FOR THEIR HONEYMOON, because her firm was courting the Florida tourism bureau contract, they went to the Keys.
“Seriously,” Samantha said. “Who goes to Key West anymore?”
They were sitting on the outdoor patio of a café that doubled as an art gallery. The tables were painted aqua green, teenagers played bongos on the curb, and across the street the sun set slowly, as it does in the tropics, over the gulf. It was their first night.
“We do, apparently,” Ethan said.
“It’s so 1927. We won’t be able to tell any of our friends.”
Ethan laughed and looked down at his plate. It was bright orange and clashed, he thought, with the creamy yellow of his key lime pie. He raised his fork.
“There’s pie.”
“There is pie.”
On the far horizon the dusking wash of color began to congeal like a blood clot over the water. He raised his hand to get the waiter’s attention.
“There’s rum.”
“Prove it,” she said.
LATER, AS THEY DRANK, as the night came on, he raised his camera and snapped a photo of her.
“I didn’t even see your camera.”
“I wasn’t going to leave it in the room.”
“You know I don’t like having my picture taken.”
“We’re on our honeymoon.”
“I don’t recognize myself in pictures,” Samantha said. “I look smaller. I look like there’s nothing there.”
ETHAN KEPT the picture. He didn’t take many and he kept even fewer. In it, she’s turning her head to the side to look not at him but at the sea, at the boats there, the darkening waves. She’s saying something, though—her mouth is open and her lips drawn up in an expression of wonder. The day’s last light tangles in her black hair. Condensation glints on the outside of her piña colada, but if you wanted you could say the blush in her skin is just sunlight, the glow in her eyes some kind of pleasure. Sometimes, when he looks at the picture, he knows it for what it is: a vanishing life tricked into permanence, the last perfect moment before the falling dark. Other times it’s simply evidence and he tries to see her as she saw herself—diminished somehow. But for him it’s just the opposite. If he could, he’d reduce the whole of their lives together to these photographs, moments outside of memory, stills that if you tried, could mean anything.
THAT NIGHT, THAT FIRST NIGHT, Samantha can barely walk when they stagger up into the room at the Marlin Hotel. She’s got her arm draped around his shoulder and he’s holding her wrist with one hand and her shoes with his other. It’s an old hotel—Hemingway era, says the plaque over the front desk. On the wall above the plaque hangs a dusty stuffed marlin. Its crest is beginning to crack and gray, beginning to look suspiciously like something pasted on.
“Caught by Papa himself,” the proprietor said when they checked in.
There are no elevators and their room is on the third floor. The staircase starts in the lobby and leads outside, wraps around the perimeter of the hotel. It’s covered, the staircase, but open to the wind. Their voices echo against the stucco ceiling. To their left rows of blinking lights lead down to the moving darkness of the water; to their right the concrete is stained by the mildew of blown rain.
“Christ, Ethan,” Samantha says. “Why so many fucking stairs?”
“Because we decided to stay somewhere nice,” he says. “Somewhere authentic. Would you prefer the Seashell Motel?”
Her head lolls against his shoulder and he can smell the raspberry and sweat of her hair. They still have a floor to go. She kisses his neck and her mouth is already dried out from drink. Her lips feel like rubber.
“Come on. We’re almost there.”
“Seashell Motel,” she says. “Why does everything around here sound like it’s about to go full-on porno?”
THAT NIGHT IN THE ROOM with the sea breeze dancing the curtains through the balcony screen, Ethan pours her a glass of water and puts it by the bedside. He turns out the light, kisses her behind the ear.
“Goodnight,” he says.
She tries to sit up on her elbows, doesn’t quite make it.
“Excuse me, Ethan,” she says. “But I think it’s my honeymoon. I think you have obligations.”
“Not to call on thousands of years of cretinous tradition,” he says, “but I believe it’s the other way around. The obligation is yours, and you are way too drunk.”
“I’m never too drunk.”
There’s something about her insistence that he doesn’t like. The indiscriminate want of it. They have all week and all the time beyond that. She turns her face into the pillow as if she’s been struck and in the shadowy disarray of the bed her hair forms a noose about her neck. He rolls over, on top of her, pushes her hair away, kisses her throat, her collarbone, but she’s impatient, and her hands are on his back, then on his hips, pulling off his underwear. He touches her and she’s dry.
“You’re too drunk, Sam. You won’t feel anything.”
“That doesn’t matter,” she says.
THEY PASSED THE WEEK in decadent routine. In the morning they’d ring the pull-bell (“So charming,” Samantha said) for coffee. They heard it ring downstairs, and then there’d be the echo of the maid’s feet on the steps, the clatter of vintage china. Once it came and the maid had left, Samantha would step out of the shower wearing a towel, or sometimes not even that. She’d affect Katharine Hepburn and say, “I’ll take my coffee on the pavilion, m’dear.” They’d sit on the balcony, drink coffee and eat breakfast and watch the sun climb over the Key. Afterward, they’d head down to the beach to walk or read. In the afternoons they kayaked among the mangroves or took glass-bottomed boats out to where the purple reefs glowed up through the perfect blue clarity of the sea. For lunch they drank piña coladas and ate fried conch or snapper. In the afternoon on the boats, Samantha filled Coke bottles with rum and drank them while Ethan snorkeled in the water lit by long columns of falling sunlight. The nights were not as bad as the first one; she wouldn’t drink too much with dinner and she’d ride her afternoon buzz into evening. But still it was strange; he’d never seen her this way.
“I’m on vacation,” she said. “It’s my honeymoon, right?”
And then, later, when he pushed her further.
“Look, it’s just sudden change. It freaks me out,” she said.
They were sitting on the covered porch of a plantation restaurant with a gabled railing and square wooden columns, yellow trellised eaves. Below them, the lights of jeeps and motorcycles lit greenly in the fronds of the shade palms that lined the street.
“You sure you’re okay?” Ethan said.
She reached across the table and took his hand, brought it to her lips. Her face and bare shoulders trembled under the guttering of table candles and the overhead mosquito lamp’s flickering light. He realized, then, something he had known now for several days but did not understand. He preferred her like this. Wounded somehow. Drinking. Or no, that wasn’t it. It wasn’t that he liked her drinking, but that he felt comforted by some sign of vulnerability. He didn’t want her hurt or frightened, certainly not that, but it was good to know that there was someone there beneath the unabashed confidence, the unremitting desire that felt, so often, like need. He’d noticed it most clearly during their wedding. The way she walked through the reception, the way the light seemed to cling to her, dazzle in her dress and on her skin, paint her black hair purple and gold and blue. She was a photographer’s fantasy. She moved and smiled and seemed to absorb the guests’ goodwill the way a plant does water. He watched her; he watched people watch her; he thought, who are you?
Now he could see her, maybe, as she saw herself: uncertain, stepping out into a new life like anyone else, someone for whom love was not a foregone conclusion. Because really, what did it mean if she did not notice that her life had changed, if she came to marriage as surely as she’d come to bed that first night? He looked across the table at her, the way she smiled, shrugged, the way some small sad
ness settled in her eyes. He was not frightened. He would not judge her weaknesses. He saw for the first time that she needed something that only he could give.
ON THEIR LAST DAY in Key West Samantha did not drink. They rose early and rented kayaks on the western keys and took them into the mangrove islands where the water, so hard and blue in the open sea, turned the swampy, mottled green of a turtle’s back. The current died and they cut slow circles through the narrow, cypress-shaded passages. He let Samantha lead. He liked to stay behind her, to watch her paddle, watch the muscles strain in her shoulders and upper back, see the sweat dampen her tank top. Once he paddled alongside her, reached over and pulled her kayak to his, kissed her. She laughed and touched his face, splashed water on him.
“You’ll capsize us both.”
“You’re getting sunburned,” he said. “Put your hat on.”
After following the mangrove waterways for an hour they came to a beach of white sand hidden among the island thicket. They pulled the kayaks to shore and ate a picnic lunch. For the first time that week Samantha had not packed any booze.
“I want to snorkel,” she said.
“There’s probably alligators.”
“It’s salt water. Do alligators live in salt water?”
“I don’t know,” Ethan said. “I don’t think so. But there might be caimans.”
“I don’t even know what a caiman is.”
“It’s like an alligator. But smaller.”
“I see,” Samantha said. “So it’s a smaller version of something that isn’t here?”
They snorkeled and manatees swam with them; they kissed while treading water with their masks on. That evening they ate key lime pie on the plantation porch. Afterward, Ethan said, “You want to go to the Green Parrot and have a drink?”
It was not quite dark and the sun was beginning to shred the horizon over the gulf.
“No,” Samantha said. “I want something else altogether.”
ON THE PLANE TRIP back to New York he recalled that night, as he would often in the following months, with some mix of wonder and building fear. He tried to remember it as he would a series of photographs. Separate images, beautiful and untouched by consequence: his lips on her stomach, the sea’s dried salt on her skin, her mouth opening as for air, the purple of the setting sun on her back and her ass. He tried not to remember how he felt—the building desperation between them, the sense that something depended on their lovemaking. He tried not to wonder what he’d never wondered before: what she was doing alone in that bar the night they first met.
The plane dipped and banked and turned toward land. They were almost home. Everything would be fine. It was documented fact, something to do with heat or magnetism: tourists turned strange in the tropics.
Night in Mara de Leon. Insects trill in the banyan trees in the street. Ethan lies on his bed with the mosquito net pulled closed around him; the overhead fan creaks and wobbles and cuts the warm air. He has a phone card now, he knows he must call Paolo. In college, when they shared a house with their friend, the long-disappeared Brendan Doyle, Paolo studied Italian and spent every school break traveling to a different country. I’m going to be a travel writer, he said. Because, you know, I just love culture. Like most things Paolo said, Ethan wasn’t sure how to interpret this comment. He didn’t know whether it was affected sarcasm, Paolo’s idea of a joke, or truly vapid. When pressed, Paolo said, I’m just saying what someone else might say, which didn’t help.
After college Paolo got a degree in journalism and married a girl who, in the midst of her thousand insanities, decided for no discernible reason to start dressing like, as she put it, a Cherokee squaw. It’s all right, Paolo claimed at first. I just wish she wouldn’t say “squaw.” In truth the costume wasn’t much better: a buckskin jacket, chaps over leggings, incongruent white sneakers, and a construction-paper feather colored in with marker and glued to a paper headband. Ethan remembers a particularly uncomfortable Thanksgiving where she said nothing but “how” for the entire dinner. Paolo had just returned from visiting Doyle in Copal and was struggling with acute diarrhea—every five minutes he’d get up from the table and run to the bathroom. Ethan sat silently across the table from his wife.
“The turkey’s delicious, Anne,” he said.
She raised her hand, palm outward, then spread her fingers like a Vulcan.
“How,” she said.
PAOLO TRIED TO REMEDY the relationship by taking her to Europe. New setting, he’d said, new air. He woke one morning in Belgium to find her gone, closets empty, the bill paid but beyond that no sign that she’d ever been there at all. When he came home he said, you know, I’m totally over Europe, and moved into an apartment in Spanish Harlem. For a year he didn’t leave the city. When Ethan saw him last, it seemed he had acquired the stylistic ineptitude peculiar to young freelancers in New York. He fit a tight purple felt sports coat over an orange polo shirt. He wore aviator sunglasses and was eating a piece of pizza. It was eight in the morning.
“I thought we were supposed to get breakfast?”
“Hey, it’s no problem,” Paolo said. “We’ll just call it brunch.”
Over breakfast Ethan asked him, “I thought you wanted to be a travel writer?”
“I’m a travel blogger now,” Paolo said. “I write for a web-based travel company. I write about trips you could take, if you wanted to.”
“But you’ve never been to any of these places?”
“Well, you know, they only give me three hundred words per entry, and really I just link to other websites for most of my pivotal copy. You have to remember, Ethan, that it’s a blog.”
Ethan finished his coffee, looked down at his plate.
“Also, I don’t think I ever want to go anywhere again,” Paolo said.
ETHAN PULLS OPEN the mosquito net, checks his shoes, and walks to the phone. He doesn’t know if the phone will work or how long the phone card will last. A cockroach scrambles across the floor. Better than a scorpion, anyway. Ethan hopes that in all of Paolo’s travels, in all the places he wandered through looking for something that could explain or prevent a life where your wife turns into a Spaghetti Western extra, where you wake to an empty bed and empty room, that he has been to Rio de Caña.
“NYET,” SAID PAOLO. “Never heard of it.”
The connection crackled and hissed, bars of music and a man saying good morning, ma’am cut and trembled on the line.
“Never?” said Ethan. “You don’t know anything?”
“Nah—I’m doing a search now, and let me tell you, I’m pulling a donut here.”
“That means you can’t find anything?”
“D’accord.”
This was another thing Paolo did, slipped into other languages not quite accurately. Individually, he spoke each of them fluently, but like a purple sports coat pulled over an orange polo shirt, he could never quite integrate them into an organic whole.
“Where are you again?”
Ethan told him.
“I’ve been there. De Leon. That’s a great city. There’s this bar where you can get a Johnnie Walker Black for like, I don’t know, ten lemps or quets or whatever the currency is. And I’m talking dobles here.”
“Don’t say dobles.”
“Hey, sure, whatever. I hear you. That was totally gringo-landia of me. My bust.”
Ethan looked out the window. The city hung dark and unlit. There was no nightlife and he could not see the ocean.
“Rio de Caña,” Paolo said. “Why you going there anyway?”
Ethan told him, and beyond his usual inclinations Paolo was quiet for a moment. Ethan heard his keyboard stop clattering. Still in the background there were ringing phones. Burring voices. Music no one would ever want to hear.
“You know what you need to do,” Paolo said.
“Maybe, Paolo. I don’t know.”
“You need to find Doyle.”
“Don’t you think he’s off the charts? Don’t you think if he turns u
p again, it’ll be because he’s dead?”
“Granted,” Paolo said. “But that’s why you called. You called so that I would tell you to go find Doyle.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“The two of you,” Paolo said. “All of you—” It sounded on the line like he was turning his head to the side, about to spit. “—can’t just take anything in the gut. I mean, it’s life, fucking take it. But no, everybody has to freak out, everybody has to, I don’t know, disappear.”
The line buzzed. Outside, in the hills sloping down out of the mountains, birds called and paused and called again. A lonely, foreign sound, a call echoing, Ethan imagined, across the electronic distance. Paolo was right, but there was nothing Ethan could say to console him. He could not comprehend Paolo’s choice to stay there, to stay banging away at his blogs through the night. When your life vanishes, how do you do anything but follow it? There had to be some kind of axiom there, some kind of deeper certainty. When you flay your life from you, what remains? Just the impulse to flay, the knife seeking new skin. The bird call came again and reminded Ethan that he should get back under the mosquito net.
“You know how to find him?” Paolo said.
“I think so. Maybe.”
“Well, then. I got to head and file some copy. Bonsoir, Ethan.”
And then the line was dead and there was Ethan standing there and replacing the phone and then turning and heading down into the hotel bar so that maybe tonight, all the spirits of the tropics willing, he could get some sleep.
Horse Latitudes Page 13
