Chapter 7
By our third day, Finn had been adopted.
I don’t know how else to describe what had happened to him.
I’d left him at the pool on the first afternoon a stranger, and somewhere in the thirty-some hours since, he had become a central figure in the social life of the entire resort, the way a stray cat becomes, over the course of a single week, the emotional load-bearing wall of an office.
I came back from the cove on our second evening to find him holding court at the swim-up bar with the relaxed older couple from the loungers, two honeymooning men from Toronto, a retired schoolteacher named Brenda who was traveling alone and gloriously unbothered, and a bartender named Esteban who, by Finn’s account, had become his closest friend in the world.
None of them, including Finn, wore a single thread of clothing.
“Mark!” he bellowed across the pool when he saw me, with the volume of a man who had been drinking pina coladas since approximately 1923. “Mark, come here, you have to meet everyone. This is everyone. Everyone, this is Mark. He won the trip. He’s the sad one I told you lot about.”
“You’ve been telling people I’m the sad one?”
“They needed context for the shirt.” He hauled me down into a wet plastic chair beside him. “But you’re less sad today. Look at him, Brenda. He’s practically luminous . . . and he’s shirtless! That’s real progress. Where’ve you been?”
“Walking.”
“Walking?” Finn turned to his assembled court with the satisfaction of a prosecutor reaching the good part.
“He’s been ‘walking’ for two days now. He disappears at noon, comes back at dusk with that look on his face and calls it ‘walking.’ The funny thing is, there’s a certain photographer who also goes ‘walking’ at noon.
It’s the same noon. Isn’t that a curious overlap in walking schedules? ”
“It’s a small resort,” I said, looking about for Esteban, desperate for alcohol to numb whatever Finn was doing.
“It’s a hundred and forty acres, Mark. Unlike some, I read the whole brochure.” The table laughed. I suddenly understood I’d been the subject of discussion for some time before my arrival. Brenda gave me a wink that no woman her age should have been legally permitted to deploy.
This was the thing about Finn that I’d known for four years and that the resort was now discovering in real time: The man had no off switch when it came to connecting with people. Where I walked into a room and made it smaller, Finn walked into a room and made it a party. People told him things.
No, people told him everything.
Esteban the bartender had apparently confided in him about a fellow he was trying to work up the nerve to ask out.
The Toronto honeymooners had recruited him to settle a long-running argument about their wedding seating chart.
Brenda had shown him pictures of her grandchildren and her late husband and a llama she’d met in Peru, in that order of importance.
And the crowning glory?
The entire population of the swim-up bar—most of whom I’d yet to meet—now knew, in considerable detail, that I had been disappearing with the only other clothed man on the island.
“I’m not discussing it,” I grumbled.
“Nobody asked you to discuss it. We’ve discussed it plenty while you’ve been off walking.
” Finn signaled Esteban for another round.
I tried not to be annoyed at how easily he captured the bartender’s attention when I’d been trying to flag him for some minutes.
“Esteban thinks you and your photographer are romantic. Brenda thinks you’re moving too slow.
The lads from Toronto are split. It’s a whole thing now.
They’re even taking bets on when you’ll get laid.
You’ve become the resort’s primary entertainment, which is only fair, given how much entertainment the resort’s been to me. ”
I should have been mortified.
A week earlier, I would have been.
Instead, I slumped in my wet plastic chair waiting on a drink I hadn’t ordered, and I let the conversation roll over and around me.
While Finn prattled on, I thought about the cove and the foot and a half of warm water and the way Wes had said, “There he is,” and I missed approximately every third thing anyone said to me.
“He’s doing it now,” Finn announced, delighted, his accent all pleasant and cheery. “Look at his face. He’s gone off wandering again. Brenda, wave your hand in front of him.”
Brenda dutifully waved her hand in front of my face.
I batted it away as if swatting a mosquito.
“I’m right here,” I snarled.
“You are physically right here. You’re hard to miss,” Finn agreed.
“But spiritually, you’re somewhere holding hands with a man with a camera.
” He leaned in, and under the performance for the table there was something real and pleased and watchful in his blue eyes.
“It’s good, Mark. I’m taking the mick, but it’s good.
I’ve not seen you like this, not ever, actually, and I’ve known you for years. ”
“Taking the mick? Is that more Lucky Charms talk?”
He snorted. “Teasing, joking, joshing. Take your pick.”
“I pick this drink,” I said, tossing back half of the fruity whatever Esteban just brought.
As always, Finn remained undaunted.
“You’re distracted, useless, a bit soft in the head.” He grinned, then his eyes widened as he covered his mouth. “Mark, I think you’re . . . happy!”
I didn’t have an answer for that, so I downed the last of my drink, which turned out to be ninety percent rum and tasted like a hibiscus had been murdered.
A tiny voice in the back of my brain told me I would regret chugging it in two gulps, but the front of my noggin begged for numbness in the wake of Finn’s assessment.
I let the subject change to the Toronto seating-chart dispute, which I was eventually—and against my will—conscripted into mediating on the grounds that a contractor would understand load distribution, and that a wedding table was structurally similar to a beam.
It was, I’ll admit, a good night.
It was the kind I didn’t have at home.
At home there was Finn, and there was work, and there was the narrow channel between them.
Here, there was Brenda’s llama and Esteban’s crush and two Canadians who would not let go of whether Uncle Gerald could be seated near the bar.
I laughed more than I had in months, and somewhere in the middle of it all, I caught myself scanning the path that led up from the beach, searching for a gray henley.
Of course, Finn caught me catching myself.
He didn’t say anything. He just bumped his plastic cup against mine under the table, quietly, where the others couldn’t see.
Trouble started the next morning, and the trouble’s name was aqua fitness.
I had, by this point, successfully avoided every scheduled activity on the resort’s roster for three days, a streak I was quietly proud of, but Brenda, it emerged, was an aqua fitness devotee, and Brenda had decided that I was now her project, the way Finn had decided I was his years earlier.
The two of them formed a coalition against me at breakfast that I was powerless to resist.
“It’s low impact,” Brenda said.
“It’s in the pool,” Finn said. “You like the pool now. We’ve established you like the pool.”
“I tolerate the pool,” I said.
“He loves working out, and he tolerates the pool,” Finn told Brenda, as if translating. “That’s growth. Two days ago, he generated his own weather system.”
So I found myself, at noon, standing chest-deep in the resort pool in a circle of mostly nude retirees, being led through a series of movements by an instructor named Carlos.
Brenda was beside me, focused and serious.
Finn was on my other side, performing every movement with such grotesque exaggeration that Carlos kept having to look away to keep from laughing.
“Reach for the sky!” Carlos called. “Now squat like you’re sitting in a chair! Beautiful! You, big man in the back, very good, you have the form of a natural!”
I did not have the form of a natural.
I had the form of a man who builds things for a living being asked to pretend to sit in an invisible chair under water in front of strangers. I couldn’t decide if I was pretending to squat in a chair or on a toilet, but I reached for the sky, and I squatted in the invisible chair.
It was during the invisible chair that I looked up and saw, on the pool deck, a camera pointed in my general direction. Wes Calloway was photographing the aqua fitness class for the resort’s website.
He had me dead in frame.
He lowered the camera just enough to look at me over the top of it.
His grin was incandescent.
And somewhat evil.
He raised one hand and gave me a small, devastating wave, and then lifted the camera again, very deliberately taking another picture of me squatting in an invisible chair surrounded by naked retirees.
“Reach for the sky, big man!” Carlos cried.
I reached for the sky.
I reached for it while maintaining eye contact with Wes Calloway across the pool deck in a kind of furious, helpless promise.
Wes mouthed something at me that I was fairly sure was “For the website,” and Finn, who had clocked the entire exchange, laughed so hard he inhaled pool water and had to be helped to the steps by Brenda.
“Are you all right?” Brenda asked him, patting his back.
“He’s in love,” Finn wheezed, pointing a dripping finger at me, “and it’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened to me. Carlos, keep going. Don’t stop on his account. Make him do the invisible chair again. I want him to suffer beautifully.”
Carlos made me do the invisible chair again.
Wes took another picture.
And I stood there in chest-deep water surrounded by nude strangers and a drowning Irishman, being photographed mid-squat by a man I could not stop thinking about.
That’s the exact moment I realized, with the slow structural certainty I brought to the things I was most sure of, that I was done for.
I abruptly understood that whatever this was had stopped being a vacation thing.
I was going to spend the rest of this trip, and possibly some meaningful stretch of my life beyond it, thinking about Wes Calloway.
“You’re doing it again.” Brenda elbowed me gently.
“I know,” I said, startled by my own admission.
“It’s nice, dear.” She patted my arm with a wet hand. “Took me till I was fifty. You’re early.”
Across the pool, Wes packed up his tripod, slung the camera over his shoulder, and pointed up the beach path with a questioning tilt of his head.
“Go on, then!” Finn called after me from the steps, recovered enough to be insufferable again. “Go for your walk! Mind the light!”
I didn’t hesitate.
I climbed out of that pool and went for my walk.
I did not mind the light.
I minded nothing at all.
For a man who had spent thirty-some years minding everything, it was the strangest and best feeling in the world.
I chased that feeling down a beach path, toward a man with a camera and a flask and a grin that rearranged his whole face, and I didn’t look back at the pool even once.