in his hot-pink Bikram

  shorts. “Paradise is a state of mind.” Crotch bulging under Lycra.

  Waistband stained with sweat. “Nobody controls your happiness but

  you. Only you create happiness, from within.”

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  It’s something Joss would say. Her Bikram instructor she can dis-

  miss. Roger knows nothing. There’s no such thing as paradise. But Joss.

  Joss she wants to believe.

  “Well, it ain’t Beaches!” The Hedonists laugh from behind their

  oversized sunglasses. “I might have told my babysitter I’d be at

  Breezes Luxury Resort, but I’m here, getting just what I signed up

  for. Anyone want a toke?”

  Vero nods at her own reflection in the strangers’ sunglasses and

  takes a toke. Hedonism is not at its best before breakfast.

  She and Shane speak less and less of Eliot, of Jamal, of LiLi, unable

  to reconcile their roles as mother and father with the Hedonist ver-

  sion of Vero and Shane. They’ll leave the real Vero and Shane back in

  the airport until this week ends. Nothing from home fits. For dinner,

  Vero picks a dress that was sexy in Sprucedale. Here, it looks like one

  of Cheryl’s gardening smocks. She does not want to look like, or think

  of, her mother here. Hedonism makes her nobody’s mother, nobody’s

  child. She buys a dress from the resort boutique—thin, transparent

  fabric, all slits and holes. “This costs more than my nanny makes in a

  week,” she says to the clerk. “And where would I ever wear this outfit

  again? Nowhere.”

  The teller rings in her purchase without meeting her eyes. “Nanny?”

  She rolls the dress in tissue paper, careful not to tear it with her sharp