“Didn’t you just tell me this morning how you need some real exercise instead of what, shuffleboard and bending your elbow at the bar?” She canted her head a degree more so that her hair, which she still wore long, swept across the right side of her face, and in that moment he felt the thing he’d always felt for her, the thing that had tugged at him now for forty years and more. “Or am I wrong? Did I mishear you? Huh, mister? Was that it?” She poked him for emphasis, but playfully, copacetically, one stiff finger right in the ribs, and he couldn’t help smiling despite himself.
Soon they were winding their way along the seashore, the road getting progressively worse, the houses sparser, everything so green it ached. It was one in the afternoon. The sun baked the roof of the bus. People dozed, their heads thrown back or cradled in their arms. Though the windows were open, the air hardly seemed to move, as if it were another medium altogether, solid, heavy, like sludge. Lunch had been at an authentic café, Ticos (that was what the locals were called) all around them, going through the motions of fork to mouth like anybody you’d see anywhere. That these people, this place, existed independently of him and everything he knew had astonished him all over again, as if he’d gone outside himself, a ghost drifting through another reality. He tried to capture it with his camera, snapping dutifully away, but the photos themselves were ephemeral, images flashing by on a computer screen, attached to nothing, and no one would ever see them, he knew that. The waiter had brought plates of rice and beans. Some sort of fried fish. And rum punch, thank god for that, though if he stopped to think about it he’d have to wonder about the ice cubes clacking away in the depths of the pitcher and where exactly they’d come from, as if he didn’t already know.
The driver jerked at the wheel, shifted down, then up, then down again. He felt his stomach clench. They passed a scatter of houses, a grocery, a school, and suddenly both shoulders of the road were thronged with boys in white shirts and dark trousers and girls in matching blouses and skirts marching through the ochre mud either to or from school, he couldn’t say which, half of them going one way and half the other. Maybe it was double sessions, maybe that was it. Or siesta. Did they have siesta here?
Someone had told him education was compulsory for everybody in the country, grades one through eight, after which it fell off to practically nothing. But that was all right. At least they were literate, at least they could do sums, and what more did you need for a tourist economy? Language skills, maybe. Their waiter at lunch spoke a hopped-up Jamaican dialect, a kind of reggae English, but you could hardly understand what he was saying. Still, just about everybody had at least some English, thanks to Imperial America and the consumer fever that kept spiraling outward till the buy-now/pay-later message was practically a tribal chant from every outpost of the earth. What a gulf there was between needs and wants, he was thinking, all these things, these appliances, these handheld devices . . . but what he wanted now—needed, urgently—was a rest stop. And something to wet his throat, bottled water, a soda, gum, did anybody have any gum?
Carolee was dozing, her head pinned beneath his left arm, sweating there, his sweat and hers, conjoined. He tried not to jostle her as he reached for her bag, for the water in the plastic bottle with the screw cap she’d remembered to bring along and he hadn’t. The bag—one of those black over-the-shoulder things she insisted on wearing looped across her chest so the street punks couldn’t make off with it—was on the floor at her feet. He leaned into her, bracing her, and felt the muscles in his lower right side grab as he reached down for it, just a pinch there, a reminder of the intermittent back pain he’d been having and the exercises the therapist had given him to keep limber, exercises he’d been neglecting because he was on vacation, on a cruise ship, and all that seemed to matter on a cruise ship was eating and drinking—you weren’t getting your money’s worth unless you put on twenty pounds and calcified your liver.
He managed to extract the bottle without waking his wife, using her slack form as a counterweight as he leaned forward, and now he was unscrewing the cap and rinsing his mouth before taking a single long swallow. It seemed as if he was always thirsty lately, thirsty back at home, thirsty on the ship, thirsty under this sun, and he wondered vaguely if it was age-related, the first sign of some as yet undiagnosed syndrome—the dreaded acronym—that would bring him down in a dark bloom of imploding cells. The tires screeched. There was a bump. Another bump. Carolee jolted awake on a ragged intake of breath. “What?” she gasped, her eyes straining to focus.
“You were dozing.”
He gave her a minute to come back to the world, the bus, the rank invasive odor of the overheated sea and the sodden jungle. She’d been into the rum at lunch too, rum black as oil, in a smudged glass two-thirds filled with Diet Coke, no ice. Neither of them was used to drinking this early in the day, but then why not, they were on vacation, weren’t they? And he was retired—or pre-dead, as he preferred to call it. Party on. Everybody else was.
“I was dreaming,” she said.