Reckless Reunion in Paradise

I flew into Maui on a Tuesday for a sales conference I did not want to attend. My company makes outdoor equipment, mostly tents and coolers and things people buy once and never use again, and every year we fly forty of us somewhere warm to sit in a ballroom and look at slides. This year it was Maui. I was not going to complain about Maui, but I was going to be honest with myself about the ballroom part.

I am twenty-nine years old. I have been a regional sales manager for three years, and I have been married for six months, to a woman named Geri who works in insurance and likes everything in the house to be where she left it. Marriage is fine. It is fine. That is the problem, maybe, but I was not thinking about that yet when the shuttle dropped me at the hotel in Wailea.

I checked in, took my bag up, and stood on the balcony looking at the ocean for a while like every other tourist on the island. Then I went down for a walk because sitting still after six hours on a plane makes my legs restless.

That was when I saw the sign.

It was one of those sandwich boards near the beach path, the kind with plastic letters you slide into grooves. PRIVATE PRODUCTION. SHOOTING IN PROGRESS. PLEASE DO NOT APPROACH CREW OR TALENT. There was a logo underneath, some kind of flaming tiki torch, and I remembered it from television. My wife watched that show. Geri watched it every week with a glass of wine and a running commentary about which contestant she hated.

And then a second thought arrived right behind the first one, the way thoughts do when you are not ready for them. Ellie worked in television now.

Ellie was my first wife. I met her at the trade show in Honolulu five years ago, when she was twenty-three and I was twenty-four, and she was working a booth for a camera company because that was the summer job before real life started. Real life started for both of us, sort of. We dated for a year, got married when she was twenty-five and I was twenty-six, and got divorced two years ago. She had gone back to school for production work before we even split, and she had been climbing ever since. Last I heard she was an assistant director on some competition show. I had not known which one. Now I was standing in front of its sign on an island in the Pacific.

To be honest, I thought about turning around and going back to my room. Then I thought about Geri, asleep in Ohio, and about how I had not done one unplanned thing in a year and a half. I kept walking.

The beach curved south and the sun was going down over the water, orange and enormous, the way it is every evening whether anybody is watching or not. About a half mile along there were trucks. Not regular trucks, production trucks, with cables running out of them and across the sand like somebody's giant extension cord. Beyond the trucks was a small city of tents, and under tiki torches there was a stage that looked like it had been built by very expensive people pretending to be castaways.

And there, in the middle of it, waving her arms at people, was Ellie.

She looked different. Her hair was shorter, and she was wearing cargo shorts and a headset and a shirt with the show logo on it, and she was pointing at the sky and then at two guys on ladders. She was thirty feet away and I should have kept walking. I did not keep walking.

One of the guys on a ladder said something to her and she laughed, and hearing that laugh from thirty feet did something to my chest that I did not have a plan for. Then she turned and saw me and stopped laughing.

She walked over slowly. She pulled the headset down around her neck.

"Jessie?" she said.

"Hey, Ellie!"

"What are you doing here?" She looked behind me like there might be a camera crew following me around. "Are you serious right now? You're in Maui?"

"Sales conference. Hotel up the road. Forty guys and a projector."

"In Maui. A projector."

"There's a beach bar, too. The itinerary is very exciting."

She laughed again, shorter this time, and then she just looked at me for a while and I let her. I had forgotten how she looked at people, straight on, no darting around.

"I'm surprised," she said finally. "That's an understatement. I'm... yeah. Surprised."

"You look good," I said. "The headset suits you."

"The headset pays the rent." She pushed some hair off her face. "God. Okay. We're shooting a night challenge in about two hours. I've got to go be competent for a while, but..." She chewed her lip, which she used to do when she was making a decision, and I remembered that, and I hated that I remembered it. "Do you want to watch? Behind the scenes. I can get you a pass."

Geri would have hated that. Geri would have hated everything about that sentence, the pass, the ex-wife, the island, the word night. That is exactly why I said yes before I finished thinking about it.

"Yeah," I said. "I'd like that."

"Okay. Stay out of shot, don't talk to the contestants, and if anyone with a clipboard yells at you, apologize to the clipboard." She smiled. "I'm serious about the clipboard."

She went back to work and I found a spot in the shadow of a truck, and a production assistant brought me a lanyard with a laminate on it and did not ask my name, which told me something about how Ellie ran things.

The night shoot was a strength challenge. Eleven contestants, all of them tan and loud, hauling logs and rope around the stage while a host with too much energy shouted into a camera. They did take after take. I learned that reality television is mostly waiting, and that the waiting is run by people with headsets, and one of those people was my ex-wife, and she was good at it. She moved the whole beach around with two hands and a quiet voice.

That was when I first really noticed the big one. Contestant number seven, per the graphic on the screen. He looked like somebody had drawn a lumberjack and then made the drawing illegal. He was hanging back during a reset, near Ellie, and he flexed at her. Not casually. He did a double bicep pose and held it.

"Come on, Miss Director," I heard him say. "Tell me that doesn't win."

"Wins you a penalty," she said, laughing. "Get back on your mark, Wendell."

"That's a maybe and you know it."

"It's a no. Go!"

He went, grinning, and she shook her head and turned, and her eyes came straight to the shadow where I was standing. She held there for a second, then went back to the clipboard. But she had looked. She knew exactly where I was the whole time, and she had looked.

I stood in the dark with my hands in my pockets and felt as if I had gotten away with something, and the night had barely started.

Mack Sandford showed up about forty minutes into the challenge. I knew it was Mack because the host had name-dropped him during a take, "our executive producer Mack Sandford," like he was a contestant himself. Everybody on the crew straightened when he walked by, which was how I really knew. He was thirty-four and wore a linen shirt that had never seen work, and he moved down the beach like he owned the sand under it.