A WOMAN IN GREEN
William Petrick |
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ONLY HOURS BEFORE THEY RUSHED OUT TO CATCH A FREE FLIGHT TO
Cancun, his burly roommate marched into the living room and presented a pair of chalk-white pills in the palm of his hand like a chef presenting a prized delicacy. They looked to Peter like ordinary Tylenol tablets. So he waited for the explanation, guessing it was likely to have something to do with better health through vitamins. Whether it was here in the duplex or the flight kitchen where they worked, Mangianelli never missed an opportunity to convert him to the wonders of natural supplements.
"Niacin, P-man. Improves blood circulation and the ability of the red cells to breathe," Mangianelli said. "And, if taken hours before, improves the stiffness and performance of the member."
"The member," Peter repeated.
"Try it," he said.
"Why?"
"There has to be a reason for everything?"
Peter stared at the familiar gap-toothed grin spreading across his roommate's face. The salesman's charm made Peter laugh in spite of himself. He'd already gone this far with Mangianelli and his ideas, what was one more?
"So when's this niacin kick in, anyway, Mangia?" Peter asked after washing down the pills with a shot of tap water. The city tap water, he was reminded again, was infused with so much chlorine that it tasted like water from a swimming pool.
"Depends on the physiology," Mangianelli said.
"What's that in minutes, professor?"
"Half hour to an hour, maybe. Could be more."
Back in his room, Peter finished gathering his khaki shorts, Gap T-shirts, surfer trunks, and Teva sandals, preparing for summer. It was another brown Dallas winter, but by the afternoon he would be standing underneath the leafy palm trees of the Yucatan. When he had told Annie about their plans to hang out for a weekend—just the boys—she had tersely reminded him that Cancun was a pre-fab paradise, trucked in on flatbeds and barges, founded, like Las Vegas, on a profit scheme. The Mexican government had used a supercomputer to find the sunniest, most accessible strip of undeveloped land in the country, a coastal paradise to transform into a profitable resort.
"So?" Peter retorted.
"It's so not you, Peter. You're going to be miserable."
"It's only two days, Annie. And I promised Mangianelli I'd do this with him. It's important for his relationship. You know, with Leslie."
"With Leslie?" she said, dismissively. "He's just looking for an excuse. You can see it a mile away. They've broken up how many times now?"
"Annie. He loves Leslie. They're just working things out. He told me." Peter had his doubts, but out of loyalty, he took his friend's earnest statements at face value.
"So why not fly to Big Bend, go hiking?"
"Cancun is where he wanted to go. And you know how easy it is to get a seat on that Saturday morning flight as a non-revenue."
"And you have no vote? There's plenty of places you can fly non-rev. That's the beauty of working for the airlines, right?"
"Don't worry about it."
"I just don't understand why you need to do this."
Peter refused to recognize her jealousy and distrust. Mangianelli had laughed when he told him about the conversation with Annie.
"Hey. We're not married, P-man," he said.
"True," Peter acknowledged.
"And P-man, just because you're on a diet, doesn't mean you can't look at the menu."
Peter finished laying out his beach clothes and hopped into the shower. The warm water shooting from the Waterpik was immediately soothing. He had slept at Annie's apartment the night before and hurried out in the morning without showering. He didn't want her to start pestering him again and somehow persuade him to call off the boys' weekend.
Peter's chest and face suddenly exploded, the skin burning as if splashed with acid. He jumped out of the shower, panting, tears staining his blushed cheeks. He stared at his member, which was gorged and burning as though acid had been poured on it. In the steamed mirror, Peter saw a 27-year-old with a face as red as a newborn. The door opened, sucking a narrow shaft of the hot mist, revealing Mangianelli. He was grinning, his teeth chalk-white against his olive skin, clearly pleased with himself.
"What I tell you?" he asked. "Is it a rush or what?"
The rush subsided and Peter's breathing mercifully fell back to normal nearly as quickly as it had begun. But his chest remained sunburn-red. Mangianelli assured him it would return to normal.
"When exactly?"
"Depends on the physiology."
The Sheraton Cancun was separated from the main cluster of hotels by miles of landfill swamp and strands of brush. The beach looked like one of the airline posters that lined the halls at the reservations office where he worked. There was the sugar-white sand, the candy-blue water, and a surf-side cabana made to resemble a thatched hut. Peter was surprised to discover that he didn't mind the bland, resort atmosphere. He was grateful to be liberated from the burden of wearing a heavy winter jacket everywhere and the unconscious bracing for the cold that met him every winter morning.
The boys picked out two chaise lounges from the vast, white fleet that was moored along the hotel's shore. Annie could bake for hours on sand, but Peter had brought along a portable chess set to help combat the restlessness that beaches sometimes inspired in him. Mangianelli ordered them margaritas from a roving, middle-aged Mexican waiter with bad skin and stooped shoulders. The waiter reminded Peter of the illegals he had worked with as a VISTA volunteer in South Dallas, the largely Mexican barrio in the shadow of the city's gleaming signature tower. Peter had enlisted on a kind of mission, an impulse to give back after years of prep school and college as well as a need to do something other than just go to law school like so many of his classmates. But living on subsistence wages in a ghetto had begun to grate on him when he saw other people his age driving by in their BMWs or simply going out to dinner.
"Would you look at the mangos on that schoolgirl?" Mangianelli whispered as a well- endowed woman sauntered by their chaise lounges en route to the cabana.
"You are obsessed, Mangia."
He adjusted the plastic Ray-Bans that slid down his nose. Peter thought he looked comic in sunglasses. His dark, wet hair and receding hairline made him look like John Belushi as a Blues Brother.
"Easy for you to say. Annie has the greatest knockers in Texas. But you don't care. You're a leg man."
"Are you going to make a move anytime soon?" Peter said.
"Don't get all bent out of shape."
"I'm not all bent out of shape. I want to play chess," Peter complained.
"What's wrong with a little anatomical appreciation?"
"You're just looking at the menu? Or are you thinking of ordering?"
Mangianelli laughed. It was deep and infectious and made you like him or forgive almost anything. Peter had been drawn to that gregarious warmth from the beginning. They had met at a company picnic, both exiles from the Northeast who thought of Texas, and Dallas in particular, as just this side of the boonies.
"That's good, P-man. I am on a diet, but I'm hung-ry, too."
"Maybe Annie was right," Peter said. "You are looking for an excuse."
"P-man, you trying to tell me you suddenly don't see beautiful women?"
The chess game finally got underway and lasted through a second margarita. Peter caught a soft, pleasing buzz. Time floated along as easily and weightlessly as the puffs of clouds that occasionally drifted over the beach. The hot sun and the steady drone of the surf kneaded his body, massaging away his restlessness.
"Never ceases to amaze me how we can just hop on a plane and go where we want," Mangianelli said. "It would be tough to give up non-revenue flying, just showing that airline card and being handed a boarding pass gratis."
"Who's planning on giving it up?" Peter said. "C'mon, make your move."
Mangianelli's face looked uncharacteristically solemn.
"Leslie thinks I should get out of catering and go do something with the suits at HQ."
"You're a food man."
"But the money is at HQ."
"She's really working on you," Peter snapped, immediately regretting it. He worked hard to conceal his dislike of Leslie, who he believed was one of those flight attendants who worked the airlines looking for a loaded, high-flying mate. She was tall and gorgeous with a sexy mane of curly blonde hair. But he saw her as too conventionally ambitious for Mangianelli, whose passion was the art and color of food presentation. It was a rare and special enthusiasm, too_one that had forever changed how Peter himself looked at a salad in a fine restaurant. Look at the colors, look at the colors, his friend would always point out as if they were in an art gallery.
"No," Mangianelli said, picking up his bishop and sending it across the board to kill Peter's rook. "It just comes up when we talk about the future. Check."
"Bastard," Peter said. "I didn't even see that coming."
"Too slow, P-man. Tequila's got your brain," he laughed.
After Mangianelli won, both settled into the environment. Peter drifted off into a sweet, welcome nap. As he did, he wondered absently why he was rarely this relaxed on a beach with Annie.
Mangianelli suddenly jumped up from the chaise lounge, startling Peter out of his breezy cocoon of sun and briny air.
"I'll be back, P-man," Mangianelli said. "I'm going to go up to the room and give Leslie a call."
Peter nodded and started to roll his neck to relieve the stiffness. He noticed most people were leaving the beach, heading for showers or more drinks inside the Sheridan's expansive bar. He thought of following them or being thoughtful like Mangianelli and calling Annie. But it was too soon to call; he hadn't been away even a day.
Mangianelli was gone for a long time, enough for the sun to turn from pink to a tropical tangerine, making the sand glow like smooth, bronzed skin. Peter was startled to have his view of the water suddenly blocked. A woman rose up from the sand, stretched her long thin arms, and yawned. Her sheer green robe fluttered in the breeze like a veil. Her green bikini was smooth and taut. As if following a script, the woman untied the robe and let it unfurl like a loose sail.
"I thought I was the only one out here," Peter said, bounding out of his chaise lounge. He pretended to be strolling to the water.
The woman had an easy smile that spread across a narrow, pretty face dotted with freckles. Her eyes were bright and alert and a green that reminded Peter of lush, suburban lawns.
"It's my favorite time of day," she said.
"Mine too."
Peter glanced at the smooth skin of her young, lean thighs. They slipped into an easy conversation about beaches and Cancun and vacations away from Chicago. She'd seen an ad in the Oak Park shopping weekly and knew winter vacations didn't come any cheaper, especially for a graduate student. It took weeks to talk her roommate into coming along.
"What made her change her mind?"
"We went on a diet together," she said and laughed a bright, playful, thrilling laugh. How long had it been since he had been so thrilled by a woman's laugh?
In a natural, easy rhythm, they walked together towards the water's edge. The sky and sea were changing quickly. The dramatic, tangerine light of sunset burst from the horizon and spread across the calm, indigo sea. Peter felt the simple thrill of watching a sunset, dormant for so long, rush back in all its glory.
Mangianelli was sprawled on one of the double beds, watching a movie on HBO when Peter hurried into the room. A tumbler, empty except for ice cubes and a lime wedge, sat on the night table beside him. In his hands was another margarita, its lips smudged with salt.
"You get lost?" Mangianelli asked.
"Mangia. We got any plans for dinner?" Peter was full of energy.
"You do, it looks like."
When Peter asked how he felt about having dinner with a woman from Chicago named Lauren and her friend, Rita, Mangianelli fell uncharacteristically silent. He glanced away from the TV and studied Peter with a thoughtful, bemused gaze.
"We going to need some niacin?"
"It's not about getting laid," Peter said.
"Oh," Mangianelli said, doubtfully. "You don't look like you need niacin anyway."
The taxi took the foursome through the outskirts of downtown Cancun, a dirt barrio of shacks, old tires, and strips of corrugated tin. The fading light hid the poor residents in heavy shadow except for a short, emaciated Indian woman who ambled between the shacks like the stray dogs that wandered through most of Latin America. Peter noticed her turn to look at their speeding taxi. Her dark, Mayan eyes blazed with a strange, haunting intensity. Like the VISTA days, he mused to himself. Back then, he would have rushed to do something.
"This a four-star restaurant we're going to?" Mangianelli joked from the other side of the cab. Peter felt Lauren's warm, soft thigh press against his when she laughed. The smell of her sultry perfume made him conjure that sheer green robe on the beach. It was like a pop song he couldn't get out of his head.
The black outlines of trees and palmettos soon appeared at the end of the long, barren road. There were low-slung cement houses with dark windows, as if they were abandoned. Headlights bounced along a narrow boulevard just beyond them. The taxi driver dropped the Americans in front of an open-air restaurant with orange plastic lanterns dangling from the wood rafters.
Absently, Peter took Lauren's hand. The warmth, the silken ease of her delicate fingers surprised and excited him. It was a cool night, and the stars spread above them like granules of white sand. The cheap lanterns gave the porch a festive village charm.
"This place is so wonderfully kitschy," Lauren gushed after the waiter had delivered the first liter of frozen margaritas.
"A toast!" Peter said, smiling at the surprise that lit Mangianelli's dark, amused eyes. Instead, Peter held up his smudged tumbler and turned his gaze to the faint sickle of the moon. "To new friends and the new moon."
"All right!" Mangianelli boomed. "Let the good times roll."
Lauren's pretty, delicate face shone with the afterglow of the day's hot sun. Her lips, her smooth, narrow shoulders, the graceful fingers that brushed Peter's in languid, teasing strokes under the table, all making each charged moment significant. After Lauren stood up and strolled inside the restaurant to find the restrooms, Peter found even her girlish, pigeon-toed walk to be charming and sexy.
Peter sank back in the plastic chair, buzzing with contentment. Mangianelli and Lauren's girlfriend, Rita, had drawn closer to one another.
"The secret to mole sauce is the mix of peppers, not the chocolate. Hell, you could use Hershey's if you wanted to," Mangianelli was saying. "Not that I would. But you have to be very careful to use only the best, plumpest habanero and serrano peppers."
"Hot but not overpowering," Rita offered.
"Yes. Yes. It's about balance, not power."
Peter smiled, admiring his friend's easy, gregarious charm. He was so happy about his decision to join Mangia for the weekend, absently wondering why he had ever hesitated. Annie was just jealous of his freedom. Like girlfriends before her, Peter suspected she wanted to control him, to change something about him that was more in line with her image of him.
Lauren returned, her long hair smoother from a fresh brushing and her lips moist with a new layer of balm. Peter was bursting with sweet anticipation. He loved women, especially the exotic allure of their femininity. Her eyes were clear and young and untroubled and they gleamed under the delicate screen of her long eyelashes. Her small, aquiline nose looked sculptural in the light and shadow. Her lips were painted with an expertly applied layer of the waxy balm and seemed to glow like her cheeks under the amber fiesta lanterns.
But when she turned briefly and smiled affectionately at him, Peter felt a disturbing, unanticipated shock. It was an un-summoned, unwanted memory. But there it was. A familiarity in Lauren's pose, a vivid recognition that he had seen it before, a cherished time that he thought was long buried and forgotten.
Annie had sat in just this same position at a café table that looked over the dark Gulf at Corpus Christi. Even the air was ripe with the same smell of the sea. She was listening to a stranger from an adjoining table. It was only their second or third date. A candle floated in a kitschy dish between them, the buttery light flickering, bathing Annie's girlish beauty, more alluring in that soft living portrait than any woman he had ever known.
Peter shook off the memory like a bad dream. How twisted, he reprimanded himself. He let himself run his fingers over Lauren's warm girlish hands, coaxing himself back into the moment.
The foursome got crazy drunk on the margaritas. Mangianelli kept ordering pitchers of the stuff and no one objected. A taxi finally drove them back through the dark barrio to the secluded beauty of the Sheraton. It was early, still, too early, Peter thought, to end the night when you were on vacation.
Mangianelli came up with the idea of the whirlpool. They started with bathing suits. Lauren wore her green bikini. Within a short time, however, the four lounged naked in the bubbling white water. Rita had brought along a bottle of tequila from her room. Peter and Mangianelli shared a conspiratorial glance. They pretended that this was utterly spontaneous, a pure and natural development they had never yearned for nor imagined. At the same time, there was an immediate understanding transmitted in that glance, a bond of silence.
Peter kissed Lauren gently, liking the smooth, anonymous warmth of the stranger's lips. There was a faint taste of the sea on them, and he closed his eyes picturing the woman in green on the beach. He kept his eyes closed tightly, forcing himself to be in the moment, to not feel what his memory had shown him at the dinner table. He pulled the woman closer, and they clung to each other in the frothing water. Lauren's thin body felt warm and pliant against his, and he knew there was no doubt that they would make love, possibly here in this whirlpool.
But the excitement didn't catch, and he could feel the passion ebbing quickly. When Peter opened his eyes, Lauren's face was bright red, as if it had been niacin induced. She looked at him, alarmed and confused at why he had stopped what he was doing. Peter stared. Her body looked gangly and awkward without the green veil. Her breasts had hard, dark nipples that turned purple in the scalding water. He closed his eyes, as if this would somehow stop the feeling that now had taken over him.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
Peter tried to answer but caught himself. He hardly knew this woman. But he knew, without a doubt, what it was he missed.
Lauren slowly fished the wet strips of rayon from the water, stepped into her green bikini, and tied on the green top.
"Too bad," Lauren said icily. "I think I'll go back to my room."
In the morning, Peter awoke to an empty room. His skull ached, and he was afraid of getting sick. It wasn't until he had dragged himself into the bathroom and splashed cold water into his puffy face and scratchy eyes that he realized Mangianelli's bed was untouched.
After a few cups of black coffee and some dry scrambled eggs stuffed into a tortilla, Peter donned his sunglasses and strolled out to the beach. It was midday and every chaise lounge was taken. He wandered through the white maze of chairs, inhaling the smells of coconut oils and sunscreens. Plastic tumblers, tinted lime-green with margaritas, dotted the white sand. He looked for Mangianelli. But it was Lauren he found. She wore a milk-white bikini, lips glistening, an empty can of Perrier in her small hand. He felt foolish that things had ended so coolly in the hot tub.
"You haven't seen my roommate?"
"They're sleeping," Lauren answered. Peter thought he saw the hint of a sardonic smile on the edge of her wet lips. Mirror sunglasses hid her eyes and reflected his own tired face. Peter's head started to throb.
"I'm sorry about what happened last night."
"It's funny," she answered after a long, uncomfortable pause. "I have a boyfriend back in Chicago. We've been together for almost a year. I'm not sure if it's going to be a permanent thing, but I've never cheated on him. I wasn't even interested in doing anything with you. I'm not sure what that was about. I guess I got caught up in the moment."
"Why didn't he come with you?"
"Tom doesn't like the beach. And he hates crowds. It would have been pure torture for him. Not that it wouldn't have been nice if he tried."
A cool breeze whisked across the beach, fluttering the umbrellas and carrying a strong scent of brine. Pop music from the surf-side bar played over the soft drone of the breakers.
"I'm not a beach person either."
"No?" Lauren laughed. "So I can only guess what brought you here."
"My friend," Peter said. "Mangianelli had been talking about a boys' weekend."
"So you both have girlfriends?" Lauren said, shaking her head. "Men."
"It's all pretty ugly, I guess."
"I just don't understand guys," Lauren said, shading the sun with her hand as she tried to find Peter's eyes behind his sunglasses. "They're either cads or romantics."
Peter took off his glasses as if to respond but merely shrugged. He wished things had gone differently. He wished he were different. But what went through his mind was that seaside restaurant with Annie. They had just met. Everything was ahead of them. That night the air had been as soft and magical as it had when Lauren and he first arrived at the Mexican restaurant. There was the same unblemished thrill of sharing their best selves, the sudden awareness—or hope—that his future might well be poised on the other side of the flickering candle.
"It doesn't matter," Lauren said. "Take a seat if you want."
Peter sat down on the hot, white chaise beside her. Lauren observed him with what he could feel was a patient amusement.
"Well, you're not a cad."
"No," Peter said. "Not yet."
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