Chapter Seventeen
If I’m honest, December is a little bit too cold for a dive-in movie. With temperatures hovering dangerously close to the fifties, people don’t really want to languish in the water for a couple of hours. In the summer, everyone is happy to grab a flotation device and a cold drink and watch mayhem on the big screen that I have mounted at the end of the pool. But in the cooler months, they tend to take seats at the tables and lounge chairs around the pool area.
Not me.
I love the pool and I don’t care how cold it is. As I use my hand pump to blow up my pink flotation device, I deliberately choose not to think about Nathan standing me up last night and ignoring my texts today.
Flings don’t need to keep in touch, I guess.
Or maybe the fling was flung and I’ll just see him for fake dating and a book event. Sounds great.
The idea of that makes my stomach twist into a knot.
Elise crosses the courtyard to where I’m fighting with my floaty.
“Your enemy turned lover is a no-show?” she asks.
I try to hide my disappointment, though I’m not really sure why. “He’s working.”
“On what?”
I let out an exasperated breath. “I don’t know, Elise. How is the Ben situation?”
“Rude, honestly,” she says.
“Ben?”
“No, you. I haven’t done anything about it. I’m not going to fling a cataclysmic wrench into my life on a whim.”
“Gee, why not?” I ask, my tone dry. I feel I’ve done just that.
Though maybe the wrench was flung years ago, and it’s bouncing around in all my inner workings still and always.
I squint against the fading light.
The sun is beginning to set, and my dear Albert is manning the grill, which is honestly the nicest thing. He can be such a pain but is essentially sweet. My cribbage ladies made Christmas cookies to share, and Solis made a chocolate cake that she garnished with fondant holly leaves and berries.
We have four extra families for dinner tonight, and the kids are running around the yard scream-singing Christmas carols that I’m sure they’re rehearsing for the pageant.
In many ways, my heart is full.
I resent that Nathan has the power to make me feel ... anything else.
“Who can say,” Elise says. “I will. I ... It’s hard. I feel like right now I’m happy. Right now things are good. I wish they didn’t need to change, but I also think they do.”
That’s a little too close to my own issues.
Yesterday morning I felt pretty good.
Right now I do not.
“Life just ... keeps on going.” I look around the courtyard at all the families, at all my residents. I pick up my pink flotation device. “We need to get the movie started.”
The festivities get going, the movie beginning to play the familiar, cheerful intro. Families are seated together around the pool, and I feel a real sense of joy that even my Nathan sadness can’t kill.
People make memories here.
Which is something I can be proud of.
They can have the happy childhood memories that I don’t.
All due to something I created, that their parents chose to give to them.
If I can’t have everything, at least I have that.
During the midway point of the movie, I get out of the pool and make my way over to the cake table. Solis is cutting and serving cake for everyone, putting the knife in a cup of water between slices. Something I learned from her when I first arrived. My family is so fractured that before I came here, I hadn’t had the chance to spend time around a functional family.
It’s been one of the greatest gifts I’ve gotten. The warm family dynamics I get to see with Emma and Elise, and Juan and Solis and their kids. The infinite wisdom I’ve been able to receive from women like Alice.
And along with it, an insight into how beautiful life is when your hair goes gray and your skin develops lines from all the years you’ve lived.
“Cake?” Solis asks me as she bats Angel’s hand away from the frosting.
“Yes,” I say.
Suddenly I can’t leave Nathan’s absence alone. He’s ignoring my texts.
“Can I have another slice?” I ask. “Please. We have a missing guest, and I feel like I should deliver this to him.”
“Of course,” she says as she hands me another plate with a heavy slice on it.
I pause at one of the empty bistro tables and set the cake down, and then I put my swimsuit cover-up on. It’s pink and flowy and covers pretty much everything, so I feel appropriately girded as I make my way to his room.
I don’t know why he hasn’t texted me, and I’m aware this might feel like too much to him. Like me pushing in when he set a clear boundary.
But I can’t leave it alone anymore. I might have lost him anyway, and one thing I can’t deal with is the reality that I might not be able to know him ever .
I want to.
I need to.
I knock on his door, and I wait.
I hear noise. The sounds of his footsteps, the movement of a chair, the leg scraping against the floor.
He opens the door, and a wave of alcohol so strong it smells like despair rolls out as he does.
He pushes his hand through his hair, and his eyes are stormy. Clear in spite of his obviously inebriated state.
“What?”
I’m not deterred by how unfriendly he sounds, not now. Not when I’ve kissed him and touched him, had breakfast with him and made out with him in a national park. Not now that I know he disappointed his dad, even though he’s a bestselling author.
“You’re ignoring my texts, you didn’t come to the dive-in movie—”
“I didn’t come to the movie because I didn’t want to.”
He didn’t say he wanted to ignore me, though.
“Yes, I know. Because you’re antisocial.”
He snorted. “Yes, we covered that ground.”
“Are you okay?” I ask.
He looks stunned for a moment. There is something in his eyes that looks like fear. As soon as I see it, it vanishes. “No,” he says.
He does not elaborate, but this is honest, at least.
“Can I come in?”
Again, he looks afraid, like a drowning man who wants to reach his hand out but is scared to stop paddling. Terrified that it will sink him.
So I do something I would never normally do if he were just a guest. I push past him and into the room.
He’s not just a guest. Whatever he might say.
“This is somewhat beyond full service,” he says, and this time the words are slurred, and I am left in little doubt of how drunk he is. If I had doubts, they are erased by the near-empty bottle sitting on his desk.
“This isn’t why we call it the Hemingway Suite,” I say. “Anyway, we’re beyond full service , aren’t we?”
I’ve never been in his room during a stay here. He gets limited cleaning, and I’m never the one to do it. So I have never seen the evidence of him living in my motel. He does have a computer on the desk. Along with a notepad. Stacks and stacks of folders, papers. The wastebasket is full of crumpled lined papers with writing on them.
The bed is a mess.
He is a mess.
He’s such a writer, honestly. Maybe that’s the beginning and end of his mercurial nature. Maybe this is all muse bullshit.
We are a difficult bunch, I am well aware. Not just because of my own self, my own propensity for getting lost in my mind, in a story, and disconnecting from the people around me, but because of everyone I have ever socialized with who has the same profession.
Writers’ rooms and the publishing industry writ large attract narcissists. People with delusions of grandeur. They attract weirdos who want fame and yet fear it in equal measure. They attract people who like the fictional world better than reality.
It is a melting pot of incompatible neuroses and psychoses and dysregulated emotional trauma.
Also alcoholism.
So really, this could be his whole story.
I still don’t think it is, though.
“You should eat some cake,” I say, shoving a plate into his hands. They are unsteady, but he takes hold of it. “Get something into your stomach.”
“I ate,” he says.
“How long ago?”
“I haven’t managed to kill myself yet,” he says. “Tonight isn’t going to be the night.”
“Sure. But I’m not just the motel manager anymore, and you aren’t just a guest. I would like a little more assurance than you won’t die .”
“Why?”
“I’ve known you for three years,” I say. Almost three years. Two and a half. Close enough. This is ridiculous. It’s ridiculous for him to act like I haven’t seen him every summer for three years, and now again just four months after he was here last. It is ridiculous for him to act like after we slept together, after we spent the day together yesterday, that I won’t care about him.
“I’m just a guy you fucked,” he says. “Once.”
I know him in many ways. That’s the thing.
And I’m tired of pretending that I don’t.
I’m tired of pretending I feel nothing for him just because this is temporary and at the end of the month he’s leaving and not coming back. He’s the one being absurd, not me.
Not only could I write this, I would write it. The hero pushing someone away, holding them at a distance by reducing what they shared—this beautiful, revelatory experience—to fucking once .
He’s trying to hurt me. I won’t let him.
“No. You’re not.” I want to say more. I want to do something to bridge this yawning gap between us. I shouldn’t. Because he is a customer. That should be all. It just isn’t.
Maybe it’s my own pain recognizing his.
Or maybe it’s my overactive imagination. Or maybe it really is just that he’s handsome.
I can’t be sure. But what I do know is that I know a man in pain when I see him.
I know what it’s like to feel like you’re drowning and have nobody there to grab hold of. So even though he isn’t reaching out, I can’t leave him thrashing there.
I just can’t.
I sit on the edge of his bed, and I set my cake off to the side. “Why do you come back here every year? You said you didn’t choose it, but I have no idea what that means.”
I recognize that he wouldn’t answer this question if he weren’t drunker than the armadillos we don’t have here in the California desert.
But I don’t care.
I want to know.
He looks away and sets the cake plate down on his desk. Then he sits heavily in the chair, his legs spread wide, large hands on his muscular thighs. He is frozen like that for a long moment.
And then he finally looks up at me.
“Because I didn’t choose this place. My wife chose it.”