THE ONLY MEANING OF THE OIL-WET WATER
PILAR WAS NOT getting over divorce or infidelity or death. She was fleeing nothing. She flew to Costa Rica one day, on two planes, from Champaign, then Miami, because she had time off and Hand, her longtime friend, was there, or near enough. There is almost no sadness in this story.
Pilar: she is not Latin in any way she knows, but ever since she was very young she’s heard from friends and strangers that her name is a Latin or Latin-sounding one. She is always embarrassed to admit, though she’s admitted it a hundred times, that she’s never looked up the provenance of her name, its meaning, or anything else about it. Her skin is the color of blond wood, easily tanning, and her hair is black, which reinforces the assumption of her Latinness, even though she’s been told by her parents, always, that she’s Irish and only Irish—maybe some Scottish, perhaps a jab of German. Though with her hair in a ponytail and with her long legs, very long for a woman not even five and a half feet tall, she resembles, more than anything, popular images of Pocahontas. She always wanted to have some Native American blood in her, just as everyone does, because with that blood, she thought, stupidly, would come nobility, as would excuses to do things the wrong way, or not do them at all, to do anything she wanted. But instead she is Irish or possibly even Welsh but not in any tangible sense, and thus born without any sorrow in the lives of her recent ancestors, and so she had to smile gratefully and create good things from scratch or perhaps just save people from skin disease. Pilar was a doctor, a young one, a dermatologist. Her profession does not figure into this story.
PILAR WALKED: with her toes pointing northwest and northeast, like a dancer.
PILAR LAUGHED: in a throaty way, and loudly, while her eyes devoured.
PILAR KNEW: when something would happen, and when something would not.
Hand was in Granada, Nicaragua, for six months and was encouraging all visitors. He was working for Intel, doing something Pilar could never really grasp, even if she wanted to, which she didn’t, because her brain, she believed, was meant to be filled with more colorful things. Intel had asserted itself in Central America and was rotating in young Spanish-speaking consultants like Hand for a year or two at a time. Pilar couldn’t imagine what Hand would know that Nicaraguan Intel could need, but then again, this was the sort of arrangement he always landed—well-paying, low-commitment, impossible to explain. Pilar accepted Hand’s invitation, but they couldn’t agree on what the week would entail. Hand, sick of Nicaragua for the time being, wanted a week in Costa Rica, surfing and looking at women jogging across the flat wet sand. Pilar wanted to see Nicaragua, because everyone, it seemed, had seen Costa Rica, but no one she knew had set foot in Nicaragua. Nicaragua sounded dangerous; she liked the word. Nicaragua! It sounded like some kind of spider. There it goes, under the table—Nicaragua!
Hand got his way. They’d be surfing in Costa Rica, on the Pacific coast. But Pilar didn’t mind. She would tell everyone she went to Nicaragua anyway.
In San Jose the humidity covered her with many gloved hands. She rented a car and immediately went the wrong direction, headed straight into the city’s center when she wanted to do the opposite. It was easily ninety degrees and she was in the merchants’ district, filled with cheap electronics and men selling things from white aluminum carts. Rental car agencies and banks and students. Clumps of pedestrians jogging through traffic. Office buildings of the sixties steel-and-glass Erector-set sort, flimsy and forgettable. The road was five lanes wide and was jammed but moving. San Jose looked like L.A. circa 1973, and she puttered through the city weirdly horny. The heat maybe. The volume of the sidewalks maybe. She watched women through her windshield and they watched her. She found an English-language station and on it Michael Jackson’s “Rock with You” and she thought she would burst. She was happy, and she’d been for a few years able to recognize it, just dumb happiness, when it came, whatever its cause. When people asked how she was, she said Happy, and this made some people angry. There was traffic heading into town and she was moving, legs and arms and neck, with Michael, who she knew she’d like if she met him. She would understand him and they’d laugh and laugh about nothing, standing in his kitchen.
HAND HAD: loved three of Pilar’s oldest friends, and she knew everything.
HAND WOULD: leave this world and everyone in it if given the chance to be in space for just a few minutes.
HAND CRIED: when he read about men falsely imprisoned, freed at age forty, and walking the streets without malice.
She found her way out of the city and drove straight west, through the tolls by the airport and then around the two-lane bends, hundreds of turns through the hill country, waiting behind so many trucks, everyone so slow. The countryside was neat and green and lush and everything was for sale. At the airport they had been selling real estate; at the car rental place, at every gas station, slick posters and handmade flyers of properties for the taking, beachfront or lowland—everywhere along the road, plots and properties available. The Costa Ricans were proud of what they’d created—the most sturdy, the most predictable, easily the most tourist-amenable nation in Central America—and now that it was ripe, they were bringing it all to market. The highway was tumored with SUVs and buses. Pilar had expected jalopies and wood-fenced fruit trucks, but they were rare. This country was singing with space and sky and bright smooth new cars with clean black tires. There was heat, but between the sun and the treetops were quick-moving clouds, and they dragged black shadows over the leaves.
LOW-FLYING, QUICK-MOVING CLOUDS: I haven’t long to live.
TREETOPS, ROUNDED AND ROUGH: That’s probably true.
LOW-FLYING, QUICK-MOVING CLOUDS: I won’t even make it to the sea. I can already see where I’ll end.
TREETOPS, ROUNDED AND ROUGH: I don’t know what to tell you.
LOW-FLYING, QUICK-MOVING CLOUDS: But the thing is, I really love moving like this, though I know I won’t even make it.
TREETOPS, ROUNDED AND ROUGH: There are advantages to flight.
LOW-FLYING, QUICK-MOVING CLOUDS: But thought is its unfitting companion.
Pilar was meeting Hand at Playa Alta, because there, Hand said, the waves were forgiving and not too big, the water warm, and the beach almost empty. Even when it’s crowded it looks empty, this beach, he said. A big flat playa, he said, and she cringed, because Hand, she knew, would say playa when he meant beach, if that beach was located in a Spanish-speaking country. She loved him. He was ludicrous.
There is no way or reason to be subtle about why Pilar was in Costa Rica. At thirty-one she was still unmarried and Hand was one of her few old friends also still unmarried, and the only attractive old friend she’d never slept with. So she knew, when she hung up the phone with Hand five weeks prior, that she would sleep with him in Alta, and she knew it on the plane and on the drive to the coast.
Was she in any way saddened by the predictability of the outcome? Was it unromantic? She decided that it was not. Sex and things like sex—things people pretend they regret— weren’t about a decision made in a heated moment. The decision is made when you leave the house, when you get on a plane, when you dial a number.
She would arrive and hope that he still looked the way she liked him to look—lean, bigmouthed, clean. They would spend the first day pretending to be friends only, barely touching arms. The second night they would drink at dinner, and drink after that, amid shirtless and dreadlocked surfers, and then would sleep together in a tentative and civilized way. That much was assured, because Pilar had done this kind of thing before—with Mark in Toronto, with Angela in San Diego—and there was never variation in the setup; only the aftermath was alterable. Afterward, with Hand, there could be very little change in their affection and respect for each other: she was too careful, and he too loosely strung. Afterward, with Mark, she’d had to tolerate his frequent references to their weekend, both the almost-funny—“I saw you naked!”—and those helping him achieve a personal sort of release—“What were
you wearing that weekend? Tell me again. Wait, hold on…”—but again, with Hand, she knew it would be mild, perhaps even forgotten, if it didn’t grow into something else. But would they want to continue having sex? That’s the simple and only question. And that depended on so many things: Would he do something strange with his tongue? Was his naked body odd in any disastrous way? Was he awkward-moving when nude? Would he cry (Mark) or become callous (Angela)? His legs might be too thin or pale, or his penis purple, or too narrow, his mouth too—
This story is not about Pilar and Hand falling in love.
Once close to Alta, the road devolved from two lanes paved to one lane dusty and everywhere potholed. The cars each way weaved and ducked, passengers inside with their hands braced against the roof. It was ten miles of this, and it felt like hours before the trees and farms gave way to the shanties and shops that announced Alta. A combination juice bar and art gallery called Forget It, Sue. Then a recycling center. More plots for sale. The place was still raw, the road still dust. Barefoot boys on bikes and mopeds outsped the cars, better navigating the road’s holes, while women let groceries in blue-striped plastic bags pull their arms earthward. Just past a Best Western and on the right side of the road, a thin line of trees hid the beach, wide and flat, rippling into a delta berthing small boats of rotting wood.
The hotel where they’d agreed to meet was called the Shangri La, above the main strip, nameless. The town titled none of its streets, but there was a primary artery, the length of three city blocks, with most of the town’s shops and restaurants attached. The Shangri La, on the hill, was white, and shone like a monument against a teal blue sky. It overhung a small garden full of iguanas, snakes, and mice, its deck jutting its strong chin toward the ocean.
The owner, a fit and sunburned German named Hans, gave Pilar keys and directions to the room, No. 5, and while walking up the steps and then along the deck, past the pool, with a preposterous view of the big ridiculous Pacific to her left, the sun teetering above, the waves blithely carrying surfers in, she actually had the feeling, momentarily, that this was not, actually, her doing this, that in fact she was still in Chicago, or even Wisconsin, and was imagining this—that she was just inhabiting a daydream concocted during, say, a dimly lit afternoon salad-bar lunch at Wendy’s. It really seemed more plausible than the reality of her in this moment, actually walking barefoot around a pool shaped like a curling kitten, bordered in hand-painted tiles of orange and blue, now stepping over two teak-brown surfers on straw mats, on her way to a room, down a long white hallway with geckos scampering on the ceiling above, in a hillside seaside hotel in Costa Rica, which holds Hand, whom she’d known for seventeen years, who was still alive, and not only still alive, but here.
Pilar was worried that her back was oversoaked from the drive, that Hand would feel her moisture and be appalled. But when she opened the door and they grabbed each other and hugged, he was just as wet as she was. He smelled like pineapple and sweat. His chin was hot on her shoulder, his hair damp.
“No air conditioning here,” he said. He said it in a guttural Spanish accent. Pilar hoped he would stop.
“Oh,” she said.
“Jesss, eeet eeez veddy hot here, jess,” he said, and then sighed, giving up.
The room was high-ceilinged and open, with a kitchen, a breakfast nook, a bedroom a few steps up. A fan spun overhead, its pull string ticking with every two or three turns. The deck overlooked the pool and the town and then the ocean. She couldn’t believe it all.
“This is crazy,” she said.
“I know,” he said, now speaking like he normally spoke. She had known him since seventh grade.
The floor was tile. The whole place was tile. She had come to expect carpeting in hotels.
“That’s pretty normal down here, the tile,” Hand said. “Anywhere south of Texas is like that.”
There was a plunger in the corner of the room, with a handle that looked precisely like a dildo. She made a note to joke about it later. Hand was standing in the corner. A gust jumped through the open window and jumbled a chime over the doorway.
She stepped over to Hand and slipped her arms around his waist and smelled his smell. She closed her eyes and pictured her old kitchen and the wallpaper there, a pattern of Disney dwarves bubbled from heat and humidity.
They left her things in the room and bobbed down the white stone steps. Outside, in the sherbet light that soon enough, with a shrug, would relinquish the day to night, there were horses. Four, just downhill from the hotel: one standing still in the road, two sitting nearby in the long gray-green roadside grass, the fourth one, white (the others were black), standing by the hotel’s straight hedge, just west of the hotel’s cherry door. Pilar and Hand looked around for the owners of the horses. They were shod but had no saddles, no bridles. Four horses, all gaunt, alone. Every horse stared at Pilar and Hand, two people from Wisconsin.
“I almost forgot you were coming,” Hand said.
They were standing and talking while the horses watched.
“What does that mean?” Pilar said. She was scratching the top of her head with one finger, in a circular motion.
“I don’t know.” He stumbled for a minute, backtracking, explaining that he’d been looking forward to her coming, but that in the past twenty-four hours he’d spaced her arrival.
“You forgot it was today, or forgot completely?” she asked.
“Your hair is dark,” he said.
“It was winter where I was. You’re not going to answer.”
“Did it used to be so dark?”
“I don’t know. Didn’t it?”
They walked by the horses; the horses watched with mild interest. Pilar didn’t know what to expect from the horses. There was nothing remarkable about their appearance, but they gave her a chill and she wasn’t sure why. She had rarely seen horses unaccompanied or unfenced and they looked huge and sinewy and tightly wound. She was enchanted by them, the novelty of having them so close to their hotel, but at the same time she wanted them gone. The size of their eyes implied a wide but focused intelligence, and she imagined that they would take the first opportunity to break into their room and kill them both.
“There’s a woman here who runs on the beach every night,” Hand said.
Pilar waited for something else from Hand about the woman, or the running—some point to the story. Nothing came. He looked at her, then down.
“There are some rocks near shore that you have to watch for when you swim,” he said. “You want to swim now?”
Pilar didn’t. She wanted to eat.
The dirt road was barnacled with small rocks, and huge rocks, and where it was not it was dusty and uneven. It was not a long walk to the beach, but it was too long. After thousands of miles of travel to reach water, even this, a five-minute stroll, felt cruel. The beach, once they ducked under a tangle of trees, was wide and flat; the tide was out. A woman jogged by the shore as her dog ran near her, jumping suddenly, as if jerked upward like a dog-marionette. But otherwise the place was empty, which was good.
“Is that the woman?” Pilar asked.
“I think so,” Hand said.
“Are there other women who run on the beach at night?”
“I don’t know. But it’s dark.”
Pilar wanted to cut stomachs open with glass.
Hand was tall enough, and built well, with flat strong pectorals and arms that were toned and brown. He’d been a swimmer in high school. But he also had a look of country madness that everyone who knew him noted. It wasn’t there all the time—just when a subject had grabbed hold of his mind and he was trying but failing, like Lassie and the well, to communicate its urgency. His was a nimble mind, sleeping shallowly when sleeping at all—but there was a raggedness to his brain that contrasted strongly with his attention to what he thought were facts and numbers of great import. Handsome in a way that sometimes looked bland, but there was character there— a faint cleft in his chin, earlobes that drooped though
had never been pierced, some gray lines in his blond hair—that gave him advantages and he knew it. The sideburns had come and gone and now were back, and this was a mistake.