Ghost Lights (15 page)

“I went to an island,” he said, wondering how much credit to take. “An island he owns. He was building a hotel there, before the storm hit.”

As he told the story she gazed at his face attentively, nodding and smiling eagerly as though he, too, must feel overjoyed and brimming with triumph. In fact he felt unsurprised, he reflected; T. being dead had never been a foregone conclusion to him. It was Susan who had been so convinced of the worst-case scenario. To him the question of T.’s deadness had been, in fact, basically a matter of indifference—which shocked him, now that he thought of it. His former indifference rattled him slightly, he realized. Now that he liked T., now that he had appointed himself T.’s protector and ally, how automatic, how thoughtlessly callous the former indifference seemed.

At the same time he was noticing Gretel’s breasts, a caramel, tanned color, the scoops of them smooth and perfect where they emerged from the fabric of the bikini. He regretted his former indifference to whether T. was alive or dead; he was mildly astonished to recognize it. But he was more astonished at the beauty of the breasts, barely covered. They hid their light under a bushel. Men were not queued up beside Gretel’s beach umbrella, for instance, rubbernecking for a gander. The breasts were here, and yet their presence had not been widely broadcast, though it would clearly be of interest to the general public. He thought of crowds along city streets, waving and straining for a look at the Pope in his Popemobile.

Not so in this case. The breasts were unsung heroes.

Incredible that his own hands and mouth had been on them such a short while ago—a few hours, a couple of days’ worth of hours, anyway, many of them passed quickly in sleep. In geological time, it was a second ago—an instant. The sense memory of it . . . no one was mentioning this. Neither he nor Gretel said to each other, right away, we are people who fucked, you fucked me and I fucked you, or made-fucking-love, or whatever. Instead it was as though this fucking had never taken place, and here they were discussing the status of a third party, one basically irrelevant to the fucking and its memory, in a separate compartment. Neither of them was bringing up her tits, her ass, how he had been all over all of them and also in the deep interior of her personal and individually owned body, to which he had no right at all but had been granted, for a few fleeting minutes, a provisional entry.

Neither of them was bringing up this list of items, these glaringly real items whose reality was greater, in fact, than most other realities, at the moment. At least for him. While genuinely regretting his callousness—which no one else knew of, and which was therefore a secret even more than what had passed between him and Gretel was a secret, because in that case she, at least, knew of it also, whereas no one at all knew how indifferent he had been to the alive- or deadness of T. (he was so grateful, as always, for the privacy of the mind)—he was far more interested in the fact that he did not want to escape from any of them, Gretel’s tits, her ass, even the softness and sweet, almost babyish smell of her inner-thigh skin. He wished it had not all happened in the dark, so he could have better recall, could see things as well as remember the feel of them . . . but now the tits and the ass, the soft, musky thighs with their hideaway—or at least the darkness that had surrounded all of these during his only contact with them—were added to his list of regrets. Which was ridiculous. Regretting his indifference, which had actually hurt no one, and now regretting the darkness, which he had not chosen.

“I hope you don’t think badly of me,” he blurted, interrupting his own droning and semi-vacant narration of the events associated with T. He was bored of it.

“Of course not!” said Gretel. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged, awkward. Maybe there had been a tacit pact between them never to mention the sex, the adultery, whatever you wanted to call it. Now broken.

“Your friendship is important to me,” he said, lying. It was a lie, and yet not in spirit, because
she
was important to him—just not her friendship, per se, which was, given the logistics of their situation as well as the marital pairings, unlikely to the point of sheer impossibility. Could they be friends in theory, separate but aware? And what would be the point? “That’s all.”

“You don’t have to be embarrassed,” she said, and put her hand on his knee.

“It’s not a problem, then?”

“No problem,” she said, and smiled. She squeezed the knee lightly. It was as though she had nothing to hide, and nothing immoral or illicit had ever passed between them.

But the touch of her hand made him want to have sex again, with sudden desperation.

“
Mutti! Mutti
!
” called a cornboy, and the two of them were running toward the umbrella, kicking up sand.

Gretel removed her hand, but not too hastily. Somehow her every movement was both graceful and casual. He wondered how she managed it.

“
Der hat eine grosse Qualle gefunden!
”

“A jellyfish,” she explained to Hal, and turned back to the boys. “Use your English! Did it sting anyone?”

“No.” They shook their heads.

“Good.”

“Coke please.”

“Me too.”

“How many Cokes have you already had today, Stefan?”

“Two.”

“Three,” tattled the Beta.

“That’s enough, then.”

“Please?”

“Please?”

She sighed.

“Look in my bag, then.”

They rummaged for money in her purse while she laid her head back and stretched her gleaming legs out beyond the umbrella’s shadow. “We haven’t lived in the States for that long, you know? They are still learning.”

“T. thought their English was very impressive,” said Hal, as the cornboys ran uphill again toward the poolside bistro. As he said it he felt the dynamic between them returning to normalcy, to the politeness of regular behavior. In the shift whatever had been intimate was lost, the raw, open thing between them was covered up and buried.

Which was an ending, but also a relief.

• • • • •

H
e tried Susan again from the telephone in his room, and she picked up on the third ring.

“Susan? I found him,” he told her, in a voice that was carefully solemn. Suspense.

“Oh my God,” said Susan, low. He heard her fear and felt a remorseful pang.

“He’s fine,” he said quickly.

“What?”

“He’s fine. He’s grown a beard.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. Really.”

She screamed on the other end. It sounded like she’d dropped the phone. It was a minute before she came back.

“I can’t believe it,” she said breathlessly. “Hal! I can’t believe you found him!”

“Seems he had an experience,” said Hal. “He has a new opinion about capitalism. He’s a changed man.”

“But he’s in one piece. He’s all there?”

“He’s physically fine. Thin though. You can see his ribs sticking out.”

“But so, so why didn’t he call me? What is he
doing
?”

“I think he had a breakdown, or something. He may need help. In the readjustment process. He’s been living in the middle of nowhere like a hermit. No running water. Or electricity.”

“
T.?
My God. I can’t believe this. So when is he—is he coming home soon?”

“We haven’t got it worked out yet. His tour guide died—”

“My God!”

“—is what happened. He was on a backpacking trip and he had to hike out alone. He got lost. It was a near miss, sounds like.”

“God! Get him to call me, then, Hal. Get him to call me right away. There are things I can still salvage, if he calls me now. I mean finances, legal situations. He would want me to, I know it. If I still can. I should try. Would you please?”

“I’ll try. But he’s not all there, Susan.”

“Just get him back here then. Get him back here. We’ll take care of him.”

It irritated him somehow, the assumption that T. would prove malleable in her hands and she could automatically mold him into his former shape.

“Who will? You will? You and Robert?”

There was a pause.

“I’m saying we need to have him taken care of, Hal. With access to services. Expertise and—and medication, if he needs it. It wasn’t so long ago he had his loss, you know. This is still fallout from that, I’m guessing. You know, his girlfriend—her dying was out of the blue. But he never did any bereavement counseling. None.”

He felt resistant to answering.

“Hal?”

“I’ll do what I can,” he said finally.

Selfishly she dwelled only on the functioning of her office, the linear track of returning to normal. As though normal was all she wished, all anyone would ever want to secure. It did not occur to her that normal might be flawed, might be wrong through and through—that maybe T., unbalanced or not, did not wish to be normal, did not want to go back to the steady state she apparently required for him.

“When you get back we should have a talk,” she said, softening. “I know you’re not happy right now. And it means so much to me that you did this.”

“I saw you,” he said. “On the floor of the office. In front of the file cabinet.”

Silence.

He hung up.

•

L
ying on the bed with the television on in front of him, not watching it exactly (it was not in English anyway and seemed to be a Mexican game show involving a tacky, glaring set and flashing lights, whose sound he had muted), he mulled over the various possible effects of his words. She might be considering the option of divorce, whether he wanted it, whether she did, whether this constituted, for the two of them, a divorceable offense; she might be cold to the very core or gleeful and exhilarated, terrified or relieved. She might already have called Robert the Paralegal with the news of their discovery, might have told him what Hal had said, or might never have thought to call him. Among all these, what were his own feelings?

It came to him gradually that he was not angry. His anger had dissipated. He had told her what he knew, and now he was not angry. There was still a sense of disappointment, of letdown—maybe for the unchangeableness of the past, the stubbornness of his unpleasant memories, which were now implanted within him permanently. Maybe for the fact that their marriage had been, in his mind, a pure union, and now it was adulterated. That was what adultery did.

He had wanted it perfect, he thought, but wasn’t that a false want? What was perfect anyway? Possibly this new, sullied marriage was in fact more perfect than the previous innocent one, more perfectly expressed the state of lifelong union or the weather of affection. Possibly the previous, innocent marriage, uncomplicated by disloyalty, had in fact been inferior to this one, more superficial. Maybe they were achieving maturity.

On the other hand, it could be simply that the thrill was gone, that it had been eradicated and would never return.

Then again, he was assuming that, just because this was the first time he had caught her in an act of unfaithfulness, this was the first time such acts had occurred. But what if she had been practicing free love down through the years, ever since the Frenchman? (And Casey not his biological—paranoid crap.) What if the marriage had in fact never been what he thought it was? The real instability, real liquid . . .

Someone was knocking; someone looked in the window, through the crack between the frame and the curtain. Gretel.

He had forgotten about his own infidelity in all this. But his own infidelity was of a lower order, or a higher order, depending how you organized your judgment hierarchy. He would never have slept with Gretel were it not for the condom wrapper fragment on his own bedside table, the bad lesbian song playing on the shower radio, Susan and Robert on the floor of the office and his subsequent unmooring. It was a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder that gave him permission for misbehavior—even a broad series of permissions, airy and limitless as the sky.

It was second-order adultery. That was it.

He opened the door.

“Come for a paddle with me and the boys. Won’t you?” asked Gretel, cocking her head and smiling.

It was late afternoon. Hans had not come back yet and neither had T., clearly: and Hal was sick of the silence of the hotel room, the static of his own body laid out on the bed.

He turned around, grabbed his sunglasses and bottled water, and followed her out of the room, down the stairs and onto the beach to where the hotel’s bright kayaks were arrayed on the sand. They pushed two of them into the placid water, the cornboys in a double kayak ahead of them, and scrambled in.

They were going to head out toward a mangrove caye, said Gretel, and pointed to it. A quick trip before sunset. It was about a half-hour’s paddle to the southeast, and on the other side there was supposed to be a small reef. She had extra snorkeling gear, if Hal wanted to use it. She handed him a hat to wear—one of Hans’s, no doubt. It was emblazoned with the single word
BOEING
.

The two of them lagged contentedly behind the boys, who raced ahead, locked into their perpetual battle of speed and strength. Once more they fought an imaginary opponent. Hal paddled at a leisurely pace.

“They have found some kind of rebel camp,” said Gretel after a while. “Hans did what they call a flyover. In a plane with someone from the Marines, or something.”

“Rebel camp?” asked Hal.

“Guatemalans, I think.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” said Hal, mildly alarmed. “Isn’t the army the bad guy, over there? Doesn’t it do genocide?”

“I don’t know about the politics,” said Gretel apologetically. “Hans just said they were guerrillas. He said it was an armed camp of guerrillas that came from over the border.”

“Over the border is Guatemala, right? And if it’s the Mayans, they’re probably escaping a fucking massacre! I mean there are official refugee camps for them in Mexico. You haven’t read about this? There was a genocide going on, a couple of years ago. Civil war. All this shit with the CIA propping up the military there, the generals that are smuggling cocaine through to the U.S. from Colombia or somewhere—remember that woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize? Rigoberta Menchú?”