Plus One (26 page)

“Boys, come!” Helen called, holding up a big canvas bag of
Styrofoam flotation noodles. “I've got the noodle bag!” Alex propped himself up and watched as she tossed the toys one by one, her boys barking like seals.

“Leo—grab the orange one!” Helen called. “That's right—whack your brother! Not on the face—back of the head! Nice one!”

Sam climbed up the ladder and began waddling back over to Alex, hands crossed over his chest. “Where'd they get the noodles?”

“I have no idea,” Alex said. He'd checked the hotel shop the day before; it was all hideous pastel-y crafts and rayon resort wear. The most fun thing they sold was a stuffed sea turtle. “She must've brought 'em from home.”

Sam eased back into his lounger. “Bet they have more than one bathing suit, too.”

Alex sat forward. “May I remind you who's got it going on right now? Check out Big Daddy Bamper over there. Stuck in the sun, nowhere to sit, pacing back and forth on the hot concrete… and look at us, kiddo. Sitting pretty.”

Sam nodded across the pool. “I wouldn't worry about Mr. Bamper.”

Alex looked over—the boys were still whooping it up in the water, but Cary and Helen had left the pool area. He spotted them following an attendant with long black hair—it was the same attendant he'd met yesterday, Gladys!—down a winding path that led to… the grotto. The supersuite cabañas—of course. Still talking on the phone, Cary casually stretched out and wrapped his neck in a towel. As Alex watched, the attendant spritzed his face with a canister of scented mist, squirted her hands from a bottle, and began kneading one of his feet with her long, muscular hands. Cabaña-side food massage? Evian spritzers?

“Face it, Dad,” Sam finally said. “The Bampers do everything we do but better.”

• • •

Alex sat there for a good half hour, watching the Bampers get spritzed and rubbed and fussed over. He wanted to
be
the Bampers and he
hated
the Bampers, all at once. Huck had a name for it—the approach/avoidance conflict. Coveting something you can't stand. Under-examined source of male anxiety, Huck said.

A wet hand flopped down on Alex's knee. Sylvie was back from the Jacuzzi; she took a big mouthful of virgin piña colada and gargled: “Goggles?”

She had figured out how to charge drinks to the room within twenty minutes of check-in and was now on a first-name basis with the entire waitstaff. Her eyes were bright red.

“Everything's up in the room,” Alex said.

Sylvie sat down on his lounger and laid a wet hand on his knee. “Please?”

“Fine—stay here.” Alex got up and exhaled swiftly. “I'll be right back.”

The walk from the pool to the room was ridiculously long, across the pink marble courtyard, up the elevator, and down a long wainscoted hallway broken up with vast, empty chambers containing tables set with tropical flowers. Alex swiped his key card and tiptoed inside.

Figgy was propped up in bed, sipping from a bowl of miso soup and tapping on her laptop. She looked up, her eyes big and glassy. “Where've
you
been?”

“Down at the pool,” he said. “I got us a really nice spot—”

“The kids woke up two minutes after you left and jumped all over me. We
so
should've gotten two adjoining rooms.”

“Oh hon.” Alex sat down on the side of the bed. He nodded at her laptop. “Work stuff?”

“New ads started airing last night. Disaster. Dipshits in publicity completely spoiled the finale.”

Alex made a disapproving cluck and took hold of her foot through the bedspread. “Can't Jess handle it? Isn't that his job?”

“It's
supposed
to be,” she said, snapping shut the laptop. “You coming back to bed?”

“I gotta grab some stuff and get back to the kids before Sylvie drains the entire island of mai tais.”

“If we'd brought Rosa—”

Alex made a face. He'd been adamant that the Sherman-Zicklins would not be the sort of family who lugged a domestic servant along on holiday. While it was true that Figgy had work and wouldn't be much use with the kids, and also true that Rosa would hardly object to an all-expenses-paid workweek in Maui, Alex held firm. No way would he be the white-skinned privileged doofus roasting in the sun while plump-armed, brown-skinned Rosa played paddy-cake with the kids. He was entirely capable of monitoring the children while Figgy recuperated.

Figgy laid her head down on his lap. “So the kids are in the cabaña? Is Helen watching them?”

“She's nearby, yeah,” he said.

“The cabaña's near the pool?”

“Kissing it.”

She made a purring sound and threw open the covers of the bed. “Get in here.”

Alex did as he was told. Apparently, setting down stakes at the pool had been impressive, maybe even a little sexy. She opened her robe and he pressed up against her. God, he thought as he tugged off his pajama bottoms, they needed this. Things had been so chilly between them, even before they left—really, it had been weird since that night at the house with Zev, the Israeli DP. He'd been so paranoid, so stupid—and in the end, there wasn't anything to indicate that Figgy had been anything but faithful. But still. He didn't like that guy. And clearly some trust issue had been stirred up for Figgy. Alex went on ZeroIn a few days later
and discovered she'd changed her password.

He kissed her on the neck and chest and let out a long sigh. He needed this. He needed to reconnect, to feel the warmth of her, to get out of his head. He tried to remember the last time they'd done it—two weeks? Three? He worked his way around each breast and settled between her legs. Figgy tensed and arched her back, pushing her hips forward into him. After all these years together, Alex still enjoyed going down on his wife, feeling her tense and shudder at his touch. But it was also, he thought now, an obligation. He had to do it—it was a matter of principle that she reach a satisfying climax. Which sometimes took awhile, time that often resulted in neck cramps or sudden uncomfortable flashes of self-consciousness. Like now, as he tried to vary his movement and time his pace to her breathing, he was buffeted by questions that were not particularly helpful, performance-wise: What part of the marital bargain am I fulfilling right now? Is this how I pay my fare? If I was the one stressing over work and signing the bill at checkout, would I be getting my dick sucked right now instead of laboring on an equal-work, equal-pay orgasm?

He must've lost his concentration, or maybe Figgy was dealing with distractions of her own, because before he'd finished the task at hand, she reached down, gave Alex a nice tug, and whispered, “I want you inside.”

It wasn't his finest performance—it took him a few thrusts to get hard—but it was still good. Of course it was. Why did he always forget that it was never
not
good? Even a quickie like this was better than nothing at all. It was like when they were first together—they'd do it on the fly, scratch the itch, then hurriedly get their clothes back on and go back to their day. Nowadays a month would go by with nothing and then there'd be this incredible pressure to make it special, and they were just so wiped out. Who had the energy? But here she was, below him, yielding. And all the usual stuff of their marriage—the logistics, the petty resentments,
the scorekeeping, the second-guessing—melted away.

“Whew,” he said afterward, rolling off her and reaching for something to clean them up.

Alex felt the mattress sink.

He looked at the ceiling and mulled, “Hotel sex—objectively better than bedroom sex. Why is that, do you think?”

Figgy didn't respond. He turned to face her. Her legs were curled up over her head, knees against the headboard, hands on the inside of her legs, pelvis held up high.

“Fig, honey?” he said. “What're you doing?”

“Yoga,” she grunted. “Modified plow.”

• • •

“Isn't this fun?” Figgy hollered across the table. She'd been in a terrific mood all day. It was heightened now by her closeness to Cary Bamper, who'd scored a reservation for fifteen at Onofisk, the hotel restaurant run by the Norwegian celebrity chef Gunda Gunderson. Alex was excited for the food but frustrated by the seating; their table was high and narrow, and he kept having to yell at the kids to stop rocking on the barstools. On his right, the Bamper boys had demolished a basket of taro crisps and were now blindfolding Sam with a napkin. On his left, Helen Bamper and a Pines dad whose name Alex couldn't remember were locked in an intense discussion of the banking bailout. Beyond them, a mile or two down the table, Figgy and Cary were huddled close, all nods and smiles and periodic explosions of laughter.

Alex's phone buzzed in his pocket and he pulled it out. Miranda had texted him another photo—for the last month or so, they'd been trading food pictures with short, suggestive captions. This time she'd sent a close-up of a caramelized cube of foie gras sprinkled with shredded herbs and mustard seeds. Her caption: “Just whipped this up, Sher. Foraged the greens from the side of
the 101 Freeway. When do we cook something up together?”

Best ignore that, he thought. It was one thing trading food porn—quite another “cooking something up.” He put the phone down and craned his head down the table. “Who's got the wine?”

The dad whose name Alex now guessed was Alan handed over a bottle of Sancerre. He was a baby-faced guy with pink cheeks, wiry eyebrows, and a gleaming bald head (Alex suddenly flashed on something he'd read about the link between testosterone and baldness—the balder the man, the higher the T-count. Could that be?). Alex seemed to remember him saying he worked in finance—portfolio management maybe? Alex felt Alan's gaze from across the table. To him, Alex must seem like an unmade bed or a sweet farm animal. They'd met once or twice, but like most Pines dads they didn't take much interest in each other. The moms at the school often met up for book club or trips to Target, but the dads barely knew each other. The line from the ladies at school was that all their husbands were dull and unsociable compared to the dynamic and energetic women, an impression this dad was doing nothing to contradict.

“So really, the best thing we can do now for Obama is keep spending!” he said. “Keep capital flowing! It's our patriotic duty to splurge. The Hawaiian-in-chief is counting on us!”

Helen Bamper laughed and raised her glass. “Hear, hear!” She was dressed in a sleeveless silk top, frosted curls falling loosely across her bare shoulders. Her skin gave off a glow of rare oils. Her muscles had been finely sculpted on Pilates tables. All traces of excess body hair had been vaporized. She'd had liposuction, hormone replacement therapy, Botox. Her face radiated a placid calm. Alex hadn't realized it before, but looking at Helen now, he decided it was true: The rich didn't just have fancier clothes and cars and houses and stuff. Their
bodies
had been improved, perhaps cellularly.

On Alex's right, Sylvie tossed down her fork and wrinkled
her nose.

He leaned down. “Don't you like your dinner? That's mahi mahi with lingonberries!”

Sylvie looked skeptically at her plate. “I thought we were getting
real
Hawaiian food.”

“It's
fusion
, honey,” Alex said. “Meeting of two cuisines, remember how I told you? You want to try mine? Pickled spam. Yum.”

She wrinkled her nose. “There's no good food in this whole hotel. Why couldn't we just go to the parking lot place?”

“We'll go the parking lot place tomorrow.”

She crossed her arms and frowned. “I don't see why we can't eat real Hawaiian.”

It was his own fault, he thought; he'd been the one who'd made the speech about
real
Hawaiian on the drive from the airport. They'd driven past a roadside barbecue, and Sylvie had fixated on the scene around the smoky grill, kids underfoot holding plastic plates piled high with cabbage and caramelized pork, served up by a big lump of a guy with steel tongs and wrap-around shades. Then yesterday at lunch she must have overheard Alex's gripes about the poolside dining menu; when a waiter asked if she'd rather have mac and cheese or chicken fingers, she shook her head and said, wearily, “L.C.D., L.C.D.”

“What?” the waiter had replied, confused.

“Lowest. Common. Denominator.”

“Just eat,” Alex said now, turning back to the grownups. The Pines dad had finished explaining the economy to Helen. Now he turned to Alex.

“So… Alex”—damn, he knew
his
name—“What is it you do?”

Alex sucked in a breath. Sometimes it felt like his whole life revolved around this one goddamn question.

“About what?” he said, he hoped not too snarkily.

“For work,” he said.

“I used to be in advertising, but now I'm working on a book. A novel, actually. Been cooking a lot. Mostly try to keep up with Figgy and the kids, you know….”

“That's great—so great,” he said, nodding emphatically. “That must be so hard, though—you work out of the house? You've got to be so
disciplined
. I swear I'd go crazy. Seriously nuts. Me on my own, I'd be swimming in Cheetos and soap operas by noon every day.”