“I go in first,” Pedro said.
He had stripped down to nylon hiking shorts. He had an interesting scar on the side of his belly, like a deep thumbprint—appendix? And the pale sunburst of a smallpox vaccination above his brown tricep. Those were not first-world scars, Liv thought. He waded into the water and she was happy to see that it was shallow for a long way. He stepped carefully forward.
When he was chest deep, he screamed and was yanked under, leaving a small splash at the surface.
“Oh, shit!” Liv said, leaping to her feet.
Isabel screamed.
“Mommy!” June cried.
Pedro surfaced, smiling, then looked at their appalled faces and grew serious. “I am so sorry,” he said. “This was not a good joke. Everything is fine, you see?” He stood, waist deep, and held up his hands. His shining hair and his smooth bare chest dripped with water. He looked cool as they sweltered. Liv wanted to strangle him.
“Oh my God,” Nora said.
Camila said something angry, in fast Spanish. Pedro apologized again.
Liv’s children looked to her, uncertain. There was no point in showing her rage. She breathed and smiled. Be calm. Be reassuring. “He was just teasing us for being afraid,” she said. “It was a joke. There’s nothing dangerous. Do you want to swim?”
They nodded. It was much too hot not to want to swim.
Liv was conscious of her pale thighs in her swimsuit, after feeling so attractive and young on the ship. Was it because Pedro was here? Was it because he clearly liked Nora? Why did she care about the idiot guide? She’d thought motherhood had cauterized her vanity. She tugged down the leg holes of the suit and tried to shake the feeling off. “Okay, you two,” she said to Sebastian and Penny. “Race you in.”
The water was warm, and the children played on the three inner tubes, their happy cries piercing the air. Liv swam alongside them for a while. She felt no current, and the water was barely salty, because of the fresh water from the river. When she was tired of swimming, she told Penny to keep an eye on her brother.
“I’m okay,” Sebastian said.
“I know,” she said lightly. “Just come in if you feel tired.”
She knew Penny understood what she was asking, but she also knew her daughter would have rolled her eyes if she’d thought she could get away with it. She got out and toweled off. The kids kept swimming and shrieking.
Pedro produced some frozen rum drink from two thermos bottles and poured it into plastic cups. It was slushy and sweet in the heat, and felt decadent, but it was so deliciously cold. The drinks were supposed to be for after the zip line, he said. The taste reminded Liv of a spring break in her lost youth, sand on her sun-warmed body, a cute boy from Arizona she had hardly known, with a compact body like the guide’s.
Pedro played some music on his phone, a man rapping and a woman singing. He leaned back on his elbows in the sand, singing to the girl’s part. Liv didn’t need a translation—it was all about sex—but Nora asked for one.
“The man says she’s so beautiful,” Pedro said. “She says, ‘Don’t try it. I know what you want.’”
“Got it,” Nora said, smiling out at the water.
This flirtation was the kind of thing Liv might have shared a glance with Nora about, if it had been someone else flirting, but she couldn’t because it was Nora. It was disorienting. She flipped through a New Yorker from her bag.
Nora’s shadow came over her. “Will you keep an eye on the kids?” she asked. “Pedro heard some special bird call.”
Liv squinted up at her, astonished. “Okay,” she said.
Then Pedro and Nora walked into the trees. Liv put the magazine down and stared after them.
She wondered, not for the first time, if Nora felt physically eclipsed, being married to Raymond, a man so widely desired. His fans wrote to him online, and openly wished Nora didn’t exist. Liv wondered if the eclipsed feeling was enough to push Nora to go make out with Pedro in the trees, just as proof of her own attractiveness.
She lay on her back on a towel and watched the children from under her sun hat. They were strong swimmers. Hector and Isabel were out there, old enough to babysit. And there was Camila, too, reading a mystery novel in Spanish. And Penny was watching Sebastian. The day was so sultry, the sun so warm, that Liv couldn’t keep her eyes open. If she’d been driving, she would have pulled over. But she wasn’t driving. She blinked, and struggled, and drifted deliciously into sleep.
6.
NORA HAD BEEN aware of Pedro’s attention, and aware that Liv had noticed it. But still she’d followed the guide into the trees looking for a quetzal. She was pretty sure that they wouldn’t see a quetzal, not here by the beach.
She knew what he was actually looking for. She was looking for it, too. Just a little no-strings attention, from someone who thought she was sexy and new. Someone who was handsome without looking better than she did, who smelled salty and warm and—different. She felt hypnotized by the way he smelled.
The trees were hung with parasitic vines that would eventually pull the trees down, to be food for the tiny shoots that would grow up and take their place. She thought of Werner Herzog’s Bavarian voice, talking about the overwhelming misery and fornication of the jungle—something like that. If you stood here long enough you could watch the plants grow. Weird insects buzzed.
She’d never been unfaithful to Raymond, even now that it had started to feel like they had a business partnership, raising children, managing his career. She’d always understood that she was the lucky one. She was an ordinary person, and he was in movies. He could have had anyone. He used to pick her up at her terrible apartment in Los Feliz, or at the public school where she’d worked with kids with learning disabilities. The kids went nuts when they saw him. He was black and famous. He signed autographs and gave dap and they loved him.
She used to cut her own hair, back then, and wore jeans and sneakers to work. When she started seeing Raymond, she began to be photographed in public, and his fans had opinions about her hair and her body. She spent money on haircuts and got a stylist to help her buy clothes. She’d lost the weight instantly after both pregnancies, out of sheer terror of the judgment and nastiness.
She had come to think that actors, the best ones, were not like other people. They were vessels to be filled up with other lives, for the purpose of art. But to be a perfect vessel you had to be empty to begin with. When she saw a child actor at work, Nora thought of human sacrifice, the emptying out of one small soul for the purpose of entertainment. She hated it when agents and casting directors gave her children an appraising eye, admiring the shape of their faces, the warm color of their skin, the length of their limbs. She wanted to tell those vultures to back the fuck off.
She liked to think that Raymond was not a truly great actor, that he was handsome and photogenic and smart and skilled, so he would continue to work, but he would never be one of the uncanny, dissociated ones.