Fleur
IN MY POST-FLIGHT haze, I’d forgotten that Shutters was virtually next door to Casa del Mar. Was it really only a few months ago that I’d toasted my 21st birthday with Sammie and Jacob and Assefa?
Oh, Assefa, where are you now? Will your Hanging Man find his peace? Will I ever be less haunted by the memory of you? Dukula. You called me your Dukula. Will I always be tied to people who name me?
Adam was fiddling in his wallet for his credit card. I knew it would be useless to offer to pay half. Shutters was quieter than usual, probably because this heat wave had struck far from the normal tourist season. I speculated as much to Donald, adding, “Thanks to climate change, travel agents could probably make a fortune exploiting the shifting weather patterns.” I was rewarded with the sort of empty expression people assume when reminded of what we’re doing to our planet.
Instead, he wrote down his cell number on a card and handed it to Adam. I wouldn’t be surprised if Adam took him up on his invitation to go out sometime for a pint. I could hear him singing loudly as the cab pulled away.
Adam seemed to have picked up steam at the prospect of a swim, and I had to admit I felt a little excited by our impromptu detour from the expected road of going home to share a few brief highlights of our journey with the Fiskes before passing out from jetlag. Adam went over to the check-in desk to speak with a pair of toothy clerks behind the counter and returned a few minutes later reporting our clothes would be safe while we swam. We proceeded down a burnished wood hallway to find a gift shop as upscale as the beach-clubbish hotel itself, where the labels on most of the items proclaimed James Perse had designed them exclusively for Shutters.
I selected the cheapest pair of flip-flops they had, a plain white beach towel, and a turquoise bathing suit that left the largest amount possible (not much) to the imagination. Changing in a lemon-scented restroom that was roomy enough for a small homeless encampment, I emerged to pass to a waiting Adam the clothes I’d flown in, all balled up around my stinky tennis shoes. He delivered them along with his own to the concierge. I was impressed by the generosity of the hotel staff to store our gear like this until it occurred to me that he might have offered them a tip.
When he returned to me, grinning lopsidedly in his new red and white, floral Hawaiian trunks and a pair of flip-flops, his towel flung rakishly over one shoulder, I noted that he was more fit than I remembered, his torso lean and long with a virile blanket of chestnut chest hair. Though he had to be as weary as I was, his limp was barely noticeable. I have to confess that my tweeter was moist enough to make me worry I’d make an audible little swish with each step as we crossed the skaters on the boardwalk. We passed a hundred Stephanie Seidenfelds as we trudged across the broad stretch of sand, but Adam didn’t seem to notice. As we neared the sea, its roar made conversation impossible, but who cared? We were enveloped by the sound, each muscle of our airplane-compressed bodies releasing to the salty, serenading wind.
Closer to the shore, we cased out the crowded sand for a vacant spot to lay down our towels. There were people everywhere, their shouting voices joining the tumult of the waves. Flitting past sand castles and seaweed were various species of shorebirds—here a Snowy Plover, there a Sanderling, and everywhere the ubiquitous seagulls with their lonesome, echoing cries.
Adam thought he’d found a good place, but I caught sight of a cloud of flies hovering over something suspiciously visceral on the wet sand nearby and, immediately averting my eyes—I know I’m breathing in, I know I’m breathing out—I enjoined him to keep walking. We had to go a bit further afield before we found a place to settle, squeezed between a family with a handful of kids who were happily spread out across a couple of overlapping blankets, mariachi music blaring from their radio, and two couples dead asleep on their towels, their pale pink backs looking uniformly about to burn.
Adam wasted no time. Shouting, “Beat you into the water,” he ran. Shaking my head at the craziness of it all, I took off after him.
The sea was rough, but we were both strong swimmers. We dove in nearly simultaneously and came up for air, gasping for breath. We managed to get out beyond the breakers and swam and dog-paddled around each other, making fun of each other’s strokes, shaking water from our heads like puppies, pointing out the boats farther out. He disappeared into the rolling water and the next thing I knew, his hands were pulling me underwater by my feet. Kicking myself free and rising up sputtering, I furiously splashed him in the face. He dove to get away and came up with his hair covered in a caul of seaweed. He flung it off without ceremony and trailed his hands in the water, letting the ocean wash them.
“Ew,” I cried, teasing. But instead of teasing me back, he swam closer and grabbed me by the waist and pulled me tightly to him. What was this? As I frantically dog-paddled to stay up, his hardness pushed against my pubic bone. But his whisper in my ear was as soft as the whirr of a hummingbird’s wing.
“Let’s go back to the hotel, Fleur. I want to take you to bed.”
“What?” I swam away, but he came after me again.
His voice was huskier than I could have imagined. “You heard me. I want to take you to bed.”
“Adam, what are you talking about? We can’t just .... Where?”
“I rented us a room.” My dog paddling became considerably jerkier as I began to take in what he was saying.
“Wait. You planned this?”
The expression on his wet face was steady and earnest. “Actually, yes. I did.”
“Why you ... you sneaky Pete.”
He laughed. I laughed. I was terrified.
“Will you?” he asked.
“Yes.” I couldn’t believe he’d asked. I couldn’t believe I’d agreed.
If I’ve learned anything by now, it’s that some things must stay veiled. Suffice it to say that when the night was nearly over and we were groggy with jetlag and soaked with sweat, Adam felt around on the bedside table for one of the floating gardenias the hotel staff had thoughtfully placed in a shallow Japanese bowl. He tucked it behind my ear so tenderly I might have been a baby and he my mother. Or I a mother and he my child, bringing me the sweetest flower. Or, or, or. Really, there never had been a category for what he meant to me, and there wasn’t one now. I drifted into a floral-scented dream world.
But I woke the next morning thinking, not of flowers or sex or love, but of Zeki. Did you think I could forget him? I would make sure the world knew all about him once I found a way to utilize his parting gift to me of the instrumentality of gravity waves in the application of P.D.
I thought, too, of Makeda, my ihite—her haunting ululations, her courage to stay where death loomed so close. I’d seen too many deaths, myself. I was constitutionally unsuited to it. As a child, I’d cried when Mother’s David Austins dropped their petals into my hands and was despondent for days when her Anne Boleyn shriveled up, a victim of root rot. I wasn’t getting any better with practice. I hated the economy of the natural world, hated that the price of nothing being wasted was life feeding on life, eternally dependent upon death. For all I knew, I’d pursued P.D. to at least momentarily bring things back from the abyss.
Adam stirred from his sleep and smiled. He had a crust of dried spittle at the side of his mouth. He stretched like a great cat. “Good morning, glory.”
I gave a half-hearted grin.
“What is it?” he asked in a cautious tone.
“Oh, Adam, I’m afraid I’m not so glorious.”
He sat up, reflexively covering his chest with the sheet. “Oh, God. Was I wrong? Are you regretting what we—”
I shook my head emphatically. “No! It’s just ... I’d make a crummy Buddhist. I don’t think I’ll ever make my peace with life being suffering.”
Looking relieved, he leaned forward and brushed his lips against my cheek. He smelled of something besides Campbell’s Chicken Soup B.O. He smelled of me. “It’s not all suffering.”
But melancholy had sunk its teeth in me. “No, really. I’m always a little sad inside. That can’t be normal.”
He threw up his hands. “Oh, come on. You’ve got some cockamamie idea that you’re weird. Unusual, sure. You’re a quantum physicist, for Christ’s sake. You want to be average, too? Fleur, that sensitivity in you, even that sadness, is precisely why I love you.” He paused, then put a finger on my nipple and traced a circle on it that made it stand at attention. “Well, that and a few other things,” he murmured, licking it now.
I felt my tweeter get wet, but still, I didn’t succumb. Something was holding me back.
Adam stopped, looking stricken. “It’s not Assefa, is it? Do you still love him?”
I really pulled away now. “Adam, you can’t ask me that.”
His face flushed. “Why not?” he said gruffly. “You had sex with me last night. Don’t you think I have a right to know?”
There was a fire flickering in his green eyes that I’d never seen before. This was a new Adam. I told him so.
“Fleur, I just .... Listen, I don’t think you know your power. That’s dangerous for a woman. You need to know it or you’ll end up doing harm. Harm you don’t intend.”
“Did I hurt Assefa?”
“This isn’t about Assefa, damn it, but no, I don’t think you had anything to do with what happened to him. He had his own demons.” Adam fell silent, and my heart ached for him. “So do I.”
“What are yours?”
“I’m too fucking nice.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am.”
I repeated, “No, you’re not.”
“Am.”
“Not.”
And then we both laughed.
Looking relieved, Adam gave my arm a squeeze. “I don’t know about you, but I could kill for a cup of coffee.” I nodded. He leaned over toward the bedside table and put in a call for room service, then rose from the bed like a careless god, flung open the drapes to flood the room with sunlight, and grabbed the box of donuts we’d left unfinished the night before. Only after our lovemaking had he confessed that, when he’d given Donald Mackenzie our cab fare, he’d taken a chance and paid the all-too-willing Scot an extravagant tip to buy a box of Krispy Kremes and leave it for him at the front desk. And only in L.A. would a hotel employee tie the familiar polka dot box in rose and sage ribbon before setting it on a small table for us like a hospitality gift. After Africa, the sheer indulgence of it fairly took my breath away. I knew it would probably take Adam half a year to pay for all this.
Room service arrived with a knock on our door just as I was stepping from the shower into the thick white bath sheet Adam was holding out for me. He gestured with his head and left the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. I heard him cheerily wishing the waiter a good morning. Suddenly, I found myself fighting for breath. How would I ever survive if he went away?
I opened the door as soon as I sensed the coast was clear. Adam sat naked on the bed, his white hotel robe flung across the foot of the rumpled duvet. He was dipping a donut into his coffee with the bemused air of a man who’d just won the lottery. I was still in shock myself. I shuffled across the creamy Persian carpet and sat beside him, my damp body liking the warm feel of his skin. At least that part of me was uncomplicated.
I wanted time to stop, but of course it wouldn’t. From a cupboard in my mind tumbled something Stanley had once said about the nature of being human: that we were each one brief nanosecond in a vast cosmic wave, the void oozing itself into shape and color and sound, then sucking it all back into blankness again.
I knew it was true. The matter, energy, and yes, information that briefly coalesced into the life of one discrete individual was just that—fleeting. And beautiful and cruel. There was no inalienable right to happiness, liberty, or even a vote for life or death except for the suicidal souls of this world. Everyone I’d ever met would be ripped away from this incarnation by a force with all the impersonality of a man running late for work, dashing out his front door oblivious to the ant he’s crushing underfoot.
But in this moment, the dew was falling from the lip of the leaf. Adam put a hand on my thigh and kissed me. His mouth was moist and tasted of coffee, tasted even more strongly of Krispy Kreme Dulce de Leche. He set down his cup and we entered the dark, melting together into its crevices. A musical refrain played inside my head. What was it? Surely not Daft Punk’s Get Lucky? A little giggle burbled up from my throat and, even as he proceeded to kiss the hollow of my neck, the curved shell of my ear, Adam chuckled with me despite having no idea why I’d laughed.
But that was the point, wasn’t it? We were just two loose-limbed kids who’d thrust ourselves blindly beyond the shoreline, all gooseflesh and manic jumpiness in the icy water, screaming as an impossibly big wave rushed toward us. At its crest the water hesitated, as if momentarily surveying what it was about to consume.
I dove with Adam into the belly of it. My heart beat crazily with nearly equal parts hope and fear, with the tiniest advantage to hope.
