The Vacationers: A Novel (12 page)

Franny refused to say anything about Antoni Vert other than that he’d been a tennis player in her day, Spain’s last best hope before Nando’s aggressive rise, but Joan was more forthcoming. He and Sylvia were theoretically working by the pool, but really they were just eating a giant bowl of grapes and an equally giant bowl of Franny’s homemade guacamole, despite the fact that Sylvia had teased her for making Mexican food in Spain, as if all Spanish-speaking cultures were the same. Joan sat with his legs crossed, his sunglasses perched on the top of his head. Sylvia sat with her feet in the pool.

“He was very famous,” Joan said. “All the women loved him. My mother, she loved him. Everyone. He was not as good as Filani, but he was more handsome. In the early eighties. Very long hair.”

“Huh.” Sylvia kicked her legs back and forth. “I mean, how interesting. My mother basically had a heart attack, but not as much of a heart attack as she’s going to have when she tries to
actually play tennis.” The pool water splashed onto her legs, which she hoped looked carefree, like a
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit shot, and not like she had just peed down her thigh.

Joan laughed, and then tossed a grape into his mouth. “What about you, Sylvia? No boyfriend at home in New York?”

Sylvia dunked a chip into the guacamole and then lowered it gently onto her tongue. It was hard to try to be seductive when they were talking about her actual life. She shook her head and chewed. “Everyone in New York sucks. Or at least everyone at my school. Do you say that, sucks? What’s the word for that?” She swallowed.

“
Me tienen hasta los huevos
. It means I’ve had it up to my balls. Same idea.”

“Yeah,” she said.
“Me tienen hasta los huevos.”

A small airplane flew across the sky, a trail of white smoke behind it, a blank skywritten message. Sylvia watched as the thin white line bisected the otherwise perfectly clear blue sky. It looked like a math equation—
x
plus
y
equals
z
. Avocado plus onion plus cilantro equaled guacamole. Skin plus sun equaled burn. Her father plus her mother equaled her.

It had been a weird spring at home. Franny was Franny, like always, the central figure in her own solar system, the maypole around which the rest of the world had to dance and twirl. It was Jim who had been acting strange. It didn’t make any sense when he’d suddenly retired.
Gallant
was his oxygen, his entertainment, his everything. Sylvia would wander through the house and find him sitting in a new room, or in the garden,
staring off into space. Instead of interrupting him, as she normally would, she would avoid him. He looked so deep in thought that disturbing him seemed as dangerous as waking a sleepwalker. That was before she knew. The longer he was home, the more conversations she could hear through the hundred-year-old walls and floors. It came in pieces at first, a few words louder than the rest, and then all at once, when her mother decided that it was too hard to pretend that things were hunky-dory. Franny had put it like this: Her father had slept with someone, and it was a Problem that they were trying to figure out, as if the whole thing could be solved with a giant calculator. Sylvia didn’t know who the woman was, but she knew that she was young. Of course, they were always young. Jim had not been present for the conversation—it was better that way for everyone.

Parents got stranger when you got older, that was obvious. You could no longer take for granted that everyone else’s family worked exactly as yours did, with the bathroom doors open or shut, with the pinch of sugar in the tomato sauce, with the off-key but effective bedtime lullaby. Sylvia had spent the last few months watching her mother ignore her father unless she was scolding him, and Jim was not someone who took well to scolding. Sylvia sat in her chair at the kitchen table and watched them silently spar. She wondered if it had always been this way, or whether it was only her more mature eyes that recognized the cold breeze between her mother and father. Sometimes in books she would come across a mention of his-and-hers
bedrooms—old movies, too; TCM was full of women waking up alone in their dressing gowns—and think that maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea. What were parents anyway, except two people who had once thought they were the smartest people in the world? They were a delusional species, as tiny-brained as dinosaurs. Sylvia didn’t think she ever wanted to get married or have children. Forget about the ozone layer, and tsunamis—what about dinner? It was all too much.

“Let’s go inside,” she said. “I’m finding all this sunshine very depressing.” She pulled one leg out of the pool and then the other, watching them drip dark spots onto the concrete.

Joan picked up the bowls of food and followed her into the dining room.

It was siesta time. They’d all been delighted to acclimate to the custom, and now everyone dragged themselves to their separate corners right after lunch, eyelids already heavy. Carmen slept on her back, while Bobby curled up like a seashell next to her, his mouth open. Jim fell asleep on the sofa in the living room, a book on his chest. Sylvia slept on her stomach, her face turned to one side like a swimmer. Lawrence slept like a child, with the covers up to his neck. Only Charles and Franny were still awake, and they were in the master bathroom, Franny in the tub and Charles on the closed lid of the toilet.

Gemma had all the best bath products, of course: shampoos
and conditioners, exfoliating scrubs, bars of soap with sprigs of French lavender embedded in them, bath gels, bubbles, loofahs, pumice stones, the works. Franny planned to soak for an hour, even if it meant using all the hot water in Pigpen. The tub wasn’t very long, but neither was Franny, and her straight legs just barely touched the far end.

“So?” Charles said. He was flipping through a magazine, one of Sylvia’s trashy ones from the airplane. “How’s it been?”

Franny had a washcloth over her eyes. “You’ve seen it.”

“I mean when it’s just the two of you.” He turned the page to a spread of women in sequined evening gowns.

“It’s like this,” Franny said, and then kept her mouth shut for a beat. “It’s like nothing. It’s like I want to punch him in the eyeball almost as much as I want him to actually apologize. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve truly considered murdering him in his sleep.”

“So you’re not mad?” The next page was the entire contents of an actress’s purse, spilled out and identified piece by piece. Chewing gum, a nail file, some makeup, a mirror, another pair of shoes, headphones, a BlackBerry. “What does she read when she gets bored?” he said to himself.

Franny explored the drain with her big toe. “I’m beyond mad. I truly didn’t know this space existed, where he could do something so terrible that the word
mad
wouldn’t begin to cover it. Do we really do it? Do we sell the house? Does Sylvia become totally unstable and crazy because the minute she goes
to college, her parents get a divorce?” She shook the washcloth off into the water, and it made a little splash. “What would you do if Lawrence cheated on you? Would you get a divorce?” She turned around to look at him.

Friendships were tricky things, especially friendships as old as theirs was. Nudity was nothing more than a collection of hard-earned scars and marks. Love was a given, uncomplicated by sex or vows, but honesty was always waiting there, ready to capsize the steady boat. Charles closed the magazine.

“I cheated on him once. With one person, I mean. More than one time.”

Franny sat up and swiveled ungracefully in the tub so that she was facing Charles directly. Her breasts were half above the water, half below, her heavy flesh settled into tidy rolls underneath. Charles wanted to ask her if he could take a photo to paint from later—she would say yes, she always said yes—but realized it was not the time.

“Excuse me?”

Charles leaned back against the toilet tank. There was a small square window on the short wall of the bathroom, and Charles looked through it onto the mountains, which seemed to wave through the ancient glass. “It was in the beginning. Almost ten years ago. We were already living together, but it wasn’t that serious. It wasn’t that serious to me, I should say. Lawrence, bless his little heart, he always thought we were in it for the long haul. He’s the settling-down type, you know,
with his real job and his supportive parents. He always wanted to get married, even before it was legal. Whatever documents we could get, he wanted them.

“This was when I was with Johnson Strunk Gallery, remember, on Twenty-fourth? And Selena Strunk always had the cutest boys working for her, the art handlers, kids who looked straight out of some gym-bunny porno, all beefed up and adorable, with little beards they’d just learned how to grow. I don’t know why they liked me—I was already, what, forty-five? But some of them wanted to be painters, I suppose. Anyway, one of them, Jason, he started hanging around the gallery when he knew I’d be there, and he was a nice kid, so I took him out for coffee. When we sat down, he grabbed my dick under the table. Lawrence is such a WASP, he would rather die than admit he even
had
a dick in public. So I was, you know, surprised. It only happened a few times, over the next few months, at my studio.”

Franny made a noise. “Involuntary,” she said, then covered her mouth with the washcloth and waved him on.

“Lawrence was so young, I didn’t think it could really be
it
. I didn’t even know if I believed in
it
. So I fucked around. I felt terrible about it, of course, and the whole thing was over quickly, but I never told him. So.”

“So? So? So you never plan on telling your husband that you had sex with someone else? What the fuck, Charlie?” Franny crossed her arms over her chest, which had a lesser effect than it might have, due to her nakedness, and that she slipped a bit into the tub, and had to pull herself back upright.

“No,” Charles said. “And I’m not telling you because I think that what Jim did wasn’t awful, because it was. I’m just telling you because you asked. I wouldn’t want to know. And if he did, and I found out, I would probably forgive him.”

Franny rolled her eyes. “Well, obviously you would, now.” The water in the tub had cooled, and she turned the hot water back on, refilling the room with a warm steam.

“Even if I hadn’t, Fran, that’s the truth. Marriage is hard. Relationships are hard. You know that I’m on your side, whatever your side is, but that’s the truth. We’ve all done things.”

“That is bullshit. Yes, we’ve all done things. I’ve done things like put on thirty pounds. He’s done things like put his penis inside a twenty-three-year-old. Don’t you think one of those is significantly worse?” Franny stood up, her body dripping, and grabbed a towel. She stayed put, the now dingy water sloshing against her calves.

“I am on your side, sweetie,” Charles repeated. He walked over to the side of the tub and put his hand out, which Franny accepted, stepping over the lip like Elizabeth Taylor playing Cleopatra, her chin lifted from her shoulders, her dark hair wet against her neck.

“Well,” she said, once she was safely on dry land. “Secrets are no fun for anyone. Keep that in mind.” She kissed him on the cheek and padded into the bedroom, listening for the sounds of snoring coming from all the other rooms.

WAITING FOR A BABY WAS LIKE WAITING FOR A HEART
attack—at a certain point, you had to just surrender and make other plans, not knowing if you’d have to cancel. Charles and Lawrence had taken a trip to Japan the previous year but had put off Paris when it seemed—for no real reason, Lawrence had just had a feeling—that they might be chosen. They had spent holidays at home alone, their anxiety too toxic to make small talk. The hoops prospective adoptive parents had to jump through were legion: writing letters, making websites, culling flattering family photographs without any wineglasses in them. The goal was to make your family sound stable and appealing, to have the birth mother imagine her child having a better life in your arms. Gay men were attractive options, Charles was surprised to learn, in part because there would never be any competition as to who the child’s real mother was. They’d never
actually been chosen before, though, and this time the waiting had taken on a surreal quality, like being told that you were going to win the lottery, maybe, just hang on for a week and see if the numbers actually match.

It had been Lawrence’s plan from the beginning, and after they were married, there was no stopping him. Charles, on the other hand, had never truly visualized himself with a baby. He had Bobby and Sylvia, after all, and other friends had pipsqueaks for whom he could buy expensive, dry-clean-only clothes and other impractical gifts. Wasn’t that one of the perks of being homosexual, being able to adore children and then hand them back to their parents? Lawrence didn’t see it that way. Some of their friends had gone through lawyers, which were more expensive but also more private. Lawrence said they’d try that, too, if the agency didn’t work. They went to informational meetings at Hockney, at Price-Warner, everywhere gay couples were welcome. They sat in brightly colored waiting rooms as quiet as an oncology ward, trying not to make eye contact with the other hopeful couples in the room. Charles was surprised that the carpet wasn’t polka-dotted with holes burned by a thousand downcast stares. There were no balloons or cheery smiles in the waiting rooms, only in the glossy brochures.

Now the best they could do was keep themselves busy. Lawrence wished for a Rubik’s Cube, or knitting needles, not that he knew how to use either. Mallorca would have to suffice. It was a hot day, and Bobby and Carmen and Franny seemed
happy enough to stay in the pool. Jim read a novel in the shade. Lawrence couldn’t take another whole day of nothing, and the Miró museum was nearby, a fifteen-minute drive down the mountain. They took Sylvia and went.

The museum itself wasn’t remarkable—a few large, cool rooms, and Miró’s playful paintings and drawings on the walls. One room had an exhibition of other Spanish artists, and they walked through quickly, pausing here and there. Lawrence liked one painting of Miró’s—oil and charcoal on canvas, large and beige, with one red spot in the middle—that looked like a giant swollen breast. Charles took his time in the last room, and Lawrence and Sylvia waited for him outside.

Outside the museum, below the city, the ocean was enormous and blue. The day smelled like jasmine and summertime. Sylvia put her hands on Charles’s and Lawrence’s shoulders, and said, “This’ll do.” Up a hill and around a corner were Miró’s studios. They crunched along the gravel and peeked inside his rooms, set up as though he would be home any moment. Easels held canvases, and half-used, rolled-up tubes of paint sat uncapped on his tables. Charles loved visiting other painters’ studios. In New York, the younger artists moved farther and farther out in Brooklyn, to Bushwick and corners of Greenpoint that nearly kissed Queens. His own studio was neat
and white except for the floors, which were spotted with so many years of accidental drips. In Provincetown, he worked on the sunporch, or in a small, bright room that had once been an attic. Had Miró had any children? Charles leafed through the small pamphlet they’d been given at the door, but it didn’t say. Lots of artists had children, but they also had wives, or partners, someone to stay home. Why hadn’t they talked about that? Lawrence could take some time off, of course, a few months, but then wouldn’t he go back to work? Who was going to watch the baby? Charles wished that the social worker had sent a photograph, but they didn’t do that—as they’d explained in the meetings, it’s just like when people have a baby biologically. You see the child when it’s put into your arms.

Lawrence tilted his head and walked around to the room on the other side of the studio, so respectful of this man’s sacred space. Charles loved that about his husband, his willingness to see what other people couldn’t, that art was both mining and magic, a trade and a séance at once. It hadn’t been easy to convince Lawrence to come—two whole weeks with the Posts was not everyone’s idea of a vacation. Charles reached over and petted Lawrence’s head. They never had time like this in New York, when Lawrence was always running to the office. When they were in Provincetown, Charles would walk over to the bakery to get them breakfast, or would be in his studio while Lawrence slept in. It felt luxurious, the two of them just wandering through a museum on a weekday. Sylvia walked back
out onto the gravel lookout, leaving them alone. Maybe it would have been easier to imagine if the child—Alphonse, his name was Alphonse—was a girl.

“Hello, there,” Lawrence said, circling back toward Charles. He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned his head down so that it rested on Charles’s shoulder. It wasn’t comfortable—Lawrence was three inches taller—but it was good for a moment.

“I was just thinking about how nice it will be to go home,” Charles said.

“What have you done with my husband?” Lawrence said, laughing.

“What?” Charles pinched him in the side, sending him scooting a few inches away. “You act like I’ve been ignoring you.”

Lawrence groaned. “Of course you’ve been ignoring me.”

Charles poked his head outside, checking on Sylvia, who was lying prone on a bench, ignoring the other tourists, who were all taking photographs of the view. “Honey, no.”

“
Honey
, yes.” Lawrence stayed put. He recrossed his arms.

“Lawr, come on. How have I been ignoring you? We’re with half a dozen other people. What am I supposed to do, pretend I don’t hear or see them?”

“No,” Lawrence said, walking slowly back to Charles’s side. A German couple tromped in, and they lowered their voices. “I’m not asking you to be rude. I’m just asking you to be slightly less of a bloodhound, always three inches behind Franny’s ass.”

“Your ass is the only one I want to be three inches behind.”

“Don’t try being nice to me now, I’m mad at you.”

Charles had often thought that if they’d had the wherewithal or the money to actually produce a biological child, a boy or a girl made with Lawrence’s sperm, he wouldn’t feel remotely conflicted. How could he not love anything that had a face like that?

“I’m sorry,” Charles said. “I’m sorry. I know I get distracted when I’m around her. You are more important to me, I promise you.” This was not the first time they’d had this conversation, but it always surprised Charles. Luckily, he knew what Lawrence needed to hear. Whether he believed him or not was another story. Sometimes he did, and sometimes he didn’t. So much depended on Lawrence’s mood, on the hour of the day, on whether their most recent sex had been good or merely passable.

Lawrence closed his eyes, having heard what he’d needed to hear. “Fine. I think we’re both just anxious, you know? This is it, don’t you think? Can’t you just feel it?” He shivered, and then Charles did, too, as if an icy breeze had somehow made its way through the studio.

“Of course,” Charles said.

Franny hadn’t packed proper exercise clothes, but luckily her feet were the same size as Carmen’s, so she could borrow a pair of sneakers, and Carmen was so happy to lend them that it seemed like she might levitate. Fran wore leggings and a T-shirt she liked to sleep in, even though it had small, soft holes around
the neckline. Her hair was too short to put into a ponytail, but she didn’t want it flying in her face (Franny imagined herself moving as quickly as a Williams sister, zooming from one corner of the court to another), so she’d also brought along the stretchy black headband she used when she washed her face.

Antoni Vert was standing behind the desk, just behind the receptionist. As in the photograph, he was wearing a baseball cap pulled low on his forehead, and a pair of reflective sunglasses hung on a neoprene cord around his neck. His face, though wider when she had seen it so often on a television screen, still looked to Franny like a Spanish movie star’s—the dimple in the chin, the black hair. She smiled and rushed toward the counter.

“Hello, Mr. Vert, Antoni, it is such a pleasure to meet you,” Franny said, holding out her right hand, the borrowed sneakers in her left.

Antoni swiveled at his hips and pointed at the wall clock. “You’re late.”

“Oh, am I?” Franny shook her head. “I’m
so
sorry. We’re still getting to know the island roads, I’m afraid.” Franny said this knowing full well that Mallorca had the most clearly marked highways she’d ever been on, gigantic signs with arrows and plenty of space. The royal
we
seemed to help her cause, as if she were blaming her lateness on some invisible chauffeur.

“We start now,” he said. “You need a racquet, yes?”

“Oh, shoot,” Franny said. Gemma had had a closet full of sporting equipment, of course. She was nothing if not healthy
and industrious. There were probably cross-country skis hidden somewhere in the house, just in case the earth stopped spinning on its proper axis and the mountains were suddenly covered with powdery white snow. “It’s in the car!” She waved the sneakers at Antoni and then bolted out to the parking lot. “I’ll be right back!”

Franny laced up while Antoni waited, clearly irritated at the delay. What was three hundred euros a lesson? Franny chose not to do the math. It was a priceless experience she was giving herself, a gift that could not be bought at any other time or place. She double-knotted, trying to remember the last time she wore sneakers. Her best guess was sometime in 1995, when she was trying to get back into shape after Sylvia was born, doing
Buns of Steel
in the living room. “Ready.”

“Come,” Antoni said. He opened the door and waited for Franny to walk through it. She had to get so close to his body in order to pass, and she walked sideways, as slowly as possible, a happy little crab.

The courts seemed more crowded once she was on the other side of the fence. On television, they always looked so enormous, with these lithe young bodies scurrying around, but in reality a tennis court wasn’t very big. In fact, the courts were so close together that Franny worried she might hit balls into someone else’s game or, worse yet, into someone else’s face. Luckily, Antoni kept walking until they’d reached the final court in the row, which had a few courts’ cushion from their closest neighbors, a boy of about twelve and his coach.

“So, you know how to play?” Antoni spoke with a thick accent, his voice low and his tongue heavy.

“I watch everything,” she said, lying. “Even the small tournaments.” Franny tried to think of one to name, but couldn’t. “I have an excellent grasp of the rules.”

“And the last time you played?” Antoni reached into his pocket and pulled out a tennis ball. Franny wished that Charles had come along and was close enough to make a joke. It was strange, having this experience alone, when it would clearly (so clearly) become something that she would write about, a story she would codify into a moment on the page. There would be a witty and slightly naughty joke from her best friend,
right there
. Only he wasn’t. Franny could tell him all about it after, he would make the joke then, and after that, it was a matter of editing.

“Oh,” Franny said. “Ages ago. A decade?” One of the women in her detestable book club played tennis every week in Central Park, as spry and mean as a goose, and she and Franny had had a game one morning. The woman pelted her with ball after ball, always giggling afterward in faux apology. The bruises had lasted for weeks. “I’m not an athlete. I’m a writer. You know, there haven’t been very many good books about tennis. Do you ever think about writing a memoir? I have a lot of friends who have ghostwritten sports books. We should talk, if you’re interested.”