“Can I have a cigarette?” she said.
The pack he handed to her had a cartoon character on it, some writing in Spanish.
“Is it even legal to have cartoon characters on cigarettes?” she said, but Porter was already on his stomach, his face pressed into the towel. She palmed the pack back and forth, eyeing Porter’s pale back. He wasn’t even a little handsome.
Alice adjusted her bikini straps. They were digging into her shoulders, leaving marks. She surveyed the indifferent group back on the patio, Porter’s prone body, and decided to take her top off. She chickened her arms behind herself and unhooked her bikini, hunching over so that it fell off her breasts into her lap. She was having fun, wasn’t she? She folded the top into her bag as calmly as she could, sinking back onto the towel. The air and heat on her breasts were even and constant, and she let herself feel pleased and languid, happy with the picture she made.
Alice woke with Porter grinning at her.
“European-style, huh?” he said.
How long had he been watching her?
Porter offered her his beer. “I barely had any, if you want it. I can get another.”
She shook her head.
He shrugged and took a long drink. Oona was walking down by the shoreline, the ocean foaming thin around her ankles. “I hate those one-pieces she wears,” Porter said.
“She looks great.”
“She’s embarrassed about her tits,” Porter said.
Alice gave him a sickly smile, and pushed her sunglasses back up her nose, crossing her arms over her chest in the least obvious way she could manage. They both turned at a commotion further down the sand—some stranger had made his way to this private beach. The man seemed a little crazy, gray-haired, wearing a suit jacket. Probably homeless. She squinted: there was an iguana on his shoulder.
“What the fuck?” Porter said, laughing.
The man stopped one of Oona’s friends and then moved on to another one.
Porter brushed sand from his palms. “I’m going inside.”
The man was now approaching Oona.
Alice looked toward Porter but he was already heading back, unconcerned.
The man was saying something to Oona, something detailed. Alice didn’t know if she was supposed to do something. But soon enough the man moved away from Oona and was now heading toward Alice. She hurried her bikini top back on.
“Want to take a picture?” the man asked. “One dollar.” The iguana was ridged and ancient-looking and when the man shook his shoulder in a practiced way, the iguana bobbed up and down, its jowls beating like a heart.
The last time she ever did it, the man wanted to meet at 4 p.m. in the parking lot of the big grocery store in Alice’s neighborhood. It was a peculiar time of day, that sad hour when the dark seems to rise up from the ground but the sky is still bright and blue. The shadows of the bushes against the houses were getting deeper and starting to merge with the shadows of the trees. She wore cotton shorts and a plain sweatshirt from work, not even bothering to look nice. Her eyes were a little pink from her contacts, a rosy wash on the whites that made it look like she’d been crying.
She walked the ten blocks to the parking lot, the light hovering in the tangle of blackberry vines that crawled up the alleyways. Even the cheapo apartment buildings were lovely at that hour, their faded colors subtle and European. She passed the nicer homes, catching slivers of their lush backyards through the slats of the high fences, the koi ponds swishy with fish. Some nights she walked around the neighborhood, near the humid rim of the reservoir. It was a pleasure to see inside those nighttime houses. Each one like a primer on being human, on what choices you might make. As if life might follow the course of your wishes. A piano lesson she had once watched, the repeated scales, a girl with a meaty braid down her back. The houses where TVs spooked the windows.
Alice checked her phone—she was a few minutes early. Other shoppers were pushing carts back into jangled place, the automatic doors sliding open and open. She lingered on an island in the lot, watching the cars. She checked her phone again. Her little brother had texted: a smiley face. He had never left their home state, which made her obliquely sad.
When a tan sedan pulled into the lot, she could tell by the way the car slowed and bypassed an open space that it was the man looking for her.
Alice waved, foolishly, and the man pulled up next to her. The passenger window was down so she could see his face, though she still had to stoop to make eye contact. The man was bland-looking, wearing a fleece half-zip pullover and khakis. Like someone’s husband, though Alice noticed no ring. He had signed his emails Mark but hadn’t realized or maybe didn’t care that his email address identified him as Brian.
The car looked immaculate until she caught sight of clothes in the backseat and a mail carton and a few soda bottles tipped on their side. It occurred to her that perhaps this man lived in his car. He seemed impatient, no matter that they had both gotten here early. He sighed, performing his own inconvenience. She had a paper bag with the underwear inside the Ziploc.
“Should I just—” she started to hand the bag to him.
“Get in,” he interrupted, reaching over to pop the passenger door. “Just for a second.”
Alice hesitated but not as long as she should have. She ducked in, shutting the door behind her. Who would try to kidnap someone at 4 p.m.? In a busy parking lot? In the midst of all this unyielding sunshine?
“There,” the man said when Alice was sitting beside him, like now he was satisfied. His hands landed briefly on the steering wheel, then hovered at his chest. He seemed afraid to look at her.
She tried to imagine how she would spin this story to Oona on Saturday. It was easy to predict—she would describe the man as older and uglier than he was, adopting a tone of incredulous contempt. She and Oona were used to telling each other stories like this, to dramatizing incidents so that everything took on an ironic, comical tone, their lives a series of encounters that happened to them but never really affected them, at least in the retelling, their personas unflappable and all-seeing. When she’d had sex with John that one time after work, she heard her future self narrating the whole thing to Oona—how his penis was thin and jumpy and how he couldn’t come so he finally rolled out and worked his own dick with efficient, lonely habit. It had been bearable because it would become a story, something condensed and communicable. Even funny.
Alice put the bag on the console between herself and the man. He looked at the bag from the corner of his eye, a look that was maybe purposefully restrained, like he was proving he didn’t care too much about its contents. No matter that he had found himself in a parking lot in the unforgiving clarity of midafternoon to buy someone’s underwear.
The man took the bag but didn’t, as she feared, open it in front of her. He tucked it in the pocket of his side door. When he turned back to her, she sensed his disgust—not for himself, but for her. She no longer served a purpose, and every moment she stayed in the car was just another moment that reminded him of his own weakness. It occurred to her that he might do some harm to her. Even here. She looked out the windshield at the cars beyond, the trees. It would be dinnertime at her mother’s house. Her mother steaming rice in a bag and putting out placemats that easily wiped clean. Asking Henry if he had a good movie in mind for after dinner. Henry loved documentaries about Hitler or particularly exotic animals. It suddenly seemed nice to load the dishwasher and wish for small things.