The weird thing about travel: You go, and then you’re there. You’ve been looking forward to it, or dreading it, or thinking about it, whatever, and then all of a sudden there you are. It’s been a month since Sarah told Lauren about this trip. Four weeks of worrying about the expense (and there was that: bathing suit, sunscreen, taxi to the airport; her paychecks have yet to reflect her new salary, and anyway, the change won’t be that dramatic), yearning for the sun, bristling at the thought of an expanse of quality time with these four girls, but delirious with the thought of freedom from routine. She hasn’t left New York in three years. Those three years ago, she went with Gabe to Denver for the wedding of an old friend of his. That was the last time. She needs a change.
She met Gabe through Sarah, though Sarah did not know him, not exactly. Huck had been one of the featured speakers in a series of lectures at the Museum of the City of New York, where Gabe worked as a curator. He and Sarah had happened to meet at a reception after one of the talks, and she’d just asked him—it’s always easier to ask for a friend—if he was “seeing anyone,” that genteel parlance, and hearing that he was not, insisted she set him up with Lauren. Gabe assented, because that was the sort of guy he is. Easygoing, easily led. Lauren didn’t have high hopes for it, figuring first that Sarah didn’t exactly know her type and, second, that anyone willing to go out for a drink with a stranger’s best friend, sight unseen (though later she learned Sarah had shown him a picture of her, on her phone), would be mentally or in some other capacity deficient. But Gabe was not. He was nice. He’d gone out with her, he explained to her, much later, simply because he’d been asked to, and this was easy to reconcile with the Gabe she came to know, the sort of guy who did what people asked of him. He was unerringly obedient.
Lauren jokes, sometimes, that the relationship lasted four years because that was how long college had lasted, and high school before it. Four years and her mind is set, like a cake after forty-five minutes. Four years and the thing, no matter what that thing is, has run its course. It’s true what she says to Fiona—there’s no hatred, no spite, no revision. Hadn’t they fucked on the floor of her living room, Gabe kissing every bit of her, her neck, her armpits, which she particularly liked? Hadn’t they had brunch with her friends and his? Hadn’t they paid those desultory visits to her parents and brothers in New Jersey?
Gabe is big, broad, the body of an athlete despite his near complete devotion to bookishness. Gabe, his glasses always slipping down the bridge of his nose, his distracted air, his terrible seasonal allergies. Gabe, with his big hands, and a penis that curved charmingly to the right, angled so it struck something in her just so. They haven’t spoken but a couple of times in the two years since they broke up, broke up because he wanted her to marry him and she didn’t, though she’s not told anyone, especially not Sarah, especially not her mother, who loved Gabe, thought him just the kind of man she’d imagined her only daughter settling down with. Gabe had wanted for them to marry. She had not. That’s all.
“I think I see Amina,” says Fiona. She fiddles with her watch.
They reconvene at the table. Showered, changed, ready for leisure. It seemed so late in the day when they arrived. Now it seems early, because there’s nowhere to go, nothing to do. Mutual agreement that they won’t bother leaving the grounds of the place tonight—maybe not all weekend! ventures Meredith. She and Fiona reorder drinks while everyone else is on their first. The french fries do not last long.
Within the hour, on the beach: this despite the fact that the sun is setting. Lauren thinks of her book, the way a criminal must his gun: Using it could change everything. It’s not all that warm, but they’ve come all this way to dig pedicured toes into white sand, and so they all are.
Later, she is tired from this residual sun, from the travel, from the dinner, which was fish, but unexpectedly buttery. It makes her stomach ache, slightly, either it’s that or the daring mix of cocktails and wine she’s spent the day consuming. At least they are all tired, so there’s no peer pressure when she begs off after dinner.
“I’m exhausted, you guys,” she tells them, and there are sympathetic nods.
Meredith actually yawns.
“Let’s make a plan for the morning!” Amina likes a plan. She’s already booked manicures for all of them.
“Let’s relax,” Sarah suggests. It’s her party so this suggestion carries a lot of weight.
“Agreed,” Fiona says. “Whoever gets up first, grab a good spot on the beach. Then let’s all meet up there.”
“We can have lunch on the beach,” Meredith says, in awe. There’s a ten-dollar surcharge per head for this particular extravagance, but who cares. “Doesn’t that sound amazing?”
To Lauren, this simply sounds sandy.