The Travelers (9 page)

Will grabs a nap and a jog, a shower and a shave, a fresh shirt and tie, shoes shined.

“Bienvenidos,
Señor Rhodes.” The restaurant hostess smiles warmly, big white teeth and jet-black hair. “Please, this way.” She leads Will across the fussy room, around a corner, down a few tiled steps, and through a wide wood-framed entryway into the large private dining room, already populated by people with glasses in their hands. Directly in front of Will is a blonde in a snug dress, facing away. A waiter hands Will a glass.

“Gracias,
” Will says, and at the sound of his voice the blonde slowly turns, and looks over her shoulder—

CAPRI

It’s dark when she returns to the hotel, a harrowing taxi ride up the narrow winding road from the lively town where she had dinner.

“Buona sera,”
she says to the girl at the front desk, dark hair and green eyes and the look of someone who’d much rather be doing anything else.

“Buona sera Signora Delgado.”

She continues through the dining room. Earlier, when she was reserving a table that she ultimately canceled, she’d glanced at the reservation book. So she knows that the white-haired man had an eight o’clock, so he should be finishing soon. She’s confident that he’ll be facing the door, which means that at this very moment he’s watching her walk by.

What does he see? He sees her stumble, like a woman who’s had too much to drink. He sees her reach down to remove one heel, then the other. He watches her exit the dining room on the far side, no doubt heading to the terrace, a young woman traveling alone in a romantic hotel, maybe suffering from a recent heartbreak, tipsy and vulnerable…

The breakfast room is empty, dimly lit. She drops her shoes into her voluminous handbag, and removes a simple-looking little box, six sides of stainless steel, one facet of which features a single switch, On-Off. She turns the switch to On. As she walks past the long buffet table, she sets this cube behind a tall vase of flowers, ten feet from where the wireless camera is mounted on the wall. The range of the device is supposedly fifty feet, but with these things it’s always preferable to be closer, safer.

She uses her shoulder to push through the terrace door, and rushes around to the side gate, where she places a second small cube. Then she finds a seat, orders a bottle of house red from a waitress.

When the wine arrives she immediately dumps some of it into a potted plant, then a splash into her glass. She swirls the liquid, coating the glass, its rim. She takes a tiny sip, just enough to get the wine’s color on her lips, on the rim. She’s not drinking alcohol tonight.

She double-checks the view from the retaining wall. There’s nothing she can see down there now, pitch-black. She searches for lights, for signs of habitation that were invisible in daylight, hidden among the dense vegetation. There appears to be a house off to the west, but not close enough to be an issue.

Okay, she thinks. There’s nothing left to check, nothing left to plan. Nothing left to do but execute. She takes a deep, deep breath, and she waits.

MENDOZA

Will’s mouth is hanging open.

“Fancy,” she says, “meeting you here.”

“My God” is all he can manage.

“Well, God
dess,
if you want to be precise. And I know you do.”

They’re still standing in the dining room’s doorway. She leans toward him and he reciprocates, purses his lips into the air near her ear, as he would to thousands of other women. But he can feel her actual lips settle on his cheek, and rest on his skin for a second longer than they should.

“But who’m I to split hairs?” Looking him in the eye, clear and confident, holding him with a firmish fist encircling his arm, something of a caress with the side of her thumb.

He’d been working hard to pull his wife back into the forefront of his sexual consciousness. And he’d been succeeding, almost.

“In any case,” she says, “it
is
lovely to see you, Will Rhodes. I wasn’t sure I’d ever again have this particular pleasure. But why are you here?”

“Should I not be?”

“I thought you were European correspondent?”

“Well, Argentina is sort of European, isn’t it?”

She squints at him.

“Our Americas man isn’t terribly expert in wine, and that’s putting it diplomatically. And we’re looking for a wine story. So they sent me.”

“You’re a wine expert? You speak Spanish?”

“
Pfft
. This is Argentina. I’m getting by.”

“Yes,” Elle says, a mischievous grin sliding across her lips. “I’m quite sure you are.”

This night, in this hemisphere, it’s a much smaller table, just eight people. There’s a lot of Spanish being spoken, too much for Will and Elle to fully engage in the conversational flow, so they turn to each other by necessity as well as preference.

It becomes another of those nights, hard to keep track of the food courses, the talk progressively looser and looser, with more and more laughter, with touching on the forearm and the wrist, two hands brushing. Elle glances down at the incidental contact, which was maybe not so incidental. “You have nice hands,” she says, staring down at them. “Like a pianist. Or a pickpocket.”

The already-thin ice, Will knows, is cracking.

Dinner is breaking up. People are exchanging business cards, shaking hands, promising to follow up about something or other, that lodge in Chile’s Lake District, the winemaker who’s doing interesting things in Extremadura.

Elle arches her eyebrow at Will. Damn that sexy eyebrow. “Won’t you join me for the superfluous drink you know you want?”

Will can pretend to himself whatever the hell he wants to pretend, but he knows what she’s asking. And he knows what his answer should be. But instead “Yes” is what he says.

They perch on plush seats in the lobby bar, consume I-don’t-want-this-night-to-end drinks, accompanied by an unburdening of her past romances and disappointments, a conversation that’s an unabashed invitation to intimacy, a second-date conversation and all that accompanies it—the flush, the butterflies, just like when he was fifteen years old, or twenty-five, but now at thirty-five he hasn’t been on a second date in a long time, and he’d forgotten this part of it. Maybe he’ll still feel this way at eighty-five? Or is this the last time he’ll ever feel this way? Last times are obvious only in hindsight.

One
A.M.
sneaks up. The lobby is deserted now except for the night manager at the desk, who’s looking down at something, probably his phone. The front doors are still open, the armed security guard leaning against a pillar out there.

“So,” Elle says, but there’s suddenly nothing left to say, now that they’ve shed the bartender’s distant company, his implicit chaperoning. The talking portion of the night is finished. What remains to be seen is if there will be another portion of the night.

“Well,” he says. “I guess this is good night.” He can’t bring himself to meet her eye.

“I’m down this corridor,” she says. “You?”

Will reaches into his pocket, removes the big leather fob. Number 32. “I don’t know.” The number doesn’t explain enough, and he can’t remember, and he’s confused.

“You are too,” she says.

Has he ever done anything this hard? What has been more difficult than standing in this empty secluded corridor, late at night, alone with this beautiful woman who wants him—who has already invited him to bed—and not kissing her?

I am not a cheater, he thinks. I’m
not
.

But Will can feel the pull of her, gravitational, and the pre-kiss buzz in his head is deafening. He tries but fails to think of something that’s not her, and the more he tries, the more insistent the images become, rapidly escalating from romantic to pornographic, the shape of her breasts, the scent of her, the feel as he slides—

Will turns halfway to Elle as she’s already turning to him, both of them having made the same decision at the same moment, and neither needs to move feet to lean in, mouth on mouth, but bodies not touching.

Elle disengages her lips. She walks away, down the carpeted hall, without saying anything, leaving him standing there alone, arguing with himself…

CAPRI

The man is approaching slowly, cupping his postprandial cigarette at an upward angle, sheltering it from the wind, maybe a bit overprotective, or self-conscious. “It’s a beautiful night, isn’t it?” The trace of a Midwestern accent, but hard to place.

“Oh,” she says, “I guess so.” She’s a dejected woman, not contemplating beauty. She’s out here wallowing, is what she’s doing.

“Do you mind if I join you?”

She opens her mouth but hesitates visibly before saying, “Sure.”

He extends his hand, says, “My name is Sean.” She knows this is not true. Sean Cullen is one of his many aliases. In the Spanish Pyrénées, he was apparently calling himself Taylor Lindhurst.

“I’m Marina,” she says, giving her own false name. But he doesn’t know that she’s lying. At least she hopes not.

She’s sitting on the low wall that separates the horizontal plane from the vertical, terrace from cliff, sea from sky. She puts down her glass, unsteady on the rough surface, tendrils of vegetation springing from the cracks and air bubbles of the volcanic rock. She shakes his hand, wonders if he can feel that her palm is moist, sweaty. He holds her hand a second too long, the unmistakable come-on, just as expected.

She has never done this before. She has come close—everyone like her has come close, she supposes. But she’s never followed through, never gone all the way. She knew she’d be nervous at this point, but not this much, and it’s probably not going to get easier if it takes longer.

It’s time.

She picks up her glass to take the final sip, step number fifteen, and to initiate the most crucial sequence, the point of no return. But just as she’s raising the glass she senses movement, and she glances over her shoulder.

It’s the waitress again, being solicitous.

Marina supposes that the expected thing would be to ask the waitress for a glass, so this man can share her wine. She wants this man to stay with her, but she can’t invite him. That would seem too forward, unnatural. Suspicious.

She cuts her eyes to her bottle, then away.

He notices. “Would you mind if I had a glass with you?”

“Um.” She cocks her head: a drunk woman realizing she’s a drunk woman who’s maybe about to make a mistake. “Sure?”

“
Signorina,
” he says to the waitress,
“un bicchiere, per favore?”

So now she needs to wait. Waiting is most painful when you don’t expect to do it.

MENDOZA

There is of course a bottle of wine in his room, and candles to help Will explore every inch of Elle’s body, shoulders and breasts and neck and ears, the exquisite torture of extended foreplay, the lengths of her legs and the darkness between, straining and aching and finally exploding with spine-shuddering release.

And then, spent, a reassuring glow from within that lasts just seconds before regret initiates its counterattack, marching into Will’s consciousness and establishing a forward position, accusatory and unforgiving, even as he’s still short of breath, lying there on the soft sheets in the large bed, with this naked nubility straddling him, slicked with a sheen of sweat, the scent of sex. Will can feel the burning of scratches on his back, the soreness of his overteased cock, which he knows will soon be aroused again, sucked again, fucked again, because they will stay awake till sunrise, engaging every conceivable position, indulging every fantasy and scenario, extracting every possible memory from one night, because this won’t—this can’t—ever happen again.

He has imagined this moment before, the fantasy of a hotel bed on the other side of the world, with a beautiful woman who’s not his wife. The reality is far better than he imagined, while at the same time much worse.

Elle climbs off him, and out of the bed, her body golden in the flattering flickering light. She pops a bottle top and pours herself a glass of water, drinks.

Will spins off his side of the bed, unlocks the French doors, pushes them open, a refreshing breeze fluttering the curtains, cooling his overheated, over-aroused body. He looks out at the full moon, then falls back onto the bed.

But she doesn’t. Instead, she’s rooting around on the floor. She finds her panties, pulls them on. Her bra too.

“What are you doing?”

She locates the tiny pile of her dress.

“Why are you getting dressed?”

She pulls the little black dress over her head, shimmies into it. “Well,” she says. “Thank you, Will Rhodes. I didn’t expect to enjoy that.”

He doesn’t understand what she can possibly mean. He suddenly fears that he has fallen into the clutches of a psychopath. This possibility hasn’t been Will’s primary disincentive to adultery, but it has certainly ranked high on the list of compelling reasons to not cheat: the impossibility of knowing what another human being is capable of, motivated by, desperate for. Sex is putting your life in someone else’s hands. And unless you really know that person, you can’t know what will end up happening.