“You’re distracted, useless, a bit soft in the head.” He grinned, then his eyes widened as he covered his mouth. “Mark, I think you’re . . .happy!”
I didn’t have an answer for that, so I downed the last of my drink, which turned out to be ninety percent rum and tasted like a hibiscus had been murdered. A tiny voice in the back of my brain told me I would regret chugging it in two gulps, but the front of my noggin begged for numbness in the wake of Finn’s assessment.
I let the subject change to the Toronto seating-chart dispute, which I was eventually—and against my will—conscripted into mediating on the grounds that a contractor would understand loaddistribution, and that a wedding table was structurally similar to a beam.
It was, I’ll admit, a good night.
It was the kind I didn’t have at home.
At home there was Finn, and there was work, and there was the narrow channel between them. Here, there was Brenda’s llama and Esteban’s crush and two Canadians who would not let go of whether Uncle Gerald could be seated near the bar. I laughed more than I had in months, and somewhere in the middle of it all, I caught myself scanning the path that led up from the beach, searching for a gray henley.
Of course, Finn caught me catching myself.
He didn’t say anything. He just bumped his plastic cup against mine under the table, quietly, where the others couldn’t see.
Trouble started the next morning, and the trouble’s name was aqua fitness.
I had, by this point, successfully avoided every scheduled activity on the resort’s roster for three days, a streak I was quietly proud of, but Brenda, it emerged, was an aqua fitness devotee, and Brendahad decided that I was now her project, the way Finn had decided I was his years earlier. The two of them formed a coalition against me at breakfast that I was powerless to resist.
“It’s low impact,” Brenda said.
“It’s in the pool,” Finn said. “You like the pool now. We’ve established you like the pool.”
“I tolerate the pool,” I said.
“He loves working out, and he tolerates the pool,” Finn told Brenda, as if translating. “That’s growth. Two days ago, he generated his own weather system.”
So I found myself, at noon, standing chest-deep in the resort pool in a circle of mostly nude retirees, being led through a series of movements by an instructor named Carlos.
Brenda was beside me, focused and serious.
Finn was on my other side, performing every movement with such grotesque exaggeration that Carlos kept having to look away to keep from laughing.
“Reach for the sky!” Carlos called. “Now squat like you’re sitting in a chair! Beautiful! You, big man in the back, very good, you have the form of a natural!”
I did not have the form of a natural.
I had the form of a man who builds things for aliving being asked to pretend to sit in an invisible chair under water in front of strangers. I couldn’t decide if I was pretending to squat in a chair or on a toilet, but I reached for the sky, and I squatted in the invisible chair.
It was during the invisible chair that I looked up and saw, on the pool deck, a camera pointed in my general direction. Wes Calloway was photographing the aqua fitness class for the resort’s website.
He had me dead in frame.
He lowered the camera just enough to look at me over the top of it.
His grin was incandescent.
And somewhat evil.
He raised one hand and gave me a small, devastating wave, and then lifted the camera again, very deliberately taking another picture of me squatting in an invisible chair surrounded by naked retirees.
“Reach for the sky, big man!” Carlos cried.
I reached for the sky.
I reached for it while maintaining eye contact with Wes Calloway across the pool deck in a kind of furious, helpless promise. Wes mouthed something at me that I was fairly sure was “For the website,” and Finn, who had clocked the entire exchange, laughed so hard he inhaled pool water and had to be helped to the steps by Brenda.
“Are you all right?” Brenda asked him, patting his back.
