Pineapple Street(15)

Since Cord’s family paid for the wedding (a breach in tradition), Sasha insisted on paying for the honeymoon. She found a deal online for a resort in Turks and Caicos, a place right on the beach, where every suite had its own hot tub overlooking the ocean. She had briefly fantasized that they might get some kind of royal treatment as honeymooners, upgrades and rose petals on pillows, but when the resort van picked them up at the airport she quickly realized the entire place was full of couples like them. As they planned their wedding Cord had rolled his eyes at the “wedding factories,” complaining about the places that pumped through reception after reception, creating cookie-cutter celebrations that were no more special or individual than a suburban prom. Now she worried he would be turned off by a place that was so clearly a factory extension, but he was happily leafing through the resort booklet, planning tennis matches, bike rides, and dinner reservations.

While they had gone to a zillion friends’ weddings together, they hadn’t actually traveled much, and Sasha quickly realized they had entirely different views of what it meant to be on vacation. For Sasha, vacation meant putting on her swimsuit at dawn, walking to the beach, and moving only to get the occasional cold drink or salty snack. Cord apparently felt that vacation meant moving constantly, like a human Roomba, bouncing from one activity to the next. He chartered a boat to Middle Caicos so they could stomp through dark and gummy caves full of bats. He hired a pilot to take them for a noisy loop above the island in a helicopter. He drove them to the famous conch fritter restaurant and they downed the chewy fried lumps with icy bottles of Turk’s Head beer. On the last full day, Sasha begged Cord for the chance to just lie on the beach, and while he brought a mask and snorkel and explored the tiny reef out beyond the sand, she flopped on a warm towel and did absolutely nothing, letting her mind clear until it felt baked clean by the sun.

They had two bottles of champagne chilling in their suite and meant to drink them before they left. After roasting on the beach until sunset, they made their way back to the room, and on their way they stopped in each of the half dozen hotel pools for a dip. They were taking their final soak in a warm-water pool, an oversize Jacuzzi surrounded by hot pink bougainvillea, when another couple appeared through the flowers. They nodded hello and slipped into the water at the other end. They had just gotten married (of course) and were visiting from Boston. After five days alone, Sasha and Cord were feeling sociable, and soon it was dark and they were having so much fun talking that they invited the other couple back to their suite for drinks. They dripped their way from the giant resort Jacuzzi to the smaller one on the screened-in porch off their bedroom. Cord popped the champagne with a knife, a party trick he’d learned to do with a saber, and they all experienced the rapturous head high that comes from drinking bubbly on an empty stomach with borderline sunstroke. It was somewhere toward the end of the second bottle that the guy from Boston removed his wife’s bikini top and everything got weird. How had Sasha not realized what they had done? They had invited another couple to hang out, drunk and near naked, in their hotel suite and somehow not realized they were initiating a sex party? Cord, who possessed a mastery of handling awkward social situations rivaling that of a foreign diplomat, hastily mentioned dinner reservations, provided the topless wife with a bathrobe, and whisked them out into the warm evening. Alone, Sasha and Cord fell down laughing and swore to tell any friends who asked that they had survived their honeymoon with their marital vows intact, and no one need know more than that.



* * *





Sasha understood that Cord loved her, but he didn’t need her, and that might have been the most attractive thing about him. He was restrained in his expressions of affection—sure, he loved sex and he was unfailingly kind—but he didn’t say “I love you” every time they hung up the phone, he didn’t bring her flowers or presents without occasion, he didn’t tell her that she was the best thing that had ever happened to him. And that was the way Sasha wanted it. After all the heartache of her first love, she was done with grand romantic gestures. She had seen the tumultuous underbelly of such passion.

Sasha had fallen in love in high school. His name was Jake Mullin but everyone just called him Mullin. They had known each other since they were eleven, placed in the same gifted and talented program at their public school, a classroom in a trailer near the parking lot. He made her nervous, and she spent years giving him a wide berth. It seemed like he was barely looked after. He never wore a jacket, and even in the snowy winter she remembered seeing him standing on the edge of the playground wearing a black Metallica T-shirt. His family lived across from the wharf in a peeling green house with iron railings, and while Sasha’s own mother packed her lunches with hearts drawn on napkins and plastic baggies full of popcorn made in the air popper, Mullin never seemed to have anything. He didn’t even carry a backpack. Sasha was older before she realized he ate the free lunch, lining up at the cafeteria turnstile holding the small, laminated card at his side.

Mullin could draw. She’d never noticed, never paid attention, but one day in high school she walked by his desk and saw a bird so realistic she gasped. Though Sasha could draw almost as well, it was because she took art seriously, spent all her free time in the school’s art studio, built all her electives around painting and ceramics classes. Mullin would spend English class carefully shading the detailed veins of a leaf and its stem and then, at the end of the period, crumple the paper in the trash.