Families and couples and people lounging alone watched the waves roll. Gaggles of teenage girls bronzed from the sun eyed shirtless boys running and shouting to get a kite airborne, the bright tail swooping along the shore. Julia didn’t know what she wanted to do first—walk or swim or head downtown or stand and watch the life unfold around her.
But Blake seemed to know where to go. He walked purposefully down the sidewalk so strewn with sand it was more like an extension of the beach.
“Coconuts,” he said as they stepped aside to let a throng of women in practically nonexistent bikinis pass by, chattering loudly in Portuguese as their laughter carried down the beach.
“What?”
“I want a coconut.”
“Okay.” Julia had never had a fresh coconut before, but she’d also never had guava juice on a hotel balcony or lain on her back to open her mouth to a beautiful man. And both of those things had been pretty darn enjoyable, so she figured a coconut probably was, too.
She wasn’t disappointed. They approached a vendor camped out along the sidewalk, and Blake held up two fingers and rooted in his pockets for change. The vendor had a giant cart filled with enormous green globes, fibrous outsides streaked with brown from where they’d been torn from the trees. The man took a machete the size of his forearm and lopped a flap off the top of each coconut with one easy stroke, making an opening to slide in a bright plastic straw.
Julia hadn’t realized how heavy they were, laden with cool water. It was sweet and slightly fruity and like nothing she’d tasted before.
They sat in the sand, watching the waves and the kids with the kite, and talked about the places Blake had traveled and Julia’s other trips, up to the Wisconsin woods, east to New York City, long drives with Liz to Toronto and Omaha. She hadn’t thought about them as really traveling—not like what Blake was doing—but he hung onto her every word, interested in how vast and varied North America was.
“Did you ever think you’d be sitting on a beach in Rio, sipping from a coconut, talking with an Aussie?” he asked, tipping the coconut to get the last drops of liquid inside.
Julia shook her head. “To be honest, as soon as I arrived in Brazil I thought I’d made a terrible mistake. Walking around São Paulo by myself wasn’t exactly what I’d been hoping for.”
“What were you hoping for?”
She thought for a minute, knowing she could brush him off but wanting to give a real answer. Wanting to remember what it was she’d dreamed of when she clicked to buy her tickets. She’d never thought about traveling to Brazil before she saw the sale on an advertisement in her inbox and decided that a trip was exactly what she needed for her Christmas, her birthday, and her life.
“I don’t totally know. An adventure, maybe. Something different. Something I could do for myself, where I didn’t have to take care of anyone or look after anyone or answer to anyone at all.” She paused and winced. “I guess that sounds sort of selfish.”
“No,” Blake said slowly, mulling over her words. “That sounds like a very good idea.”
“I guess sometimes you have to step back and think about yourself before you completely burn out—or explode.”
She knew, though, that she’d never really explode in front of her friends or colleagues. She’d just keep plugging away like she always did, trying not to rock the boat, until she made herself so small she disappeared.
“You should be thinking about yourself. What you want, what you need. It seems strange that getting away helps bring us back to what we’re really looking for. I guess it’s like having a giant time-out from life.”
“Where you can sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done?”
“Something like that.”
“And what is it you’d done that you needed to think about?” she asked, glancing at him out of the corner of her eye, keeping her voice light and playful but aware that she’d slid from joking around into more serious territory.
The waves surged in and out, the ocean a living, breathing thing. Julia wasn’t surprised when Blake shrugged.
“Work, mostly,” he said. “Things got really crazy on set, and I felt like the screenplay and production were completely taking over my life. Which is what I wanted, obviously—I’m definitely not complaining about creating a popular show.”
Julia nodded. She suspected there was more he wasn’t telling her, but she realized this was the first time he’d really mentioned anything about his job. Or the fact that, from what it had sounded like from Chris and Jamie, he was a pretty big deal. “Just because you’re fulfilling your dreams doesn’t mean you don’t need to take care of the rest of your life,” she said, waving her straw at him as she lifted the coconut and tilted it back to drink up the last bit inside.
A thin stream trickled down her chin and Blake brushed it up with his thumb, cupping her jaw for a moment in his hand. “Insightful.”
“Normal,” she corrected him.
“No, some people seem to think that when you’re ‘famous’ or ‘successful,’” he punctuated the words in air quotes like he didn’t really mean them at all, “you have everything you could possibly want. Except for more fame and success, since, like money, one can never have enough.”
Julia had a definite feeling that “some people” meant his ex-girlfriend, whoever she was. She must have liked Blake’s popularity—maybe a little too much.
“And what is it that you still want?” Julia asked.
He looked over at her. Looked at her, looked past her, looked through her. Maybe even looked into himself. Finally he answered. “To be happy. Is that too simple? Or too hard? Too impossible to even think about? I want to write—I’ve always wanted to write. So I just want to do it. I want to write and create and make things happen on screen. Make sure my mom is taken care of—don’t laugh.”
Julia didn’t.
“And—” he looked away, gazing down the beach at the humpbacked dome of Sugar Loaf Mountain rising like a crooked finger where the line of sand curved away in the distance. “It’d be nice if there was someone else who shared that desire, who wanted something simple. Meaningful work, a close family, good friends you can count on, who like you when you’re down as well as up.”
“That doesn’t seem like too much to ask for,” Julia said, following his gaze down the beach.
He turned and looked back at her, squinting into the sun. “Doesn’t seem like it, but I haven’t had it so far. Maybe it’s time to revise my expectations.”
Julia shook her head. “Don’t settle for anything less.”
“See?” He smiled. “Insightful.”
“No. Just trying like everyone else not to fuck up.”
“Well, not everyone seems to be trying for that. So I’d say that, in and of itself, makes you a rare bird.”
“Do what I say, not what I do. I’m the one who spends more time at work than at home, and I can assure you that I’m not bringing in any more pay. I’m too much of a sucker to say no.”
Blake chuckled. “It sounds like you really care about your job, though.”
“I care about the students,” she corrected him.
“At least you always know why you’re doing it.”
Julia nodded. Sometime in the future, when she was grading tests on the weekends or trying to get through to a student who just didn’t care, she was going to have to remember those words.
He reached for her coconut and she passed it over, watching him stand and brush the sand from his shorts. He moved with such grace, so easy in his body as he slid his sandals on and walked back to the vendor. When he returned, he was holding the coconuts balanced in both hands, each one split open with a stroke of the vendor’s machete to expose the creamy white inside. He passed her a little piece of the coconut that the man had cut off, showing her how to use it like a spoon to scrape out the flesh.