Diving In

by Galway, Gretchen

  “I’m going to go back to the pool.” She was glad that woman had called. It was just the jolt in the spine she needed. “Thanks for lunch.”

  “Wait, hold on. Are you going swimming again? I could spot you.”

  “I haven’t decided yet. But I wouldn’t want to mess up your schedule. You’ve got to call your girlfriend back.”

  “Diane’s not my girlfriend. We’re just really close.”

  “It’s none of my business.”

  He tapped her shoulder, rolling his eyes. “Don’t make that face. It’s true.”

  “I’m not making a face.”

  “Everyone thinks that just because Diane and I had a thing a long time ago, and neither one of us got gay or married, we can’t really be just friends.”

  She slipped on her sunglasses. Any man who put his phone on the restaurant table to take a call from one woman—who wasn’t a relative or a coworker—while he was having lunch with another one, had feelings that went beyond friendship. “It’s none of my business.”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t be that way.” He put a hand on her shoulder, the second time he’d touched her; yes, she was counting.

  “Last night you said you were trying to change.” She turned and began walking away. “I think you need to try a little harder.”

  * * *

  Betty called her again that night.

  “Are you hitting on me?” Nicki asked, chewing on a Swedish fish. The red, sticky, gelatinous candy clung to her teeth like bright, artificially-colored barnacles. “Because we already talked to each other today, and I’m starting to feel uncomfortable.”

  “You should be so lucky,” Betty replied, then sighed. “It’s pathetic of me, but I was wondering what happened with the love shrimp today.”

  Sprawled in bed, with her freshly painted nails drying under the ceiling fan whirring overhead, Nicki told her about her day.

  Betty sprang into action. “First thing in the morning, you’re letting Lawless know you’re hot and ready for him.”

  “He did seem to catch a chill easily. Maybe that’s how I’ll turn him on, by talking about my body heat.” Nicki had decided to stop arguing with Betty about her little fantasies.

  “Whatever works,” Betty said. “But don’t tell him you’re a schoolteacher. He can’t be the sharpest tool in the shed, so you shouldn’t intimidate him. Tell him you’re a flight attendant. Dudes love that, right? Sexist bastards.”

  “Wasn’t your last girlfriend a flight attendant?”

  Betty chuckled. “She certainly knew how to put my tray in the upright position.”

  “You have a tray?”

  “It’s a strap-on.”

  Groaning, Nicki popped another candy fish into her mouth. She had a pile of them off to one side, lined up like sardines in a can. “Does Jaynette get jealous when you talk about your conquests?”

  The line went quiet.

  “Betty?” Nicki asked. “You still there?”

  Pause. “Yeah.”

  Nicki’s supportive friend radar went off. “Is everything okay between you two?” Jaynette the yoga instructor had stolen Betty’s heart the summer before.

  “I told her when we met that I was a free spirit. I mean, duh, look at me.”

  “The green hair should’ve tipped her off,” Nicki agreed.

  “I know, right?”

  “So she is jealous?”

  Betty sighed. “It’s so annoying.”

  Nicki tried to remember if she’d ever met a girlfriend of Betty’s who lasted more than a few weeks. One of her friends was an on-again, off-again type, but that was more about convenience than true connection. “When’s the last time you were in a serious relationship?”

  “When’s the last time you were in a serious relationship?” Betty retorted.

  “Guess I hit a nerve.”

  “Marriage equality is great for some people,” Betty said, “but for lone wolves such as myself, it’s a pain in the ass.”

  “Uh-oh. Jaynette wants commitment?”

  Betty fell silent again. “No,” she mumbled finally.

  “But you’re upset she doesn’t want to share?” Nicki wasn’t quite sure what the problem was. “You’ve been single for a really long time. I’m sure it’s hard to get close enough to somebody who tries to put limits on you.”

  “That’s not it.”

  Nicki held the phone up to her ear with her shoulder so she could juggle the last three candies. It wasn’t like Betty to be evasive; she didn’t know what methods to use to pry the truth out of her. “Where is she right now?” she asked to buy some time.

  “Out.” Betty’s voice was sour, resentful, hurt.

  “Oh,” Nicki said softly, finally understanding. She let the candies scatter over the bed. “She’s not jealous. You are.”

  “I told her when we met that I never get exclusive. Now she’s holding me to it. How can I complain? How can I change the rules in the middle of the game?”

  “Does she know how you feel?”

  “Pfft,” Betty said. “I’m not going to tell her that. It would be manipulative and unfair. I’ve been on the other end of that way too many times to do it to somebody else.”

  “It’s the truth. You can’t avoid it forever.”

  “If I tell her now…”

  Nicki wiggled her red-tipped toes, kicked the empty candy wrapper to the floor. “You think she’ll dump you. Because that’s what you would do.”

  Betty made a pained, breathy noise, like a sleepy person stubbing her toe in the dark. “Jesus,” she said.

  “It’s what you did do,” Nicki continued. “More than once.”

  “Way to make me feel better, Nick.”

  “But I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “Karma’s a bitch. That’s the truth.”

  “You need to talk to her about how you feel,” Nicki said.

  “Oh, great idea. I’ll send her a text message this second telling her I’ve never loved anyone the way I love her, that she completes me, that she’s the wind in my sails,” Betty said. “And she’ll read it while she’s in bed with somebody else.”

  “Or you could, you know, talk to her alone later.”

  “Yeah. Whatever.”

  “Now you’re just feeling sorry for yourself.”

  “No, I deserve to have my heart crushed like a bug,” Betty said before adding in a more typically robust tone, “What do you say you change out the bridge phobia post with something about Lawless? Is there a place you can hide and snap a good shot of him?”

  “I’m not doing that.”

  “We can crop out his face. Nobody really cares about that anyway. Is he hairy? We’ve got a thread going right now in the forums about the tyranny of body hair removal.”

  “I don’t know. He wears a swim shirt and board shorts—Never mind. I’m not going to expose some random guy on your blog, give me a break. You get thousands of hits a day.”

  “He’d never know,” Betty said. “Unless he’s secretly a left-wing lesbian, he’ll never know.”

  “The blog’s demographics are much more diverse than that, like it or not.”

  “Don’t remind me,” Betty said. “It’s your fault. Phobic Phoebe attracts wishy-washy heterosexual chicks.”

  Nicki prodded her sleeping laptop. “I’d be happy to skip next week’s post this week if you’d like. We seem to argue a lot more than we used to.”

  “No! You can’t skip anything! You promised me two years ago you’d be reliable. If I stop delivering what I’ve promised, Phobic Phoebe and the rest, the blog will never survive, it’ll become just another abandoned, dead, dated—”

  “Chill,” Nicki said. “Of course I’ll write it. If you lay off the heavy-handed editorial.”

  Betty exhaled loudly. “Promise. I’m launching new Phoebe merchandise next week, and I can’t afford to lose any momentum. Wait until you see the new stress balls.”

  “Mail me a pair.”

  “To Hawaii? No way. Too expensive.”


  “You are so cheap,” Nicki said.

  “You try making a living from blogging. I’m lucky I can eat.”

  Nicki snorted. “You make more money doing part-time programming jobs every few months than I do working all year.”

  “All year, my ass,” Betty said. “You are in Hawaii, aren’t you? Anyway, I don’t get benefits. I have to think of the future. What if I want to start a family someday?”

  Not believing what she’d heard, Nicki raised the volume on her phone. “Excuse me?”

  “I better go before my ovaries get too hopeful and pop out an egg,” Betty said. “Love makes you crazy. I’m walking proof. You’re lucky to be out of it.”

  “Yeah. Real lucky.” Unbidden, it was Ansel’s face, not Miles’s, that flashed before her eyes.

  No, not him. In a panic, she dug out her favorite fantasy about Miles, the one when she climbed him like Mt. Everest, and waited for the wave of unrequited longing to wash over her.

  “You still there?” Betty asked.

  “Not really.” She’d lost it completely. Even in her favorite fantasy about Miles, she was picturing Ansel; and he was laughing.

  She said good-bye to her unhappy friend and quasi-boss, then dragged the computer onto her lap and began to type. Ahead of schedule, but she needed a place to vent.

  Smelling blood in the water, the sharks came for me immediately, she wrote.

  * * *

  Perhaps because of his distracting relationship with his roommate, Ansel forgot to mute his phone when he went to bed, which allowed Brand to wake him in the middle of the night to complain about his pictures of the office building in Kihei.

  “My God, you went to the wrong one!” Brand shouted in his ear.

  Ansel squinted at his phone: 4:24 a.m. “Time change, buddy, remember? Curvature of the earth and all that?”

  “You were in the ocean-side building. We want the inland one. There are two properties. Two.”

  Ansel sighed, rubbed his eyes. He’d left the shades open to watch the moonlight on the water as he fell asleep. Unfortunately, that had been less than an hour earlier. Sleep wasn’t always easy for him. “It’s taken you this long to look at the pictures?”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “You missed my birthday.”

  “Oh, shit. Sorry. Thirty, right?”

  “Yup.”

  Brand cleared his throat. “Is that why you took pictures of the wrong building? You’re having a crisis?”

  “I’m not buying a building right across from the beach that doesn’t face the ocean.”

  “It’s not for tourists,” Brand said. “It’s for accountants, lawyers, small business types.”

  “Who need the view even more. And who live in Maui for a reason.”

  “It costs too much,” Brand said. “Just to have a few windows that glimpse some water they see every day anyway.”

  Ansel slipped lower under the sheets, closed his eyes. He could still fall asleep again if he hung up now. “Mmm,” he said, his thumb rubbing the screen to make the unhappy man go away.

  “I’ve already emailed Jenny and explained the mistake.”

  Damn it. Ansel fumbled with his phone. He’d locked the screen somehow and Brand was still talking. “There was no mistake.”

  “We’d have to charge twice the rent.”

  “You’re exaggerating.” Drifting back into his dream, Ansel tried to remember his password to unlock his phone and make the loud man go away.

  “I’ve run the numbers,” Brand continued. “We’d never find tenants in this economy at the higher rents.”

  Finally, Ansel saw the glowing red button that would solve his immediate problem. “You worry too much,” he said as he tapped it, already half-asleep.

  Silence. A belated birthday present.

  Ah, that was better.

  But he’d forgotten to mute it, and the wind chimes he used as a ringtone knocked him awake again. In his stupor, he’d left the phone wedged between the pillow and his ear.

  “Jenny will meet you there at nine,” Brand said. “At the right one.”

  “Actually, it’s on the left,” Ansel muttered. And then, “Fine,” just to make him be quiet.

  He slept until Brand called him a third time. Now the sun was up, making Ansel squint around him at the white sheets, pale walls, golden dawn sky. It was like waking up in heaven. “I told you I’d meet her at nine,” Ansel said, pulling a pillow over his face.

  “It’s 8:12,” Brand said. “Better get moving.”

  “Crap.”

  “You wanted to be a businessman.”

  “Yeah,” Ansel said. “Not your minion.”

  “Listen, partner. Jenny Kapule is probably already there waiting for you. She’s been really patient with us so far, don’t punish her.”

  Ansel thought about the flash of joy in the real estate agent’s eyes when he’d told her they’d be making an offer on the expensive property instead of the discounted, hill-facing one. “I won’t,” Ansel said with a smile, rolling out of bed.

  He cleaned up and rushed out of the condo without seeing his housemate, reaching Kihei with a minute to spare. In the parking lot between the two buildings, he reassured Jenny they were only going to look at the other structure to rule it out, and that, yes, they still wanted to proceed with the oceanfront one.

  Jenny looked hopeful but unsure. Recently married with a baby on the way, she was as eager to close the deal as he was. “But Mr. Warren…”

  “Needs to see a few good photos to clarify the situation.”

  He returned to the condo two hours later with three dozen unflattering shots that would look even more convincing after he touched them up a little on his computer. Bad lighting, inopportune close-ups, slightly excessive percentage of shots taken of a water stain below a (since repaired) window.

  Brand would have to agree with him now. Being a businessman could be fun after all.

  He was opening the first photo on his computer when his mother called. He’d assigned an operatic ringtone to Melinda Jury that suited her tireless and powerful personality. It gave him a second to prepare before answering the phone.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “You didn’t call me back. Don’t forget—your birthdays have more to do with me than you. And thirty! That’s a big deal.”

  He moved the phone an inch further from his ear. “You said in your message not to call you back.”

  “Did I?” She laughed. From the heart, like she did everything. “I didn’t mean it. Rachel knew not to believe me. Did she tell you she’s getting married?”

  “That’s what she told me.”

  “We all deal with mortality in our own ways,” his mother said.

  Ansel groaned. “Even my mother thinks thirty is over the hill.”

  “There’s always another hill to climb, no matter how many birthdays you have,” she replied.

  “Sounds exhausting.” But he smiled. He loved his mom. Everyone did.

  “She’s still in London, you know. Your sister.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “And where are you? In the old days, I wouldn’t have to ask that unless you were the one calling me, which apparently doesn’t happen anymore.”

  “You told me not to call you back,” he repeated, smiling. “You know I’m the obedient one.”

  “I didn’t mean never. You could’ve called me yesterday, for instance. From wherever you are. Which is where, kiddo?”

  He stood and went out to the balcony. “Maui. Didn’t Rachel mention it?” He was still convinced she’d set him up.

  Possibly successfully. He couldn’t get Nicki out of his head.

  “Maybe she did, I don’t remember. I can’t keep up with you two,” his mother said. “Have you seen that friend of yours with the coconut business? That shampoo of his was wonderful.”

  He’d almost forgotten about that. A few years ago, he’d introduced one of his friends to another, and Primal Pedro’s Products from Pa
radise was born. “Actually, I’m here on business of my own.”

  “How wonderful. Your father would love to hear about that.”

  Turning his back on the ocean, Ansel leaned against the balcony. The sun was hot on the back of his neck—too hot, like a dragon breathing on him.

  She’d never hinted at the argument with his father; she never asked about his finances; he didn’t know if she knew he wasn’t taking money from the family coffers anymore.

  If she really didn’t know—and he didn’t think she did, because she would’ve called a family meeting by now with a professional mediator that would’ve gone on until everyone was hugging each other—he wanted to keep it that way. Someday, perhaps as he handed her a new yacht (she could donate it to Greenpeace) he could casually mention he’d paid for it with his own millions.

  He went back inside. “Brand and I are partnering up to buy some investment property. There’s an office building in Kihei, right on the ocean, pretty cool.”

  “An office building on the beach?”

  “A cube with a view,” he said.

  She laughed. “I love it! Good for you. You’re always up to something interesting. If only I could hear about it from you instead of from Rachel. And no, I’m not going to get on the Internet and chase after you like a lovesick stranger. If I want pictures and stories about your life, I’ll make you give them to me directly.”

  He sat at his desk, smiling at the photos of the building he had up on his screen. “Are you guys still in Costa Rica?” His mother was the founder of an environmental education foundation and personally escorted tours of low-income American city kids through the rainforest three times a year.

  “Just flew back yesterday. We’re home.” They’d kept the small house in Menlo Park where he’d grown up—though the booming tech economy over the last three decades had made the three-bedroom, 1954 stucco box worth more than a two-hundred-acre thoroughbred horse farm anywhere else. “I’m actually calling for a reason,” his mother added, her voice dropping an octave.

  Here it comes, he thought, sitting taller. Dad had told her, and she was going to make it better.