The Beach Boy

The friends met for dinner, as they did the second Sunday of every month, at a small Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. There were three couples: Marty and Barbara, Jerry and Maureen, and John and Marcia, who had recently returned from a weeklong island getaway to celebrate their twenty-ninth wedding anniversary. “Were the beaches beautiful? How was the hotel? Was it safe? Was it memorable? Was it worth the money?” the friends asked.

Marcia said, “You had to see it to believe it. The ocean was like bathwater. The sunsets? Better than any painting. But the political situation, don’t get me started. All the beggars!” She put a hand over her heart and sipped her wine. “Who knows who’s in charge? It’s utter chaos. Meanwhile, the people all speak English! ” The vestiges of colonialism, the poverty, the corruption—it had all depressed her. “And we were harassed,” she told the friends. “By prostitutes. Male ones. They followed us down the beach like cats. The strangest thing. But the beach was absolutely gorgeous. Right, John?”

John sat across the table, swirling his spaghetti. He glanced up at Marcia, nodded, winked.

The friends wanted to know what the prostitutes had looked like, how they’d dressed, what they’d said. They wanted details.

“They looked like normal people,” Marcia said, shrugging. “You know, just young, poor people, locals. But they were very complimentary. They kept saying, ‘Hello, nice people. Massage? Nice massage for nice people?’ ”

“Little did they know!” John joked, furrowing his eyebrows like a maniac. The friends laughed.

“We’d read about it in the guidebook,” Marcia said. “You’re not supposed to acknowledge them at all. You don’t even look them in the eye. If you do, they’ll never leave you alone. The beach boys. The male prostitutes, I mean. It’s sad,” she added. “Tragic. And, really, one wonders how anybody can starve in a place like that. There was food everywhere. Fruit on every tree. I just don’t understand it. And the city was rife with garbage. _Rife! _” she proclaimed. She put down her fork. “Wouldn’t you say, hon?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘rife,’ ” John answered, wiping the corners of his mouth with his cloth napkin. “Fragrant, more like.”

The waiter collected the unfinished plates of pasta, then returned and took their orders of cheesecake and pie and decaffeinated coffee. John was quiet. He scrolled through photos on his cell phone, looking for a picture he’d taken of a monkey seated on the head of a Virgin Mary statue. The statue was painted in bright colors, and its nose was chipped, showing the white, chalky plaster under the paint. The monkey was black and skinny, with wide-spaced, neurotic eyes. Its tail curled under Mary’s chin. John turned the screen of his phone toward the table.

“This little guy,” he said.

“Aw!” the friends cried. They wanted to know, “Were the monkeys feral? Were they smelly? Are the people Catholic? Are they all very religious there?”

“Catholic,” Marcia said, nodding. “And the monkeys were everywhere. Cute but very sneaky. One of them stole John’s pen right out of his pocket.” She rattled off whatever facts she could remember from the nature tour they’d taken. “I think there are laws about eating the monkeys. I’m not so sure. They all spoke English,” she repeated, “but sometimes it was hard to understand them. The guides, I mean, not the monkeys.” She chuckled.

“The monkeys spoke Russian, naturally,” John said, and put away his phone.

The table talk moved on to plans for renovating kitchens, summer shares, friends’ divorces, new movies, books, politics, sodium, and cholesterol. They drank the coffees, ate the desserts. John peeled the wrapper off a roll of antacids. Marcia showed off her new wristwatch, which she’d purchased duty-free at the airport. Then she reapplied her lipstick in the reflection in her water glass. When the check came, they all did the math, divvying up the cost. Finally, they paid and went out onto the street and the women hugged and the men shook hands.

“Welcome home,” Jerry said. “Back to civilization.”

“Ooh-ooh ah-ah!” John cried, imitating a monkey.

“Jesus, John,” Marcia whispered, blushing and batting the air with her hand as if shooing a fly.

Each couple went off in a different direction. John was a bit drunk. He’d finished Marcia’s second glass of wine because she’d said it was giving her a headache. He took her arm as they turned the corner onto East Eighty-second Street toward the Park. The streets were nearly empty, late as it was. The whole city felt hushed, focussed, like a young dancer counting her steps.

Marcia fussed with her silk scarf, also purchased duty-free at the airport. The pattern was a paisley print in red and black and emerald green and had reminded her of the vibrant colors she’d seen the locals wearing on the island. Now she regretted buying the scarf. The tassels were short and fuzzy, and she thought they made the silk look cheap. She could give the scarf away as a gift, she supposed, but to whom? It had been so expensive, and her closest friends—the only people she would ever spend so much money on—had just seen her wearing it. She sighed and looked up at the moon as they entered the Park.

“Thank God Jerry and Maureen are getting along again,” Marcia said. “It was exhausting when they weren’t.”

“Marty was funny about the wine, wasn’t he?” John said. “I told him I was fine with Syrah. What does it matter? Que sera, sera.” He unhooked his arm from Marcia’s elbow and put it around her shoulder.

“It gave me such a headache,” Marcia complained. “Should we cut across the field, or go around?”

“Let’s be bold.”

They stepped off the gravel onto the grass. It was a dark, clear night in the Park, quiet except for the sound of distant car horns and ripping motors echoing faintly through the trees. John tried for a moment to forget that the city was right there, surrounding them. He’d been disappointed by how quickly his life had returned to normal after the vacation. As before, he woke up in the morning, saw patients all day long, returned home to eat dinner with Marcia, watched the evening news, bathed, and went to bed. It was a good life, of course. He wasn’t suffering from a grave illness; he wasn’t starving; he wasn’t being exploited or enslaved. But, gazing out the window of the tour bus on the island, he had felt envious of the locals, of their ability to do whatever was in their nature. His own struggles seemed like petty complications, meaningless snags in the dull itinerary that was his life. Why couldn’t he live by instinct and appetite, be primitive, be free?

At a rest stop, John had watched a dog covered in mange and bleeding pustules rub itself against a worn wooden signpost. He was lucky, he thought, not to be that dog. And then he felt ashamed of his privilege and his discontentedness. “I should be happy,” he told himself. “Marcia is.” Even the beggars tapping on car windows, begging for pennies, were smiling. “Hello, nice people,” the beach boys had said. John had wanted to return their salutations and ask what it was that they had to offer. He’d been curious. But Marcia had shushed him, taken his hand, and plodded down the beach with her eyes fixed on the blank sand.

Crossing the lawn in Central Park, John now tried to recall the precise rhythm of the crashing waves on the beach on the island, the smell of the ocean, the magic and the danger he’d sensed brewing under the surface of things. But it was impossible. This was New York City. When he was in it, it was the only place on earth. He looked up. The moon was just a sliver, a comma, a single eyelash in the dark, starless sky.

“I forgot to call Lenore,” Marcia was saying as they walked. “Remind me tomorrow. She’ll be upset if I don’t call. She’s so uptight.”

They reached the edge of the lawn and stepped onto a paved path that led them up to a bridge over a plaza, where people were dancing in pairs to traditional Chinese music. John and Marcia stopped to watch the dark shapes moving in the soft light of lanterns. A young man on a skateboard rumbled past them.

“Home sweet home,” Marcia said.

John yawned and tightened his arm around her shoulder. The silk of Marcia’s scarf was slippery, like cool water rippling between his fingers. He leaned over and kissed her forehead. There she was, his wife of nearly thirty years. As they walked on, he thought of how pretty she’d been when they were first married. In all their years together, he had never been interested in other women, had never strayed, had even refused the advances of a colleague one night, a few years ago, at a conference in Baltimore. The woman had been twenty years his junior, and when she invited him up to her room John had blushed and made a stuttering apology, then spent the rest of the evening on the phone with Marcia. “What did she expect from me?” he’d asked. “Some kind of sex adventure?”

“We can watch that movie when we get home,” Marcia said as they reached the edge of the Park. “The one about the jazz musician.”

“Whatever you like,” John said. He yawned again.

“Maureen said it was worth watching.”

“It’s unconscionable what they are doing to you, Eduardo,” Marcia said to the doorman in the lobby of their building. The doormen were petitioning management to provide a proper chair for them to sit in. All they had now was a tall stool with no back. “To have to stand for that many hours, doesn’t that constitute torture? John is going to have a word with them. They’ll do something. They have to.” Marcia pulled the silk scarf from her neck and folded it in her hands.

Eduardo leaned on his little podium, propped his chin in his hand. “How was the vacation?” he asked.

“Oh, it was wonderful, wonderful. Everything. I mean, the seafood was just beyond compare! The ocean was like bathwater,” Marcia answered. “And now we’re utterly exhausted.”

“Jet-lagged,” John said.

Eduardo tapped his pen on the podium. “When I go home to my country, it’s the same. I don’t sleep.”

“Yes, it’s rough. Well, good night,” Marcia sang.

She and John climbed the wide marble stairs to their second-floor apartment. They’d lived in the building for twenty-six years. They could have navigated their way through the lobby and up the stairs in complete darkness, and had, in fact, done so during a blackout one summer when all of Manhattan lost power for a night. Marcia had enjoyed it. They’d lit candles, eaten the ice cream that was going to melt anyway, and talked.

Now they walked down the bright, wallpapered hallway, and John unlocked the door to their apartment. Inside, there was still a stack of unopened mail on the front table, a blinking red light on the answering machine, a smell of mothballs from the closet where Marcia had been looking for her squash racket earlier that day. “I want to get it restrung now,” she’d insisted, “before it’s too late.”

“Too late for what?” John had asked.

“For when someone asks me to play.”

John had stood and watched his wife’s bottom wiggle as she stooped down into the depths of the closet. She was in remarkable shape for a woman in her fifties. She often teased John that he needed to start taking better care of himself. “I’m going to make it to a hundred and five. You don’t want me to have to replace you, do you?”

“You’d have no problem, I’m sure,” John answered.

It was true. People liked Marcia. All of John and Marcia’s friends were really friends of hers. John sometimes felt as if he were just a strange appendage to his wife. Surely she could have done better—a brain surgeon, a lawyer, a physicist. Had he given her the life she deserved? They did take a trip every year, usually in late summer to celebrate their anniversary, but that was all. They’d never had children. John had never won any awards.

“I’m going to take a Tylenol for my headache,” Marcia said. “Want to get the movie set up?” She shut the closet door and ran her fingers across the squash racket, which now lay on the table in the hallway.

“Will you eat popcorn?” John asked.

“I really shouldn’t. But if you’re making some . . .” Her voice trailed off as she walked down the hallway to the bathroom, flicking on the lights and rubbing her temples.

John went to the kitchen and got the jar of popcorn kernels down from the cupboard. He liked to make popcorn the old-fashioned way, in a big steel pot with a long metal arm that stirred the kernels. He lit the stove, melted the margarine, poured the popcorn in, and stood over the pot with his eyes closed, turning the handle slowly and feeling the warm air rise toward him, remembering moments on the island when the sun on his face had struck him as so hot, so intimate, it was like Marcia’s breath on his cheek.

As the kernels began to pop, he brought his ear to the lid of the pot, closer to the heat and the noise. The irregular staccato made his pulse speed up. The heart fascinated him. Sometimes he liked to put his ear to Marcia’s chest and listen. Her heartbeat was light and chatty, a rhythm that made you want to waltz around the kitchen. John could have been a cardiologist, but he’d pursued dermatology instead. At parties, he wowed people with descriptions of boils and rashes and growths, strange hair patterns, nasty scars, pus-filled cysts, bizarre freckles, cancers, moles. “Within six feet of this fellow, you could detect the distinct smell of porcini risotto,” he’d say. “His armpit was filled with fungus.” At the stove, John righted himself, continued to stir the popcorn with one hand, and took his own pulse with two fingers of the other, pressing on his throat and breathing slowly until his heart rate returned to normal.

Meanwhile, Marcia took two extra-strength Tylenol, splashed some cold water on her face, brushed her teeth, and went to sit on the leather sofa in front of the television in the living room. A sudden excruciating pain in her head made her vision blurry. It was as if she’d been plunged underwater, the room murky and muffled, and she couldn’t breathe. She tried to call out to John. “Honey? John?” She could only gasp. Her throat gurgled, her hands trembled, and then she died. It was that simple. She was gone.

When all was quiet, John turned off the stove and poured the popcorn into a wooden salad bowl. He carried the bowl and the saltshaker into the living room, sat down next to Marcia’s dead body, salted the popcorn, ate several handfuls, and turned on the television. “Which movie did you say?” he asked her, scrolling through the pay-per-view listings. He looked at her downturned face. Her head hung to one side, resting on her shoulder. John smoothed her hair, put a hand on her knee for a moment, changed the channel to the baseball game, lowered the volume, ate the rest of the popcorn, then fell asleep beside her.

“I’m sorry, Mr. John,” Eduardo said in the lobby, as the body was wheeled out early the next morning. John nodded, still in shock, having woken up and discovered Marcia, cold and limp, slumped across the couch beside him. He followed the E.M.T.s out onto the street and watched them load her into the back of the ambulance and drive away, the siren blaring—but for what? “She’s already dead!” John cried out after them. Eduardo took him by the arm and led him back inside and up to the apartment. A neighbor brought him some water from the kitchen. The glass, a souvenir from a cruise that he and Marcia had taken through the fjords of Norway, retained a faint smear of her berry-colored lipstick on its rim. John put his mouth on it and sipped.

The memorial service was a week later. The chapel ceiling at St. Ignatius was vaulted and painted a cornflower blue with spiky white stars. The carpet was dark red, with a jagged gold pattern that reminded John of shattered glass. Marcia’s friends filled the pews. They moaned and wept. Maureen and Barbara embraced John and held his hands and babbled all at once, drowning out the few words he had to say as he took his seat in the front pew. He dabbed at his eyes with old tissues he found squirrelled away in the breast pocket of his suit.

Several friends told stories, boasting about how much Marcia had meant to them, how deeply she’d touched their lives. Marcia would have liked it, John thought—all these people discussing her, pointing out her best qualities, remembering her finest moments. She’d have eaten it up. But what did these people really know about her? What could one know about a person? John had known her best of all, had been able to predict her every move, the arc of her sighs, her laughs, the twists of her shadow as it crossed a room. In the days since her death, he’d felt her drifting through the apartment. He’d done double takes the way you do when you think you see your own cat or dog begging for food under the table at a restaurant. Nobody would understand, John thought, how well he knew the sound of Marcia’s coffee spoon hitting the saucer, how the sheets rustled around her when she turned over in bed. But were those things significant enough, he wondered, to boast about?

When it was his turn to get up, John spoke of their recent trip to the island. “She was so happy there,” he said. “So alive.” He paused, waiting for a laugh, but there was none. He looked out at the crowd, all those drawn, wrinkled faces wet with emotion. He could imagine Marcia sitting among them, already composing her opinion of the speech he was giving. “He was terribly overcome,” he imagined her saying to her friends over coffee and cake at the reception. “You could see him really straining to get something across. To no avail, I’m afraid. Well, that’s John. Not the best talker. But that’s why we got along so well.”

John leaned against the lectern for balance, trying to think of interesting memories to relate. “The seafood,” he began to say, but stopped himself. It all seemed so trite. “Why tell stories?” he wondered aloud. “As soon as something is over, that’s it. Why revive it constantly? Things happen, and then more things, inevitably, happen next. So?” He shrugged. His hands trembled. He tried to smile, but he was now, indeed, terribly overcome. He left the lectern, tripping down the shallow steps. He felt as he did when he was gassed at the dentist’s office—disoriented, befuddled. “Eduardo?” John called out. He staggered drunkenly. His secretary came up and guided him back to his seat.

Maureen took the stage next and recited what she claimed was one of Marcia’s favorite poems. John pulled the last crumpled tissue from his breast pocket. He found a tiny wishbone wrapped up inside it. He recalled a dermatology-conference dinner, where quail had been served, a few years earlier. He’d planned on bringing the wishbone home so that he and Marcia could make a wish together. John always wished for whatever Marcia wished for. “This way, we both win,” he said. Now he pulled the bone from the tissue and held it in his hand as he dried his tears. Poor Marcia, he thought. She could have wished for everlasting life.

“We passed the fields of gazing grain, we passed the setting sun,” Maureen was saying, her voice swelling and shaking in a way that she must have rehearsed for days, John thought. He’d always secretly hated Maureen. Her tireless obsession with rain-forest conservation confounded him. The woman was from White Plains, for Christ’s sake. He would not miss Maureen, or any of Marcia’s friends, for that matter. “Poor Marcia, she really loved you, you know,” Barbara had told him before the memorial. Of course he knew that Marcia loved him. They’d been married for nearly thirty years. People feel so special, so wise, when somebody they know drops dead. “We’d just seen her at dinner,” he’d heard Maureen telling someone. “And to think, just a few hours later, she was gone forever. Isn’t life strange?”

But life wasn’t strange at all. Marcia’s sudden death was the strangest thing that had ever happened to John. And even that wasn’t very strange. People died all the time, in fact. As he crushed the tiny wishbone in his fist, it cracked into pointy shards that poked into the skin of his palm like needles. “Since then ’tis centuries; but each feels shorter than the day,” Maureen continued. John shook his head at this nonsense. Listening to the stupid woman revel in the spotlight made him ill. He held his bleeding hand over his heart, feeling it pound like an axe through a thick wooden door. His throat clenched with what—sorrow? Was that all it was? He scoffed at how small that seemed. Then something seemed to break inside him. His breath caught. He choked and coughed. The wild thumping of his heart stopped. He belched loudly, from the depths of his gut, as though releasing some dark spirit that had been lodged down there his whole life. His secretary laid a hand on his shoulder. “Excuse me,” John said, wiping saliva from his mouth. When he looked up again, Maureen’s poem was over. He straightened in his seat and felt his heart start back up. Its beat was now soft and aimless, like a baby’s babbling. He was calm, he thought. He was fine.

Next, Marcia’s choir group took the stage and began to sing an old Negro spiritual. They sang lifelessly, as though the song didn’t mean anything to them. Perhaps it didn’t. John rose and walked up the aisle to the bathroom at the back of the chapel. He blew his nose for a while in the stall, urinated, defecated, then flushed the broken wishbone down the toilet.

A week later, John still had not returned to work. He spent his days in silence, eating duty-free Ferrero Rocher chocolates and bouncing the strings of Marcia’s squash racket against his skull. He paced the apartment, his mind empty but for the bits of music he heard from cars passing on the street outside. Or he sat on the leather sofa in front of the muted television, which was showing back-to-back episodes of true-crime docudramas. People liked to kill one another, it seemed, on speedboats. Aliases, disguises, offshore bank accounts—these notions began to pepper John’s mind. With Marcia gone, perhaps he could fill his remaining years with criminal pursuits, he thought. He was too clumsy to be a cat burglar. But couldn’t he stalk someone? Or vandalize something? Library books? The back seats of taxis? Easiest would be to send death threats to someone he despised—Maureen, perhaps. He could do that without even leaving the apartment. He winced at his cowardice. At every stage of his life he’d been reasonable, dutiful. He’d prescribed creams, lanced cysts, cut plantar warts out of the rubbery soles of smelly feet. Once, he’d pulled a seven-foot coil of ingrown hair from an abscess on the tip of a patient’s tailbone. That was as wild as it got for John. He’d never been in a fight. His body bore no scars. The hands now folded in his lap were bland, beige, wrinkled in all the predictable ways.

The spot he’d chosen for the urn of Marcia’s ashes was on a shelf in the kitchen, next to the coffee grinder and the mini food processor that she had used expressly for guacamole. “The secret is to freeze it first,” he recalled her saying. Or was that something else? John didn’t care. He’d had enough of what people said, tips and tales, theories, tidbits. If he could have it his way, nobody would ever say anything again. The entire world would go silent. Even the clocks wouldn’t tick. All that mattered would be the beating of hearts, the widening and narrowing of pupils, the whirling of ties and loose strands of hair in the wind—nothing voluntary, nothing false. He opened the fridge and peeled back the tinfoil from a dish one of the friends had brought over. Fat from the chicken had congealed into a dun-colored jelly. He stuck his finger in it, just to feel the cold gunk.

Then the phone rang.

“And?” is how John answered. The voice on the line was a recording from the local convenience store. Marcia’s photos had been printed and were ready to be picked up. She’d used a disposable camera on their trip to the island. John hung up the phone. Marcia’s purse was where she’d left it, on the table in the hallway. He rifled through and found the claim stub in her wallet. Without changing out of his pajamas, he put on a jacket and shoes and went down to the lobby.

“How are you, Mr. John?” Eduardo asked. He followed John to the door and opened it, his black rubber shoes squeaking on the polished marble floor.

John didn’t answer. He had nothing to say. He let his head hang and plodded slowly down the block. He didn’t care if people thought he looked forlorn or deranged. Let them judge. Let them entertain themselves with their stories, he thought.

At the convenience store, he went to the counter and pulled out the claim stub. When the shopgirl asked for his last name, he handed over his business card. ****

“Can you confirm the home address?” she asked.

John shook his head.

The girl rolled her eyes. “Are you deaf or something?” she asked.

“Maaa, haa,” John said. He ground his jaws and pointed to his ears.

“O.K.,” the girl said, softening. She held up a finger. “One minute.”

John nodded. Why would she need to confirm his address, anyway? What kind of impostor would want someone else’s photographs? Someone with a speedboat, perhaps. John laughed at himself. “Maaa, haa,” he said again.

“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t understand you,” the girl said. She slid the packet of photos across the counter and pointed to the glowing numbers on the cash register’s display screen. She held up her forefinger and thumb and rubbed them together. “Money,” she said. “Dinero.”

“Gaaah,” John said. He handed her the cash, then grunted. The girl waved goodbye cheerfully. If Marcia could see him now, acting like some kind of Frankenstein, she’d laugh, John thought.

He pulled the photos from their sleeve and shuffled through them on the way home. There were half a dozen shots of ocean waves, the horizon, and several street scenes, each interrupted by the splatter of bird shit on the car window through which they’d been taken. Nothing looked as beautiful as it had in real life. The people, the buildings, the beach—it was all flat and dull, despite the glossy finish of the photo paper. There was a closeup of cocktails served in coconuts and decorated with toothpick-speared chunks of pineapple and orange slices and Maraschino cherries, colorful paper umbrellas, curlicue straws. On either side of the frame were the brown, deeply lined hands of the server holding the raffia tray. There was a shot of Marcia’s ankles, her feet plunged deep into the pale-gray sand. It had been gritty, soft, dry volcanic ash, like what was left of Marcia in the urn in the kitchen, John supposed. There were a few photos of the pool snapped from the balcony of their hotel room, a blurry shot of John on his cell phone in the lobby, one of John shaking hands with a tiny monkey in the forest, John shaking hands with the nature guide, John eating a platter of crabs. There was only one photo of Marcia, a self-portrait taken in the reflection of the vanity mirror in the hotel bathroom. She smiled coquettishly in her berry-colored lipstick, her face a floating mask above the white orb of the flash.

The final photo in the set seemed to be an extra, a half-exposure at the end of the roll. The right side of the picture was gray, empty. A red line went down the center like a burn mark. The left side showed the grainy landscape of the beach at night, and, in the bottom corner, the top half of a face. It belonged to a local, a native. A beach boy, John presumed, one of those male prostitutes. The dark skin appeared almost black in the dimness of the picture. Only the whites of the eyes glistened, almost yellow, like hanging lanterns. Marcia had taken the photo by accident, John supposed. But when had she come so close to a beach boy? She’d made such a fuss about keeping her distance. During that first walk, when the beach boys had followed them, Marcia had hurried back to the hotel grounds and insisted vehemently that John look away. “If you make eye contact, it’s like an invitation,” she’d said.

“To what?” John had asked.

“To a party you wouldn’t like,” she’d answered, “and that you’d have to pay for.”

“Would you like it?” he’d asked. He’d been joking, of course. Marcia had said nothing.

“Hello, nice people? Hello?”

At home, John found Marcia’s magnifying glass in her bedside drawer. He sat down, turned on the lamp, and held the magnifying glass over the beach boy’s eyes, hoping he might find some kind of explanation reflected in them. Had Marcia been unfaithful? Had she been pretending, as long as John had known her, to be a prude? He craned his neck and brought his own eye closer and closer to the photo, squinting, straining every muscle until he found something he took to be a sign, an invitation—a single red pixel in the darkness of the boy’s right pupil.

Back on the island, John stood once again in the hotel lobby. The overnight flight had been bumpy. He hadn’t slept at all. The radio in the hotel shuttle from the airport had warned of hurricane-force gales, possible flooding, thunder, lightning. A murky bank of clouds crept slowly but steadily across the sky.

“Will we have to evacuate?” John asked.

The desk attendant rubbed her eyes. “Maybe, sir. They don’t tell us anything.” She slid John’s room key across the counter. Behind the check-in desk, the clerks were talking and yawning and sharing small cookies from a grease-soaked paper bag. John remembered the cookies from a tour of the market on the other side of the island. The guide had explained to him and Marcia that the cookies were made not from flour but from some native root vegetable, molasses, and butter that came from goat’s milk. A sack of twenty cookies cost less than a dollar.

“Can you imagine?” Marcia had whispered.

John had hoped that the guide would arrange for them to try some, but they’d simply idled by the vender’s cart, Marcia covering her mouth and nose with a tissue, while the guide chatted with a passerby in the local patois. Rife, John recalled now. The sights and sounds and smells of the market came back to him. There were bowls of spices and beans of every hue, hot goat’s milk poured from dirty metal teapots atop charcoal briquettes into small plastic cups like the ones John used at the dentist’s to rinse and spit. Hot smoke from cauldrons of roasting meat roiled across baskets of nuts and fruits, stacks of woven shawls that the women used as slings to carry their babies on their backs, pyramids of pastel-colored toilet-paper rolls. In a dark corner of the market, they’d passed an old man, his eyes sky blue with cataracts. He sat behind a table full of empty Coke bottles and tin cans. Beside him was a rickety chest of drawers. When John asked what the man was selling, the guide answered “spiritual medicine,” twirled his finger in the air, and widened his eyes, as though to make fun of the crazy old man. “People in the villages believe in that nonsense,” the guide said. “They believe in magic. Evil.” He crossed himself and laughed, then yelled at a young girl who had splashed dirty water on his shoes while rolling her bike through a puddle on the path. One of Marcia’s photos had been of that market. The royal-blue plastic tarps covering the stalls appeared nearly black, like funeral shrouds. Recalling that image now gave John the chills. He’d told everyone back home that he was going to the island to scatter Marcia’s ashes. That was the excuse he gave.

As John unlocked the door of his hotel room, a family passed by him in the hall—parents with three sleepy children.

“Last flight back to the mainland,” the father said with a British accent, his arms full of gape-mouthed, plush toy monkeys.

John wasn’t very worried. The beach boys would not get swept away in any flood, he knew. He had spotted a few of them already on the drive from the hotel. For prostitutes, he thought, they seemed so relaxed walking along the road, so casual in their sun-bleached striped T-shirts, their rubber sandals grinding over the gray dirt. His plan was to find the boy from Marcia’s photo and do whatever she had done with him off in the dunes at night while he was sleeping. That would be revenge enough to set his heart at ease, he thought. It would be the strange thing that gave his life some meaning at last. It would be his life’s one adventure.

He inspected his hotel room, approving of the lone queen-size bed, the flat-screen mounted on the wall, the small window that looked out onto the beach. The sky had an eerie, vapid whiteness. John could see the red-tiled roof of the hotel’s al-fresco dining area and one corner of the fence that partitioned the beach. To get to a private spot where he could dump the ashes in the water, he’d have to go beyond that fence. A few beach boys sat perched in the dunes beyond the hotel, like exotic birds in their bright-colored shorts. Even with no sun to reflect off their taut dark-brown skin, their bare backs gleamed. If only he had Marcia’s opera glasses, John thought, he could see their faces.

The heavy-duty black plastic bag containing Marcia’s ashes had passed through customs undetected. Of course, John had left the metal urn at home. He figured that if anyone asked what the bag contained he’d say that it was medicinal bath salts to soak his feet in. But nobody questioned him. He took Marcia’s ashes out of his suitcase, carried the bag down to the empty dining room, selected a stale roll from the breakfast-buffet table, sat and ate it, and pocketed a knife from the place setting. He nodded and smiled at the hotel workers, who were busy shuttering the windows in preparation for the storm.

Outside, the wind whipped at John’s face, forcing him to pitch his head forward as he walked along the fence. Sand pricked at his skin like needles. As he approached the waves, the sky flashed. A moment later, thunder pealed long and deep, and a few cold drops of rain fell on his back. He crouched by the water and took out the knife. It was a cheap knife, with dull, wide serrations. The plastic of the bag was so thick that he had to place it on the sand, hold it down with one hand, and stab at it repeatedly. To keep the sand out of his eyes, he shut them. He thought one last time of Marcia, pictured her clucking her tongue at this indecorous ceremony. He thought of all the wishbone wishes he’d wasted on her petty desires: good seats at the movies, a trip to Vermont to see the foliage, a sale on cashmere sweaters or towels. And, secretly, all along she’d been a whore, he thought, a deviant, a pervert, carousing with prostitutes right under his nose! Meanwhile, she’d shushed him every time he’d said anything remotely off-color, as if anyone were paying attention, as if it even mattered. John tore at the hole he’d made in the plastic bag, crawled over the sand on his knees, felt for the water, and dumped the ashes out.

A mere hour later, the storm was over. The sky was gray, but the rain had stopped. Little damage had been done to the island, though the hotel had lost electricity. John’s room was dim. From his window, he watched the ocean pounding the beach in tall, floating waves, as the wind howled like a cartoon ghost in a haunted house, comically persistent. He stood and uselessly pressed the buttons on the TV remote, then stared at his reflection in the rectangular black screen. He was still wearing what he’d worn on the overnight flight: his gray summer-weight wool trousers and a white linen dress shirt. The shirt was now crushed and wrinkled, the collar warped around his neck. His face was swollen, his ears full of sand. His graying hair lay in waxy tendrils around his face. He laughed at his slovenly appearance and tried to smooth his hair back, but the rain and the salt air had dried it into straw. He didn’t care. Marcia was gone for good now, and he felt like celebrating.

Downstairs in the empty restaurant, John took a seat on a barstool. Outside, workers were unfolding the shutters from the dining-room windows. The clouds over the ocean were paler and thinner than before. He ordered a Glenfiddich, saluted the bartender, and drank. “How much for the whole bottle?” John asked. “No, don’t tell me. Just charge it to my room.” He flashed the number on his key. A whole bottle just for him, out from under Marcia’s shaming gaze. Why had he let her control him like that? He’d lived his entire life on his best behavior, a slave to decorum. For what? John shook his head and poured himself more whiskey. He could do whatever he wanted now. He could buy a hundred goat-butter cookies. He could make all the crass jokes he liked. Through the windows, he saw the clouds part and the sun shine. The staff began to drag the lounge chairs and tables and umbrellas back onto the deck. A few large gulls coasted back and forth, low across the beach. John smacked his lips, slid off his barstool, and took the bottle of Glenfiddich down to the sand, carelessly kicking off his salt-stained leather loafers and peeling off his socks on the way. He walked around the hotel fence and along the shoreline for several minutes, well past the spot where he’d dumped Marcia’s ashes.

The sand was cool and hard under his feet. The waves were high and frothy still, but he could swim, he thought, chugging from the bottle. He looked around to see if anyone was watching. The beach was empty. He stuck the Glenfiddich in the sand, quickly removed his pants, and started sloshing into the warm, churning water. He waded in waist high, stiffening his body against the turbulent gushes, which seemed somehow gentle and powerful at once. He looked out at the horizon. This was what the beach was good for: staring out at the sea gave one the feeling of infinity. But it was an illusion, John thought. The sea wasn’t infinite. There was land on the other side. Wasn’t that always the truth about things? That they ended? How many more years did he have, at this point? Ten? Twenty? A powerful wave knocked him down, and when he righted himself and found his footing he was facing the shore. A beach boy in tiny, bright-red shorts stood on the sand, watching him. John waved and hollered “Hello!” just before the next wave pulled him under.

A few weeks later, telling the story over dinner, John would explain that the storm had kept him cooped up for days. “It barely made a dent, that storm. But everything shut down. You know these poor countries—there’s no infrastructure. Even if you did try to intervene and make some order, the people are all so superstitious, it would take a hundred years, with all their spells and blessings.”

“Well, I think it’s beautiful of you,” Maureen said, “to go back there, with Marcia.”

“She said it was heaven, after all,” Barbara said. “Didn’t she say that? That it was heaven?”

“She did say that, yes,” Maureen answered.

John put a hand over his heart, which was now broken by something he found far more interesting than a dead wife. His drunken jaunt on the beach had ended strangely. The beach boy, though not the one who’d appeared in Marcia’s photograph, had indeed been young and beautiful, his eyes yellow, his lips thick and glossy. He’d spotted John flailing in the undertow, pulled him from the water, and dragged him to shore. John had rolled onto his side, sputtering and gagging on the salt water he’d swallowed. The boy stood over him, his strong brown legs just inches from John’s naked body. “You saved me,” John managed to say. As he reached a hand out to grip the boy’s ankle, his fingers trembled. Some kind of force field seemed to surround the boy. He couldn’t be touched. When John held his palm over the boy’s foot, he could feel heat rising up. The boy took a step away. Perhaps he isn’t even real, John thought. But there he was. “Come here,” John demanded. “I need to ask you something.” He got onto his hands and knees, tried to stand, but he was too exhausted. He was drunk. He collapsed on the sand. The boy stood and stared for a while, then yawned, turned, and walked away. It was clear to him and to the other beach boys watching from their perch in the dunes that the old man wasn’t carrying any money. ♦