Matthew Pitt

THE WHOLE WORLD OVER

Receiving the invitation on the answering machine hurt, and that it took two years to get it at all hurt more. Still, when their old friends asked them to visit, Harvey and Sue jumped at the chance. It happened quickly; they didn’t have time to catch their bearings. Harvey wasn’t even sure what he’d packed. Moat had already booked the flight, leaving an open date for the return. Had paid for it without even affording Harvey the gesture of saving face, of offering to split the cost. Of course the trip was out of Harvey’s means, but that wasn’t the point. It was presumptuous for Moat to take care of everything. It was presuming a lot to take two people away from their home, without a moment’s notice, without even their blessing, after having been absent so long.

“Sir? Care for a cocktail?”

Harvey smiled at the flight attendant and regarded her cart. “No. I know all about your cocktails. Seven-dollar glasses of sugar water. I could get looped quicker from cough syrup.” Once they’d landed he would have plenty of time to drink his worries away. The attendant asked Sue, with the same doting, placid face, the same question. “I’m not above sugar water,” Sue said. “A Rob Roy, please. No. Change it to rum and Coke, rum and Diet Coke. After all, we are headed for the islands.”

True enough, Harvey nearly added, but why we’re headed for this island . . .

And if he had, Sue would’ve begun, but not finished, a follow-up speculation: Oh I’m sure it’s gorgeous, and bright, and maybe simpler, too . . . Still. Why Anna and Moat moved there, how they even knew there was a there to move to . . . Here she would have folded her seat back, as if allowing their gripes room to breathe.

But in fact they didn’t voice any complaints. Not during the initial flight, nor the jfk connection, nor the series of hop flights that followed. They said little at all, only mentioning Anna and Moat once: a comment about how their friends seemed to be making quite a life for themselves after retirement, and they must be more than happy, and the island must feel like home, since they hadn’t mentioned any possibility of leaving it.

Not that Anna and Moat ever explained themselves anymore. Since the abrupt move, they’d sent just one card and a telegram. The invitation had provided a phone number and a street address, but it had not suggested even a bare thread of the loneliness Harvey and Sue had felt in the two years.

Anna and Moat weren’t there to greet them at the airport. “You’d think at least one could show,” Sue muttered. In fact, no friends or family were there for any of the passengers, no heraldry at all. There were suitcases and bloated duffels lying around, but no one came to claim them. It hardly even seemed like an airport, what with the low ceilings, the absence of vending machines and duty-free shops, the filthy carpeting. There weren’t even those groups of men, usually thin, usually mustached, in white dress shirts rolled to the elbows, holding placards bearing the names of those they were supposed to drive to resorts. “They’ll be waiting for us once we clear customs,” Harvey chanced.

But they weren’t. Harvey swallowed his bitterness. A single officer, adorned with red and gold shoulder ribbons, smiled as they passed with their bags in tow. That was the extent of security. Harvey was ready to tip the officer with American dollars, but was ignored. The sky was a greenish, flat haze, a waste of sunlight. As they fished for sunglasses, they felt as though they were waking from a deep sleep, but into a silence so pleasant, breezes so mild, that the waking world seemed more comforting than the dreaming. When Sue hollered to hail a cab, she thought she saw her breath. How high up were they, and if they were high up, why wasn’t it cooler?

“So your car doesn’t have A-C, I’m guessing?” Harvey asked. As much as it embarrassed Sue, that side of her husband that would assume a driver in a foreign land would speak English, it pleased her greatly, the side of him that would assume that a driver in a foreign land would want to make friends.

“No, of course not, no. But you get used to it.”

“Hah!” Harvey exclaimed. “That’s a typical local response.”

“Full truth,” the cabby swore, his finger jutting up. “One adapts here. Don’t believe? We make bet. If you still sweat when we get to where you go, you owe nothing. Now. Where do we go?”

Harvey checked his wallet. “Tell me if this makes sense: Kotanga C46, uh . . .”

“Actually,” said Sue, “could you take us to the center of town?” Harvey eyed Sue, who shrugged. “They don’t know we’re here, so let’s have fun first. Besides, I know you. You’ll be in a lather over getting snubbed, and you’ll pout for an hour. You might as well pout with me. Over dinner and drinks. I’m famished.”

“What kind of food you looking for?” the driver asked.

“Doesn’t matter. Whatever’s closest.”

“Please. Name what you like.” When they did, the driver only grinned and told them they weren’t being specific enough. Their second effort got the same admonition. Sue noticed how high the hair of his beard was, how it touched the corners of his eyes when he grinned. He clicked his radio on to a reporter in midstream tragedy: The bus overturned, trapping all thirty passengers under four tons of metal. Frowning, he switched off the story. “Nasty news here, all the time.” He squealed up an alley and parked beneath the terrace of a restaurant, which bore to Sue a hapless resemblance to the day-labor site in Boor’s Bend, the small town she’d lived in her whole life. Pedestrians and bikes lit the dusty thoroughfare, which was spoked by creeping ivy and paved only by occasional protruding stones.

“So you recommend this place?”

“I recommend for you.”

“I mean, do you like it?”

“What matters is you will.”

Harvey smirked. “Your enthusiasm’s talking in circles. There isn’t much in town you’d recommend, is there?” The cabby wasn’t sure about that. But he knew that what he did like here he loved, and what he’d found here he’d found nowhere else the whole world over. Harvey was satisfied.

“So now. Is this free ride for you?”

Harvey touched his skin. “Goddamn. You’re right. I am getting used to it.” He paid up happily, but his attempt to tip was again refused.

After dinner they arranged to meet Anna and Moat near the shore. On the phone, Anna and Moat had kept them reeling with questions. We took a cab. Yes, we already ate. The food? Marvelous. Well, we never asked what it was . . . something like duck but not duck, lighter than duck, lighter than pheasant, lighter than quail. Tangy tomato, green rice glazed with lager, a bay leaf as big as a teaspoon in the mix. They grew hungry again simply fumbling through the description. We can’t wait either. See you then, see you.

Harvey enjoyed their chat. He was in better spirits having eaten, and he laughed at how well his wife knew his tempers, knew him. He wasn’t sure it was a question of love. Usually he felt he would always love her, though at times it seemed to him he never had. But Sue wanted and deserved devotion, and Harvey felt he’d honored their union by providing the providence of steady work. He’d worked hard for four decades; numbed away exhaustion and a gathering sourness over his contracting business; lost dreams, sleep, and time—and in time, stamina—to keep Sue’s hands idle and their house filled with goose-feather pillows, Chablis, crystal serving bowls, purchases that, in Harvey’s estimation, framed love better than words.

Or at least those things were solid and didn’t require memory and imagination to conjure them back. Harvey didn’t need to replay words Sue had said. He knew where she stood: when she’d bought ten bottles of that perfume that still made him a little crazy, just as the bankrupt manufacturer was pulling its stock off the shelves—that was love, or at least a tribute to it. Words were by nature both gummy and slippery, and Harvey had little use for them. Even Sue’s old love notes were for him more attractive in the reedy feel of paper on fingertips, the veined ink joining one letter to the next, than they were in the messages themselves. When he was twenty-one, Harvey didn’t have the money to give Sue an engagement ring (not even close), but he did have his hands and a stubborn idea. He had purchased a few ounces of an alloy called Inconel, carrying it around in a jacket pocket for a week, not sure where to turn for help. Finally, Harvey ingratiated himself with a supervisor at the tool-and-die plant in Boor’s Bend, who agreed to let Harvey use their tools in exchange for off-the-clock janitorial work. Harvey had taken the bar stock, drilled out its center section, cut it on a band saw, sanded it, smoothed it, and, most of all, ausformed it. He’d abused every square millimeter of the ring-to-be, fed it to fire and left it soaking in fish oil, until he’d made it immune to any tests it might face through the years of days to come, to the challenges to longevity.

On their way to the shore, they walked by a group of musicians rehearsing on a band shell stage. The performers were acclimating to the heat, playing awhile, resting, and playing again. Harvey nibbled on about the time, but Sue stood still. The melodies enchanted her. They were airy, full; every other music in comparison seemed miserly, even Buddy Holly and the Crickets in her parents’ basement forty summers before, playing “Not Fade Away” while she and Harvey played at the not-so-clear line between chastity and ecstasy in the muggy, mildewed heat. “What do you think that instrument is?” she asked. “I thought maybe a balalaika. But the sound’s not the same; this is much more aggravated . . .”

“Sue!” Harvey hissed. “Is it the lager talking or does that look like Sid?” Sue sighed in surrender and asked where he was looking. Up the avenue, there were pylons connecting crackling chicken wire. “Where the wires end? See?” Sue stared, stunned. It was Sid. How long had he been here? Was he on vacation? Harvey, wondering the same, added, “You don’t think he actually lives here? Do you? He isn’t holding any maps, guides, nothing…” That was true—but they didn’t have that kind of literature either. But something in the way Sid moved—how he blended with the environment—convinced Sue that he was a resident. Well, if he was, they’d have to introduce him to Anna and Moat. Sue watched Sid walk toward them, down the sloping street. He looked bright. His tight, curly hair had lapsed to gray, though his mustache was holding serve, still as dark, or darker, than his skin. And he still stepped with a long gait, as though he were just a few steps from home. Sue moved quickly, anticipating the reunion.

So had Harvey, although now he slowed, with a few hundred feet still between them. Sid looked different. He’d lost weight; had his penchant for weekend drinking caught up with him? His body was an echo of its former girth. But his nose had never looked that way, quite that big, hooked so sharply! And when had he switched from contacts to glasses? Harvey cleared his throat and clutched his wife’s arm. “Do you know, that isn’t Sid? That isn’t Sid at all.”

“Don’t tease.” Sue twisted out of her husband’s grip, though now she too had doubts. Harvey was right; it wasn’t Sid. Not Sid, but someone else they knew. That woman whose cheating rat husband ran out on her and their children. She and Sue had shared sitters. She had—shit—she had one of those Old Testament names . . .

“It’s Sarah!” Harvey exclaimed. “The Sarah who wrote speeches for senators.” Harvey felt foolish thinking it had been Sid. But Sue had seen the same thing. Maybe the light here was tricky; or it had been Sid, and he’d slipped into the crowd . . . No, that was desperate talking. And it didn’t matter besides. It was Sarah. Not Sid. Not a man. Sarah.

“Looks like her hair never completely grew back in after the chemo,” Sue said. Harvey peered in. Yes. They’d heard about the cancer through the grapevine. But a grapevine with rotten roots: The rumor was that Sarah had died. Clearly, that was wrong. Yes, she looked tired; yes, her hair was short and brittle; but things could be worse. The closer they came, in fact, the fuller and darker Sarah’s hair looked. The healthier she became, the younger she looked. Sarah’s lipstick went through a thorough erasure, disappearing even as her lips widened, and an underbite developed. Just as they were about to greet Sarah with a hug, the man who was not Sid and who had become Sarah became not the woman who was Sarah but another man—a man with black bangs flopping over his eyelashes, a young man, younger than most of their memories, whose eyes pierced Sue and Harvey without even slight recognition.

He passed by anesthetic to their presence. They didn’t dare look back. An addled tenderness surfaced on their faces as a patio conversation curved behind them. “Right into a corner, right into a corner. Never saw it coming.” Harvey was worried the people were talking about them. He and Sue could find no safer or more comforting thing to do than bundle together, hold the other’s waist without speaking.

This embrace could have gone on and on, but it lasted only until Moat called out a happy hello, carrying a bundle of flowers—cockscomb, zinnias, sunflowers, and statice—that all held the packed scent of fresh earth. “I know I should be bearing gifts.”

“Nonsense,” Harvey said, although Sue had shopped for hours for Moat and Anna, bringing sundries from the States. “Let’s get a look at you, old man.”

Moat turned for them twice. He looked rested. His eyebrows were busy and black, features that somehow both quieted and dignified his baldness. His long face widened from bottom to top, like a hand fan. Harvey stared; he would not hesitate to call Moat beautiful, right to his face, given the right situation. It was good to shake his hand, to wrestle with it playfully, to pretend to be young. Sue only gathered their suitcases.

Moat grunted as he lifted one. “My luck to get the one with the kitchen sink.”

“We packed light,” Sue responded sharply. “Not everyone can leave in a rush.” Harvey knew Sue was peeved Moat hadn’t brought a gift, and he wished she’d get over it. “Not everyone can live like you.”

“I’ll give you that, Sue.”

“We can’t wait to see your vacation home.”

“Hmm. Sorry if I misled you with the phone message. This isn’t a vacation home. What we have now is all we have.”

“You let go of your place on Ninetieth?” Sue marveled. “This place must be hot.”

Harvey tried flattering Moat, a formidable talent of Sue’s, but one Harvey never could seem to mimic, no matter how long he’d been her understudy. “It really is like heaven here,” he offered, though based on the early returns, he hardly believed this.

Moat smiled thinly. “Come on, I’ll take you to the boat. Anna’s there. The waves will look rough, but it’s smooth sailing today, I promise.”

Boat? Sailing? Had Harvey heard right? It had to be a joke. Moat was deathly afraid of water. Had been ever since he was a kid. His parents had taken him to San Antonio, where he’d walked too close—and carelessly—to the edge of the River Walk. He had gone down twice before his mother could jump in and save him, had felt something slimy and hard brush his chest. He swore it was an eel; it had probably been an oar. In any case, Mitch became Moat after that, and his phobia stuck. Yet here they were, on the dock. There was Anna, biting a piece of dark bread and looking firm in her swimsuit. Moat yelled at her to start the engine. “What do you know,” Harvey said once he saw Moat step off the shore and commandeer the wheel. “Facing your fear really works.”

“I’m not sure I get you,” Moat replied. He pointed to the waves. “See those fish? The ones with red stripes? They don’t surface unless a storm’s on the way. When it hits, they feast on the dead remains.”

“After which Moat and I take the boat out, cast our lines, and feast on them,” Anna finished. She offered bread to the group; the casual copper in her hair glimmered as she tore off pieces. “All the fish here cook up pretty good. Poach ’em, add some lemon and butter, you’ll pray for storms every night!”

“A sailor and fisherman, Moat?” Sue asked. “When did you decide it was safe to go into the water?”

“Having a boat saves time,” Moat responded obliquely. Sue backed off, trying to catch sea spray in her mouth. Neither Moat nor Anna seemed to want to address the old phobia. Moat had probably undergone some kind of therapy, and blocking out conversations about the fear was part of the cure. Harvey was more suspicious. Moat had always been a braggart. It wasn’t enough for him to recount the long process of dismantling his fear. No. Moat was acting as if he’d never been at the fear’s mercy in the first place. Unbelievable. What better way to puff himself up? Harvey slid his hand across vinyl. He wouldn’t let it bother him. If Moat wanted to dismiss the past, fine. If Moat wanted to wait until breakfast to gloat over his good fortune, if he wanted to spoon out the permanence of his estate one asset at a time—here’s my boat, beachfront property, propeller plane—Harvey would let him. He didn’t need to feel threatened. He didn’t need to grip the rail that tightly; he could loosen his grip and let his knuckles plunge back from white to peach. Harvey had a prize of his own, a prize Moat had once wanted too: Sue. They were in college when they met Sue; she hosted debate team parties in her parents’ basement. Down there, Moat and Harvey learned to switch off their trust and friendship, introduced themselves to the miserable brunt of desire. But Harvey had been the one to win Sue over. Or at least wear her down. Harvey took solace in this victory over Moat. Better investments, a younger wife—not even the furthest ends of earth could erase it.

Sue took the pin out of her hair. She breathed in the air, let it unfold in her lungs. Air lacking traffic, lacking the stench of the mills from Boor’s Bend. Nowadays those mills seemed to burn hotter than normal. The odor of refined rubber was thick, greasy, incendiary. Harvey’s frugal nature had pulled their daughter, Kate, through college, kept them out of debt and in a home. But that home was, and remained, in Boor’s Bend. Except for one year, she’d never lived outside the town limits. If she and Harvey could ever move away, she would want it to be here. Close enough to friends. And far from home. But what did that matter if she couldn’t clear aside the images of home even when she’d left it?

Harvey was complaining about the hop flights, the endless string of islands. Anna chuckled. “It’s a long damn home we got. And getting longer all the time.”

“Is it all developed?”

“Much of it’s not. Most places never settled.”

“Uninhabitable?”

“Yeah, but some have tried. People pack up, leave their families behind. It gets hard here. You don’t know their names, but you can guess their stories. They try to stake a claim. Usually over that thick ridge to the east.”

“Any towns that way?”

Moat cut the engine and threw a mooring over the side. Anna struck a match, daring the wind to kill the flame before it could fuel her cigarette. “None. They don’t last long, I suspect.” As they neared the dock, Harvey held his hand above his eyes like a bridge: there was a construction site within walking distance. He’d have to check it out. He made a note of what it was near, the outline of the stand of trees. The shore felt cold when he stepped down. It was darkening quickly. The tide rising. One wave washed up a mottled Venus, then another recollected it. Some water slapped Sue’s thigh as the sun descended. The ocean waves, which had spooned them from pier to pier so carefully, were now circling the boat like wolves.

Before they went inside the house—which seemed small from the beach—Harvey stopped at a bodega. “He has this habit,” Sue explained. “Every time we go overseas, he likes to buy the strangest-looking piece of fruit he sees.” This time it was purple, waxen, shaped a little like a dumbbell. Its skin was colored with a thin net of white stripes. After leaving, Harvey counted his money. “He shortchanged me.”

“Shrug it off,” Moat said. “You’ll never miss the money.”

Harvey and Sue got the mattress. Anna and Moat slept on the back porch. “We don’t want to cause trouble,” Harvey said. He nervously offered to stay at a motel.

“Good luck finding one,” Moat said, trying to squeeze the luggage through the doorframe.

The house was roofed with a dour, grassy thatch, built with particleboard, T-shaped, cramped for even one couple. The ceiling sagged sleepily in places. Sue felt embarrassed for the conditions. The ancient stove, shabby sink, the vines of dust in the corners. A broken thermometer lay on the floor, surrounded by spilt mercury. Sue compensated with brightness, overmentioning the rich banquet of sounds from outside: the cicadas, the night birds, the frogs. Harvey couldn’t think of much to say as they sat on pillows, his feet almost touching Moat’s. Letting jet lag explain their discomfort, Sue and Harvey said goodnight.

They slept for seventeen hours, a listless, broken sleep. When they rose it was barely still daylight. Sue hoped they were alone in the house. She wanted to remain in the room and have another night to come up with things to say. She rolled over and faced Harvey. She hadn’t known the two of them weren’t doing well—had he? “Not a clue. Moat’s got pride, but this is ridiculous. We could have wired cash.”

“Cash doesn’t sound like the issue. For how they tell it.”

“Then what’s keeping them here?” Harvey asked. “Maybe Moat got rooked on the boat. He’s such a landlubber. Probably gave away the farm to get into the ocean.”

Sue looked around the bedroom for better explanations. Green mildew covered the baseboard. The bureau was raised on cinder blocks, for times when high tide bullied its way through the floor. They couldn’t have become attached to a home like this. “It must be simpler here.”

“So is prison,” said Harvey.

Sue watched him rub skin cream into the wrinkles around his brow and under his eyes. She couldn’t help herself. “I love you,” she said. She tightened the lid to the cream and touched his oily hands.

What she said disarmed him. He knew it shouldn’t have, but after all these years, their I love you’s had become mainly the means to dampen arguments, to take the sting out of escalated moments, words to cool off by. She said it—and she meant it, he knew—but there it was; the words seemed displaced.

He turned the sheet down and stroked her neck. When he touched with such tenderness she felt bound to reward him. She held his hand to her breast, acquiescing. He shut his eyes quickly when he pressed into Sue, as though surprised by a beam of sunlight. As he did, Sue thought of what she wasn’t thinking of. The sweat on her thighs. How hard the floor felt beneath her back. How slow time seemed to move as Harvey built momentum. Sue wondered not why she was tired even after their long sleep, but why this tiredness did not concern her. What was filling her mind then? The clearing of Harvey’s throat, the bump of his hand beneath the small of her back, the gingery smell left by last night’s rain.

They felt guilty for having risen so late, so when they left the bedroom, Sue and Harvey acted as though it were early, aping the cosmetic gestures of morning. They pressed pants with a travel iron. He tried reading the sports pages from the local paper, though it was hard following the pidgin literature, and he couldn’t make sense of the games’ rules. She used toilet paper to fashion a makeshift filter for two cups of weak coffee. They fried up plantains, and did it all quietly, as if Moat and Anna were the ones still sleeping.

Sue found a skillet and then a single egg. She held it up for Harvey’s approval. Then, raising her arm, she struck the egg too hard against the countertop. The shell splintered; its yolk crawled out. The sound was that of metal impaling more metal, something more ambitious and ugly than an eggshell simply splitting against wood. Sue did not move to collect the spill; she just watched. Harvey stood idly. A drop of isolated blood that had been in the center of the yolk spread out and dripped down the epicenter, ambushing the yellow with crimson.

A moment later their friends returned, their arms full of cloth bags. They stepped over the mess on the floor without comment. They’d brought back sacks of alcohol. Anna placed the hardest liquor on the card table. The rest of the bottles they stored in the medicine cabinet. Moat removed a deck of cards from a pantry, which was, except for a stack of citronella candles, otherwise bare.

Anna cut the deck while standing; Harvey offered to arrange the chairs so he could grab a better view of her. He liked the swing of her ass. Who wouldn’t? Anna reveled in her relative youth. Harvey thought of this as he shook his highball glass in his hand, let his wife pour his first drink, watched his one ice cube rock left to right, stirring the rum and cognac.

Everyone was wrecked and still trying to look serious about their playing. The moon had been up for hours, and they were down for the count. “This game is Spit in the Ocean,” Harvey announced, almost singing the last word.

“Wait, wait, you can’t deal yet. You forgot to collect my cards,” Anna said. “From the game before last.” No one could remember who had won that game. The truth was no one would have noticed if wind brushing through the open door carried the deck away.

Moat asked Harvey how work was treating him. “Don’t ask,” Harvey muttered, shuffling. “If it’s not the housing market that’s gone soft, it’s the homeowners. Cold feet, trying to change styles on me mid-design . . . I swear. Young couples pick up one book on feng shui and think they’re fucking architects. Dealer takes two.”

Sue admired the table, the ponds of spilt rum. Like, she thought, little islands. People raised, people folded, Harvey called. Anna revealed a royal flush. “I win!” she yelled. “A royal flush beats your hand.”

“It would,” Harvey agreed, “if that were actually a king in the middle of your hand, and not just some pathetic six of clubs.”

“Wow, unforced error.” The wind blew Anna’s hair. “Ooh, you guys feel it? Sea breeze gets so thick here, you think you can drown in it. Which reminds me—we need another drink.”

“No more drinks,” said Sue. “We need something sub-tense-stive. Sub-stens-tive.”

“You want substance?” Moat produced a bag. “We got chocolate.”

“Chocolate!” Anna squealed.

Harvey turned to bite a piece off the block Moat was holding. “We also have plantains,” Moat offered. “But only two, so I’ll play you quarters for them, Harv.”

“You’re trying to liquor us up, aren’t you?” Harvey laughed. “So we’ll take this shack off your hands?”

Buried beneath mixed drinks, Sue was still in contact with her sense of propriety. “We’ve survived worse, Harv. What about our place in Midtown?” That lone, glorious year in Manhattan, where Sue wanted to hide herself in the city’s indifference. “We signed the lease sight unseen; the bedroom window turned out to face a fifty-thousand-watt sign of the Dow-Jones average! We had to move the bed into the kitchen to get a decent night’s rest.”

“Was that the place you got,” Moat asked, “after the first baby?”

“After Kate. Our daughter. The only baby we had.” Harvey broke off more chocolate. Crumbs fell into his highball glass. That was cheap. Moat more than anyone knew how Harvey had longed for a son. Someone to pass his contracting firm on to. Although he’d hated the company for half his life, it was half of a life no one understood but him, a half Harvey wanted to have shared with somebody.

“This chocolate is fantastic, Moat. Which store’d you get it at?”

“I didn’t. You get it by asking the right questions to the wrong people.” He smiled mischievously. “You have to know the channels.”

“Are these channels legal?”

Anna smiled. “Para-legal.” Harvey and Sue joined in on their friends’ splashing laughter, though they didn’t know why. It was clear their connection was strained. But they persisted in retelling old stories Moat and Anna seemed tired of, or oblivious to. That Fourth of July in London, the pigeon that made off with Anna’s hat . . . Remember when we got fined for letting our dogs drink out of the water fountains? Anna and Moat smiled, but contributed little. Giving up, Harvey said, “I guess leaving wasn’t hard for you.”

“Not true,” Anna replied. Leaving tore them apart, but more the act than the aftershock. Having been gone from the States two years, they found there were things they didn’t much miss. The beggary of the rich. The “do unto others before they do it to me” philosophy. Oh, they missed a few small pleasures (thanks, by the way, for the massage oil). But it turns out life back there wasn’t the life; the best was yet to come.

There was a shrill birdcall from a treetop. “What the hell’s that?” Harvey asked.

“Those are nenes,” Moat replied. “It means it’s late. They have to mate before dawn, before their predators wake up.”

“You’ve got your bird wrong,” Harvey said. “Nenes are extinct.”

“Not here they’re not.”

Harvey sneered at Moat’s confidence.

“We could cross-reference it with Peterson’s if you want,” Moat suggested, sobering with each syllable. They heard the birds again, whatever they were, mercilessly crying for companionship.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” Sue said.

“You just went.”

“Well, I’m going again. I forgot to do my business the first time around.”

“It’s like when I slept with you, Sue,” Moat offered. “I wasn’t even sure we’d really done it until the second time.”

Sue lifted her head. She rubbed her temples, and then her ears, as though fearing a gunshot or drill or some terrible sound. But there was only quiet. Then: the cicadas and night animals. The fan in the other room. Harvey rocked on the legs of his chair. The wood grooved into the floor and made a noise like a small bone breaking. He turned slowly to Sue with a deference she found both alarming and ugly. “Did you,” he asked, “hear that too?”

“I did,” she said.

But Sue said nothing else. And Anna hadn’t budged. And Moat hadn’t offered a punch line. So Harvey unbuttoned his shirt, fingers rubbing against the bottom of his throat. Air—he needed air—needed to let it in. He had to say something. The longer he waited to speak, the more irrespective the revelation seemed, the more he wanted to forget it out of pocket and just go to bed. “Fuck you for being the one to tell me,” Harvey said to Moat. He turned to Sue. “And fuck you for letting him be the one.”

He’d heard of this kind of thing happening, secondhand. Kate had come back home for half a year after her own affair cut down her marriage. Sarah, whom they thought they’d lost to cancer and then, just yesterday, to hallucination. Now the secondhand had caught up with him. He rose. “I’m out,” he said, and he gave Sue his last blue chip.

It wasn’t until he began walking that Harvey knew he had nowhere left to go. There were no car services, no taxis; here, the cabbies went home to families after midnight; they didn’t remain in front of Plexiglas, at the beck and call of any loose traveler who whistled or waved. There was no pay phone, no red-eye, no flights from the island at all until after noon, and even those Harvey couldn’t afford. He had no means of transport. No way to get away.

“Where will you go?” Sue had asked, following him into the bedroom. He was fumbling with his shirt and wouldn’t answer. Each time he missed a button, he felt old. She kept up her goddamn talking until he said something back. When did it happen? How long did it last? The scene alternated between blurted questions and lengths of silence. He’d agreed to sleep on it before demanding a divorce. She’d agreed to let him go where he wanted, but she wanted to know where that was.

“Wherever it is, I’m sure it will be beautiful.” He knew perfectly well where he was headed—the memory of the construction site had haunted him all day—but it felt so good to act as though he were wandering, to keep her guessing, to lie to her, to do just a little back of what she’d done to him. Make her fear he might wind up lost in the darkness, and that it would be her fault if she never saw him again. “After all, this is paradise here. I might as well explore paradise.” Outside, a rowboat knocked twice into the retaining wall. Harvey shut his eyes. The alcohol was like a splint in his head. You don’t know their names, Moat had said of the people here who tried escaping from their homes, but you can guess their stories . . .

Fuck you, Moat. You knew my fucking story. Better than me.

When Harvey reached the construction site, he was vexed by what he saw. Or rather, by what he didn’t. An absence of drill bits, forklifts, measuring tape. It was all abandoned; work had been stalled for months, maybe years. Maybe there’d been a strike. Or the money had dried up, or the interest. Harvey walked through the building’s skeleton. Warts of tar had dried on the floorboards. He stepped over humps of dust. It occurred to him he’d never visited one of his own sites on a weekend, seen it this way. Without women and men on-site, the building was left to the mechanics of nature, which was always tracing its path, be it lightest erosion or heavy rains stabbing unprotected sheets of drywall. Was it still a construction site? If someone wasn’t there working, measuring, or securing pieces every moment, was the site simply left to atrophy?

When he returned, the house seemed even smaller. Sue was on her side. For the first time in years, when he climbed into bed he realized he was climbing into bed. But he felt he had to be beside her. She clutched his hip and, to his surprise, he let her. A long while without words passed. “Did you take your medicine?” he asked.

“I did. But it isn’t helping. I got too drunk.”

“You had water, though?”

“From the bottle,” she said. “I still don’t trust the water here.”

“I’m just beginning to,” Harvey said. He wondered what he would look like in the morning to his wife, how she would look to him. “It was beautiful. Out there just now.”

“I’m so sorry, Harvey. I’m sorry for all of it.”

He didn’t know how to answer. It was an apology he was expecting, but one he suddenly felt little need for. Still, Harvey took it with him to sleep. He dreamt of everyone he knew, from his baby daughter, Kate, to her baby daughter; from animals he’d thought were extinct to friends he’d lost contact with so long ago he couldn’t guess whether they were still alive. A dream that everyone was mute in the afterlife. There were rules, restrictions, borders. You could empathize and laugh with the eyes, but not the mouth. You could not describe your lamentations. You could not answer for yourself or plead your innocence because here innocence had lost its allure and affectation.

Harvey woke to pieces of something brushing his face. He thought it was seaweed, that he was sleepwalking into the ocean. “Are you afraid of water?” It was Anna. Her elbows rested on his chest, and her hands were scooped around her ears.

“Only when I’m under it,” Harvey laughed. Moat had fucked Sue ten years ago, when Sue was fifty, the age Anna was now. “Jesus, you scared the shit out of me.”

“That’s how wake-up calls go,” she said, lighting a pillar candle. He watched the erection of the flame, the light dully gleaming off the brass cup. Sue wasn’t in the bed. He had a wild thought of pulling Anna down to him, candle and all. “We want to swim.”

To swim. Harvey figured it for three or four a.m. They want to swim. They were insane, the both of them. “OK, a swim.” But first he wanted to shave the shadow off his face. He went to the bathroom; pipes creaked as hot water spat from the spigot. Harvey caught it with a rag, which he placed to his face. He could feel his skin getting supple under the heat. He held the rag still on his skin until it cooled, and he realized he wanted more. He thought of Sue. Harvey again covered his face. Their marriage was (and was seemed the right tense for the marriage; death or divorce, whatever would wind up killing it, it was nearly over) a good citizen—purchasing anniversary gifts on time, kissing goodnight, bringing home milk from the market. Certainly in the course of nearly forty years, the marriage had bled out of loyalty. But for the most part it had been timid. Stalled, as though waiting for a shove that had not come. The snowballing wealth of recent times hadn’t helped. The gifts felt unearned. Harvey felt beneath the spigot; the water was cooling. He decided his shave could wait.

Moat was outside already, throwing rocks into the sea. After each throw his hand stayed outstretched, as if he expected the rocks to boomerang back once he’d released them. Sue was standing next to him, but she drifted away when Harvey approached. “You’ve got Crest in your bathroom,” Harvey announced. “And Camay. I’d have thought you made your own shaving cream out of, you know, homegrown aloe and petrified cicada shells or something.”

Moat was sheepish. “Nothing like that, no. No coconut radios, either.”

Why were they discussing this, Harvey wondered, discussing anything? Shouldn’t he and Anna be enraged? Shouldn’t he be punching Moat’s lights out? Harvey wanted to lift one of the black rocks at their feet, make Moat think he was going to bring it down on his head, only to heave it into the sea instead, watch the army of rings spring from the point of impact, feel the wave he created consume their feet. But he couldn’t work up the restlessness. Had old age reduced him to this? Had what he felt for Sue declined so sharply that he gave others permission to touch her, desire her, fuck her, and live to tell the story?

They didn’t wind up in the sea. Moat and Anna led them up a trail far from the house, climbing steeply over a ridge. When they reached the pond, they were overheated and out of breath, and it was a welcome sight. Sue treaded water, wondering if Moat would speak. The truth was she didn’t know his side of it. Her side was desire and emptiness, feelings that came so doggedly and determinedly ten years ago, they’d decided to work together. Sue had calculated that night, planned it, and had lived off its high for years. Hadn’t he? The four swam to a spot where the water was shallow and they could stand. “Where were you when it happened?” Harvey asked. “What season was it?”

Moat couldn’t remember. Not any of it—what Sue had worn, who’d first suggested keeping the affair quiet. Sue realized it wasn’t an act. Every fact of the night was lost to Moat: the scratch of AM jazz when clouds interrupted the rented Camry’s radio signal, the high memory of Sue’s stockings curled around the hotel room lamppost, how she’d had to plow her hands in the ice bucket the next morning, so she could slide her wedding band back on. He didn’t share her memory of the danger involved, the prickly thrill of shame.

Harvey kept pressing; even now, his directness was breathtaking to Sue. “It wasn’t in our bed?”

“No,” Sue whispered, as if she’d taken that precaution particularly to spare him, “never on our bed.”

“The second time, you mean? The second time, were you still drunk, or sober?”

“Look,” Moat said, “we had sex.”

“So I’ve been hearing. That’s the rumor.”

“But it’s less than a rumor; it’s over. A finished fact. Old lust. Does it have to hurt you this much?”

It was not the sex that hurt but the history that followed. A history they’d constructed and he hadn’t seen. A history they’d carried with them quietly in Harvey’s presence, at parks, driving through tollbooths on their way to Prospect Beach, sealing inside the envelopes of cards they gave to each other on anniversaries. Harvey thought of the faces he’d seen when they first arrived on the island. Faces that seemed to be friends but were only strangers cast in a deceptive light.

“Is it going to keep hurting you?”

“You adapt,” Harvey snapped. “Here, you adapt. It’s going back I’m worried about.” They were running out of friends in the States. Abrupt cardiac arrests, complications from triple-bypass surgeries, and protracted cancers had seen to that. Some still lived in Boor’s Bend, but were not up to visitors; it was all they could do to care for themselves. Others were healthy but were defecting: to the Sun Belt, to condominiums and planned communities. Sue had mentioned joining some of them soon. But that didn’t sound like joining to Harvey; it sounded like chasing.

And Harvey knew a thing about chasing. He’d chased Moat for years. He’d minored in Moat’s major, business administration. He’d moved to New York City right after Moat had. And while Moat settled in, thrived in his work, got the place with Anna in Westchester, the city grew exponentially harder for Harvey, and he left as soon as office space opened up in Boor’s Bend. Even in college, Harvey considered now, Sue had caught Moat’s eye before his own. “I hate what you have,” Harvey said. He meant it for Moat, but was looking at both Moat and Anna.

“This?” Anna asked. “This is swampland with a view. Everything here is provisional. Just enough to get by.”

“That’s beside every important fucking point I could name.” He wanted to scream at her for patronizing his situation. This wasn’t about one house over another; it was about who had made the better home with what they’d been given.

“What we do here isn’t glamorous,” Moat said. “We try to keep everything out. I spend hours each day with a shovel, in galoshes. Digging out sand and debris. Thoughts I don’t want to have. You’re going back to friends and family. You have the whole world over there.”

Then I want the whole world over, Harvey thought. His mind danced back to the construction site. The frame, still standing, but useless. Was this what hurt now, what kept him from asking anything more? Would any questions he pursued, or answers she gave, expose holes in their life they’d never bothered to fill?

He didn’t want to ask Sue why she’d done it—out of fear he would recognize the reasons. Lust, the encroachment of age, a compound fracture of the two, or something more sublime. Kate was grown and gone, the deed to the house signed; they had settled their accounts. It would seem there was nothing in disarray left in their lives. Harvey was not afraid to talk about the past. He was afraid of the man he’d become—no longer one who wanted Sue so much he’d give up nights to make a ring so perfect she’d never want to be seen without it, but one who sighed through his teeth when she told him she’d been unfaithful, a man who would let something like that go.

They were at a clearing where they could tell night was breaking. Sue saw the first peek of a sloppy peach sun and heard the tide, unendurably calm from this high up. No birds or clouds, yet; the sky seemed empty-handed. “It’s morning,” she said.

“Morning enough,” Anna answered. “We’ve got to find food.”

“If it’s open,” Moat remembered, “I know a place. A little chophouse.”

Sue turned to Harvey. They hadn’t had a full meal since the first night, that light fowl, the rice. Since then they’d had only coffee and liquor, plantains and chocolate. Harvey hadn’t even thought to cut up that dumbbell-shaped fruit he’d bought. Knots turned in their stomach. So little made sense on this island. It was hardly threatening, but they wanted to leave; and though it was beautiful only in pockets, they knew they would someday long to return, just as any dream, good or bad, begs completion.

They walked a little further, around a tangle of banyan trees, their pace picking up, and found the chophouse. But all the signs suggested it was closed. The inside was dark. There was a hearth outside but no smoke. No scents of grease, fire, sugary dough. Harvey took Sue’s hand. Later on, once they’d safely made it back, he would feel suffocated by that hand. It would take effort on Harvey’s part not to turn from Sue when she looked her husband’s way. They would cry and bungle their hugs; their bodies would feel blocky. And they would not know which damages to first attend to. But this could come later. Now they needed only their next meal. “I think we’re in luck,” Anna said, waving her arms to be seen. She’d spotted a woman in the window turning a sign over, turning on lights. The place ahead was opening up after all. They would be received.