The Vacationer by Tim Lane

We had not fought in a week, but this was no cause to celebrate, seeing as how the peace between us had taken on a blunt, wieldable shape, something that could be used as easily for evidence as for a weapon. We were out walking, for hours walking, any excuse to get out of the small hotel room where we had no choice but to encounter each other, and now we stood on a promenade that seemed to hold the bay, perfect and flat, in its arms. Young men, boys really, jumped into the water below, skin browned by sun, laughing for the tourists. Each leap was a bid to fly. And they were enough, almost, to do it. Or that’s how it felt.

The scene arrested Lee, and so arrested me, too. His feet hurt, and I took on his hurt as my own, like I took on every bump or mishap he had, and increasingly so, as he moved from silver fox to just plain old, because even though we talked about this trip like it was ours, we knew it was only mine. Lee had agreed to come along like he’d agreed to do so many things in the last few years. Praying that this would be the cure to my agitation, my fucking depression in regards to life, the everyday thing of it. I put my hand on his lower back. Sweat and harsh fabric. Poor baby, I said.

The jumpers were young, eighteen or so, and not yet Lee’s type, but a few of them would age into it, I could see. Which, I guess, was another way to say that some of them echoed me as I once was. They climbed the metal ladder, bleeding rust down the wall, and smirked, pat in their stunning youth. One got to the top of the ladder, goose pimples on his arms, beautiful in little green trunks, and flourished his hands around a wooden sign imploring people not to swim in half a dozen languages. Then he laughed, winked at us, and dove. Lee’s eyes were like that song: hungry.

We ordered seafood and sangria at a nearby restaurant. Because we had been walking for so long, we were well past the lunch rush and had our choice of tables. We sat near the water where we could see the swimmers in the distance, laying on towels now and sharing cigarettes. I tried to pick out the one in the green shorts but couldn’t find him. He had either changed or left.

We ate French fries, little buttery clams, a fish presented flayed open, crackling. I was ravenous, and I could see that Lee was pleased by this. I couldn’t help but be annoyed at his delight in something so simple as nourishing yourself. But I was also taken by it, of course, a little. Proud, in a way, however humiliating, to be seen as improving.

Maybe later we would have sex. Maybe later he would look up at me, mouth glistened, and say I gave him awe.

When Lee met me I was wild and daring. I played music in front of rooms filled with people; I left town on whims; I laughed at everything. He had taken me to be something of an angel, or a spirit. Unknowable, and so worthy. He didn’t see the behavior for what it really was: a dodging of something dark. I was made up of parts that could be disassembled and put back together. And as we settled into our life together, as he became my life, closing the door behind him, there was no more reason to perform for him. I presented outward one thing, and came back and gave him another. He’d taken to commenting on this, after a party or event, of which he was constantly compelled to attend for his work, as if he were joking. How come I only get the mopey man, and they get the fun one?

I took the jug of sangria, half-finished, back to the kitchen where I found our waitress and asked her to pour what was left into water bottles they were going to recycle. I expected her to say no. In the States, they would have said no. Instead she smiled at me, and did just that, wishing me well, I thought, though I couldn’t be sure. My Spanish was poor.

I came back from the kitchen with the two bottles in-hand and Lee looked at me and blinked both eyes at once, a second, a second and a half, like he hadn’t done in a very long time, like how he used to do often, committing whatever I’d done, the ideal me, to his memories. Back when we were both telling the same story. When he was the charmed and I the charmer.

We walked through the tangle of the old part of the city and drank. The narrow, cobbled streets were coming alive with people sitting out at bars, mopeds nosing through, a warm breeze. I saw a man exit his apartment with a surfboard under his arm. He padded down the street, barefoot, and I asked Lee if we could live here forever. He pulled me close, kissed my neck, the rasp of his chin on my skin, his fingers on the band of my shorts. Anything, he told me. We can do anything.

We followed the surfer, who stopped to talk with people as he went, a lingering at the far edge of our vision, our white rabbit, until we came out from between the last of the buildings and were at the edge the water again, only it was rougher than the section before, where the boys had been. Here was the ocean with waves rushing to join violence into still, stoic rock. The surfer picked his way over boulders and timed a jump, surfboard under his belly, into the white churn. He paddled out to an area where others sat on boards, waiting for their wave. I walked down the sidewalk to where the rocks stopped and the concrete promenade started up again, funneling the hungry ocean into a calmer channel. I stood at the railing and watched the surfers. Hadn’t I used to surf? Lee asked me. I laughed. It wasn’t surfing, what I did. A dedicated falling. It was more for the tan than anything.  And he laughed too, finished up his bottle, red rivulets on his chin, and told me it was good, to see me like this, to take this vacation. I didn’t answer, so he swung again: wasn’t it interesting, how we hadn’t argued the whole trip? Didn’t all the happy couples we knew come back with stories?

And then: I love you, you know.

I thought back to Oregon, to that part of me who hated his job, who found it hard to leave his bed when he was home. I hated that person. As we travelled, every passing day, I hated him more, even as I suspected I wasn’t all that different from him now, that I was hating the indifferent ghost that animated the body. How feckless. Without its haunting, there wouldn’t be anything, good or bad, depressed or wine-stained, left.

Lee, forgetful, or drunk, or frustrated with me, threw his empty bottle out over the water. Then he said, seeing my face: Oh shit, I wasn’t thinking.

I took off my shirt, and Lee said I shouldn’t, that no dolphins would die because of his bottle. I took off my pants, and he pointed out the sign, warning against swimming, the dangers illustrated in a stick man going under. I ignored him, and I saw by how he loved it, this thing I was doing that he took as wild, carefree, that we would not make it, him and I, that we hadn’t been making it for a long time.

Sometimes, the dramatics work. And sometimes, they don’t. I looked at him once more, and I dove in for the bottle, wondering if this time I might fly instead of sink.

Tim Lane’s words have appeared in Maudlin House, Monkey Bicycle, and Tin House online among others. His novel, Rules for Becoming a Legend, is out now from Viking Press.