Chapter 47
I awoke the next morning not knowing where I was.
Only that I had done something unforgiveable.
Guilt bristled into sweat along my legs.
With the crashing of waves, incrementally, it returned: the beach, the lovely night we’d shared.
It wasn’t so much an awakening as a lulling back asleep.
A kind of lucid dreaming into which I willed myself, hearing the sounds of our children whispering in the room opposite us, the wingbeat of their consonants, the sudden high music of their laughter, thinking, If I could hold it in my mind at all times—that we made them only from ourselves, our love—nothing would ever be wrong between us.
In this way, I gave myself over to the new rhythm of my days.
Their idleness and boredom, their heat. Each afternoon at two o’clock, we gathered beneath a palapa for whatever meal the proprietress, a fat woman in her fifties, had made for the guests.
Only half the cabanas were rented. The other guests were all Mexicans, who insisted out of deference that our mealtime conversations be conducted in English, holding forth on the failures of NAFTA, the troubles of class stratification in Mexico, the serenity of this particular stretch of beach.
Senor Melendez, a grandfatherly man with a barrel-shaped stomach and white panama hat, took it upon himself to teach Henry chess.
After each meal, the two sat at a small concrete table in the garden, he with a cigar and a glass of tequila, Henry with a bottle of Coke.
Most evenings, we walked into town. Beginning in late afternoon, the townspeople sat in lawn chairs on the sidewalk, smoking or slowly drinking their liter bottles of beer.
There was a dwarf who had no legs and was always in the same chair on the same stoop beside his paralyzed friend, as if the two had sprouted from the spot like potted plants.
Henry enjoyed speaking with them when we walked past, wishing them good evening, telling them how he was learning chess.
He would have been frightened by such characters at home, and certainly never thought to strike up a conversation with them—a fact Tom and I remarked to one another proudly.
On our second night, making our way along roads rather than the beach, we had discovered the town’s single restaurant, where a fisherman’s wife sold marlin tacos and fried squid.
A little farther, a man stood on the sidewalk before a tienda grilling hamburguesas and salchichas.
There were ice cream treats in a case outside the launderette, half melted and stale.
After we’d eaten, we would sit next to each other on a bench in the park, holding hands while Henry and Ida played.
It was as if we were discovering anew how to be an autonomous family.
Pulling on damp suits and rumpled clothes.
Eating cobbled-together meals with our hands, drinking soda straight from the bottle.
Brushing our teeth together at the one big sink adjacent to the children’s room, laughing and drooling white foam when we caught sight of each other’s faces in the mirror.
Climbing into unmade beds. These were pleasures that for six months hadn’t been allowed us, in our large house with María tending to our needs.
In certain ways, I’d never allowed them, and it occurred to me that making meaning—in life, in art—didn’t have to be so effortful.
Just as each night Tom and I made love, as miraculously free from complication and shame as it had been the first night here.
Sometimes we spoke softly during our lovemaking.
Or else paused and looked at each other, for whole minutes moving not a muscle, smiling with the guilelessness of children, before resuming more slowly than before.
Other times, it lasted scarcely a minute.
He parted me and in one slow stroke we arrived, shuddering together, after which we slept heavily in each other’s arms.