Everyone seems at home, or more at home than Lauren is. She always feels a bit odd in hotels. It’s true she hadn’t wanted to come, is deeply skeptical of spending days on end with a gaggle of girls. Over that arc of time, conversation becomes consensus, and groups turn into something else, gangs, almost. Still, as wedding rites go she has to suppose this is better than a night out in one of those neon underlit limousines, drinking champagne, singing karaoke. Now that they’re here, Lauren is excited to go to her room, to shower the plane off her body, to put on a bathing suit, to sit by the pool with a book. She’s brought two, even though she suspects that everyone else will expect there to be a lot of group conversation. She doesn’t particularly have anything to say.
Even after the grandeur of the lobby, the room is a surprise. The floor tile is cheap, the wall color offensive, but the bed sprawling, and the bedroom spills out onto an indoor-outdoor room and from there, just the outdoors: green grass, a winding path, and that sea; it’s still there, it wasn’t a dream. The air-conditioning is on with conviction. The porter deposits Lauren’s bags and she realizes she doesn’t have any currency, whatever it is they use in this country. She gives him a five-dollar bill, hopes that’s enough, or not too much to be an insult. Anyway, he doesn’t say anything. The bathroom is strangely old-fashioned, but the water in the shower is wonderfully hot. Her skin feels oily and her hair smells like fast food. She uses the shampoo provided for her convenience, not caring what effect it might have on her hair. She can’t afford this, none of this. It’s a little faded, the luxury, but it’s luxury all the same. Sarah is paying for the hotel, for all five rooms. She insisted and in the end no one fought her on this. It’s not as though she doesn’t have the money.
Lauren rubs sunscreen over her body. You have to work at sunscreen or it just sits there on you. There was mutual consent that they’d meet at the bar, where the woman at the front desk told them they could order snacks or sandwiches until the restaurant opens for dinner. She is hungry, actually, almost starving. She puts her bathing suit on, then a dress over that. She wants to eat, quickly, a shrimp cocktail—which sounds suitably tropical and ridiculous, the sort of thing you’d only order if you found yourself in a hotel—then she wants to lie on a chaise by the swimming pool, fall into the cold water, wrap herself in a big and ridiculously fluffy towel. She wants to read and then fall asleep and then wake up and continue reading, but in the end she leaves her book in the room and finds the bar.
Fiona is already there. She’s involved with a cocktail, taking pictures of the view with her phone. She’s wearing the same hat, an exclamation mark to underscore her height.
“Amazing, right?” This by way of hello.
Lauren sits at the table Fiona has commandeered. The bar is empty, only the bartender behind the bar. A beautiful smile there, too. Maybe it’s because they’re black that their smiles seem so bright. Maybe this is a racist thing for her to think.
“To be sure,” she says. Which is, she realizes as she says it, an insane thing to say, some accidental attempt at Englishness. She gets that way with accents sometimes.
Fiona doesn’t seem troubled by this. She’s wearing dark glasses. Her hair looks reddish in this light. She’s pretty, Fiona. “I’m having a mai tai,” she says, the tone confessional.
Lauren laughs, because she thinks she’s supposed to. “That sounds good.”
“It’s good, my friend, highly recommended.”
So Lauren signals the bartender and orders one, as well as some french fries, called chips here, a colonial holdover.
“You’re in food, yeah?”
“Cookbooks.”
“I’m a terrible cook,” Fiona says. “I’m English.”
Lauren laughs again. “I don’t actually cook, either,” she says. “Not much. The cookbooks we publish, they’re by celebrities. Easy recipes. Chocolate cakes with mayonnaise in them, tacos made out of store-bought rotisserie chicken.”
“My husband does the cooking.” Fiona sips her drink. She’s graceful. “He’s always trying to do these ambitious things from magazines. Recipes that begin with things like ‘Dig a hole in the backyard.’ He makes a terrible mess. Dirtying every bowl in the house, that kind of thing. You’re married?”
“No.” The bartender brings her drink. Lauren shakes her head for emphasis. “Not spoken for!”
“Last woman standing.” Fiona sips her drink.
“Something like that.”
“But you have a serious boyfriend, right? I remember Sarah saying something about that.”
“Had. We’re not together anymore.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she says. The chips have arrived. “Anyway, been a couple of years.”
Fiona nods. Her eyes have wandered out to the view.