*
The center was hours away, but she didn’t mind. She clung tightly to his back on the motorcycle and reveled in the speed, taking in the lushness of the landscape and the chaotic tumble of the towns, the new concrete houses abutting ramshackly wooden ones, their metal roofs shining side by side in the sun. They got there by midday and, having settled into a companionable silence, followed a tour guide through the rain forest, giggling at the names of the birds he pointed out: the bananaquit and oilbirds, the bearded bellbird and blue-crowned motmot, the squirrel cuckoo and boat-billed flycatcher. An ease had set in by the time they were having high tea on the wide veranda of the former plantation house, watching the copper-rumped hummingbirds hover at the feeders dangling from the porch: four, five, six hummingbirds bobbing and whirring in the air, like a magic trick.
“It feels so colonial,” Janie said, leaning back into her wicker chair.
“The good old days, huh?” He squinted at her inscrutably.
“You’re being facetious, right?”
“I don’t know. They were good for some people.” He kept his face blank for a moment, then burst out laughing. “What kind of an asshole do you think I am? I was a Rhodes Scholar, you know.” He said it lightly, but she knew he was trying to impress her. And had succeeded.
“You were?”
He nodded slowly, his quick eyes filling up with bemusement.
“Got me a master’s in eco-no-mics from Bal-li-ol College. Oxford, England.” He spread out the syllables, playing the rube.
He wanted a laugh and she gave it to him. “So shouldn’t you be teaching at Harvard or something?”
“For one thing, I make about twenty times what I’d make teaching, even at Harvard. And I’m not beholden to anyone. Not some head of the department, or president of the university, or spoiled-ass son of a major donor.” He shook his head.
“Lone wolf, huh?”
He faux-pouted. “Lonely wolf.”
They laughed together. Complicit laughter. She felt something between her shoulders loosening, a muscle she’d mistaken for bone, and a lightness came over her. Her scone crumbled to pieces in her hands and she licked the stray bits on her fingertips.
“You are just too fucking cute,” he said.
“Cute.” She made a face.
He recalibrated quickly. “Beautiful.”
“Right.”
“No, really.”
She shrugged.
“You don’t know, do you?” He shook his head. “You know a lot of things, but you don’t know that.”
She cast about for something sardonic to say and decided instead on the truth.
“No,” she admitted, sighing, “I don’t. Sadly. ’Cause now—” She was going to say that she was almost forty and fast on the road to losing whatever it was she’d had, she was all but ready to point out the three gray hairs and the deepening wrinkle between her eyebrows, but he waved all that away with a hand.
“You could be a hundred years old and still be beautiful,” he said, as if he meant it, and she couldn’t help it, it was such a good line—she smiled at him, soaking it all up with a queasy feeling that she was being swept along toward a shore she hadn’t envisioned and needed to do some serious paddling in the other direction if she wanted to get home safe.
She held tightly to his waist again on the way back. It was too loud for either of them to say anything, for which she was grateful, no decisions to be made, nothing to worry over, only the palm trees and tin roofs spinning out behind her, the wind whipping her hair across her face and the warm body close to hers; this moment, then the next. Happiness began to burble in the base of her spine and rise, giddily, up her body. So this was what it was like: the present moment. She felt it like a revelation.
And wasn’t this what she’d been after—this lightness that came galloping through, grabbing you by the waist and hauling you along with it? How could you not surrender yourself to it, even if you knew you’d end up sitting bruised in the dirt? She supposed there must be another way to experience that breathless rush of being alive—something inward, perhaps?—but she didn’t know what it was or how to get there on her own.
Then the ride was over, and they were standing there awkwardly, outside the hotel. It was late; they were tired. Her hair was coated with grime from the wind. A bumpy moment, and nothing to speed them over it. I should go inside and pack, she thought, but the wedding reception was going on in the banquet hall, and now they could hear the steel pan drums starting up, the sound rippling out across the night, carrying its own distinct, watery beat—drums invented years ago from the discarded cans of the oil companies, music from garbage. Who was she to resist? The humid air cradled her body like a large damp hand. “Want to go for a walk?” They said it both at the same time, as if it was meant to be.