By our third day, Finn had been adopted.
I don’t know how else to describe what had happened to him. I’d left him at the pool on the first afternoon a stranger, and somewhere in the thirty-some hours since, he had become a central figure in the social life of the entire resort, the way a stray cat becomes, over the course of a single week, the emotional load-bearing wall of an office.
I came back from the cove on our second evening to find him holding court at the swim-up bar with the relaxed older couple from the loungers, two honeymooning men from Toronto, a retired schoolteacher named Brenda who was traveling alone and gloriously unbothered, and a bartender named Esteban who, by Finn’s account, had become his closest friend in the world.
None of them,including Finn, wore a single thread of clothing.
“Mark!” he bellowed across the pool when he sawme, with the volume of a man who had been drinking piña coladas since approximately 1923. “Mark, come here, you have to meet everyone. This is everyone. Everyone, this is Mark. He won the trip. He’s the sad one I told you lot about.”
“You’ve been telling people I’m the sad one?”
“They needed context for the shirt.” He hauled me down into a wet plastic chair beside him. “But you’re less sad today. Look at him, Brenda. He’s practically luminous . . . and he’s shirtless! That’s real progress. Where’ve you been?”
“Walking.”
“Walking?” Finn turned to his assembled court with the satisfaction of a prosecutor reaching the good part. “He’s been ‘walking’ for two days now. He disappears at noon, comes back at dusk withthatlook on his face and calls it ‘walking.’ The funny thing is, there’s a certain photographer who also goes ‘walking’ at noon. It’s the same noon. Isn’t that a curious overlap in walking schedules?”
“It’s a small resort,” I said, looking about for Esteban, desperate for alcohol to numb whatever Finn was doing.
“It’s a hundred and forty acres, Mark. Unlike some, I read thewholebrochure.” The table laughed. I suddenly understood I’d been the subject of discussion for some time before my arrival. Brenda gaveme a wink that no woman her age should have been legally permitted to deploy.
This was the thing about Finn that I’d known for four years and that the resort was now discovering in real time: The man had no off switch when it came to connecting with people. Where I walked into a room and made it smaller, Finn walked into a room and made it a party. People told him things.
No, people told himeverything.
Esteban the bartender had apparently confided in him about a fellow he was trying to work up the nerve to ask out. The Toronto honeymooners had recruited him to settle a long-running argument about their wedding seating chart. Brenda had shown him pictures of her grandchildren and her late husband and a llama she’d met in Peru, in that order of importance.
And the crowning glory?
The entire population of the swim-up bar—most of whom I’d yet to meet—now knew, in considerable detail, that I had been disappearing with the only other clothed man on the island.
“I’m not discussing it,” I grumbled.
“Nobody asked you to discuss it. We’ve discussed it plenty while you’ve been off walking.” Finn signaled Esteban for another round. I tried not to be annoyed at how easily he captured the bartender’sattention when I’d been trying to flag him for some minutes. “Esteban thinks you and your photographer are romantic. Brenda thinks you’re moving too slow. The lads from Toronto are split. It’s a whole thing now. They’re even taking bets on when you’ll get laid. You’ve become the resort’s primary entertainment, which is only fair, given how much entertainment the resort’s been to me.”
I should have been mortified.
A week earlier, I would have been.
Instead, I slumped in my wet plastic chair waiting on a drink I hadn’t ordered, and I let the conversation roll over and around me. While Finn prattled on, I thought about the cove and the foot and a half of warm water and the way Wes had said, “There he is,” and I missed approximately every third thing anyone said to me.
“He’s doing it now,” Finn announced, delighted, his accent all pleasant and cheery. “Look at his face. He’s gone off wandering again. Brenda, wave your hand in front of him.”
Brenda dutifully waved her hand in front of my face.
I batted it away as if swatting a mosquito.
“I’m right here,” I snarled.
“You arephysicallyright here. You’re hard to miss,” Finn agreed. “But spiritually, you’resomewhere holding hands with a man with a camera.” He leaned in, and under the performance for the table there was something real and pleased and watchful in his blue eyes. “It’s good, Mark. I’m taking the mick, but it’s good. I’ve not seen you like this, not ever, actually, and I’ve known you for years.”
“Taking the mick? Is that more Lucky Charms talk?”
He snorted. “Teasing, joking, joshing. Take your pick.”
“I pick this drink,” I said, tossing back half of the fruity whatever Esteban just brought.
As always, Finn remained undaunted.
