The Jezebel Remedy (14 page)

“You won't find that shit on the Internet, huh? I'll see what I can do. So how about a good lawyer joke? Or are those off-limits too?”

“Have at it,” Joe said.

“Okay. So what happens to a lawyer when he dies?”

They were almost at Joe's building. “His chances of becoming a Henry County cop increase?”

“Nope,” Toliver replied. “He lies still.” The officer paused for effect. “And that would apply to Mexican lawyers, Greek lawyers, English lawyers, black, white, yellow, man, woman, old, young. It's what we in the police business call race neutral.”

Brett and Lisa's suite at the Ocean Club opened out onto a ground-level patio and a sweeping view of the ocean, and when the porter inserted their plastic key card and sidestepped away from the entrance and Lisa saw where they'd be staying, she was still wearing her Virginia clothes, and she dropped her purse and wool jacket on a counter and left Brett behind, sailed across the room, past the elaborate bowl of fruit and bottle of champagne, right through the patio doors, and she didn't stop until she hit the water, the air warm and salted, the sun close enough to do her some good, the blue and turquoise and the long horizon and lollygagging heat a sublime improvement on the dregs of a Henry County winter. A Jet Ski banged over waves, chatter from the hotel's bar meandered down the beach, a swell nudged in and rose to her knees, soaking her slacks. Her shoes were kicked off on the sand, neither of them upright, separated and pointed in different directions.

Brett waited on the patio, drinking a Kalik beer, dressed for Nassau—flip-flops, a wrinkled linen shirt—since he'd boarded a plane in Roanoke. She returned after a while and used the tub spigot to wash her feet and changed clothes in the bathroom, and she and Brett walked to the bar, which was built on a bluff's edge and caught the tail end of a trade wind, just enough breeze to register. They sat at an outside table, both of them facing the ocean. She had no plans, nowhere to be, no more ambition than to finish her drink, a tourist piña colada, and why not, she told the waiter, she was a tourist and it was the Bahamas and what could be better?

The Ocean Club was elegant and polished, a tile and mahogany
showcase with British trimmings. The pool was beside a terraced garden populated by classical statues: a stone gathering of satyrs, a Hellenistic Zeus, a bare-breasted demigoddess and flitting cherubs eager to spread Bacchus's wisdom. Oddly enough, a marble FDR and Napoleon had also joined the party. Unlike her last Caribbean vacation, there was nary a T-shirt salesman or hair braider in sight, no teenagers hawking trinkets on the beach, no touts for the banana boat and booze cruise, no all-you-can-eat buffets. Their suite came with a butler, and shiny electric golf carts navigated paved trails to deliver guests to their various accommodations, the carts' only sound the brake pedal springing free as the driver started forward.

After Lisa had finished a second drink and been brought another, Brett asked if she wanted to leave and visit the casino at Atlantis, maybe shoot dice or play baccarat or try her luck at blackjack, but she told him she was happy where she was, and she scooted her chair closer to him and rested her hand above his knee, her flat palm intimate and frankly carnal against his leg.

“I don't really know, uh, what interests you,” Brett said. “I guess that sounds kind of strange given our current circumstances. But tell me, okay? I hope you will.”

“Hard to beat this,” she answered.

“No kidding.” He covered her hand with his.

It didn't take long for the alcohol to affect them, but they were high and loose, not obliterated like they'd been in Roanoke, and Lisa asked for a glass of water and a plate of fruit, had to think for a moment because the waiter inquired if she wanted her water plain or with gas. “Plain will be fine,” she told him. As it slipped away in increments, the sun put on a nonchalant soiree, illustrating the sky and Technicoloring the clouds and water, and a group of gulls casually glided and dipped over the ocean, the boldest ones landing on a wooden railing at the bar to plead and screech for scraps, their heads herky-jerking, bobbing.

“Let's walk back to the room,” Lisa suggested, “and watch the last of this.”

“You want to take anything to drink? Should I order a traveler?”

“I saw the bottle of champagne. I think that'll be perfect.”

While Brett was paying the waiter, an elderly couple passed their table, and the woman, immaculate and sweetly proper, her hat fastened with fabric strips that knotted beneath her chin, paused to speak to them and told them they were a lovely pair. Such pretty people. “And you both look so happy,” she said. Her husband nodded, agreed. He was carrying a cane with a carved knob but didn't seem to need it, appeared able to stand and move around on his own. “How long have you been married?” she asked Lisa. “My Gary and I have been together for fifty-three wonderful years,” she quickly added.

Lisa instinctively lifted and spread her fingers. She'd seen no reason to remove her wedding ring. She was married, and Brett knew she was married, and she was planning to stay married, and taking her ring off struck her as both pointless and naïve, akin to pretending the last two decades could be quarantined in a velveteen jeweler's box. “Twenty years this summer,” she said. “My husband and I have quite a ways to go to catch you and Gary.”

The lady beamed. “Are you in the movies? You're so attractive. We hear a lot of famous people vacation here. We really don't follow the culture as much as we should.”

“She does look like a movie star, doesn't she?” Brett said. Jovial and relaxed, he didn't appear at all upset by Lisa's reply.

“Well, honey, you're no slouch yourself,” the lady told Brett, a harmless flirt from a woman who'd no doubt been a beauty in her time. Pushing eighty, she still delivered the line stylishly.

Brett and Lisa didn't make it to the champagne, not immediately. They began kissing a step or so inside the open patio doors, slightly under roof but still a part of the lawn and ocean and the epilogue hues—blues, oranges, pinkish reds—saturating the sky. Buzzed and light-headed, she hardened her choice there, divided off her house and dog and mom-and-pop law practice, ditched the threadbare routines and millstone schedules for a needle full of passion, flew toward an obviously pernicious flame, chose a two-day jolt over her for-as-long-as-I-live promise, decided for real what she'd already decided in theory before leaving the farm, and the fact the affair was corrupt and off-limits only added to the lure, notched it higher.

Soon they were twined together on the king bed, and the run-up
to sex was completely unmapped, all the particulars a glorious blank, each button or zipper or hook deliberate and joyous, every squeeze and rub loaded, nothing wasted, nothing overlooked, nothing discounted. It had been years and years since she was seventeen in a car's backseat or upstairs in a sneaked bedroom during a sorority bash, forever since she'd wanted to have sex and knew she would but had no idea what the details might bring. The sensations, touches, rhythms, all of it was foreign, erotic, the strange cologne, the unfamiliar skin, how he pieced into her. They spent half an hour taking off clothes, unwrapping, side by side, Lisa on top, Brett on top, and he removed her modest emerald-and-diamond necklace and then asked if he could put it back on her, pinched the clasp and encircled her neck after she collected her hair to keep it from interfering.

“Birth control?” he asked.

“Pills.”

With the doors still apart and the curtains gathered so she could see the beach, and the night scents hinting and thickening and electric lights turning on around the property, she rolled to the edge of the bed and, naked except for her bikini panties, paraded across to the champagne and fetched it for them, and Brett uncorked it and they took pulls straight from the bottle, and while she was drinking, taking her turn, he kissed her neck and her breasts and before long he slipped his hand inside her underwear and she lay back against a bank of pillows, half-ass tried to set the bottle on the floor but didn't, so that the Dom Pérignon spilled on the covers and quickly lost its chill and wet the duvet and sheets, dampened the mattress.

They'd tracked sand into the bed, and those fine grains were wet, too, and all of a sudden the sand was underneath her calves and ankles, and she couldn't get rid of it, and it started bothering her, just a little irritating at first, then a drumbeat problem, bad enough that she thought about getting up for a towel, or maybe pulling the duvet off the bed, and she shifted and wiggled and caused Brett to accidentally nick her with his watchband. The metal bit into the soft skin high on her rib cage and distracted her more, and she lost her place and sort of had to start over, and then her conscience wasn't so smothered, resurfaced, and she began thinking and worrying and fretting, her own
voice magpie-chattering in her head, no damn good for sex. Twenty years. A
vow
.

She couldn't settle her mind, couldn't cut herself free, wasn't so sure she should keep to her choice, and she decided she needed to wait, almost felt panicked. There were still two days left, plenty of time, and now she mostly wanted to be finished with what they were doing and put on warm-weather clothes and leave the room, so when Brett slid his finger inside her again, she reached down and touched him and rubbed and spit on her hand and kept rubbing and working until he was done. A ceiling fan circled above her, a tasteful lamp shone on a nightstand, a wisp of sea air curled through the curtains, and the crystal in an unused champagne flute trapped the lamplight and prismed it into low, subtle color.

“Are you okay?” he asked her. “I think we lost a little ground after the champagne spilled. Sorry.”

“I'm fine,” she said. “It's just…a lot. Even perfect, even here, it's not going to be easy. I'm, well…let's not dwell on it. It was exactly where I needed to be. Not too much.” She caught herself wondering about an earlier flight home, the fee to change her ticket. “But I can't help…the guilt.”

“I understand. We can move at your pace. No pressure. I'm for sure not complaining about a pretty amazing evening, but I feel bad. That was kind of one-sided. You sure there's nothing I can do for you?”

“Not for now.” She was on her back, watching the fan. It moved slowly enough that she could see the four blades clearly. “Other than taking me somewhere to eat.” She turned toward him. “I probably should be apologizing to you. I know we didn't come here for me to deal with my issues on your vacation.” She smiled. “Let's get out of here and have some fun.” She picked up the Dom bottle and there was a sip that hadn't been lost, and she downed the very bottom of the champagne, sitting there naked except for her necklace.

They showered and dressed and hopped into the resort's Range Rover, and an affable fellow wearing a pressed tropical shirt drove them to Atlantis. It was almost ten o'clock when they finally ate a meal, and they kept right on drinking, ordered a bottle of wine with their dinner. Afterward, they spotted a sign and followed an arrow and
strolled on a labyrinthine path past wall after wall of huge aquariums filled with fish, eels, sharks, rays and sea turtles. The rooms were kept dim, the aquariums, some nearly as big as a city bus, were brightly lit. Lisa and Brett held hands and occasionally stopped to watch the goings-on in the tanks.

The walkway wound them back to the casino floor, where they posed for a cheesy photo seated together in an oversize prop throne, the king and queen of this gaudy paradise. They both laughed at the picture and bought it from the hotel vendor, who asked them, while he was fitting it into a cardboard frame, if they had any children and if they were enjoying their vacation on the island.

As they were leaving, Lisa was waylaid by a Wheel of Fortune slot machine. She studied it and squinted at the payout lines, and Brett asked if she wanted to give it a try.

“Yes. Do you have a dollar?” She set her cosmopolitan on a ledge in front of the machine.

“I do, but you need to bet all three lines. If you were to hit a jackpot, a buck wouldn't win you the best money.”

“I'm not sure I completely understand, but I'll take your advice,” she said.

“Here's a twenty.” Brett handed her a bill.

“I want to pull the handle,” she remarked. “That's half the fun.”

“It'll be a test for us,” Brett said, “to see if we're lucky together.”

She fed the twenty into the slot. “We'll probably win a car or a humongous check and have to pose for a publicity photo in order to claim it.” She grinned at him. “So I push this button?” she asked.