The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories (15 page)

UPDATE:

Liz and I liked to believe that our utopia would go on indefinitely, but instead it lasted four years, which is still a good long time. In 2003, her boyfriend took a postdoc in Manhattan and she left to join him in a fabulous apartment in The Village. By that time, I was spending most nights over at my boyfriend Kevin's house anyway. So Liz and I each ended up ensconced in hetero-normative relationships.

In 2004, Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage. Days after the ruling, my friends Julie and Laura took vows under a fluttering hoopa, and a rabbi announced that their partnership was now protected by the laws of the Commonwealth. I wept with joy -- as did almost everyone sitting in the folding chairs around me.

Liz and I remain close friends, and we still call each other “my Boston wife.”

“Are those polka dots?” I called, trying not to sound like I was panicking.

Nancy, in the front of our kayak, twisted to peer back at me. “What?”

I pointed ahead. We were floating toward a stretch of sand that was pocked with blotches, as if a giant clown had laid out his suit to dry.

“Weird,” Nancy said, completely unconcerned about the dots on the beach. She stowed her paddle and—as if she were dismounting from a circus pony—threw herself out of the kayak and into the water. She began pulling the boat toward shore, staggering through the waist-high surf, her legs sending up arches of glitter, her tiny safety vest riding high on her shoulders.

Then, with the sea lapping around our knees, we waited for the others. We couldn't carry our kayak onto the shore by ourselves—it was laden down like a suburban station wagon, avocados and bananas and dry bags and sacks of water strapped to its every surface. The waves threw pebbles onto the shore and then pulled them back again, with a sound like breaking glass. I shaded my eyes and studied the beach. The splotches appeared to be rocks, but they came in colors that alarmed me: the taupe
shade of a Band-Aid, the purple of a bruise, the blush of fevered skin.

Soon, the rest of the kayaks floated up, the boats nuzzling against each other, people splashing into the water. Sam, our guide, untied a rope from the back of his kayak and pulled what looked like a boombox out of the water: our latrine. He had forbidden us from defecating in the desert because of a profound dryness that would harden our turds into joke doggie poop, creating an eco-hazard. When we left a campsite, Sam towed the boombox behind his kayak and emptied our shit out at deep sea. This service alone, it seemed to me, was worth the price of the trip.

Nancy and I had known each other for years. We belonged to the same tribe of friends, people in their 30s who took vacations together, finding some cabin in the mountains where we could hold a grownup slumber party, with tequila and poker. Always, Nancy and I would grow restless in the cabin. We'd wake up early, the others still breathing softly in their sleeping bags, and slip out with our cross-country skis, reappear five hours later with the tips of our hair frozen stiff.

A few months ago, I'd called her. It was one of those February days when the salt from the last snowstorm smears the asphalt and darkness comes at four. “Do you want to fly out West and go hiking?” I said, the cordless phone wedged into my neck. This was my craving: hours climbing up a sandstone mountain with orange dust stuck to my skin, then a beer, some Mexican food.

“You know what we should do?” she said. “We should take a week and go down a river in kayaks.”

I realized that she, the former leader of Outward Bound trips, envisioned us navigating by the stars, paddling alone on the open sea, stopping on windswept shores to forage for berries. She would not agree to any version of camping that involved watching cable TV at night.

So we compromised: we'd sea kayak, but with a guide and a group. I figured nothing could go too wrong.

Now, Nancy and I were trooping down the beach with infected-looking stones, our dry bags bumping against our legs. We were off to set up our tents for the night, away from the others. The social dynamics of our kayaking group reminded me of Gilligan's Island.
Remember how the castaways never quite formed one unit, but instead clung to the identities they'd had before the wreck? Skipper, movie star, millionaire.

In our castaway society, Nancy and I were the Superwomen, and we maintained a polite distance from the Biologists, the Adman, and the New Age Divorcee. We'd become the Superwomen because our kayak always shot out ahead of the group, and the guide had to yell at us to turn around and come back where he could see us. Nancy, of course, supplied 90 percent of the muscle.

She dumped her stuff on the sand. “Hey,” she said, as she bent over, “can you name all the American presidents, in order?”

“Washington, Jefferson, Madison,” I began, unpacking my tent. By the time I'd reached Polk, Nancy had hers set up—white fabric dazzling in the sun. It rippled a bit in the wind, but was otherwise as tight as a sail.

I was still arranging a mess of orange and purple nylon on the sand. I'd borrowed the tent from an ex-boyfriend; he'd neglected to warn me that this impressive piece of high-tech gear was designed for ice. It could wedge into the crevice of a mountain, its stakes hammered into frozen snow. A clear-plastic window trapped heat from the sun. A vent made out of fabric—essentially a shirt-sleeve
that extended from the side of the tent—allowed you to fire up a stove inside, without asphyxiating on its fumes.

I coaxed the tent onto its knees. It was a rumply, wrinkled mess, because its stakes did not hold in the sand. When I crawled inside it to change out of my wet clothes, the sun clawed through the clear-plastic and sweat immediately popped out on my skin. It had to be 105 in there.

Sam had lectured us about keeping our tents closed up at all times. Otherwise, he said, “varmints” would get in. But after two days without any varmint sightings, we'd all grown cavalier. Now, I opened up the vent to a deliciously cool circle of blue. I unzipped the tent door to get a breeze moving through. I left the tent that way, and strolled off.

An hour later, I was walking out of the ocean backwards with a snorkeling mask on my face, my flippers thwacking the wet sand. One of the Biologists called out to me, but the wind tore his words away. I could hear, though, the panic in his voice.

“What?” I called.

“Nancy,” I heard and “scorpion.”

I shucked off the flippers and ran up the beach, my cheeks still throbbing where the snorkeling mask had pressed. In the sand, my sprinting gait turned into the slow-motion plod of nightmares where you can never run fast enough.

She sat on a puke-colored rock, holding one hand up against her chest, looking even tinier than usual, those shorts that would fit a twelve-year-old girl, those sinewy legs extended, her head big on her body, curls beating at her cheeks. She must have been clenching her teeth—her mouth looked all wrong.

“There was a bug on my shirt. I brushed it off. Can you believe I did anything so stupid?” She shook her head.

Sam, the guide, arrived with a leather-bound book, his finger marking a page. At first I took it for an encyclopedia, but then he said, “see if you can identify it by the picture,” and held the book in front of her. Over her shoulder, I saw the engravings. This was not an encyclopedia of words. It was an encyclopedia of scorpions. And also of rattlesnakes, of heart attacks where there are no defibrillators, of blood poisoning and parasites and broken bones. The book seemed to be smeared with all the bad news it carried.

Nancy examined the engravings and finally pointed with her good hand.

“You sure?” he said, poker-faced.

“Pretty.”

“Unfortunately, that's the worst of the lot,” he said. “It sometimes kills kids and old people, but you're going to be OK. If you were going to have a reaction, you probably would have had it by now.”

The beach, dimming now, the sand turning from white to gray, seemed to warp, to pulse along with my heartbeat. Sam said the scorpion wouldn't kill a healthy adult. But Nancy was so small. She weighed no more than a hundred pounds.

“We've got to get her out,” I told him.

“We can't,” Sam said, closing the book and carefully sliding it into a dry bag.

“Of course we can. There must be people somewhere.”

Sam shook his head. “There's no way to evac.” He pointed to a shrimp boat parked out near the horizon, its nets folded like bat wings. “The best we could do is try to radio that boat, but there's probably no radio on board.”

“I'm OK,” Nancy said, and she slid off the rock and onto the sand, rubbing some of it over her bad thumb, as if this were medicinal. “It feels like I stuck my finger in a light socket. But I can stand it. It's tolerable.”

Something about her calm unsettled me all the more.

“Don't you have anything to give her?” I demanded.

He squatted beside her. “Look, she'll be OK. The Mexicans get stung all the time and they don't take anything for it.”

In other circumstances, I would have sided with him—denouncing spoiled Americans and the way they ran whining to emergency rooms and demanded painkillers. But panic brought out the first-worlder in me. I believed that just because we were Americans, a hospital should materialize in the desert, its sliding doors swooshing open to frosty air-conditioned air, end tables piled with
People
magazines, doctors padding around in their surgical booties. Nothing materialized. Instead, the beach darkened. The waves made their death rattle.

“What's in your first-aid kid?” I tried, “An epi pen? Antihistamines?”

He ignored me. “Do you think you can make it without aspirin?” he asked Nancy. “It would be better to let your body clean out the poison, without adding anything else into the mix.”

“Yeah. This is the strangest feeling. Buzzing. Like there are bees inside. And the weirdest part is, it's slowly going up my arm.”

He nodded. “It's moving to your heart.”

“It's here now,” she pointed just above her elbow.

He continued to nod as she spoke, and I guessed that rather than paying attention to her words he was listening for slurred speech.

She began to ask him something, but he interrupted.

“Nancy, let's get you out of that sweater,” he said. And then, like a gentleman helping his date take off her wrap, he maneuvered her Polartec sweater backwards off her shoulders.

I assumed that he wanted to examine the arm. But instead, he snatched the sweater and danced a few feet away from us. He trained his flashlight on the fabric as he shook it. Something small and yellow fell off. He followed the dot with his flashlight, but it had disappeared into the sand. “Another one,” he said. “They're everywhere. They live under those rocks.” He pointed with his light at one of the strange stones. “Now that it's night, they're going to come out.”

“I guess I shouldn't be sitting here,” Nancy said, struggling to her feet.

We ate dinner huddled on a blue tarp, all in a clump, nobody so much as sticking a toe out onto the sand. Except Sam. He squatted in front of the fire, putting a pot of water on the grate, so we
could wash dishes. His face, flickering yellow, was impassive as the cliffs that we'd paddled past today. Was he really sure that Nancy would be OK? Maybe he was only pretending, so as not to spread fear.

“Where's it up to now?” I asked Nancy, who sat crunched beside me on the tarp.

“Here,” she said, touching just below her shoulder.

“What about when it gets to your heart?”

“It'll be OK.” Her voice floated up to me through the dark. “It's starting to throb less.”

“You didn't eat anything.”