The Vacationers: A Novel (6 page)

The grocery store in Palma was heavenly. Franny and Charles clutched each other at the head of every aisle. The packaging was sublime, even on canned sardines and tubes of tomato paste. Being in a foreign country made even the smallest differences seem like art. Charles had once painted Franny from a photo in a Tokyo supermarket, her wide face beatific. It was one of their very favorite things to do together.

“Look,” Charles said, holding up a package of flan pudding.

“Look,” Franny said, holding up a bag of
jamón
-flavored potato chips.

The ham aisle was magnificent: chopped ham, bacon, chorizo, mortadella, sobrassada, salami,
ibérico
, hot dogs, ham pizza, sausages, ham jerky. They filled a shopping cart with
jars of peanut butter and jam and toilet paper and juice—
zumo—
and lettuce and oranges and manchego and loaves of sliced bread. “What time is it?” Charles asked, as they stood on line at the cashier. “It feels like three in the morning.”

“Poor little duck,” Franny said, and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. When they’d met, both Franny and Charles had been young and beautiful-ish, with enough style to fudge the rest. Her waist had nipped in with a good strong belt, and his hairline was only just starting to announce itself. They could live to be a hundred years old, and that would still be how Franny saw him—like a shorter James Dean, with curious eyebrows and curvy lips, just as gorgeous as possible. It didn’t matter that Charles was now completely bald, with only a laurel of stubble clinging to his skull—to Franny, he would always be the one she loved the most, the most handsome boy she could never have, except in all the ways she did have him, forever.

“How’s it going? With Jim, I mean.”

“Oh, you know,” Franny started, but didn’t know how to finish the sentence. “Bad. Bad, bad, bad. I can’t look at him without wanting to cut off his penis.”

“Sylvia seems like she’s taking it all well, though,” Charles said, nodding at the cashier. He spoke even less Spanish than Franny did, which wasn’t saying much.

“But you haven’t even seen her yet,” Franny said, confused.

“Facebook.”

“You’re on Facebook?”

Charles rolled his eyes. “
Sí
. And why aren’t you? Oh, lovey, you are really missing out. But yes, Sylvia and I do the Facebook chatting all the time. I think she probably does it at the dining room table, sitting right across from you.” He lowered his voice. “She tells me all her secrets.”

Franny let go of Charles’s shoulder and knocked her body against his, threatening a stack of chocolate bars behind him. “She does not,” Franny said, jealous of both the fact that Charles knew things about her daughter that she didn’t and that Sylvia had found a way to communicate with Charles that she didn’t even know existed. “Sylvia doesn’t have any secrets. That’s what’s so wonderful about her. She’s the first teenager on the planet to just be happy.”

“Of course she is,” Charles said. He bowed his head. So much of being a good friend was knowing when to keep your mouth shut. “And that’s the good part, after all. No matter what happens with Jim, you’ll always have Syl and Bobby. Kids are forever, even if love isn’t, right?”

“I’ll love
you
forever,” Franny said, sliding her credit card out of her wallet. “Kids, too, I suppose.”

Bobby knocked on the front door, though the house was as much his as anyone else’s. When no one answered, he tried the knob and found that it was unlocked. He turned to Carmen and Lawrence behind him, who both nodded. He pushed open
the door. “Hello?” The house was completely silent except for the sounds of the trees swishing in the breeze and the occasional car on the road. “Hello?” Bobby said again, taking a few tentative steps into the foyer.

There was a thump from upstairs, and then the creak of a door slowly opening. Sylvia appeared at the top of the stairs, on her hands and knees.

“I’m jet-lagged,” she said.

“Come and help us with our bags!” Bobby said, his voice booming.

“Yessir, I’ll get right on that,” Sylvia said, before turning around and crawling back into her bedroom. The door closed with a thunk.

Joan wanted to get a sense of where Sylvia stood, and came over brandishing a workbook like one she hadn’t seen since middle school, with pictures of cows and broomsticks and other objects to identify.
How does Mariella tell her friend that she MIGHT come over for dinner? How would she say that she WILL come over for dinner?
Sylvia dutifully filled out a few pages before Joan, reading over her shoulder, stopped her. He was sitting close enough that Sylvia could smell his cologne. When guys at her school wore cologne it was obviously disgusting, but Joan made it seem sophisticated, like a Mallorcan James Bond. Sylvia imagined Joan’s medicine cabinet, each
shelf crowded with male grooming products. His hair alone no doubt required half a dozen potions to move the way it did. Sylvia breathed as shallowly as possible while Joan checked her work. He clicked his pen against the table,
open, closed, open, closed
.

“Sylvia,” he said, “your written Spanish is good.” Joan stretched her name out to four syllables, like it was made of honey.
See-ill-vee-ah.

“It’s okay,” she said. She wanted him to say her name again.

Joan backed his chair a few inches farther away. “We should spend our time just talking, you know, conversational.” He was wearing a polo shirt with the buttons undone at his neck. Outside, someone laughed, and Sylvia turned to look behind her, out the dining room window. Bobby and his girlfriend were in the pool, and she was riding around on his shoulders in a one-team chicken fight. Carmen was old, over forty. Bobby was an entire decade older than Sylvia, so he already seemed ancient, and that Carmen was more than ten years older than
him
made her seem like she was trying to drink his blood. They’d met six or seven years ago at the gym where Carmen was a personal trainer. Bobby’d been working out there, and then he’d brought her home. Sylvia found the entire thing very tacky, about as tacky as she found Carmen herself, who wore eyeliner every day and the kind of sneakers that were supposed to make your butt better, even though she was a personal trainer and had a fine butt and should know better, anyway.

“It’s weird to go on vacation with your whole family,”
Sylvia said, in Spanish.
“Really weird.”

“Tell me about them,”
Joan said. He swiveled in his chair so that he was looking out the window, too.
“That’s your brother?”

“That’s what they say,”
Sylvia said.

There were footsteps in the hall, and both Joan and Sylvia turned to look. Lawrence had changed into his bathing suit and was holding a sweating glass of water. He walked up to the door to the garden and watched as Carmen and Bobby took turns doing handstands in the shallow end.

“Maybe I’ll just take a nap,” Lawrence said, and turned back around.

“And who’s that?”
Joan asked.

“My mother’s best friend’s husband. They’re gay. I don’t think he wanted to come.”
Sylvia paused. She wanted Joan to laugh, but only because of Lawrence’s reluctance. This was important.

“And now he’s stuck with you for how long?”
Joan asked, the right question.

“Two weeks,”
Sylvia said, smiling so hard that she had to lean forward and pretend to take a sip out of her empty water glass. If she didn’t interact with anyone else for the entire two weeks, Sylvia thought, that was okay. Joan looked like an excellent candidate for sex. In fact, if sex had made a poster advertising its virtues, they might have put his face on it. Sylvia let her lips linger around the rim of the glass. Wasn’t that what one
was supposed to do, draw attention to one’s mouth? She gave the glass one little lick, decided that she felt like a camel at a zoo, and put it down, hoping he hadn’t noticed at all.

It was too hot to walk during the middle of the day, and so Jim waited the sun out. He switched into his running clothes (Lycra, windbreaker) and sneakers and headed out with just a quick wave to Sylvia, who was curled into one of the living room sofas with a book three inches from her face. She was on
Villette
, working her way through the Brontës. She’d read all of Jane Austen that year—Austen was good, but when you told people you liked
Pride and Prejudice
, they expected you to be all sunshine and wedding veils, and Sylvia preferred the rainy moors. The Brontës weren’t afraid to let someone die of consumption, which Sylvia respected.

“Be back soon,” he said.

Sylvia grunted a response.

“Tell your mom I went for a walk.”

“Where else would you have gone?” Sylvia asked, still without looking up from her book.

Jim headed up the hill. Mallorca was dustier than he’d anticipated, less rolling and green than Tuscany or Provence, more rocky and sun-bleached, like Greece. There was supposedly a plateau of some kind a few hundred feet up the road, from which one could see the ocean, and Jim liked the idea of a vista.

Weekends were fairly easy—he wouldn’t have been at the office, anyway, and so running his normal errands felt good, natural. He would watch a movie with Sylvia if she’d let him, he would debate about which restaurant to order dinner from, he would run around the park a couple of times. The weekdays were the challenge—Monday mornings, in particular. Being in Mallorca would make that easier. He still woke up at seven a.m., popping out of bed and into the shower. Jim was not a foot-dragger or a layabout, not like all these young people who were living with their parents until they were thirty and spending their time playing video games. Jim liked to work. The weekend hadn’t been bad, but today was worse, though not as bad as when they were at home, when his chest seized just at the moment the alarm was to go off, his body panicked at its lack of forward momentum.

For the past forty years, every day at work had been spent moving ahead, trying to be the smartest he could, trying to be the best he could, trying to open as many doors as possible, and now, just like that, the doors had closed, and he had nothing to do but sit at home and wait for the phone to ring. Which it wouldn’t. The board had made that clear: it wasn’t a threat, it was a promise. Jim was finished, professionally. As long as he wanted them to keep their mouths shut, he would stay home and take up bird-watching. This was presented as a courtesy. The gaping maw on the other side of the silence was that every magazine in New York and every website with a gossip column would be delighted to list the salacious details at length. Jim
would have balked at the threat if he hadn’t recognized it as the truth.
Gallant
’s new editor would be a clear-eyed man of thirty- five—even if no tragedy had taken place, Jim’s tenure had an expiration date. No one wanted advice from their father.

The road was steep, and even though the most intense heat of the day had passed, there was no cover over Jim’s head, and the sun felt strong on the back of his neck. If this house had come along three months later, Franny wouldn’t have taken it. If Sylvia hadn’t graduated, if the whole vacation hadn’t been pitched as a gift to her, Franny would have canceled it. Jim didn’t know if he should feel grateful that the wheels had already been in motion, or stuck, as though he’d been caught in a bear trap. At home, there were always other quiet rooms, places to hide. Their house had been the right size, once, when there were two kids and a babysitter and visiting grandparents, but now it was far too big. The three of them not only had their own rooms, but had multiples: Jim had his office, and a den that Franny avoided, Sylvia had her room and Bobby’s, which she had turned into a holding pen for local disaffected youth, and Franny had everything else: the kitchen, the garden, the bedroom, her office. They never had to see one another if they didn’t want to, could spend days walking in their own loops, like the figurines above the entrance to the Central Park Zoo.