Tomorrow There Will Be Sun Page 3

  “Muchas, muchas, muchas gracias,” I say as Enrique hands me my first margarita of the evening, which also happens to be the first hibiscus margarita of my life.

  Peter stares at me. He’s trying to tell me to cool it with the muchas, but muchas and gracias are about the only two words of Spanish I know.

  I shrug. “I’m grateful. Sue me.”

  I appear to be the only one who thought to dress up. The men have donned short-sleeved button-downs and shorts, Malcolm paired a black T-shirt with his rolled-up khakis and Ivan is already in his pajamas. Clem is wearing spandex pants and a cropped tank top. I’ve stopped asking her why she goes to school dressed like she’s going to the gym because she’s only following a trend. When I drop her off in the mornings, she’s one of a sea of girls whose labia are on full display.

  And Ingrid, well, it doesn’t much matter what Ingrid wears; she always looks like she just stepped out of a magazine. Not a fashion magazine, more like a home design spread, something showcasing the perfect cook’s kitchen or a library with books arranged by color, and there she is stirring up a hollandaise or reading a vintage red-spined copy of Light in August, looking elegant in a blousy shirt, ripped jeans, bare feet.

  “Roberto,” Solly begins.

  “Yes, sir?”

  Solly moves in closer. Rests a hand on his shoulder. Lowers his voice, like he’s sharing a secret, but not so quietly that we can’t all hear perfectly. “Hey. I’m a Roberto, too. Robert. Robert Solomon, but everyone calls me Solly. So from one Roberto to another—drop the ‘sir,’ will you? ‘Solly’ will do just fine.”

  “Okay, Solly.”

  Solly reaches into his pocket for his iPhone. “Can you acquaint me with the sound system here?” He shuffles his feet and wriggles his hips in an embarrassing effort to demonstrate his dance moves. “There must be some way to get some tunes playing.”

  There’s built-in surround sound with an iPhone docking system, which Solly would know if he’d bothered to read the emails I sent him. He’s hard-core about his music. He’d be insufferable for seven days if he couldn’t play DJ.

  I look over at Clem. She’s holding a drink the same color as my hibiscus margarita, talking to Ingrid and Ivan. I know she drinks sometimes. I’m not naïve. And also, I read her texts. A few weeks ago she barfed on Ariella’s parents’ Turkish kilim runner. She puts on a good show—I might not have even known she was wasted when she got home that night, delivered safely by a sober Sean in a Lyft. But since I can see her texts on my laptop (WTF Clem? That rug is expensive! My parents are gonna kill me!) I busted her, and she cried, and I made her stay in the following weekend, hardly a punishment, because we let Sean come over and they made pizzas and watched Napoleon Dynamite for the ten-thousandth time. Anyway, I don’t think she’s brazen enough to drink in front of me, but just in case, I go in for a closer look.

  “It’s a hibiscus spritzer, Mother,” she says. “Hibiscus juice and sparkling water. Want a taste? It’s kinda gross.”

  Ivan is walking in tight circles around Clem, faster and faster until he falls down.

  “He napped for three hours,” Ingrid says. “He’ll never go to sleep tonight.”

  The sun has slipped away, leaving the sky a Rothko of pink, orange and a deep purple-blue. Solly has hooked up his playlist and the house fills with music—Cesária Évora, a Cape Verdean who sings in Portuguese, so not an entirely apt choice, but still, she fits the feel of the evening just right. When Cesária Évora died a few years ago, her obituary described her songs as infused with sodade, the Creole term for “nostalgic longing.” It’s how I feel right now, gazing at the multihued sky: a nostalgic longing, even though I’ve never been to Puerto Vallarta, never even been to Mexico. It makes me want to pull my husband close, forgive him the millions of things he does every day to make me hate him just a little bit. Because, like Solly said, these are the moments that matter, spending time with the ones you love most. So it could be nostalgic longing, or it could very well be that I’m kind of drunk. Either way, I look for Peter, but he’s not here.

  “Where’s Peter?” I ask Solly, because Solly is Peter’s other other half.

  “He had to take a call.”

  “A call? It’s Saturday night. We’re on vacation.”

  Solly puts an arm around me and says softly, “Work crisis. Give him a break, okay? It’s not like he wants to be dealing with this now.”

  Three years ago, Solly and Peter started a bagel company that aimed to bring New York bagels to Angelenos starved for the real thing. If it doesn’t sound like the most original idea, that’s because it isn’t. But Solly believed that if the bagels were good, and if the marketing was right, and if they could figure out some sort of app for on-demand delivery to supplement the brick-and-mortar spot in Santa Monica for which he’d already signed a two-year lease on a whim, they could make a fortune.

  A fortune would be a gross exaggeration, but the business is doing well, and they are making money, though I always suspect Solly is making more of that money than Peter.

  Solly brought the business cred to their endeavor; he grew up the scion of a mattress empire and went to Harvard Business School despite having been, according to Peter, who was his college roommate for four straight years, a mediocre student at best. Peter brought the design expertise, having worked at first for magazines, and then for years at a fragrance company, where he developed a staunch aversion to perfume, which is why I no longer wear any.

  Peter nailed it with the Boychick Bagels logo—it’s simple and retro and you see young people wearing the T-shirts and tank tops and hoodies all over Los Angeles. They went through several ideas for names: Bagel Buds (sounded like they were selling bagels and weed), Bagel Bros (douchey), Bagel Boys (only slightly less douchey). Since Peter isn’t Jewish, I suggested Bagel Goys, but they decided instead to go full Yiddish, even using a Yiddish-style font for the logo.

  At first I wasn’t sure about Peter going into business with Solly. He had a solid job with health insurance and a 401(k). We never had to worry about the size of my book advances or my lackluster sales. I worked hard, I contributed to the family, but we didn’t have to rely on my income to keep us afloat. Still, Peter wanted to take this leap. He was tired of his job and he wanted a change and of course what I wanted was for Peter to be happy.

  Peter never agreed to shoulder the breadwinner burden alone and it’s not what I wanted either, for him or for us. We both grew up in households where our parents took on traditional gender roles. Our fathers never changed a diaper and they made the money and all the big decisions. Our mothers didn’t work until they both found themselves middle-aged and divorced. Peter and I set a different course for ourselves, and yet when the opportunity to start the business with Solly arose, it forced us to take stock. I realized we’d slipped quietly into something resembling a 1950s marriage—he made the money, I made the house run smoothly.

  We agreed this would have to be a family endeavor with both of us firmly on board. I need you, Peter said. He pointed out that I managed our finances and paid all our bills and had a far better understanding of what was reasonable and what was fantasy for Team Carlson. So together we did the research. We looked at the numbers. We learned that four out of five businesses fail in their first year and that the ones that survive can take years to turn a profit. We had some savings, sure, but for us, the risk was huge. If Solly’s whim didn’t pan out it wouldn’t make a difference to him—he’d just fall back comfortably onto his piles of mattress money. What would happen to us?

  As usual, Solly had answers. He and Peter would be equal partners but he’d put up the seed money. Peter would start drawing a salary right away. We’d keep our health insurance. Our 401(k). The venture wouldn’t fail. Overhead would be low and the markup high. By year two, Solly swore, they’d be in the black and they’d be splitting profits down the middle.

  The business is now i
n its fourth year. It is, by start-up standards, a smashing success. And yet, even though I know Solly has his money to recoup, it still doesn’t seem like Peter is an equal partner. He’s more like Solly’s right-hand man. I’ve stopped mentioning this to Peter; it’s a sore spot between us so I leave it alone. All I know is that Peter works tirelessly and puts in longer hours than Solly. I’ve watched Peter grow from a talented designer into a marketing guru and brilliant entrepreneur. He’s my husband, so I’m allowed to brag.

  The on-demand option is gearing up to go 24/7 and has been a royal headache. The app falls within Peter’s domain, as do so many pieces of the company, but still, I don’t see what’s so important that he’d have to deal with it now, on a Saturday evening on the first night of our vacation, though I do have an inkling about who is on the other end of that phone call.

  “Where did he take the call, Solly?”

  Solly shakes his head. “Come on, Jen. We haven’t even sat down to eat yet. I know how important it is to you that we all dine as one, and so does Peter, so you can rest assured he’ll be back in a minute. Have another margarita.”

  “I don’t want another margarita.”

  A bell rings. Not the doorbell. It’s Roberto, ringing a little brass bell. The dinner bell.

  “Ding dong,” Ivan shouts.

  Solly squeezes my elbow. “Take a seat. I’ll go grab him.”

  I so want this vacation to go perfectly. I want everything infused with specialness. This isn’t only because we spent more money on this trip than we’ve spent on any other vacation we’ve ever taken; there’s another calculus at play. Peter is turning fifty. We’ve been together almost twenty years. In two years our daughter will be out of the house. And six months ago my doctor called after my annual mammogram and asked that I come in for a “sit-down conversation.” Peter sat next to me squeezing my hand. She told us we were lucky to have caught it early, as if all three of us had stage-one breast cancer, and that with minimal treatment I should be shipshape. I worried about trusting my life to someone who would use the term shipshape, but I finished radiation three weeks ago and she was right. Things look good and I’m feeling fine. Anyway, all of these factors add up. These seven days are high-value days. Every minute counts double, triple, even. So I let Solly go collect Peter, and I polish off my hibiscus margarita.

  I choose a seat next to Clementine, across the table from Ingrid, and I ask Enrique to remove the birds-of-paradise so we can all see one another. On the menu tonight: prickly pear cactus enchiladas and jicama salad, rice and beans for Ivan and maybe Malcolm if he’s a picky eater, too, but not for Clem, whose culinary adventurousness has always filled me with pride.

  The food hasn’t even been served yet, and Ingrid is frowning at her plate. She picks it up, looks at the back of it, and puts it down again. Enrique is making the rounds with the large dish of enchiladas, so she beckons Roberto over.

  “So sorry . . . Do you know . . . Is this pottery lead-free?”

  “Lead-free?”

  “Yes. Is it free of lead? Much of the traditional pottery from Mexico is made with a lead-based ceramic glaze. It’s very dangerous to eat off of plates that contain lead.”

  Roberto says something to Enrique in Spanish. Enrique says something back.

  “Yes,” Roberto nods. “It is lead-free.”

  Ingrid rubs her hand over the plate and examines her palm, like she’s checking for dust. “Would you mind . . . Do you have paper plates in the kitchen? I’m happy to go get them myself.” She starts to stand up but Roberto motions for her to stay put. “I will get for you.”

  “Two, please,” she says and she takes Ivan’s plate and her own and hands them both to Roberto.

  Solly and Peter return, taking the seats at opposite ends of the long table.

  “Sorry about that, everyone. Bagel emergency. All peachy now. Wow, does this food look incredible. I don’t know what this is, but it looks incredible.”

  “It’s enchiladas,” Enrique says, holding the dish for Peter to serve himself. “Please.”

  Peter is the first person to whom I show my writing, my first editor, in part because he has an excellent vocabulary and always catches me when I repeat words, which I tend to do, so I can’t help but notice that he just said incredible twice.

  “Who was calling you?” I’d decided not to say anything. Hadn’t I decided that? Didn’t I calculate that when the minutes are high value it’s important to try not to ruin a single one of them?

  “Just someone from the office. We’re dealing with a glitch. Let’s not bore everyone.”

  “Just someone from the office?”

  Why am I doing this on my vacation? The very time I set aside to escape anxiety and insecurity, to be less controlling, the time I planned to try to be, as they used to say at Clem’s preschool, my best self. Everyone stares down at the lead-ridden plates.

  Peter takes a bite of his enchilada and then looks up slowly and locks his eyes onto mine. “Jonas. Jonas from tech. Like I said, it’s all cleared up now.”

  “Good,” I say and manage a smile. We’ve moved on from Cesária Évora to something a little too clubby for my taste. I dig deep for some of that sodade, but it’s gone; slipped away, like the sun.

  * * *

  • • •

  I CAN TELL by the way Peter brushes his teeth that he’s still mad at me for grilling him at the table about the phone call. He takes his frustrations out on his molars, and he’s not being kind to his gums. He doesn’t want to tell me he’s mad, because then I’d proffer my side, and we’d both dig in, and this is the first night of our seven-night dream vacation. We’re supposed to be having the kind of sex we never find the time to have at home.

  “I didn’t know that my life was missing prickly pear cactus. But it was. There’s been a prickly-pear-cactus-sized hole in my life all these years.”

  Peter comes out of the bathroom and cocks his head at me. “A prickly-pear-cactus-sized hole?”

  “Yep.”

  He smiles. We’ve brokered an unspoken deal. We will leave the earlier events of the evening alone. It’s better this way. It’s what we both want.

  “Can you believe Malcolm?” I ask.

  “Believe what about him?”

  “Can you believe him? How grown-up he is. And how handsome.”

  “He was always a good-looking kid.” Peter climbs into bed next to me. “Clem could hardly take her eyes off of him.”

  “What? That’s ridiculous.”

  “How is that ridiculous?”

  “Because she’s madly in love with Sean. She excused herself right after dessert so she could go back to her room and spend the rest of the night FaceTiming him.”

  Peter laughs.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I just think it’s funny that you, of all people, could believe a sixteen-year-old girl wouldn’t go all weak in the knees over an older boy who looks like Malcolm. So what if she has a boyfriend? And I hate to say it, because Sean’s a good kid, but there’s not much of a contest there.”

  “There is, because she’s in love with Sean.”

  “Ha. She’s sixteen. What does she know about love?”

  “Sixteen-year-olds know plenty about love. They think about love all the time. Their romantic ideals haven’t been derailed by things like adult responsibility or the general mundanities of everyday living.”

  Peter reaches for a magazine and adjusts his reading light. “Maybe,” he says. “I guess you do know more about this than I do.”

  What he means is that because I write about teenagers, I know more about teenagers. What he doesn’t mean is that I know more about this because I habitually read Clem’s texts including the ones with Sean. Early on, when Clem first got an iPhone, and I first downloaded the app to my laptop that allows me to see her texts, I told Peter about something I’d read
that made me concerned that Clem wasn’t treating another girl at school kindly. Peter told me to stop reading her texts. He said it was an invasion of her privacy and creepy to boot. Instead, I just stopped telling him, keeping every insight, every revelation, to myself. The result is that I get a window into the lives of teenagers that’s useful when it comes to writing about them, and also that I know far more about our daughter than he does.

  Clem and Sean have the kind of relationship it would be difficult to put in a book. It’s too sweet, too romantic and way too innocent. They’re sixteen-year-olds who profess their love for each other incessantly and still haven’t ever had sex. It’s a mother’s dream and no reader would believe it.

  “Here’s a shocker,” I say.

  Peter peers at me from behind his magazine. “Yes?”

  “Ingrid tried talking to me about her manuscript again. Not five minutes after getting here. She was boasting about her daily word count, clearly angling for me to ask to see it.”

  “Solly says it’s really good.”

  “What does Solly know about young adult fiction?”

  “He said it’s for younger readers. Not little kids, but not teenagers either.”

  “It’s middle grade?” How does Peter not know the terminology? I’ve been working in this field for more than a decade.

  “I guess so.”

  “So what does Solly know about middle-grade fiction?”

  Peter folds the magazine and puts it on his nightstand. He props himself up on his side, facing me. He takes my hand, and rubs his face with it. His stubble won’t be soft for another day or two. “Why does this bug you so much?”

  I sigh. “It’s just that . . . I’m sure Ingrid looks at me, at what I do, and thinks: if she can do it, why can’t I do it?”

  He holds my hand between us and squeezes it. “You do make it look easy. But that’s just because you’re a pro at what you do.”