Twenty-Three
Nina needed to make a friend on this trip the same way she needed another hole in her head, but here she was, lolling in the shallow end of a hotel pool in the Caribbean on what should have been an ordinary December morning in Rochester (Clara was in AP Bio; Bridie had a free period).
She was wearing last summer’s swimsuit, a navy one-piece with a thick ivory stripe down the center, which the salesperson at Sibley’s had assured her was slimming.
The suit was cut higher on the leg than she was used to, and she’d had to shave her bikini line before they left.
She’d already secreted her pink disposable razor in the suitcase hidden in the back of her closet, so she borrowed Sam’s silver-plated razor, the one he’d had since they met.
Unused to the instrument’s weight, she’d given herself a tiny cut at the bikini line.
Wading in the pool now, the chlorinated water made the cut sting in a way that felt soothing.
She wanted something on the outside to hurt.
Finn was sitting at an aluminum poolside table beneath a brightly colored and tasseled umbrella, deep in conversation with their local attorneys and someone named Mr. López, an American from Miami who was an attorney and a kind of expediter as far as she could gather.
Finn wanted to speak to the men alone. Nina knew but refused to know how he was going to persuade the courts to grant their divorces without spousal consent, which even in this place designed for quickie divorces they were supposed to have secured.
She knew it had to involve money. She knew he’d been talking to Mr. López for weeks.
She knew they had to live in this hotel for forty-eight hours to “establish residency” in the Dominican Republic and that on Thursday morning they would go to the courthouse and these men sitting across the concrete patio, drinking iced tea, and quietly murmuring, heads bent, would go in front of the divorce judge.
Finn and Nina would marry the following day.
Unbound and rebound in the span of twenty-four hours in a courthouse on an island she would never want to return to again.
Finn didn’t care that the church wouldn’t recognize their divorce and remarriage, and neither would Honey or Sam.
He considered their recalcitrance a tiny technicality.
Once they were married and living together as husband and wife, his argument went, Sam and Honey would have no choice but to capitulate and grant them official divorces in New York State.
And then they’d simply marry one more time.
“I’ll marry you in every goddam state in the country if I have to. Fifty weddings, fifty courthouses.”
Although his argument was heartless, he was correct.
Honey would be hostage to Finn’s finances (“Don’t you worry about Honey,” he’d said dismissively when she brought up her concerns.
“She’ll be well provided for.”) Sam would probably never speak to Nina again, but he would want the scandal and its resultant heat in his rearview mirror as quickly as possible.
In the days after Garret delivered Sam to their front porch, he and Nina warily avoided one another.
She wanted to wait him out. Every day that went by without him coming to her to offer an apology or an explanation, she became angrier.
On the following Saturday, when Bridie and Clara were out of the house, she put together a salade Nicoise, one of Sam’s favorites. She made a baguette and a tarte tatin.
“What’s the occasion?” he said, coming into the kitchen, pleased.
“You tell me.”
He squinted at her, confused.
“Don’t you think it’s time we had a conversation about the other night?”
Sam’s face shuttered, the tiny muscle in his jaw twitching as his color drained. And the persistent suspicions she’d tried to quiet erupted into something undeniable and solid.
“What about the other night?” he said, turning away from her. “I’m sorry I drank too much.”
“And Garret? And Margaret?”
“I told you, it was a client thing just like—”
She put her hand up to stop him. “Please, let’s not do it like this,” she said.
“Like what?” She could see him gearing up for combat. In that moment, his and Clara’s resemblance was destabilizing it was so familiar: Chin up. Lips thin. Eyes blazing.
“Like I’m dumb. Like you’re dumb,” she said. He sighed and sat at the table and picked up a fork and speared half of a hard-boiled egg. “Sam? I’m talking to you.”
“Sit. Since when are you not able to talk and eat at the same time?”
She would try to figure it out later, why that particular comment made her livid—the casual dismissiveness, the lack of contrition, the inability to engage honestly for the duration of one lousy lunch.
Standing there, watching him shovel haricots verts and tuna into his mouth like he didn’t have a care in the world, untethered her from whatever it was—a silent pact?
A tacit agreement? Willful ignorance?—that had kept them loosely, unquestioningly in lockstep.
She almost felt herself floating away. She could hear him talking, but the words coming out of his mouth were gibberish.
He sounded like he was speaking to his staff.
First, he stated the problem: she was misreading things.
Then he asked a question: What was she implying anyway?
Followed by an observation: Did she know how ridiculous she sounded?
He wrapped up with a recommendation, a specific action, as she often heard him suggest to coworkers: she should sit down and have some lunch and stop acting crazy.
He spoke deliberately and calmly, but his eye contact was aggressive, and his entire demeanor made it clear her responses were unwelcome and unnecessary.
“You know,” he said, sopping up the vinaigrette in his bowl with a piece of bread, “people say this time of life”—he looked up, gestured aimlessly with the baguette—“the change, can cause strange symptoms. Not just physical but mental.”
She started to feel insane. She folded her hands in her lap and said: “I want a divorce.” He laughed at her.
“SO,” THE WOMAN SHE WOULD come to know as Judith said, slowly wading toward Nina sitting at the shallow end of the pool, “are you one of us?”
“Pardon?” Nina wasn’t in the mood to talk to this woman or anyone.
“One of the fallen? Holding the forbidden apple? Hester Prynne?” She took a finger, wet the tip with her tongue, and traced a letter A on the swell of her left breast. Nina laughed despite herself. “I guess I am,” she said.
“Welcome,” Judith said. She was spectacularly beautiful. She shook the water out of her long black hair like a sleek wild animal or someone in a Pepsi commercial and sat down next to Nina on the stairs. “I’m going to order a drink because you look like you could use one.”
“What do you recommend?” Nina said. Was she going to drink her way through this entire inexplicable trip? Maybe.
“Something called tropical punch. It’s good and strong.
Lots of vitamin C, too.” She waved prettily toward one of the pool attendants, who were all young, skinny locals looking slightly absurd in their dress whites, like they’d come straight from the deck of a naval ship.
It was hot and they were wearing long pants and long-sleeved shirts and navy ties.
Nina realized her bathing suit matched their uniforms. One of the attendants came over, cheerfully wiping his brow.
“Hi, Cyrus,” Judith said. “A couple of punches?”
Beyond the deep end, Finn stood and shook the hands of the men he’d been meeting with. He had a manila folder under his arm. He turned to look for Nina, spotted her, and waved. She smiled back. He was beautiful. Something in her settled a little.
“That your guy?” Judith asked. Nina nodded.
“Mine’s over there.” Judith pointed to a heavyset balding man sitting on one of the lounge chairs with a big book on his lap. From where Nina was sitting, she recognized another big potboiler. “Is he reading Trinity?” Nina asked.
“Exodus,” Judith said. “Get it?”
“Very appropriate.”
“That’s Danny. That’s my guy.”
Nina couldn’t help but like this woman, who was acting like they were all at a table at the high school cafeteria, pointing out their crushes.
Cyrus hurried over with two tall sweaty glasses filled with a coral-colored liquid, red straws, and fat wedges of pineapple on the rims. Nina took a sip.
It was cold and sweet and delicious and tasted mostly of rum.
“This is good,” she said to Judith. “This is extraordinary.”
“There’s a smile!” Judith said. “I was going to ask why so glum.”
“Oh. It’s complicated.”
“Sweetie, if it weren’t complicated, we wouldn’t be here. Danny’s been trying to divorce his wife for ten years.”
“Ten!”
“Ten and three months. You know how many days? I do. It’s 3,739. Or close. I don’t do leap-year math.”
“A lot of days,” Nina said.
“His wife’s a real bitch. Got to hand it to her, though, she made us work for it.” Judith drained her tropical punch in one noisy slurp and waved her empty glass toward Cyrus, who nodded.
“And your husband?” Nina asked. It hadn’t occurred to her last night that she might find comfort in talking about the thing they were all doing in this place.
“Oh, I never had one,” Judith said. “Thank god. Only one furious spouse to deal with. How about you?” she said cheerfully, taking her second drink from Cyrus, as if they were talking about local tourist sites or restaurants.
“We’re both married” was all she was willing to offer Judith in terms of details.
“Not for long! When’s your hearing?”
“Tomorrow,” Nina said. She’d woken up in the beautiful hotel room, palms outside the window, the sky a kind of vibrant pink she’d never seen before, and told herself once again to get back on a plane to her daughters.
And yet here she sat, sipping a rum drink.
(Bridie in math; Clara, creative writing.)
“We’re tomorrow, too! Finally. He’s a dentist and I’m his assistant. We’re together all day and we want to be together every night. Who could walk away from that?”
Later, at dinner on the veranda of the hotel, surrounded by the chatter of other guests, the bustle of the staff, and buffeted by the sea breezes, Nina and Finn were quiet, awkward, speaking but not really.
“Pass the butter.”
“How’s your fish?”
“I like your tie.”
“Pretty sandals.”
“Look at the moon, would you?”
The conversation superficial, but the undertones complex. Nina understood how easily everything they’d put into motion could melt away, as quickly as the scoop of mango sorbet in the silver dish in front of her, a tiny, dissipating yellow sun.
“Ready?” Finn said finally.
They’d just crossed the threshold of the room when Finn grabbed her, pulled up her long, floral skirt, and bent her over the bed the way she sometimes liked.
Usually, he defaulted to sweet and gentle, but now he was quick and desperate and as he plunged into her, she reached behind him and grabbed his buttocks and said, “Fuck me.”
It was like she’d flipped a switch. She felt herself become hollowed out. He didn’t go soft as much as evaporate. One moment he was inside of her, the next gone. They didn’t move for a minute. Two. Finn sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay. We’re tired. Today has been hard.”
“You’ve never said anything like that before. During sex, I mean. The—the swearing.”
“I thought you’d like it.”
“I was—surprised, I guess.”
The bed was across from a full-length mirror, and she could see how vulnerable and middle-aged they looked, how exposed. As she collapsed on the bed, she started to sob. Finn covered her with a sheet, patted her back, said, “Shhh, shhh,” as she cried herself to sleep.