An Ex to Grind (44 page)

"With e-mail, fax, and teleconferencing, we can service clients from anywhere," said Weezie, her excitement growing. "I can work out of my house a couple days a week, and you can work out of—" She giggled. "Your bungalow in the Abacos."

It sounded like a dream come true. Doing what I was trained to do. Partnering with my best friend. Earning a living without sacrificing my personal life. A lot to consider but no downside, as far as I could tell.

"Why don't I figure out the numbers while you're gone?" she suggested. "By the time you're back, I'll have a budget and a business plan for you to look at."

"While I'm gone?" I said with a laugh. "You have me out the door already!"

"Out the door and on the beach with Evan."

"When am I making this trip, by the way?"

"Tomorrow," she said. "Dan's got Buster for the rest of the week, so you could stay until Sunday night. All we have to do is book your flights, pick out some sexy bathing suits for you to pack, and send you off to be with Picasso."

I sighed as I thought about Evan. I closed my eyes, sat back in my chair, and pictured myself surprising him at his bungalow—without a cheese booger dangling from my nose; without a grungy T-shirt riding up my chest; without a red, swollen face resembling a parade float; without old feelings for an ex-husband clouding my new feelings for him. I pictured us without encumbrances. It was a lovely picture.

"Earth to Melanie," Weezie said, shaking my foot. "Where's your head right this minute?"

I opened my eyes. "I was thinking that I might just do it."

"Which?" she said. "Working with me or going to see Evan?"

"Both," I said.

Weezie jumped out of her chair and hugged me. "I'll get the airlines on the phone. You start packing."

I smiled. "Who made you the boss? I thought we were partners."

"You can be the boss when you come home. We'll trade off as the situations warrant."

I started to say something—to thank her for being a constant in my life, for teaching me about friendship, for being such a great sounding board—but she held her hand up.

"Go pack," she said.

"Yes, boss," I said.

The next morning at seven-forty-five, I was on a bound for Fort Lauderdale. From there, I would board a nineteen-seat turbo prop for Treasure Cay, one of the more developed islands in the Abaco chain. And from there, I
would hop a ferry over to Green Turtle Cay, the tiny island where
Evan was renting his cottage.

I make this sound very carefree and no-big-deal-ish with all my flying and hopping and ferrying. But I wasn't a relaxed traveler, to put it mildly. I was terrified of even slight airplane turbulence and made a point of avoiding turboprops, which were SUVs with wings, as far as I was concerned. Still, Evan was worth my death-defying acts, I'd decided. If I was brave enough to go to him without an invitation, I was brave enough to go to him propping and hopping.

Actually, I was lucky to get a coach seat on the New York-to-Florida flight on such short notice, given all the snowbirds and second homers who commute back and forth regularly, and even luckier to get a seat in the "two" section next to the window. As I soared over the eastern seaboard, about twenty minutes into the flight, I turned to the passenger next to me, as I always do, seeking reassurance. If he or she didn't seem anxious whenever the plane dipped or shook or shimmied, I would take it as a positive sign.

The man next to me on this particular flight was in his sixties, I guessed, wearing a navy blue blazer, kelly green slacks, a pink sweater, and white shoes. Which is another way of saying he had shed his Manhattan black for South Florida's all-colors-all-the-time. He was buried in a book—it was one of those evangelical novels theorizing that God lets some people into heaven but leaves others behind—and he seemed fairly engrossed in it, perhaps wondering if he would be in the former group or the latter.

Pumped up with the thrill and uncertainty about my adventure, I was dying to talk. And so I interrupted his reading and made chitchat. He put down his book without annoyance and made chitchat back, which hinted at his goodness and led me to believe that he would, indeed, make God's cut.

Our conversation was superficial at first. His name was Charles, although his friends called him Chuck. He was married with two children and three grandchildren. He was a dermatologist with a private practice in Fort Lauderdale, and he'd been visiting his grandkids in Long Island. That sort of stuff.

Then, as often happens between airline passengers who know they'll never see each other again once they get where they're going, the chitchat became more personal. At least, mine did. I was pretty keyed up, as I said, and couldn't stop talking.

I told Chuck all about Evan, about how he'd supported me during an exceptionally difficult period in my life; about how he was tackling a career as an artist after being squeezed out of the publishing business; about how excited/nervous I was about my spontaneous decision to visit him; and about how he and I would finally be able to be intimate now that we had put our pasts behind us. (I really couldn't shut up.)

Chuck asked me if it was commonplace for me to break out in hives whenever I was excited/nervous. I asked him why he was asking. He said, "You've been scratching the daylights out of that left arm of yours. It's dotted with lesions."

I looked down at my arm, where there
was
an unsightly rash. I must have been so focused on Evan that I hadn't realized I'd been tearing at my own skin. "Now that you mention it, it does itch," I said.

He took a closer look at the source of the itching and asked me to show him my other arm, which I did. To my horror, it had similar
lesions
on it.

"I've never had hives before," I said.

"They're not hives," he said, after examining both arms as well as my hands, my fingers, my neck, and a small patch behind one ear. There were rashes everywhere. "Have you spent any time in the woods over the past twenty-four hours?"

I said I hadn't. He asked me if I was sure. I said sure I was sure. Then I flashed back on my Central Park experience.

"But I wasn't in the woods, exactly," I said. "It was just a clump of bushes, and I was only in them for a few minutes."

He nodded, chuckling.

I asked him what was so funny. He said people often mistake poison ivy for less benign plants.

"
Poison ivy
?" I yelped. I'd had it twice after weekend jaunts to the country with Dan and had wanted to kill myself both times. Never had I itched so much. Never had my skin turned the color of raspberries with the bumpy texture to match. Never had I been forced to wear only a bedsheet for an entire week until the rash began to dry up and I could tolerate having clothes touch it. Never had I gone through a vat of calamine lotion.

I told Chuck I couldn't possibly have poison ivy. Not now, of all times. He said he was sorry but that he would stake his thirty years as a doctor on it.

"Try not to scratch," he cautioned. "Oh, and stay out of the sun, don't bathe or shower, and avoid physical contact with others. It'll make it spread."

After his diagnosis sunk in, I considered smashing the window next to me and leaping out of the plane. I mean, this guy had basically just taken away any expectation I had of being at my best for Evan, who had seen enough of me at my worst. Never mind that I also felt guilty about Weezie; since I'd dragged her along on my spy mission, she must have gotten The Crud too.

But, of course, I didn't smash the window or leap out of the plane. Instead, I spent several minutes in quiet contemplation, remembering not only what Weezie had said about love (that it doesn't waver) but what Evan had said about love (that it was about accepting weaknesses as well as strengths), and I decided to go for another kind of flying leap.

When you get right down to it, what is a leap of faith if not appearing at your beloved's doorstep, not only uninvited but letting him see you for who you really are?

My arms started to itch in earnest then, driving me insane. It was as if the rash, having now been identified by a professional, was free to run rampant.

As I battled the urge to rip my skin to shreds, a question suddenly popped into my head and ended up steering this story right back to its beginning.

"Just curious," I said to Chuck, who'd retreated into his book. "Do men and women come down with poison ivy with the same frequency?"

"Now that you mention it, I
have
seen a rise in the number of women who come down with it," he said, looking up. "It's probably because you're doing your own yard work now, along with hiking and hunting and fishing—activities that used to be considered 'male.'" He chuckled. "Hey, you women wanted sexual equality? You've got it."

Yes, I thought, as he went back to his reading. We have it and we're better for it. But it does have its occasional drawbacks.

When I landed in Fort Lauderdale, I stopped at an airport sundries shop during the layover and bought some cortisone cream and some Benadryl. Then I went to the ladies' room, took the pill, and applied the cream, which, unlike the pink calamine lotion, was a pasty white. As I peered at myself in the mirror over the sink, I noticed that the poison ivy had surfaced on my face; there was one patch on my chin and another on my left cheek and a third on the tip of my nose, so I put the cream there too.

Are you getting this? I looked like a monster. Or like those people who paint their faces to support their teams at sporting events.

Two hours later, I made it through the turboprop flight and its attendant turbulence with relative ease. Thanks to the Benadryl, I was pretty much knocked out from takeoff to landing, and the only bumps I felt were on my skin.

But it was on the fifteen-minute ferry ride that I really began to loosen up. It suddenly dawned on me that I was in paradise. I mean, like Utopia. I'd been to the Caribbean and I'd been to Bermuda and I'd been to Hawaii, and they were each stunningly beautiful in their own way, but the Abacos had a more quiet, less showy allure. No giant hotels. No giant fast-food restaurants. No giant tourists with video cameras. (Okay, there were a few, but they stayed in Treasure Cay to play golf.)

As the boat carried me along to Green Turtle, I sat and watched nature go by: the water, which was the sort of turquoise/aqua/teal you only see in either movie swimming pools or your dreams; the soft sandy beaches that make you want to bury your toes in them; the lush, tropical landscape with its swaying palms and trees laden with coconuts, grapefruits, and berries; the afternoon sky, which was blue but dotted with big, puffy clouds that felt low enough to touch. And I listened, both to the excited chatter of visitors like me and to the natives, whose melodious voices were singing to one another about their workday.

"Excuse me. Is there a city on Green Turtle?" I said to one of the locals. I asked this, not because I was hankering for a city. God, no. I just wondered if civilization had encroached on all this beauty.

The Bahamian woman, who was with her three young children, smiled and said, "New Plymouth, you mean?"

"I guess so," I said, picturing paved roads, traffic congestion, and everything else I'd left behind.

"
This
is our settlement," she said, gesturing past the dock where our ferry was about to tie up.

Her settlement. I looked around and sighed with relief. Along with secluded inlets and gently sloping hills and green forests, there was, at this southern tip of the cay, a little village with the flavor of an eighteenth-century New England harbor. Clapboard houses with gingerbread trim lined its narrow streets, which weren't clogged with honking cars but were quiet and pristine, except for a couple of clucking hens. No wonder they call the Aba-cos the "out islands," I thought. And no wonder Evan loves them.

"New Plymouth is very small," said the woman almost apologetically, mistaking my expression for disappointment. "Only about four hundred people live here."

About half the population of Minco, I thought, remembering how afraid I'd been of small places, of not being able to succeed in small places. No more.