Sunsets of Tulum. Mr Raymond Avery Bartlett
Reed felt his cheeks begin to get hot, a heat that started in his neck and then spread upward and outward, all the way to his ears. The three coeds collected the dropped items, thanked him again for the use of the key card, and started to leave.
“Wait,” said the third girl. “Where’s my book? It was right here.” She looked at Reed, as if he’d somehow hidden it.
“We’re going to miss the bus,” Sharon said. “You’ll find it later.”
“But it’s not here.” Again, a look at Reed. You took it?
After they’d gone, Reed settled back into his chair. He closed his eyes and saw that young woman’s face swimming there in the darkness of his eyelids. He remembered the look she’d given him, how they’d shared that secret laugh at the other girls’ expense. That feeling in his chest, as if some magician had reached his white gloves into the top hat of his torso and released a wild dove there. The idea that the last thing she’d ever think about him was that he’d swiped her book bothered him. The unanswered, “Why?”
Laurel returned right as Carlos was serving him another cocktail.
“What was that all about?” she asked. “Those girls.”
“They needed to use the bathroom. I lent them my key.”
She sat down. They looked at each other.
“Reed,” she said, softly. “I’m going to go back tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? What do you mean? We just got here.” He sat up and stared at her.
“I’ve got so much going on back home. You know. Important stuff.”
“Oh, like this isn’t important?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I think it’s important. Us.”
“I shouldn’t have said it like that. It’s just—”
Reed stood up. “I’m sorry but I think that’s bullshit.”
“People are staring,” Laurel said, looking around.
“Let them look. I care about us. Having a future.”
“Stop it, Reed. Now.”
“We don’t share anything anymore.”
“I mean it.”
“But don’t you think we could—”
Laurel cut him off by plunging back into the pool. This time she popped up only a few yards away, and before she could say anything Reed cut her off. “So now you’re just going to walk away? That’s it?”
“I’m not walking away,” his wife said. “I’m swimming away.” And then she went under.
“What?” Reed yelled. Ripples seemed to mock him. He felt dizzy, but there was nothing to steady himself with. He curled his toes around the smooth lip of the edge. His chest felt tight. But she was still underwater, past the midway point to the other side. He wasn’t going to chase her anymore.
He was turning to leave, planning to storm back to his room, when something in the water caught his eye: a novel—sodden and bloated—was clogging the mouth of the cleaning intake just a few feet away from the chaise where he’d been sitting all day.
He remembered the soft splash. It all made sense now.
“There’s your book,” he thought, as if explaining it to her. “It was there the whole time!”
He bent down and retrieved it gingerly, and the fight he’d just lost seemed very far away.
The Murakami Book
Reed stood there for a moment looking at the book the way a drunk might pick a winning lottery ticket out of a trash barrel. The colorful cover had blurred and the pages had thickened to nearly twice their normal size, the color and texture of papier-mâché.
“Waiter!” he called. “Can I get some help?”
Carlos came running over.
“I dropped my book,” he explained.
Carlos looked at the sodden mess Reed was carrying.
“I can call bookstores. We find you another copy?”
“No,” Reed said, shaking his head. “This one, um, it has sentimental value. But is there a way to maybe dry it out somehow?”
“I give it to Housekeeping? They, how you say, heat the pages with a hair dryer?”
“Wonderful.”
When Carlos had left, Reed stretched out again in the chair, replaying the scene with the three girls, seeing that third girl’s face, the way she’d mouthed the word “drama” to him.
He’d never see her again. The thought of having her book, of reading the same pages she’d been absorbed in, gave him a strange feeling like he was doing something improperly intimate with her.
Reed ordered another cocktail and another one after that, and as the sun turned the hotel structure into a sundial he watched the shadow as it lengthened and stretched across the triple clock face of the giant pool.
He picked up the abalone ashtray and again wondered how it was possible that a lowly mollusk could create something so beautiful. As the shadows reached the seawall a mange-ridden mongrel appeared at the stairs and began scouring beneath the empty tables for crumbs. Reed remembered the girl tossing tortillas and wondered if this were the same dog. It looked a little like his dog from childhood. Part beagle, part shepherd. He hadn’t thought about that dog in a long time. Poor thing, he thought. He could see its ribs.
Reed tried to toss peanuts for it but it was too far away, and then a waiter noticed and shooed the hungry mutt with angry claps of his hands. The dog skittered away, rounding the corner of the stairs so quickly that it slid on the tile before dashing down the stairs to the beach below. Just hungry, he thought. The girl’s scraps might have been its only meal the whole day.
The last thing Reed remembered about that evening was a glimpse of the moon suspended above the terrifying vastness of the ocean, a white thumb-smudge careening in wide circles around the inky paper of the night sky.
Day Four
Laurel Departs
Reed woke up to the sound of a doorbell. For a moment he thought he was in their brownstone in Boston, but the starch of the sheets and hard pillow gave it away. Laurel groaned and shifted the covers over her head. The doorbell rang again, followed by a soft knock.
“Housekeeping,” someone called.
“Coming,” he said. “Just a minute.” He sat up, rubbing his temples. His head throbbed; he couldn’t remember a hangover this painful since college. As soon as he stood he remembered his leg was injured. Not putting ice on it was dumb: though the bleeding had stopped, it was red and quite swollen. Hot to the touch. He wrapped a white terrycloth robe around him and limped to the door, stopping once to steady himself on the back of the room’s chair. A boy in the hotel uniform was standing there with a tray, and in the center was the book that the girl had lost.
“Your book, Señor. Luz María dried it for you.”
He picked up the heavy hardcover and opened it. Tucked inside was a small card on hotel stationery that read: “We are sorry for the damage to your book. We could dry it, but some damage could not be repaired.”
For a book that had spent an hour, maybe more, in the water it was remarkably repaired. Dry as if it had been baked in an oven. The binding was back in place; Reed could see a few spots where fresh glue, still tacky, had beaded at the top and bottom before hardening. The cover was warped and blistered from the long soak, and parts of the bird design had peeled off, revealing the cardboard underneath. But