The Vacationers: A Novel (13 page)

“Okay, we start easy,” Antoni said, ignoring her. He walked over to the far side of the net. “Ready?”

Before Franny knew it, Antoni had served a ball. She watched it land three feet ahead of her and laughed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Did you want me to return that? It just seems so funny, actually playing with you.”

“This is not playing. This is practice. Warm-up.” He hit another ball, and Franny was surprised to find her feet moving and her racquet outstretched. She connected—the racquet smacked the ball back over the net, and Franny was so thrilled by her own sporty prowess that she jumped up and down, ignoring the fact that Antoni was, of course, going to hit the ball right back. He did, and the ball skidded by her, its bouncing path to the fence undisturbed. “Sorry, sorry,” Franny said. “I’m ready now. Sorry! I just didn’t know that that was going to happen. Ready.” She dropped into a half-squat like the players on television did, waving her hips back and forth.

Antoni nodded, his eyes hidden behind the reflective panes of his sunglasses. He arched backward, throwing a ball high into the air. Franny had watched him play for so many years, she knew the motion of his body. It wasn’t an OCD tic, like some of the younger players had (Nando Filani was notorious for turning his head to the side and coughing, which McEnroe always likened to a prostate exam). Antoni’s body moved purposefully, his shoulders as wide as a swimmer’s. He threw another ball up and hit it slowly, as gently as a mother to a child. Franny bounced from side to side, waiting to see where the ball would land, and then hurried toward it, getting the edge of her racquet underneath it just in time to send it back over the net.
They volleyed lightly for a few more strokes before Franny missed a shot, and she panted happily, exhilarated.

“Not bad,” Antoni said. Franny wiped her forehead with her fingertips. “Let me see a serve.” He walked over to her side of the net, coming deliberately behind Franny. He slid his sunglasses down his nose and then crossed his arms. “Toss, then serve.”

Franny bounced the ball a couple of times and was relieved to find that it felt good in her hand, familiar. There had been a time when this was a normal function for her, and she willed all the atoms in her body to remember those days, standing outside in Brooklyn, the girls from her high school team all cackling and yelling. She threw the ball into the air and swung her racquet overhead. Franny heard a loud crack, and then she wobbled forward a few feet, and the next thing she knew, she was staring into Antoni Vert’s shadowy face, lying on her back in the middle of the tennis court. At last, he looked as delighted to see her as she was to see him.

Bobby and Carmen were out by the pool doing their exercises, and normally that would have made Lawrence do an about-face and sit in the bedroom reading for a couple of hours, but the day was too beautiful to stay indoors. He put on his hat and sunglasses and headed outside, a novel tucked under his arm.

“Hey,” Bobby said from the deep end of the pool. He was
treading water in the most athletic way possible, bouncing up and down like a spring, the damp ends of his curls weighty and dark.

“Hey!” Carmen said, mid push-up. She dipped down halfway, stopped, and then went even closer to the ground before straightening her arms and rocketing back up to a plank position. Lawrence was impressed.

“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 whimsical:
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.

Sometimes it was pleasant to sit in silence with a near stranger, both of you lost in your own thoughts. Once the pressure to speak was gone, the quiet could hover for hours, covering you in a sort of gossamer cloak, like two people staring out a moving train’s window. Both Lawrence and Carmen found that they liked each other far more than they imagined they might, and they quite happily sat together without speaking until the sunset was complete.

Franny was in bed with an ice pack on her head, where a large goose egg had already formed. Antoni had driven her home himself, a ride that she dearly wished she remembered for more than just her own throbbing skull. Antoni tried to explain to Charles, who answered the door, what had happened, but there wasn’t much to say. She had hit herself in the head with the butt of her tennis racquet and briefly knocked herself unconscious. She would be fine, Antoni was sure, though he admitted that he hadn’t seen it before, not such a direct hit on one’s own scalp. Antoni had been very sweet about the whole thing—when Antoni had his sunglasses and baseball hat off, Charles could see what had made Franny’s heart go aflutter. He was still gorgeous, and spoke so quickly with his beautiful mouth, Charles almost didn’t even care what he was saying, just so long as he kept talking. She had a strong swing, Antoni said, and smiled. They would reschedule, if she wished, and he would call to check on her. Antoni wrote down the name of his personal doctor for Charles and then left, getting into a waiting car driven by one of his employees, who had followed them up the mountain.