Last Resort (6 page)

“No sharks, I hope,” Gwen says.

Lorenzo laughs. “No, miss, no sharks here. At least no big ones. Maybe little, baby sharks. Don’t worry. You go have fun—enjoy yourself.”

We walk to the end of the beach where the cliffs that encircle the resort slope down and meet the water. No other guests are this far down the beach, which is a good thing because we look ridiculous, stomping towards the water in our flippers and masks. Swimming side by side, we glide above the coral formations that create underwater canyons. Gwen taps my side and points to a lime colored moral eel undulating in the crevices. Sunlight flickers on a clump of brain coral staunchly defended by tiny shrimp. Black sea urchins, their sharp spines jutting in all directions, lie in clusters and schools of fish swirl around us. We swim a bit farther and disturb a stingray hidden in the sand beneath us. I spot a large barracuda hovering motionless just beneath the waves, probably waiting for a fish to straggle into the open water. A translucent jelly fish pulses by us, as delicate as a scrap of old lace, and we give it a wide berth.

We swim for an hour—sometimes together, sometimes separated but never far from each other. The kaleidoscope of life all around me is mesmerizing.

“How about some lunch?” I ask Gwen.

“Great. Let’s do this again tomorrow,” she replies, flushing out her mask. “Maybe after lunch we can take one of the hobie cats out.”

“It’s a date.”

We return our snorkeling gear and head along the beach towards our bungalow to shower off and dress for lunch. A black sailboat sails into the bay. It looks like an old Spanish galleon, complete with cannons that blast from the gun ports to announce its arrival.

“Isn’t that something?” Don comes to stand by us. “Looks like something out of the age of pirates. The ship came here early today—picked up some of the other guests for a tour of the island.”

The boat drifts as close to the shore as possible without scraping the reef. At the stern Conner and Alexandra lean against the side of the boat. Her hair, tangled from seawater, blows in the wind. Shirtless and poised like a statue of an ancient gladiator, Conner looks to the horizon. One of the crew scampers along the bow and drops anchor. Conner, Alexandra and the other guests climb into a small powerboat chained to the sailboat. They motor to the beach and slide up where we stand. Conner helps Alexandra out of the boat. I am content to keep walking, but Gwen stops.

“How was it?” she asks.

“It was wonderful,” Alexandra sighs dreamily as she pulls her hair into a ponytail. “Captain de Salle sailed around the entire island, and then he took us diving on this amazing shipwreck. I felt like I was in an undersea National Geographic program.”

“That’s great,” Gwen replies and then gestures to me standing impatiently several feet away. “We just went snorkeling.”

“The reefs here are no comparison to the shipwreck de Salle just took us to,” Conner brags.

I take my wife’s hand with the intention of heading back to our room, and say to Conner, “Maybe later in our trip we’ll check out your shipwreck.”

“You know, Phil, if you’re concerned about swimming so far out to sea they have life vests to help you,” Conner says with a cocky grin. “Just in case you get tired.”

“I swim fine,” I retort.

He throws up his hand to indicate he meant no offense, and then promptly proceeds to offend me. “It’s just that it’s easy to get tired once you’ve been out there swimming for a while. You might not have the stamina.”

Am I imagining this or is this guy I hardly know taunting me? Conner seems completely at ease—we are just two men making polite conversation, but something about his amused expression reminds me of a cat toying with a mouse.

“How far did you two swim out on the reef?” Conner asks.

Gwen points to the far end of the beach where we snorkeled.

“Oh, that’s not far,” he remarks, and points to a buoy bobbing out in the bay. “Now if you said you swam out to that buoy I would be impressed. Hey, let’s swim out there now—you and me, Phil. The exercise would do us good.”

Gwen squeezes my hand. “Phillip, that’s too far.”

Conner steps into the surf, not waiting for my reply. “C’mon, let’s go. It’ll be fun. We could make a race of it.”

I have been in situations like this before. The predicament I am in would be familiar to any boy on the playground. Accept the dare or back down? Conner’s easygoing smile barely conceals his smug bravado. When faced with a challenge like this in the past I always feigned an excuse to avoid it. Not this time. I do not want to be that timid, drip of a man, anymore—a man so easily overlooked and disregarded by everyone, even his own wife. I stand next to Conner in the water.

“Phillip, what are you doing?” Gwen asks, perturbed.

Her concern for me is irritating. Alexandra shows no such concern for her husband. How weak does Gwen think I am? I ignore her question.

Conner turns to Don. “Can you count us off?” then he says to Gwen. “Don’t worry about Phil. If he can’t make it he can always climb on my back.”

Don and the other bystanders laugh. Now I officially hate Conner.

Don counts us off, “One, two…” frustratingly long pause. “ …three!”

I leap into the water, arms flailing, hearing nothing but the rush of water and the thrust of my arms propelling me forward. I get several yards out and realize I am alone. I stop swimming. Conner is still on the beach laughing at me.

“C’mon back,” he waves. “I was only kidding.”

My face burns. Conner played me for a fool. I hesitate, treading water, and then a stubborn streak rises in me.

“That’s okay, I still want to swim to the buoy,” I call back. “Like you said, it will be good exercise.”

Gwen starts to protest. I pretend I cannot hear her and swim on. After a few minutes, I feel winded. Despite all my effort, the buoy seems only marginally closer, while my wife and everyone else on the beach appear to be miles away. Pausing to catch my breath, I look down and cannot see the bottom. How deep is it? I have never swum this far from land. If exhaustion overtakes me and I drown, no one will be able to reach me in time. Gritting my teeth, I continue towards the buoy. I can do this. I can call Conner’s bluff. To keep my imagination from dwelling on whatever hungry sea predators might be lurking beneath me, I imagine my triumphant return to the beach, shoving my swimming prowess in that arrogant asshole’s face. Gwen will kiss me and extol my incredible stamina. I will take it in my stride, chuckling and pulling her close to me, accepting compliments from all the guests gathered on the beach.

I reach the buoy—a floating ball tethered to the sea bottom by a slimy, algae covered rope—and cling to it, panting heavily. As the black sailboat sails away, the crew point at me, say something to each other and chuckle. I give a weak wave. No one waves back. I turn to the beach. My wife is just a dot mixed in with the other dots. Now my imagination starts to get the better of me. I picture a shark—a ravenous tiger shark—circling in the deep blue below me, preparing for a fatal upwards rush towards my dangling legs. Or that barracuda—the one I saw poised so diligently over the reef. In a moment, I will feel it slice into me, opening a major artery. Feebly, I will struggle back to the shore but the blood loss will be too great for me to make it.

I shake my head, trying to dislodge these thoughts from my brain. From this vantage point, the entire resort lays before me. How pathetic would I look if I refused to budge from the buoy and someone from the resort had to rescue me in a hobie cat? I am not about to find out. I rest for a few more minutes and then head back to shore.

No matter how spent I feel stopping in the middle of the bay is not an option. To conserve energy I flip over on my back and paddle with my feet. My progress slows, but never stops. It seems like an eternity, but I reach the shallows and touch bottom.

Don and Amy stand next to Gwen. Conner and Alexandra are nowhere in sight. So much for my victory lap.

“That was a stupid thing to do,” Gwen scolds.

I am too exhausted for much of a rejoinder and can only shrug.

“We thought you’d be hanging out with Neptune, young man,” Don teases.

“That…was…my…workout…for…the…day,” I pant, trying to make light of it all.

“Really, Phillip, I cannot believe you,” Gwen mutters. “I am not ready to be a widow. You shouldn’t let Conner goad you into a stunt like that. I am just relieved you made it back.”

I am too tired to mount much of a defense. How could I explain to Gwen that all my life jerks like Conner have mocked and ridiculed me? Conner, Patrick Farber—all the overconfident jackasses who feel I am no competition, simply someone to brush aside while they take what they want. Gwen should realize I am finally standing up for myself.

Part of me wants to tell her all of this, but I do not.

“Let’s get ready for lunch,” I tell her, and we head back to our room.

After lunch, Gwen and I sign up to use one of the hobie cats. The hobie cat, which is the size of a compact car, is basically a miniature catamaran. Lorenzo runs through techniques of successfully piloting the craft.

“If you pull too swiftly on de line de cat will capsize, and you probably won’t be able to flip it back over,” he says.

“Has that happened to the other guests?” Gwen asks.

“Just dis morning,” he shakes his head with a wry smile. “When dat happens one of us has to sail out on another cat to come to de rescue.”

Gwen looks at me warily.

“Maybe it would be better if you came with us,” I suggest. “I don’t trust my sailing coordination.”

Gwen chuckles and pats me on the back. “Don’t feel bad, honey. At least this way we won’t end up floating in the middle of the bay.”

Gwen and I hop onto the tightly stretched canvas as Lorenzo pushes us off from the shore. The moment he raises the sail the ocean breeze propels us at a gentle pace away from land. Lorenzo shifts the sail, leans back on the line and we accelerate. I feel the water slapping against the canvas that we sit on. Within minutes, we are much farther than the buoy I struggled to reach during my swim.

Lorenzo sails near the other resort across the bay. Sunbathers dot the beach. A few shield their eyes from the sun to get a better look at us. Gwen waves to them. A few of them wave back. Lorenzo adjusts the sails to propel us along the craggy, arid coastline. Gwen hands me our camera and poses for a photo, smiling radiantly, long tendrils of hair fluttering in the breeze, the vastness of the open sea as her backdrop.

“What’s that over there?” I point to the rocky isle across the bay that I spotted on our first night at the resort. The red light I saw flashing on the island sits atop a metal tower.

“The light is to warn ships about de island.”

“Does the island have a name?” Gwen asks.

“Not really. Goat Island, I call it. Every once in a while a technician has to go dere to service de warning light. He told me a goat lives on dat island. It must have swum out dere one day—decided it seem like a nice place to call home.”

“Or it couldn’t figure out how to swim back,” I add.

“True, true. Dere is a current dat sweeps towards Goat Island. The goat is probably stuck, unable to swim back against de current. The technician told me he tried to coax it into his boat but no luck.”

“The island is so small. I’m surprised it has enough food to eat,” Gwen muses.

Lorenzo smiles knowingly. “Nothing is tougher den a wild goat. Dey don’t need much to get by.”

Back on the beach, we thank Lorenzo for his expert sailing skills. We shower and dress for dinner. Jonas greets us as we arrive at the empty restaurant. “You have the honor of being our first guests tonight,” he leads us to a small table at the back sheltered by flowering bushes with a prime view of the sea.

Alone with Gwen, I find myself at a loss of anything interesting to say. This was not something I expected. Throughout the day, we got along smoothly, except for the time I swam out to the buoy, but without anyone else around to help spark a conversation, or some physical activity like snorkeling to distract us, we become like two strangers. We deliberate over our dinner menu with the silent intensity of attorneys focused on a contract.

“Do you remember how it was when we first met?” Gwen suddenly asks, breaking the silence.

I pause for a moment, recalling that time. “Yes, of course. Those were the happiest days of my life.”

“You were so funny—the things you used to say. You were so different from the usual dumb jocks I’d dated before. You were clever and silly. When I first met you, I thought ‘What an interesting new friend I’ve made’, and then before I knew it you were so much more to me. Remember that time we went to a picnic and got caught in a downpour?”

I think back wistfully to that day. “The sky turned black. The rain came down in buckets. I was drenched straight through to my underwear.”

“And we ran all the way back to my apartment,” she continues, her face aglow from the memory of that day. “Stomping in the puddles—laughing because there was no point in trying to keep dry anymore. And once home…”

“We tore each other’s clothes off. It was the first time we ever made love—soaking wet and laughing, rolling around on your bed.”

She gazes into her champagne glass as though divining the future in its bubbly depths. “Will it ever be that way again?”

I take a deep breath, choosing my words carefully. “It’s asking a lot to think everything can be just as it was. We had something beautiful—”

“And I ruined it,” she whispers.

“Who knows? Maybe in time it can be good again…not like it was…different—but still good.”

The restaurant is nearly full now. We say no more as we eat our meal and look at the churning sea.

With our melancholy meal out of the way, Gwen rises from her seat and gestures to the calypso band playing a slow song in the lounge. “Come dance with me.”

Other couples are dancing arm in arm, smiling, chattering to each other. The last thing I want to do is join them. Nevertheless, Gwen stands before me, hand outstretched, with such a sad, hopeful expression, that I take her hand and stride to the dance floor. Connor and Alexandra are there. He dips her with dramatic flourish and she squeals with delight. I cannot stand to be near him. I lead Gwen to the other side of the dance floor. Don and Amy dance cheek to cheek, and wave to us as we approach.