Via Dolorosa(34)

“It’s cold but it feels good.”

“It looks cold,” he said.

“Why do you hate the water?”

“I don’t hate the water.”

“You should come in.”

“I’d rather watch you.”

“You always say that,” she said.

“It’s the truth.”

Toweling her hair, her arms, her long legs, she said, “You don’t like her very much, do you?”

“Who?” he said. “Your little Spanish photographer?”

“I thought she might be someone you’d like.”

“Why would you think that?”

“I just thought it.”

“You’re trying to fix me up?”

She shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Well,” he said, “I haven’t been in the mood.”

“It’s something you need to be in the mood for?”

Nick said nothing.

Emma spread out the towel on the sand and sat in the center of it, drawing her legs up under each other. She turned to look at him briefly. He could see salt from the ocean crystallizing in her hair, her eyelashes, her eyebrows. Her mouth was very small; her lips still just barely exceeded the width of her nostrils. Tight, compact. When she smiled she hardly ever showed her teeth. There was something so beautifully self-conscious about that, and he found he could not stop thinking about it as he watched her now. Beside her on the sand were her poetry books. She picked them up, shuffled through them as she would a deck of cards before selecting one. Flipping through the pages, she said, “Would you like me to read some to you?”

“That’s all right.”

“You’re sure? It’s Byron.”

“Not right now.”

“You like Byron…”

“I think I’m going to go for a walk,” he said, getting up and dusting the sand from his legs.

“Oh? Should I come?”

“It’s all right. I’m just going to find a bathroom, really.”

“Oh,” she said, dejected, turning back to her poetry book. He couldn’t stop looking at her small, small mouth. “All right.”

He walked by himself down the beach, his shadow stretching further ahead of him as the day grew older. At one point, in the tall reeds, he urinated while staring up at the white dunes. Gray gulls burst from the reeds, taking flight. The whole day had turned old and gray. He watched the date palms sway in the cool summer breeze. Without much commitment, he thought of the white swans he would occasionally see in the fountains and pools in the hotel courtyard. He wondered where they went when they weren’t in the pools. Was there a special place for swans? At night, when the darkness came, was there someplace they all hid? Finishing up, turning around in the reeds, he wondered about the swans. Something solid struck his foot as he turned to head back to the beach. He looked and saw it was one of the whitewashed planks of wood discarded by the hotel, now many days ago—one of the planks he had painted a face on while Emma laughed and joked about it. That had been earlier in their trip, one of the first days, before the storm came. Before things changed. Looking at the whitewashed plank now, seeing it muddied by the storm, the caricature smeared and running and bled away, he imagined himself picking it up and splintering it down the middle over one knee. Closing his eyes, he envisioned it so well that it ignited phantom pain in his right knee. He could almost hear the satisfying crack of the wood…

Lieuten—

With the day growing long, he trekked back by way of the dunes to the beachfront. Many of the couples had returned to the hotel for supper; he saw less sunbathers and swimmers in attendance as he approached. The shadows of the great palms were pulled long and distorted down the length of the sand, too, reaching thirstily for the water. It was growing late. Getting closer, he could still see Emma, though, sprawled out on her towel, one of her poetry books propped in her lap. But she wasn’t reading. She was watching a woman who stood at the cusp of the water, her feet in the tidal foam. Son of a bitch. It was undoubtedly Isabella Rosales. He could tell her shape, and the presence her shape exuded. Stopping, Nick hung back and stood watching. He watched Isabella. He watched Emma watch Isabella. A few times Isabella looked in Emma’s direction, and even motioned at her; in response, though, Emma would quickly bow her head and feign involvement with her poetry. Nick watched Isabella wade further out into the water…out until the upper portion of her slim, muscular, brown thighs became sleek and wet. It was the skin of a seal pup. She stood just far enough in the water to where the waves broke, foaming white and thick and frothy all around her. Yet Isabella did not go in all the way, which, it suddenly dawned on Nick as he surveyed, was what he had been waiting for her to do. He wanted to see her wet. He wanted to see what would happen and how she would look as she found herself slowly overtaken by the sea. But she did not go in past her thighs. He watched. He spied. Still, more frequently, she would turn back to the beach and look at Emma. Once, Isabella motioned to his wife, who responded, rabbit-skittish, with a single wave: he saw the hand come up, the wrist twist, then fall back to her book. Yet at one point, surprising her husband, Emma set the book down and followed Isabella into the ocean. Both stood up to their thighs. Their skin tones completely opposite, they looked like negatives of each other. Would they actually cancel each other out? Would too much exposure to each other be enough to make them both completely disappear?