Aquamarine (19 page)

“Hallie!” Jesse says when she sees it’s not a joke, and starts laughing. “What did I make?”

“A tamale pie.”

“Oh my.”

Jesse is on to the letters, mostly the odd request to speak before local groups of young people on “The Making of a Champion” or “The Will to Win.”

“No one was ever prouder of anyone than I was of you that day,” Hallie says, launching into a subject she knows Jesse doesn’t like rumpled, but Hallie can’t help herself. “Seeing you win.”

“But I didn’t.”

“You got a medal. I don’t believe they give medals to losers. Oh, and some girl called you from there,” Hallie says. “Another swimmer.” She rummages through her overstuffed purse and pulls out an equally overstuffed peach leatherette wallet bursting with cleaners’ receipts and supermarket tapes and phone numbers of clients. Sweetie pokes her nose in and sniffs these. “Now, where did I put that slip?”

“Maybe this is it,” Jesse says, snatching at a promising scrap. She reads it, then hands it back to Hallie. All it says is “cinnamon floss.”

Hallie checks it out. “Oh. Renee, my hygienist, says it’s terrific; I’ve been meaning to get some.” Hallie goes back to her rooting and almost immediately comes up with the right one. “Here’s your friend.” She hands it to Jesse.

“Evelyn Spencer,” Jesse reads aloud. She can hear her voice, flattened like a movie mummy fresh from the crypt.

Hallie, who prides herself in not missing much, says, “Perhaps we were expecting someone else?”

Friday afternoon, Jesse is teaching her Scared to Death class. She has six students. Breathing is the biggest part of their problem. If she could just pass a little tray of cocktails around before class. As it is, she has to mellow the students out herself, the hard way—distracting them from their worst fears, which are all really the exact same fear. She has worked out a little program combining some poolside yoga, some New Age tapes, and a “go for it” atmosphere. When this all comes together, it works pretty well. Today, however, is not a high point.

Jesse’s favorite student, Dolores Huerta, a Cuban woman who is acutely hydrophobic, but very plucky and determined, has just taken in a large amount of water through her nose. She is gagging and coughing and alternately pointing at herself and flapping her thin arms around like a crazed, rickety penguin. As the five other students look on, faces bleached with terror, Jesse reaches an arm across Dolores’s bony chest and, with the other hand, chops her several times between the shoulder blades.

It’s at this moment that Tom Bellini comes through the archway to the pool, into Jesse’s life for the first time in three years. Sharon, who Jesse knows has been waiting for his car all afternoon, comes out of the house and goes all gawky when her dad hugs her, dropping her shoulders like a marionette. She takes him into the house while Jesse hauls Dolores out of the drink and onto a chaise where she continues to cough wet little coughs. Jesse hops back in the water and tells the others, “Hey! No problem!”

They stand and look at her with wild eyes, pupils dilated. They spend the rest of the hour just getting through it. When they’ve all gone, probably never to return, Jesse dries off, pulls on shorts and a T-shirt over her bathing suit, and goes inside.

Sharon has set out a little spread that tears Jesse’s heart in its desire to please. Sardines on crackers and little ham salad triangle sandwiches with the crusts cut off. She and Tom are having glasses of Perrier with lime. Jesse acts extremely casual around this. She can tell she is supposed to pretend they do this every afternoon—pause genteelly, a little teatimey tradition. She also notices there’s an old, but freshly pressed cloth on the contact-papered kitchen table. And that the recliner has been pulled out of the kitchen, into a corner of the living room, its missing arm obscured against the wall, camouflaged under an avalanche of throw pillows.

Tom is sitting on a lawn chair, his legs crossed at the knees. He’s wearing creamy linen pants and a washed silk shirt. The gentleman caller.

“Your drowning class?” He nods out toward the pool as she comes into the room.

Just as Jesse is thinking that, except for a haircut that is long and locky in the back, he looks much the same, he says, “Boy, Jess. You’re getting to look more and more like your mother.”

This isn’t good. Her mother looks like someone painted by Grant Wood. Jesse reaches up with both hands and rumples her wet hair. As if this is going to make a big difference. As if messing up her hair is going to transform her from a six-foot rangy redhead approaching middle age with an old crick acting up in her back and a wet swimsuit soaking through her shorts, into someone hot. Into Cher.

“The old place looks great,” Tom says now, easing into a deep soak of nostalgia. Transforming Jesse’s hard present into a heart-tugging past. In his version, the school isn’t a dilapidated anachronism; it’s the definition of old-fashioned charm. She hates this. He knows better. She can still see him in his last years here, after he’d figured out that the fame of an Olympic athlete is only slightly longer than everyone’s allotted fifteen minutes. After he’d discovered that the pipes underneath the Bud Barris Academy were in worse repair than its portals. After he’d seen that in hard times—of which there were many seasons in Venus Beach—the first thing people drop is their kids’ swim lessons.

This was where he began to lose interest. Tom saw life as an adventure, an endearing quality in the short run, but one which left him uninterested in dealing with the largish parts of life which turned out to be less than adventures. And so while he could be counted on to take the kids to Safari Land and the Serpentarium, he never once sat in the waiting room of the pediatrician’s office. As a family unit, they functioned more like a mother, her two kids, and their swinging bachelor uncle.

Jesse can pull up a perfect picture of Tom near the end, sitting in the back office, eyebrows bunched together, eyes pouchy from so many hours sitting between the mint-colored canvas-back ledger and the old, crank-operated adding machine, trying to make the red numbers do gymnastics, hurtle into the black, trying to put the fun back into things. When he couldn’t, he left. But that’s a sad memory, so he tints the fatigued truth with sepia.

Jesse leaps in with wild lies, to defend her life from his appreciation. “We’re going to put in a diving pool out back. We’re to the point where we’ve got to expand, or burst at the seams. Some guy came by last month and wanted to franchise us in five southern markets.”

These days Tom is back in New York, working for his father. Over the years, BelliniSport has become a minor contender in the sportswear trade. When Jesse met him, though, it was still Bellini Brothers, a sweatshop in Newark, which cranked out racing suits and flocked team T-shirts. His father, Rocco, had higher aspirations and sent Tom down to Mexico City, to the Olympics, to try to pick up endorsements from medalists for a line of women’s racing suits. Jesse was ambivalent, shy.

That fall, he came to see her again in Missouri. He had a mock-up of the suit with him—blue with maroon and white trim.

It was on the ten-city promotion tour for this suit, in a room in the Drake Hotel in Chicago, that Jesse went to bed with Tom. They were both extremely inexperienced, and so the event took on greater significance than it might have otherwise. They felt linked by it and began hatching their ideas for Tom to escape his family’s business, for Jesse to flee New Jerusalem and the dead sure sequence of life events that awaited her there.

Now Tom has remarried, is on to a new adventure. Jesse was sure he would find some model a couple of decades younger than he is. Instead, and worse in a hard-to-explain way, he married a woman a little older than Jesse, the Bellini account exec at their ad agency. Jesse hates each of the very few things she knows about Kyra. The first is that Kyra is her entire name.

“Oh, get real. What’s her last name?” she asked Tom.

“I think that’s Kyra’s business,” he told her.

Kyra wears only black. It’s her signature color. Jesse tries to imagine all the things that would have to be different about her own life in order for her to have a signature color.

“Kyra says why don’t you come up for a couple of weeks during your vacation,” Tom is telling Sharon now. “You haven’t seen the bambinos yet.”

Jesse hasn’t seen the bambinos, hasn’t even met Kyra. She wasn’t invited to the wedding. Sharon was, and she came back with the report that Kyra was “kind of neat.” She’s forty-one to Tom’s forty-four. Time was pressing in on them, so right off, they had her last-chance baby, which turned out to be the twins.

“Some pics of the rug rats,” he’s saying now, passing them around. When he takes the snapshots back, he looks through them and restrains himself (but not quite hard enough) from smiling. Then slides them back into his wallet.

“So,” he says, drinking down his Perrier as he stands up into his man of action mode, as though everyone else is reclining on chaises, fanning themselves. “I’d better get moving on this. Hustle my butt down to Delray and talk to Handelman. It would be great if we could just lay a little incentive on the guy who owns the BMW.” His blowfish routine, puffing himself up to deal with scarier forms of life in the tank.

When they are outside in the parking lot, standing around his rented Olds, black with tinted windows, he says, “On my way back I thought I’d pick up Anthony. And what’s-her-name.”

“Lynette,” Sharon says.

“The Eskimo,” Jesse says.

“I thought we could all go out for dinner.”

When he’s at the end of the drive, turning onto the county road, Jesse says to Sharon, “Can’t I be washing my hair?”

“Come on,” says Sharon, who just wants everything to be all right. “It’s just one dinner. We’ll all be together again. It’ll be nice. You’ll see.”

“Oh, honey.”

The phone rings just as Jesse is coming out of the shower.

“Sharon!” she calls out, but the phone keeps ringing. She knows Sharon isn’t answering so she won’t have to go through the disappointment of it not being Ian. She blots the water off her hair with a stiff towel while she rushes down the short hall and into her bedroom and picks up.

It’s Oscar. “I just got this thing installed. The guy just left. Now I can grill steaks right on the stove, without ever leaving my realm of air-conditioned splendor. My life is now totally perfect, complete. And I want you to share it with me.”

“The steak,” Jesse says.

“Yes,” Oscar says. “Look, I know it’s short notice—”

“And I’d love to, you know it, but this is happy family night. A heartwarming dinner at the Cattleman’s. I’m sorry you won’t be there to share this joy of the moment with us.”

Oscar doesn’t say anything. She can hear the soft, whippy sound of pages being turned, and knows he is skimming the instruction booklet that came with the grill. She tries to make him feel bad for caring so little about her small sorrows.

“Oscar, I’m just dragged down with too much family at the moment. I’ll be fun again soon, I promise.”

“I’ll keep the massage oil on warm,” he says. Oscar is extremely deft at ducking an argument.

The Cattleman’s Corral has a huge parking lot marked off by a ranch fence. Jesse and Sharon pull in next to Tom’s rental car and get out of the Hog and start toward the restaurant, both of them awkward in heels. There’s a flapping sound at their backs. Sharon doesn’t even have to turn around. “No problem with
those
wipers,” she says to Jesse.

The restaurant is Lynette’s choice. “They have an endless salad bar,” she told Jesse on the phone.

“The Beef Baron sounds good,” Anthony says, looking at the menu.

“We guarantee thirty-two ounces of meat,” says the waitress in a voice dulled by having had to say this too many million times. “It’s for your heartier appetite.”

“They put you in a deep pit, then throw the meat in after you,” Sharon says.

“I’ll try it,” says Anthony.

Sharon, who has ordered fried shrimp every single time Jesse has ever been in a restaurant with her, going back to when she still said “schwimp,” finishes intently studying her menu, looks up, and says, “I think I’ll have the fried shrimp.”

The waitress turns to Jesse, who says, “I’m having trouble deciding between the fish
du jour
and the catch of the day.” Then immediately feels crummy for fooling around while this woman, who has had to serve too many giant hunks of meat and defrosted filets of fish, has to wait for her. “What do you recommend?” she says, trying to get serious.

“I like the Neptune’s Platter,” the waitress says, and her voice lifts a little into the realm of the living, so Jesse knows it’s not a formula response.

“Then that’s what I’ll have.” Actually, tonight Jesse would just as soon skip the food component of this meal entirely, and order an IV with a Valium drip.

Tom, she can tell, is enjoying his small moment, at the head of the table, as it were, although the table is actually round. Basking in good feeling and fond memories. It’s like he’s here on a package tour of his past. The kids like seeing him, it’s clear. Jesse still worries that in the middle of their darker nights, they hate her for not being able to love their father.

Everyone takes a long time at the salad bar, which features, along with the usual torn lettuce and tomato wedges and chickpeas and bacon bits, a table with hot trays of chicken wings and corned beef and cabbage and macaroni and cheese and red Jell-O and bread pudding. Back at the table, their dinners are waiting. At Jesse’s place is a plate filled with a variety of small, batter-covered objects.

“Good shrimp,” Sharon says. Even as she’s sitting down, she’s already pulling a tail out of her mouth.

Tom pours white wine for himself and Jesse out of a heavy amber carafe. He wanted to order a bottle, but they have it only by the glass, or in carafes tapped from the cardboard boxes at the end of the bar.

Anthony and Lynette watch as the waitress sets their Cokes down in front of them. They’re shy in this social situation. They’ve dressed up. Lynette has on a skirt of something vaguely snakeskinny. She has the white, chick-fluff hair of the girls pictured in
People
heading into trendy clubs on the arms of heavy metal stars. It’s as though she’s picking up night signals from some heated social center, all the way out here in this remote locale where none of what she’s ready for is happening.