“We’ll be OK,” he said.
“Got it,” said Paul. It was larger than I’d thought, and the plastic was light gray, not white, as it had seemed from a distance. It was tied like a gift with burlap string. “It’s light,” said Paul. He laughed. “It’s way too light.”
Paul brought the package to the bow and set it down. Dennis knelt across from him, and Marse and I watched over their shoulders. Dennis used a key to tear the plastic, then Paul spread the tear open with both hands. The plastic was thick; he had to put some muscle into it. When a portion of the contents was visible, Marse said, with unconcealed disappointment, “Newspaper.”
“What’s inside?” I said.
“It’s just a newspaper,” said Paul. He widened the tear in the plastic and pulled out a crisp, neatly folded New York Times. “Sunday edition,” he said.
“There’s more,” said Dennis.
Inside the package, bundled in the same gray plastic, was a smaller parcel. This one was tightly packed and lumpy. “Here we are,” said Paul.
Dennis was tentative with the keys this time. He made a small tear in the corner of the parcel and widened the tear with his thumb. Paul hovered impatiently. Inside the widening hole, something silver reflected the sunlight, and I caught a whiff of the contents. Dennis stepped back to let Paul take over. What Paul revealed, after a few seconds of working at the package, was six or seven whole fish—bonitos, I believe. Silver scales came away on Paul’s hands.
“Fish?” I said.
Dennis was delighted. “What the hell?” he said.
Marse picked up the New York Times and folded back the sections, one by one. In a crease of the classifieds, she found an envelope. Paul started to grab it but she stepped away from him. She read: “ ‘Marc and Kathleen—Another touch of civilization couldn’t hurt. Hope the champagne didn’t get too bubbly in flight. Crossed fingers that you catch something big with this bait. Any marlin yesterday? Happy anniversary, Mimi and Ronald.’ ”
“Holy shit,” said Paul.
“Anniversary?” said Dennis.
We dumped the bait into the bay. Dennis started the engine and we headed back to the stilt house. Paul and Marse sat side by side on the gunwale, their legs dangling in the well of the boat. Within a few weeks, they would split up. I never had any reason to believe this had anything to do with me. She wouldn’t know what had passed between me and Paul until many years later, long past the time when it would have made any difference. And although Dennis would see less and less of him, eventually Paul would burst back into all our lives and stay there, a surprising but permanent fixture. All around us, couples whose weddings we’d attended, whose unions we’d toasted, broke up: Kyle, who’d married a potter named Julia shortly after I’d moved to Miami, was first; then one of Dennis’s law partners, with whom we’d become friends; then Benjamin O’Dell, Bette’s ex-fiancé, who’d married a girl he’d met while traveling in England.
A month later, Dennis sorted out the paperwork with the boat, and we sold it and started saving for another. With the money from the sale, we paid off the addition on the house. Grady offered his boat when we wanted it, which meant more outings with Dennis’s parents, which I didn’t mind. Margo loved being with them—Grady carried her piggyback and never told her to keep her voice down, and Gloria kept sugary cereals on hand and let her try on her good jewelry. We kept our membership in the yacht club—Grady had gone to bat for us, and declining would have been humiliating—and for a long while we didn’t take vacations or go to restaurants, and we put off sending Margo to summer camp. Whenever I grew frustrated with living lean during that time—and this would not be the last tight period during our life together—I reminded myself of the boat we’d never really owned, and thought of the choices we were making in opposition to the choices we could have been making, and I was relieved. It was so easy, I understood now, to take a wrong turn.
That afternoon, before returning to Miami, Marse and Paul napped in the downstairs hammock and Dennis went into the big bedroom with a book. I finished packing our things and made light trips to the boat, prolonging the process to have something to do. There was a lot of garbage to tow in to shore. There was always, no matter what efforts we made, a lot of garbage. At one point when I came downstairs, Paul was alone in the hammock. “Where is Marse?” I said.
“I have no idea.”
I put down the bag I was carrying and looked around. The downstairs bathroom door was open and she wasn’t on the boat or the dock. I opened the door to the generator room, but there was only the loud motor and the many shelves of salt-crusted shoes. I went back to the hammock. Marse could certainly handle herself, but nevertheless I felt protective of her. “Really, where is she?”
“I really don’t know.” He had an arm under his head. The hammock swung leisurely.
“Get up.”
“Why?”
“Go find your girlfriend.”
He smiled. “She can take care of herself.”
“I know she can, but I’d prefer to know roughly where everyone is at any given time.”
He gave a mock look of concern. “You think she drowned?” He was baiting me; of course he knew where she was. He sat up in the hammock and I stepped back. “I don’t bite,” he whispered. I heard Dennis talking upstairs, then Marse’s laugh. Paul said, “I have no intention of hurting Marse, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”
I took a breath. “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”
He was sitting down, but still I felt dwarfed by his intensity and charm and looks. “I can be discreet,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt Dennis either.”
I didn’t say anything.
“It’s been a while,” he said, “me wanting you.”
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“You think you’ll never do it, Frances?”
There was a warm wind coming from the north. I willed it to carry our words, and my memory of them, out to sea. “No,” I said, “I’ll never do it.”
His voice was calm. “You will,” he said. “One day you will, and you’ll realize that what people say about it isn’t true. You won’t feel guilty, you’ll just feel happy and horny and you’ll think back and realize you could have done it with me.”
He was broad and sexy. He would be good at sex, I guessed. He would put his heart into it. He would be generous and complimentary, would inspire an eagerness to please, a dismantling of inhibition. He would moan without checking himself. He was a man who loved plants, who worked for himself, who had great sex: I felt a brief flush of desire for him.
When I didn’t say anything, he put his hands in his pockets and shrugged, then looked off. “That goddamn package,” he said. He seemed truly to shift his attention. In the end, he turned away and walked upstairs, and I remained, overcome by sorrow for many reasons, not the least of which was this: I had a feeling that Paul was right about what he’d said. We were still at the start of a long road together, Dennis and me. The future was still so murky. For a long moment it seemed almost inevitable that our happiness would not last, could not last, and that at some point, after Margo left home or before, I would find myself in a similar situation, and this time I would want it badly enough to let it happen. And—this thought was incredibly sad to me—I might not even feel terribly ashamed. I might come to consider it just one episode in the life of the marriage, just another wave in the windy channel. Not a hurricane at all.
1982
On a Saturday evening in February of Margo’s sixth-grade year, Dennis and I drove her to a slumber party in a gated community called CocoPlum, ten minutes from our house by car. The hostess was a girl named Trisha Weintraub, whom I’d met only once. Trisha was a year ahead of Margo in school. When we drove up, her mother, Judy, was sitting on the terra-cotta porch with her boyfriend, drinking white wine. Judy’s boyfriend wore a loose linen shirt unbuttoned to his sternum, and Judy wore hammered gold earrings and an embroidered caftan. When I complimented her on the top, she told me she’d brought it back from Lima, where she’d been on retreat. Dennis asked the pertinent questions: How many girls were sleeping over? Was Trisha excited to be turning thirteen? (Margo was still only eleven.) Did Judy have our number, in case? Would any boys be dropping by? (He managed to slip this last one in jokingly; if I’d asked, I would have seemed uptight.) Judy didn’t say anything about it, but I assumed that she’d heard Dennis was unemployed. All the ladies must have heard—it was exactly the kind of thing that got around.