“You are really good at that,” he said, and then kicked off his flip-flops and settled into one of the lounge chairs.
“Thanks!” Carmen said without stopping. “I can show you, if you want.”
Lawrence squeezed out a dollop of sunscreen into his palm and began to cover himself—arms, legs, cheeks, nose—with a thin coating. It was the expensive stuff, chalky white and impermeable.
Bobby stared. “What is that? Zinc?”
“What, this?” Lawrence said, turning the tube over. “I don’t know. It’s made of things I can’t pronounce.”
“Don’t you ever want a tan?” Bobby swam over to the side of the pool. “Sometimes I go to the beach with just tanning oil and fall asleep. It’s the best. You wake up and you’re totally bronzed. Like, a statue.”
“That sounds like an excellent way to get skin cancer.”
“Well, yeah, I guess.” Bobby did some flutter kicks, his feet sending little plumes of water into the air. Lawrence tried to imagine having a baby and then watching the baby grow into someone who used tanning oil. It wasn’t as bad as smoking crack, but it did seem to signify major differences in ideology. Bobby dunked his head underwater and then hoisted himself out of the pool. “I’m gonna hit the showers, guys. See you in a bit.”
Carmen grunted, and Lawrence nodded. For a few minutes, they stayed in silence, Carmen doing her push-ups and Lawrence doing nothing at all, just staring off into space and watching craggy faces emerge from the mountains, which happened as often as they appeared in clouds. There was a man with an enormous beard, a cat curled up into the shape of a doughnut, a Samoan mask, a sleeping baby.
“How long have you guys been together now?” Lawrence heard himself ask. He didn’t want to read the novel he’d brought outside. It was the next movie he was working on, a period- piece adaptation. Nineteenth-century Brits, lots of party scenes with scores of extras, lots of horses. Those were always the worst. Every page turned into nothing but dollar signs—Lawrence read the cost of crinolines, of vintage lace, of imported parasols. Werewolves weren’t great, either, but packages of fake hair were less expensive than real dogs for a hunting scene. His favorite movies of all were the tiny ones where the actors all wore their own clothes, brushed their own hair or didn’t, and everyone rented a country house for a week and slept all piled on top of one another like a litter of newborn kittens. He could do the accounting for those in his sleep.
“Me and Bobby?” Carmen sat with her legs wide open in straddle position and leaned forward. “Seven years, almost.”
“Wow, really?” Lawrence said. “Was he still in college?”
Carmen laughed. “I know, he was a baby. He only had one set of silverware. One fork, one knife, one spoon. And then a drawer full of plastic ones that he got from take-out places. It was like going out with a kid in high school, I swear.” She swung her torso over one leg and then crab-walked her fingers to the toe of her sneaker. “Fucking hamstrings.”
“Not to be rude, but how old were you when you met? We have a big age gap, too, and people ask me all the time. I don’t mean to be offensive.” Lawrence didn’t actually know if he meant to be offensive or not, but he was curious. He hated when people asked him the same question—young men phrased it in such a way that meant they thought Charlie was old, and old men phrased it in such a way that meant that they thought that Lawrence was nothing more than a blow-up toy, available for sex at all hours, in any orifice. It was nothing like either of those things. Lawrence never thought about the ten years between them except when they were playing Trivial Pursuit and Charles suddenly knew which actors were on which television shows, and who had been whose vice president. In their practical, daily life, the age difference mattered as much as who finished the toilet paper and needed to remember to replace it with a fresh roll, which is to say, if it ever mattered, it was only for a split second, and then it was forgotten. They had worried about Charles’s age, for the birth mothers, and now that they’d made it past the first round, Lawrence hoped that it wouldn’t be the thing standing in their way. They could change apartments, or neighborhoods, lots of things, but they couldn’t change that.
“Well, I’m forty now, so I guess I was thirty-four? Maybe thirty-three? I can’t remember what month he joined the gym.”
“And were you pretty serious right away?”
“I guess.” Carmen closed her legs. She reached up and pulled the elastic out of her ponytail, shaking her hair loose. It hung in awkward damp curls around her shoulders, kinking out at funny angles where the rubber band had held it in place. “We try to keep it casual, but with respect, you know?”
Lawrence didn’t, and shook his head.
“I mean, we’re exclusive, but for the first few years, it was more like, we’ll see. Now we’re really solid, though.”
“I gotcha.” It sounded like bullshit, like the sort of thing men with several second-string girlfriends might say. Lawrence had a dozen friends of just that description, men who refused to commit, because what was the point? But his friends were older, and only a handful of them were interested in having children. Life would be so much more interesting if one could ask all the questions one wanted to and expect honest answers. Lawrence just smiled with his lips closed.
Carmen pushed herself up to stand. It was still light, but the needles on the pine trees had started to shift from glittery to dark, which meant that the sun was saying farewell for the day. “What about you? When did you guys decide to get married? I mean, when did you know you were ready?”
“When we could.” Lawrence would have had a thousand weddings to Charles. They’d had a party each time a law passed, and one with their parents at City Hall, followed by a giant party at a restaurant in SoHo where Charles had drawn murals on the walls, so they were all surrounding themselves, smiling in two places at once, Lawrence and Charles and even Franny. That was one thing Lawrence hadn’t known when he was young, when he had fantasies about his Dream Wedding, back a hundred years ago when he’d stolen all of his sister’s Ken dolls and laid them on top of each other on his bunk bed, way up there where no one would see. Lawrence didn’t know then, and wouldn’t know for decades, that marriage meant sealing your fate with so many other people—the in-laws and the grandfathered-in friends of the bosom, the squealing children who would grow into adults who required wedding gifts of their own.
“That sounds nice,” Carmen said. She wasn’t really listening anymore, but instead halfway into her own Dream Wedding. It would be a small affair, maybe on the beach, with a reception inside afterward. All of her Cubano relatives would want a band, and so they would have one, the men in their guayaberas, the women with flowers behind their ears. Even though Carmen herself didn’t eat sugar, her mother would insist on a cake—tres leches—and everyone would have a piece. Bobby would pretend to shove it into her face, but instead feed her the tiniest bite, knowing full well that each swallow meant fifty more jumping jacks the next day. But on their wedding day, she would eat a whole piece and not care, she’d be that happy. Together, she and Bobby could be a training team, maybe someday leave Total Body Power and start their own gym. Carmen had already started thinking about names.
Clive. Clifton. Clarence. Lawrence had always imagined the baby being a boy, maybe because they were both men, maybe because he wanted a girl so badly that it felt like bad luck to even daydream about the possibility. Alphonse wasn’t right, but they could change it. C names felt natural, and slightly old-fashioned in a way that he liked. For a girl, he liked something more whimsicaclass="underline" Luella, Birdie, or maybe even something cinematic: Scarlett. A couple they knew had recently been chosen by a birth mother and were now delirious from lack of sleep, happy as clams. That was all Lawrence wanted—the chance to stare through bleary, four a.m. eyes at a slumbering Charles, wishing that he’d wake up and feed the baby. He could smell the sour spit-up, the foulness of the soiled diapers. He wanted it all.