World Gone Water (15 page)

In the morning, robed and having breakfast at the tiny table outside her cabana, she looks at me and asks, “How long have I known you?”

“It feels like forever,” I say, getting up to kiss her.

Caitlin decides she wants me to come along on her sales trip, and I decide I can get away with saying I'm doing work for the contest, so I leave a message on Talie's machine and meet Caitlin at the airport for the flight to New York City. One of those chiseled-jaw guys is across the aisle from us in first class, and Caitlin makes a comment about him, purring a little, and I'm surprised at how much it burns me, how much it makes me want to pop the window with this guy's head, exposing the whole cabin to a loss of pressure, everyone being sucked out over Kansas. “Oh yeah?” I say, and, sensing I am upset, Caitlin says, “It doesn't mean he has my heart.”

“Who has it?” I ask, wanting to hear it. Caitlin touches her finger to my chest and I kiss her in front of the chiseled-jaw guy to let him know what he'll never have.

What we see of New York: We start at the zoo in Central Park, as it's right outside the Plaza Hotel, our digs (we don't pay to go in the zoo, just look over the fence while the sea lions are being fed). I ride my hand up Caitlin's dress when she's leaned over the zoo fence. People are cramming on all sides but no one sees me, and I slip my finger inside her and I think maybe the guy next to us hears her gasp.

We retrace our steps to the Plaza, and once we're clear of the chandeliers and lunch crowd, she pushes me against the inside of the elevator and rips my shirt clean open, the tiny white plastic buttons scattering around us.

Later, I ask if I can take her out to dinner. I'd like to get dressed up, see her across a candlelit table. The fantasy is ruined, though, when Caitlin says, “Dinner's right here”—a line from a thousand porno movies—and puts her hand between my legs. She takes me in her mouth and I remember when Jason and I used to call each other by our porno names. We followed the rule of taking the name of the street where you lived as your last name. I was Charlie Olive and he was Jason Greenwich.

We used our porno names once, I almost forgot, when we met these two sisters in Las Vegas:

“Let's go inside,” the tall, blond, big-nosed girl said as she stood up.

“Help me up,” I said. I had about twenty gallons of alcohol inside me and I looked down her inclined driveway at the gate, which was just closing.

“Hey,” Jason greeted us. He was sitting next to our good friend who'd moved to Las Vegas for the luck, and with them was the tall, blond, big-nosed girl's sister.

“Wanna hit?” Jason asked.

I pushed the joint away.

“Let's all climb in your bed,” the tall, blond, big-nosed girl suggested to her sister.

“Great idea,” her sister agreed.

Suddenly the five of us were underneath the covers, passing around a chilled bottle of Southern Comfort. (The sister claimed it tasted better cold.) I looked over at my good friend who'd moved to Las Vegas for the luck and saw him kissing the tall, blond, big-nosed girl's sister.

“Go get it, girl,” the blond big-nose whooped.

“Shh!” the sister warned. “The housekeeper is sleeping.”

“The housekeeper?” I asked.

“Don't worry, she's old,” the blond big-nose muttered.

“When are your parents coming back?” Jason asked.

“End of the week,” the blond big-nose answered as she took a swig from the now half-empty bottle. “Fuck!”

“What?” I asked.

“I forgot to turn the lights off in the driveway,” she said, and sprang off the mattress.

“I'll go with you,” I called out after her, and stumbled from the bed.

The hallway was dark and I heard her flicking light switches off. Then she came back up the hall.

“Wait,” I said, and pulled her up against me. We started kissing and I put my hand up her shirt and massaged her breasts. She started getting into it, so I reached down her underwear.

“We can't now,” she whispered as she pulled my hand out from between her legs.

“I want you now,” I said, and lunged at her.

“Hold on.” She stopped me.

“Till when?”

“Later,” she whispered loudly. “In my room.”

“Okay,” I agreed, following her back into the bedroom, where the others were still lounging.

“How often do you guys come to Vegas?” the tall, blond, big-nosed girl's sister asked us.

“Not enough,” Jason said. A real cheese machine.

I reached under the covers, hoping to get my hands in the tall, blond, big-nosed girl's crotch again, but when I felt down there, I found Jason had beaten me to the prize.

“Go with me to the fridge,” the blond big-nose said to him, and the two of them leaped out of bed.

By the time I stumbled after them, they'd already gone into her bedroom. I crept up to the door and listened.

“Let me get a rubber,” I heard her say.

“I brought one,” Jason said.

“Oh?”

“Never can tell what you're going to run into in Sin City,” the cheese machine said.

Oh my God
, I was thinking.

He started giving it to her, because she moaned a few low moans and then squealed a little.

“Hey,” I said as I walked in.

Suddenly everything was silent. It was so dark I couldn't even make out the bed. I stood there for a minute, hoping to be invited into a threesome, but no one said anything. I quietly closed the door behind me.

I walked back to the sister's bedroom and opened the door. Our good friend from Las Vegas had the sister spread out naked on the bed and was licking between her legs. She looked over and smiled at me and I closed the door.

I was starting to sober up and I didn't like what was going on. I felt what it was like to lose out on something because I wasn't man enough to just take it. I went out into the front room and sulked on the couch, trying to explain to the housekeeper who I was.

In the morning, while Caitlin is with a client, I skip down Fifth Avenue to a bagel cart for some breakfast. A swell of people come out from the subway under the Plaza, everyone in a business suit or dark clothes. I skip back up the Plaza's steps, palming a warm cinnamon raisin bagel, skip past a limousine with its door opening and past a family of tourists gawking at the chandeliers.

In Boston, Caitlin and I have a terrible fight on Lansdowne Street. The fight starts in Axis, where we came to dance. “I'm too tired to dance,” Caitlin says. “Let's go somewhere else.”

Thinking she really wants a good time, I take the lead and force her on the dance floor. She gyrates lethargically in place to the bass beat of an unrecognizable song before turning and walking off the dance floor.

The fight continues in Jillian's, a pool hall down the street.

“You are
insensitive
,” she says. “It's amazing what you can find out about a person.”

“Let's just go back to the hotel, okay?” I say. Her insults are mortally wounding me.

I sleep fitfully on the floor, dreaming a dream where Caitlin is riding in a horse-drawn carriage through Central Park while I am running after her on foot. I am calling out to her, but when she looks back, her carriage takes off into the air, gliding over the park and into the clouds. When I try to show someone a picture of Caitlin to find out where she's gone, I realize I don't have any. When I try to pronounce her name to the police, it's untranslatable by the cop.

In the morning I wake when Caitlin crawls down on the floor too. “I'm sorry,” I say, hoping today is a new day.

“I'm the one that's sorry,” she says.

Our breath is foul when we kiss, but neither of us flinches, and Caitlin says, “I have the weekend off. Let's take a car trip.”

“I asked the guy at the counter for a romantic place, and he said there's something called the Colonial Inn in Concord. I guess it's supposed to be historic,” I say.

“Well, well,” Caitlin says, chuckling. “Aren't we a little Romeo?”

“It sounded like a place that might be haunted, though,” I say, ignoring her.

“We could go there,” she says, kissing my neck. “Or we could go to Cape Cod.”

“Why did you say that just now? The Romeo thing,” I ask, pulling away.

“I don't know,” she answers, shrugging. “I just thought it was cute that you were, you know … doing
research
.”

“You were being condescending,” I say. I know what kind of reaction this'll get.

Caitlin is silent, then says in a quiet voice, “I'm sorry.”

I'm surprised that I have her on the fence. I feel like pushing her further. “Are you a condescending person?” I ask.

Caitlin sits back and closes her eyes. She begins to tremble.

“Look, I was only joking,” I say, not surprised at how quickly I back off. “I know you're a good person.”

My words have no visible effect on her and I'm stuck for what to say next.

Instead, Caitlin says, “I have this terrible feeling that I'm in love with you.”

“Why is that such a terrible thing?”

Caitlin stands, not looking at me, and says, “It really feels great, but I have to guard against it. You're not going to be around forever.”

The last words sear me completely.

“I
will
be here forever,” I want to say. And even though I
think
it's true, it would sound corny and melodramatic after knowing her for only a few days, so I don't say anything, and we move silently to pack our bag for the weekend.

Things are as they were, though, once we're driving toward the Cape. Caitlin touches the inside of my thigh while I drive, and I glance over and catch her smile.

A giant yellow wreath hangs on the bridge over the canal we cross to get onto the Cape, marking the spot where a woman drove
head-on into a metal pole, killed on impact. It was on the news the night before in the hotel, and what occurs to me is that forty-eight hours ago at this time, that person was alive and making plans to drive to the Cape, along with whatever else she was doing that day, picking up laundry, paying her electric bill, calling her friends to say she was on her way.

There was a girl who got killed when I first moved to Phoenix, a foreign exchange student from Russia who stepped out in front of a city bus while looking the wrong way. They put her picture in the newspaper, along with one of a makeshift memorial featuring flowers and a teddy bear that sprang up at the site of the accident. I couldn't look away from the picture. I somehow knew the confusion from that morning, the chaos of running late and the nanosecond that was nothing more than a mistake that cost this girl her life.

The windows on the rental car are manual, so Caitlin climbs in the backseat to unroll them. The wind coming off the ocean scrubs everything clean, and you get a new life.

“I'm just going to sit back here,” Caitlin says.

“But I want you up here,” I say, patting the seat next to me, looking in the rearview mirror.

“Nope.” She smiles. “I'm going to sit back here.”

“What'll you do by yourself back there?” I ask.

I love to be coy with her.

“I'm going to put my feet up on your shoulders and masturbate. Will you keep the speed above sixty?”

I eye her in the mirror. “Someone will see,” I say, even though I wouldn't care if someone did. It simply seems to me that we could have a nice drive on Cape Cod, squeezed on all sides by ocean and sand, and enjoy ourselves in this pacific freedom without starring in a porn movie. “Come back up front,” I say, more telling her than asking.

Caitlin puts on a pout and climbs over the front seat. She turns the radio on and a moment of total division passes between us.

“I wasn't going to do that anyway,” she says apologetically. “I was only joking.”

“It's a nice day, isn't it?” I ask.

Caitlin rests her head on my lap and closes her eyes. “It
is
a nice day,” she says.

An old drive-in movie sign in Wellfleet makes me think of a hundred things from high school.

The Cape narrows, and soon there's beach and ocean visible in every direction. The wind becomes fierce, and Caitlin, sensing something, sits up.

“We've driven to the end,” I say. “I didn't even notice.”

Caitlin points out the sign for Race Point Beach and I pull off. THIS BEACH CLOSES AT DARK, the sign says. Except for a family wading down the shore, the beach is deserted. The showers in the changing room drip synchronically, and the sandy slope down to the water is one of the walks you know is going to be harder on the way back up.

“Bury me in the sand,” Caitlin says.

I kick away the dry sand and scoop handfuls of thick, wet sand onto her body, packing it on tight. Caitlin giggles as I do, and I shape two giant breasts out of sand and put a large tangle of seaweed between her legs.