Tomorrow There Will Be Sun Page 14

  When I reach the rocks I turn around and head north toward the other end of the beach, where if I continued through the dark I’d pass Villa Perfect, the home of my new friend Maria Josephina, and eventually reach the town and the hotel beaches, which are probably full of revelers, even this late at night. The water slips up under the soles of my feet, erasing any trace of my footprints.

  I see no sign of my daughter. The most likely explanation for this, I decide, is that Solly and Peter were so deep into their conversation and that bottle of tequila that they didn’t notice the kids return from the beach. Their swim would have been brief. As Peter has pointed out, Clem is a wimp about the cold.

  As I turn to head back to the villa I see two figures coming up the beach toward me from the direction of the starfish rocks. In the dark they do not look like Clem and Malcolm. The height is right, but the figures are both too thick, too broad. They don’t look lithe and graceful like our daughter and Solly’s son.

  I’m frightened, but this lasts only a second, because as they draw closer I can see that in fact they are our kids, and that they don’t look like themselves in the dark because they’re each wrapped in a large blanket.

  “Hey, Mom,” Clem says. “What are you doing out here?”

  “I was just getting some fresh air.”

  “Really? There’s lots of fresh air in the house because, like, there aren’t any walls.”

  “Well, I wanted to be outside and then when I came out here and I didn’t see you I got a little worried.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s late at night.”

  “It’s not that late, Mother.”

  “Why are you carrying blankets?”

  “Because,” Clem says, “last time we swam at night I was really cold when we got out of the water.”

  “Did you go swimming?”

  Clem and Malcolm exchange a look. I can’t tell what kind of look because it’s too dark out to read faces.

  “No,” Malcolm says. “Clem thought the water wasn’t warm enough so we went for a walk instead.”

  “With blankets?”

  “Yes. We had them with us, so.”

  “So . . . what? Finish your sentence.”

  “So we brought them along. Jeez,” Clem says. “Are you still drunk?”

  “I wasn’t drunk.”

  She scoffs. “Whatever.”

  We stand there, the three of us, while I decide what to say next. Whether to continue with my interrogation. I want to know where they walked to—I went to that end of the beach and I didn’t see them. Did they scramble to the other side of the rocks? What’s on the other side of the rocks? Did they turn inland? Make their way through the jungle patch? Don’t they know that it’s dangerous to be out at night? What’s with the blankets?

  Am I still drunk?

  “I think I’ll head inside,” Malcolm says.

  “See you in there,” Clem tells him.

  He turns and heads up to the house. Clem and I stand silently, facing each other. I want to wrap myself inside the blanket with her, to feel that sort of closeness, but she wants the opposite of that.

  “What’s your problem?” she asks. “Why are you out here?”

  “What’s going on with you and Malcolm?”

  “What? Why are you asking me that? God, Mom. You are so annoying.”

  “Clem,” I say. “What about Sean? He’s a nice boy. You have such a nice relationship with him.”

  “You know what your problem is, Mother?”

  I shouldn’t let her talk to me like that. I should scold her. Take away her phone. Do something. Instead I just say, “No. What’s my problem?”

  “You have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. You think you know everything. You think you have it all figured out. But you’re wrong.” She turns her back on me and starts up toward the villa. Over her shoulder she calls, “The problem with you, Mother, is that you don’t know anything about anything.”

  WEDNESDAY

  You would think that after nearly twenty years together, it would be easy to find the perfect gift for your husband on his birthday.

  Peter insists that this trip is enough. That we’ve spent so much money we should cut back where we can, but more than that, he claims there’s nothing in the world that could top a week on a luxury vacation with the people he loves most.

  “Things are just things,” he told me. “I never liked things that much in the first place, and as I get older, I like things even less.”

  This, of course, is not entirely true. There are things Peter likes. He likes good bourbon. He likes a good pair of socks. He likes fancy chocolate, the darker the better. He likes big doorstopper books about military history. He enjoys a cigar every now and then. None of these things fits the occasion. Peter is turning fifty. These things are just things. And anyway, with the exception of the socks and maybe the chocolate, these things proved problematic to pack along on an international trip.

  So the short of it is, I have nothing. Nothing to give my husband on his fiftieth birthday.

  The best birthday gift I ever gave Peter was when he turned thirty-one, the first of his birthdays we spent together. We were already living in a Spanish-style duplex in West Hollywood planning a wedding nobody knew about yet.

  We spent nearly every minute together in the days that followed that night at the bar in New Orleans. Everything about Peter Carlson took me by surprise. I hadn’t come to New Orleans to hole up in a hotel room with a man I’d just met, but he had a beautiful smile and he barely took his eyes or his hands off me and I’d never before been the focus of such intense, intoxicating attention. I loved the way he smelled and his sunburned arms and I loved his white hair and the thin trail of darker hair below his belly button. I liked how he worked as a designer for a magazine—it seemed edgy and sophisticated and very adult. Despite all of this I told him I was just getting out of a relationship and that whatever was happening between us wouldn’t go anywhere. This wasn’t a ploy to make myself more desirable, and yet there was no denying Peter’s desire.

  We skipped the music. We never went to another bar. We ate from stands where you ordered food on the street so you could continue on with the revelry, which for us meant having sex, nonstop sex, and talking. We told each other everything. The entire story of the years that led up to the night we met.

  We bonded over being the children of divorce, and discussed how my experience made me unsure if I ever wanted to get married while his made him want to have the kind of marriage that eluded his parents. He held my new bangs off my forehead and put them back again so he could weigh in on which look was better. (The bangs.) He loved my raspy voice and made me read aloud from the Bible he took from the hotel nightstand. My job with teens in foster care impressed him, and hearing myself describe it to him, I felt real pride in the work I was doing. I told him I wanted to write, and he asked me why I didn’t, and I said I didn’t know how to be a writer, and he shrugged and said I guess you just have to sit down and do it. This is still the best piece of advice about writing that I’ve ever been given.

  The friends I’d come to New Orleans with were having their own wild adventures, and Solly didn’t mind Peter abandoning him because Solly meets people everywhere he goes, and there was no shortage of young, beautiful, unattached women in town for Jazz Fest.

  As we lay naked on one of the nights or mornings or afternoons, Peter told me about the View-Master he’d lost when he was nine. I’d had one, too, as a child, the red plastic toy into which you’d slip a white cardboard disk of tiny photographs to click through. I had some assortment of cartoon character disks, Mickey Mouse or maybe Snow White, I couldn’t remember. But Peter remembered his very well. He had a collection of travel disks, from Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Antarctica and less exotic locales like Washington, D.C., and Yosemite. He used to lie in bed and look a
t these places and fantasize about visiting them with his sister, who didn’t give him the time of day, and his parents, who were in the midst of a spectacularly bitter divorce. Somehow, in the back-and-forth between his boyhood home and his father’s new apartment, Peter lost his View-Master. Each parent blamed the other parent for misplacing it. Neither parent offered to buy him a new one.

  So for his thirty-first birthday I tracked down a vintage seventies View-Master. This was just around the time eBay was getting started, but I didn’t yet know about eBay, and so I spent months searching antique shops before I finally struck gold at a tiny place in the Valley. Then I found a film developer who took a series of photographs I had of Peter and me from our first year together and converted them onto a white cardboard disk that fit into the View-Master. He charged me four times what the vintage toy cost, but it was worth every penny. Peter cried when I gave it to him. It was the first time I’d ever seen him cry.

  I knew I’d never top that gift, and that seemed just as it should be: You put your best foot forward, give the greatest gifts at the beginning of your love story, so that you have something to look back on and say, “Remember that time . . .” But now, twenty years later, I wonder if I had it wrong. If maybe we should save our best gifts for the middle, for the times when you both need reminding that you are special to each other.

  When Solly arrives at the breakfast table with a gift-wrapped box for Peter, I’m livid. This isn’t fair, I know. Peter didn’t tell Solly not to buy him anything. He didn’t tell Solly that this trip was enough. How could Solly know that to Peter things are only things? That as he nears fifty he cares less for things? Only a wife would know that.

  And what did Solly get him anyway? Not bourbon. Not cigars. I can tell by the shape of the box that it isn’t a book.

  Solly puts the present down at the empty place where Peter will sit when he’s done with his morning bathroom routine, a routine that has gotten longer and louder over the course of our stay in Mexico; also something only a wife would know.

  “How nice,” I say. “What’s in the box, Solly?”

  “You’ll see.” He smiles at Ingrid. She knows, too. I’m the only adult in the room who doesn’t.

  “What did you get him, Mother?” Clem asks. I know that Clem knows that I didn’t get him anything. She was there for the conversations about how this trip was to be his big fiftieth birthday present from all of us.

  “This trip is his gift,” I tell her. “You know that.”

  “You didn’t get him anything? Nothing to open on his birthday?”

  “Did you?” I ask her.

  “No. But I’m not, like, married to him.”

  “So? You’re his daughter. You could use the occasion to give something back, considering how much he’s given you every single day of your extraordinarily charmed life.”

  I know that the last thing Peter wants for his birthday is to show up to breakfast to find his wife and daughter bickering, but sometimes Clementine can be so selfish.

  Clem leans closer to Malcolm and says something to him under her breath to which he shows no reaction at all. He smiles at me weakly.

  Peter enters the dining room and everyone applauds. He takes a theatrical bow. He looks happy. Content. Wanting for nothing.

  He slides into the seat in front of the wrapped box. “I thought we said no gifts.”

  “Nobody said anything to me about no gifts,” Solly says. “And for the record, I would like gifts on my fiftieth birthday. Many gifts. No expense should be spared. And no joke gifts, please.”

  “Duly noted,” Peter says.

  Enrique comes to pour Peter some coffee. “Feliz cumpleaños,” he says.

  “Thank you, Enrique.”

  “Here in Mexico we have the tradition of la mordida. Where you go to eat the cake with your hands behind your back like this”—Enrique mimes eating without hands—“and then your family, they shove you into the cake so that you get it all over your face and in your hair.”

  “As inviting as that sounds,” Peter says, “I think I’d like to start with some eggs over easy.”

  Enrique takes the empty plate from his place and heads toward the kitchen. “As you wish,” he says.

  Peter studies the box. He picks it up and gives it a little shake.

  “Careful,” Solly tells him.

  “So it isn’t a snow globe?”

  “Right. Nor is it a pair of maracas.”

  “What could it be?” Peter says as he tears into the paper, revealing a black box, which he opens on its hinges. The inside of the box faces him, so the rest of us can’t see its contents. “No. Way,” Peter says. “No way!” He turns the box around. It’s a watch.

  Peter has never worn a watch for as long as I have known him.

  “This is amazing, Sol. Really.” He takes the watch out of the box and straps it onto his wrist, the one on which he isn’t wearing the string bracelet I gave him, and he stares at it. I think, though I find it hard to believe, that I see tears in Peter’s eyes.

  “So when we were in college,” Solly starts, “I used to wear this watch. It was from my father’s business. It said Solomon Mattress Company on the face. I still can’t figure out why he had them made. They weren’t for sale. And what employee would want one? I guess he made them for family, a reminder of the ship our good fortune sailed in on. Anyway, Peter used to make fun of me for wearing it. He thought it was terribly bourgeois, though he never used that word, because as you can probably discern, bourgeois is a word beyond the limits of Peter’s simple vocabulary.”

  Peter lets loose a sharp, staccato laugh.

  “Someday, I told him, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to own a business worthy of a watch face.” Solly reaches over and takes Peter’s wrist and turns it so we can take a closer look at the watch. On its face: the logo of Boychick Bagels.

  “This is . . .” Peter takes his wrist back and stares at the watch again. “Amazing.”

  “But wait,” Solly says. “There’s more.”

  Of course there is. With Solly there is always more. With Solly enough is never enough. He reaches into his pocket and he retrieves three more watches. He straps one to his wrist, hands one to Malcolm and one to Clementine.

  “It seems only fitting that our progeny should wear them, too. Like I wore the watch from my father’s mattress company. And if anyone tells either of you that you are bourgeois for wearing it?” He wags his finger at the teenagers. “You be sure to tell that person to go fuck himself.”

  “Ding dong,” Ivan says. “Go fuck himself.”

  “You tell ’em, Ivan.” Solly pulls Ivan onto his lap; he quickly wriggles out and retreats to his mother, who is doing little to hide her disapproval.

  “Thanks, Solly,” Clem says, fiddling with the band. “I love it.”

  Clem is particular about everything she wears, careful to never make a fashion statement someone else didn’t make first. I don’t know if watches are in among Clem’s peers, but I doubt it given that they’re never more than arm’s reach from their phones.

  “Don’t worry, baby,” Ingrid coos at Ivan. “Daddy had one made for you, too.”

  Ivan shrugs. “I don’t care.”

  “We’re just saving it to give it to you later, when you’re a little bigger.” She strokes his hair. “Because you’re his progeny, too.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I SPEND SOME TIME on the website for the restaurant Solly booked us for Peter’s birthday dinner.

  It’s the opposite of what I pictured. Not to sound like Clem with my gross generalizations, but I imagined a palapa roof, colorful tablecloths, massive margarita glasses, maybe a wandering mariachi band.

  Instead the restaurant is modern and rustic. Sleek and simple. It looks like one of the many hipster places that have popped up over the last few years in downtown L.
A. where Peter and I always talk about going, but then we consider traffic on the 10, and the lines to get in, and we just go to the same Italian restaurant in Westwood we’ve been eating at for years.

  I imagine Solly would have selected this restaurant for its name alone, even if it hadn’t come so highly recommended by Roberto, and even if it didn’t have reviews in Bon Appétit, Sunset magazine and a mention in the New York Times.

  It’s called El Cabron Suertudo: The Lucky Bastard.

  All of the text on the website is in Spanish; they promise una experiencia gastronómica. There are a few photographs of the food—definitely Instagram worthy. It’s the kind of restaurant my father would call “schmancy.”

  I close my laptop and head downstairs to join everyone else at the pool. It has returned to postcard-perfect vacation weather.

  There are six loungers and every one of them is occupied. I expect Ingrid to tell Ivan to move to make room for me, but she doesn’t. She is reading a book to him as he lies in the lounger next to hers. Malcolm and Clem have pulled their chairs close to each other and Peter and Solly have done the same. They are all lost in their own conversations. Their own little universes of two. I sit at the shallow end of the kidney and dangle my feet in the water.

  I stand up and say, “Well, I guess I’ll go for a walk on the beach.”

  Peter is the only one who responds, which he does without looking my way. “Okay, honey. Have fun.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I WALK NORTH, toward town, though I have no intention of going that far. I don’t have my wallet. I don’t even have on any shoes. Just my bathing suit and the gauzy pink cover-up I thought was cute when I first bought it but now plan on leaving behind.

  I round the bend to the three villas. Nobody is on the beach. Nobody swims in the glassy water out front. Nobody stands on the balconies. Is it siesta time?