The Midnight Watch

The travel agent called it a couples' cruise. Travis called it three nights of free drinks and a chance to sleep past six without the lawn guys showing up. We booked it back in February, him and me, he was twenty-nine and I was twenty-eight, married five years. I was a graphic designer and he sold cars, and we'd been saving for a real vacation since our honeymoon, which had been two nights in a motel in Sarasota.

We got on the ship in Miami on a Friday. Brody and Tami Schneider were on the same sailing. They lived three houses down from us, which we hadn't known until we saw them in the boarding line. Tami was thirty-four, a real estate agent, and Brody was thirty-five and sold yachts, which explained the tan and the teeth. They'd been three houses down from us three years and we'd had them over for a barbecue exactly once.

"Small world," Brody said when he spotted us. "You two drink?"

"We do," Travis said.

"Then we should drink together. That's how I see it anyway."

So Friday night we ended up on the Lido deck with a little table and four plastic glasses and the sun going down over the water. Tami had on a yellow sundress and Brody had on one of those shirts unbuttoned to the middle, and I felt a little underdressed in my flat sandals and my cheap dress, but nobody said so.

"You know," Brody said, tipping his glass toward the horizon, "in the old days, people used to watch sunsets together."

"They still do, Brody," Tami said. "That's what this is."

"No, I mean really watch them. Small towns on the coast, everybody comes out and sits on the seawall and it's a whole event."

Travis laughed into his drink. "You're saying this sunset is underattended."

"I'm saying the four of us should fix that." He looked around the deck like he was taking attendance. "Same time tomorrow night, this exact table. And if anybody's late, they owe a round."

"That's not a hardship, we're on an all-inclusive bar plan," I said.

"Everything's a hardship if you make it one," Brody said, and Tami rolled her eyes at me like she'd heard that one a hundred times, which I guess she had.

We talked about nothing for an hour. Where we'd grown up, whether Nassau was worth getting off the boat for, the weird little dog that wandered between our two backyards back home and belonged to nobody. It was easy talk. Easier than I expected it to be with people we'd only ever waved at over a fence.

Around nine Tami touched my arm. "Come with me to the restroom before we do another round. If I have one more of these I'll be useless tomorrow."

The restroom was up a deck and quiet, real quiet, just the ship's hum under everything. Tami checked the stalls, all empty, and then she leaned on the counter and looked at me in the mirror.

"Can I say something kind of out there? You can tell me to mind my own business."

"Okay," I said, and my stomach did a little drop, the way it does when somebody starts a sentence that way.

"Brody and I have a thing. Not a problem, a thing. He likes to watch. Other people, I mean. Other couples."

I didn't say anything for a second. I rinsed my hands even though I hadn't used the bathroom.

"Like, we've been to a couple of clubs back before we moved to your neighborhood. We watch. Sometimes we're watched. He loves it and honestly so do I, but I don't love the club scene anymore, too loud, too much perfume." She laughed. "Too many guys named Steve."

"And you're telling me this because..."

"Because I like you, Gloria. We've been waving at each other for three years and I've never once had a real conversation with you, and tonight felt good. And maybe I had one drink too many and said the quiet part out loud. If this makes it weird, we'll just never speak of it, I swear on my license plates."

I looked at her in the mirror. I was intrigued, and I was nervous, and mostly what I was was surprised at how much the intrigued part was winning.

"It doesn't make it weird," I said. "It makes me ask questions I didn't plan on asking."

"Ask them."

"I don't have any yet. Give me a minute. It's a lot to take in over a sink."

Tami laughed and it broke some of the tension. "Fair. It took me two years to have my first question and it was a dumb one."

"What was it?"

"I asked Brody if it meant he didn't like doing it with me. Which is the opposite of true, by the way. It's like going to a movie you've seen a hundred times with somebody who's never seen it. You get to watch them watch it."

I washed my hands again, uselessly, just to have something to do. "And Brody, the joke about the sunset. Was that..."

"That was just Brody being Brody, mostly. He's a flirt, it's how he breathes. But yeah, the watching thing is real. It's ours. We don't push it on anybody."

"And you're not pushing it on us?"

"No," she said, and she said it fast enough that I believed her. "I'm telling you a secret because I wanted one real friend on this boat who wasn't my husband. That's all. Forget the other part."

We went back out. Travis and Brody were arguing about whether a sunset could be late, which apparently it could if you were using the wrong horizon. We finished our round and said goodnight, and Travis held my hand the whole walk back to the stateroom, which he does when he's happy, which he was, because he'd had two drinks and gotten to talk about boats with a yacht guy.

In the room he sat on the bed and started taking off his shoes. "Good night, huh? They're more fun than I thought. Brody's kind of a character."

"He is."

"You okay? You went quiet the last twenty minutes."

"Tami told me something in the restroom. I don't know if I should say it. She kind of swore me to a maybe."

Travis stopped with one shoe half off. "A maybe. What does that mean, a maybe?"

"It means if I tell you and it turns out to be nothing, I've broken a confidence over nothing. And if I tell you and it turns out to be something, then you're going to spend all night thinking about it and so am I, and we've got a sunrise yoga thing tomorrow I already regret booking."

"You booked sunrise yoga?"

"Tami and I booked sunrise yoga. That's a separate problem."

He put the shoe down. "Okay, look. I won't spend all night thinking about it. I'll spend ten minutes thinking about it and then I'll go to sleep, because I'm on vacation and my plan is to be unconscious by eleven. Tell me or don't tell me, Gloria, either way I'm not going to make it a whole thing."

So I sat down next to him on the bed and I told him. All of it, the clubs, the watching, the being watched, the part where she said they don't push it on anybody and the part where she said she wanted one real friend on this boat.

Travis was quiet for longer than ten minutes. I know because I watched the clock.

"So they're into that," he finally said. "Brody likes to watch."

"That's what she said."

"And she told you this why? Tonight, out of nowhere?"

"Because we finally had a real conversation and she'd had a drink. She said forget the other part."

"Did it feel like forget the other part?"

I thought about it honestly, the way I try to do things. "It felt like a door open that she wasn't walking through. Just standing near."

Travis nodded, slow, and got the other shoe off. "Sunrise yoga's at seven?"

"Six forty-five. God, why did I book that."

He got into bed and I got into bed and the ship did its hum under us and I lay there a long time thinking about a door standing open, and whether I wanted to walk through it, or stand near it, or just watch somebody else walk through it first.

The alarm went off at six and I hated everything. Travis rolled over and looked at me with one eye open.

"You're really doing this."

"I said I would. Tami's meeting me up top at six forty-five."

"Have a good downward dog or whatever it is. I'm going back to sleep until eight."

So I went alone up to the top deck, and the sky was still gray and the water was flat, and Tami was there in leggings with two bottles of water like she'd planned a military operation. We did the class. It was fine. My balance is bad and hers isn't, and afterward we stood at the rail with our water and for a while we both kept quiet.

"Okay," she finally said. "You look like you've been rehearsing something. Say it."

"Travis knows."

Tami set her bottle on the rail. "You told him."

"I told him last night. He took it better than I thought. He didn't make it a whole thing, which is his phrase for it."

"And now what, he's freaked out?"

"No. That's the strange part. He's curious. He kept saying curious. I asked him if it bothered him and he said, and I quote, it bothers me that it doesn't bother me more."

Tami laughed. "Oh, that's a Travis sentence if I ever heard one."

"He asked me if you two have done it with other couples before. With the watching thing. I didn't know."

"Twice. Both times it came out of a conversation like ours. Nobody planned it. Both couples are people we still know and still like, and both times we agreed it was a one-time thing and then it sort of quietly became not a one-time thing, but that's us, that doesn't have to be you." She turned to face me. "Gloria, I need you to hear me. I am not fishing. I don't want you to feel steered."

"I know you're not. That's why I'm talking to you at all."

We got coffee at the little window up there and drank it looking at the water, and then she said she had a shore thing booked in Nassau with Brody and went off to get dressed, and I went back to the stateroom where Travis was awake and sitting on the bed with his hair sticking up.

"How was yoga?"

"Fine. I'm terrible at it."

"Cool. So I've been thinking. Not all night, like I said, but some."

"Okay."

"I don't feel jealous. I feel I should be honest about that because it seems like I should. I feel curious. Like when somebody tells you there's a room in a museum you've never been in, and you've been to the museum forty times."

"That's a weird way to put it but I know what you mean."

"Did they ever actually do it? The watching thing? Or do they just talk about it?"

"They've done it. Twice."

Travis sat with that for a while. "Huh. And it worked out. Nobody got divorced."

"Tami says the couples are still their friends."

He rubbed his jaw. "So what does that even look like, practically? They just sit in a corner of the room?"

"I don't know, Travis."

"Because I'm not saying yes. I'm saying I'd like to know what the question even is before I answer it."

"Then ask Brody at dinner. He's the one who'll say it straight. Tami says he's the talker about it and she's the one who feels weird."

"I can work with that."

Dinner was the second night, and we had the same table, which Brody pointed out like it was a conspiracy. Travis had been drinking a little and Tami and I had matching windburns from the morning, and for two courses everything was normal. Travis talked about Nassau, Brody talked about a boat he almost bought, and then somewhere around dessert Travis just went for it.

"Brody. Can I ask you something and you take it however you take it?"

Brody put his fork down. "Shoot."

"Tami told Gloria about you two. The watching thing. And I'm not asking to be nosy, I'm asking because I honestly don't get the mechanics of it. What does a night like that actually look like?"

There was a silence of maybe two seconds and I could feel Tami go still next to me. Brody, though, didn't even blink.

"Okay," he said. "Straight answer. We've done it twice, with two couples we trusted. The way it works is simple. You're in a room, we're in the room, nobody touches anybody. I watch. Tami watches. You two do what you two would do anyway, or you don't, your call. That's the whole deal."

"And that does it for you?" Travis asked.

"Does what?"

"That's enough. Just watching."

Brody smiled a little. "Travis, have you ever been watched? I mean, has anybody ever watched you and Gloria?"

"Brody," Tami said, low.