Ann Patchett - State of Wonder

Marina could remember that exact feeling. It was a thought so briefly held and deeply buried that she could barely dredge it up again: What if Dr. Swenson were my mother? She made a mental note to call her mother before she went to bed tonight, even if it was very late. “But what does that have to do with Mr. Fox?”

“He bothers her,” Jackie said, as if he had suddenly woken up and found himself in a restaurant, in a conversation. His blue eyes peered out brightly through the fringe of his overly long bangs. “He writes her letters asking her what she’s doing. He used to call her.”

“That’s when she got rid of the phone,” Barbara said. “It happened years before we got here.”

Marina took the slice of pineapple off the edge of her glass, dipped it into her drink and ate it. “Is that really so intrusive? She does work for him after all. He is paying for everything, her research, her apartment, this dinner. Isn’t he entitled to know how things are going?”

Barbara corrected her. “ He doesn’t pay for it. The company pays for it.”

“Yes, but the company is his job. He runs it. He hired her. He’s responsible.”

“Is the person who commissions van Gogh responsible for the painting?”

Marina wondered if she would have come up with a similar quip of logic when she was twenty-three or however old Mrs. Bovender actually was. She was quite sure she would have felt the same way. It was exactly Dr. Swenson’s brio she had been drawn to, the utter assuredness with which she moved through the world, getting things done and being indefatigably right. Marina had not met her like again, and she was glad of that, and she was sorry. “I suppose that van Gogh would be responsible for making good on his sale, and that if he didn’t show up with the painting after a vastly extended period of time it would be within the rights—”

Barbara put her cool hand on Marina’s wrist. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Mr. Fox is your boss, Dr. Eckman was your friend. I shouldn’t be running on about this.”

“I understand your point,” Marina said, making a conscious effort to get along.

“We’ll try to find a way to get word to Annick, and if we can’t we’ll just entertain you ourselves until she comes back.”

Marina took a long pull off her drink, even though there was a distinct voice in her head telling her not to. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Of course we do,” Barbara said, and sat back peacefully in her chair as if everything had been decided. “It’s what Annick would want.”

By ten o’clock the world was a furnace cracked open in a closed room, but just outside of Manaus people crowded the river’s bank on a Wednesday to lie across towels spread out in the sand. Children played in the shallows while adults swam wide circles around them. Their voices, the screaming and laughing while they splashed one another, sounded less like words and more like the call and answer of birds. Milton in his infinite wisdom had brought a large striped umbrella in the trunk of his car and stabbed it repeatedly into the sand until it was able to stand upright and provide a circle of shade. It was in that limited field that he and Marina sat on towels, their arms around their knees. Marina had gone to buy a swimsuit from Rodrigo that morning and the only possible option, which is to say the only one-piece, was cheap and bright and had a small skirt that made her look like an aging figure skater. She wore it under her clothes now, unable to imagine what had ever made her think she would go into the water. The Bovenders, who had no interest in the umbrella or its protection, were, without their clothes, unnerving. Jackie wore a pair of cutoff shorts that rode dangerously below the sharp protrusions of his hipbones, while Barbara’s bikini was carelessly tied together with a series of loose strings. It seemed that the desired effect of their swimwear was to make their fellow beach-goers feel a strong breeze could strip them bare. At one point Jackie yawned, tilted forward into the sand, and raised himself into a handstand. The muscles in his arms and back separated into distinct groups that any first year medical student would have been grateful to study: pectoralis major, pectoralis minor, deltoid, trapezius, intercostal. The people on neighboring towels pointed, calling for their children to watch. They whistled and clapped.

“Not sick anymore,” Milton said.

Jackie brought his feet to the ground and sat again. The vine that encircled his ankle was hung with tiny clusters of grapes. “I’m fine.”

“That’s why I married him,” Barbara said, half of her face shielded behind enormous black glasses. “I saw him do that at the beach in Sydney. He was wearing his boardies. I said to my girlfriend, ‘That one’s mine.’ ”

“Marriages have been built on less,” Marina said, although in truth she didn’t think this was the case.

“Do you swim?” Milton asked her. He was wearing his trousers and his white short-sleeved shirt. He showed no signs of removing them.

“I know how,” she said, “if that’s what you’re asking.”

Barbara stretched along her towel, her oiled body reflecting light from every surface except for the few discreet areas covered by fabric. There was a small, circular diamond hanging in the gold chain of her anklet and it glinted along with her skin. “It’s so hot,” she cried quietly.

“Hot is what we do best,” Milton said. He had a little straw hat sitting on the top of his head and somehow it made him look cooler than the rest of them.

“Let’s go for a swim,” Jackie said, and leaned over to smack his wife’s stomach lightly with the flat of his open hand. Her whole body jumped an inch off her towel.

“The water is only going to be hotter,” she said.

“Up, up, up,” he said, and stood himself, leaning down to pull her to her feet. She paused a moment to shake the sand out of her pale hair. It was for the other beach-goers as great a spectacle as her husband standing on his hands. They were halfway to the water, their arms draped against each other’s naked waists, when they turned back to their compatriots. “You’re coming, aren’t you?” Jackie asked.

Marina shook her head. “Go, go,” Milton said. “We’ll come and watch.” He got up stiffly and helped Marina to her feet. “They want us to see how pretty they are in the river.”

“They were pretty enough just lying there,” Marina said.

“We are the parents,” Milton said. “We have to watch.”

Marina went along with a sullen sense of duty, but out from under the umbrella the world was a different place. It had not been cool beneath the candy colored stripes, but away from them the sun meted out a pummeling that was stunning. She stopped for a moment to spot the Bovenders as they walked into the brown water holding hands. On a few occasions since arriving in Brazil she had been as hot but she had always been able to step into the shade, to go into a café for a can of soda, return to her hotel room and stand in a cold shower. She had come to know in advance when the heat was about to overwhelm her as clearly as if there had been a thermometer built into her wrist and so she had been able to save herself accordingly, but looking out at the water and the sand she was uncertain of where she could go. She was melting into the people around her, into Milton. There was a little ice chest beneath the umbrella that Milton had brought with them — cool bottles of water and beers for Jackie. She could rub a piece of ice against her neck. Far ahead of them the Bovenders sank into the water and blurred into all of the other children around them as they swam away. With everything in her she cursed them for being unwilling, unable, to wake before nine. After all, she had been tired herself. She had taken a Lariam fresh from the new bottle Mr. Fox had sent the night before and at three in the morning she had woken herself, and no doubt everyone else in the Hotel Indira, with her interminable screaming. Someone is stabbing a woman to death , was the thought she had swimming up through sleep before she realized where the sound was coming from. After that she was finished for the night, no more sleep, just waiting.