The Forgetting Time(4)

He faux-pouted. “Lonely wolf.”

They laughed together. Complicit laughter. She felt something between her shoulders loosening, a muscle she’d mistaken for bone, and a lightness came over her. Her scone crumbled to pieces in her hands and she licked the stray bits on her fingertips.

“You are just too fucking cute,” he said.

“Cute.” She made a face.

He recalibrated quickly. “Beautiful.”

“Right.”

“No, really.”

She shrugged.

“You don’t know, do you?” He shook his head. “You know a lot of things, but you don’t know that.”

She cast about for something sardonic to say and decided instead on the truth.

“No,” she admitted, sighing, “I don’t. Sadly. ’Cause now—” She was going to say that she was almost forty and fast on the road to losing whatever it was she’d had, she was all but ready to point out the three gray hairs and the deepening wrinkle between her eyebrows, but he waved all that away with a hand.

“You could be a hundred years old and still be beautiful,” he said, as if he meant it, and she couldn’t help it, it was such a good line—she smiled at him, soaking it all up with a queasy feeling that she was being swept along toward a shore she hadn’t envisioned and needed to do some serious paddling in the other direction if she wanted to get home safe.

She held tightly to his waist again on the way back. It was too loud for either of them to say anything, for which she was grateful, no decisions to be made, nothing to worry over, only the palm trees and tin roofs spinning out behind her, the wind whipping her hair across her face and the warm body close to hers; this moment, then the next. Happiness began to burble in the base of her spine and rise, giddily, up her body. So this was what it was like: the present moment. She felt it like a revelation.

And wasn’t this what she’d been after—this lightness that came galloping through, grabbing you by the waist and hauling you along with it? How could you not surrender yourself to it, even if you knew you’d end up sitting bruised in the dirt? She supposed there must be another way to experience that breathless rush of being alive—something inward, perhaps?—but she didn’t know what it was or how to get there on her own.

Then the ride was over, and they were standing there awkwardly, outside the hotel. It was late; they were tired. Her hair was coated with grime from the wind. A bumpy moment, and nothing to speed them over it. I should go inside and pack, she thought, but the wedding reception was going on in the banquet hall, and now they could hear the steel pan drums starting up, the sound rippling out across the night, carrying its own distinct, watery beat—drums invented years ago from the discarded cans of the oil companies, music from garbage. Who was she to resist? The humid air cradled her body like a large damp hand. “Want to go for a walk?” They said it both at the same time, as if it was meant to be.

*

Trouble, trouble, trouble, she said to herself as they walked, but his hand was warm in hers and she thought maybe she’d give herself this. Maybe it was all right. The wife was probably one of those women with hard, perfect faces, blond hair that gleamed around huge diamond studs. She wore short white skirts and flirted with the tennis instructor. So why should Janie care? But, no, that wasn’t right, was it? This man’s eyes were warm, genuine, even, if you can be calculating and genuine at the same time, which maybe you couldn’t be. And he liked her, Janie, with her imperfect face, her pretty blue eyes and slightly hooked nose and curly hair. So probably—probably the wife was lovely. She had long, swinging brown hair and kind eyes. She used to be a teacher but stayed home now, caring for the little ones, patient and gentle and too smart for the brutality of that life, it was sucking the lifeblood out of her and yet feeding her at the same time—she was loving, that’s what it was, this man was well loved (something in the relaxed way he moved, the shine on his face) and right now the wife was sleeping with all of their little ones in their big bed because it was easier that way, and she liked the warmth of their small bodies nestled against her, and she missed him so very much, and maybe she thought that sometimes on those long, long trips he was up to something but she trusted him because she wanted to because he had that boldness in his eyes, that life—

Why do this to herself? Can’t she let herself have anything?

He was pointing out the shells scattered across the beach while she was stuck there in her thoughts.

She nodded absently.

“No, look,” he said, taking her head in his big warm hands and pointing it toward the shore. “You need to look.”

The shells were scuttling across the beach to the water, as if the sea was drawing them in with the power of its charm.

“But—how?”

“Sand crabs,” he said. His hands were still on her face, so it wasn’t hard for him to turn it toward him and kiss her once, twice, only twice, she was thinking, just a little taste and then they’d turn right back, but then he kissed her a third time and this time she felt all of her hunger rise up like a perfumed plume of smoke from a genie that had been locked in a bottle for a hundred years, encircling this man she barely knew—though her body knew him, it wrapped itself around him fiercely and kissed him as if he was the dearest of the dear. Their defenses fell away, like their clothes. And maybe it was some uncanny combination of chemicals triggering pheromones, and maybe they’d been lovers back among the pharaohs and had just now found each other, and who knew why, really? Who fucking knew?