The Castaways

JEFFREY

H e was going to give them one shining moment together before things fell apart.

And really, it should be his wife telling this, she was better at it than he was, she remembered every last detail about each one of their group trips, down to what they ordered for dinner, who sat next to whom on the airplane, and what the bar bill was at the end of the night. But Delilah wasn’t available and this story needed to be told, even purely as an antidote to the sad and difficult material that came before and to what was yet to come.

South Beach! Miami!

There had been so many great things about this trip, but perhaps the greatest thing was that it was spontaneous, pulled together in five days.

It had been the most brutal winter of all time. Brutal! The temperatures were in double-digit minus figures for a week straight. The harbor was frozen and the Coast Guard had to send an ice cutter through so the steamship could make it back with fuel and food. Even so, the Stop it was very much the luck of the draw, except that Phoebe always got Sunday Styles), and on that particular awful football-less slate-gray ten-below-zero day, Jeffrey had the Travel section. He was halfway through his third Kahlua coffee (to which he had, uncharacteristically, added a shot of whiskey) and the cover photo—a bunch of half-naked people drinking mango mojitos in South Beach—seemed to mock him.

That is where we should be, he thought.

Then he thought, That is where we should be .

He excused himself from the table. The Scrabble game was growing predictable anyway, with Addison trying to get away with the word qat once again. He claimed it was Russian for “hat,” and since he was the linguistic expert among them, no one bothered to contest it. Though today Delilah was in a combative mood and said, “No foreign words.”

“What?” Addison said. “You can’t make that rule now. ”

Delilah said, “I should have made it seven years ago.”

Jeffrey slipped over to the computer in the corner of the kitchen, taking his Kahlua/whiskey coffee and the Travel section with him. He proceeded cautiously; he read the fine print, he clicked on every link. South Beach: this was, he realized, simply a reinvented, reimagined version of the Miami Beach his parents and grandparents had visited a generation before. Except now it was Cuban food and nightclubs with monosyllabic names like The Drink and BED . Now it was cocktails made with freshly squeezed fruit and vegetable juices and art deco hotels with rooms draped in white Egyptian cotton. One might not think that South Beach was a farmer’s kind of place, but it was eighty-seven degrees in South Beach and sunny. Jeffrey was going to make this happen.

Ninety minutes later (with breaks to refill his “coffee” and change the DVD for the kids, with seven answers over to the table of “I’m working on something here, give me a minute”), he had reserved eight tickets on American Airlines, Boston to Miami, for $237 per person. And he had, on hold, the penthouse suite at the Sagamore Hotel, which was locked in like a Lego between the art deco gems of the National and the Loews. The penthouse slept eight and cost $1050 per night. It was less per person than the Radisson in Hyannis in the height of summer. The last piece of the puzzle was baby-sitting. The Kapenashes always used Mrs. Parks, the retired dispatcher, and for the other kids, Jeffrey e-mailed the Bulgarian twins, Lana and Vesselina, who had worked at the farm market the summer before and who had (unwisely) decided to stay on Nantucket for the winter. To see what it was like! (Did it rival a former Communist bloc country in the gray and dismal department? How about twenty-four hours with no bread at the supermarket?) Jeffrey and the Bulgarian twins joked about how bad the winter was, how boring, how cold. Would they want to make an extra five hundred bucks baby-sitting?

Their response came back: We want to go to South Beach, too! Only kidding! Yes to baby-sit!

Jeffrey stood up from the computer with all the details written down on a sheet from Delilah’s to-do pad. He turned down the music and cleared his throat. The five Kahlua/whiskey coffees made him feel light and giddy and unlike his usual self. He, the parsimonious farmer, had single-handedly booked a trip to South Beach, Miami! If he wanted to go, he knew they would want to go.

He was right. They jumped for joy! They let go a group cheer. They toasted one another and they toasted him. Imagine! Jeffrey! Leaving Friday! They vowed to buy Lana and Vesselina and Mrs. Parks truly fabulous thank-you gifts. Addison said he had a friend who owned a sushi restaurant right there on Lincoln Road. Greg had played in a band with a guy who was now the DJ at the underground club at the Delano. Whoo-hoo! It was the best vacation they’d ever taken, and they hadn’t even left yet.

Phoebe went to the tanning booth twice the week before their flight and burned the skin off her nose, but no matter. Tess didn’t have a single bikini that fit; the scale at the gym said she had gained seven pounds since the summer. But who cared? It snowed again on Wednesday and again school was canceled and again Jeffrey and Delilah were trapped in the house with two rambunctious little boys who wanted nothing more to do with Delilah’s homemade Play-Doh and other indoor distractions. Delilah said, “I’m going to miss them so much! But not really.” She made six dozen chocolate chip cookies and three dozen peanut butter cookies with chocolate kisses. “Mommy and Daddy are going to be gone for seven days!”

They arrived at the airport in full-length down coats. Phoebe wore her fur hat with the ear flaps, which the Chief jokingly called her Russian qat. Their flight to Boston was canceled because of weather in Boston, even though on Nantucket it was bright and sunny, with a wind-chill factor of minus twenty-two.

Addison worked his magic with the woman behind the Cape Air desk, and they were on the next flight to Providence and had been rerouted from Providence to Miami. Piece of cake. One stop at Au Bon Pain, an issue of the Economist front to back, and a twenty-minute nap later, Jeffrey’s plan had come to fruition. They stepped off the plane in Miami, Florida. They shed their coats, gloves, scarves, and the Russian qat and followed the man holding the sign that said “The Castaways” to the limo.

Is it possible to tell a story that is happy from start to finish? Doesn’t the word story mean that there is conflict, then resolution? Maybe the trip to South Beach didn’t properly qualify as a story, because all Jeffrey remembered was good upon good, best upon better. They asked the limo driver to stop at the liquor store on the way to the hotel. They bought champagne, Patron, Mount Gay, white wine, a case of Corona, tonic, seltzer, Coke, limes, lemons, bottled water, pretzels, peanuts, sesame sticks, potato chips, nacho chips, bottled salsa, bubble gum, and a scratch card. The scratch card was a winner, the Chief announced: five hundred dollars. Everyone thought he was kidding; each of them bought scratch cards from time to time, and no one had ever won more than two bucks.

“I’m serious,” he said.

Delilah checked and let out a hoot. Five hundred dollars! They couldn’t believe it! It was, at that moment, better than world peace. The Chief cashed the card, collected the money, and paid the bill. He had enough money left over to pay the limo driver and tip the bellman at the hotel who was responsible for their sixteen bags.

The Sagamore was cool and white and filled with avant-garde objets d’art. The concierge was a lean Frenchwoman named Genevieve who had platinum blond hair in a geometric cut. Upon their arrival, she handed out lasciviously pink raspberry caiprihanas, along with ripe pieces of mango dipped in sea salt. Genevieve led them through a secret passageway to a space-age elevator that jetted them up to the penthouse suite.

The penthouse suite was all white, as promised, with mirrors and sleek, cutting-edge electronics. There were four identical white bedrooms lined up to overlook the ocean. Each bedroom was dominated by a king bed iced with butter cream and dotted with fondant pillows. The bathrooms were white tile and white marble threaded with gold. There was a living area with white leather sofas and high-design glass tables; there was a “kitchen,” which consisted of a fridge to store the liquor and a counter on which to cut the lime wedges and spill the snacks. Addison did both things in short order.

The place was heaven—not just heavenly, but heaven, as in the place Jeffrey wanted to go to when he died. Always when he checked into a hotel, his first instinct was to make love to his wife, and he had that instinct right now. He led Delilah wordlessly into their white bathroom, peeled off her winter clothes, and began to kiss her.

“Do you love it here?” he asked.

But she was too happy to answer.

Later he lounged on the green-and-white-striped canvas furniture on the impressive penthouse balcony, drinking a Corona, inhaling the view across the white beach and the ocean as if it were a drug.

He did not remember every hour of the vacation as clearly as those first hours, but he did remember certain things. Sprawling with Delilah on the white-cushioned papasan by the shimmering turquoise pool, debating the pros and cons of going to war with Iraq with Addison, who lay next to a sleeping Phoebe in the neighboring chaise. All the women—and the men—around the pool were beautiful. They were thin and tanned and wore designer sunglasses and sleek bathing suits and white, flowing coverups. They spoke French or Portuguese, they kissed on both cheeks, they ordered the huge salade Nicoise for lunch and ate only the olives. They ordered cold, sweating bottles of white wine and drank them the way Jeffrey and the others drank water (which came in cylindrical glass bottles that cost twelve dollars apiece). It was hot in South Beach, eighty-seven, eighty-nine, ninety-four. Delilah was Mediterranean, she turned brown as a nut in one afternoon, but Jeffrey was a farmer. He respected the sun, he knew what it could do. He dunked frequently in the pool, he drank four bottles of the expensive Dutch water, he moved under the umbrella to play dice with Greg and the Chief.

They always tried to fit in wherever they went, to respect the sense of place. In Vegas they had gambled and driven to see the Hoover Dam. In London it was Buckingham Palace and the crown jewels. At the Point, in Saranac Lake, they canoed and hiked and cooked over a fire. In South Beach, it was clear from the beginning, they did not blend. They were as obvious as a pack of grizzly bears—the unhealthy pallor, the flab, the Red Sox hats to shield their eyes from the sun. Andrea, in her black tank suit, did actual laps in the swimming pool, and their fabulous European fellow guests watched her with undisguised interest, as though she were some kind of curious wildlife.

A woman doing the butterfly stroke in the pool!

The ladies went shopping on Lincoln Road. They were in and out of BCBG , Ralph Lauren, Lilly Pulitzer, AG, Lucky Jeans, and a bunch of boutiques that sold sequined dresses and over-the-knee white snakeskin boots. All the women bought new sunglasses at Aspen Optical, even Andrea, who couldn’t have told you whether Tom Ford was a fashion designer or a car salesman; even Tess, who couldn’t afford them. The new sunglasses were big and round, with gold bling decorating the sides. The women put on their new sunglasses and mugged for the Chief’s camera.

“We’re getting there,” Delilah said.

They had to change their internal clocks. They drank triple espressos in the morning, skipped breakfast, took a nap by the pool, drank iced tea and expensive Dutch water, picked at a light lunch (did they even serve carbohydrates in South Beach?), walked on the beach, shopped frivolously, savored a cafe con leche at the Cuban place on the corner, called the kids to check in, then…

Then the day began. They opened Coronas and slipped in wedges of lime, the girls popped champagne and filled up slender flutes, they toasted one another, they took deep, grateful drinks. They showered and lounged on the impressive balcony while wearing the hotel’s waffled robes. They snacked on sesame sticks and sliced mango with sea salt. It was seven-thirty, the sun was setting, they made love discreetly behind closed doors while “getting dressed.” Greg played Buffett and James Taylor’s “Mexico” and then, once the sun set, he swung into Sinatra and Bobby Darin and they all gathered in their silk and sequins, heels and perfume, ready to leave for dinner. Their reservation was at nine o’clock.

Nine o’clock! At home they would have eaten pot roast at five-thirty, been finished and cleaned up by six, had the kids in bed with stories by six-thirty, and been back down with the dishwasher churning at seven, while outside snow piled up or the wind screamed like a woman in agony. Some nights they watched reruns of The Sopranos, some nights they rented movies, some nights they crawled into bed at seven-thirty with the latest David McCullough tome and fell asleep after ten pages. Some nights they cleaved to each other and made love despite being weighed down by the layers of flannel, chenille, and goose down. Every night, save for the ones when they gathered at the Begonia, they were fast asleep by nine o’clock.

But not in South Beach! In South Beach they arrived at the threshold of the restaurant at nine o’clock and were escorted to their table, where they sat, without deviation, in this order: Phoebe, Addison, Tess, Greg, Delilah, Jeffrey, Andrea, the Chief. They were a strand of DNA , repeated, then repeated again. They ate things like sushi and soft-shell crabs in a Meyer lemon reduction, and they shared desserts with passion-fruit foam and honeycombed pineapple. They drank wine at dinner and ended with shots of Sambuca or sips of tequila. And then, feeling happy-happyhappy and ready to go, they cabbed it to a nightclub. At the first nightclub, BED , the doorman had their names on a list, provided by Genevieve, and they were whisked past the waiting mob (made up mostly of teenagers, Jeffrey noticed; truly, to fit in in South Beach, they needed to be twenty years younger). They were shown to an alcove with two cocktail tables pushed together and four ultrasuede cubes where they could sit, should they want to sit.

They looked out over the dance floor, at more gorgeous Europeans lounging on round beds in the midst of a sea of gyrating young bodies.

Jeffrey ordered a bottle of champagne and a bottle of Grey Goose and tonic and lemons. A beer for the Chief (twenty dollars) and four bottles of Icelandic water. They came with a dish of salted cashews, presumably complimentary, delivered by their preternaturally beautiful (though scowling) cocktail waitress. She poured everyone a drink with disdain. (She knew their type--married thirty- and forty-somethings, probably with a stable of kids back home, wherever they lived, Peoria or East Bumblefuck, Idaho.) Jeffrey took a sip of his ice-cold vodka tonic with a twist and declared it an elixir of youth. He was ready to dance.

They let loose in a wild, free, sexual way. Jeffrey had never moved his body like this in public. There had been some crazy parties at Cornell, of course, but this was elemental, tribal, it was a trip to the moon. Jeffrey was released. Was he thirty-eight? The father of two small boys? The owner of a hundred and sixty-two acres of permafrosted land? It didn’t matter. He took off his jacket, slid off his tie, unbuttoned his shirt. He was sweating, he was breathless, he was dancing, he was living!

And he was not alone. There, like satellite planets coming in and out of his orbit, were Greg, Phoebe, Delilah, the Chief, Tess—and a guy Jeffrey didn’t recognize, an interloper who was getting awfully close to Phoebe. Jeffrey was aware of this much, and he was about to ask the guy to step back. Phoebe could not be counted upon to protect her own airspace; she seemed not even to notice this guy.

Then Jeffrey realized the interloper was Addison without his glasses. He had taken his glasses off, he was sweating too profusely, they would slip off, the dancing was so wild, they would fall off. The reason the interloper kept bumping into people was because it was Addison, the sight-impaired. He could not see a damn thing without his glasses, and Jeffrey wondered what it felt like to be dancing in a blur of bodies, to be reliant on sound, smell, touch. Jeffrey wanted to be Addison.

Just then a cry went up and Jeffrey was nudged in the ribs. He turned. It was the Chief, pointing. Across the dance floor there was an elevated stage with two poles. There were two women dancing, three women, four women.

“Look at the girls!” the Chief shouted.

The girls, the women—Delilah, Phoebe, Tess, and Andrea—were all up onstage, spinning around poles, lifting their legs, throwing their heads back. Phoebe was the most beautiful of the four women, and the best dressed, in a short go-go number of red-and-orange fringe. But she was the weakest dancer—spaced out, she was a cross between a Deadhead and bad Twyla Tharp. Tess was adorable and Gidgety in her white pants and navy striped nautical top; she had been born to do the twist. These two used their good judgment and hopped down from the stage into the arms of the strapping black bouncers. This left Delilah and Andrea. Jeffrey—and everyone else on the dance floor—was mesmerized. They danced separately with their poles in a surprisingly erotic way (okay, Delilah had watched a lot of Sopranos episodes this winter, but where had Andrea learned to pole-dance?). Then they came together in a sensual, crowd-pleasing moment, and Jeffrey felt aroused, then disturbed. The only two women he’d ever made love to—well, it was powerful to see them together like that.

They kissed once, briefly but passionately, and Jeffrey’s heart stopped, went into free-fall, then started again, pounding in sync with the bass. The Chief whistled, then pounded Jeffrey on the back.

“Look at our girls!” The Chief’s tone of voice said it all: this was enough fantasy to last him the rest of his life!

As for Jeffrey, well, what was he to think? How to process this? The only two women he had ever loved had kissed each other. Jeffrey’s past and his present, his present and his future… he wasn’t sure what was going on inside him.

Addison said, “What just happened?”

He couldn’t see. He’d missed it!

Jeffrey kept dancing. He spun around, he put his hands in the air. Those were his women, this was his entourage. They either fit in or stuck out, he was either not himself or more himself than he’d ever been before. He was hot and more than hot, he was warm, finally warm. This had been his idea. His idea! He was in heaven. They all were.