by Lewis Shiner
“Mmmmm. Sure.”
I sat up and opened my eyes to a pale, sun-drenched world. Lori unpacked the basket. There were hard rolls and cheese, boiled shrimp, plantains, and oranges. “I don’t really cook,” she said. “I’m more of the found objects school.”
“It looks great.” There were purple linen napkins and real glasses for the Tehuacán water. I sat cross-legged and started on the bread. Bob Marley sang about shooting the sheriff. I said, “Have you ever actually tried to leave him?”
“I got as far as Mexico City once. I’d forgotten what it was like living alone, sleeping alone. You get…unreal. You know what I mean? Like you’re not really there.”
“I’ve been married a long time. I think I could stand being alone. I mean, it gets unreal with her there.”
“So why are you? Still married, I mean?”
“I guess I’m getting something out of it, right?”
“Some things you do because you can’t see any other way. If you say some inner-city kid who dropped out of the sixth grade is selling crack because he’s getting something out of it, well, that’s not very compassionate, is it?”
“I guess not. I spent the night at a motel once, after one of our non-fights, when she’d told me how unromantic I was and I let it stew all day. When I came home she was hysterical. I mean, completely over the top. Convulsive weeping, screaming, swearing she couldn’t live without me. It was more like a threat than anything else. Like if I ever tried to leave her again she would hunt me to the ends of the earth.”
“That’s a lot of emotion for somebody you say is cold.”
“Or for somebody who doesn’t even seem to like me anymore.”
“Like and need are different things. Emotional blackmail is what it is. I’ve done it too. I guess every woman I know has.”
“She was really scared—”
“Of what?” Suddenly Lori was furious. “What did she have to be afraid of? Did you hit her? Did you smash the furniture?”
“No, but I—”
“She was afraid you were going to leave her. Before she could leave you first.” She got up and walked to the edge of the water, her back to me.
“Lori?”
After a minute she came back and sat down again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just…women think they can’t live without a man. And really, all it is, we can’t stand for someone else to do the leaving. It makes me so fucking mad sometimes.”
The suddenness and violence of her anger had unnerved me. “Are you saying I don’t have any responsibility to Elizabeth?”
“Of course you do. You’re a Rescuer.”
“This is more of that self-help stuff, right?”
“Yeah. You’re a Rescuer and I’m a Victim.” She smiled. “We’re made for each other.”
We finished lunch. Lori put Bonnie Raitt on the jam box and we talked about music. Who we’d seen live, favorite records, like that. I remembered the drunken conversation Graham and I had in Santa Monica, about how few women there were that I could have this conversation with. It made me dizzy. When the talk wound down I asked her if she wanted to swim.
“It’s dangerous. The current’s fast around here.”
“I’m a good swimmer.” I smiled. “I’ll rescue you.”
“Very funny. I’ll go in with you, but don’t get cocky and don’t get out too far. I don’t want to have to explain to your mother that we drowned you too.”
I wondered if she would say anything at all that came into her head. She stood up to take off her shirt and shorts. I didn’t make the pretense of looking away. It wasn’t about sex so much as sensuality, to see her stretch and move in that particular way. It seemed to embody everything that desire was about. I waited until she was done, then got up and walked into the water.
I felt the pull of the current, strong, like she’d said. I kicked hard against it and still didn’t make a lot of headway. As soon as I stopped to look I felt myself drift back. That was okay too. I was full of sexual energy, a little scared of it, and the ocean was a safe place to burn it away.
Eventually I let the current carry me back to the shallows. My hair had come halfway loose from its pony tail and I took off the elastic tie and shook it out. Lori sat in the shade of a lava boulder, up to her neck in water. “Leave it down,” she said. “I want to see.”
I combed through it with my fingers as I walked toward her. “Well?” I said. “What do you think?”
“I think you should watch your step. There’s a lot of sea urchins around.” She showed me the crooked smile again.
I reached both hands out to her. She looked at me for a second, then took them. I pulled her onto her feet and watched her face for a sign. Apparently the swim hadn’t been enough. Before I knew it I had pulled her toward me and leaned into her. Slowly, very slowly. If she started to turn away I would have time to pull back. She didn’t turn, and she didn’t lean toward me. She stood there and let it happen.
There was a moment when it was clear I meant to kiss her. That was when she closed her eyes. I closed mine too.
Her lips tasted of salt and summer sunshine. I smelled coconut sunscreen and a faint perfume from her hair. Her lips were soft as quicksand and I felt them move under mine. I put my arms around her and her arms went around my neck. I felt the curve of her shoulder blades, the small muscles of her back under my hands. Her fingers stretched out across the side of my head and grabbed a tangle of my hair.
I broke the kiss and started again, this time touching her lips with my tongue. Her mouth opened and her tongue flickered against mine. Something cracked inside me and a moan came out. I didn’t understand for a second that it was me who made the noise, me, whose wife complained because I was so silent in bed.
It was a long kiss. When it was over I said, “And I thought you didn’t like me.” She smiled and her hands moved over my face, her thumbs next to my mouth, her little fingers under my chin, and she pulled me into her and kissed me with a concentration that made my knees go weak.
She took my hand and led me to the beach. She lay down on her towel, not on her back, which might have ended with us making love, but on her side, her head propped up with one hand. I pulled my towel over until it touched hers and then I lay facing her. I didn’t know what she wanted so I leaned in to kiss her again. She put one hand on my chest as our mouths met, not resisting, but still holding me away.
I kissed her for a while and then I said, “What happens now?”
“I don’t do things like this,” she said. “I’ve been with Tom five years and I never…”
“Yeah, I know. Eleven years for me. But this is happening.”
“You just…took me by surprise.”
“Is that all it is?” I rolled her onto her back and kissed her again. Her arms went around me and held on tight. When I lifted my head we both had trouble breathing.
“No,” she said. “It’s not just surprise. It’s trouble. I knew you were trouble the minute you got off that plane. It’s why I tried to scare you away.” We kissed some more and then she said, “I don’t want you to stop kissing me. But I can’t go any farther than that now. You scare the hell out of me.”
“I’m scared too.”
The next time we pulled back she said, “Tell me what you’re afraid of.”
I rolled onto my back, leaving one hand on her waist. “A lot of things. I’m married, you live with somebody. I have a plane ticket that says I’m out of here in four days. I’m not looking for some kind of tropical quickie. I don’t want it if it isn’t real. I barely know you and you don’t know me at all.”
“I think I have a pretty good idea.”
“No. You don’t. I’m crazy, and there are things happening to me that I can’t explain.”
“Does this have anything to do with that Beach Boys tape you played me last night?”
I was stunned. “How did you know that?”
“The way you acted. Why don’t you just tell me about it?”
I realized that I’d been looking for an excuse. So I told her. I told her about the Beatles song and Graham and Celebration of the Lizard. I told her about 1966 and meeting Brian and going into the studio with him to finish Smile. “I can’t say it wasn’t all a hallucination. I may be completely out of my mind.”
“But you don’t feel crazy.”
“Yeah, sometimes.”
“You don’t sound crazy.”
“Thank you. And there’s the tapes. The tapes are real. You heard Smile last night, and I’ve got a CD of Celebration in my room.”
“If it felt real to you, then it was real.”
“That sounds like Brian. Feelings are all that’s real.”
“He’s right. Do you know how it happened? The…traveling part. Can you do it again?”
“I don’t think I want to. It was too…out of control. Anything could have happened.” I touched the smooth soft skin of her face. “I didn’t think I would be able to tell you all that.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m really glad I did.”
“Me too,” she said. She leaned over and kissed me and we didn’t talk again for a long time, just lay there kissing in the sand, and the entire world consisted of the smell of coconut oil and the sweet taste of her mouth, the heat of the sun and the gentle pressure of her body. I wanted her, the touch of her tiny, delicate hands drove me crazy, and at the same time I could have lain there and kissed her for days.
There was one moment that I will always have, like a photograph. She was lying in the hollow of my shoulder and she said, “I wonder sometimes why people can’t just be happy. I know you can’t be happy every minute, but most of the time. Just be happy unless there’s some immediate tragedy right in front of you.”
When I think about my life it doesn’t seem like I’ve been happy that much of the time. She made it sound like the easiest thing in the world.
Something finally brought us back. The wind shifted or there was some sound just below conscious recognition. Lori looked at her dive watch and said, “Christ, it’s almost three. If Tom finds us gone he’s going to wonder.”
To hell with Tom was what I thought. The words that actually came out were, “I don’t want to go.”
She stopped in the middle of getting up and kissed me one last time. “Me either. But we’re going to do it anyway.”
“We could run away,” I said. “To some romantic Caribbean island.”
“You’re really something.” She straightened up and grabbed the basket. “Shake out the towels and bring them to the car.”
On the ride back I said something about Dr. Steve and Allyson, that if I was crazy I wouldn’t get much help from a guy who was screwing a sixteen-year-old.
Lori laughed. “He’s not screwing her. That’s some weird game she’s into. She’s his daughter.”
“Now that’s really twisted.”
“You get used to it. I mean, most of the people we get are like Pam and Richard, or retired people like your folks. But every once in a while we get weirdoes. It’s the tropics. People come all unglued.”
“Tell me about it.” I leaned over and kissed her on the side of the neck. This time she did physically push me away.
“We have to be careful. I mean it. Like really careful. Okay?” She turned to look at me.
“Okay,” I said.
“If anybody asks, we had a picnic. If they ask where, we just say near the Naked Turtle. Which is not exactly a lie, we weren’t far from there. But the Naked Turtle is public and Tom wouldn’t care so much about that.”
“Okay.”
She pulled into the driveway and was out of the car, carrying the basket, before I could react. I got out slowly. She was already at the door of the dive shop. “I’ll see you tonight,” she said.
“Okay.”
When I got out of the shower I heard voices outside. Tom and Dr. Steve. I puttered around the room, wrote postcards to Elizabeth and my mother, tore up the one to my mother, started one to Pete. I’ve met somebody, I wanted to say. I wanted to tell the world.
It was an hour, all told, before my desire to see Lori overcame my nerves. I’d gotten to where I was looking at my watch every few seconds. I dried my hands on my pants legs and went out into the sunshine. They were all at the bar next door. Lori faced my way, masked by her sunglasses. She shifted in her chair as if she’d seen me, held still for a long second that made my heart beat hard, then turned to say something to Tom.
I sat in the same place as the day before, next to Tom, across from her.
“You look like you got some sun,” Tom said.
I touched my forearm and the fingerprint showed white. “I had sunscreen on. I guess I needed something stronger.”
“This is the tropics,” Dr. Steve said. “You have to be careful.”
I needed a drink. I ordered Tehuacán water instead.
“Getting a real taste for it, eh?” Tom said.
I felt like everybody there could read my guilty mind. Though Lori hadn’t spoken I knew her eyes, behind her sunglasses, had never left me.
I asked about the dive. It turned out they’d seen a couple of sharks at Maracaibo. Allyson couldn’t stop talking about them. “I thought I’d be so scared, and I wasn’t. It was like, they didn’t give a shit for me at all. It was like watching a hurricane or a forest fire or something.”
Dr. Steve said, “Me, I’m scared of hurricanes and forest fires.”
Tom said they were going back to the south end the next day, to the Columbia shallows. “Hector wants a couple of days off,” he said to Lori. “Do you think you could help out with the boat?” She nodded and he said, “We’ll do the shallows tomorrow and the drop-off on Friday.” He turned to me. “What about it, are you in?”
I looked him in the eyes. There was no suspicion there, only the usual things that one man might show to another: the appearance, at least, of nothing to hide, the readiness to have another beer or tell another joke. “Sure,” I said.
We all walked downtown for dinner. I don’t remember much of it. I wanted to be alone with Lori, wondered if she felt the same. Tom didn’t sit next to her, didn’t physically assert himself at all. Still his attention centered on her all night, more so the more he drank. I saw Lori’s submission to it, knew that if I offered to leave she wouldn’t come with me.
We stayed drinking at the restaurant until after ten. Afterward I sat in the darkness of my room for half an hour. Then I opened the door quietly and walked over to the deserted bar.
The moon was less than half full, low in the sky. What light there was came from the stars. There was a breeze off the ocean. I let my hair down and turned into the wind to feel it more. I had my eyes closed when Lori walked up, slow footsteps in the sand. Maybe, like me, she wanted to draw the pleasure out. She took forever to get there. Finally I opened my eyes. She wore cutoffs and a long-sleeved white sweater, and the loose waves of her red-brown hair were blowing too. I thought she was beautiful beyond words.
I reached one hand for her and she backed away. “No,” she said. “No touching.”
“Okay”
“Talking,” she said. “We can do talking.” She sat down across the table from me.
“What do you want to talk about?”
“I thought about what you said today. About Brian Wilson and all that. You make him sound so real, like I almost know him now. But it’s like what you said about your father dying. It’s hard to get your mind around it, that all that really happened to you. I know it’s the truth. I know that. It’s just hard.”
“I could prove it to you. I can make the music come out of any kind of stereo. I could make it come out of your tape player, if you wanted me to.” I heard the reluctance in my own voice.
“I believe you. I don’t want a demonstration. You say it’s over, and I think I like it better that way. It happened. It’s in the past. I don’t care about the past, I never did.”
“And the future?”
“I guess I’ll
believe it when I see it.”
“Which leaves right now.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not so bad.”
“No.”
“What would you do if we were really alone? If nobody could see us?” It’s not like me to take so much for granted. It had to be Lori that brought it out.
She put her arms on the table and rested her chin on them. She was halfway across the table toward me. Her dark blue eyes burned into me. “Kiss you,” she said. “I thought about kissing you all through dinner.”
“I want to make love to you.”
“Ah, sex. Sex is more difficult.”
“Sex is easy. Everybody does it. You don’t even need a license.”
She straightened up and her face disappeared in shadow. She was quiet so long that I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so…”
“That’s okay. It’s not you, it’s me. I don’t have orgasms easily. That’s what I should have said in the first place. I don’t have those earth-shattering vaginal orgasms I read about in books. Books that men write, most of the time. In fact when I read about them it seems like some kind of cruel joke.”
It was hard not being able to touch her. “You don’t come easily or you don’t come at all?”
“I can come. With a lot of patience and…tenderness. And like that.”
“Which Tom doesn’t do.”
“Not in a long time, no. I mean, there’s sex. There’s lots of sex. Tom comes. Every forty-eight hours. You could set your watch. You’re tired of this, right? Of the truth all the goddamn time? It can be pretty exhausting.”
“Is that what…last night…”
“Yeah. I had to excuse myself to perform my duties.”
“And then you came back out here, and…”
“And had a perfectly lovely time with you. Yeah, that’s what I did. Can you see that sex is not a big deal for me? It’s like Tom has some bizarre disease and I have to give him this treatment every other day. Sort of like an insulin shot, only messier.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“There’s nothing you can say. I should go.”
