“Well, they say it at start-ups, too. I’m sorry. But you owe me one. You described the way Roberto set the table as festive.” He grabs me again and pulls me back into spooning position. He buries his face in my hair. He kisses my neck and my shoulder. He lifts up my T-shirt and he kisses the small of my back. He flips me around and then he kisses my stomach. He removes my shirt and then his own. He slips off my pajama bottoms and my underwear. He wriggles out of his boxers. He climbs on top of me and pulls the covers up to our chins.
There’s a clap of thunder.
“God, I love the rain,” he whispers.
* * *
• • •
ROBERTO AND ENRIQUE have lined the edges of the open living spaces with towels to soak up the water. I guess this is what they meant when they said the house was built for comfort as well as luxury. We may not have doors or walls to protect you from the elements, but we will have our staff line the floors with threadbare towels so you don’t slip and break your necks.
Everyone else is already at breakfast. Clem has wrapped herself in the blanket from her bed.
“I am sorry,” Roberto tells me as he hands me my coffee. “I know you worry about weather. I know you do not like the rain. But it will not last longer than one day. That is what it says in the newspaper. Tomorrow there will be sun.”
“It’s okay,” I say.
As Roberto retreats to the kitchen Solly leans in close. “I can’t believe he let it rain on our vacation. It’s so hard to find good help these days.”
“Shut up, Solly.” I’m not in the mood for Solly’s humor. I don’t even want to look at him right now.
“You shouldn’t say shut up.” Ivan is sitting at the table building something with his LEGOs.
“I was joking,” I say to Ivan. He doesn’t bother to look at me. “But you’re right. Saying shut up is not okay.”
I wait for one of his parents to step in and explain that after twenty years of friendship, and when you are an adult, you can tell each other to shut up and nobody takes offense.
“You two slept in,” Ingrid says. “That must have been nice. This one”—she pats Ivan on the head—“up since six a.m.”
“I want to go snorkeling,” Ivan says.
“Ivan, you hated snorkeling,” I tell him.
“I did not!”
I know better than to get into an argument with a five-year-old. I know that facts and evidence don’t matter. I know that he probably doesn’t even remember his epic freak-out in the water yesterday. And besides, the way he carries on refusing to look up from his LEGO set makes for excellent psychological warfare.
“Well, sweetie,” Ingrid says to him. “It’s raining today and—”
“Ding dong.”
“And we need to find things to do indoors.”
“But I want to snorkel,” he whines.
“Look—” Ingrid points out to the bay, but he still won’t take his eyes off his LEGOs.
It is gray and choppy and white-capped. “You don’t want to go out in that.”
“So, Peter,” Solly says. “On your last day in your forties, the last day of your first half century of life, rather than bathe you in sunbeams, God has decided to piss rain upon you. What did you do to get on his bad side?”
“I don’t know,” Peter says with a huge smile. “But isn’t it perfect?”
“Pish.” Solly waves him off. “While you and your bride slept the morning away, the rest of us debated what we should do. We have two votes for a movie marathon scrapped together from Villa Azul Paraiso’s random collection of VHS tapes.” Clem and Malcolm raise their hands. “One vote for a LEGO build-off.” Ingrid takes Ivan’s arm and raises it for him. He quickly yanks it away. “And the final two votes go for long, uninterrupted nap time.” Solly and Ingrid high-five each other.
I know everyone is looking to me. I am the default planner. The one who books vacations eight months in advance. The one who recognizes that the minutes are high value and cannot be wasted sitting inside complaining about the weather. Surely I have some idea of what we should do?
I take a final bite of my breakfast and bring my coffee cup into the kitchen.
Luisa is cleaning the stove. Roberto stands up from the table. He refills my cup and shows me the paper. Up in the corner is a little graphic. There is a sun and then a cloud with rain and then another sun.
“See? Yesterday there is sun. Today there is rain. Tomorrow there is sun.”
I nod. “Okay.”
“I am sorry.”
“Please don’t apologize about the weather.”
“Yes,” he says. “I will not.”
“I’m wondering if you have any ideas of what we should do today. What do people do in Puerto Vallarta on rainy days?”
He and Luisa exchange a few words in Spanish. She doesn’t appear to be particularly sympathetic to my situation.
“The guests here, they like to enjoy the house. Stay inside. Read books. Be together. We have games. Some miss pieces, but some have them all. Or, you go to town. We give you umbrellas. You visit the church or the galleries. There is a movie theater. It is near to where Mr. Solly makes the reservation for your dinner. They sometimes show movies in English.”
“A reservation for dinner?”
“Yes. He says that tomorrow it is the birthday for your husband. He wants to do something special. We tell him about the restaurant in town that is the best. He asks us to make a reservation. It is confirmed. So we do not cook the dinner for you tomorrow.”
“Okay.” I suppose this is something I should have thought of: a night out. It’s the right way to celebrate, even if we’ve paid for all of our meals already. I feel foolish. For not having thought of making a plan for my own husband’s birthday, and for standing in the kitchen asking the staff for advice about how to enjoy a rainy day in a luxury villa.
I pick up Roberto’s paper and look at the little icons again.
I flip the paper over. There is the face of the man I saw yesterday. The governor. This time he is sitting in a red velvet chair next to another man, with flags in the background. They both wear blue ties.
“What’s happening here?”
Roberto takes the paper. Luisa comes and looks over his shoulder. They discuss the article. Luisa jabs at the paper with her finger a few times.
“The governor. He meets with the interior minister for Mexico. They speak more about the drug cartels and the violence.”
I take a closer look. The interior minister looks Asian.
“He is Mexican. He is Miguel Chong. His mother is from Chinese descent, but he is from Hidalgo state.” Roberto says.
I don’t bother trying to defend myself or deny that this is exactly what I was wondering. Roberto knows I expect all Mexicans to look the same, as if mine were the only multicultural country. And here I’ve been scolding Clem about her insular worldview.
“What are they saying about the drug cartels?”
“They speak of increasing police presence in Jalisco state. Because of violence between gangs. They do not like the recent activities of these two cartels. They do not want Puerto Vallarta to become like Acapulco. But here it is still safe. Mr. Chong, he wants to control production of flowers from where they make the heroin. The poppies? So if the government controls the flowers, and makes drugs for medicines, it stops trafficking and weakens the gangs. But it is still far away and maybe happens never. For now, they bring in more police to stop the drug trade.”
“Do you worry about all this?” I ask him. If I opened my local paper every day to this sort of local news I might never leave the house.
“Like I say, it is safe here. And the violence, it is between gang members only. So no. I do not worry. And you do not worry.”
“So you feel like it’s a safe place to live? With a family?”
Luisa
says something to Roberto. He replies with a long string of words—I can’t even tell when one sentence ends and another begins. As I have many times in my life, I feel embarrassed for having elected to take French instead of Spanish in high school—an indefensible choice for a Southern Californian.
“Yes. We live here always. Our son, he is now in Mexico City. He is student there.”
“Your son?”
“Yes.”
“You mean, you have a son . . . with Luisa?”
They share another quick exchange and a laugh.
“Yes. She is my wife.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“And Enrique,” he says. “He is my brother.”
I didn’t know that either. I’m not sure why this surprises me. It’s not like I spend my time in the kitchen asking them about their lives, I’m far too concerned with where to go shopping and what to do when it rains. I haven’t spent a single minute imagining who they are outside of this house. I caught a glimpse last night when they passed through the dining room in jeans and sweatshirts, but I didn’t let my imagination follow them beyond the large wooden front doors.
“Is Enrique married, too?”
“Yes, but his wife takes his children to the United States. He does not see them, but he will soon we hope. Enrique helps to take care of our parents here.”
I wonder if Enrique’s absence from the kitchen means that right now he’s off making all our beds, putting fresh flowers on our tables; if maybe I was wrong about the woman’s touch.
I feel like I should say something more, but I’m not sure what, so I take my empty coffee cup to the sink and I wash it and place it on the counter.
“Gracias para los breakfast, Luisa,” I say.
She smiles at me. “De nada.”
* * *
• • •
I FIND INGRID ALONE, reading in the main floor living room. She’s on to another children’s book. Another Newbery runner-up. Another book I haven’t read.
I ask her about it.
“I love it,” she says. “I’m not sure what the committee was thinking this year. All of the silver medals are far better than the book they actually gave the award to.”
“I guess consensus is difficult. Maybe it was a compromise?”
She shrugs, pulls the throw blanket up to her chest and puts the book down on the table. She’s settling in for a nice long chat. I hesitate to sit down with her. I’m still rattled by what Peter told me about Solly and Gavriella. The weight of that knowledge is a boulder in my stomach.
When Solly started his affair with Ingrid, Peter didn’t tell me. He kept Solly’s secret. He didn’t want to put me in an awkward position with Maureen, who, unlike Ingrid, was a true, close friend. Peter told me later that he pushed Solly to come clean, that it would have gone on much longer had he not spent many nights over many drinks with Solly playing out the different scenarios and convincing him he needed to make a choice. I always wondered if Peter tried talking Solly into choosing Maureen, into staying married to his wife, to the woman he once loved so fiercely that he sobbed through his own wedding vows.
It didn’t matter that I didn’t know about the affair; on some level I know Maureen still holds it against me. Our four lives were interwoven in such a way that our relationship couldn’t avoid some collateral damage from such an ugly implosion. And by virtue of the fact that I am married to Peter, I am forever a part of the universe of Solly from which she needed escape. But once she resettled in New York and things starting turning out as well as they did for her—new job, new friends, new gorgeous apartment, new string of boyfriends ending in one serious, unreasonably handsome one—we started to rebuild what we’d lost, text by text, email by email, and brief visit by brief visit. But of course, things were never quite the same between us.
I sit down in the chair across from Ingrid and I push what I know out of my head. What do I know anyway? Peter didn’t really tell me anything. I chose to take Peter’s silence in response to my question about Solly as a yes, because in all our years together we’ve developed a shorthand. But I don’t know for certain, do I? And if I don’t know something for certain, how can I tell her about what I don’t know?
“The Printz winner, though,” Ingrid says. “Now, that’s a book that deserved the gold.”
I haven’t read this either so I just nod in agreement. There’s really no excuse for a writer of YA fiction not reading the book that’s been crowned best book of the year written for young adults. Before I wrote my first book, I’d never even heard of the Printz Award. It’s better that way. Who needs to know about the awards you’ll never get? But clearly, Ingrid is doing her homework. She’s devouring the prizewinners. And who knows? Her book could very well wind up with a sticker on it one day, too.
I look at Ingrid stretched out on the sofa. She’s just a bit too long for it so she bends her knees and props her feet up on the armrest. She’s wearing gray sweatpants and a blue long-sleeved T-shirt, not a hint of makeup. Her hair is wild. With all those proteins and the limited complex carbohydrates, with the absence of all that sugar and alcohol, her skin glows even more than usual. She’s written a book I stayed up late reading and woke up early to finish. And yet, when I look at her, what I feel is pity. She’s thrown her lot in with a man who will never give her the whole of his attention and affection, a man whose appetite is too large, a man for whom there is never quite enough of anything.
“I started your book last night,” I say.
She sits up quickly and the throw blanket falls to the floor.
“Oh. Wow. I’m . . . nervous.”
“Don’t be. It’s really good so far. I really enjoyed what I’ve read.”
“For real?”
“Yes, for real.”
“Because, like I said in my email, I don’t want you to protect my feelings.”
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I’ll be honest.”
“Brutally honest.”
“I’m against brutality.”
She laughs. “Solly is the only one who’s read it and he says he loves it, but you know Solly. He’s such a softy. He loves everything I do.”
Oh, Ingrid. Poor Ingrid. Beautiful, naïve, talented Ingrid. I decide to dole out a little bit more.
“Well, from what I’ve read so far, I think you may be onto something pretty special.”
She brings her hands up to her face to cover her huge smile, like Clementine and her friends used to do in middle school, like smiling is shameful, something to hide.
I debate saying more. Admitting I’ve finished it. Admitting I admire and envy her talent. Admitting I haven’t stopped thinking about her book except for when I’ve been thinking about the fact that her husband may be cheating on her. But I don’t. For whatever reason, I’m not ready yet. I need to look at it again. Make sure I’m not so disenchanted with my own unfinished book that any completed manuscript shines like a polished diamond.
“Jenna, I don’t even know what to say. This means . . . everything.”
“Of course,” I say, and I wonder if maybe Solly sobbed through his wedding vows because promising fidelity to one person for the rest of his life was too unbearably sad.
* * *
• • •
I FIGURE THIS HOUSE has to have a Scrabble set somewhere so I go down to search the TV room and find Malcolm looking through a shelf of old tapes.
“I’m trying to curate the perfect double feature,” he says. He holds A Nightmare on Elm Street in one hand and Meet Me in St. Louis in the other. “What do you think?”
“I think that never, in the history of humankind, has there been a viewing of those two movies back-to-back.”
“They also have a copy of Grease, but it’s in Spanish and it’s called, no joke: Vaselina.”
“Now, that I would like to watch.”
�
�Wanna join? Clem is on her way.”
I think for a second about taking him up on his offer, but this was their plan for the rainy day, not mine. I don’t want to intrude. I shouldn’t intrude. “No, thanks. I have a date to kick my husband’s ass in Scrabble.”
He sits down on the arm of the sofa. “Well, I wouldn’t want to get in the way of a good ass kicking.” His smile is wide. The kid drew a full house: he’s got his father’s magnetism and his mother’s looks.
“You know, Malcolm, it’s really nice to spend some time with you. I’m sorry I don’t get to New York to see your mom as often as I’d like.”
“Well, it’s not as if she comes out to L.A. to see you, so you probably shouldn’t beat yourself up.”
This is true. As far as I know, Maureen hasn’t returned to Los Angeles since she filled a New York–bound extralong moving truck with half of their marital property.
“So how do you get on with Bruno?”
Malcolm shrugs. “He’s chill. And his place is sick. Or I guess it’s our place now. It’s, like, a block from the High Line. So that’s cool.”
“Sounds like you got pretty lucky with the stepparents.”
“Bruno isn’t my stepdad. He’s just my mom’s boyfriend. But, yeah. I guess so.”
Is that hesitation I hear in his voice? And is that hesitation I hear about Bruno or is it about Ingrid?
“It can’t be easy for you,” I say. “Living so far away from your father. And your little brother. I’m sorry you’ve had to go through that.” I’m drawing on my days working with foster kids. All those hours spent in temporary living rooms practicing the listening and reflection skills I learned in the mandatory two-day training I attended before getting handed a full social worker’s caseload. I hear how this is hard for you. I hear that you are unhappy. I hear that you wish your life was different.
“You don’t need to feel sorry for me, Jenna.”
“That’s not—”
Tomorrow There Will Be Sun Page 12
