The Vacationers: A Novel (7 page)

Gallant
’s board had been unanimous in their decision. That’s what surprised Jim the most—he expected censure, yes, but not outright vitriol. The girl—he hated to remember the excitement he felt just hearing her name, Madison, a name
he would have ridiculed otherwise—had been twenty-three, the age that Franny was when they got married, so many thousands of years ago. Twenty-three meant that she was an adult, out of college and ready to enter the workforce. An editorial assistant. Franny had pointed out that Madison was only five years older than Sylvia, but twenty-three was an adult, a full-grown woman. Capable of making her own decisions, even if they were bad ones. When the board mentioned Madison, they used the word
girl
, and, once,
child
, which Jim’s lawyer had objected to, rightly. It wasn’t a courtroom, though, and such language held no weight. They were all sitting around the table in the conference room, as they had so many times before, discussing tedious matters. All ten board members had shown up for the meeting, which was unusual, and Jim knew the moment they walked in that things weren’t going to go his way. Not one of the three women on the board looked Jim in the eye.

Jim rounded a corner. There was a long stone wall a few yards ahead, on the ocean side of the road. The mountains seemed to have shifted color with his elevation, and now were tinged with blue. He brushed off the stones and sat down, swinging his legs over so that they dangled a few inches off the ground on the other side. Before him, sheep grazed and strolled, their heads low and content. They wore bells around their neck, which clanged pleasantly as the sheep snuffled in the grass. He didn’t know how much Franny had told Charles about the situation at the magazine. The children didn’t know much—Bobby didn’t know
anything—
and he wanted to keep
it that way. According to Jim’s resignation, he was leaving his position as editor in order to pursue other passions, to spend more time with his family, and to travel more. Though of course that’s exactly what Jim was doing, the implied motives were completely false. If Jim could have, he would have returned from Mallorca and gone straight back to work, gone straight back to work every single day until he dropped dead at his desk, horrifying the young staff, now all trying to be so adult with their natty tie-clips and shiny shoes.

The sun wouldn’t set for a few more hours, but it had dipped behind the mountains, and the blue was darker now, as if a watercolor brush had swabbed over the trees and rocks and hillside. Jim could have walked farther, but the road was steep, and more than exercising, he just wanted a few minutes away. Jim sat and watched the sheep until they all stopped moving and just stood, staring off into the distance or at one another or at the grass underneath their bodies, as if they’d all coordinated it beforehand, this moment of silence. It was the sort of thing you might remark on to the person sitting next to you, a tiny and unimportant but nonetheless noteworthy part of the day. If he had been a different kind of man, he might have written a poem. Instead, Jim swung his legs back over the wall and started his way down the hill. Behind him, the sheeps’ bells began to ring again, without hurry. It was all up to Franny, in the end. She wanted to take these two weeks, she’d said. These two weeks to make her decision, with all of them together like a real family. He’d already started to mentally mark things as
the last time—the last time he’d do this with his daughter, the last time he’d do that in his house. It had taken thirty-five years to build, and would take only two weeks to fall apart. Jim couldn’t take back what he’d done. He had apologized, to Franny and to the magazine, and now it was up to them to decide what his punishment would be. He only hoped that his wife would be less harsh than the stony tribunal of board members, though she (Jim knew, he knew) was entitled to the most ire of all.

It didn’t matter that most of the party had flown in that morning, and that they would need to have a third wind in order to stay awake through dessert. Franny had cooked, and everyone was going to sit at the table together. She’d bought fish at the market, and lemons, and Israeli couscous, and fruit for a tart, and enough wine to make the whole thing float. Her hands smelled like rosemary and garlic, which was better than soap. She’d found the rosemary growing in the yard, a great big bush of it, well tended and right by the kitchen door. Carmen was in the shower, and Bobby was changing out of his swimsuit, but everyone else was already dressed and in the dining room. Franny liked this moment most of all: being alone in the kitchen after almost everything was finished, and listening to the assembled guests chatting happily, knowing they were soon to be fed. Charles hadn’t come with them on vacation since Bobby
was a baby, not for longer than a weekend, and Franny’s pulse quickened happily at the sound of his voice and Sylvia’s together. They were friends. How had that happened? It felt impossible that Sylvia was already eighteen, and that she would be leaving so soon.
Leaving.
That was the word she liked to use. Not
going away
, which implied a return, but
leaving
, which implied a jet plane. Franny would never have been so cruel to her own mother, who had insisted on weekly dinners throughout her first year at Barnard, as if Brooklyn and Manhattan had anything to do with each other, as if she hadn’t just moved to another hemisphere. If she and Jim were really over, Sylvia would have it even worse. When she came home to visit, where would she go? To her mother in an otherwise empty house? To her father in a bachelor apartment, slick and sad with all new furniture? Franny stared into space, her hands still on the corkscrew.

“Can I help with anything?” Carmen appeared just behind Franny’s right shoulder, startling her.

“No, no, all done,” Franny said. “Well, you can carry this to the table.” She put down the bottle of wine and handed Carmen a bowl. “No, wait,” she said, and handed her a different one. Franny always wanted to carry in the most impressive-looking dish, no matter that everyone knew she’d cooked everything on the table.

Carmen’s dark hair was wet, and her curls hung heavily over her shoulders. It was what Franny’s hair had looked like before she’d had the Brazilians zap it with lasers, or whatever they did
at the salon. It was the first beauty treatment she felt was truly life-altering, after discovering mustache bleach when she was a teenager.

“Thank you for having us here,” Carmen said. She had put on makeup, which Franny found distasteful. After all, it was only the family, and they were only having dinner. She would just have to wash it off in a few hours. Putting on makeup for this crowd, at this hour, smacked of deep-seated insecurity, which Franny had little patience for, both as a host and as Carmen’s boyfriend’s mother, on his behalf. Of course, Franny didn’t trust anyone whose life’s work was shaping other people’s altoids, anyway. No, Altoids were the mints. Deltoids. Still, it was nice that she was making an effort.

“Of course,” Franny said. “We’re so glad you could join us. And how is everything going, at the gym?”

“It’s good! It’s busy. Really good. Yeah.” Carmen nodded several times.

“Well, shall we?” Franny asked, gesturing toward the dining room. She waited until Carmen had passed in front of her to roll her eyes. Life would be so much easier, Franny often thought, if one were permitted to select romantic partners for one’s children. There was nothing physically wrong with Carmen, save for the lack of egg production in her forty-year-old ovaries, but that wasn’t even the worst of it. She was a deadly bore, and that problem couldn’t be solved with in vitro. Still, she had shown up, and offered to help, which was more than Franny could say for either of her children.

BOBBY AND CARMEN’S ROOM WAS BETWEEN SYLVIA’S
room and the bathroom and overlooked the pool, which meant that any noise louder than a whisper could potentially be heard by everyone in the entire house. Bobby was awake but hadn’t moved yet, not even wiggled his toes—Carmen was still snoring softly next to him, and he didn’t want to disturb her.

At their apartment in Miami, Carmen was up before dawn. Her clients liked to get in a workout before heading to the office, and so she started seeing people at five-thirty a.m., straight through until ten a.m. Then there was a break until the lunchtime crowd, and then she was booked again from eleven a.m. until two p.m. She saw up to eight clients a day, sometimes more. Everyone at Total Body Power knew that Carmen got results, and that she worked you harder than the other trainers. She’d been seeing some of her clients for more than a decade,
back from when she was fresh out of kinesiology school and working at the YMCA. Bobby’d come to the gym looking for some help with his lats and traps, and that was that. Of course, that was when Bobby had the money to spend on a personal trainer twice a week.

His mother was up—Bobby could hear the pans banging onto and off the stove, the sound of pancakes being distributed or eggs being cracked. Maybe both. Franny liked to show off for a crowd, to separate whites from yolks with a single hand, to warm the syrup on the stove. His mother’s favorite currency was food. When Sylvia was small and Bobby was still at home, Franny would pour pancakes into the shapes of animals, which thrilled them both, even though Bobby had always felt that it was his duty as the older child to pretend not to care.

Carmen grumbled and turned onto her side, taking the sheet with her.

“Good morning,” Bobby said, using his best newscaster voice. Carmen thumped him in the chest without opening her eyes. “It’s late.”

“How late?” she said, eyes still closed.

“After eight.”

“Jesus.” Carmen shimmied her body backward until she was sitting up against the wrought-iron headboard. She was wearing her pajamas: a pair of faded boxer shorts that preceded her relationship with Bobby, now going on six years, and a pale pink camisole that clung to her rib cage and small breasts, her dark bull’s-eye nipples showing through. If you asked the Posts,
they would all tell you exactly what kind of body Bobby found attractive: a thickened teenage gymnast, women who looked like they couldn’t ovulate if you gave them a million dollars. He didn’t care. Bobby loved how hard Carmen worked on her body. Her thighs were her calling cards; her biceps were her advertisements. She looked strong and serious, which she was. Bobby respected that she always knew what she wanted, from herself and from her clients. If she told him to drop to the ground and give her twenty push-ups, he’d do it. She had a strong sense of the human body, and of what people could do, if encouraged. It was one of the things Bobby liked most about her.

“When are you going to talk to them about the money?”

Bobby had been putting off a real conversation with his parents for months—every time his mother called, he got off the phone as quickly as possible, or else turned the chat around and asked Franny about whatever she was doing, which would get her going for at least twenty minutes, a respectable period of time. He hated to ask for money, and even more than that, he hated the reason he needed it. At first he’d just needed a little sideline business, something to tide his bank account over until the real estate market picked back up. He hadn’t planned to stay at the gym for longer than a few months. When the best membership salesman at Total Body Power approached Bobby about selling the supplement powders, it sounded like a no-lose scenario. Those were his exact words: “no lose.” So far, Bobby had lost every penny he’d ever saved, plus about a million pennies he’d never had in the first place.

“Soon. I just need to find the right moment. You don’t know them,” Bobby said. “It has to be at the right time.” He leaned back against the wall.

“Fine. Just remember that you said you were going to do it, and so you actually have to open your mouth, okay?” She got out of bed and stretched. “I think we should go to the beach, don’t you? Or do you need to think about that, too?”

“I’m coming, I’m coming, yes,” Bobby said, even though the idea of staying in bed, alone, sounded suddenly blissful. He swung his legs over to his side and touched his toes to the cool stone floor. Charles and Lawrence were in the kitchen now—he could hear their voices, and then his mother’s laugh. There would be plenty of time spent sitting around, listening to them all tell the same stories over and over again, Sylvia somehow laughing inside it all. Bobby knew that the conventional thought was that she had been the accidental child, that she was the one born too late, but he couldn’t help feeling that it was the other way around, that he’d been born too early, before his parents got their act together. He’d had to figure out so many things on his own, not that they’d ever acknowledge that. The Posts were masters of self-delusion, all of them. “Yeah, let’s go.”

Gemma had promised Wi-Fi (password: MALLORCA!), but she hadn’t mentioned details: the network was slower than
dial-up and worked only when the laptop or telephone in question was held over the kitchen sink. Lawrence hadn’t technically taken a vacation, but since he worked from home, what was the difference? Spain was the same as New York, which was the same as Provincetown, not counting time zones. Charles liked to make fun of Lawrence by saying that he had the least glamorous job in the most glamorous field—he did accounting for the movies, keeping track of the budget and the salaries and the deductions. The trailer rentals, the lights, the gluten-free wraps with hummus and bean sprouts. He was working on a movie that was filming in Toronto, a Christmas-themed werewolf comedy called
Santa Claws
. A lot of the money went to fake fur and soap flakes to be used as snow.

“Oops, sorry, Lawrence,” Franny said, bumping her bottom into his hip as she bent down to reach into the oven to check on a quiche. “Close quarters!”

“No, no, I’m sorry, I’m just completely in the way,” he said, and then flapped his free hand in frustration. “I just need to send this one spreadsheet, and then I’m really done.” Lawrence held the computer up toward the ceiling and waved it a bit from side to side until he heard the telltale
whoosh
that meant the e-mail had been sent. There was a noise that some more e-mails had come in, but he didn’t even scan through them before bringing the laptop back down to his chest and closing it. “All yours.”

It was just the three of them—Sylvia was still in bed, Bobby and his girlfriend had gone off to the beach, both of them
entirely clothed in high-tech fabrics as if they were about to run a triathlon, and Jim was swimming laps in the pool, visible through the kitchen windows. Charles sat at the head of the table, a cup of coffee held daintily in his hands, as if he were expecting the queen of Spain to walk through the door. Lawrence loved so many things about his husband: the way his white and gray stubble looked on his face and head, all more or less the same length and prickliness; the expression on his face when he was looking at something he wanted to keep, something he wanted to paint. But Lawrence did not love that he felt invisible whenever Franny Post was in the room.

“Darling, do you remember that woman who used to be married to George, what was her name, Mary someone?” Franny asked, poking a finger into the eggy surface of her quiche, which would sit out on the counter all day, everyone nicking a slim piece when they felt like it. Franny was good at producing massive quantities of the sort of food no one notices—the dense, dark muffins that were equally good at four p.m. as they were for breakfast; the cut-up fruit in a large bowl on the center rack of the refrigerator. She liked a house full of grazers, thinking that satisfied stomachs led to satisfied guests.

“Rich Mary? The one with the limp?” Charles didn’t take his eyes off Franny as Lawrence scooted around to the far side of the table, to the seat next to him. Lawrence opened his computer again to look at the e-mails, hoping that the stupid werewolves would leave him alone for a few hours. There were a
bunch of junky e-mails—sample sales in Chelsea at the place where he liked to buy their sheets; J.Crew; a forwarded series of political cartoons sent by his mother; the New York Public Library; MoveOn.org. Lawrence deleted them all quickly. Then, left at the very top, was an e-mail from their social worker at the adoption agency. Lawrence felt suddenly out of breath. Charles and Franny kept talking, but he could no longer hear them. He read the e-mail once, and then again. The words jumbled together on his screen.
I know you’re on vacation, but there is a baby boy. Please call me as soon as you can.
He tried to tune back in to the conversation so he could extricate his husband as quickly as possible. He didn’t care how much it cost to call New York, or what time it was. They were getting on the phone.

“Rich Mary! You should see her now! Her face is like the surface of a balloon. It used to have angles and now it’s all”—here Franny made a sucking noise—“
smooth
. And they’re not even married anymore. I think she used all of her divorce money to get someone to put a vacuum cleaner on her face.” Franny turned off the oven, satisfied.

“Some people,” Charles said, shaking his head and laughing, though Lawrence knew that both Franny and Charles had had needles injected into their foreheads in order to make wrinkles disappear. They’d gone to the same dermatologist. Vanity was a problem only when it was someone else’s. Lawrence wondered what the cutoff was: knives, maybe, or general anesthesia.

“Honey,” Lawrence said, standing up, “can I talk to you for a second?”

Before Charles could respond, Jim hurried in through the back door, his hair plastered to the side of his head like a Ken doll’s. He hunched over, his towel wrapped around his wet shoulders.

“How’s the water?” Charles asked. Franny crossed her arms and leaned back against the fridge.

“Fine,” Jim said. He shook his head to one side, clearing out a clogged ear.

“How’s life at
Gallant
?” Lawrence asked out of habit, wanting to be polite but really just trying to get out of the room as quickly as possible, but as soon as the syllables were out of his mouth, he remembered. Lawrence felt Charles grab his knee and give it a hard squeeze, too tight to be flirty. “I mean, how is it being at home?” Lawrence felt his face begin to flush. All he knew was that Jim had been “let go”; Charles hadn’t wanted to say more.

“Well,” Jim said, standing up straight again. He looked toward Franny, who hadn’t moved or smiled. “It’s a change, that’s for sure.” He narrowed his eyes at a spot on the ceiling, and Lawrence followed his gaze, finding nothing but a tiny crack in the white paint. “Think I’ll go shower off.”

Lawrence, Charles, and Franny all stayed exactly where they were, like actors in a play the moment before the lights came on, until they heard the bathroom door click shut. Charles was out of his chair and across the room before Lawrence could
speak again. Lawrence watched as his husband drew Franny into his arms. Her arms wrapped all the way around Charles’s back, where she clasped her own wrist, the way sixth-grade boys knotted their arms around their dance partners. Franny’s thick shoulders began to jerk up and down, though her crying didn’t make a sound. Lawrence wished he could see Charles’s face, but it was pointing in the other direction.

“I’m really sorry,” Lawrence said. “I don’t know what happened,” meaning both that he didn’t know what had gone down at the magazine and that he didn’t know what had occurred in the three previous minutes. Neither Franny nor Charles made any sign that they had heard him. The kitchen smelled like warm food and tenderness. Lawrence knit his fingers together in his lap and waited for the moment to pass, which it did. Franny gave her head a shake and patted her damp cheeks with her fingers. Charles kissed her on the forehead and then returned to his chair. No one would have cried if they’d gone to Palm Springs and done nothing but had sex and read books for two weeks. Lawrence said a little prayer for the vacation he’d actually wanted, and then watched it—
poof
—float away. He needed Franny to stop crying, and then he needed his husband’s full attention, before someone else called the agency and claimed the child, before the open door was closed and their baby wasn’t their baby, before they were old and creaky and alone forever and ever, just the two of them and Charles’s paintings of other people’s children. He waited patiently, counting his breaths until he got to ten, and then starting over.