Sylvia dragged herself into the dining room, moving as if her bare feet were made of glue. Glue that very recently had been seen almost entirely naked.
“This is Joan, he’s going to be your Spanish tutor,” Franny said, gesturing to the man, who Sylvia now was forced to shake hands with.
“Hi,” Sylvia said. Joan’s grip was a little bit soft, which made it easier to keep breathing. She might have died if he had a handshake as good as his hair.
“Very nice to meet you,” Joan said back. There was no wink, no acknowledgment of the run-in at the bathroom door. Sylvia slid into the chair next to her mother without taking her eyes off him, just in case he did make a gesture that indicated he had seen parts of her body that he shouldn’t have.
Franny had slept with a Spaniard once, when she was at Barnard. He was visiting for the year, and lived in the dormitory on 116th Street, just across the street. His name was Pedro—or was it Paulo?—and he had not been an expert lover, but then again, neither was she, yet. Like most things, sex got better with age until one hit a certain plateau, and then it was like breakfast, unlikely to change unless one ran out of milk and was forced to improvise. All Franny could remember was the way he murmured at her in Spanish, a language she didn’t speak, and the sound of those r’s rolling off his soft, persistent tongue. Franny had hoped for some love letters in Spanish when he returned home, but by the time he left New York, they weren’t even seeing each other anymore, and so she hadn’t gotten any. Pedro-Paulo hadn’t been nearly as good-looking as Joan, anyway. The boy at her dining room table was built like an athlete and wanted to be a doctor; he had a strong chin with the slightest hint of a cleft at the center. He hadn’t come from church—he’d come from playing tennis with his father. They played at a tennis center about fifteen minutes away, the home turf for Mallorca’s most famous son, Nando Filani, who had won two grand slams already this season. Now all Franny could do was picture Joan in a sweat-drenched T-shirt, the muscles in his arms flexing as he ran for a shot. If Sylvia had been a different kind of girl, Franny might have been worried about leaving her alone with Joan for so many hours over the next two weeks, but things being as they were, she wasn’t.
“Mom?”
“Sorry, sweetie. Did you say something?”
“We’re going to start tomorrow at eleven. Is that okay?”
“Perfecto!” Franny clapped twice. “I think this is going to be so much fun.”
They all stood up to walk Joan to the door, and Franny grabbed Sylvia by the hand as he climbed into his car and did a three-point turn to drive back down the hill.
“Wasn’t he gorgeous?”
Sylvia shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know. I didn’t really notice.” She spun on her heels and ran up the stairs to her bedroom, shutting the door with a loud clunk. As Franny suspected, she had nothing to worry about. It was only after Joan had gone home and Sylvia had gone upstairs that Franny realized that the age difference between her and the tutor was as wide as the difference between Jim and that girl, which made her audibly gulp, as if she could swallow her sickened feeling like a bit of traveler’s indigestion.
Everyone agreed that an early dinner was best. While she was boiling the water for the pasta, Franny put some olives out in a shallow bowl, with a second small bowl for the pits. She sliced the dried sausage and ate a few pieces before returning her attention to the capers and cheese. The sausage was a little bit spicy, with flecks of fat that melted on her tongue. Franny loved cooking in the summertime, the ease of almost every ingredient being at room temperature. She opened the jar of capers and let a dozen or so fall into a large bowl, into which she then grated some of the cheese. That was all they needed—oil and starch, fat and salt. Tomorrow they would eat vegetables, but tonight they were truly on vacation, and eating only for pleasure. She should have tried to find some ice cream for dessert, but they could do that tomorrow, when everyone was there. Charles loved to buy the crazy local flavors, always: the dulce de leche, the Brazil nut, the tamarind. She opened and closed the kitchen cabinets, looking for a colander, and found it on the third try. The water was still only at a simmer, and so Franny kept opening and closing cabinet doors, just to see what else was on hand: a mandoline, pots large enough to boil lobsters, lost attachments to a stand mixer long forgotten in a dusty corner. The last cabinet she opened had two pull-out drawers stocked with pantry items. An extra box of dried pasta had been in here, and the olive oil. Franny pawed through, seeing what else she could add to their supper, what else was hiding. A jar of Nutella was in the back row, next to a crusty-looking jar of peanut butter. Franny looked out the window over the sink: Jim and Sylvia were still swimming, already cultivating the healthy glow they got every summer, no matter the weather or the location. Some people were just built that way, as though they could happen upon a triathlon and complete it without any training whatsoever. Even though Sylvia was bookish and wan for most of the year, eschewing organized sports of any and all kinds, she was her father’s daughter, competitive and built for physical exertion, whether she liked it or not.
Franny plucked the jar of Nutella out of the drawer and unscrewed the cap. It wasn’t even half full—hardly enough for the three of them to spread on toast in the morning, if they’d had a loaf of bread. She was almost impressed with Gemma for entertaining such base pleasures, but it had probably been bought by some other guest, or for a small child’s sophomoric palate. Franny plunged her pointer finger into the wide mouth of the jar and dragged it around the edges, until there was a large crashing wave of the creamy stuff in between her knuckles. She put the whole thing in her mouth and pulled her finger out slowly, with a low moan. Franny screwed the top back on the jar and hid it in a different cabinet, one where no one else would look, just in case.
The setting sun had shifted over the mountain, and now Jim and Sylvia swam through the shade on their laps back and forth in the swimming pool. From Gallant’s current issue: “Why Doing Laps Will Make You Live to 100,” written by a novelist with a weak breaststroke and a spare tire, a piece Jim had commissioned because he thought it sounded like something Franny would like. (Gallant was always looking for more female eyes.) Jim’s fingers began to prune, but he didn’t mind. From the deep end of the pool, he could see mountains and trees and the back face of their little pink house. An airplane flew overhead, and both Sylvia and Jim were grateful not to be on it, not to be leaving anytime soon. A good swimming pool could do that—make the rest of the world seem impossibly insignificant, as far away as the surface of the moon.
“It’s not bad, huh?”
Sylvia swam over to the far lip of the pool and hoisted herself up on her elbows.
“It’ll do.” She wiped the water out of her eyes. “What time do Bobby and whatsherface get here? And Charles?”
“In the morning, like we did. They’ll be here early.” If they’d been in New York, standing on opposite sides of 75th Street, they wouldn’t have been able to hear each other: the cars, the people, the airplanes, the bikes, the noise of everyday life in the city. They hadn’t been talking as much as usual, anyway, not lately. Now they were twenty feet apart and could hear each other perfectly. If they’d shouted, their voices would have bounced off the trees lining the mountain and echoed into the valley below, into Pigpen proper, maybe all the way to the ocean.