Family and Other Accidents (7 page)

“Happy or sad?”

by being young,
by being nice

It's already too late.

Another involuntary flinch of his stomach, like a CD skipping in a changer, and Jack knows it's just a matter of time before he throws up again. Watching the rise, crest, and fall of champagne in the glasses, he puts his palms on the linen tablecloth and wills the Dramamine tablets to kick in, wills the boat to stop rocking, wills his girlfriend and the older couple at their table to stop trying to include him in the conversation.

“George and I take this cruise every year for our anniversary.” The white-haired woman nods at Jack and Mona. A few minutes ago she introduced herself as Helen Stein. “And we were wondering if it's your anniversary, too.”

“Nope, just a vacation.” Mona finishes her second glass of champagne. A semicircle of mauve lipstick stains the rim—when Jack met her, she wore only bubblegum-scented Chap Stick.

“We've actually avoided the altar thus far,” Mona continues. “But we've been together for a long time. Five years, right?”

“Right.” Jack looks up. He runs through witty things to say, but can't think of anything other than the motion; he wishes he were anywhere else in the world, as long as it wasn't rocking. The Steins smile, and he tries smiling back. George Stein looks a little like Jack's father might have if he hadn't died thirteen years earlier.

Their waiter brings a dimpled dish of escargot. Jack's stomach shudders again, and he's on his feet, excusing himself.

“Do you need help—” Mona is up, too, setting her napkin on her chair, reaching for Jack's lower arm. In the five hours since the ship left port, her hands and soothing words have gone from gentle to bored.

“No, please, just have din—” Guts spinning and whirling, he gags, waves her away. “Please, I just want to be alone.”

He turns away from Mona's look of sympathy and annoyance and stumbles through the narrow halls back to their tiny cabin just in time to vomit in their tiny toilet with its enormous flush. Then he crashes into their tiny double bed.

Three hours later the Dramamine is finally working; instead of feeling sick, Jack feels sick and very, very sleepy. He's drifting in and out under the stiff sheets when Mona stumbles in and flips on the overhead light.

“Were you sleeping?” Her words are bleary from alcohol. “Do you feel any better?”

“Not really,” he answers both questions. “How was dinner?”

“Fabulous.” Kicking off her shoes, she opens the efficient closet and takes out a silk nightgown. Her voice trails off as she goes to the bathroom. “We all had lobster. The waiter said he'd have room service send you some crackers, if you want.”

Mona left the closet open, and her dresses sway back and forth on wooden hangers. Ten dresses for a seven-night cruise. The first winter they dated, he bought her a green velvet cocktail dress so she would have something to wear for his firm's holiday party. With her hair down at the party, she'd looked like a sexy elf—something found on a naughty Christmas card.

“You know that couple at our table got married three weeks after they met?” Mona says. In the full-length mirror on the open bathroom door, Jack sees her reflection, naked and pale. “Isn't that crazy?”

“It seems to have worked out okay for them.” Jack sighs. “Are you coming to bed?”

Sucking in her stomach and straightening her spine, Mona tries to pinch an inch of flesh from her thigh.

“I've put on ten pounds already,” she says. “If you keep hurling, at least you won't fatten up too much on this trip.”

Jack rolls his eyes; he's weighed 175 since he was nineteen, and he doubts she's gained two pounds since he met her.

“I guess three weeks isn't that strange. Craig and his ex-wife got married after dating only a month or something.” Mona pulls the nightgown over her head, studies some blemish on her chin and frowns into the mirror.

“Who's Craig?” Jack mumbles.

“God,
Jack
. He's the other council reporter. I've introduced you to him at every
Plain Dealer
party for five years. Do you ever pay attention to anything I tell you?”

“Blond boy?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, yeah. I don't like him.”

“Why not, because he looks like Brad Pitt?”

“I dunno, he seemed like a space case.” Jack can't remember if this is true, he only knows he doesn't like the way Mona says Craig's name—as if this Craig were developing a cure for cancer or reading to the blind on his days off from the paper. “Come on. I'm tired.”

Closing his eyes, he tries to let his body become one with the rocking. Eighteen years ago, one month before his fifteenth birthday, he'd lost his virginity to Anna Fram on her parents' heavy oak bed. He'd felt sick then, too—wanting everything to be perfect because he loved Anna, or thought he did. He'd assumed it was love because when she would go home after finishing necking and schoolwork, Jack would lie awake and smell her on the sheets. Hundreds of years seemed to cram themselves into those hours before he would see her on the way to school the next morning. As Mona brushes her teeth and washes her face, he tries to remember if he ever felt that way about her and why he stopped feeling that way about Anna once he was at college.

Finally he senses the change in light, feels Mona pull down the bedspread and get in. Her hair, full from the salty, humid air, tickles his face and throat. The first few times they messed around (she wouldn't sleep with him until they'd been seeing each other nearly a month) he hadn't been able to keep his hands out of her curls. Now it occurs to him that they haven't had sex since they left for vacation. He tries to think of the last time they had sex at all; he'd been working late to bill enough hours so he wouldn't feel guilty for the time off, and she'd covered all those early city council meetings. Maybe two weeks, maybe three?

Letting his palm linger over her head, he flexes fingers, but retracts his hand at the last minute.

“So, are we
ever
going to get married?” Mona asks.

It's something she brought up last May at Carrie Fram's wedding. Then he'd flipped it around, asked if she wanted to get married—she'd just shrugged. Tonight he's so close to sleep, he doesn't feel guilty not giving her any answer.

“Come on,” he says, doubling a pillow under his head. “Are you happy or sad?”

“I don't know,” she says. Their room hums with something mechanical, perhaps the engine. “Happy you stopped puking.”

         

Mona is not a particularly fast runner, but she likes the thing that happens when she hits her stride, the click when her thoughts become clear. But because Helen Stein wants to jog with her, Mona knows it will take longer for the click to happen today.

Helen diligently follows Mona's lead, stretching her right leg against the deck's wood railing, then her left. There's no way Helen presses hard enough to warm her muscles, but Mona says nothing. She “ran” with Helen yesterday, knows the older woman will only walk around the track once or twice before calling it quits. Still it's hard for Mona to be annoyed as the water beyond them shimmers with phantom flecks of gold and silver.

“Jack looked good today,” Helen says. “I hope the two of you are having better time now.”

“Yeah, much better,” Mona says; but last night, even though Jack wasn't sick, they hadn't made love. After the ship's subpar presentation of
42nd Street
, they'd gone back to their cabin, where she'd skimmed glossy island shopping magazines and he'd tried to figure out how to check his messages remotely using their cabin phone.

“Well, we're in St. John tomorrow, and the beach is the most beautiful you've ever seen,” Helen says. They start around the track, Helen keeping their pace at a casual hop. “And then there's the big ball on Friday night. I know it's silly, but people here get so dressed up. Oh, and, the dancing. Do you like dancing, dear?”

Mona says Jack doesn't dance, and Helen reaches for Mona's arm, suddenly serious. There's a trace of Rita Hayworth in Helen's eyes, and Mona realizes Helen was once a very beautiful woman. “We've taken this cruise for years, and every time we take the ballroom classes,” she says. “You and Jack should join us. It makes everyone so happy to see nice young people.”

“I'll ask him,” Mona says, finding it strange she and Jack could make people happy by being young, by being nice—by being anything.

As Helen aborts the run to sunbathe, Mona jogs ahead, pushing for the click, when it becomes automatic, when she doesn't think about the ache in her left knee, forgets the gnawing headache from too much wine the night before. Her thoughts become clear and she can line up all the things she wants—the investigative piece she's writing about Ameritech, what she would say if she won a Pulitzer prize, names she might give children starting with Arrabella and Alexander and working down the alphabet. Today she also thinks of dancing in the full-skirted black dress she got at Saks for the trip, spinning, round and round, with a faceless partner.

         

Drinking a dry martini and watching the whisked white peaks of the waves from the Admiral's Deck with George, Jack actually feels a little like an admiral, or at least someone of moderate importance.

“What kind of law do you practice anyway?” George asks, and Jack says he does mainly corporate litigation without going into much detail. Generally it's a question people ask without any real desire to know the answer.

“Ah, I bet you never go to trial,” George says warmly.

“Twice in seven years.”

“You know,” Frank says, “I'm only two semesters shy of a law degree myself.”

“Really?” Jack asks, shifting in his deck chair, the plastic straps eating into his thighs. “What saved you?”

“After the war, I wanted to take advantage of the G.I. Bill, but I already had an engineering degree. So I started law school. Helen got pregnant during the start of my third year, and I took a job at G.E., thinking I'd go back and finish up later.”

Nodding, Jack drains the inverted-cone glass, the alcohol hot in his chest. Generally he doesn't drink other than an occasional gin and tonic with clients. Today, however, it seems right to have these James Bond–esque martinis with George, like a moment of maturity Jack never got with his own father—most of their conversations had ended with his father asking rhetorical questions.

Catching the eye of a blond server, Jack raises a finger, signaling they need another round. The waitress, a college-aged girl in short shorts and a red and purple bikini top, appears with a martini in each hand. She gives Jack a plastic pen and charge slip. He signs it to his cabin number—an imaginary account he assumes will be settled at the end of the trip.

“So you never went back?” Jack asks, pinching an olive off the miniature sword.

“I thought about it,” George says. “But I liked my life; it was just too much to give up for something I didn't want that badly.”

“A fine decision,” Jack says.

He starts to crumple his copy of the receipt, but notices that the waitress wrote a note—
If you want a friend
—followed by a cabin number. Looking up at her, Jack remembers a girl at Penn who handcuffed him to the frame of the bunk bed in her dorm room when they fucked. He can't recall that girl's name, and wonders whatever happened to those nameless girlfriends who drifted in and out of his life like the changing of the weather. When the blond waitress sees him seeing her, she motions him to the bar with a jerk of her ponytailed head. Telling George he'll be back in a minute, Jack goes over, smile ready.

“So I hear you're in the market for friends,” he says. He hasn't cheated on Mona since the early days in their relationship (when she probably wasn't seeing other guys but he kept on with a few other girls until it became too much work). Still, he knows the drill, when to nod, when to touch his chin with the back of his thumb.

The waitress introduces herself as Alix-something. Telling him she's taking a year off UNLV to get some “real life experience,” her voice is full of good-natured exaggeration. Jack laughs along with the stories about the leak in the staff lounge and how she'll change her major to hotel management when she returns to school. She leans in, grazing his shoulder with her hand, asks if he'd like to tour the staff quarters, see how the other half lives.

“Your father can come, too,” she says, nodding at George, then winks. “Or he doesn't have to.”

Mona is two decks below tanning with Helen; it would be so easy for Jack to have Alix-something—a fun, pretty girl who works on a boat to get a tan and get laid. He imagines his hand at the small of her back, and her lips tasting of sea salt and coconut rum. But then the achiness sets in, just like trying to work with the flu, that feeling he should have just stayed home because nothing's getting done.