Emerald City (17 page)

After smoking for an hour or so, the balloon man climbs back into bed with me. He’s a skinny Spaniard with a sudden, crooked smile. In another life I might have loved this man, even married him. As it is, I lie beneath him and stare up at the fan, its long blades immobile in winter.

Finally the passport chores are done. I spread my map across a café table, as my husband used to do. I consider my options.

“Alison?” a man says.

I can’t place him. He has that elfin sort of face which doesn’t age, pale eyes, and strong square hands.

“Rutgers,” he says. “Remember?”

I do, then. He was not a friend exactly, more one of those people I had known about and spoken to occasionally. “John?”

“Jake.”

“Weren’t you always selling something? You had a lot of business schemes?”

“Bravo.” He eases into a chair beside me. I remember now that he ran a business typing students’ papers. Later he sold shares in a card-counting venture in Atlantic City. He had seemed so much a man of the world that just sitting beside him made you feel nostalgic, as though he were already beyond those college years, looking back, and you were one of his memories.

“So, what have you been doing?” I ask. “How many companies have you chaired?”

“This and that.” He taps the table’s edge as if testing for hidden compartments. “Nothing earthshaking.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

“And you?”

I take a deep breath, and only then does it strike me what a terrible process I’ve initiated. My life teeters before me like a bad view from an unsteady height. “It’s a long story,” I say, feeling my smile wane. “Not worth it.”

“Ditto.” He takes off his glasses, which are shaded beige, and rubs the skin between his eyes. The lids are pink at the edges. I have an odd sense that we have just exchanged a confidence.

“You, ah … waiting for your husband or something?”

“Right,” I say, pleased by this suggestion. “He’s at the Alhambra. I wasn’t up to the climb today.”

“I hear you. My wife’s up there, too.”

“How funny!” I cry, unable to resist. “I wonder if they’ll meet.”

I feel lighthearted, as if nothing had happened to me yet. I imagine myself standing in a cafeteria line, holding a blue plastic tray. In my mind, it is late spring, and the grass is green and fat.

“Do you know, I was robbed up there the other day?” I tell Jake. “Two boys got everything. My passport … I had to buy this bag.”

I hold it up. It’s made of the softest calfskin, that fine leather for which Spain is famous. For two days I have held it in my lap, smelling the sweet new leather each time I breathe. At night I leave it open beside the balloon man’s bed so I can smell it as I go to sleep.

He feels the seams. “It’s good quality,” he says. “A lot of times they aren’t. Where’d you get it?”

“Right nearby. I can show you.”

“But your husband …”

“Oh, he just left. He’ll be gone awhile.”

The sunlight in Granada is more pure and strong than any I have felt in Spain this winter. It warms my neck. The soft leather of my new bag rubs pleasantly against my shoulder. I feel the happiness that comes of believing your own lies for a minute. I picture my husband wandering through the halls of the Alhambra, loaded with his guidebooks and maps, describing everything to me at dinner over a bottle of wine.

“You must have a hundred companies by now,” I say in a voice I don’t quite recognize.

“Not exactly.”

“Well, lots then.”

“Sure,” he says, shrugging. “A few.”

“Are some of them in Spain?”

He glances at the sky. “No. None here.”

We’re near the cathedral. It is very quiet on these backstreets, and their narrowness keeps the sun from touching the pavement. When I find the small corner shop where I bought my leather purse, its gates are down. “Siesta,” I say. “Damn.”

We stand awkwardly, unsure what to do next. Twice Jake turns to look behind him. “Are you being followed?” I joke.

“No,” he says. “Why, are you?”

I adjust my calfskin strap. “Of course not.”

“You know,” he says. “Seeing you makes me remember my very young self. It’s a funny feeling.”

“What do you remember?”

“How completely without fear I was.”

“Isn’t everyone, at that age?”

“Me especially. Too much.”

“Now you scare more easily?”

He moves away, hands in his pockets. There is no sound but the squeaking of small black birds that circle overhead. They sound like mice, only more plaintive.

Jake turns to me quickly. “I did a stupid thing,” he says. “I’ve lost a lot of people’s money.” The skin is white around his mouth.

“How awful.”

“It is awful.” He breathes as if we had just been running. “I don’t know why I told you that.”

“It’s all right,” I say, rubbing my damp palms along the sides of my dress. I want to get away from him.

“Forget I said that.”

“Fine.”

He pushes his hands inside his pockets and looks at the sky. It is very blue above us.

“I’ve ruined families, that’s what I’m saying. These people have nothing left. Can you imagine what that’s like?”

“For you or for them?”

“For them,” he says, startled. “Them. Of course.”

I run my fingers over the soft leather strap of my purse. I love this purse much better than the first.

“You know what’s worse? I cheated them. Set it up that way. Then it went more wrong than I meant.”

He is watching the church facade, its broad doors and bulges of plaster. I wonder if I should simply walk away.

“Look at this,” he says, laughing abruptly. “They’re chasing me around the globe, and here I am in a churchyard spilling my guts to a total stranger.”

“We went to college together.”

“That’s true.”

I hold the bag in my arms, hugging the leather to my chest. I watch him pace across the stones.

“I’m leaving Spain today. Going to Morocco, down into Africa. That’s a secret,” he adds, laughing again. It is a strange, nervous laugh I’m not fond of. He moves close to me. His breath is oddly sweet, and his hands shake. I’m afraid he might faint, and then what will I do with him?

“You know the worst thing? The worst thing is I can’t do anything. It’s gone.
Finito,
my whole life.”

“But you’re so young,” I say, surprising myself. “How on earth can you say that?”

It’s true. He is a young man, frightened as a boy. He grows embarrassed, and his eyes veer down to the shiny stones at our feet. “Christ,” he says, shaking his head. “Look, I’m sorry to put you through this. Your husband’s probably looking for you …”

His whole face trembles. He watches me with a look I recognize: the look I’m sure I must have myself when I watch the normal people living happy lives.

“I don’t have a husband,” I say, holding his gaze. I feel it coming now: a giddy rush of confession, urgent as nausea. “I have nothing in the world.”

Jake is speechless. He stares at me, his mouth open a little, his head tilted to one side. I feel an uneasy desire to move closer to him.

“Are you serious?”

I nod in silence and look away.

The sound of a motor distracts us. Turning, I see two men in puffy jackets on a Vespa. It hurtles down a side street, heading straight for us. I barely have time to look at Jake before the bike ploughs between us at top speed and someone knocks me onto the pavement. I sit up, stunned, rubbing my hip, and see my new calfskin bag swinging from a motorcyclist’s shoulder. I scream at the top
of my lungs, and the sound echoes back across the courtyard. The Vespa rounds a corner and disappears.

Jake runs after them, his footsteps following the motor into silence. I stand alone beneath the whirl of squeaking birds and wait. After a while I sit on the church steps and stare at the hem of my dress, bright green against the stone. Minutes pass, too many to continue waiting, but I feel no urge to move. Night is hours away. A man comes and opens the gates to the leather shop. Beautiful bags like mine hang in the windows. I wonder, if I explain to him what happened, whether he might give me another one for free.

On a warm island whose name I can’t remember, my husband and his wife have taken Penny on vacation. I imagine the sweet smell the air must have. Pineapple, is it? Flowers? I recall the sticky buds that sprout from the stalks of tough, sappy plants. I can feel their texture as though I were holding one now.

In the churchyard, there are mostly shadows, though sunlight still grazes the tile roofs. I imagine Jake packing his things for Morocco. Was he actually working with the thieves, I wonder, or did he merely see an exit and take it? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. He’s gone, my possessions are gone, and I am one step nearer a point I’ve been longing for, it seems: the point of giving up. Yet my mind keeps drifting to Jake—his panicked belief that his life is over—and this seems so sweet, so melodramatic. He’s thirty-two, for God’s sake. And it strikes me, then, that I’m no older than he is.

Just then he totters from a side street. There is a long tear down one trouser leg, and his shirttails flap in the breeze. He smiles the way I remember him smiling in college, a big sly grin like cartoon foxes have. He raises my leather bag toward the sky. “Nailed the bastards,” he pants, handing it to me with care. “Haven’t run like that since track.”

I pull back the zipper and see my things: familiar, insignificant. I
stare at the jumble of shapes and feel my eyes grow wet. “You saved it,” I tell him.

Jake’s face is red. He clenches and unclenches his fists, running his hands through his hair. He looks at me several times without speaking. “Ever been to Morocco?” he finally asks.

I imagine beaches, crowded cafés, that smell of tanning lotion. From what seems a great distance, these summer things come wafting back. I look around me. Blue shadows sprawl across the stones, and dusk thickens and chills the air. A last stop, I think, before I go back home to begin again. I’m young, headed to Morocco on vacation. In Morocco it is summertime.

Parker has dragged his lounge chair into the sea, and water washes over his knees and belly. He holds
The History of the Crimean War
above the splashing. The sun burns overhead.

Lucy has never understood how he can read in the sun this way. Especially that sort of book: heavy, hardbound, dull. When he finishes he will begin another instantly. He has brought a dozen books on their vacation, and the Crimean War is the subject of each.

Lucy sits beneath a palm tree, so that the sun touches her fair skin only in small patches. There was a time when she would not let any sun touch her at all, for her white skin became mottled with freckles and she thought they made her look cheap. But as she grows older she doesn’t mind the freckles so much, and the sun feels good in small doses.

Lucy sits with a magazine in her lap and watches people. She has only recently begun to know the pleasure of watching others. For many years she could only worry that she herself was being watched, and would hide beneath wide hats and sunglasses and lipstick to avoid people’s stares. But lately she has grown more curious, less self-conscious.

The island of Bora Bora attracts a diverse crowd. This is the best hotel on Bora Bora, many say in all of the islands around Tahiti. It is certainly very expensive, though Lucy does not know how expensive, exactly, because Parker handles that. On the beach there are tanned men in their late forties with hairy stomachs and thin gold chains around their necks. Their companions tend to be much younger women with exercise-hardened bodies and light blond streaks in their hair. There are families, too: docile fair-haired children; teenagers who still lie splayed on their deck chairs at high noon like creatures stranded by the receding tide.

A young woman with long blond hair follows her luggage to a bungalow on stilts above the water at the far end of the beach. The bungalows over the water are the very best at the hotel; Lucy and Parker are staying in one as well. The woman wears a Polynesian dress and a flower in her hair. She and the bellboy enter the bungalow, where the bellboy will explain about towels and meals and the woman will marvel at the vivid red flowers that have been tucked into the room’s every crevice. She will breathe deeply to savor their perfume. This is what Lucy did when she and Parker arrived eight days before.

The sun is growing quite hot, and Lucy shifts her chair farther into the shade of the palm. She looks forward to lunchtime, when she and Parker will sit in the cool dining room and eat crab salads as they watch the sea. So far, Parker shows no signs of moving. The water splashes gently over his soft belly. He turns another page.

Glancing back down the beach, Lucy spots the blond woman whom she just saw arriving. Now the woman is standing on the deck of her bungalow, wearing a bikini and looking down at the water, which laps at the bungalow’s stilts. Lucy watches her climb onto the railing that surrounds the deck and then dive into the sea in a perfect arc. There is hardly a splash. Lucy stares at the spot where the woman disappeared and waits for her to surface. It seems to take a long time, and she reappears some distance from where she landed. Lucy has not seen anyone else dive off the railing of a bungalow that way. It looks very daring—the sort of thing she imagines doing herself, but would never try.

The woman swims parallel with the beach, then emerges from the water not far from where Parker is sitting. She has the delicate slenderness of the very young, a smooth stomach, and long, narrow legs. Her skin is a rich, even brown. She wears a sparkling turquoise bikini, cut high above her hips to emphasize the fluid curve of her waist. The top wraps her tightly. Lucy glances around the beach and sees that many people have noticed the woman; even Parker has looked up from his book. The blonde turns and begins walking back toward her bungalow. Lucy watches her, noting the slim ankles, the golden tint of her skin against the white sand.

“Did you see her?” she says to Parker when finally he joins her under the palm tree.

“Who?” he asks, carefully shaking sand from his book before replacing it in the beach bag.