Pilar and Hand had woken up facing opposite walls but their ankles entwined. They smiled at each other and he reached over and grabbed her nose, as if to pluck it off. She knew that they would continue to sleep together because the night before had been good, and nothing wrong had happened. It would be this way: at night they would brush their teeth and sit on the bed and pull their legs around and under the thin blanket. They would scoot toward each other, their hands searching like those of children pretending to be blind.
To Pilar’s left came three small sharks, striped, built like jets. They were headed for her. She was calm and knew she could make it safely. She pointed her head toward the shore and with her flippers gave the sharks a flurry of waved good-byes, the fins like handkerchiefs in a breeze. Close to shore she stood in the warm shallows, feet slipping over the mossy rocks, and looked for Hand. He wasn’t anywhere. She wanted him not to be attacked by sharks. She wanted to sit on him, on this island, facing the sunset—it was all the colors of a bloody wound.
But there was a man on the island. She hadn’t seen him before. Or he’d just shown up, and Hand was not visible but the man, not far away, waved to her and stepped toward her. He was about forty, and wearing a small swimsuit and sunglasses, neon-framed, reflective lenses. She jumped back into the water, not fearing the sharks. He followed her to the water and then screamed at her, slapping his chest.
On the way back to shore, after she recounted the episode and described the man—Hand had not seen him—Hand scolded her for wearing clothes that invited the attention of men in the town whom the two of them didn’t know enough about and couldn’t necessarily trust.
“I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be seen as prey,” he said.
He went into great detail about what the men in the town had been doing when she’d been walking by. There was the guard in front of the bank, who carried a semiautomatic rifle and, according to Hand, looked Pilar up and down and inside out each time they went into the bank or passed by. How does she decide not to wear a bra? Hand wanted to know this. Not to alarm her, he said, but men covet certain women, women they see every day. So perhaps it would behoove her—he used this word—to do more to disinvite the gaze of these men.
She was speechless. She was furious and confused and ashamed and wanted to club him and kick him and jump on his head.
“I care about you, Pilar,” he said. “Don’t get pissed. And don’t make that face.”
Her lower teeth were jutting out, like a piranha’s. She knew she did this. She was angry that it was now this way with them, and so soon: she was not free. She would be given advice, or whatever it was. They paddled and she focused on the broken hillside. She put Hand in a new category. He was
that
. This was this, and nothing more.
In the evenings the sun dropped through the ocean and the sky would darken quickly. Armadillos scurried below their deck, under the streetlamp, their shiny shells sniffling through the high grass. Under the bed where Pilar and Hand slept, platoons of ants circled around crumbs and moved them to the door, under, and on to parts unknown. Geckos squiggled up and down the wall above the screen door, heading to and from what appeared to be their home, in the beam in the center of the room. The dusty white light during the day never wavered. There were three or four clouds all week.
For a few days Pilar and Hand were married. They surfed and rested their boards fin-up on the hard sand, sat on the flat beach, ate round crackers and drank Fanta. They watched the water, eating nuts and cookies. After they finished eating they would nap, her head in his stomach, and in an hour they would paddle out again. They would stay in the water until the water became black, and then stay until the sun set into it and the black water was striped orange loosely.
At night the surfers roamed the streets barefoot but with hair fluffy from having been finally washed. Couples walked, leaning into each other while glancing at people they found more attractive. Or maybe not. There was no way to know what they were thinking.
Every night, after dinner, Pilar and Hand bought ice cream from a man who had been burned on half of his face. Burned or perhaps it was coming from below—his face had great growths on it, oval and coarse, like the ass of a boar. Usually the moon was yellow behind Vaseline. Sometimes there was hay on the street.
One night they went to see the huge migratory turtles huff ashore and lay their eggs, hundreds of eggs, all of them soft and slathered in gel. They stood behind one enormous one as it swept sand into its hole, sprinkling each group of eggs.
Some days they could hear people playing tennis, but they could not see the court, and even looked for it one day and could not find it. They watched a man painting a picture of the beach; he welcomed their watching and talking. He was from Philadelphia and had had a bad year, a litigious divorce and a friend dead, killed driving to Tahoe.
They slept together once sober and it was awkward—they were not lovers but friends playing Twister. They went back to their original plan the next night. They drank a bit, and then went to bed, just under the surface of consciousness, feeling no edges. Someone watching them from afar might ask: How did they speak to each other? The answer: With the warmth of very old friends, though they were not yet old. How did he touch her? Clumsily, for he was clumsy and she was critical. How did she kiss him? Desperately, pulling and pushing, like a woman trying to get to the bottom of a deep pool.
When they walked usually there were stones in their shoes, because the road was dotted with pebbles and their shoes were loose.
They were leaving Alta the next afternoon—Pilar for home and Hand for Granada and there were no future plans—so they rented boards early and were in the water by nine. It was an uncomplicated day.
Hand was out in the sea before her and she watched him until she was too hot to stay dry. She paddled past the breaks, which meant pushing through four full waves collapsing, like drunks, onto her. Each time she would have to either push the board’s nose into the wave and hope she stayed on, or would preemptively surrender, diving off, waiting for the board to bungee away and come back to her. She had never been so tired.
Hand soon shot past her, on a bigger wave, one that would have crushed Pilar had she tried it. She watched him speed into the beach, looking like he was going faster than the wave. She noticed that people riding waves seem to be moving much faster than waves do when they’re traveling without passengers. Hand had caught this one at the perfect moment and was riding it left, on and on, as it sped away and toward the estuary. It seemed endless. He waved to Pilar. She waved back. It’s weird, Pilar thought, to wave to someone while they’re standing on water. She maybe loved him.
She sat up again, watching the flat blue for growths.
If there were a question that needed to be answered in this story it would be not one but many, and would be these: How can a world allow all this? Allow these people to live so long? To travel all these miles south, to a place so different but still so comfortable, and in that place, meet again? To allow them to be naked together for the first time? What would their parents think? What would their friends think? Would anyone object? Who would plan for them? How many times in life can we make decisions that are important but will not hurt anyone? Are we obligated—maybe we are—to say yes to any choice when no one will be hurt? We use the word
hurt
when talking about things like this because when these things go wrong it can feel as if you were hit in the sternum by a huge animal that’s run for miles just to strike you.
In two hours, she found two waves. Waves were something she cared about now. But she began to care more about seeing them than catching them, and more about catching them than riding them, and above all she wanted to simply stay out beyond the breaks. Because after each ride, the trip back, past the breaks, was too much.
Her arms seemed so thin, like narrow dowels being pushed through syrup. The ache at her shoulders brought her near tears. It wasn’t right that it should be so hard, especially here. The waves would crash ahead of her and the tall strong foam would roll at her, and would then run over her. Knocked off the board, she would scrape the water off her face, spit, expel snot, jump back on the board, paddle twice, achieve maybe ten feet of progress out, and then get knocked over again. Her spirit was broken many times.
She closed her eyes. Opened them, closed them. She could end this world or allow it. This was a moment when a believer, a thoughtful believer, would think of God’s work, and how good it was. The waves were perfect to the right and perfect to the left. Far away there were loud long hoots from the man in the cowboy hat, riding a long low slow breaker all the way in. Pilar thought of the man at her church group who taught everyone how to win at pinball. She thought of curved penises. For a while she was enchanted by those who proposed that God was in nature, was all around us, was the accumulated natural world. “God,” they would suggest, “is in all living things. God is beauty, God is in the long grass and the foam finishing a waterfall.” That sort of thing. She liked that idea, God being in things that she could see, because she liked seeing things and wanted to believe in these things that she loved looking at—loved the notion that it was all here and easily observable, with one’s eyes being in some way the clergy, the connection between God and—
She saw Hand, almost at the estuary, finally end his ride, nimbly stepping off his board and into the water, as if descending from a chariot. He stood for a second, knee-deep, and adjusted his bathing suit. Then he doubled over again and dumped his head. Had his hair had gone dry during his ride? Incredible. He wouldn’t be back for a while.
But a single contained God implied or insisted upon a hierarchy that she didn’t accept. God gave way to a system of extremes, and implied choices, and choices required separations, divisions, subtle condemnations. She was not ready to choose one God, so there would not be this sort of god in Pilar’s world, and thus the transcendental deity—
But then why God at all? The oil-wet water was not God. It was not the least bit spiritual. It was oil-wet water, and it felt perfect when Pilar put her hand into it, and it kissed her palm again and again, would never stop kissing her palm and why wasn’t that enough?
Her board was pointing almost directly toward the now-dimming sun. The dimming sun made the water seem even more like oil, and where the sun did not highlight the water, the water was black. The sun was large and was more three-dimensional than usual. The water was black where the sun wasn’t making it gold. The water was getting warmer and the surfers around her became with each passing minute more abstract, closer to silhouettes, moving in slow motion.
She sat up on the board, straddling it. She didn’t want to surf. She wanted to sit here for a long time, the waves behind her, ridden by the vague black figures. She wanted only to sit and stare ahead and wait for more of the water to go golden.
When the sun fell and the water turned black she would ride the last wave in and sleep. She felt that she knew how her old age would feel. She would be too tired to move. She knew that if she rode in she would not be able to ride out again.
They left the town at dusk. The roped road was potholed completely, full of slow-driving tourists in SUVs, so careful with their rentals, like elephants stepping gingerly around puddles. Pilar and Hand passed and left them and drove away from a dusk gaudy with purple. The road went from dirt to gravel to finally pavement unpotholed, but remained two lanes, winding back and forth over hills and down hills and always under a perfect canopy of trees with long fingers overhead laced.
When the night went black they realized their lights were too bright. Passing cars thought their high beams were on, and flashed them. They flashed them back, showing them their real brights, and then, to retaliate, the cars would flash theirs again. It happened a hundred times. They hated the implication of their thoughtlessness, and the strain on their eyes was terrible, all the flashing, all that quick bright anger.
The night before, it was windy and restless outside, and Pilar and Hand had recently fallen asleep and were still lying front to back, Hand’s knees behind Pilar’s knees. There was a loud thump. Hand sat up and when Pilar moved to investigate, he gestured her to stay in bed. She did because she wanted to see what he would do. Was she scared? She was. Hand had made her convinced—more when she thought about it than when she didn’t—that the man from the bank would come, with his gun, and kill Hand and then rape her.
Hand was at the front door of the room when Pilar looked up and found the origin of the sound. It was a hole in the roof, over the bed, where the skylight once was. The wind had pulled the skylight off, and Pilar could see the clear black night through the square in the ceiling. Hand came back to bed and they were friends in bed together, nude. Hand said he liked going to the door to look for invaders and Pilar said she was glad it was a hole in the roof.
ON WANTING TO HAVE AT LEAST THREE WALLS UP BEFORE SHE GETS HOME
HE IS BUILDING a small house in the backyard for when their baby is old enough to use it as a fort or clubhouse or getaway, and he wants to have three walls up before his wife gets home. She is at her mother’s house because her mother has slipped on the ice—a skating party, Christmas-themed—and needs help with preparations for her holiday party, planned before the accident. It’s snowing lightly and the air is cold enough to see. He is working on the small house with a new drill he’s bought that day. It’s a portable drill and he marvels at its efficiency. He wants to prove something to his wife, because he doesn’t build things like this often, and she has implied that she likes it when he does build things, and when he goes biking or plays rugby in the men’s league. She was impressed when he assembled a telescope, a birthday gift, in two hours, when the manual had said it would take four. So when she’s gone during this day, and the air is gray and dense and the snow falls like ash, he works quickly, trying to get the foundation done. Once he’s finished with the foundation, he decides that to impress her—and he wants to impress her in some way every day and wants always to want to impress her—he will need at least three walls up on the house by the time she gets home.