The Vacationers: A Novel (9 page)

“That’s good,” Jim said. “We want that sear.” It was like talking to an invisible camera on the other side of the grill,
someone doing a documentary on father-son small chat. Jim was no good at it, he knew. He wanted to ask Bobby about Carmen, about what the hell he was doing in Florida, that rancid pit of a place. He wanted to tell Bobby what he’d done, how fuzzy the future was, how he was sorry for letting them all down. Instead, Jim found he could talk only about their dinner.

Bobby lined up the other steaks, all in a neat row, and then stood back, beside his father. They were the same height, more or less, though Bobby still couldn’t seem to stand up straight. Bobby had broader shoulders, and larger biceps, but he’d never lost his ragdoll posture.

“Any interesting properties on the market?” Jim asked. He crossed his arms over his chest, keeping his eyes on the steaks.

“Sure, oh, yeah,” Bobby said. He’d been a real estate agent for years along Miami Beach, mostly renting but occasionally selling properties near where he and Carmen lived. They hadn’t always lived together, but it had been a few years now of what seemed like a good domestic situation—the bedroom had blackout shades and a ceiling fan whirred away in the living room, and they were just a few blocks from the ocean. Franny so wanted Bobby to have a child—he was almost thirty, and had spent most of his twenties with a woman who had now aged out of her childbearing years. When they were alone at night, after half a bottle of wine, that was often what Franny wanted to talk about, wondering how Bobby had gone off course, and whether it was her fault. Jim wasn’t sure the boy was ready. He might be, some years down the road, but not yet. Privately, Jim
assumed that the blessed event would occur quite out of the blue, when some girl called him up some time after the fact and produced a very Post-like baby, his or her mounting bills tucked into the back of their adorable onesie. “I’ve got a really sweet two-bedroom on Collins and Forty-fourth, right across from the Fontainebleau. Travertine, glass, everything. Brand-new bathroom—it has one of those crazy Japanese toilets, you know, with the sprays and the heat? It’s a nice one. And then there are a couple of houses over on the other side, in the city. Good stuff.”

“And the prices? Coming back up?” Jim nudged one of the steaks with the end of his tongs.

Bobby shrugged. “Not much. You know, it’s still pretty rough. Not everywhere is like Manhattan. I mean, like, your house is worth, what, six times what you paid for it? Five times what you paid? That’s amazing. It’s not like that in Florida.”

“You could always move back, you know. You want to sell our house?” Jim laughed at the thought of it; he wasn’t serious. Who sold a limestone on the Upper West Side? Even if it was too big? Even if they got a divorce? Jim thought they would ride it all out, he was almost positive, and if they were going to ride it all out, they were going to do it in their house. Feet first, that’s what they liked to say. Every time they repainted a ceiling or fixed the crumbling 1895 wires in the basement—feet first, that was the only way they were leaving the house. Now Jim didn’t know. Franny had mentioned selling the house a dozen times, sometimes at full volume, and he had started to look at
rentals in the neighborhood, but no, they wouldn’t sell the house, they couldn’t. It made Jim feel like his knees might buckle.

“Wow, I mean, that would be an incredible opportunity, Dad.” Bobby looked at him through the fallen curls on his forehead. Jim hated it when Bobby had long hair—it made him look too soft, too young, like a goddamn baby deer. Just like Franny when she was in her twenties, only without the spitfire spirit that had made him fall in love with her.

“Oh, I wasn’t . . . Moving back, yes. That would be lovely. I don’t think we’re quite ready to hand over the keys to the house, though, chum.” Jim hoped his voice sounded light.

“Right, no, of course.” Bobby pushed his hair out of his eyes and reached for the tongs. “Mind if I flip?”

“Of course,” Jim said, taking a step back, and then another, until he felt something prickly on his neck. He turned around and was surprised to find that he’d made it all the way to the trees at the edge of the manicured section of the yard, before the land dropped down steeply and led, eventually, to an ancient-looking town, where Spanish fathers and sons had tended olive trees and raised sheep together for centuries, working in tandem, like two parts of the same organism.

Bobby had retired quickly after dinner, claiming a headache, and Jim, Sylvia, and Charles had settled into the living room
sofa for their umpteenth viewing of
Charade
, which Gemma happened to have on DVD. It was one of Sylvia’s favorites. Cary Grant was sort of like her dad, plus or minus the chin cleft—high-waisted pants and a way of talking that was both flirtatious and belittling at the same time. It was what stupid girls in her grade liked to classify as “like, sexist,” and she would have argued with them, but now she wasn’t sure, maybe they were right. Sylvia sat in the middle, with her head on Charles’s lap and her feet tucked up into her chest so that they didn’t quite hit her father’s thighs. It was a rare moment when Sylvia  thought she might miss living at home, but they did exist, even when she was already so many thousands of miles away. Walter Matthau was chasing Audrey Hepburn, his droopy dog face the saddest thing for miles. Sylvia closed her eyes and listened to the rest of the movie, kept awake by the chuckles and exclamations of her two companions.

Part of the fun of going on vacation with so many people was supposed to be that you didn’t all have to be together all the time—that was what Franny had imagined. She was clearing up the kitchen and the pool area—Carmen seemed to have been raised by actual humans, and put things away and helped wash dishes, but Franny couldn’t say the same for her children. The pool was a mess—discarded plates with nubs of fatty steak left behind, all the better to coerce coyotes or
dingoes or whatever the local wild dogs were out of their hiding places.

“Let me help,” Lawrence said, pulling the door to the kitchen closed behind him. They were in sweaters now. In New York, they would still be shvitzing, the concrete of the sidewalk and the buildings acting as heat conductors, keeping everyone glistening from June through September. It was a lovely night in Pigpen, clear and dark. Once the sun went down, the only lights were the ones in the house across the way and down the mountain’s slopes. It reminded Lawrence of Los Angeles, only with a quarter as many houses and actual oxygen.

“Oh, thanks,” Franny said. “My children are animals.”

“Mine, too,” Lawrence said, projecting into the future, his arms already wrapped around a small body swaddled in cotton. A tiny thrill shot up his spine. “I mean, you should see Charles’s studio.”

“Oh, I know,” Franny said. “All ancient pad thai affixed to paper plates. It’s his response to post-1980s expressionism excess, I think.”

Franny sat down on one of the lounge chairs and picked up a pile of napkins and magazines and orange peels, Sylvia’s detritus. “She’s going to college. Ivy League. You’d think that she could throw something away.”

Lawrence reached out for the garbage, and then held it against his chest. He stood between Franny and the house. If Sylvia and the boys were to get up, in search of more to eat, they would see only his silhouette against the rest of the dark.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m really sorry about earlier. About saying something about the magazine, to Jim. I honestly don’t know what happened, but I do know that I put my foot in my mouth.”

Franny leaned back, drawing her legs up beneath her. She stretched her arms over her head, and then lowered them until they were blocking her eyes. She groaned. Franny had never felt older than she had in the last six months. It was true, of course, that was always true, that you’d never been older than you were at precisely this moment, but Franny had gone from feeling youngish to wizened and crumpled in record time. She could feel the knots in her back tighten, and her sciatic nerve begin to send out little waves of distress to the sides of her hips.

“I’m sorry,” Lawrence said, not sure if he was apologizing for worsening Franny’s mood or for whatever had happened with Jim at the magazine, or both.

“It’s okay,” Franny said, her eyes still hidden behind her arms. “I’m surprised Charles didn’t tell you.”

Lawrence sat down on the lounge chair next to Franny’s and waited.

“He fucked an intern.” She moved her hands and waved them around, as if to say “Abracadabra!” “I know, that’s it. Jim fucked an intern. A girl at the magazine, barely older than Sylvia. Twenty-three years old. Her father is on the board, and I guess she told him, and so here we are.”

“Oh, Franny,” Lawrence said, but she was already sitting up and shaking her head. He had imagined many scenarios for
Jim’s sudden leave from
Gallant
, and for the tension in the Post family—prostate cancer, early-onset dementia, an ill-timed conversion to the Jehovah’s Witnesses—but not this one. Jim and Franny had always seemed happily solid, still capable of goosing each other in the kitchen, as off-putting as it sometimes was.

“No, it’s fine. I mean, it’s not fine, we’ve been married for thirty-five years, it is not fine for him to have sex with a twenty-year-old. A twenty-three-year-old. As if there’s a difference. I don’t know. Thank you. Sylvia knows some, but Bobby doesn’t know anything about it, I’m pretty sure, and I’m trying to keep it that way for as long as possible. Maybe forever.”

It was strange that Charles hadn’t told him. Lawrence felt his cheeks flush with embarrassment, his own, not on Franny’s behalf. How could Charles not have told him? Lawrence quickly imagined all the ways he could have mortified Jim and Franny over the next two weeks, without ever knowing what he was doing, all the ways he could have said the wrong thing.

Lawrence reached out and put his hand on Franny’s shoulder. “I’m really sorry, Fran. I won’t say a word to the kids, of course. And I’m sure Charles would be delighted to murder him for you, if you just say the word.”

That made her smile. “Yes, I think so.” She stood up. “At least one of us has a good husband. Come on, let’s finish cleaning up before it’s morning and the cretins destroy everything all over again. It’s not the worst thing in the world not to have children, you know. Makes your life a terrible mess.” And with
that, Franny kissed Lawrence on the cheek, almost tenderly, and walked back inside. Lawrence turned and watched her through the window as she turned on the faucet and squirted soap onto the offending pile of dishes. Lawrence was still holding a stack of garbage on his lap, including a magazine left over from the airplane full of “Sex Tips He Won’t Believe”
and “What You REALLY Need to Know About Going Downtown.” He couldn’t believe Jim and Franny let Sylvia buy trash like that—it seemed as bad as openly reading an issue of
Hustler
. He thumbed through to the article about oral sex, which was really more like a list, complete with reader suggestions. Straight girls really just needed to watch one or two gay porn movies in order to learn everything they needed to know, Lawrence thought. Maybe he’d tell Sylvia that one of these days. Something moved in the corner of his eye, and Lawrence looked upstairs. Carmen was staring back at him from her open bedroom window. They made eye contact, and Carmen put a finger to her ear, as if to say,
I didn’t hear anything,
and then the light was out and the curtain was drawn and she was gone.

FRANNY AND SYLVIA DROVE WITH JOAN, AND CHARLES,
Jim, and Lawrence followed behind them. It was Franny’s idea to make a pilgrimage to the Robert Graves House in Deià, even though Franny claimed not to know anything about Robert Graves aside from the 1976 TV movie version of
I, Claudius
, which Jim said made her a heathen. That was right before they got into their separate cars and drove the forty minutes north. Sylvia was excited to get out of the house, but would have preferred a trip to the beach, despite the obvious drawback of having to deal with sand. This was like going on a school field trip with her mother, a pleasure she hadn’t had since elementary school, when Franny routinely volunteered to accompany the class to the zoo or the Museum of Natural History, when she would then shirk her duties and run amok, waddling in front of the penguins like the rest of the children. At least Joan was
along for the ride. Franny made him drive, of course, because he knew where he was going and wouldn’t destroy the stick shift of the tiny tin box of a rental car, and also because she liked to sit in the front seat and be driven around islands by handsome twenty-year-olds. If Jim could objectify someone barely out of the teens, so could she.

“Sorry that we’re all crashing your date with Joan today, Syl,” Franny said, winking at her in the backseat. Joan checked her reaction briefly in the rearview mirror, his eyes faster than a snake.

“Let’s try to stay adult here, shall we?” Sylvia said. “I’m sorry that my mother is sexually harassing you, Joan.
No le prestes atención.
” She crossed her arms over her chest, secure in the fact that her mother would be adequately annoyed and therefore stay quiet for the rest of the ride. Franny turned to look out the window and hummed something to herself, a song that had nothing whatsoever in common with the song playing on the car’s cheap radio, a Céline Dion song that came and went as the mountain roads unfurled ahead of them. She rolled the window down halfway, enough for the air to send her short dark hair across her face.

Sylvia leaned back, curling her body into the corner of the seat. The car was the size of a pedicab, and about as secure. The chassis rocked side to side as they climbed a hill, and Sylvia closed her eyes, happy that if she was going to die on the mountainous roads of Mallorca, she at least would have had the last word with her mother. It wasn’t fair to be annoyed with her,
but Sylvia was anyway. Obviously her father was worse, and the one to blame, but Sylvia had been inside their marriage for long enough to know that it wasn’t that simple, nothing was, certainly not a relationship twice as old as her. In the back of the car, with her eyes shut tight, New York felt farther away than an ocean, not that she missed it. Surely there were parties going on,
woo-hoo
, at someone’s empty house, with bottles of booze and lemonade all poured into some giant vat of vaguely citrus-tasting awfulness, but she would never go to a party like that again. One would think that a lifetime of being a good girl followed by one stupid mistake would pretty much even out, but one would be wrong.

There were four people from her class also going to Brown, but two of them she would immediately never speak to again, an obvious and unspoken agreement based on the fact that they hadn’t exchanged more than three words in all of high school. The other two were the problem: Katie Saperstein and Gabe Thrush. If Sylvia could have chosen two people to excommunicate for the rest of her life, to actually push a button and have them vanish off the planet, it would be Katie Saperstein and Gabe Thrush. Both together and separately.

Sylvia and Katie had been good friends—mud masks, sleepovers, shared Googling of half-naked movie stars. Katie was plainer than Sylvia; it wasn’t cruel to say so—she had brackish-colored hair and a nose that always looked like she’d just walked into a plate-glass door. Once, when Katie was frustrated by how long it was taking to grow out her bangs, she cut
them off at her forehead, creating, in essence, a small, growing horn. They both wore terrible clothes (that was the point) from the Salvation Army, ill-fitting jeans and ironic T-shirts advertising places they’d never been. Since tenth grade, they’d been close, eating lunch together most days on one of the stoops around the corner from school, with Sylvia ignoring Katie’s blatant overuse of mayonnaise and Katie teasing Sylvia about her resistance to bacon. It was a good friendship, one that might have survived the leap across the chasm into college life. They’d talked about rooming together, even, but that was before Gabe ruined everything.

That was how it went, Sylvia had to remind herself. Even though she vastly preferred blaming Katie, the pug-faced slut, it was really Gabe who had done her wrong. They hadn’t been exclusive, of course. No one was, except for the idiots who pretended that they were engaged and went home and had sex during their free periods because their parents weren’t home and the maid wouldn’t tell. Most people just floated around, too afraid to say what they wanted and too afraid to get it. Gabe had made a habit of coming to the Post house on a weekly basis. He and a few friends would ring the bell sometime in the afternoon, that magical zone during which Franny was bound to be working in her office and Jim was still at the magazine and no one would ask many questions. Sylvia thought it was hysterical how little her mother knew about her life, when her job was supposed to be about paying attention to details. Franny knew everything about how to make mole according to
some Mexican grandmother’s recipe that she learned in Oaxaca in 1987, but she had no idea that Gabe Thrush was coming over to lick her daughter’s rib cage on a regular basis.

They hadn’t had sex, obviously. Sylvia could scarcely imagine Gabe paying
less
attention to her, but having sex seemed like it was probably the one way to make that happen. He had tried once, she thought, but didn’t know for sure. Mostly it was just rolling around in her bed with her shirt open or off, praying that no one walked in. Sylvia considered the romance the greatest achievement of her life to date, in that Gabe was good-looking (unlike some of the mutants she’d kissed out of boredom at summer camp) and popular, and when he called her on the telephone, they actually had amusing conversations. The problem was that Gabe Thrush was having similar relationships with half their class, including, it turned out, Katie Saperstein.

Unlike Sylvia, Katie had no mixed feelings about putting out. She walked into school on a Monday with a giant hickey on her neck and Gabe Thrush on her arm. Sylvia watched the two of them walk through the double doors, practically oozing postcoital smugness, and felt as snubbed as Katie’s nose. That was in April, just before they all found out about who got in where. Since Sylvia was no longer speaking to Katie or Gabe, she had to hear the good news from Mrs. Rosenblum-Higgins, their largely ineffectual college counselor—wasn’t it just
great
, going to Brown with her friends? They were friends, weren’t they? It was that weekend that Sylvia went to the party
and got too drunk, that weekend when all the photos were taken, that weekend when Facebook exploded and she considered ratting out someone in the Mafia just to be put into witness protection.

The car did another shimmy, as if threatening to go on strike, and Joan turned abruptly up another steep hill—the road had no guardrails, no fences, nothing separating them from plunging to their depths if Joan had to suddenly veer.

“How far are we, Joan?” Sylvia asked. The scenery outside the car’s windows looked much the same—sunny and bright, with houses the color of rustic pottery. They passed a field of gnarled and twisted trees, their branches heavy with enormous lemons.

“Deià is a few kilometers more. We are nearly there.” Joan was dressed down, in a simple cotton T-shirt, but he was still wearing his cologne. Sylvia could smell it from the backseat. She thought about Gabe Thrush trying to wear cologne, standing in the middle of a crowded floor at Macy’s, getting spritzed by hundreds of overeager young saleswomen, and laughed. If either of them tried to get anywhere near her in those lonely first days of college, she would set them on fire in their sleep. They didn’t deserve her. No high school boy did. She was better than that, Sylvia knew, bigger and better and ready to shed her skin like a snake.

“Good,” she said, arranging herself as sexily as possible in the backseat. “I’m sure my mom has to pee.”

The house was just past Deià proper, on the road that led out of town. It had been a museum for just half a dozen years, but like many writers’ homes that are open to the public, great pains had been taken to make the house look little changed since Graves’s prime. If anything, newfangled items had been removed and replaced by their earlier counterparts, so that the house felt like something of a time warp, still punctuated by the clacking of typewriter keys instead of laptop computers. Jim admired the simplicity of the house, which was like most others in the area, a pale stone building with curved brick doorways and cool floors. They’d somehow beaten the native Mallorcan and the girls, and were already wandering around the small museum’s grounds. A friendly woman led them around the two halves of the wide plot, pointing out the highlights of Graves’s impressive garden. The heavy floral smell of jasmine floated over the bright faces of the zinnias and the massive tangles of bougainvillea. Charles fancied himself a naturalist and bent over to fondle the colorful leaves of the violets and the cosmos.

“I would kill to have a garden like this.” Even at their summer house in Provincetown, they had only window boxes. In the city, their apartment overlooked the Hudson River, but the patio was dark most hours of the day, pointing as it did into the cold backs of several taller buildings.

Lawrence laid a hand on his shoulder. “We could always move out of the city for real. Buy a bigger place on the Cape. Less dunes, more dirt.” He could so easily picture Alphonse staggering among the planters, picking a tomato with his chubby baby hands. That was the kind of parent Lawrence wanted to be: encouraging and adventurous. Let the baby play in the dirt, let the baby explore.

“Please,” Jim said. “Good luck getting him out of there.” For a moment, Lawrence thought he meant the baby, but no, of course not. He looked toward Charles, relieved that their limbo status was still a secret. It was probably the way straight couples felt in those first tender weeks of pregnancy, when the egg and sperm had mingled but were so vulnerable that they might not take.

There was a hooting noise at the front entrance, and then a loud laugh as Franny scrambled up the shallow incline toward them. “Are we all moving here?” she asked. “Because I don’t think I can do that drive again.” She kissed Charles on the cheek, as if it had been weeks since she’d seen him last. “Poor Joan had to deal with us screeching and praying the entire time.” She turned around and winked at Joan and Sylvia, now a few feet behind her.

“Would you like the tour of the house?” the docent said kindly, perhaps wanting to hurry them out of the way. Franny puffed out her lip and nodded enthusiastically, as if Robert Graves had been her favorite writer for her entire life and she could hardly believe her luck, being on this sacred ground. It
was one of the things that drove Sylvia the craziest about her mother, the mad look on her face when she wanted someone to think she was paying special attention. The woman led the adults through to the house, and Joan and Sylvia followed behind.

When they were enough feet away from her parents that they wouldn’t be able to hear her, Sylvia said, “I’m sorry about my mother.”

“She’s not bad,” Joan said. “My mother is a little, eh, too.” He wiggled a hand by his ear, the universal sign for crazy.

Sylvia couldn’t imagine Joan having a crazy mother, let alone a mother at all. Or a father. Or ever needing to use the bathroom. Or blowing his nose. He stepped aside to let her follow the group into the house, and she got a mouthful of his cologne, which, mixed with the garden jasmine, made her breath catch in her throat. Joan was too much, a water fountain in the middle of the Sahara, a long-shot horse winning the Triple Crown. She couldn’t take it. Sylvia hurried toward Charles and took his hand, elbowing Lawrence slightly out of the way.

They looked at the sparse living room, the kitchen with its gorgeous AGA stove, the pantry full of British cookie tins, their bodies crowding together in the roped-off sections of the floor. They trooped upstairs and looked at offices that could have been abandoned long enough to fetch a cup of tea. They marveled over the tiny bed, where Graves had successively slept with two wives and a mistress.

“Can’t be the same bed,” Charles said. “No woman would accept that.”

“This is not Manhattan, dear,” Franny said. “I don’t think there’s a mattress store on the corner.” She swiveled around, looking for the docent, but the woman had left them to their own devices. “I guess we’ll never know.”

“What do you think, Joan?” Franny said, making eye contact with the tutor. “Have you been here before?”

“On a school trip, yes,” he said, nodding. “We learned one of his poems, ‘Dew-drop and Diamond.’”