“Are you drunk?”
“Not really,” said Matt.
“Matt…,” said Lee, blocking the doorway.
“She doesn’t love me anymore,” said Matt. “She has all this pottery. So much pottery from the mall.”
Lee shook her head, dismayed and confused.
“Remember the Hilton Head Island Holiday Inn, Lee?” he said. “I would have married you. I would have!”
“I know,” said Lee. It had been the summer after their junior year. Matt had surprised her with a room on the beach for her birthday. (It had taken him months of working at the Piggly Wiggly bagging groceries to pay for it.) Lee’s period had been a few days late, so they’d bought a pregnancy test at a Walgreens on Palmetto Bay Road. When it had been negative, they’d celebrated with wine coolers and carefully condomed sex. Lee sighed, wanting to tell Matt she might be pregnant now—wanting to tell anyone—but deciding against it.
“I think about it sometimes,” said Matt. “How it might have been.”
“Jesus,” said Lee. “Matt, really?”
“Really,” said Matt. “I meant what I said at the wedding, Lee. I wanted it to be you.”
“It was your rehearsal dinner,” said Lee. “What did you want me to do?”
“I wanted you to stop me,” said Matt.
“It’s too late now,” said Lee.
“I know,” said Matt.
“So you’re cheating on her?”
He exhaled. “Yes,” he said.
“But your daughters…”
Matt looked up, and a flash of something like anger lit his expression. “You don’t have any idea,” he said. “I came on this fucking trip to try to find some love again. To try to see if there was…anything between us. But it’s over,” he said. “I didn’t want this! But Janet…I met Janet. She’s a single mom. And she needs me, Lee. I’m all she’s got. I love her—I don’t know what else to say. I hate myself about how it all happened, but I love Janet, and Regan and I are done.”
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” said Lee. “This just makes me so sad.”
“Me, too,” said Matt. “But she’s going to be okay. Regan’s going to be okay. I promise.”
“Baby Ray Ray,” said Lee, shaking her head. She wished she could protect her sister, keep the pain of Matt’s affair from her somehow.
“I thought I’d saved her,” said Matt. “I thought I could take care of her. But she…it’s like she’s a ghost inside. She acts all loving…like we always have perfect dinners or whatever, but it’s a mirage…everything always looks fine but you try to…touch her, reach her…and it’s just air.”
Lee thought of her sister, the lovely mother she had become. She was confused by the distance between Matt’s version of Regan and what Lee had seen. To Lee, Regan seemed deep and vibrant. Sure, Regan was conflicted—even worried (and with good reason)—but she was so realized, so grown-up, alive. “You’re wrong,” Lee said.
“I was so lonely,” said Matt, not seeming to hear Lee. “I thought I was going crazy. But then I met Janet,” he said. “I fell in love. It happens. What am I supposed to do?”
“What you have with Regan…it’s a lot of people’s dream come true,” said Lee.
“I’m not a failure,” said Matt. “I just fell in love. Real love. And I can’t give that up, Lee. I just can’t.”
Lee remembered telling Matt she was moving to Los Angeles. He had been furious, desperate. “You need someone who wants what you want,” Lee had told him, her mind bright with visions of her California future. He’d wrapped her in his arms, clutched at her.
Now, Lee remembered that Regan had been there, too. At the edge of her bedroom door, a flash of auburn hair. The sound of footsteps down the stairs, but when Lee went to the hallway, she found a platter of cheese and crackers.
My God. Had Lee somehow known that Regan would put Matt back together after she left? Had she subconsciously set it up, so she could run? “Matt, look!” she’d said. “Cheese and crackers.”
“Regan’s so wonderful,” Matt had said, picking up a Ritz.
THE RUINED CITY OF Pompeii was hot and horrifying. Charlotte walked along uneven streets that had once been a community. Regan’s admission that her marriage was falling apart was weighing heavily on Charlotte. How sad that Regan would have to live as Charlotte herself had: alone, frightened, unloved. She could imagine how upset Louisa would have been to witness her granddaughter’s broken family. Charlotte had called her mother in hysteria after finding Winston’s body and cried, “Mom! It’s Winston! He’s…he hung himself!”
Louisa had responded, “Don’t move. Don’t tell anybody anything.” She arrived at the house as the paramedics carried Winston out. “A heart attack,” she said. “Tell everyone it was a heart attack.” Charlotte had rushed to her mother for a hug, but Louisa had stepped back, searching Charlotte’s face, asking, “What did you do?”
Oh, so many things! She had spent the years since Winston’s departure cataloging them: she let herself go, she tried to make him sober, she let the kids “run the show,” she didn’t keep them quiet enough, or servile enough, or maybe she should have been less obvious about how much she hated sex with her bloated, boozy husband. She’d let herself be deflowered early by an old man and she’d sort of liked it. She was no prize. She’d always been plain.
Here she was, nearly seventy-two, and still she heard Louisa’s and Winston’s criticisms. And to add insult to injury, Charlotte would have to watch her own daughter’s sad story unfold. Her mind spun, imagining Regan crying on her lemon-colored couch; Regan waitressing at Denny’s; Flora and Isabella humiliated on a public school playground, wearing that awful purple mascara that had heralded Regan’s own demise into troubled teendom.
Their guide, a tall man named Massimiliano, held a pole with a placard that read SPLENDIDO 27. Among hundreds of people and dozens of guides with poles, Charlotte struggled to keep number 27 in sight. There were pillars and brick walls. There was an amphitheater where, my heavens, the sun was strong.
“I am so hot,” said Lee.
“For the love of God, just keep moving,” said Cord.
“I could use a cold drink,” said Lee. “Or a bag of ice to dump on my head.”
Massimiliano seemed able to walk backward, not pass out from heatstroke, and keep up a lecture simultaneously: Mount Vesuvius had erupted in A.D. 79, burying this Roman city under volcanic ash. The ash, said Massimiliano, “poured across the land like a flood.”
Ugh. Charlotte held on to Lee’s hand and struggled to keep up.
“The city was captured in a darkness like the black of closed and unlighted rooms. That is a quotation. Can you imagine this? Try to imagine this.”
Charlotte didn’t want to try to imagine this.
“Two thousand people died and the city—this city—was abandoned.”
Massimiliano, mercifully, led them inside a building. It was still stifling, but at least there was a respite from direct sunlight. Charlotte leaned against a wall and closed her eyes. “In 1748,” said Massimiliano, “explorers rediscovered this place. Pompeii was intact! Skeletons and buildings and paintings and tools can teach us about what it was like in this place before the eruption that ended human life here.”
Minnie would have loved Pompeii. She’d been a history buff, always watching late-night documentaries and telling Charlotte about them whether Charlotte was interested or not. Oh, how Charlotte missed Minnie now, her dull stories and grating laughter. It was still a shock that Minnie was just gone, that Charlotte would never, ever, see her again. And then the selfish part: was Charlotte next?
Massimiliano led them through the rooms of the house and back outside. They stopped at a street corner and Massimiliano explained there was a big line waiting to see a stone penis that had been carved in the road to show the way to an an
cient brothel. “We will have to wait here approximately forty-five minutes to see the penis,” he explained. “Some people, they take a selfie with the penis.”
“Oh, my,” said Charlotte.
“No, thanks,” said Cord.
Regan looked conflicted, but Lee said, “No! No penis selfies.”
“We move on,” said Massimiliano, seemingly relieved.
On their way to the exit, their tour guide stopped by a display case of ceramic pots. “Do you want to hear what it was like for them, the ones who did not flee in time?” he asked. His voice was eager—it was clear he wanted to perform. When no one responded, Massimiliano pointed to a stone figure among the pots. “You see it is a human,” he said.
“Where?” said Charlotte, narrowing her eyes. “Oh,” she said, making out the mummified figure, knees to chest, head down. If you didn’t look closely, you wouldn’t see the man. You would think he was a vase.
“Fuckety fuck,” said Cord.
“Language, Cord,” said Charlotte wearily.
“When the sky went dark,” said Massimiliano, warming to his topic, “you would have grabbed your valuables from your house. And your children. And your wife. You tried to get out, toward the sea, where you hoped a boat would save you. But the dark—and earthquakes—would make it hard to find your way. Buildings began to collapse. Frightened, you decide to stay still. You hope it will be over, and the sun will rise again.”
Clearly, Massimiliano had had theatrical training. He projected his voice over the crowds. They were spellbound, the heat of the day forgotten.
“You crouch down and pull your children close to you. You pray to God and you wait. Like this man, you see?” Massimiliano pointed to the figure.
Charlotte felt tears behind her eyes.
“But then the massive pyroclastic surge came at dawn,” said Massimiliano darkly. “You are made into the fetal shape as you die. Your cadaver spasms so you are like a baby again. And the rain comes, turning the pyroclastic flow into cement, which preserves your body as so.”
There was a moment of hushed reverence. Regan pressed herself to her mother’s side. Lee moved close to Regan. Cord encircled them all in his arms. The Perkins family stared at the form of a man who had been dead for two thousand years. It was hot. Charlotte could smell underarms. Life was so precious and so short.
CHARLOTTE WOKE EARLY. HER sheets were warm and smelled faintly of detergent. She lay still for a moment, just savoring. It was finally starting to happen, thought Charlotte. Her children were coming back to her. She was needed again—by Regan especially, but also by Cord and Lee. It felt so good to be asked for help! Her purpose on earth, she was beginning to understand, was taking care of her kids, now and always.
Still, and to be honest, she felt a twinge of regret that she wasn’t going to have another romance of her own. Someone just for Charlotte, who loved her to her bones. Who would think she was beautiful even though she was old, hold her tight if she was afraid. Someone who would counter the dark march toward death with the hot flash of sex, an explosion of limbs intertwined. Charlotte wanted to wake and find a pot of hot coffee ready—a morning when she could just take a mug from the cabinet and pour.
Minnie had insisted the idea of a “one true love” was a falsehood created by smutty writers trying to sell books and men scheming to keep women vacuuming quietly instead of changing the world. It wasn’t that Minnie was a lesbian (though who knew?) but that she was pragmatic. After her husband died, Minnie was done with romantic love.
“Once you give up on finding Mr. Right,” she’d implored Charlotte, on one of their daily walks around the lagoons, “you can find yourself. Inside.” (Here she struck her rib cage with a fist. Beside them, a crepe myrtle bloomed.) “Do you know what I mean?”
“Sure, I guess,” Charlotte said. “But I can’t help what I want, can I?”
In Minnie’s view, of course you could.
How ironic, thought Charlotte, that Minnie didn’t live to see Charlotte accept her dour pronouncement. “Okay,” she said now. “I give up. It’s time, Min. I’ve got the kids, and that’s a lot. I’ve got Father Thomas to talk to. You’re right.” She could almost see Minnie in her aqua golf visor, nodding with a self-satisfied expression.
Charlotte rose and parted her curtains. It was too dark to see much as they approached the port. Taking in the gray, blocky buildings, Charlotte felt sorry for the inhabitants of Civitavecchia, overrun each day by tourists who (like the Perkins family) would trample through on their way to glittering Rome.
She pulled the curtains firmly closed and made a concerted effort to focus on happiness. Was that the feeling inside her rib cage? It was a skittery excitement, like drinking too much coffee before heading downstairs on Christmas morning. Maybe her children would move back in with her! That was probably pushing it, but watching the nightly news with Cord and Lee as Regan prepared cheese and crackers…well, that was a lovely image.
Charlotte showered, ran a brush through her hair. It was only when she looked in the mirror that she realized she was singing aloud. She’d thought the song—Tony Bennett’s “Song of the Jet Set”—was inside her head.
“Shining Rio, there you lie,” crooned Charlotte. “City of sun, of sea, and sky!”
CORD HAD BEEN DREAMING about sleeping in a bathtub made of velvet when his phone rang. He sat up, completely disoriented, the weird urine-perfume smell of his cruise ship cabin bringing him back to reality. His brain was fogged with pills and bourbon. His phone buzzed again. They must have been close enough to shore to pick up a signal. “Hello?” he said.
“It’s me,” said Giovanni.
“Hi, you,” said Cord. He got out of bed in his underwear and stepped onto his balcony, where he could see faraway twinkling lights against a dark expanse of sea. “What time is it?” he said, taking a deep breath, tasting salt and ocean water.
“Listen, Cord, this is important,” said Gio.
“I’m listening,” said Cord. He marveled at his utter lack of panic, his bloodstream full of depressants silencing the lonely voice for the moment. Oh, it was going to come back, and with a vengeance. But for now, Cord enjoyed the blessed quiet.
“Did you tell your mom about me? Does your family know?” said Gio. His voice was breathless, excited.
“Yes, of course,” Cord lied without hesitation. God, it was easy to lie! He’d forgotten how simple life could be. The engine of the ship thrummed beneath him like a snoring animal.
“Did you say yes?” said Giovanni.
“They can’t wait to meet you,” said Cord, pulling a cigarette he’d bought at the Galaxy Bar from his robe pocket.
“Charlotte can’t wait to meet me?” said Giovanni.
“That’s what I said,” said Cord, using a matchbook from Shells to light up. The smoke entered his lungs and made him even more languid.
“So they know,” said Giovanni, with wonderment. “They know who you are.”
“Yup,” said Cord.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Nope.”
“Rome today, right?”
“Yes,” said Cord, sitting down in his deck chair, resting his feet on the glass partition that kept him from falling overboard. “I believe our tour is called ‘Panoramic Rome by Motor Coach.’ We drive by all the glories of the city, pause for photos, then motor on.”
“You don’t even get out of the bus?” screeched Giovanni.
“I don’t believe so, no,” sighed Cord.
“Oh, dear,” said Giovanni.
“Well, Mom’s old,” said Cord. “We’ll do it again someday, you and me.”
“Promise?” said Giovanni. “Promise me Rome?”
“You promise me Rome,” said Cord. “I promise you everything.”
“I love you,” said Giovanni.
“And how I lo
ve you,” said Cord. This, at least, was true.
“I’ve got to go,” said Giovanni, a note of something—glee?—in his tone.
“Where?” said Cord. “Where are you going?”
“I’ll never tell!” said Giovanni, sounding shockingly like Charlotte. “Have a good day in Rome, my love!”
“You as well,” said Cord. “Little goofball.”
* * *
—
HE SAT ON THE balcony for a while, watching as the ship approached port. As much as he made fun of the bus tours, the drink specials, the whole “cruising” experience, there was something deeply moving about approaching land from the sea. Cord felt connected to the explorers and soldiers who had done the same. How much more terrifying and exciting their lives had been!
He just wished his two worlds didn’t have to collide. And did they? Did they really? How hard would it be to just keep things divided? With a boozy brain, it seemed possible.
* * *
—
CHARLOTTE WAS UNUSUALLY CHEERY at breakfast. “I’m just so happy,” she said. “All my babies, all right here around this table!”
“Oh, Mom,” said Regan, leaning over to envelop Charlotte in a hug. She wore a baseball cap, rumpled sundress, and Teva sandals. Cord narrowed his eyes and looked—really looked—at his sister. Her nose was reddish, her eyes sunk deep in their sockets. She wasn’t well, he could see. He was flooded with worry. Where was Matt?
Charlotte struggled to free herself from Regan’s overlong embrace. She met Cord’s eye for a moment, winking. The wink said, “How silly is Regan?” as if Cord shared his mother’s view that Regan was silly, that a broken marriage was a joke. He didn’t share this view! He was terrified for his sister, heartbroken that her husband was a liar, concerned for his nieces. He wanted to throw Regan over his shoulder and spirit her away, whisk her through museums and order her exotic foods and restore her to the Regan she’d once been, long ago. He wanted to fix her, to fix everything. Instead, he picked up a pain au chocolat and shoved it in his mouth.
The Jetsetters Page 17
