Via Dolorosa (19 page)

A cool breeze brought him back to reality.

Carrying a fresh carafe of demitasse, Emma returned. Isabella Rosales walked beside her, wrapped in a floral sarong and a flesh-toned bikini top, her skin coffee-colored under the bright sunlight of midday. Her stomach was tight, muscled, and freckled—the color of new copper. Faint blond hairs traced down her abdomen, straight down into the folded dip of her floral sarong. Her belly button was a winking eye. She carried with her a small camera with a detachable lens. Emma set the carafe on the table but did not sit. Nick watched steam curl from the spout of the carafe. There were only the two chairs, his currently occupied, and it looked as though Emma might offer her chair to Isabella. It seemed to remain unoccupied for an eternity.

“Nicholas,” Isabella said, smiling. “How’ve you been?”

“Fine. Good to see you.”

“You two are always so handsome together,” she said, and motioned for Emma to sit. “It is so refreshing to always run into you both,” she went on, and Nick felt that she was being deliberately vague in her speech. Even her eyes refused to light on him and remain for any significant length of time. Had she mentioned to Emma that he had been out with her last night? He didn’t think so…

“We can get another chair, if you’d like to sit,” Emma said. “We’ve got fresh coffee, too.”

“Thank you, but no. I’ve planned to be out and about the island this afternoon. I’m going to take pictures of the storm’s aftermath. I’ve been told that just south of here, many of the small houses were destroyed by the storm.”

“That’s horrible,” Emma said.

“The camera finds it beautiful,” Isabella said. “The camera also finds you both beautiful.” Without hesitation, she brought the camera to her face, the detachable lens now pointing at him, at Emma. “May I? For a souvenir.” And she laughed. “A souvenir for me, I mean.”

“Oh, yes, please,” Emma said, already sliding her chair closer to Nick. “I just wish my hair was in better shape—”

“I have never seen a more beautiful woman sitting out in the sun,” Isabella retorted, watching them through the lens of the camera. “So beautiful and young. And without sin. Like a woman, but like a child, too.”

“And what about Nick? Is he handsome and like a child without sin, too?”

“Nicholas,” Isabella said.

“Is he?” Emma pressed.

Isabella lowered her camera. She looked at Nick with her own eyes. Black ice. Said, “Nicholas, too, is a child. A very handsome child. But there is a part of him that has been forced to grow up too soon. I wonder, Nicholas, is that the soldier part of you? Or is it something deeper?”

“I have no idea,” he said.

“Don’t you?”

“No. I’ve never seen that part of me before. The part you’re talking about.”

“Yes,” Isabella said, bringing the camera back up to her face. “The part you have never seen is that very part that makes you blind to such a thing. Interesting, yes?”

“Take the picture,” he told her. “I’m sure the picture will tell all.”

Isabella snapped the photograph.

“I love the way she talks,” Emma marveled. To Isabella, she said, “There is such poetry in your speech.”

“I find speaking English very pleasing.”

“And you have a wonderful accent, too,” Emma went on.

“Gracias.”

“I know a little Spanish,” Emma said. “I wouldn’t say it in front of you, though, but I know some. I would have to be really drunk to try and speak my crippled Spanish in front of you, though. I would be embarrassed, it’s so poor.”

“There is no embarrassment here,” Isabella assured her.

“Really,” Emma said, shaking her head. “I won’t do it. It would be like an insult to you.”

“So then one more picture?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And we will make it a fine picture. Nicholas, kiss your wife.”

“Then you won’t see our faces,” he said.

“Don’t be so sour,” Isabella warned. “Are you always so sour? Kiss your beautiful, childish, sinless wife. Kiss her and I will take the picture.”

He turned and kissed Emma. It seemed a long time before the flash went off.

“So beautiful,” Isabella said after the picture was taken.

“Good luck with your houses,” Emma said.

“I hope they’re not totally destroyed,” Nick interrupted.

“At least this time,” added Isabella, “no one was killed.”

After lunch, they went down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand. A few couples, roughly their own age, frolicked in the water. Occasionally, children took to their feet, pumping up and down the beach, leaving five-toed divots in the sand. The day had brightened yet there was still a charcoal thread of threatening clouds sweeping across the horizon, and the sea was still slate-gray and rough. Where an outcrop of auburn stone snaked tongue-like into the water, great heaving whitecaps burst upon it and foamed in a thick flow toward the shore. Quite visible, too, was the dark strip of space at the crest of the horizon as the Earth rotated and turned the sea to face the emptiness of infinity. When Emma went into the water, Nick remained on the beach. He watched her swim for some time, sleek and white, and there were a few times when he could not see her head rising from the waves. He sat up straighter to search for her. Just when his concern began to mount, she always reappeared, her cropped dark hair, darker when wet, slicked back from her face. Once, she waved to him. He nodded in response. When she came from the water and walked up the beach, he watched her until something panged within him, forcing him to turn away. Did she notice? He didn’t think so. Toweling off, her shadow peeled away from her and stretched out toward the sea.

“It’s cold but it feels good.”

“It looks cold,” he said.

“Why do you hate the water?”

“I don’t hate the water.”

“You should come in.”

“I’d rather watch you.”

“You always say that,” she said.

“It’s the truth.”

Toweling her hair, her arms, her long legs, she said, “You don’t like her very much, do you?”

“Who?” he said. “Your little Spanish photographer?”

“I thought she might be someone you’d like.”

“Why would you think that?”

“I just thought it.”

“You’re trying to fix me up?”

She shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Well,” he said, “I haven’t been in the mood.”

“It’s something you need to be in the mood for?”

Nick said nothing.

Emma spread out the towel on the sand and sat in the center of it, drawing her legs up under each other. She turned to look at him briefly. He could see salt from the ocean crystallizing in her hair, her eyelashes, her eyebrows. Her mouth was very small; her lips still just barely exceeded the width of her nostrils. Tight, compact. When she smiled she hardly ever showed her teeth. There was something so beautifully self-conscious about that, and he found he could not stop thinking about it as he watched her now. Beside her on the sand were her poetry books. She picked them up, shuffled through them as she would a deck of cards before selecting one. Flipping through the pages, she said, “Would you like me to read some to you?”

“That’s all right.”

“You’re sure? It’s Byron.”

“Not right now.”

“You like Byron…”

“I think I’m going to go for a walk,” he said, getting up and dusting the sand from his legs.

“Oh? Should I come?”

“It’s all right. I’m just going to find a bathroom, really.”

“Oh,” she said, dejected, turning back to her poetry book. He couldn’t stop looking at her small, small mouth. “All right.”

He walked by himself down the beach, his shadow stretching further ahead of him as the day grew older. At one point, in the tall reeds, he urinated while staring up at the white dunes. Gray gulls burst from the reeds, taking flight. The whole day had turned old and gray. He watched the date palms sway in the cool summer breeze. Without much commitment, he thought of the white swans he would occasionally see in the fountains and pools in the hotel courtyard. He wondered where they went when they weren’t in the pools. Was there a special place for swans? At night, when the darkness came, was there someplace they all hid? Finishing up, turning around in the reeds, he wondered about the swans. Something solid struck his foot as he turned to head back to the beach. He looked and saw it was one of the whitewashed planks of wood discarded by the hotel, now many days ago—one of the planks he had painted a face on while Emma laughed and joked about it. That had been earlier in their trip, one of the first days, before the storm came. Before things changed. Looking at the whitewashed plank now, seeing it muddied by the storm, the caricature smeared and running and bled away, he imagined himself picking it up and splintering it down the middle over one knee. Closing his eyes, he envisioned it so well that it ignited phantom pain in his right knee. He could almost hear the satisfying crack of the wood…

Lieuten
—

With the day growing long, he trekked back by way of the dunes to the beachfront. Many of the couples had returned to the hotel for supper; he saw less sunbathers and swimmers in attendance as he approached. The shadows of the great palms were pulled long and distorted down the length of the sand, too, reaching thirstily for the water. It was growing late. Getting closer, he could still see Emma, though, sprawled out on her towel, one of her poetry books propped in her lap. But she wasn’t reading. She was watching a woman who stood at the cusp of the water, her feet in the tidal foam. Son of a bitch. It was undoubtedly Isabella Rosales. He could tell her shape, and the presence her shape exuded. Stopping, Nick hung back and stood watching. He watched Isabella. He watched Emma watch Isabella. A few times Isabella looked in Emma’s direction, and even motioned at her; in response, though, Emma would quickly bow her head and feign involvement with her poetry. Nick watched Isabella wade further out into the water…out until the upper portion of her slim, muscular, brown thighs became sleek and wet. It was the skin of a seal pup. She stood just far enough in the water to where the waves broke, foaming white and thick and frothy all around her. Yet Isabella did not go in all the way, which, it suddenly dawned on Nick as he surveyed, was what he had been waiting for her to do. He wanted to see her wet. He wanted to see what would happen and how she would look as she found herself slowly overtaken by the sea. But she did not go in past her thighs. He watched. He spied. Still, more frequently, she would turn back to the beach and look at Emma. Once, Isabella motioned to his wife, who responded, rabbit-skittish, with a single wave: he saw the hand come up, the wrist twist, then fall back to her book. Yet at one point, surprising her husband, Emma set the book down and followed Isabella into the ocean. Both stood up to their thighs. Their skin tones completely opposite, they looked like negatives of each other. Would they actually cancel each other out? Would too much exposure to each other be enough to make them both completely disappear?

He walked down to the beach and sat crossed-legged on Emma’s towel. The women swam further out, both deep and wet now, their hair slicked back on their heads. They were both seal pups, he could see, bobbing and playing in the surf. The current strong, their dark little heads drifting gradually north and, after some time, he actually had to turn his head to continue watching them.

After a while, Isabella came out of the water. He watched her walk across the sand and began to think of ways to busy himself because he knew she was heading in his direction.