A Gate in the Fence

My husband joked for a decade about taking me to a resort where married couples swap, and this year I booked it.

We left Minneapolis before dawn, with the de-icing trucks spraying orange foam over the wings and eleven inches of new snow piled along the edges of the long-term lot. By a quarter to twelve I was in the back row of a white van on Highway 307 with a rolled towel so cold it hurt laid across the back of my neck, watching a wall of jungle go by close enough to touch, and my husband beside me was reading the safety card for the van. There was a safety card. Of course he had found it.

I should tell this in order, because it happened in order, and because for ten years nothing happened at all.

Sameer and I were married in June of 2011, when I was twenty-three and he was twenty-six and neither of us owned a decent towel. On our fifth anniversary we were at a steakhouse in Edina with a babysitter on the clock, and somewhere between the bread and the bill he picked up his phone and showed me a website, white stucco and turquoise water and a page headed For couples who are curious, and said, "Next year, that resort," and laughed. I laughed too. It was a good joke. It was such a good joke that he made it again on our sixth anniversary, and our seventh, and every June after that, the same four words and the same laugh, until I could have mouthed it with him over the menu, and I am a person who notices when somebody's breathing changes for a living, so I can tell you that every single year, just before the laugh, there was a half second when he wasn't joking at all.

Ten years of that. You can only watch a man not mean something for so long.

My anesthesia group trades holiday shifts like baseball cards. For six years I have worked the first two weeks of December so that I can have Christmas off, and this year, in October, I traded both weeks to a colleague named Dana for her Fourth of July and a bottle of very good bourbon, and then I sat at the kitchen island after everyone was asleep and booked a Jungle suite at Casa Paradiso for the first week of December, nonrefundable, and printed the confirmation on the printer in his office, which he had never once in our marriage seen me use. That was October. I folded it in thirds and handed it to him across the dinner table between the dal and the dishes, and he read it through two times, top to bottom, and set it down very carefully next to his plate.

"Okay," he said.

That was all he said for about a day. Then he bought a new pair of swim trunks, charcoal, and left the receipt on the counter where I would find it, which in my husband's language is roughly a sonnet.

So I want to be fair to him. He came. He packed better than I did. He told our friends and the people on our street that we were going to a beach in Mexico, which was true. But I had booked it, and I had handed it to him, and the whole way down, through the de-icing and the long blue flight, I was braced for the moment he would find a way to make it a joke again, now that it was real and we were in it and there was no one left to laugh at it but us.

It came, the moment. It just wasn't a joke.

Somewhere over the Gulf, with the window shade half up and the sea below us gone a flat bright silver, he had his eyes shut and his head back against the seat, and I thought he was asleep. He wasn't. He said, without opening them, "Nobody at home ever knows."

It wasn't a question. It wasn't quite a rule either. It was the voice he uses when he's sure of a measurement.

"Nobody," I said.

He opened his eyes then and looked at me, and I looked back, and he found my hand on the armrest and held it until the drinks cart came. That was the whole agreement. People spend more words choosing a paint color. We have spent more words choosing a paint color, in fact, and I have the swatches to prove it, but I didn't need any more than that one, and neither did he, and when the cart came he ordered a ginger ale and I ordered a tiny bottle of white wine at ten in the morning and he didn't say a thing.

The van driver was a man in his fifties in a white shirt who had handed back the towels and the water without turning his head and had not said a word since the airport, and I loved him for it. The road ran straight and flat and the jungle came right up to it on both sides, low and tangled and impossibly green, broken every few miles by a speed bump he took like a man easing a baby into a crib, and a roadside stand selling coconuts, and a gas station, and once a long white wall with a hand-lettered sign for hammocks. I had taken off my parka at the airport and stuffed it into my carry-on, and my sweater after that, and I was down to a fitted black tee and the good jeans, the ones that know where my waist is, and I could feel the air conditioning on my arms and the heat outside the glass pressing on it like a hand.

Sameer finished the safety card and put it back in its pocket. He pushed his hair off his forehead with his fingers, which is what he does when he's thinking, and he did it twice.

"Architect," I said.

"I'm not doing anything."

"You're doing it with your hair."

He laughed, a real one, and leaned over and kissed my temple, and a minute later the van turned off the highway onto a white dust road through the trees and he took my hand again and didn't let go of it until we were standing in the lobby.

The lobby had no front wall. That was the first thing. You came up a flight of pale stone steps past a whole sheet of magenta bougainvillea pouring down the white plaster, and under a thatched roof so high and steep it made the inside dim and cool, and you could see straight through, past the slow fans and a polished floor and a long desk of pale wood, to a band of sea so turquoise I honestly thought for a second it had been lit from underneath. The air smelled of cut limes and something smoky and sweet burning in a dish. A couple about my parents' age were coming the other way in matching straw hats, holding hands, and the woman smiled at me as if she knew exactly where I'd come from and was glad I'd got there.

The woman behind the desk wore a navy linen dress and silver earrings, and she checked us in with the unhurried competence of somebody who has never in her life lost a reservation. Breakfast was at the Terraza from seven to eleven. The Wi-Fi password was on the card. The welcome mixer was at La Palapa at sunset, and the time was in the app, the one with the pineapple. Then she slid a glass bowl a few inches toward us across the wood, and it was full of silicone wristbands, white and coral and turquoise, the turquoise exactly the color of that strip of sea behind her, and she told us what they meant in the very same tone she'd used for the Wi-Fi.

White meant you had come to look, coral meant you would touch, and turquoise meant you were open to all of it.

Then she very kindly turned to her screen.

I didn't look at Sameer. I looked at the bowl. I had read about the bracelets in October, at the kitchen island, long after midnight, with my heart going, and I had decided that I would not be the one to reach in. I had booked it. I had handed it over. If there was going to be a color, he was going to have to pick it.

He lifted a white band out first and turned it over between his fingers, inside and out, and I knew perfectly well he was looking for printing. My husband reads the instructions on a box of pasta. He reads the terms and conditions. He has read the back of every shampoo bottle in our house, and when there are no instructions he gets the faint injured look of a man who has been let down by the manufacturer, and he got it now, standing at that desk, holding a little loop of white rubber up to the light.

Then he took a second one, and set the pasta face aside, and said, "White, for now," to the clerk, and to me, "Okay?"

"Okay," I said.

He took my left hand and eased the band down past my knuckles, slowly, because it was a tight fit and he was careful about it, and it settled against the bone of my wrist cool and smooth, an inch above my watch, and then he held his own wrist out to me without a word so I could do his. I did. My fingers weren't quite steady. His pulse was going under my thumb when I pressed the band flat, and I laid two fingers on the inside of his wrist, the way I check a patient, and he turned his hand over under them and held mine palm to palm across the desk.

The clerk handed us our key cards without looking up. I could have kissed her.

Our suite was down a white stone path that switched back and forth through the trees, past a stone bench and a fork where a second path went off toward the sea, with the leaves so big and close on either side that we kept walking into the sun and out again, and a porter ahead of us with our bags on a cart who had the decency to go a little faster than we did. The room was white and cool, with a dark wood ceiling and a fan turning in it, and a bed big enough to land a plane on, and glass doors that folded open onto a terrace with a small plunge pool cut into the stone and a hammock slung between two posts at the very edge of the jungle. Round the side of the terrace, behind a wall of pale limestone with little ferns growing in the cracks, there was an outdoor shower, open to the trees, with a brass rose on it the size of a dinner plate.

Sameer went straight to it. Of course he did. He wanted to know how the water came in.

I unpacked. Or I unzipped my suitcase and stood looking into it, which is a stage of unpacking, and there, rolled small at the bottom inside a pair of socks as though I might be stopped at customs for it, was the black bikini. I had bought it in October, online, at the same island, the week after the booking, and it had come in a padded envelope and I had tried it on in our bedroom with the door locked and then not taken it off for twenty minutes, turning in front of the closet mirror, and then put it in the drawer, and then taken it out of the drawer and put it in the suitcase, and then taken it out of the suitcase the night before we left, and put it back in at four in the morning while he loaded the car. It was not a bikini for a woman who was trying to look smaller. The top was cut low and held my breasts high and full in two black triangles that did not pretend to be anything else, and the bottoms sat right on the curve of my hips and showed exactly how much of me there was behind, and I had never in my life owned anything like it.

I heard the water come on outside. I heard him say, "Oh, that's very good," to nobody, the way he talks to a well-made hinge.

I put the bikini on.

When I came round the limestone wall he was standing under the rose with his eyes shut and his face turned up into it, in the charcoal trunks, and the afternoon light was coming down through the trees and lying on him green and gold, on the long brown shoulders and the swimmer's chest and the water running down the flat of his stomach and darkening the waistband of those trunks he'd left the receipt for. His hair was flattened back black and shining. His beard was full of water. I have seen this man in the shower some thousands of times, mostly while I was trying to get in front of the mirror, and I stood there on the slatted wood floor with a gecko on the wall beside me and looked at him as if I had never once seen him before.

He opened his eyes.

He did not say anything for a moment. He looked at me from my bare feet up, slowly, and I watched him do it, and I watched him stop at my hips and stay there, and then at my breasts in those two small black triangles and stay there longer, and when he got to my face his own had gone completely still in the way it does when something is more beautiful than the drawing.

"Bhatia," he said. It came out low.

"I nearly didn't pack it."

"I'd have had to go home," he said. "I'd have had to go all the way home and get it."

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

Get the e-book