The Scenic Route

by Devan Sipher

  “It’s a crazy day. Crazy week. Totally crazy.”

  He got the crazy part. What he was missing was why she was going to the airport. “Are you picking someone up?”

  “I’m catching a plane.” His heart sank. “But we can meet up now, unless you have some symposium to attend, because I’m going to be sitting at the airport with nothing to do. They make you check in ridiculously early for international flights.”

  “You’re going abroad?”

  There was a pause on the line. He thought they lost their connection. “To Madrid,” she said. There was another pause. “Crazy, right?”

  They made plans to meet in an hour at La Carreta, a popular Cuban restaurant at the airport, which would have been more convenient if he had actually been at the airport. Since he wasn’t, he went down to the lobby to catch a shuttle. And had perfect timing, because he saw one pulling up. He also saw a line of people waiting for it—with suitcases! He had left his suitcase in his room, and it would be odd for him to meet Naomi without it, since as far as she knew he hadn’t left the airport.

  He went back upstairs to retrieve the case, contemplating that even a little dishonesty takes a lot of effort. There’s a lesson in that somewhere, he thought, as he lugged his case outside to wait for the next shuttle.

  Bad idea. He was in Miami in July. It wasn’t a city, so much as a swamp with million-dollar condos. Austin remembered studying Siberia in ninth grade and wondering why people would choose to live in such a climatically challenged place. He conjectured that those people were so cut off from the rest of the world, they didn’t realize there were better options out there. But what excuse did Floridians have? Don’t they get the Weather Channel? They couldn’t even make California’s claim of a “dry heat.” This was wet heat wrapped in a drenched blanket inside a steam bath. This was what hell aspired to be.

  By the time the shuttle arrived, he was sopping. There was a reason he hadn’t waited inside the lobby, but the reason wasn’t coming to him. It could have been due to sudden-impact heat stroke. Or just the humidity short-circuiting his neurological system.

  The shuttle’s air-conditioning was set to a subarctic level to counteract the external torridity. Austin imagined small icicles forming in the wet patches underneath his arms and in the small of his back.

  For some reason, it wasn’t until he was getting off the shuttle that it occurred to him the restaurant wasn’t at the airport but inside the airport, meaning he was going to have to get past security. He had no idea how, but begging came to mind. Begging actually seemed to be the beginning and end of his list of options. He could claim he had left something behind at the gate, since he had left the airport less than an hour ago. It didn’t seem unreasonable to ask a security agent to pretend he hadn’t left, and by pretend, he meant let him reenter. He also figured there had to be a romantic soul or two working for the TSA.

  There wasn’t.

  What he considered a reasonable and even heartwarming request was met with a threat of incarceration from a snappish supervisor with short-cropped hair and a shorter temper. Austin was informed that no one crossed the security checkpoint without a valid ticket (with a strident emphasis on the “no one”). That stumped him for a minute, but there was an obvious solution.

  He had only one question when he reached the front of the line at the American Airlines counter. “What’s the cheapest flight I can get leaving today?”

  “Where do you want to go?” the ticket agent inquired.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  She looked up at him suspiciously. But he convinced her his motives were amorous, not felonious, and twenty-five minutes later he was striding toward the restaurant booth where Naomi was sitting, with a boarding pass for a flight to Tampa in his pocket—and relief that he was only ten minutes late.

  She stood up, and when they embraced he felt something electric. His arms found their natural place around her waist, as if her body had been designed with the dimensions of his in mind. They lingered in each other’s arms until she pulled away.

  “I was beginning to think you were standing me up,” she said.

  “I got a little lost,” he replied with a sheepish grin as they sat down. There was a cafeteria tray on the table with a plate of several fried items and two Coronas.

  “Is this restaurant okay?” she asked. “There’s a fancier place called Top of the Port. But this place is tastier.”

  “This is great,” Austin said. “Tasty is great.” Just looking at her was great.

  “So what are you doing here?” she asked.

  “A medical convention,” he said. He was pretty sure he’d already told her that. Was she testing him?

  “Oh, right,” she said, playing with her fork.

  It dawned on him that it sounded like he’d purposely not told her about his supposed convention while they were in California. “Very last-minute,” he said.

  “The convention?”

  “My attendance.” And this was how one lie begets another. “My partner was going to come, but he wasn’t able to.” It was a white lie. To make her feel better. “He’s taking his wife to Hilton Head.” That part wasn’t technically untrue (or wouldn’t be in a few weeks’ time).

  “Take some food,” she said, pushing the tray toward him. He appreciated the offer, but he had wanted to treat her to a meal. “I picked up some appetizers while I was waiting. The yucca fries are particularly good.” She speared one with her fork. “I also got croquetas and a pastelito. It’s a pastry with guava and cheese. I make a version with Gruyère and fig jam.”

  “Where can I get one of those?” he asked, taking a couple of fries.

  “I could have cooked up a batch if you’d given me any advance notice,” she said, gently chastising him. “But there’s probably plenty of food at the convention.”

  “Of course.” It was getting hard to remember all the things he was making up. He wanted to tell her the truth, but instead he said, “So you’re going to Madrid?”

  “Yeah,” she replied, nodding.

  He waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. “Any particular reason?”

  “You don’t need a reason to travel.”

  He’d stepped right into that one. “I just meant you hadn’t mentioned anything about Madrid while we were in LA.”

  “You didn’t mention anything about a convention.” She seemed prickly.

  “I wasn’t planning on going,” he said, “until my partner canceled.” Oddly, saying it a second time made it feel more true.

  “Right,” she said, biting into a croquette. “Sorry. It’s actually a potential work thing.”

  “You’re thinking about working in Madrid?” He tried not to sound as disconsolate as he felt.

  “It’s a possibility,” she said. She took a healthy swig of her beer, and he followed suit. “It’s an opportunity. Maybe. It’s a vacation. How about you?”

  “I’m not going to Madrid,” he said with a smile.

  She laughed. “No you’re going to be partying down with the doctors. Hitting the hot spots.”

  “I don’t know about that,” he said. “Little too hot out already. Maybe the lukewarm spots.”

  She took another gulp of her beer. “I wish the timing was better.” He wasn’t sure what she meant. He only knew what he hoped she meant.

  “It would be nice to spend more time together,” she said, and something deep inside him ached at the words. “But you probably have a jam-packed schedule.”

  Tell her, he told himself. Tell her that there is no convention. But to what end? She was getting on a plane to Madrid. And all he’d be doing was admitting to being a liar. Which he wasn’t. Well, except for the very ill-thought-out machinations of his current situation.

  “Not so jam-packed at the moment,” he said.

  She seemed to ruminate a bit about this st
atement. She looked at her watch. Then she put down her beer. “Come with me,” she said, abruptly bounding from the table.

  “Where are you going?” he said, racing after her with his suitcase in tow.

  “It’s a surprise.” They sped through low-ceilinged corridors and down slow-moving escalators. As they neared the terminal exit, Austin became even more confused.

  “Don’t you have a plane to catch?” he asked.

  “I’m checked in and so is my luggage. All I have to do is go through security again when I get back.”

  “Get back from where?”

  “That’s the surprise,” she said with an impish grin, before dashing through the glass doors and flagging a taxi.

  “Earlington Heights Metrorail,” she told the driver.

  “They have trains in Miami?” Austin asked. It was news to him.

  “You’ll see,” she said.

  The taxi zipped along a different expressway than the shuttle had taken earlier, depositing them at what looked like a commuter rail station. Austin was paying the driver as a locomotive pulled in.

  “Run!” Naomi commanded.

  She emptied a handful of quarters into a turnstile, and they managed to scramble up a stairway and on board just before the train’s doors closed. They laughed as they caught their breath, like truant teenagers playing hooky. Standing close beside her, he felt like he would follow her anywhere.

  Less than fifteen minutes later, they disembarked and she led the way up an escalator to what looked like another train platform. But instead of a train, what came along was called a Metromover—a bright blue electric vehicle that looked like a hybrid of a monorail and a bus.

  “There’s a good chance you’re going to think I’m ridiculous,” Naomi said, “but this is one of my favorite things to do in Miami.”

  They got on board, and she pulled him to the front of the tram as it emerged from the station on a curving elevated track that swooped its way around and through the high-rises of downtown Miami. It was like Chicago’s El with a touch of the Jetsons. And Austin was a like a kid on a carnival ride as the Metromover hugged sleek glass buildings and pastel-colored edifices. But the best part, the part that made him feel giddy in a childlike way he’d rarely felt when he was truly a child, was when the Metromover plunged through the façade of a glittering tower, tunneling through to the other side as if the track’s path had been designed by a drunken engineer or a denizen of Toontown.

  Naomi was watching him watching the Miami skyline whiz by. “Isn’t it great?” she asked, beaming like the eight-year-old he dimly remembered. He nodded. “My friends make fun of me, but I think it’s awesome.”

  “It is awesome,” he said, taking her hand in his and feeling a surge of adrenaline as she gripped his fingers. They rode the entire downtown loop. And then they did it again. She pointed out places of interest, like the Freedom Tower and Bayfront Park. He tried to pay attention to her words, but her words were flowing from her mouth, and her mouth was a work of art made of mesmerizing curves and crescents.

  He noticed her check her watch again, and he died a little. It seemed that before any time had passed they were exiting the tram into the sticky late-day air. He could feel the heat rising as they descended an escalator to the rail platform below. Naomi was giving him directions to the convention center, which wasn’t particularly useful, since he wasn’t really staying there. She was saying she was glad he had called. He was saying he was glad she was glad. And then he did what he’d come to Florida to do.

  He kissed her.

  On the lips. Tenderly. But fervently. Everything he felt for her was in that kiss. He left everything on the court. And he held her to him like he was never going to let her go.

  But he did.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Mandy was sweating. She knew her faculty adviser liked to make her sweat, but this time it was literal.

  The air-conditioning was on the fritz in West Hall, where she was explaining, no, defending her dissertation proposal. The amazing thing was she was actually excited about it, but excitement is less valued in academia than levelheaded gravitas. And she had no gravitas. What she had were her notes from thousands of hours of watching chimpanzees have sex. Often violent sex. And she had evidence that the violence was often linked to self-destructive and unpredictable female behavior. Something Mandy knew a thing or two about. And her hypothesis was that primates had as hard a time comprehending each other’s actions as their Homo sapiens cousins.

  “There’s been so much focus on sexual coercion by male chimpanzees,” Mandy said, coming to the conclusion of her presentation, “but what if there’s also an element of confusion?”

  “I think not,” said Dr. Lola Peña-Punjabi.

  “You don’t think there’s confusion?”

  “I do not think there has been too much focus on sexual coercion.”

  “I didn’t say too much,” Mandy said, mindful it was a primary focus of the department’s research.

  “I do not think I can support you using university resources to rationalize rape.”

  “Are you serious?” Mandy asked in disbelief. But Dr. Lola Peña-Punjabi was always serious.

  “Rationalizing rape” was in no way what Mandy was suggesting, but it was pointless to argue. Mandy knew there were few job opportunities for someone with a PhD in primatology, and even fewer for someone without a PhD. Or without the support of her department. It was a very small and incestuous world. And the narrow pathways to success had numerous toll bridges that were guarded with a tenacity that put Homeland Security agents to shame.

  “Isn’t it worth considering that a female’s actions may not always be to her benefit?” Mandy asked. “And isn’t it really empowering females to give them permission to make mistakes?”

  Dr. Peña-Punjabi regarded Mandy in a way that suggested she was the one making a very large mistake.

  “Amanda,” her adviser said. No one ever called her Amanda. Dr. Peña-Punjabi claimed that formality was a way of showing respect, when really it was a way of showing condescension. Mandy looked nervously at her wristwatch. “Amanda,” she repeated, “is there something else you would prefer to be doing?”

  “No,” Mandy assured her. “I’ve been prepping for this meeting for the last week.”

  “What I meant is, is there something you would prefer to do other than a dissertation?”

  “I’m very excited to get started writing a dissertation.” Mandy dreaded the thought of it. “Unless there’s some other option I don’t know about.” She gave a quick laugh to show she was joking, but she wasn’t.

  “You do not have to get a PhD,” Dr. Peña-Punjabi said in her cautious, soft-spoken way. Her toffee-complexioned face remained almost inert, with her lips making the bare minimum motion. “You also do not have to get one in this program. Perhaps it is not a good match.”

  Mandy’s throat constricted. Being told you’re “not a good match” was the ivory tower equivalent of Donald Trump saying, “You’re fired.”

  Mandy’s first thought was that a decade in academia had given her no employable work skills. Other than possibly typing. And she had no place to live outside of student housing. And no way of paying back her student loans. But she was getting ahead of herself. She couldn’t be kicked out without first being put on probation. And even that was a long and time-consuming process that she suspected Dr. Peña-Punjabi would prefer avoiding.

  “I will do whatever it takes to complete this program and earn my degree,” Mandy said.

  Dr. Peña-Punjabi sighed. “If that’s what you really want,” she said. “But I do wonder if you are making things unnecessarily difficult for yourself.” If she were a man, Mandy thought, she would be a total manstrosity.

  Before Mandy left the office, she received a two-week extension to come up with “a more suitable proposal.” Those were Dr. Peña-Punjabi
’s precise words. But when had Mandy ever been attracted to anything “suitable”?

  She found herself thinking about Hal. He had texted her several times, but she hadn’t responded. Though she had thought about it, more than once. If she responded, it meant she wanted to see him again. And she didn’t. She refused to be that person. The person who, well, wanted to be with a person like Hal. The whole point was that she wasn’t emotionally invested in him. He was the antidote to Tad. He had cleared the toxins out of her system and helped her stop obsessing about Tad. She finally had been able to focus on work without checking her phone for texts every five minutes.

  And because nature abhors a vacuum, the moment she no longer needed to hear from Tad was when she started hearing from him incessantly. Phone calls and texts and e-mail. She hadn’t responded to any of his messages. She hadn’t even opened his last e-mail, which he’d sent more than a week back. Though she supposed that she should. Out of politeness. Or curiosity. Everything she felt about Tad, she now viewed from a distance. Like watching some video documentary and wondering, Who is that woman, and why doesn’t someone stop her?

  She supposed she owed Tad an apology for her blog post. Though it wasn’t like she’d named him, and it was unlikely he would have seen it. They didn’t have any friends in common, to the best of her knowledge. The advantage of meeting online. But the least she could do was open his e-mail and read it. So that’s what she did on the corner of State Street and South University. If she’d had any inkling about the length of the e-mail, she would have chosen a spot with a bench.

  Mandy, I’m writing because you won’t answer my calls or my texts, which makes it kind of hard to have a conversation. Obviously, you’re still upset we didn’t get together a couple weeks ago. You seem to have some idea that since I didn’t meet up with you I must have been “doing it” with someone else. And while I appreciate your faith in my libido, the truth is the reason I wasn’t able to get together with you was that my parents were in town. And the reason I didn’t tell you that my parents were in town is that I didn’t really want to introduce you for a lot of reasons that really have nothing to do with you and a lot to do with me (and my parents, who being parents, come with a lot of operating instructions). And, yes, I kind of thought it was a little soon for the whole “meet the parents” thing. My concern was that if I told you I didn’t want you to meet my parents you might get insulted. You might have a hissy fit. You might run off and give me the silent treatment. Kind of like what you’re doing now. I know I should have just told you the truth. But I didn’t. Because I’m human. And I do stupid things. And I make mistakes. But I think that’s the definition of being human. I don’t know. You’re the anthropologist. Here’s what I do know. I like you. A lot. And it’s really upsetting to me that you’re so angry you won’t even speak to me. Because I really thought we were getting along pretty well. But that’s my perspective. You might have a different one. It would be nice to know what it was. Maybe you could share it with me. Like in an e-mail or a phone call. Or maybe over pizza at Cottage Inn? Just throwing it out there. And I’m sorry. For what I did (not telling you about my parents). And also for whatever you think I did (but I assure you that I didn’t). I hope you’re okay. And I hope to hear from you soon. Miss you. Tad