Empty Resort Games

The off-season at the Sea Crest Resort is a strange kind of quiet. Not the peaceful kind. The kind where you can hear the vending machine hum from forty feet away and every door you open sounds like it's announcing you to someone. I've worked here eleven years, and February is always the worst month for it. The wind comes off the water and pushes grit up the boardwalk, except the boardwalk is closed this year. Has been since October. Condemned railing, rotted planks, some fine from the county. So now the guests, all nine of them this week, have to walk the long way around the main building to get down to the beach, and half of them complain about it, and the other half don't leave their rooms at all.

I was mopping the lobby that Tuesday when I thought about the promise. I don't know why that day and not some other day. Maybe because the lobby was so empty it felt like a stage with nobody on it. Maybe because I'd found one of Valentina's old earring backs under the bench by the fireplace and it put her in my head.

Here's the promise, or part of it. Twenty-two years ago, on a Sunday, in our kitchen in Dune Hollow, she told me she wanted more adventure out of me. Out of us, really, but she looked right at me when she said it. I said I'd work on it. I said it the way you say things in a kitchen on a Sunday, easy, with half your attention on the eggs. And then I never did much about it. We had good years. We raised her nephew for a stretch when her sister couldn't, we paid off the house, we got a dog and lost the dog. But adventurous, no. I became a man who takes the same route to work and orders the same sandwich and gets to bed by ten. She never threw it in my face. That's the part that gets me. She just carried it, and I could tell she carried it, the way you can tell someone's carrying a box even when they hold it nice and level.

She's fifty-two now. I'm fifty-four. We've been married twenty-eight years, which means I've spent more of my life next to her than not next to her, and I still can't always tell what she's planning. She was a florist for nearly thirty years before she retired last spring, and her hands still do flower things without her noticing, little arranging motions in the air when she talks. She met me in an art class at the community college when she was twenty-two and I was twenty-four. I was terrible at drawing. She kept my terrible drawing anyway. It's in a drawer somewhere and I know exactly which drawer.

We honeymooned in this town. Same town, different beach end of it. That was before the resort got bought and renovated and bought again. We stayed in a place called the Sandpiper that doesn't exist anymore, and on the second night she said something to me on the balcony that I have thought about more times than I'd admit to anyone. She said she liked the idea of being seen. Not by everyone. By someone. By a stranger, maybe, one time, and she wanted me to want that too, or at least survive it. I laughed it off. Twenty-six-year-old me thought she was teasing. She wasn't teasing. I figured that out around year six and did nothing about it for another sixteen.

So that's the promise. That's what I never delivered on.

* * *

She showed up at the resort at two in the afternoon, carrying a picnic basket.

I was coming out of the supply closet by the east stairwell when I saw her through the glass doors, walking across the wet lot with the wind pushing her coat around. She had the basket on her arm like a lady going to a garden party, and she was wearing the red dress. The red dress is not a beach dress. The red dress is a Christmas party dress, and I have told her so twice, and both times she said she knew.

She came in and the automatic door did its slow tired thing and she stood there in the dead lobby with her hair everywhere and looked around like she was pricing the place.

"This is where you work," she said.

"This is where I work. What's in the basket?"

"Lunch." She set it on the front desk, which is against about four rules, and started walking. "The man at the gate said the pier's closed. The whole pier."

"Boardwalk too. Repairs. It's all taped off."

"So it's empty."

"It's February, Val. It's empty every February."

She turned around and looked at me, and I saw the look, the one from the kitchen twenty-two years ago, except older now and more patient, the way a hunter gets patient. She'd done her hair before driving over. She'd done something to her eyes. The red dress had a coat over it and I knew the coat was temporary.

"You remember what you promised me," she said.

"I remember."

"Do you. Because you've had twenty-two years, Miles, and I've been very polite about it."

"You have been. Painfully polite."

She smiled at that. She picked the basket back up and walked toward the east hallway, the one with the guest wings, and I stood there a second holding my mop like an idiot before I leaned it against the wall and followed her. Nobody was on that hallway. The whole east wing gets shut down in November except for storage, and the doors to the guest rooms all stand open with the curtains drawn and the beds stripped.

"Lila knows you're here?" I asked. Lila runs the desk most days and would have buzzed her in.

"Lila let me in. I told her I was bringing her favorite janitor his lunch. She said the third floor's empty this week."

"You talked to Lila about my floors."

"I talked to Lila about everything. She's very chatty. She says you're the only reason the place doesn't smell."

I caught up to her at the top of the east stairs and she was standing in the middle of the third floor corridor, looking down the long row of open doors. The light through the gaps in the curtains made stripes across the carpet. The wind was doing something against the north windows, a low rubbing sound.

"Third floor's empty," she repeated, like she was confirming it for herself. Then she picked a door, halfway down, room 314, and walked into it like she owned it. I followed. The room had a stripped bed, a chair, a window with a crooked curtain, and a view of the gray water and the closed boardwalk with its orange tape flapping.

She set the basket on the chair and opened it. Out came sandwiches, wrapped in wax paper. Out came two bottles of the beer I like. Out came a folded piece of paper that she held onto.

"Lunch," she said, handing me a sandwich. "And then we're going to play a game."

"What kind of game."

She sat down on the stripped mattress, crossed her legs, and looked up at me with her hands folded in her lap like a schoolteacher, except for the dress, which was riding up her thigh in a way no schoolteacher's ever managed.

"The kind with rules," she said. "I made a list. Rule zero is that either of us can say stop, any time, and the game is over, no questions."

She held up the paper. I didn't take it.

"Val. We're at my work."

"I know exactly where we are, Miles. That's the whole point of the list. And your job is not part of the game. Nobody's job, nothing, rides on this. It's separate. If you want out, we eat the sandwiches and go home."

She patted the mattress next to her. I sat down. My sandwich sat in my hand getting warm and I didn't take a bite of it, because I could feel the twenty-two years in the room with us, all of it stacked up on that paper in her lap, and I had a feeling I was about to start keeping it.

I ate the sandwich because she told me to and because it was actually a good sandwich, turkey and that mustard she gets from the co-op, and she watched me eat it with her chin up like she was timing me. She didn't eat hers. She drank half my beer instead, which was also very her.

Then she stood up and smoothed the red dress down and said, "Pool."

"The pool's drained."

"The indoor pool isn't. I looked out the lobby window."

She was right about that. The indoor pool is the one part of the resort that runs all winter because of a deal the owners have with a swim club in Newport, and it sits at the end of the south hallway behind glass doors nobody bothers to lock because the club only comes Saturdays. It was a Tuesday. I knew it was a Tuesday because I'd mopped the lobby, and the calendar in my head has run on mopped lobbies for eleven years.

We walked down there and she was ahead of me the whole way, clicking on the tile in her good shoes, and I kept thinking I should say something sensible. I didn't say anything sensible. I carried the paper with the folded list, because she'd handed it to me at the door of 314 and told me to hold it and not read it, and holding it felt like holding a ticket to something I hadn't agreed to buy.

The pool room is big and blue-lit and smells like chlorine year round. The water was calm. There were lounge chairs stacked against one wall and the lifeguard chair pushed in a corner like furniture somebody was storing. Valentina walked to the edge and looked at the water the way she looks at fabric in a store.

"Nobody's coming," I said. "Club's Saturdays."

"I know. I asked Lila."

"You and Lila need to be studied."

She turned around and faced me and reached behind her neck and undid the buttons down the front of the red dress, all of them, without hurrying, and shrugged it off and stepped out of it and stood there in her bra and underwear on the cold tile, fifty-two years old, arms crossed, smiling at me like she'd just won an argument I didn't know we were having.

"Val."

"Here are the rules for this one. You sit in that chair. You watch me swim. I swim without the rest of it on. You don't touch me until I get out."

"That's a rule?"

"That's rule two."

"What's rule one?"

"Rule one is you stay in the chair."

I looked at the chair. It was one of the stack, a plastic lounge thing with a towel over it that she'd apparently put there before I arrived, which meant she had walked through my resort earlier that afternoon with a towel under her coat, planning this, and I hadn't known a thing. I sat down. "Fine. I'm in the chair."

"Say you'll watch."

"I'll watch."

She reached back and unhooked the bra and dropped it on the dress, and then the underwear, and she didn't hurry any of it and she didn't look away from me while she did it, and I will tell you the honest truth, which is that after twenty-eight years a body can still do that to you. She got a running start of about two steps, which I yelled at her about because the deck was wet, and she dove in clean, hardly a splash, and came up halfway down the pool and pushed her hair back with both hands.

She swam. She did laps, slow ones, on her back mostly, and I sat in the chair with a towel across my knees like a modest old woman and watched my wife swim naked in my workplace, and the list stayed folded in my shirt pocket the whole time like a coal.

"I think about it," she said. She was floating on her back by then, arms out, not going anywhere, the water flat around her. "Being watched. I always have. You know that."

"I know that."

"Not just you. I love that it's you. But some stranger, some man at a pool or a beach, seeing what he can't have." She turned her head and looked at me across the water. "Wouldn't that be something. Right now, if some guest walked in."

"Nobody's walking in. Nine guests, and none of them down here."

"But if one did. If one came through that door right now and saw me."