I lit another cigarette and watched the smoke blow to my left. I could hear people to my right and tried to make out what they were saying but they were speaking in voices too low to hear.
They were angry; people liked being angry. They liked fighting and making up and feeling like a button had been reset, like they could start fresh, or perhaps it was just one more nail in the relationship coffin and another step closer to done. I wondered what people were doing in this hotel, which is what I always wondered in hotels, or when traveling, in general. Why had they come here? Were they happy? It made me think of my honeymoon and how I’d cried and told my husband that the marriage had been a mistake and then he’d cried and said maybe it had been and it made us feel better. We’d stayed together seven years.
Soon Shelly would be finished with her bath and we would go to the CVS where she’d buy kitschy ashtrays along with her junk food. She’d buy t-shirts and postcards that said MIAMI in different-colored letters. These trips, more than anything, were about proving that she traveled and had friends. She’d sent me postcards and T-shirts from all over the world. I wore one of the shirts often: ARUBA, it said, thin and slick between my fingers because I’d washed it so many times. On the occasions I’d worn it out of the house, people asked me what Aruba was like and I said it was a beautiful place with very pretty women, that we’d rented a Jeep and driven from one side of the island to the other, climbed to the top of the lighthouse. I told them that my boyfriend left the hot young cleaning lady large tips every morning even though he was cheap and had never tipped a cleaning lady before.
I texted my boyfriend, told him I’d arrived safely. I asked if he wanted to see a picture of my bruise. A little over a week ago, I’d fallen down the stairs and bruised my left thigh; it had spread and the colors were glorious.
I don’t need to see the latest, he wrote back. You know what I like. I did know what he liked; he was very forthcoming about what he liked. Around the house he liked for me to wear shirts that barely covered my ass. He also liked it when I baked cookies. I sent him a picture of the bruise anyway, which looked ugly and more horrible than it did in person. He didn’t respond. Then I went back inside where Shelly was standing in front of the TV in her bikini bottoms.
“I need you to help me apply this tanner,” she said. “I meant to get a spray-on but ran out of time.”
All she had was time. She didn’t work. I had time, too. I was in my third and final year of graduate school, was older than all but one of my classmates.
I had seen her breasts on a number of occasions but I always liked to see them again. They were round and nice but her nipples were too dark. I liked pale nipples, nipples one shade darker than one’s skin color, like my own. She handed me the mitt and the foam and told me to rub it in good.
“Do you want me to do you?” she asked, when I’d finished.
“I don’t think so.”
“We need to be tan,” she said.
When I was around her, I felt heavy, short. I wasn’t heavy or short but she was tall and wore heels that made her taller and never gained weight despite her diet, which seemed to consist solely of candy bars and chips. I thought of it as an endearing trait, her love of processed foods. And though she ate these things, she counted every calorie, had figured out how to do it without gaining a pound.
“Okay,” I said, “you can do me.” I pulled my dress down and hung it on the back of a chair. I raised my arms and stood with my legs apart.
“Jesus,” she said. “What the fuck is that?”
“I told you I fell.”
“I didn’t know it was this bad. Jesus,” she repeated.
“I know. It’s awful, isn’t it?”
“Does it hurt?”
“Only when I touch it. I hope it heals okay.”
“Well,” she said, and I could see that this bruise, which really was huge and horrible, had depressed her. We weren’t going to look as good in our bikinis as she’d hoped. And I was sure I was fatter than the last time she’d seen me. Every time, I convinced myself I was fatter than the last time she’d seen me.
She rubbed the tanner in thoroughly, gently, not just on and around the bruise, but over my entire body. “Maybe this’ll hide it some,” she said. “It’ll be fine.” I hated self-tanner, the way it smelled, the way my ankles or knees always looked wrong. I thought of a crime show I’d watched in which a man claimed his wife had an allergic reaction to a self-tanner and it had killed her. It was so preposterous that many people believed it, at least until they’d gotten all of the test results back.
We waddled around with our arms flapping, legs spread, and then I slipped my dress back on and she began to take pictures of herself. She was always taking pictures of herself and posting them to her Instagram. Most of them appeared to have been taken by someone else and I often wondered who was behind the camera, if she had a tripod she set up. She looked sexy in these photos, hair falling in her eyes, lots of skin. I hardly ever posted new photos or took them or even agreed to be in them because all of the personas I put on felt wrong. I didn’t feel sporty or nerdy or sexy. I wasn’t pretty or ugly enough, fat or thin enough. Eventually I wouldn’t need to construct any persona at all. I would just be old.
She went to her room to get ready. I tried to read one of the books she’d mailed me months ago. She was always passing along her favorite books, telling me what movies to watch and music to download, but recently I didn’t want to read or listen to or watch things I hadn’t read or listened to or watched before.
The book had an unattractive cover of a lady in a big coat holding a bird. I turned it over and read the blurbs again. I read the author bio for the third or fourth time and stared at her picture. It was a picture she’d used for decades.
“Are you ready?” she asked. She looked amazing and effortless, but I knew she had carefully planned this outfit, perfectly casual yet nice enough to wear to a fancy restaurant. It was all a performance and it was all for me. I was wearing an unfamiliar bra that dug into my side fat and the slutty dress. I’d forgotten to pack my knockoff Spanx so I had to stand up as straight as possible and suck in my stomach but my makeup looked pretty good. My boyfriend said he liked natural women, but it wasn’t really what he liked—it was only what he wanted to like. Perhaps it made him seem like a nicer guy to himself.
We went down to the hotel bar and took the last two stools, opened the enormous drink menu between us. We had to hold it right next to the candle to read it.
“Let’s order something tropical,” she said. “Pineapple or mango.”