Via Dolorosa(49)

“I already ordered you lunch. You need to eat something, Nick. Don’t cancel the room service like you did yesterday. Promise me.”

He promised. She left.

Alone, he tried to watch television but could not get into it. He took a cigarette out on the patio. It was nice out. Down below, he watched the great white swans drift lazily across the surfaces of the three courtyard fountains. Further out, he could see the beach. There were many people on the sand, soaking up the good weather. His eyes fell on all of them, or so it felt that way to him. There were many. He wondered, as he went from person to person, if he would recognize Emma from such a distance. And if not, had he already spotted her and moved on?

When Emma returned around lunchtime, she found him still smoking on the patio. Coming in to change out of her bathing suit and into Capri pants and a fresh halter-top, she did not say anything to him. From the patio he just barely turned his head at the sounds of her dressing in the room. That exact moment happened to signify to the both of them that there was no longer any sickness here, and that there probably hadn’t been for some time now. Yet neither bothered to address it. They ignored it the way people will sometimes think it necessary to ignore a visibly ugly scar. Until she was getting ready to go out again—

“Don’t stay out there too long,” she said coldly. “Breeze might make you sick all over again.”

Fifteen minutes later, showered, groomed, refreshed, he rode the elevator down to the lobby and situated himself at the restaurant bar. Roger was there, quietly going through a checklist of inventory. It took some time before he finally came over.

“Lunch menu?”

“Just a coffee for now.”

“I’ll have to heat some up.”

“I’ll wait.”

Roger went back to his checklist. When Nick looked up again, the bartender had disappeared into the kitchen.

Isabella came through the restaurant wearing very little clothing. Her body was taut and brown. She had her hair pulled back, framing her face. All shoulder and upper chest, red-brown and sleek from the sun, a wraparound pair of red sunglasses covering her eyes, he could not tell if she saw him seated at the bar. Her legs seemed to slide from her abbreviated shorts as she walked and, when she paused in her stride to examine the framed menu on the wall of the bar, her thighs left just the slightest and most perfect wink of space between them.

“Isabella,” he called.

“My Nicholas,” she said, coming over. “You’ve been lost to me.”

“I’ve been sick.”

“Honeymoons will do that to a man.”

“Can I buy you a drink?”

“What are you having?”

“Coffee.”

“I will have the same as you.”

“It’s being brewed now.”

“I will wait with you.” Smiling, she allowed her eyes to drift about the room. “The wife is not here with you?”

“I’m alone.”

“Did she run off with a sailor? That sometimes happens.”

“Not to my knowledge. Anyway, I don’t think she’d tell me if she did.”

“It would be good for you, anyhow,” she said, her tone casual.

“Is that right?”

“Oh, yes.”

“How’s that?”

“Marriage is improbable.”

“Is that what you think?”

“It is what I know.”

“How do you know?”

Tapping a cigarette from a pack she had fished from her purse, not offering him one, she said, quite elementary, “I just know.”

“Have you ever been married?” he asked.

“No,” she said, “but almost.”

“What happened?”

“It was a few years ago, when I was still young and na?ve. Now,” she added with a wry smile, “I am just young.”

“This was back in Spain?”

“Yes, in Madrid,” she said. “But he was an American boy, very light-skinned and handsome. I was enthralled and found him completely unique. Which was unique in itself because very rarely, even during my sadly misguided youth, did I find anything to be unique. People most particularly.”

“What was his name?”

“I won’t tell you his name. He was a writer back then and is, I suppose, somewhat of a writer now, too, although his ideals, unfortunately, have changed.” Lips tugging on her cigarette. “Either way, you would recognize the name, so I won’t tell it.”

“So what happened?” he asked, watching the reflection of his own lips move in the lenses of her dark sunglasses.

“Something was lost,” she said, simple enough. “Something in him, something in me. What usually happens?” She removed the cigarette from her mouth and pouted her lower lip, as if to acknowledge her own question with a deep sense of consideration and concern. There was lipstick on the filter. “Do you know what a civet is, Nicholas?”

“A—civet? No…”

“A civet,” Isabella explained, “is best described as a cat-like monkey or a monkey-like cat. In Indonesia, plantation owners feed coffee beans to civets and the civets ingest them, digest them, then—how do you say?—discard the remains in their waste.”