Jack closed the trunk and we took off our shoes and moved toward the water until our feet were wet. The windsurfers were all there, as if they’d come beforehand to set up. They wore brightly colored shorts and their hair dripped onto their shoulders. They were all men. They were muscular and confident, even when they fell, even when climbing back onto the board and lifting the sail out of the water. Jack walked away from the shoreline toward a short, fat date palm. He spread out the towel. I followed him, and we sat down with a foot of space between us. The view of the windsurfers, the breeze, the warm air—it was all lulling. I hugged my knees, then rested back on my elbows. My ankles were pale; my toenails were painted light pink. Jack got up and went to his car and came back with a sweatshirt and another towel, and he balled up the sweatshirt and handed it to me, so I could use it as a pillow. When he sat down again he was closer to me. We lay back. The traffic was only twenty yards away, but I felt invisible to the passing cars and to the men windsurfing, who were absorbed utterly by the task of staying afloat. I felt Jack’s body next to mine, parallel, untouching, and I closed my eyes and concentrated on the heat between us. It felt like a blanket, but like a blanket when it’s being pulled slowly off of one’s body, the slither against the skin. Jack’s forearm lay over his eyes. “Are you sleepy?” I said softly.
He looked at me, at my eyes and forehead and lips. “Yes. Are you?”
I nodded. My mouth was open. My body was still but pushed to the limits of stillness—I was poised on the edge of moving, toward him or away from him, I wasn’t sure. He, too, was on the verge of moving, I could sense, but we stayed still and I closed my eyes again, waiting for either his mouth on me, or his hands on my body, or for nothing at all. He might have been waiting, too. We ended up dozing on the sand, and as I half-slept I felt the shade of the palm fronds moving over my body, back and forth in the breeze like a hand.
We slept for just under an hour. When I woke, Jack was sitting up with his legs crossed, facing the water. I touched his back and smiled when he turned around. A look briefly appeared on his face—a cross between fear and desire. I was hot, sweating along my brow and behind my knees. I got up and walked to the surf while Jack shook out the towel and folded it up and put it back in his car, along with the sweatshirt and towel we’d used as pillows.
“My body feels like Jell-O,” I said when he joined me at the shoreline.
“You’ll be sore tomorrow,” he said. He was referring to practice that day, to the dozens of serves and volleys.
“I can feel it starting already,” I said.
All of a sudden he’d moved behind me and pressed himself against my back, his mouth in the hair at my neck. His hands pulled against my hips. I felt off balance, like I might fall, but he was solid on his feet and held my weight. He hardened against my back. His breath on my neck came in bursts, like he’d been running. He made a sound like a soft grunt and his hand slipped under the front of my shirt and pressed against my stomach. I put my hand over his and his breathing in my ear slowed. I felt his mouth and nose move against my neck, his hot breath. Then he moved away. By the time I turned around he was walking back up the beach toward the car. He stopped at the door on the driver’s side and looked back at me, and I followed, still catching my breath. He got in, and I got in, and for a moment we sat there, not saying anything. “I’m sorry,” he said.
I wanted to say, I’m not. But then I thought that if I wasn’t now, I would be. “Don’t be,” I said.
“You do something to me.”
“We do it to each other,” I said, and I knew that by saying it aloud we’d cut the taut line that ran between us, and it would fall.
Marse’s brother, Kyle, married his second wife in late August in the Church of the Little Flower, down the street from the Biltmore Hotel, and the reception was held in the Biltmore’s main ballroom. Kyle had been there the day Dennis and I had met, and we’d hired Kyle’s contracting firm when we’d built the addition on the house, and so I suppose he’d felt obligated to invite us even though we hadn’t seen each other socially in years. Or maybe Marse, who was in the wedding party, added our names so she would have someone to dish with.
Bette called while I was getting dressed for the wedding, and I answered the kitchen phone in my panty hose while fishing with one hand through my purse for lipstick. “Suzanne wants to move,” Bette said. I pictured her rolling her eyes, her tight-lipped grimace. “She thinks the house is too small. She wants a garage, for crying out loud.”
I loved her house, which is what I told her. “But if Suzanne’s not happy there . . . ,” I said.
“She’s concerned about the investment.” She exhaled loudly. “She says we need to put our money where it can grow.”
“It is growing.”
“She said something about closet space.”
“Well, she has a point there.”
“And she says she’s tired of Miami.”
I put down my purse. “What does that mean? Where does she want to go?”
“I shouldn’t have told you. I knew you’d panic.”
“I’m not panicking,” I said. She’d never mentioned moving away before, not even once. It had never occurred to me that this was even possible.
She said, “Maybe what I need is a new girlfriend,” but she didn’t sound convinced.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I guess I have a decision to make,” she said before hanging up. “I hate that.”
Later that night, I found myself huddled with Marse on a divan in the corner of the Biltmore ballroom, a plate of hors d’oeuvres between us. Marse was telling me about the bride, a management consultant with very fresh-looking breasts and heavy white-blond bangs. “She’s not quite as young as she looks,” she said. “Kyle was drunk at the rehearsal. He was saying all sorts of crap. He said women our age are bitter, so he steers clear. He said he hoped she didn’t get bitter. I told him it was inevitable.”
“We’re bitter?”
“I am, he said. Single women my age are. You get to a certain point, he said.”
“Men shouldn’t use that word.”
“No, they shouldn’t. I didn’t mention that there’s a word for men his age who live in condos and buy black leather furniture.”
“Loser?” I said, and she nodded. Kyle wasn’t exactly a loser, but he had grown untidy with age; his hair was unkempt, and he didn’t put much thought into his wardrobe. But he’d made some money and drove a very silly car—something sporty and expensive, which I assumed younger women liked. His first wife, Julia, was a potter with a studio in Coconut Grove. Over the years I’d bought several of her pieces as gifts. She was at the wedding, too, and from where Marse and I were sitting, I could see her having what seemed to be an engrossing conversation with a man I didn’t recognize. She wore a light peach tunic and pearly white slacks. “Julia looks great,” I said.
“Kyle said she couldn’t be happier for him.” Marse pulled at the top of her dress, smoothing it out. “I’m too old to be a bridesmaid. I’m too old to have other people pick out my clothes.” She wore a garnet-colored, strapless organza dress with a sheer, cream-colored slip that showed at the hem, and a ribbon of the same color around the waist. I thought the outfit was pretty, but it didn’t agree with Marse, who was more comfortable in a fitted suit or a short tailored dress.