Amateurs (20 page)

Archer hadn't abused his power, though, or at least he hadn't made John feel unappreciated, and it was a touching sign of his loyalty that John had been invited at all to this small but lavish birthday party. He had even been given a favored friend's cabin, spacious and within spitting distance of the Great House. And maybe Archer was looking out for John when he booked newly single Jessica Kim into the room next door. It was true that when John heard her shower running one morning—it sputtered intermittently like a machine gun—he imagined her lathering herself in a more seductive style than cleanliness and sand removal would require. But he only thought of Jess that way in flashes. Sometimes—it probably wasn't cool—but sometimes he still thought of Sara in that way. It was awesome to see her. He'd told her so when they hugged on the dock the first night, he having walked down the hill with a borrowed flashlight—or “torch,” as Gemma called it, maybe fittingly—to greet the last incoming boat; only later, when he was trying to read a book about shipbuilding while a bug ricocheted inside his bedside lampshade, did he remember that
awesome
was one of the words Sara looked down on and tried to discourage. It had just slipped out, and he'd meant it in the old-fashioned, not strictly positive sense, since it was also painful to see her, hard not to stare or seem like he was making a big point of not staring. On this trip he had learned to position himself in spots where he couldn't get a direct view of her, as if she were the sun, or the fire and brimstone Lot's wife wasn't supposed to look back at.

The first clanks and voices sounded from the kitchen. He sipped his herbal tea and stared at a tiny lizard that had emerged from the deck's cracked stone parapet. Of course the lizard knew that another
creature, a large one, was nearby, but did it sense itself being watched? He started to feel a paternal tenderness toward the lizard, a warmth he suspected would prompt ridicule if articulated. From Sara, probably. Her cynicism was only superficial, but it was a thick surface.

Birds chirped, tea dribbled down his beard. So peaceful here. He whispered it, “So peaceful,” and his voice sounded strange, like balled-up paper blowing across a concrete floor. He decided to let the tea dry on its own. He thought maybe he could feel it drying. He was all the time talking about leaving New York, but now, as the lizard darted away, he knew he had to make good on those threats, find a quiet place, a place where he could start building bikes again, or start building something else. “So peaceful,” he said again, “so peaceful.”

Sara woke up early with a hangover and settled in on one of the patios before most of the others. She hoped to check her e-mail over coffee, but Robert, the Defense Department guy, was similarly engaged at the next table, and by now she'd deduced that his laptop was fortified against inclusive use of the resort's wireless. He didn't seem to notice her exasperated sighs. She thumbed through the printer-hot
TimesDigest
and watched an army of creamy yellow butterflies—perhaps the species that gave rise to the name—float around a shrub that one of the gardeners identified as a Jamaica caper tree. After Robert powered down, she took the opportunity to visit an online retailer and arranged for a CD of John Adams's
Nixon in China
to be sent to Archer's condominium. She was still grinning over this when the painter strolled up to her table. “What are you on to now?” he asked, nodding at the paperback to the right of her plate. The cashmere sweater tied loosely around his neck was the color of underripe watermelon.

“Michel Leiris,” she said, slurring the surname to hide her uncertain pronunciation. She turned the book over to reveal its cover.
“A kind of anthropological autobiography. Arrestingly undissembling.” The phrase didn't excite him. “I loved
Persuasion,
by the way,” she added, hoping to keep him by her table a little longer. “Overnight it's my favorite of her novels. I love how Anne is older than the typical Austen heroine and for once not only as clever but as wise as her creator.”

“God, do you mean, or Jane Austen?”

She smiled. “Austen.”

“Good. I don't rate the wisdom of our creator very highly. But I haven't read that one,
Persuasion
,” he said, erasing the endorsement he'd given with apparent emotion on the beach. “I don't think I've read any Jane Austen.”

“Oh.”

He excused himself as John and Lucas arrived.

“Did you guys sleep together?” Sara said.

“No,” John said.

“Yes,” Lucas said.

“We arrived at the same time from opposite directions.” John exhibited no feel for the homoerotic or homophobic joking so common with straight men of his age and type, she thought, forgetting for a moment that she had started it this time.

“There's mad caterpillars on that tree over there,” Lucas said, pointing. He strapped his backpack around the chair next to Sara's.

“Fat black-and-orange ones,” John said, brushing dandruff off his navy linen jacket.

“Princeton caterpillars,” Robert broke in. “It's a good year for them.”

“Is it?” Lucas said in a tone that didn't invite embellishment. After returning from the buffet with a quantity of pastries, fruit, and yogurt that might have been called gluttonous in itself, Lucas ordered an omelet and sausage. “I'm trying to cram in my month's eating down here where the food's free.”

“I don't reckon that's healthy,” John said, meaning
healthful.

Sara closed her eyes to better concentrate on the just-right temperature: breezy and, she guessed, seventy-eight. John and Lucas were caught up now in a friendly debate about whether bears truly hibernate. Her hangover was gone, and she was feeling the optimum effects of her morning coffee, high but not jittery. She wondered how many more sips she could afford.

“Oh, did you start without me?” Gemma mock-pouted, sneaking up on them. Today's romper was marigold orange. Lucas seemed to truffle in vain for an adroit response. Sara watched a hummingbird hover over a dish of mango.

“What?” Lucas said, looking at Sara.

She was smiling broadly. “Nothing,” she said as Archer came into view.

When Gemma showed up for breakfast in another of her amazing baby-style outfits with the high-waisted short shorts, Lucas wanted badly to touch her, not just to touch her sleeve or hug her goodbye three days from now, but to put his hands all over her and guide her into new positions so he could put his hands in different spots. “You didn't start without me, did you?” she said. “Not in our hearts,” Lucas answered. Archer followed a minute behind her, looking bleary. He greeted Lucas: “Your holiness.”

“I'm not really into these papal puns, man.” They didn't bother him out of other mouths, actually, and it was Lucas himself who'd dubbed his first (and last) car the Popemobile.

“All right, noted.”

“It's been a lifetime of 'em, you know.”

Archer repeated that he understood and was soon recruiting people for a morning hike to Franklin Beach, where there was said to be excellent “schnorkeling” (for some “quirky” reason he pronounced
the word in what must have been the German way) and opportunities to “commune with nature.”

“If we go as a big group, wouldn't we be more likely to commune with each other?” Lucas said.

“We could multitask,” Archer said lamely but with a bonhomie that seemed genuinely interested in everyone's fun. Lucas's thought experiment for this trip was to imagine that Archer was annoying and full of himself but not a scoundrel. Really there was no reason, other than class resentment and sexual jealousy, for Lucas to be against Archer, and the sexual jealousy wasn't so gnawing anymore. He admitted that Archer seemed to be good for Gemma, good
to
her as well, Lucas's invitation to this island being a sign that he was good to her, willing to make sacrifices. Lucas tried to admire Archer for bestowing such largesse on someone he presumably disliked—and maybe Archer only disliked Lucas because Lucas had disliked him first. Which would make him all the more generous. The resort's prices were unpublicized on if-you-have-to-ask grounds, but Lucas guessed that, for the cost of a week's stay, a person could live frugally but not hungrily for the better part of a year. Lucas himself could pull off such austerity if he finally left New York, moved back home to help with his ailing father, returned to DJing in a less competitive market.

Gemma studied the water. “Too windy today for snorkeling, I fear,” she said. They were on one of the patios overlooking the choppier Atlantic side.

“For schnorkeling, yes,” Archer said.

“Archer tells me it was very windy in Cape Town,” Sara said to Gemma.

“Horrifically,” Gemma said.

“See any elephants?” John said.

“I suspect that elephant sightings are unusual in Cape Town,” Sara said.

“I thought maybe they'd safari too when they were over there,” John said quietly.

“No, their dry season is better for that,” Archer said, but coughed up a few anecdotes from an earlier safari. He pronounced
zebra
to rhyme with
Debra.

“You traveled over the holidays as well, didn't you?” Gemma asked Sara.

“Not really. I spent a few days with my grandfather in Chicago.”

“Surely you had to travel to get there.”

“Well, yes, but it was more of an errand—not that I don't love my grandfather,” Sara threw in. “He's ‘slowing down,' as they say, but resolved not to leave his house, so my dad asked me to check on things. Now we're trying to find someone to look after him.”

“A medical professional, you mean?” John said.

“No, he needs a factotum more than a nurse,” Sara said. “According to my lay evaluation, at least. And my dad doesn't want to spend much money, or, you know, doesn't want my grandfather to spend much—no doubt thinking of his inheritance.”

“Is your father a greedy man?” Gemma asked.

“No,” Sara said. “I shouldn't have put it that way. Anyway, best would be someone who's not a professional in any line.”

“Like a bum?” Archer said.

“Just someone whose life decisions have opened the door to flexibility.”

“Okay,” John said, nodding like a bobblehead doll. “I know a guy in Chicago. He's in improv comedy, but, as to the professional thing, I guess I'd call him semipro.”

The sun was shifting. Lucas put on a pair of pink drugstore sunglasses over his regular glasses. He was taking style cues lately from the insane.

“It'd be a live-in position,” Sara said, “and quite a ways from Chicago itself.”

“Maybe give me the contact info just in case,” John said. “How old's your grandpa?”

“Ninety? Ninety-one? My dad wants to take his license away.”

“I do think we should be more vigilantly testing the driving competence of our aged,” Gemma said. “Last year I was very painfully doored by a woman of your grandfather's vintage.”

“What's ‘doored' again?” Sara said.

“I was cycling, observantly, when an extremely elderly woman opened the rather ponderous door of her Buick—”

“Mercury.”

“—right in front of me.”

“There was a hole the size of a tennis ball in her shoulder,” Lucas said. He had been talked out of waiting in the lobby during Gemma's short hospitalization.

“Not a tennis ball, Lucas, a golf ball,” Gemma said, showing the scar on her creamily rounded shoulder.

“Still, it must've hurt like hell.”

“It was not quite hell. Perhaps closer to the duty-free shop in the Cancun airport.”

“In my grandfather's defense,” Sara said, “he hasn't been in any accidents. He backed into the garage door, but no one was harmed.”

“Hard stuff,” Lucas said, “getting old.” He felt least original when aiming for sympathy.

“At ninety-one I daresay he isn't
getting
old,” Gemma said.