Time of My Life (16 page)

Chapter Seventeen

T
he muggy October air in Miami shocks my system, such that nearly every pore declares mutiny with profuse and unstoppable sweating. By the second day, I’ve all but camped out in the resort pool in an effort to offer my body some relief. After my fingers have pruned, I slink out of the water onto my waiting lounge chair and reach for the SPF. Always with the SPF.

“You’re not going to get
any
color down here?” Jack asks, setting down his book on the mini–patio table that sits between our loungers.

“Of course not!” I furrow my face and zealously rub the lotion into my forearm.

“But . . . you love a nice tan,” he says, as I flip over and hand him the bottle to slather more block on my back. “That’s part of the reason I chose Miami.”

“The sun is terrible for you!” I exclaim, reaching for my linen hat, whose circumference outsizes a watermelon. And it’s true: I’d learned all about the horrors of the sun via my diligent magazine reading in my old life. Wrinkles. Lines.
Melanoma.
I’d flip through the pages, then assiduously examine every mole on my body, holding up a mirror to peek at the ones on my back, and compare them all with the gruesome, gnarly pictures in the articles. And Katie never left the house without a full coating of SPF 50. Even in the rain. “You could never be too careful,” a renowned Stanford professor was quoted as saying in the latest piece I’d perused in
Allure.

“Um, okay,” Jack answers with confusion, still rubbing. “But you spent all of last summer laying out in the park.”
Don’t remind me!
My skin nearly crawls at the thought of the damage I’d wrought in years past.

I turn my head away from him, pressing my face into the chair, and grunt a response. Slowly, I feel his fingers veer from my shoulders into the edges of my armpits and then slightly on the cusp of my breasts.

“Not now!” I try to sound serious, but mostly, I giggle.

“Now,” he says, leaning into my ear.

“It’s the middle of the afternoon!” His hands weave farther underneath my bikini.

“And that’s a problem, why?”

He’s right,
I tell myself.
Just because you and Henry never had sex in the middle of the afternoon, or if you did, it was because it was your only window while Katie was napping, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t run up to your suite and screw Jack’s brains out.

I push myself off my stomach, tie a towel around my waist, and grab his arm, then we race to our room, tugging, pulling, clawing at each other until twenty minutes later, I’m curled naked in bed, inhaling the sweetly cloying scent of suntan lotion and sex, and finally, it seems, blessed by a too-cold blast of air-conditioning, my body ceases to sweat. Just as I’m drifting into unconsciousness, that deep haze brought on by a great orgasm and strong sun, I hear Jack rustle in the sheets next to me.

“God,” he says. “I could lie here with you forever.”

Forever,
I think.
What’s that?

But rather than answer him, I place my hand over his beating chest, and then soon, I am spent.

T
HE RESTAURANT
that Jack has chosen for dinner is impossibly hip, with smooth granite walls and towering bamboo shoots and models whose faces I double take because I wonder if I know them personally or have just seen them in one of my many magazines.

We’re seated in the back, away from the pulsing bar and the even-more pulsing music, and though I’ve been back in my old life for nearly three months, I am struck with an overwhelming sense of surrealism. Sort of like déjà vu, only not really, since I know that I haven’t been
here
here before. Because seven years ago tonight, not only was I not in Miami but also it was the fateful night that I, armed with the security of having met Henry, untied my anchors to Jack for good.

In the weeks leading up to the breakup, we’d spiraled from ailing to critical, and when he announced, yet again, that he was heading to visit his mother for the weekend, and failed to invite me along, I erupted. In retrospect, now with my neutered temperament, which clamped down on my niggly comments about his under-achievements and overbearing gene pool, it seemed like I could have taken steps to prevent the blowout.
Maybe I overreacted,
I tell myself now, sipping a mojito and glancing at Jack, whose tan had brought out the blue in his eyes and whose hair had grown two shades lighter in just a few short days.

Back then, Jack asked me to rethink things. “This is ridiculous!” He shouted, loud enough that our neighbors could hear. “She’s my mother! It’s a weekend!”

“It’s not about your mother!” I cried back. “It’s about . . .” I shook my head and flitted my arms in a circle. “This! It’s just all of this!” I didn’t mention the kind-eyed man whom I’d met at the bar who seemed to interlock with me in the way that puzzle pieces might.

“Do you want me not to go see her?” He slammed a suitcase shut on our bed. “Is that it? Do you want me not to go, because then I won’t fucking go!”

“That’s not it,” I said quietly. “It’s so much more than that.”

“Because we fight?” he asked. “Is this because of our stupid fights? Because everyone has goddamn fights.
Everyone!
”

“It’s not about the fights, Jack,” I said, then reconsidered. “Well, it is about the fights. Sort of. It just feels like we don’t fit anymore.” I thought again of Henry.

“This is bullshit,” he said, though he stopped screaming and now seemed poised to explode into tears. “Fucking bullshit. Two years of my life, and then this. Out of nowhere.”

“It’s not exactly out of nowhere,” I said, sitting on the bed.

“It’s completely out of fucking nowhere,” he answered, lifting his suitcase and heading for the front door. “Just like your goddamn mom. One day here, the next day gone.”

The door slammed, and that’s when I started to cry. Because while he might have been cruel, he might also have been right. Just the day before, we’d nursed cocktails with Meg and Tyler and toasted our fortune and circumstance, and now, this—yes, I could see how to Jack it did seem out of nowhere.

But no longer,
I think, drowning a giant sip of the mojito.
Now I’m here, in this restaurant that my old suburban self wouldn’t have thought worthy of going to, in a dress that my old suburban self couldn’t have squeezed into, and with a man who my old suburban self never quite laid to rest.

I shake myself out of the memory, just as our waiter arrives to

take our order.
This is the here and now. This is the moment,
I think.
This is the time of my life.

L
ATER, WITH MY STOMACH
happily dancing with mahimahi and crusty sourdough bread and rich molten chocolate cake and one mojito too many, Jack pays the check and takes my hand.

“I chose this place because they have the most incredible roof deck,” he says. “Come on, let’s go.”

He pulls back my chair for me and guides me, arm around my waist, to the elevator. (Take that,
Marie Claire
! Chivalry is not dead!)

The doors ding open when we reach the top, and we step onto a mutedly lit terrace, with tiny white lights, like the fireflies of my childhood, dotting the stucco walls, and soaring potted palm trees looming from corners and crevasses. A jazz trio plays on an elevated stage to our right, and just ahead, I can see the ocean, its waves sweeping in, then out, then in again. Slim, crisp patrons mill about and the air smells of salt, just washed in from the sea.

We amble over to the ledge and stare out at the endless tide, its roar still detectable below the buzz of conversation, and then Jack turns to me.

“Jill, you know that I love you, right?”

“I do,” I say, returning my gaze to the water. I’m mesmerized by its rhythm, how even when you think another wave won’t come along, even when you think the beat won’t hold steady, another crest rides up and there it is—the pulse of the ocean all over again.

“Look at me, baby. I’m saying something important here.” His palm guides my cheek back to him. Jack inhales. “I know that as a writer, I’m supposed to have a way with words and all of that, but I’ve thought about this over and over again, and I just don’t have the right words for this moment.”

It hits me, suddenly and viscerally, what is happening.

“And so,” he continues and lowers himself onto one knee, “all I can say is, Jill, I love you more than anything, and I’d be honored if you’d marry me.” He bats a curl of blond hair off his forehead, then reaches into his pants pocket and pulls out a box.

I can feel all my pores reopen, sweat marching forward, like an angry army, and my eyes are frozen wide, unable to blink. Blood rushes through me, and my mouth turns arid. I still haven’t spoken when he slides the ring on my finger.

“So you will?” he says, rising to kiss me. I must nod my head or give some slight indication that, indeed, I will, though I can’t remember giving such an acknowledgment, because the next thing I hear is raucous applause from the partygoers around us who have stopped sipping their martinis for just a moment to notice our passing flicker of a life moment. Jack swings me around in a bear hug and screams some sort of victory cry, reminding me of an ancient warrior who just slayed a beast, and the roar crescendos, then softens, just like the waves below.

Jack kisses my ear, biting just enough to tingle, then heads to the bar for celebratory drinks.
On the house,
cooed the cocktail waitress after making her way over to congratulate us.

I lean against the cool ledge and hold my left hand out for a view. The ring sings out—it is shining and round and big and hopeful—and by any standard, I should be bursting,
I am bursting,
to have it. I hug my arms in tight, wrapping my hands around my back, to ward off a cool breeze that strikes out of nowhere. The wind passes, and I release myself, staring down at my finger once again.

This was perfect,
I think.
It wasn’t intimate like Henry’s proposal, and so what if his words weren’t quite poetic, weren’t quite what I’d imagined when someone asked me to swear myself to him for life. It was pretty close to perfect. Perfect enough.

I run my thumb over the ring, trying to swivel it back and forth the way that I’d grown accustomed to with Henry’s, and it’s only then that I notice that the band is nearly choking my finger. That it’s wrapped around so tight that the better half of my ring finger looks like an overstuffed sausage. I pull my hand closer and hold it up to the light. It’s hard to see at first, but then, I can feel the throb: There, just to the right of my knuckle, is a tiny gash, no bigger than a gnat-sized paper cut. Jack must have nicked it when he pushed the ring on.

I raise my hand to my mouth and suck the pulsing joint, the unmistakable taste of blood spreading across my tongue, and after a minute, the pain subsides. I examine my knuckle again, turning back and forth and back again under the dull glare of the tiny white lights, and best I can tell, the cut is gone.

I catch Jack’s eye from the bar and smile.

And yet, if I listened to my wiser self, my suburban self who still clanged around in my brain when I let her, she would have told me that though the wound was now invisible, it was never really gone.