•
Why did you get married at all?”
Lisa came up with that question from nowhere I could see. We were lying in the sun with our eyes closed and our sunglasses on, side by side, holding hands between the deck chairs. I had thought she was asleep. Even with my new Persols on, the sun was as red as grapefruit through my eyelids. We were drinking those fresh-squeezed lime juice margaritas they have at the Four Seasons that are the best in Texas. The best north of the Rio Grande Valley.
I didn’t mind telling her the truth.
“It was after you left me. Dumped me, I mean.”
“Hey,” she said. I lifted my glasses and saw that she was smiling. She wasn’t looking at me, she was just lying there smiling. She looks so nice, I thought.
I should have gone ahead and said that to her.
“Anyway. I went back to Calgary. I got a job selling encyclopedias. Then my dad offered me eight grand to fly down to Florida and drive across the country with him. Even if he hadn’t offered me the money I couldn’t really say no. I had turned down a trip to India and a monastery in the Himalayas so I could hang out with Wendy. I still felt guilty about it. He called the Himalayas the Himahooleeyas. ‘This summer me and my son here are going to the Himahooleeyas,’ he would tell the checkout girl at the drugstore, ‘want to come along?’ So I flew down to Florida. We spent a few days in New Orleans and then we came across on I-10 to visit Jim and see his new store.”
I took her hand and put it on my stomach. I was getting fatter, lately. I was sweating in the sun. We should get in the water, I thought. Cold water sounds nice right about now.
“If we would start doing drugs again I could lose this weight,” I said.
“That is not funny, Bobby,” she said.
“There was this cocktail waitress. I told my dad, ‘That’s the kind of girl I would ask out on a date if I had the balls to ask any girl out on a date.’
“‘So ask her out,’ he said, and I said, ‘That girl is way out of my league.’”
“You really do not get women at all,” Lisa said.
“That’s what my dad said. He was always telling me when I was a teenager, ‘If you want to get laid, son, you have to learn to think like a woman.’ And I would ask him if we could talk about something else. Anyway, when our waitress came back to the table my dad said, ‘My son here thinks you are out of his league but I am betting you would go out with him. What do you think?’”
“That’s a dad for you,” Lisa said. She smiled. My dad and Lisa could have been friends, I bet, if I weren’t in the middle of them. But because she was my lover my dad would not think of her with his usual generosity. He would treat her like I imagine he treated his own lovers, when he was married to my mother. He would treat her like she was only invited to join our civil company because she was providing a married man with his necessary recreational sex. For him she’d be one step up from a porno magazine on a newspaper stand. Or maybe even one step down.
“So what did she say? She didn’t say okay.”
“No. She said, ‘I like both of you. I think you’re both nice. Either one of you might ask me out and I might go.’”
“Well, that was honest of her. She was a friendly girl, wasn’t she?”
“So he asked her,” I said. “He asked me if it was okay when she left the table.”
“I do not even believe you,” she said.
“I know. That’s how charming he is. He does it without even trying. It’s like some old nurse who was a witch taught him the secret smile to use when he was born. I bet he got even more girls when he was drinking.”
“I meant, for you,” Lisa said. She sipped her margarita. I could tell her eyes were frowning behind her sunglasses and I felt like I was telling the story wrong. It wasn’t anything against my dad, I wanted to tell her.
“It wasn’t hurtful. It was just one of those things. He was teaching me something. Like hitting me on the head with a stick.” Like a Zen master. He was helping me. To get free of him, maybe. Of trying to be like him.
“Okay,” Lisa said. “It doesn’t hurt to get hit with a stick?”
“I’m not explaining it right. Really it was a good thing. But anyway, that made me see things differently. Wendy, I mean. It made me see the value of Wendy. More clearly than I did, I mean.” Was that what he wanted? “I mean, she loved me. She believed in me. I understood that I wasn’t one of those guys I always wanted to be. With women, I mean.”
Telling the story was making it less clear in my own mind.
“I need another margarita,” I said. “Do you need another margarita?”
She was quiet. Her straw made a sucking sound at the bottom of her drink.
“Hey, not to change the subject, but when is Jim’s baby coming?” she asked me. “Isn’t their baby due any day?”
One of our salesmen had gotten a girl pregnant and Jim and his latest wife were adopting the little baby boy, who would be born in a week or two. They were going to call him Tanner.
“Plus, you know, honestly, nobody will ever love me the way Wendy does,” I said. “I mean, except for Jim, I guess. But he’s my brother. That’s reason enough to get married right there.”
She reached out and took my sunglasses off. It was bright as a lightbulb out there by the surface of the pool.
“Let’s have another drink,” she said.
She sounded odd. But it may have been me. With the sun and not having eaten breakfast I was feeling a bit drunk.
“There was something I wanted to ask you, too,” I said. Since you already said his name. Since you introduced him into the conversation. Better to get it out now, Bobby. In the open.
The thing was, a few days before, Jim had answered the phone and started having a conversation with someone who could only have been Lisa.
She didn’t respond.
“Okay, I’m hot. I’m getting in the water,” she said. She stood up. The sun was on her back and shoulders. She put her sunglasses on the table. Her movements were abrupt but had that fluidity beneath them like a tree branch shaking in the wind.
She was so slender that her belly curved in behind her hip bones.
“Can we talk for a minute, Lisa?” I said. But she dove in.
Later in the bungalow I questioned her about it directly.
“Did you call the store the other day? Did you talk to Jim on the phone?”
She said, “Don’t be ridiculous.”
Ridiculous was not a word she would use unless she was lying.
•
Monday morning when I was back at the store, I asked Jim. It was not really a question we were allowed to ask each other, but I didn’t care.
“Yeah, she’s called a couple of times. I picked up the phone when she was calling for you, I guess, and recognized her voice. She said you guys are dating a little.”
I admitted to myself that I was not as surprised as I should have been. He was lying, too. The conversation I heard only a second of before he hung up had nothing to do with Lisa and me. He had been telling her about his last trip to Vegas. The return of Lisa to our lives should have been electrifying news. They didn’t even have their stories straight. As developments go, it was oddly reassuring. By the way he said it I didn’t think they were having sex or anything. Maybe they were just worried about me. They knew how bad things were with Wendy and they were hoping to protect me, trying not to add new worries and complications into my life. It could be that innocent, I thought. It was better if I left it alone. Also, that way, if I was wrong, if they were up to something together, I could keep an eye on them. By playing dumb, I mean.