A Little Too Much Sun
On the plane to Aruba, Alice gazed out the window with a sense of impending doom: insofar as she saw her life as a conspiracy against itself, falling from the heavens en route to her honeymoon sounded particularly tragic, if not perversely satisfying. Greg munched on the salted almonds the flight attendant passed out, his free hand limp against her thighs. Despite her warnings, he’d refused to put his phone on airplane mode. The clouds outside wrapped their jet in gauze. When the plane went down, and the oxygen masks came out, and everyone around them scrambled for words to fill the voluminous waiting before oblivion, she would smile at her new husband as if to say: Now look what you did.
Their hotel, situated between a small casino and the Atlantic, opened from the lobby onto a stretch of private shoreline. Alice looked up and failed to apprehend the sky: it was the kind of shimmering, sudden blue that defies one’s concept of color. Down below, imperfect rows of straw umbrellas dotted the sand. Guests lingered at tables clustered beneath a thatch-roofed bar: tan, content, eyes glazed over with forgetfulness; husbands and wives pecking at chips, sipping drinks from salted rims, abandoning themselves to the spray of the ocean, the tropical heat. In the absence of children, they all appeared equally ageless.
Upstairs in their room, Greg began to unpack. It was only 3 p.m. and the sun still hovered nearby, menacing them with its heat. Alice stepped onto the balcony. A man and woman figured by criss-crossing limbs occupied a bench facing the ocean. Every couple, Alice thought, was a cubist portrait, held together by its own coded logic.
“What’s wrong?” Greg asked from inside.
“Nothing,” she said.
Her husband took off his shirt and pants, then slipped out of his boxers. From his fingers hung a bright, cabana-striped bathing suit. His body contained multitudes—of lumps, hair, muscles deflated like flat tires. And yet she had great affection for this legible form of his, a presentiment of longing, so eagerly did it reveal to her the signs of its own decay. This dumb hunk of flesh, the opposite of a soul.
Now his dick was growing hard.
“Pity the poor penis,” she said, smiling and clicking her tongue.
They liked to play this game together: Greg got hard and Alice, as a show of pathos for his irrepressible erection, acquiesced. But this was an act of grace on Greg’s part. Because Alice knew Greg knew she relied on their lovemaking more than he did. For Greg, whose love for Alice came easy and unimpeded, it was a simple function of his ardor; for Alice, whose love for Greg had to be wrung out of her, it was a ploy for self-persuasion, the chance to disappear into her body and watch from below as her feelings ran through her and over him.
Alice got undressed and sat down on the bed. Greg bobbed towards her like debris from a shipwreck, drawn helplessly onto shore.
The newlyweds had been married, the weekend prior, in the bowl of a mountain range in Colorado. This hardly made any sense. The air smelled like so much nothing. They were both born in the Midwest, lived in Boston; the only mountains they knew were from photos. They failed to see the value of hikes. They didn’t even ski. Reading her vows, hastily composed on a napkin between breakfast and lunch, Alice found herself overcome with emotion, moved to tears by the fact she could be moved to tears by such timeworn clichés.
She’d spent a year planning the wedding, anticipating it, racing towards a single date on the calendar, this vivid abstraction pressurized into something brittle and small. The constant busyness filled her with self-loathing. At times during the process—negotiating with the caterers, interviewing DJs—it would occur to her that she was planning a party under false pretenses, the sublimating guise of tradition, and this made her feel rotten. Nonetheless she wanted it to go well, for everything to run smoothly, for her family and friends—her mother, most of all—to think fondly of the event, her organizational prowess and the relationship at its center. She wanted this so badly the wanting exceeded all other concerns—professional, existential, moral—and what her wanting saw, it ate.
Now it was all over and she was happy. She was: she was the happiest she’d ever been. Here she was standing in the rain, trying to catch every last drop on her tongue. But instead she was just getting wet.
When they’d showered and dressed again, Alice and Greg walked back downstairs. The bar was pleasantly desolate, an island all their own. Along the disappearing shoreline crept a procession of inky figures, their features blacked out by the setting sun. It was getting dark now, but the temperature hadn’t dropped more than a few degrees. Alice looked into her palms: they told her nothing. So she looked at Greg. Beneath a gargantuan head of shaggy brown hair, his face was a surplus of cheek crowding the thin ridge of his nose. Lips set in the grooves of a previous smile, Greg’s was not a face designed for suffering. It was as though he were predisposed for contentment, the way others are destined for stardom; as though to be happy, he needed only follow the path his body had laid out for him.
“I remember when we first met,” Greg said, apropos of nothing. “Waiting for drinks at that horrible dive on Lincoln. I’ll never forget what you said to me…”
“What did I say?” she asked.
“I turned to you, totally innocent, and you said, ‘No.’ You said, ‘I already know how this ends.’”
Alice shook her head. She’d been so drunk, that entire year she’d been so exhaustingly alone. And he’d stared at her through the dim, so soft and smiley, like nothing in the world could hurt him.
“So I asked, ‘How does this end?’ And you said: ‘Flat on our backs. Staring up into the dark.’”
Greg laughed. Alice looked away. The two continued to drink as a breeze thinned the night air. Lining up the empty glass bottles in front of them, Alice began to feel protective over her lot. Life was a series of drinks and then you die. Or a number of pisses and then you die. Or a compendium of tiny affections and then you die. Could it be that elemental? (She was getting drunk.) Greg put his hand in hers. Her sweet stupid wonderful person of a man: how could he still not understand what she’d meant?
At around midnight, Alice and Greg noticed another couple smoking at one of the tables on the other end of the bar, gesticulating animatedly in the moonlight.
“Are they calling to us?” Greg asked, looking off in their direction. Now it appeared they weren’t talking to each other, but motioning for Alice and Greg to join them. “Do you want to?”
Alice got up off her stool and traipsed over to the table, Greg trailing behind her with fresh beers. She stopped abruptly in front of the couple. Although the night had turned cool, the two strangers were sweating profusely. The woman had enormous breasts and a sagging mouth, drooping eyes. By contrast the man appeared strangely taut, his thinning black hair spiked with sweat. He seemed, somehow, too alive.
“Last ones standing,” he said, raising his glass. “Calls for a toast.”
Alice looked down at the pack of cigarettes.
“May I?”
The man pulled a cigarette out for her and they introduced themselves.
“Honeymoon?” Charlie asked. He had an English accent.
Greg smiled.
“Could you tell?”
“You seem uneasy with each other,” Eva said. Alice picked up a lilt in her speech, a subtle nowhereness she always associated with Scandinivians.
“Really?” Greg said, in an amused way.
“Don’t mind her,” Charlie said. “She can be unapologetically brusque.”
“I mean it as a good thing, of course,” she said. “You’re still finding your way with each other.”
“Once you’ve found your way,” Charlie pointed out. “That’s when the trouble begins.”
Eva unwound a slow, condescending smile. Alice sat smoking. Her head began to open up to the sky.
“How long have you been married?” Greg asked.
“17 years,” Charlie said. “We come here every year for our anniversary. The weather never changes.”
“Although we’re no longer married,” Eva clarified.
“No,” Charlie said distractedly. “Technically, we’ve just been divorced.”
“We are divorced.” She turned to Alice. “He has a problem stating things as they are.”
“And you just decided to come anyway?” Greg asked. Even in the dark Alice could see her husband’s face turning bright red.
Charlie nodded. “One last hurrah,” he chuckled. “And to tell you the truth, it’s felt the same as it always has. Being here.”
He fingered another cigarette from the pack and lit it up. Alice looked at him with newfound respect. She wondered what it was like, this capacity to return so seamlessly to the person he was before.
When the bar closed, the four commandeered a bottle of rum and ambled down to the sand. Stars pierced through lazy ribbons of cloud and made the water shine. They drank to their love, their happiness, new beginnings. Alice leaned back into Greg’s chest as she smoked, his hands big and warm against her hips. Eva held the bottle as Charlie dashed into the ocean. She watched him, her lips drawn into a rueful expression; for a moment her beauty seemed to fall away, like clothes discarded on a cold bathroom floor.
“Are you sad?” Alice asked her.
“Yes,” Eva said. “Of course I’m sad.”
She took a contemplative pull and wiped her mouth. Behind Alice, Greg had nodded off.
“And yet it’s a kind of relief,” Eva explained.
“What is?” Alice asked.
Eva watched Charlie skip naked onto shore. Tomorrow, Alice knew, the couple would be gone.
“To know that something is over.”
The next morning, Alice rolled over and thought: You can wake up to someone day after day and still they’ll appear disfigured somehow, pummeled by the early light.
Alice knew Greg. But Alice did not yet know her husband. Greg talked with a mild, indistinct drawl. Greg spoke French but only to their poodle. Greg was 35 but looked more like 28. Greg only cried, for some reason, during Adam Sandler movies. Greg made a habit of touching the mole beside his right eyebrow, as if to affirm its coordinates on his face. Greg had proven to her, one night on the ferry home from the beach, that romance was not dead.
Her husband, however, was not Greg: her husband was a concept derived from Greg. Her husband existed in the shadow of all other husbands, for all time: good, bad, faithful, philandering. Her husband lived in the conditional with the potential to assume that other convoluted notion: a father. Her husband would age alongside his wife in the forever Alice and Greg promised each other in Colorado. But what was forever?
Downstairs at breakfast, husband and wife sipped their coffees while staring into the pool. In the light of day, the hotel looked empty. There was nobody else in the restaurant, nor were there any guests lounging by the pool. By now, Charlie and Eva would’ve checked out of their room. They would’ve gone to the airport together, then home to their lives, separate and alone, and time would’ve kept plodding on, so that in a day or two the vacation would come to seem like a doctored photograph.
“God,” Greg said, squinting into the sun. “That was depressing last night.”
“I don’t know,” Alice said.
“What do you mean?”
She put on her sunglasses.
“I thought it was kind of sweet. In a way.”
“They were, I don’t know. Caustic.”
“They were resilient,” she said. “And they clearly still had a lot of love for each other. What’s so depressing about that?”
Greg frowned. Then he leaned forward in his chair.
“What’s depressing is the thought of us no longer being together, Alice. I can’t even imagine it.”
He looked at her with a burning sincerity. As much as she loved him—and she did, she could feel it gripping her chest—she found some twisted reassurance in the idea.
“No,” she said. “Neither can I.”
At the pool, Greg slipped off his Birkenstocks and jumped in. Alice lathered her body with sunscreen and made herself comfortable on a lounge chair. She intended to read for a while, but the novel she brought had begun to exhaust her. The unnamed narrator, vacationing in Greece, had met various strangers, most of them men, none of them particularly interesting, and the longer the characters talked, the more the narrator seemed to drown in her interlocutors’ speech until the author had succeeded in reducing her protagonist to a figment. This poor middle-aged woman, squeezed into small lapses of dialogue.
Greg had raved about the book, practically forcing it into Alice’s luggage. Now she wondered what her husband found so appealing about it.
“To know someone,” he told Alice once, early on, “to really know someone, is to be bored by them.”
He was referring to his job, of course, but she couldn’t help taking it as a comment on their relationship. When they met, Greg was already one of the industry’s most dependable celebrity profilers. He wrote puff pieces sparkling with pre-planned moments of spontaneity, engineered to appease fans and publicists alike. Greg never felt conflicted about this but emboldened. He would proudly sacrifice his journalistic integrity if it meant repairing the disintegrating mythos of the star. Her husband believed his central task was to obfuscate, not illuminate. Sometimes Alice wondered if it wasn’t hers as well.
But what did Alice have to hide? She had become a person she’d long despised, a college-educated dilettante with a comically overpaid marketing job, whose every ambition had been smoothed out by the demands of adulthood. And so her inclination to withhold rather than proffer was borne of a fear (one she wouldn’t even admit to Greg) that she had nothing much to give. She continued to skate along the surface of herself, if only to maintain the illusion of depth.
“Why don’t you come in?” Greg shouted from the pool. He was floating on his back.
“I’m reading,” Alice said.
“Sometimes,” Greg said, “you say you’re reading. But I know you’re just staring at the words.”
“How do you know? Are you behind my eyes?”
Greg lifted himself out of the pool and laid flat his entire soaking body over hers. “Now we are a blob,” he whispered.
Sometime in the afternoon, Alice woke up on the pool chair. Greg lay next to her, reading. She swung her legs around to sit.
“Is it strange to you,” Alice said, looking around, “that we’re the only ones here?”
Greg frowned.
“We’re not the only ones here,” he said. “We saw a bunch of people yesterday.”
“Sure, but,” Alice said, “we’re the only ones here now.”
“So?”
“So where did everybody go?”
Greg dog-eared a page and closed his book.
“We’re here during the off-season, Alice.” He shrugged. “The hotel’s not at full capacity. It’s nothing to worry about.”
But as the days went by, it became increasingly clear that Alice and Greg were indeed the only couple left at the resort. Even the staff had dwindled in size, reduced to one bartender, one waiter, one maid, the chef, and a clerk at the front desk. In the beginning, they discussed it together in hushed tones, speculating about what had happened. Eventually they asked the clerk where everyone had gone, but she’d merely smiled and shrugged: they’d checked out.
The clear blue weather held fast. Their days passed in much the same way: eating acai bowls at breakfast, the peanut butter sticking to the roofs of their mouths. Lazing around the pool, reading and napping. Heading to the beach around sunset, where Alice laid out on a lounge chair as Greg ran into the water and came sprinting back, smiling and panting from the effort. Time compressing and expanding as the ocean gave of and gathered itself, the sky fading into night. Returning to the bar, sun-spent and salt-licked, to sip on pina coladas and share a shrimp cocktail, before fucking and showering and wandering downstairs to eat dinner on the same poolside patio, every meal a rendition of the last: fresh fish, rice, vegetable, candles and wine. The stars appearing over the pavilion reminding them of sleep.
Yet the resort continued to change—to become less of itself. One morning they left their towels on the pool chairs and found them there again in the afternoon, still damp. Plates began piling up on tables in the restaurant, swarmed with flies. The bar became crowded with empty beer bottles. Soon Alice and Greg began to pick up after themselves; not long after that, they were making their own meals in the industrial kitchen behind the bar. Mostly this meant chicken fingers and burgers, eggs Greg dutifully whipped into omelets and frittatas. They got drunk, alternatively, on expensive bottles of champagne and cheap fifths of tropical rum; Greg broke into the sundry shop and stole a few Cuban cigars, and the two shared them on the beach as they watched the tide come in, frothing over the sand.
The only night they left the resort was to go to the casino. Clumps of slots framed two rows of table games, capped at each end with long, horizontal craps tables. They were the youngest couple there by a good 20 years. Sheaths of sun-spotted skin with canes and panama hats held onto their cards for dear life. Greg sat down at blackjack, Alice watching from behind. A few hours later, he’d won close to $500.
“Bet it all on the next hand,” Alice said. “I want to go home.”
Greg did what she said. Alice held her breath and gazed into the back of his big beautiful head. The dealer went bust. And now, she thought, Greg would die. He would die in the middle of the night, peaceful, his winnings secure in the safe behind the sliding closet door. He would simply go to sleep and never wake up. That was all. It was a relief to know it—to acknowledge his inevitable dying as one does a hair in their food. She would go on, laden with grief (she could feel this already, a horrible scream swelling in her gut) but free of another, ghostlier weight. She would heal—eventually. And then Alice would begin again.
“We have to leave soon, you know,” Greg told her, the following night on the beach. They were alone beneath a lid of low-hanging clouds. “Our flight is tomorrow.”
Alice nodded. Their flight would be delayed, or canceled, and once delayed or canceled, delayed or canceled again, and again. She was sure of it. They would live in this already passing moment forever, maybe longer. Time would stop its stupid ticking. They would never know each other, not the way husbands and wives know each other; they would never find out whether they would’ve turned into the people they promised they’d become, at the altar, that placid day in late September. Instead they would take shelter in this shallow pocket of eternity, their vacated resort just south of the hurricane belt. She’d never felt closer to death, here in the sand, beneath the stars, lying in the nook of her husband’s shoulder. But she understood this death, she could hold it at arm’s length, whereas returning home meant a different death would start slowly approaching as if from the other end of a desert road, inching closer, and closer, and closer.
And yet: there were only so many ways to describe the sky. That’s what kept occurring to her as she lay on the beach with Greg, staring up into the firmament. This gentle rebuttal to a proposition about awe. There were only so many ways to describe the sky, and they were already running out.