The Vacationers: A Novel (8 page)

Sylvia woke up with a dry, open mouth. She’d had four glasses of wine at dinner, and the jet lag made her feel like she had cinder blocks tied to her ankles. She rolled onto her stomach and reached for the clock—her own clock, also known as her watch, also known as her iPhone, was on permanent airplane mode, lacking all of its usual distractions and conveniences, and she found the separation from the object jarring, as if she’d woken up and found that she was missing a finger. A good finger. It was something she hadn’t considered when her parents presented her with the notion of a trip to Spain. Of course the Internet was still there, whoring away at all hours, and she could get access to everything on her laptop. If the sensation of loss hadn’t been so great, Sylvia might have liked having a little distance from the rest of the world. The problem was you never knew what people were saying about you when you were gone. It was an even bigger problem than knowing what people were saying about you when you were within earshot.

The photos were taken at a party, one of the first “last parties” of the year. There was the last party at the park the cops never checked, there was the last party at someone’s free house, then the last party at someone
else’s
free house. The party in question had taken place at an apartment on the sixth floor of the Apthorp, a giant building on 79th Street, only five blocks from the Post family manse. Sylvia hadn’t wanted to go, but she
had, because she did like
some
of the people she was graduating with, if not very many of them. When the photos surfaced on Facebook the next day, her skin slick with sweat, her eyes blurry from too many plastic cups full of cheap beer, her tongue in one boy’s mouth and then another and another, boys she didn’t even remember speaking to, she vowed to herself that she would never go to a party ever again. Or on the Internet. Moving to Spain was sounding better and better.

“Shit!” she said, looking at the time. She had three minutes to get dressed and downstairs before Joan would arrive. Sylvia pulled on her jeans and a black T-shirt from the pile on the floor. She leaned against the mirror and looked at her pores. There were girls at school who spent hours in the ladies’ room putting on makeup expertly, as though they were each teaching their own YouTube tutorial, but Sylvia didn’t know how, nor did she want to learn. It was almost impossible to change anything about yourself at a school you’d been attending since you were five—with every tiny step away from your former shell, someone was bound to say, “Hey! That’s not you! You’re faking!” Sylvia lived in fear of such fakery. Going to college was going to be amazing for many reasons, the first of which being the simple fact that Sylvia planned to be a completely different person the moment she arrived, even before she made her bed and pushpinned stupid posters on the walls. This new person was going to know how to put on makeup, even eyeliner. She stretched her mouth open and peered into her throat, thinking, not for the first time, that it was all completely and utterly
hopeless and that she was almost certainly going to die a sad, lonely virgin who had accidentally gotten drunk and made out with every single boy at a party her senior year of high school, a slattern without the added benefit of actual sex. She dug through the plastic baggie she used for makeup until she found a tube of strawberry ChapStick and slathered it across her lips. She’d try harder tomorrow.

Lawrence pulled Charles into their bedroom as quickly as he could.

“What are you doing, my strange little munchkin?” Charles was amused, despite having just left Franny’s soggy embrace.

In lieu of an answer, Lawrence opened his laptop and spun it in Charles’s direction.

“Give me the phone,” Charles said. “What time is it in New York?”

It was just before five p.m. in New York, and they managed to catch the social worker before she was out the door. Deborah read them the details off a form: the baby weighed five pounds, ten ounces and was seventeen inches long, born to a twenty-year-old African-American mother. The father was Puerto Rican, but he was out of the picture. The birth mother had chosen their letter out of the book at the agency. The baby’s name, which they would of course be welcome to change, was Alphonse.

“Are you interested in proceeding?” Deborah waited.

Charles and Lawrence held the phone between their faces, both leaning forward, so that together their bodies formed a steeple. They looked at each other, eyes wide. Lawrence spoke first.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, we are.”

Deborah explained what would happen next—they’d heard it before, but like everything important, the minute that it became a reality, they’d forgotten all the details. The birth mother could choose any number of families, and the agency would approach them all on her behalf. Once those families had said yes, the agency would go back to her with the list. The birth mother would then pick the winners, as it were. The choice was out of their hands.

“We’re in Spain,” Lawrence said. “Should we come home? Should we come home right now?” He glanced around their bedroom, calculating how long it would take them to pack and drive to the airport.

“Stay on vacation,” Deborah said. “Even if the birth mother does choose you, we’re looking at a couple of weeks before you’d be able to bring Alphonse home. If you can stay, stay. I’ll be in touch whenever I hear something, probably next week.” She hung up the phone, leaving Charles and Lawrence standing there, the precious object now silent between them.

“Do you want to go home?” Charles asked.

Flying back to New York and furiously buying cribs and bouncy seats and high chairs and then not being chosen would
be even worse than staying where they were, Lawrence knew. Let Mallorca be a distraction. Let the Posts try to get him to think about anything else, when there was Alphonse, sweet Alphonse, a baby in a hospital somewhere in New York City, a boy who needed his fathers. Staying was better than rushing back and not being picked. Lawrence didn’t want to let himself get too excited or take anything for granted. He wished he knew if the birth mother had picked all gay couples, who else they were up against. He wanted to see photographs of smiling families, and then to strangle the competition.

“We can stay,” Lawrence said. “Let’s stay.”

Joan was waiting at the door. It took such self-confidence to just stand there, knowing that someone would let him in. Sylvia was sure that Joan had never worried about anything in his entire life. He probably wouldn’t have rung the bell for another ten minutes, content to breathe in the clear air, to watch packs of bicyclists zoom by, their spandex clothes blurring together. He probably would have written a poem about it in his head, just because, not even minding when it all vanished a moment later. Joan smiled when she opened the door, and kept smiling as he walked through the dark foyer. Sylvia looked at their reflection in the giant mirror hanging behind his head, and then followed him into the bright dining room. If Joan had a girlfriend, which he obviously did, she would know how to put
on eyeliner. She would know how to give a perfect blowjob. She would know how to do everything.

“Tienes novia?”
Sylvia asked, only half meaning to voice the question. “I mean, my mom was asking me. I told her I would ask you. She’s really nosy. What’s the word for nosy? You know, always in everyone else’s business?”

Joan sat down and crossed his legs. In New York, only the gay boys crossed their legs. The straight ones made a point (especially on the subway) to sit with their knees as far apart as possible, as if whatever was between their legs was so enormous that they couldn’t help it. Sylvia respected how little Joan seemed to care about seeming heterosexual. “Not really. When I’m in Barcelona.” Joan shrugged. It was easy for him to find girls, of course.
Claro.

There was a shuffling sound, and laughter, and then Charles and Lawrence stumbled into the kitchen, one of them clearly chasing the other. Charles reached the kitchen first and stopped short when he saw Joan.

“Hola,”
he said.

“Hola,”
Joan said back.

“
Hola
, Sylvia,” Charles said again, his entire face a wink. He smoothed his forehead as if he were brushing bangs out of his eyes.

“Oh, Jesus, just leave us alone,” Sylvia said, which set them off again, giggling like prom dates. Charles and Lawrence zipped through the kitchen and out the back door, setting themselves up nicely in the sun. Charles held their books, and
Lawrence held the towels. Somewhere in the pile there was some sunscreen, and a hat to protect Charles’s scalp from burning. Sylvia watched them settle in, feeling simultaneously envious and like love, in its best form, was something for comfortable adults, and something she might expect to find only decades down the road.
“Let’s talk
about the future,”
she said to Joan, who was staring off into space, perhaps contemplating his own beautiful existence.

Even though Franny was the cook in the family, Bobby and Jim both had very particular feelings about grilling meat. If Franny had minded surrendering the tongs, or found it at all sexist that the men in her family enjoyed sticking things into the fire, as all men had since the cave, she would not have relinquished her position. As it was, she had never much liked getting a face full of smoke, and was quite happy to let someone else do the lion’s share for a change. Jim liked to make sure the grill was hot enough, to add newspaper or coals and occasionally douse the whole lot with a good squirt of lighter fluid. Bobby liked the cooking of the meat itself—the smell of the initial sear, the way the meat firmed up around his poking finger as it neared ready. Charles and Lawrence had no interest whatsoever and sat with the girls on the opposite end of the pool, Sylvia in the water doing somersaults.

They’d bought thin steaks (Franny had put a hand on her
rib cage, along the diaphragm, at the butcher counter, a pantomime that seemed to have worked), and Jim had marinated them in some oily concoction all afternoon. The grill was fairly new, which made Jim grumble. It was the years of use that lent great flavor, like a cast-iron pan. He scraped the grill with a stiff metal brush he’d found, trying to generate some kind of friction that would elevate the meal. The day had started to cool—like clockwork, a western wind worked its way through the mountains every evening, forcing all but the most stubborn children out of their swimming pools and into their clothes.

The house was exactly what Franny liked: beautiful and in the middle of nowhere. It was the sort of quirk that used to be charming—they’d go to some exotic foreign land, or to a boundless state like Wyoming, but without fail, the rental Franny had chosen would always be just far enough away from everything else that it was exactly like being at home, only with a different backdrop strung behind them. Jim gave the grill another good scrape. It was nearly hot enough—the heat made the air above the slats go wavy.

“It’s ready,” Jim said. “Should be three or four minutes on each side. We don’t want to overcook them.”

Bobby appeared at Jim’s side. He peeled the first steak off the plate and lowered it onto the grill, where it let out a great hiss.