The Vacationers: A Novel (19 page)

The piss worked like a charm. Bobby’s leg was still patterned with raised skin, but it didn’t actually feel like it was on fire anymore. He and his father rinsed the small puddle off the beach as well as they could, and then headed up the sand toward the bathrooms and the snack shop to clean up.

The bathrooms put New York City to shame—a slightly sandy floor, but otherwise sanitary and orderly, with extra rolls of toilet paper and paper towels on view, the kind of things that would have been bolted down if they were in Manhattan. Bobby soaked a few paper towels with soap and water and cleaned himself off. Jim stood back and watched after washing his own hands.

“What’s going on, Bobby?” Jim made eye contact with his son in the mirror, which Bobby quickly broke, angling his face back down toward his wounded calf.

“Nothing,” Bobby said. “I mean, you guys heard all of it. I wasn’t making enough money, so I got another job. It’s not
that
much debt. I’ll be fine. I was going to ask you guys to help me, but it’s fine, I can do it myself.”

“I meant with Carmen. What was Sylvia talking about in the car?”

Bobby let out an exasperated moan. He turned around and leaned against the lip of the sink. “God! It was nothing. Some girl at the club. It was nothing. I know that you and Mom have been together since you were younger than me, and you guys have a great marriage and all, but things are different now. I don’t know. Carmen is fine, she’s good, you know? She and I
get along really well. But I don’t know, forever? Probably not. So why pretend? It’s not like she’s gonna know.”

Jim and Franny had agreed not to tell the children about Madison, about Madison’s upturned nose and her blond hair and the way she had wrecked Jim’s life. The way he had let her ruin his life. No, that still wasn’t it. Jim had been the agent of his own destruction. It was the way he had wrecked his life by choosing to have an affair with a woman so young. By choosing to have an affair at all. Affairs seemed so old-fashioned, like something his own father would have done, and no doubt did do, over and over again. They didn’t threaten the marriage, because the marriage was a scrim, a false curtain pulled tight over the turbulent inner lives of his parents. Jim had never wanted a marriage like that, and he didn’t have one. He and Franny had struggled and fought throughout, especially when Bobby was young. It was never a foregone conclusion that they would stay together—that was something from the stone ages, not the seventies. They’d seen free love (at least on television) and still chosen to get married. Their eyes were open. It was impossible to keep the information (the basics, only the basics) from Sylvia, because they were all under the same roof, but it had been easy to keep the truth from Bobby. It made it nicer to talk to him on the phone, now that Jim and Fran, separately or together, could pick up the telephone and travel back through time to a better marriage.

“Bobby, I cheated on your mother. It was a horrible thing to do, and I don’t want to sound cavalier about it. The only aspect
of the entire situation that I know I did right, however, was to tell her the truth.” Parenting was a terrible curse—it was about subjugating your mistakes so well that your children didn’t know they existed, and therefore repeated them ad nauseam. Was it better to be a hypocrite or a liar? Jim wasn’t sure. Either way, he wished that Franny was standing next to him, in this beachside Mallorcan men’s room. She’d be furious at him all over again, but she would know what to say to their son.

“This is a joke, right?” Bobby looked confused, like he was vacillating between pride and disappointment. His face eventually settled into a half-smile, the look that Jim had most hoped he’d avoid.

“It’s nothing to be happy about, Bobby.” Jim flattened his own mouth into a thin, tight purse. He motioned toward the door.

“No, come on,” Bobby said. He slapped the remaining water off his leg and shook it out. “It’s just that I didn’t know that. About you. It’s kind of funny. I mean, you’re my dad.”

Jim looked at him quizzically. A Spaniard in a very small bathing suit walked into the bathroom and headed for the urinal in the corner.

“Maybe it’s genetic,” Bobby said.

“Don’t be an idiot,” said Jim.

Franny ducked under Sylvia’s umbrella to apologize.

“Sweetie, I’m sorry I snapped at you,” she said. Sylvia looked
at her warily. Franny wasn’t much for apologies, and her daughter clearly suspected there was more coming. Franny shrugged her shoulders and relented. “What’s going on with your brother? Can you tell me?” Franny looked back at the water. Despite the presence of electric fish, Carmen was still swimming. She was going to go back to America weighing three pounds, all the exercise she was doing to avoid spending time with the family, and for the moment, Sylvia didn’t blame her.

“I don’t think you want to know.”

“Of course I do,” Franny said, but she wasn’t sure. The debt was enough, and the job at the gym. She didn’t want to feel like a snob; she was the daughter of a truck driver and a housewife—how could she be a snob? And yet she wanted more for him. She wanted him to want more for himself. She and Jim had had so many whispered conversations over Bobby’s crib when he was a baby, even before that, over her stretching belly when she was massively pregnant. They had planned his future—as a politician, a writer, a philosopher. A personal trainer with a sideline of whey had not been on the list.

“He cheated on Carmen. The other night. I saw him. It was gross.”

“What do you mean? Dancing with girls, like?”

“Mom.” Sylvia sat up, her spine uncurling. Slumped over, her baggy T-shirt hung to her knees, her bathing-suited body hidden well beneath it. “Please. I saw a lot more than that. Like, tongues. Eww, can we not talk about this? It was gross enough to watch it happen once. I’m not dying to relive the
moment.” She squinted toward the sun. “I can feel the skin cancer beginning to form.”

“You actually saw him with another girl?” Franny’s breath shortened. There was that sickening satisfaction at hearing gossip for the first time, swiftly followed by the realization that she’d done everything wrong, everything important. She leaned to the left so that she was able to see where Jim and Bobby had gone. They weren’t at the far end of the beach anymore, and she couldn’t see them elsewhere on the sand. Maybe they’d heard Sylvia open her mouth and had run, knowing what was to follow.

Jim didn’t know it was possible to see actual wavy lines of anger around someone’s head, like a cartoon come to life, but when he saw his wife pacing back and forth on the sand, there they were, clear as day. Charles and Lawrence were standing on her left, and Sylvia was still tucked under her umbrella on the right. Carmen had made her way out of the water, and stood awkwardly in the background, her wet hair clinging to her shoulders like a cape. When Franny saw Jim approaching, she huffed her way up the beach to meet him. She made it just past the edge of Sylvia’s towel, kicking a little sand onto her daughter by mistake.

“Do you know what your son did?” Franny was hysterical, her eyes wild and searching.

“I do now.” Jim was in no mood for this. What Bobby had done wasn’t his fault—it had nothing to do with Jim or his own poor choices.

“He had sex with another girl, practically in front of his sister. In a public place! Should I be happy that you at least had a hotel room?”

Sylvia peered out from under the umbrella, her pale eyes tracking her mother’s movements.

“Fran, let’s talk about this at home,” Jim said. He stretched out a hand toward her, but she slapped it away.

“At home? In New York? When the kids are gone and you are, too, and so who cares anyway, you mean? I think they all deserve to know. It was crazy to think that we could keep a secret like this.” She pretended to look worried. “Oh, no, are there reporters here? Is anyone here from
The New York Times
?” The other patrons of the beach were staring, and Franny waved. “I think that woman’s from the
Post
.”

“Mom, we don’t have to do this here, okay?” Sylvia’s voice was quiet. She rolled onto her hands and knees and then pushed herself up to stand. She looked so thin to Jim, so delicate, just the way she had as a baby. He hated what she would hear next, and the way she would turn toward him, wanting it so badly not to be true.

“Your father slept with an intern. Your brother slept with a stranger.” Franny stopped, calculating how cruel she should be. “I don’t know how this happened.”

“People sleep with interns all the time,” Bobby said. “And strangers! Especially strangers! What’s the big deal?”

“She was not an intern, she was an editorial assistant,” Jim said. Franny looked at him and bared her teeth.

“The big deal is that she’s barely older than Sylvia, which makes me ill. The big deal is that your father and I are married to each other. The big deal, my love, is that you don’t seem to understand why this is a big deal. That is the biggest deal of all. Because my husband may have disappointed me, but if I haven’t even taught you that much, then I have disappointed myself.” Franny spun around and began to cry at a very high pitch, the sound of an insistent smoke alarm. Charles hurried over and tucked her into his arms. Lawrence shook his head in sympathy.

“I think it’s time to head back to the house,” Lawrence said, quickly gathering as many things as he could carry. “You get the rest,” he said to Jim.

“Franny, come on,” Jim said. “You’re acting like a crazy person right now. Just relax.”

Charles spun Franny out of his arms like a dancer sending his partner twirling across a ballroom floor. He marched up to Jim, stopping when he was two feet away. Charles gritted his teeth.

“Don’t you tell her she needs to relax, after what you did,” Charles said.

“I think we
all
need to relax,” Jim said, softening the air with his hands. He looked around at his children, seeking their support. “Am I right?”

“You have always been such a motherfucker,” Charles said. He pulled back his right arm, strong from decades of hoisting canvases and gallons of paint, and let it fly, directly into Jim’s right eye socket. Jim stumbled backward, surprised, and clutched his face.

“Let’s go, Fran,” Charles said.

Franny was shaking as if she were the one who’d been hit. She gave Jim a pleading look and then let herself be scooped back under Charles’s arm. They started to walk to the car.

“Wait!” Sylvia said. “Don’t leave me here with them.” She wanted to say more to her father but couldn’t. There was no air inside her lungs. Sylvia pictured the couch in the dark—maybe he had been there after all, not last night, but the night before, and for who knows how long before that. Everything was worse than she thought. She tried to remember New York, and all the nights since her father had stopped working, all her mother’s dates with her awful book club. There were too many things to think about all at once, and Sylvia felt like she might throw up. She dug her feet into her shoes, which were half filled with sand, and clomped after Charles and her mother.

Lawrence drove, and Sylvia sat in the front seat, giving Charles and Franny the entire backseat in which to cuddle and moan. Sylvia had never heard her mother wail like this—Franny sounded like a circus animal being trained to jump through a
fiery hoop. Sylvia tried to face forward and ignore whatever was happening behind her. Out the window, palm trees waved hello, gigantic pineapples wearing grass skirts. The morning was bright, and Sylvia cupped her hands around her eyes like a horse wearing blinders. Lawrence turned on the radio, and Elton John’s voice once again filled the car.