“We’re settled all right.”
“I see how he looks at you. In love, like he’s afraid you’ll disappear.”
Was that true? On top of all his other worries, did he have to worry about her? “He knows I’m not going anywhere.”
“An outsider sees things. My mom says I have the sight.”
Ann got up and dusted the sand off, pleased despite herself. Although she didn’t believe a word, it was falsely reassuring, like a good fortune cookie.
She headed back to the fare, looking forward to seeing Richard, maybe apologizing for being a little too hormonal, too type-A lately, but when she got there, the room was dark and he was asleep.
* * *
She woke early to the sound of a boat engine. Outside, John Stubb Byron and his silent knitting wife hurried onto the boat as if they were making a getaway. Cooked waved at Ann, and she waved back vigorously, as if to say, I see you, I see you. The boat motored out of the lagoon.
Later at breakfast, Ann asked about the couple.
“They say it’s too crowded here.” Loren lifted his thin shoulders and dropped them in a noncommittal way.
Only Ann and Richard showed up for breakfast. Mango was served, a splendid thing — voluptuously split open, orange flesh shiny under Ann’s spoon. She never ate mangoes at home; she didn’t know why. She avoided them at the grocery store. They seemed exotic, difficult with their thick greenish-yellowish-red skin bruised like a sunset, and the large pit pinioned down within its fibery strings. A mystery how to prepare one, but here the fruit was opened, diced, ready and willing. Here mangoes were lovely. She promised herself that, from now on, she would eat them at home to remember being on the island. While they lingered over a third cup of coffee, Loren brought Ann a fax from the main resort. It was yet another note from Javi:
Spent the night in jail. Lorna bailed me out. Don’t worry — everything will be fixed. BTW, Lorna’s not as stuck up as she used to be. Hope you don’t mind me asking her out.
She balled up the paper, but there was nowhere to throw it, so she stuck it in the pocket of her cover-up. Titi glared impatiently at their empty plates, willing them to get up. As Ann and Richard poked along the beach, they saw her and Cooked disappear into the trees.
It was strange to go from full-throttle panic to having nothing to do but worry about one’s tan lines. Should they have stayed back home and stuck it out? Should Ann even now be sitting in the prison of her job? Richard couldn’t bear the thought of his stillborn kitchen. Leisure time yawned in front of them, and without email or Internet, much less TV, Ann thought this might not have been the best idea to get their minds off things after all. Richard had not asked to see the fax, but now, alone, he hinted.
“That from Javi?”
“Yes.”
“Anything I should know?”
“He says, ‘Don’t worry.’”
Richard gave his irritating tight nod.
* * *
When Cooked came back from his morning “nap,” he offered to take the two couples over to a nearby deserted motu for snorkeling.
Ann declined.
“Are you sure?” Richard asked. His voice wheedled like a young boy’s asking permission to go play, not wanting to give away his excitement.
“Go enjoy yourself,” Ann said.
Richard hesitated, knowing solidarity was what was called for, but why couldn’t Ann go along with the program just this once? He craved the release of being back underwater.
She took his hand. “We can’t just sit and stare at each other, right? Nothing is going to get decided today.”
“Can you remind me again what we’re doing here?”
“Assessing our options.”
“It’s not criminal, though, what we did, right? It was our money.”
“It has more to do with intent. The truth is slippery sometimes.” Answered like a true lawyer.
Wende came out in a tiger-print bikini, wearing oversize dark glasses. She tiptoed, as if too much motion hurt. Cooked’s eyes grew big, grinning at the invitation that was Wende as she climbed into the boat. Titi stood in the kitchen doorway, sulking.
“Is there any way I could get some breakfast to go?” Wende asked.
Now Cooked climbed back out and waded through the water to the kitchen. Titi huffed inside. Sitting at the table, drinking coffee, Loren read his newspaper, ignoring the whole thing as if he were just another guest.
The previous night they had been kept up by the rapt, orgasmic sounds of lovemaking coming from Dex and Wende’s hut. It had woken Richard from his exhausted slumber, and Ann and he had lain side by side in bed, listening. They snickered at the obvious showmanship, although the truth was that it made each of them mourn the disappearance of lust in their own lives. Why couldn’t they have had the island to themselves so that they could concentrate on healing through nature, communing with the solitariness that was the essence of the desert island ideal, or at least be with civilized people who muffled their cries of pleasure in their pillows?
As they waited, Dex came out in long baggy swim trunks, whistling.
When Cooked carried out a paper bag of fruit and folded pancakes, Wende called across the water: “Thanks, Titi. You’re the best.”
Titi shrugged, not sorry in the least that she had spit on the pancakes. She watched the girl untie and shed her top as soon as the boat took off.
When it was gone, Loren looked up, surprised to find Ann still sitting on the sand, nursing a coffee she had cadged from the kitchen.
“You don’t go to swim with the fishies?”
“I don’t like water.”
Loren laughed. “Perfect.” He stared at her a moment. “I didn’t at first either. It scared me. But that’s why I eventually went in. I will make a picnic for us later.”
“I came for solitude. I can entertain myself quite well.”
“I’m a selfish man — I would like you to keep me company. If you change your mind, let me know.”
* * *
The boat motored out across the blue lagoon, and soon it was easy to forget that there was even such a thing as land — it seemed the entire earth was covered with this limpid, body-temperature bathwater. The sun overhead scalded, and Richard felt his skin starting to tingle from burn. He’d forgotten Ann’s sunblock. Although he tried to concentrate on the watery view ahead, Wende was slathering oil all over her lovely, bare brown self, smelling of coconut, and it was difficult not to be taken in by the display.
Dex had been pouting over the sudden departure of John Stubb Byron, especially without even a good-bye or the promised signed books. “But I get it,” he said. “Artist to artist. Mano-a-mano. We blew his cover, his anonymity. He couldn’t be the observer but became the observed. It’s an artist thing.”
“You always want people to recognize you,” Wende said.
That’s when Dex feigned sleep, wedged into the back of the boat, propped up on the life jackets that no one wore. The islands were very French in their disdain for safety regulations.
Richard knew how unworldly, how adolescent it was, but how did the French handle this topless thing? Their everydayness about it made it all the more erotic. Or maybe it was the other way around; maybe the puritanical streak in Americans made any sighting of off-limits flesh all the more seductive. His parents had been affectionate with each other, but he still marveled at the fact of his conception, as prudish as they were around the house: a peck on the cheek or an embarrassed hug passing for intimacy.
When Cooked, their instructor and safety monitor, dropped anchor at a picturesque cove, they put on flippers and masks, then jumped into the water while he waved them off and took a nap.
They paddled to a huge coral forest, watching clouds of parrot fish swim by. As beautiful as the sea life was, even more beautiful to Richard were the mermaid flutterings of Wende, her hair a halo around her. At one point, he grew so bold as to grab her ankle to point at a glorious burst of angelfish behind her bare back. She nodded in pleasure. He longed to place starfish over her perfect breasts, if not his own outspread, starfishlike hands. After half an hour, Dex signaled that he was ready to return to the boat. Wende went with him, but as much as Richard missed her company, he found he didn’t mind being alone. He was never alone in his regular, workaday life; working in a kitchen was a team activity.