Waves in the Off-Season

I watched Joseph unpack the car in that way of his, the way a pharmacist counts pills. He had the two big bags lined up by the tailgate and he was pulling things out in order, toiletries first, then the food cooler, then the clothes. Everything had a place before we even saw the place.

"Give me something to carry," I said.

"You've got the pillows."

"The pillows are easy. I want a real job."

He handed me the cooler without looking up from his inventory. "Fine, but the eggs are on the left side, so don't swing it around like last time."

"Last time was one time."

"One time was three eggs," he said, and shut the trunk with his hip.

We were in Pismo Shores, which is not Pismo Beach, whatever the chamber of commerce hoped. It's a town two exits south where the boardwalk shops close after Labor Day and mostly stay closed. February. Gray sky, gray water, a rusted sign over the bait shop creaking in the wind like it was complaining on behalf of the whole street. We'd rented a beach house for the weekend because Joseph wanted quiet and I wanted, well, I didn't know what I wanted yet, exactly. I had a wordless itch about it.

He got the front door open and then he unpacked the bags onto the kitchen counter, grouping things. Coffee with the coffee. Pasta with the pasta. He folded the empty bags flat and set them by the door to reuse. Three years of marriage and I could time a stopwatch to this man. I love him. I'd also started noticing that I could predict him the way you can predict a song on the radio you've heard a thousand times. You catch yourself singing along before you've decided to.

"You want the bed near the window or the bed near the door?" he called.

"You pick."

"I'll pick window. You steal covers."

See. Predictable. I stood in the rental's little living room with the cooler going warm in my hands and thought, for no reason I could name, I would like to see this man surprised. That was the itch. There was the entire shape of it, right there, before anything happened.

"Shack for dinner?" he said, checking his phone. "The one with the fry baskets. Reviews say it's open year round."

"Sure," I said, and something in my voice must have had a plan in it already, because he glanced over at me, but I just smiled and carried the cooler to the fridge.

* * *

The seafood shack had six tables and, that night, three customers. A guy at the bar who looked like he lived there, and a couple by the window who never spoke to each other, which was its own kind of entertainment. Our waitress was maybe twenty-five and had the energy of someone counting the hours until she could leave this town for the season, or forever.

Joseph ordered the grilled plate. I ordered the fried basket and two beers.

"You never do two beers," Joseph said when she walked off.

"I'm on vacation."

"You're on a weekend."

"Same thing in February." I leaned back and looked at him. He's thirty-one, two years older than me, and he had his reading glasses out because the menu was printed in what looked like nine point font by someone with a grudge. He looked like a teacher, which he is. He looked like the man who has paid every bill on time for three years, which he also is.

"You're staring," he said, not looking up.

"I'm allowed. You're my husband."

"That's not in the vows."

"It's implied." I took a swallow of the first beer. "Hey. Remember Portland?"

He put the menu down. "What about it?"

"The conference. The hotel with the broken ice machine. The night we, uh." I waved my hand in a circle. "The fire alarm."

Joseph went a little red, which at thirty-one he can still do, which I like. "Martin."

"Third floor stairwell," I said. "You had your tie around your wrist like a racetrack official. I remember thinking, this man has a plan and I am the plan."

"You were the one who said the stairwell," he said, pointing his fork at me before the forks even arrived. "I wanted to wait for the room."

"Waiting is for people with patience. I've never had any. You knew that when you proposed."

"You proposed when I was twenty-seven. You'd had years to develop patience."

The beers came and I ordered a third, which got me the eyebrow again. The waitress took our order and left, and I kept going, because I had a direction now and I'm a salesman, steering is the whole job.

"And the parking lot off Highway 1," I said. "The one with the view of the ocean. You put your coat down on the hood first. You were worried about the paint."

"I was worried about the paint," he agreed, and then he laughed, one short burst, surprised out of him. "God, that was a long time ago. Eight years."

"Eight years. We were animals."

"We were young."

"We were loud."

"We were lucky nobody called the cops on the parking lot one," he said, and drank, and looked at me over the rim with an expression I hadn't seen in a while. Recognition, maybe. Like I'd said a password.

Here's what I'd figured out, sitting in the rental living room with the warm cooler: somewhere in three years of being good husbands to each other, we'd become careful. Not unhappy. Careful. Scheduled. And I had decided, driving over that morning, that this weekend I wanted to be the one who wasn't careful. I wanted to be the bad influence for once, because Joseph had never had one and I was tired of being the responsible one on my own file.

So when the third beer arrived I said, "After this, let's walk down to the water."

"It's February."

"It is."

"The water is, what, fifty degrees?"

"Fifty-five, maybe. Warmer than your classroom."

"Martin." He set the beer down. "What are you doing?"

"Nothing. Finish your beer."

He finished his beer. He knows when I'm working an angle. We've had three years of practice and he can read my pitch posture from across a room. But he let me pay, and he let me steer him down the gravel path to the beach, and when we got to the hard wet sand where the tide had smoothed everything out, he stopped and looked at the water and said, "No."

"You didn't even hear the proposal."

"You're wearing your serious salesman face. The answer is no."

"I don't have a serious salesman face. I have one face."

"You have at least four faces. I married all of them." He put his hands in his jacket pockets. The wind came off the water and pushed his hair around. "You want to go skinny dipping. In February. In the Pacific."

"I do."

"It's forty miles an hour of wind and fifty degree water and the house has a perfectly good, perfectly heated, indoor shower."

"All true," I said. "And?"

"And you're insane." But he was smiling. That was the tell. He turned his body toward me, away from the water, and I saw him deciding something, working it like a problem on the board in his classroom. "You're serious. You're actually serious."

"I'm actually serious," I said. "Take your clothes off and run into the ocean with me. We'll be back in the house in ten minutes, we'll be scalding under the shower by midnight, and you'll have a story nobody at the faculty meeting will ever hear."

"That last part is doing a lot of work."

"It's a good part."

He looked at the water. He looked at the empty beach, one gray sweep of it in every direction, nobody for a quarter mile either way. He looked back at me and I watched three years of being the reliable one lose the argument to something older.

"Ten minutes," he said. "And if I get hypothermia you're calling the urgent care line yourself."

* * *

We came back up the path with our clothes in a wad, dripping, shrieking, and I want to note here that Joseph went into that ocean first. I want that remembered, because he will tell this story differently for the rest of our lives. The water knocked the air out of both of us and we came up laughing like idiots and then we could not get out fast enough, and by the time we got the front door open we were both blue and shaking and wide awake in a way I hadn't been in years.

Joseph went for the thermostat. I went for him.

I don't have a better explanation than that. He was standing there in his wet boxers, hair flat, turning the dial with a shaking hand, and I crossed the kitchen and got a hand on either side of his face and kissed him, hard, and bit his lower lip when he opened up for me. He made a noise into my mouth, half shock, half laugh