The Karaoke Secret

The house was too quiet. That's what got me.

Twenty-two years of noise. Two kids, a dog, a revolving door of their friends eating my groceries. Then one Saturday in August we drove Katie up to Flagstaff for her freshman year, and by Sunday night the silence in that house on Cameron Lane was so thick I could hear the refrigerator thinking.

Nina noticed it too. I know she did. She started doing dishes at nine at night just to have the radio on. She'd stand there scrubbing a pan that was already clean, hips swaying a little to some station she never listened to when the kids were home.

Then in September she put a printout on the kitchen counter. Cancun. All inclusive, except she'd booked this weird little beach bar hotel instead, some place called Playa Serena, not the big resort I'd have picked.

"One week," she said. "Just us. Before we turn into people who only talk about gutters."

I'm Phillip Cameron. I'm fifty-three years old, sales manager for a building supply outfit in Tucson, and I have not always been smart about my wife. We got married twenty-seven years ago. I was twenty-six, she was twenty-five. We'd met two Christmases before that, at a company party where she beat me at pool and I never recovered. She's fifty-two now and she still beats me at pool.

The trip was her idea. All of it. I just said yes, which, looking back, might be the smartest thing I've done in a decade.

Here's the part I haven't figured out though. Without the kids as a buffer, I don't know how to talk to her. Sounds stupid. We used to talk for hours, driving nowhere, before the kids. Now at dinner in Cancun, first night, we got through the fish tacos and the sunset and then we just sat there. Two people staring at the ocean like it owed them money.

"You okay?" she asked me.

"Yeah. You?"

"Yeah."

That was the conversation. Three days in, we'd gotten better at the small stuff. Worse at the big stuff. Or maybe the big stuff was just sitting there between us, patient, waiting its turn.

---

Club Sirena sat two blocks down the beach from our hotel. Peeling turquoise stage, mismatched stools, iguanas sprawled on the patio wall like they owned the place. Tourists singing karaoke badly, which is the whole point of karaoke. A bartender with a shaved head and a laugh you could hear over the ocean.

The host was a woman named Anya. Thirty-four maybe, dark hair, tattoo of a snake curling up one forearm, energy that felt explosive and imminent. She'd worked as a cocktail waitress in Vegas, we found out later. It showed.

Tuesday night she got up on the little stage between singers and scanned the crowd with those eyes. I was on my second beer, watching a guy from Minnesota absolutely murder Sweet Caroline.

Then the mic pointed at us.

"Okay. Married couple. Third table back. You two have been sitting there all week like it's a stakeout. Come up here."

Nina laughed. I shook my head.

"No no no," I said.

"Yes yes yes," Anya said. "I've been watching you. You're going to sing with me and you're going to like it. It's an old country song. Even you know it."

Somehow I was standing. That's all I can tell you. One second I had a beer, next second Anya had my arm and was steering me up two steps onto that rickety stage. Nina was cackling at the table, camera out, betrayal in action.

The song started. Something slow from the seventies. Anya sang the first verse, and she could actually sing, which felt like cheating. Then she handed the whole thing over to me.

I sang. Badly. But halfway through the second verse something happened. I stopped singing it at the screen and started looking at my wife. She'd gone quiet. Watching me. Not laughing anymore.

Anya drifted over during the last chorus. Her hand settled on my shoulder, light, and she leaned in close to the mic like we were harmonizing.

"You're holding back," she said, low, just for me. "She likes when you don't."

The song ended. Applause, scattered but real. I came off that stage warm and confused and grinning like an idiot, and Nina pulled me down into the chair beside her and kissed my cheek.

"You were terrible," she said. "I loved it."

---

Anya came over a few minutes later with three shot glasses on a little tray and a bottle I didn't recognize.

"Mezcal," she said, setting them down. "From my cousin's town. Real stuff, not the tourist stuff. On me."

"You're bribing us," Nina said.

"Obviously. Sit."

We sat. She pulled a stool from the next table over and planted herself across from us like we were friends from way back. Her name tag said ANYA and had a little plastic lizard clipped to it.

"You've been here three nights," she said. "I notice things. You hold hands walking on the beach but not at the bar. You eat dinner at the same time every night. You laugh at each other's jokes when you think nobody's watching. And you haven't danced once. Not once."

"We dance," Nina said, doubtful even as she said it.

"You shuffle. That's not dancing."

Nina looked at me. I looked at Nina. The woman had us dead to rights.

"Drink," Anya said. "Then I'm asking you a question and you have to answer honestly. Them's the rules of the mezcal."

We drank. It was smoky and it went down hot and it made my eyes water.

"Good, right? Okay. Question." She leaned forward on her elbows, and I want to stress here that her whole manner was friendly. Warm. Curious, not cruel. "When's the last time you two fucked somewhere other than the bedroom? Door closed, lights off, the standard issue married thing. When's the last time you did it anywhere else? Kitchen. Car. Hotel balcony. Anything."

Nina choked on nothing. I felt my face go red in a way it hadn't since I was a young man, which, fine, I'm fifty-three, my face does what it wants now.

"Excuse me?" Nina said, but she was half laughing.

"Am I wrong?" Anya spread her hands. "I watch people. It's my job, watching people. You two aren't broken. You're just parked. There's a difference and nobody tells couples that."

"Where the hell did you get the nerve," I said, and it came out more admiring than I meant it to.

"Cousin's bar. Family business. You learn to read a room." She shrugged. "Also I'm right. Look at your faces. My question hit like a dart."

The truth was the answer to her question was a number with too many years in it. Our bedroom, our closed door, eleven o'clock at night, whispering so the kids wouldn't hear, and whispering so long out of habit that we kept doing it after they grew up and moved out. The habit outlived the reason. Nobody tells you that either.

"Twenty-two years," Nina said suddenly, to her shot glass. "Give or take. Hotel in Nogales. We were young and stupid."

"Nina," I said.

"What? You asked." She wasn't talking to me, she was talking to Anya, and there was color in her cheeks that wasn't just the mezcal. "Twenty-two years of doors closed. There. Happy?"

"Delighted," Anya said. "You just did something most couples can't do. You said it out loud."

An iguana dropped off the wall with a thump and shuffled across the patio like a tiny dinosaur with somewhere to be. Nina laughed, really laughed, and Anya grinned like she'd won something.

"Okay," Anya said, standing up, collecting the glasses. "I like you two. I'm going to talk to my friend the DJ and then I'm coming back. When I come back, don't say no right away. Say no second. Let me finish first."

"That sounds ominous," I said.

"It sounds fun," Nina said, and then looked startled at herself.

Anya pointed at her. "See, she gets it." She walked off toward the stage, hips swinging, and picked up the mic to introduce some guy from Toronto.

I looked at Nina. She looked at me. Two blocks away, Gordo's taco stand was lighting up for the night crowd, and the ocean was doing its thing, and my wife of twenty-seven years had a look on her face I hadn't seen since before we had a mortgage.

"What do you think she's going to ask?" Nina said.

"I have no idea!"

"I kind of want to know."

"So do I," I admitted. "That's the scary part."

She reached under the table and took my hand. First time in a while she'd done that first. Her palm was warm and a little sweaty and I remembered being twenty-six and holding that exact hand at a Christmas party, twenty-four years old, while she told me she was about to run the table on me.

"Phillip," she said.

"Yeah?"

"Say no second!"

I laughed. Down on the stage, Anya caught my eye and smiled with the confidence of someone holding a royal flush, and the DJ cued up something with a heavy bass line, and the night, which I'd figured was over, turned out to be just getting started.

Anya was true to her word. She came back twenty minutes later, but she didn't come back alone.

"This is Rhys," she said, parking a tall guy at our table like she was delivering a pizza. "Rhys, this is Phillip and Nina. They're from Tucson. They're having a midlife awakening and I've decided to supervise it."

"Texas, actually," the guy said. "Dallas. But I'm adopting Tucson if you'll have me." He stuck out a hand and I shook it. Big hand, sunburned nose, wedding ring finger bare, oil field tan, the kind of guy who looked like he could carry a drill pipe under one arm and probably bragged about it. Thirty-eight, maybe. Younger than me by a good stretch.

"Rhys is on vacation," Anya said. "Twice a year he comes down here, drinks too much, sings worse than you do, and goes home. He's harmless."

"I'm not harmless," Rhys said, grinning. "I'm well behaved. Different thing."

He pulled a stool over from the next table without asking, which should have annoyed me and didn't quite, and sat down closer to Nina than to me. I noticed that. Anya noticed me noticing.

"Can I get you a drink, Nina?" Rhys said. "Or are you on the mezcal train now? Because that train has no brakes and no schedule."

"I'm on the train," Nina said, and held out her glass so he could pour from the bottle Anya had left. Her voice was doing something light and flirty and I hadn't heard it do that in years, and it wasn't aimed at me.

"So what do you do, Dallas?" she asked.

"Oil fields. I supervise a crew out past Midland. It's exactly as glamorous as it sounds." He leaned in. "What about you? Let me guess. Teacher?"

"Bookkeeper."

"Wrong guess. You look like trouble, and bookkeepers never look like trouble."

"Oh, she's trouble," Anya said from behind the bar, not even looking up from the tap she was wiping. "You have no idea!"

Nina laughed. Actually tipped her head back and laughed, and Rhys looked pleased with himself, and I sat there with my beer going warm and felt this thing twist in my chest that I hadn't felt since before we were married. Some guy at a party, 1990-something, standing too close to Nina, and me wanting to punch him and not knowing I was allowed to feel that. Jealousy. That was the word. Twenty-seven years of marriage had sanded it down to nothing and now here it was, sharp again, sitting in my chest like a stone.

And the worst part, the truly stupid part, was that I couldn't tell if I was jealous of Rhys for sitting too close to my wife, or jealous of Nina because the pretty young host had spent the whole evening reading me like a menu, and now some other man was getting the attention that had been pointed my way all night.

Both, probably. Both is a fine answer. Both is honest.

"You're doing a face," Anya said. She'd come around the bar with three fresh drinks and a bowl of limes nobody had ordered, and she set them down and looked right at me with that knowing little smile, the lizard on her name tag catching the light. "That face. That's the face of a man feeling something he forgot the name of."

"I'm fine," I said.

"You're jealous," she said, delighted. "That's wonderful. That's the best thing I've seen all week."

"I'm not."

"Phillip." Nina turned and looked at me, and her eyes were shining and there was a challenge in them. "Are you jealous?"

"I don't know what I am," I said, and that was as close to honest as I could get with a stranger's knee six inches from my wife's.

"Good," Anya said. "Hold onto that. That's fuel. Drink your beer."

Rhys, to his credit, seemed to take none of it personally. He raised his glass to me. "To whatever that feeling is, brother. I've been on the receiving end of it a few times myself. It means you still care. That's not nothing."

We clinked. I drank. The stone in my chest didn't go away but it stopped strangling me.

Anya jerked her head toward a booth in the corner, one of the old vinyl ones with a split in the seat that had been repaired with silver tape sometime this decade. "Come on. Corner booth. More private, and the iguanas can't hear us there."

"There are iguanas right there," Nina said, pointing at the wall.

"Deaf as posts. Come on."

We wedged in. Anya took the outside of the bench across from us, Rhys slid in next to her, and the table was sticky in the way bar tables are sticky, some ancient layer of sugar and lime that no amount of wiping would ever fix. Anya set the mezcal bottle down in the middle like a centerpiece.

"Okay," she said. "Here's what I was going to ask. And remember, no second. Let me finish."

"Finish," I said.

"Every year, couples come down here. Older couples. Nice couples. Married forever couples. And I watch them eat