Diary of a Heretic

Howler Monkeys

Sun’s not quite up yet and Nando hands me a hoe and I go to work near the cliff. An invisible cloud of no-see-um insects rises from a thick thatch of grass and bites my neck and face. Nando and Hugo are off tearing up the shrubs and bushes. I tear off my glove to slap at the bugs. Wave my hands around and they disperse. I reach for the hoe handle before the glove. And searing pain invades the inside of my wrist. I flick off a long, thin, brownish thing. Reflex action. But I see the snake falling in the air. Its yellow tail means it’s a juvenile. And juvenile pitvipers are even more lethal than the adults.

The bite already looks like multiple blood blisters. I call Nando. Maybe he hears the alarm in my voice, but he was already afraid, and runs toward me so fast it’s like watching violence. He looks at my wrist. “Shit, Scottie. The terciopelo?”

“Yellow tail.” I hold my forearm and pain explodes up and down the whole limb.

“Keep calm, hombre.” [Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]

*

Is everyone stuck in their childhood? Nightmares, feverish delusions—they’re all the same. We’re trapped in an out of sync past. So in the dark, my mother slams the door, gone for good. Then she’s back yelling that my dad’s not worth it. She drove to a Lake Michigan pier, ready to “press the pedal to the metal” so her car would go soaring into the water, when it occurred to her that my dad wasn’t worth it. If he wanted to make up it up to her? If he wanted to do her a favor for being such an asshole? Why didn’t he go drown himself?

A minute later, my dad’s screaming at me, “Who broke the Christmas angel if you didn’t?” Do I think he did it? My mom? “That leaves your sister Annie. Are you telling me your sister, who’s not even crawling yet, broke the Christmas angel? 

My dad won’t go away. He keeps punching me, slamming me to the ground. I don’t get up, but because this isn’t real, he can keep punching and slamming me all he wants. “You’re lying to me, Scott! What makes you think you can lie to me?”

My head pounds. It weighs two tons at the top of my fossilized neck, which itches like hell. I’m lying on a bed, stripped except for my shorts. My right arm is twice as big as the rest of my body. My mind’s spinning in the air, which is neither light nor dark. A voice warns me not to move, not even to twitch. A plastic case covers my mouth and nose. A metal tank by the bed sweats and clanks, like I’m stupid. A tube connects the tank with the face mask, which I can’t rip off, because of another tube attached to my one arm that still is an arm. The swollen growth on my right boils and stings, and as bad as the pain is, I can’t believe it’s my arm and not some sick, grisly reptile, bristling with fangs.

Two guys are arguing. “You could’ve killed him if he was allergic, Nando.”

“Not with the sheep serum. This wasn’t the horse shit, the horse Polivalentes. I stuck four sheep vials in his butt.”

“He still could’ve been allergic to sheep antivenom. You didn’t know.”

“What about all those shots you gave him, Doc?”

“Standard tetanus. And cortisone because he’s got that rash on his throat. Why am I explaining this to you? Inside the wrist is a terrible place for snake bites. Especially pit vipers. Their venom gets into the veins and you get blood clots, strokes.”

“But he’s okay, now. Or do I call for the plane?”

“Overnight here. And after two days he can go to San Jose for chest X-rays. EKG. I’m not sure if they’ve got an MRI there or not.”

Emma’s screaming, “Oh my God!” She’s flying, wearing a bikini, about to jump on the bed.

“Who are you? What’re doin’? Nando, get her out of here.”

“It’s Emma, Doc. Scottie’s amante.”

 I fall back, hearing howler monkeys. Their howling is funny and scary. They wake you at dawn, but it’s not dawn. I’ve got no idea what time it is, but it’s not dawn.

Nando’s leaning over the bed before he leaves. “You’ll be okay, Scottie. Just rest. Pura vida, hombre.”

Emma says, “Dr. Arelleno,” and he lets her touch my forehead while he shoots me up with more antivenom. “Every six hours now,” he says.

He’s measuring the roiling, man-eating creature that used to be my right arm. “Stabilized but not subsiding.”

It’s right out of a tired cartoon. A cheapo Frankenstein movie where I’m the monster. Emma tugs on Dr. Arelleno’s sleeve and they step into a shadow. She says, “He’s trying to say something.”

(Click here to read the next episode.)

Seduced

“Let me get this straight,” Carlos said.  “You think people who come to the meetings are going to say, ‘Holy crap!  I can’t go out tonight; it’s Valentine’s Day!’?”

“And you think it won’t affect business if we’ve got a bunch of misfits sitting around talking about whether a personal relationship with God is possible?”

[Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]

Carlos tossed his waist-length hair behind him. He circled the room on the balls of his feet.  And as usual, the sight of his powerful calves and ankles in motion made me pant. The evil, alluring Carlos, a beatific grin on his face, set his twin sets of iron balls in their nests. Still grinning, he swayed on those wondrous feet as the raggedy terry cloth robe my mother gave me ten Christmases ago began to slip off his skinny Mexican shoulders, the frayed tie having come loose from his twenty-six inch waist.

Circling silently behind me, he rose on his toes (Carlos is short, five-five, five-six at most) and pressed his hands on my shoulders. Then I felt his brindled hair on my cheek, grazing my ear and then (God Help Me) the pouch of new flesh at my neck.

Jostling me, he said, “Come on, Malcolm.  Forget the stupid store.”

His hands moved along my back and I bit the inside of my cheek.

“Forget the fucking store!” Carlos dug at the area where my legs join my trunk.

“We are about to embark,” he said, “on a totally new, life-everlasting kind of venture.  All that matters from now on, Malcolm, are endeavors of the soul.”

“Yes.” I held my breath. The robe shifted and swayed behind me as Carlo’s small sinewy body shifted and swayed behind me.  He ran his hands up and down the length of my arms, the flaps of that robe opening away from him.

“The time,” he whispered, “is perfect,” and pressed his hand on my painfully constrained penis, which angled huge and hard along my thigh.

“The time, the time, the time,” Carlos said, “is now!”

His fingertips tapped on the tip and in my extremity, I put myself out of the world.  Whatever happened next, I told myself, happened.  There was nothing I could do.  No move I could make, no sound, no silent wish would change what Carlos had in mind. Quivering and panting, I tried pretending that what we were enacting was nothing more than an intricate kind of handshake. While Carlos kept stroking, kept pressing, kept rubbing, I gathered all my consciousness to keep from moaning.

At this point, at this crucial—I beg you, Carlos, please just one more second—he managed to make it both better and worse by moving his hands up and away, his fingers near my chest before mercifully he drew me closer to him.  He hugged me from behind. With the robe open, I recognized his tight muscled torso rubbing against me, his hip points jabbing my butt cheeks, squashed down and together by my way too-small jeans.

But I was not, was not, was not going to groan and gasp, shiver and come.  I refused to think of his nakedness.  I suppressed a fantasy involving the terry cloth belt knotted around his wrists, tied up over his head, so he dangled from the ceiling.  And I stalwartly resisted the image of myself yanking out his long brown hair, strand by strand, so as to hear him groan.

Instead, I imagined freezing to death on a tundra in Alaska. Lost among a sea of glaciers, I considered an arctic wall of cryogenically frozen heads.  Hundreds and hundreds of them stored among the ice floes.  Superfrozen heads submerged in one endless million-year-old glacier.

No good, of course. Carlos’s fingers were gliding along my bigger-fatter-softer-every-day belly. He caressed my padded chest and pressed hard against my back side.  He was saying, “You’re ready for this, Malcolm.”  And then the act of a virtuoso—his hands swept down and away. “Come on, come on,” he hissed, and my lungs flew open, my eyes rolled in their sockets.

“Oh God, Carlos.”  I screamed and hopped and then I really gave it up:  choking, crying, thrashing.  Carlos laughed and reached for me, saying, “Hey easy, baby, easy.  Are you all right?”

(Click here to read the next episode...And if you enjoyed this excerpt, please visit Amazon.com, where Diary of a Heretic, the novel, has been selected as a Semi-Finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. If you download the free excerpt and write a mini-review, it will help me get to the Finalist stage.)

He Spun Too Far

The second meeting hasn’t even taken place and Carlos is already talking about branching out, buying a few more bakeries to showcase his fabulous breads. What he wants, is for us to pool our resources and buy a loft or warehouse where we can all live and work together—all meaning him and me and, incredibly, Stephanie (!) and Maggie (!)

[Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]

But what do I care?  As long as he’s back sleeping on my couch, back performing those spellbinding hand exercises.  He bathes, combs out his hair, and puts on my robe.  He circles the floor, rotating the Chinese iron balls in his quick, strong hands.  And as I obviously love watching this (twice I’ve caught myself with my mouth agape), he’s extended the routine to an hour, adding a CD of gentle flute music.

I haven’t felt such lust since Jason, my roommate at Northwestern. He died the winter of our senior year, which is when my mom and dad bought me this place, so fearful were they that I’d renounce my worldly goods after dropping out.

Carlos came with the real estate. The old German guy who opened the coffee shop in the late 1950s died at 88, a month after Jason died at 20. Who knows how long Carlos was running the show? No question but café belongs to him, except in name; everyone knows that. But my parents swooped in with the cash two days after the old man was cremated.

For four years now I’ve revivified those sweetest, joyful days, hours, and minutes with Jason. We were more than lovers. What we shared in three years and one semester can’t compare to anything anyone else has known. That’s my belief. There’s my religion, but damned if I’m telling Carlos about it!

Tonight Carlos and me drank our usual bottle of Côte du Rhone. Then he took his usual long, languorous bath, steaming up all the windows.

Suddenly he’s standing behind me, wrapped only in a towel, pulling me tight against him in an embrace. The ends of his long hair are wet and warm and beads of water slide down his arms onto my arms.

It’s too much. “I gotta get out of here. Take a walk, clear my mind.”

“Suit yourself,” he says. Already, he’s plucked up his silver Chinese balls from their embroidered little nests and manipulates them with his agile fingers.

“Aren’t you even gonna put on the bathrobe?”

“In due time, Malcolm. Weren’t you going out?”

The answer could hardly be more obvious as I’m bundled up in one of those big puffy snow jackets, watch cap, and gloves. I leave quietly, or so I hope. Wrapped around my neck is an old rough silk aviator’s scarf Jason gave me the week we became lovers. A few months after he died, I was riding on the bus when my nose started bleeding—and kept bleeding. These two ladies intervened. Trying to help me, they loosened the scarf, folded it up and tried to mop up the blood. After my scarf was saturated, they offered their sweaters. But I got off immediately—the next stop—holding the bloody scarf, now folded into a square with both hands and running as my nose kept bleeding. All these years later, the scarf, dyed a brownish red, signifies so much to me that I never wear it. I only take it out and hold it. But Carlos has me beside myself. Perhaps I unwound the scarf and wrapped it around my neck as protection. The demon baker teases me until I’m ready to jump off a building.

That’s how Jason died.
We had gone downtown, pursuing our ritual game of rooftop hunting, swaggering past hotel registration desks or talking our way past office-building night watchmen. We tried stairwells and fire doors until one opened onto the roof. One always did. That night it was the Hyatt Regency.

And, that night, same as a hundred nights shimmered with a surreal glow. Jason and I reveled in the sparkling lights and spun in each other’s arms. But, I remember a terrible surge to my happiness. So that after we took our position in the center of the roof, a dizzying and scary new height disoriented me. I recall suffering a sickening intimation. But we were kids, basically. Spinning together, our four hands locked, we soaked up the night sky and counted, one, two, three, before we let go. Me spinning and falling back in one direction, Jason the other. Same as always. Except this time, Jason spun too far!

From that point four years ago up until right now, everything surrounding me occurs too fast. Life happens in a way that’s too fragmentary to understand: A pop and flash and the unspoken refrain:

Hey, man, why didn’t you come with me?

(Click here to read the next episode...And if you enjoyed this excerpt, please visit Amazon.com, where Diary of a Heretic, the novel, has been selected as a Semi-Finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. If you download the free excerpt and write a mini-review, it will help me get to the Finalist stage.)

Keep Calm

Emma’s friends with everyone at Mia’s except Trevor. Pascal and his wife Julietta have taught her to clean and grill fresh fish and make soups and stews. She plays Scrabble with Bo and shares secrets, intimate ones—that’s my guess—with the regular yoga teachers.

[Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]

At first I worried she might get into meditation and non-attachment. Mia’s like that, aloof. But they call Emma a sensation junkie. And for now, Mia says, her sensation fixation, which includes her wild emotions, is okay. 

Well, thank you, Mia, I want to say. Thank you for approving Emma’s sensations. But no, Emma’s happy and busy. And no one expects me to get involved. I’m welcome to hang around or not. Mostly not. Their tantric little community bores me fast. 

Too bad, though, that Emma’s not interested in the music studio, where I try almost every afternoon to compose songs—almost every day. Half the time, I don’t bother, because nothing’s humming in my head.

I met Emma in Chicago, singing in my friend Charlie’s band. She’s a great mimic and moves her voice really well. But she’s impatient. Before a melody and a few beats can start a vibe, she gives up. We try it together, looking for a groove, and she’s gets real angry right away. “If ya got it, ya got it. If ya don’t, ya don’t. And I fuckin’ don’t.” She thinks she’s a no-talent and when I say, “You’re wrong,” she says, I’m an idiot. She’s got just enough music in her to know it’s not enough. “Leave me alone, Scott. The ‘don’t give up thing’ depresses me.”

So when Nando asks to see the land I’ve given him as a bonus, how far it extends, because he wants to build a house for him and Kira and the baby, who’s due in six weeks, not two—the doula miscalculated—I offer to help. His land extends up from the beach to a small cliff of chalky rock. At the top an overgrown field recedes a quarter mile before giving way to the jungle.

“We’ll clear that area and build you a bungalow that looks out on the ocean. Kinda like mine but one story.”

He’s nodding and smiling and punching my arm. “My brother and I, we can do that in a few months. And make a low fence, front yard, backyard, so the boy can’t run off.”

“You know it’s a boy?”

“No. Just healthy, right, Scottie? Okay, if I start next week? My brother Hugo has the material.”

“Start tomorrow.”

He calls Hugo and ten minutes later, the three of us are walking the ground, measuring this and that. Planning the lay-out. Foundation goes here. Garden here. Nando wants natural steps to the beach, meaning we’ll cut into the rock. He’s done that before. The rock’s soft. So we agree to start clearing the field early tomorrow morning. You gotta work before the sun gets too hot. Hugo says, “Pura Vida,” and climbs into his sun-bleached, pastel green truck. Nando starts toward his trailer and I’m going the other direction to pick up Emma from her infernal yoga training.

“Five then, Nando? Meet here or at your place?”

He’s already started on the jungle path, but trudges back to the drier, grassier area where his new house will be. He’s shirking and apologetic from a hundred feet away. Taps my shoulder and kind of hugs me, saying, “You shouldn’t do the groundwork, Scottie. Leave it to me and Hugo and, I don’t know, maybe Trevor.”

(Trevor? Yeah, right.) “Why not me, Nando? We built my place.”

“Only after Hugo and me had cleared the ground. You were away, surfing, Scottie.”

“It’s just digging and hoeing, right? How hard is that?”

“It’s not hard. But what if there’s snakes?”

“Boots. Big gloves. I’ll be fine.”

(Click here to read the next episode.)

Players

Possessing another person’s inner life is impossible, Emma says. Whatever she means by “inner life,” (I mean, whether it’s the same thing I mean), I’m sure she’s right.

[Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]

“If you admit that much, Scott, then think about why you chase women. Like, hunting down prey.”

“I don’t know.” Really stretching, like I’m not the only guy out there doing this, I say, “Hey, even Cupid used a bow and arrow.”

“Cupid, oh good one, Scott. Don’t take this the wrong way. I’m not unromantic. The opposite. But you’ve got to think of me as a person and not another score.”

We’re walking on the beach at sunset, which is a romantic cliché. But still beautiful. More than beautiful—awe inspiring. Look at the world, look at the possibilities in your life—she means my overprivileged life specifically. “And you plan to spend it going after me or some other woman, and then another and another?”

“Who says?”

“Everyone says it’s your goal.”

“Everyone at the yoga farm, you mean. And what about those guys, Emma? Aren’t their games surfing, getting high, and hitting on some girl visiting for a two-week retreat?”

“I never talk to those guys, Scott. But Mia says she’s known you over ten years, and you’re the same way.”

“Used to be. Mia’s talking about me when I was twenty-three.”

“My age. What if I liked hunting, Scott? What would you think of me?”

“Let’s stop talking.” Truth is I can’t imagine Emma like that. Except now I am imagining her like that. And, this would make her mad. It turns me on.

(Click here to read the next episode.)

Religion Without Rules

Maggie Townsend, across the table, chin on hands, asked me pertinent, half-adoring questions about "my forum." She tossed her blonde curls and said she could feel it in the air: something fantastic was about to happen.

[Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.] 

Carlos, next to me, caressed the inside of my forearm. It took everything I had, life-or-death restraint, to hold myself immobile.

“Don’t you hear it all the time?”  Maggie asked. “That hum rising to a buzz?” She personally was ready to dedicate herself to freeing legions of thwarted souls.

“What?” Determined to ignore Carlos, whose intricate, excruciating touch kept burning my arm, I asked Maggie how she and Carlos knew each other. What was their connection?

Lavishing even more attention on me, Maggie said, “From tai chi.” They had taken a class together at the Y and had considered each other best friends” ever since.

Best friends?  I couldn’t tell whether this was a romantic euphemism or a simple, plain truth. But nothing’s simple. Maggie Townsend talked too much. She wiggled in her seat and ran nervous fingers through her bleached hair. Her avidness was embarrassing in a way that made me like her. And, by now I was positive:  No matter what she and Carlos shared ideologically, sexually they were impossible.  Carlos was the archetypal secular gay monk. While poor, needy Maggie Townsend was obviously, tortuously “straight.”

I liked her, too, because she agreed with me about the first meeting. “False euphoria can be dangerous,” she told Carlos.  “It was insulting how you set Malcolm up.”

Fresh coffee and big squares of my carrot cake appeared before us. Stephanie served us so unobtrusively, you’d think she had invisible powers. Pooling over, down and around each perfect square of cake was a luscious pineapple-cream cheese sauce only Carlos could have concocted. 

“Okay,” he said. “So maybe the last meeting didn’t reach total rapture. Still, it was—it was perfect.” Carlos was running his knuckles lightly, swiftly along my leg, “If you got carried away, Malcolm, it’s because the meeting took on a life of its own.  And isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be?  No one person running it, no one dictating how things should go?

“No rules,” Carlos said, “and ritual will develop spontaneously.”

“Where are you getting this, Carlos?”

Stephanie, who was serving me more coffee and cake, said, “It’s not so hard to figure out. Religion without rules. Everybody has their say.”

“Who’s talking about religion?”  my voice rose.

“No one,” Carlos said.  “No one is talking about it explicitly.  But. . .”

“But what?”

“The New C. of C,” Carlos said, “may not have anything to do with religion, per se, but it is life-affirming, a forum for the whys and wherefores of life and death.”

“Really! And, how the fuck do you know?”

“Simple, Malcolm, I know whereof I speak.”

He was caressing my shoulder, one satiny brown hand squeezing the back of my neck.  I dragged my finger through the leftover sauce, and was raising it to my mouth, when he swooped in and sucked it off.  Sly with mischief, Carlos swirled his fingertips over his plate.  He wagged five silken pineapple-cream cheese caps in front of my face.  “No thanks.”  I averted my eyes.  He smacked his lips.  “Oo-yum!”  But when I looked again, his sauce-covered fingers were still there in front of my face, waiting to be licked.

(Click here to read the next episode...And if you enjoyed this excerpt, please visit Amazon.com, where Diary of a Heretic, the novel, has been selected as a Semi-Finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. If you download the free excerpt and write a mini-review, it will help me get to the Finalist stage.)

The Ultimate Believer

Ninety-nine percent of the time I’m sure they’re right:  You don’t give up after one try.  But when I close my eyes there’s a nameless but familiar face there, winking and grinning at how stupid I am. Carlos is back at work—and thank God (no questions asked, no answers given)—back staying with me.

[Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.] 

The next meeting is scheduled for the fourteenth, at eight o’clock, and already he’s talking about branching out, buying a few more bakeries to showcase his fabulous breads.  Before long, what he really wants, is for us to pool our resources and buy a loft or warehouse where we can all live, work and pray together—all meaning him and me and, incredibly, Stephanie (!) and Maggie Townsend (!)

But what do I care?  As long as he’s back sleeping on my couch, back performing those spellbinding hand exercises.  He bathes, combs out his hair, and puts on my robe.  He circles the floor, rotating the Chinese iron balls in his incredibly beautiful hands.  And as I obviously love watching this (twice I’ve caught myself with my mouth agape), he’s extended the routine to an hour, adding a CD of exquisitely gentle flute music.

Tonight when I said his plan for reviving the New C. of C. carried whiffs of conspiracy, he wrapped his arms around me from behind. I was standing at the counter, opening another bottle of Côtes du Rhone. Carlos had been taking his bath; it was easier for me to mention “conspiracy” when he was in another room.  But suddenly, there he was, standing behind me, wrapped in a towel.  The ends of his hair were wet and warm beads of water were sliding down his arms, on to my arms.  His almost regrown mustache brushed my face. “That mentality, Malcolm, is what makes you so perfect.”

I did not even try not to tremble.  Carlos is old and there are places where his skin is wrinkled but he’s lean and brown, and thick greenish veins swell over his sinewy muscles so that you can see, (and really but feel) them pulse.  For a second I thought he was going to throw me to the floor—and then he was at the other end of the room, clothed in my robe.

Crossing his brave-looking, high-arched feet, he leaned against the doorjamb and said, “That lunatic fringe mind-frame is what makes you so perfect as a spiritual leader.”

After managing a long, steadying sip of wine, I asked, “How so?”

“Because it shows such extraordinary ability to look past everyday logic.”  He shook his head and laughed. “Conspiracy nuts are the ultimate believers. Think about it, Malcolm. What is faith but the ability to see connections that are not completely there?”

(Click here to read the next episode...And if you enjoyed this excerpt, please visit Amazon.com, where Diary of a Heretic, the novel, has been selected as a Semi-Finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. If you write a mini-review, it will help me get to the Finalist stage.)

Bona Fide Saint

Well, they did it.  They convinced me to give it another try.  Carlos and Stephanie and Maggie Townsend spent half the night coercing me into giving the New College of Complexes another chance.  We’re planning one more—and I’ve sworn should it fail, last—meeting in two weeks.

[Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]

Why, I asked again, if they thought the idea was so “crucial” as Carlos kept saying, did I need to be involved? Why didn’t they start a theology group without me?

Because,” Maggie said, “to succeed, the group needs a holy leader.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because otherwise it’ll devolve into a coffee klatch with pretensions.”

“So you be the one.”

Tossing her head, Maggie mock-checked everyone’s face to see if she dared speak.  “Hard to believe in this day and age,” she said, “but some Americans still have kind of problem with women’s spiritual superiority.”

“A problem,” Stephanie feigned astonishment, “with divinely inspired female leadership?  You’ve got to be kidding.” 

“Okay, okay.” I waved that issue away. “Then why not you, Carlos?  You’re always saying you know how these things work.”

“Exactly. And they don’t work with someone like me at the top. Whereas you, Malcolm, if you’d only apply yourself—could qualify as a bona fide saint.”

“Oh yeah? Just how vain, and how stupid, do you think I am?”

“I’ve watched you for more than a decade, Malcolm;  I know what I’m talking about. You’re a true innocent. You’re wildly non-materialistic and you go into these spells of communing with the universe, where you’re really, I mean really, out there.”

“Oh yeah?”  Despite myself, I leaned back, grotesquely flattered.

(Click here to read the next episode...And if you enjoyed this excerpt, please visit Amazon.com, where Diary of a Heretic, the novel, has been selected as a Semi-Finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. If you write a mini-review, it will help me get to the Finalist stage.)

Inversion Practice

Headstand, handstand, shoulder stand. Mia teaches three classes a week and practices for an hour every day. She looks great, shape-wise. She’s in great shape. But the tropical sun has seriously spotted and wrinkled her skin. I see Mia every year so why her face suddenly looks so terribly old to me, I’m not sure. Between last year and this, Mia’s appearance slipped from one era into the next. It really disturbs me, but I hide it well enough. Except whatever I hide, Emma sees right away. She says I act awkward around Mia, like I’m not sure where to look.

[Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]

And she knows why. The juxtaposition of Mia’s young body and old, old face is obvious.

“It makes me sad.”

“But you just noticed? All of the sudden?” Emma asked.

“Guess so.”

Emma grew up afraid of the sun. She doesn’t just wear hats and sunscreen. She stays undercover during the day. Dawn and dusk are the best time for surfing, but Emma wears this weightless synthetic suit, including gloves to block out the rays. She slathers zinc oxide on her face and feet. Sure, she’s only twenty-three, but fair as she is? Emma’s never gotten sunburned, never even slightly tan.

Our second week here Emma bartered with Mia, offering to change and launder sheets and whatever needs doing in exchange for the yoga teachers’ training. Mia said a better exchange would be if Emma stayed for three months and taught classes. Good thing, too, since I gave Mia the money to start this place, and when necessary, give her money to maintain it. Technically, I own half of it.

I’m sitting on a picnic table in the shade, waiting for Emma to finish an anatomy lesson. Who knows how long I was staring blankly at the ocean, not reading my book, Russell Banks’ Cloudsplitter.

Mia taps my shoulder. “I’ve never seen you so moody, Scott.”

“I don’t know what’s going on. I can’t get over Emma, for one thing.”

“So don’t get over her,” Mia says. “Enough ‘love ’em and leave ’em.’ ”

“No.” She’s looking at me, waiting for an explanation. “I mean, no, that’s not it. I’m nowhere near that yet. I can’t even begin to capture her.”

“That, too,” Mia says. “Give up the capture thing. Think about it. I mean, what a bad habit.”

 I nod. Yeah, I know.

“Take up yoga,” Mia says. “Turn yourself upside down.”

All the guys who hang around here doing yoga, surfing, buying and selling marijuana raise my hackles. They’re bums. And I come close enough to spending my life in the same shiftless, selfish ways they do without taking yoga classes with them, following their yoga-breath, matching them move for move.

Mia says, “Did Emma tell you about her and Trevor?”

No answer necessary. The idea makes me sick, I mean, actually sick.

 “So that’s part of it. She doesn’t tell you everything. No worries, though, Scott. Even if you should give up jealousy, too. Trevor rubbed Emma the wrong way.”

 Apparently, Trevor offered Emma a free Thai message, when her shoulders and neck ached after three hours of surfing. How was Emma to know Trevor doesn’t do anything for free? (Mia didn’t say that, but it’s true.)

 Trevor’s given me a Thai message. Everyone here tries it once. Nando, Kira, and I are probably the only ones who aren’t regulars. Even Mia’s boyfriend Bo pays the guy for an hour a week. He jumps all over you, pulling and pushing every muscle in your body. He chants and hums as he pummels you past pain into ecstasy. That’s the idea.

Mia says Emma called him “a sleazy asshole” loud enough for everyone in the pavilion to hear. If a guy’s doing “body work” like that he should wear more than loose shorts. Mia laughs.

“The guy’s never heard of compression shorts?”  That was Emma’s comment.

And Trevor’s? “I told her to keep her eyes closed.”

(Click here to read the next episode.)

What You Say

Click here to read the first episode of this story, or here to read the one previous.

What you say and don’t say can either make all the difference or no difference.

That makes sense. I guess. But Emma knows perfectly well that after two weeks in Costa Rica I’m still out of my mind over her.

“Don’t worry, Scott.” She’s lying beside me. “I’ll wait till you get your mind back.” She giggles, but I don’t. She’s gonna wait and see.

I say, “I’ve fallen in love with you, Emma.” And, “I’m dying for you, baby.”

That’s old Motown, she says. “Why can’t you say, ‘I love you.’? Try it, Scott. I. Love. You.”

Naturally, I’ve heard this before. But if we’re playing that game, it’s better if I don’t roll over the first time she says so.

“What’s the difference? You know how I feel,” And, fitting my fingers between hers, I hold her hand on my chest.

“Of course, I do. And you know how I feel.”

“Uh-hum.” The thing is, I don’t. The sex is mind-blowing. We’re having a great time. Nando asked why I never followed through on that dinner invitation to him and Kira.

“We’re not there yet,” I told him.

“You’re not? Incredible. You must be getting really impatient.”

“Nando, what do I look like? It’s not that. It’s, well, impatient isn’t even the right word.”

“You’re in trouble, Scottie.”

“No,” I told him. “No, I’m not. Not yet.”

So now, I’m holding Emma and whispering to her. “Don’t I show you how I feel? Isn’t showing better than telling?”

“It can be.”

“Come on. Isn’t what we’re doing enough for you, Emma?”

“Of course,” she says. “It’s more than enough.”

So that’s good. What’s wrong with me—that’s the thing. I’m propped up above her, my hands pressing down on either side of her upturned face. I lean down, my mouth near her ear. “I love you.”

And she hoots, pushing me away. “You faker, Scott.” She’s laughing and kicking her feet. “Acting like it’s this big deal to say, ‘I love you.’ When it’s easy for you. You don’t worry about it. You’ve said it a million times. But with me you were saving it. So that, ‘I love you,’ would be this great big special moment.”

She’s batting me with a pillow and I’m batting her back. She’s right. Sort of. I lift her up, cradling her in the air. “I wasn’t saving it. Not deliberately.”

We’re lying down now, or I am. She’s straddling me. “We’ve been together a month, Scott, two weeks in Chicago, two weeks here. And you never said, ‘I love you.’ But—you weren’t saving it?”

“I wasn’t saving it until you started prodding me. I love you.” I roll away, watching her. We should eat something and go to the beach before it gets dark. I’m teaching her how to surf. “I love you.”

“Don’t you want to know if I love you, too?”

I’m nodding. Yep, I sure do wanna know if Emma loves me. 

“Well, of course,” she says. “I mean, of course.”

(Click here to read the next episode.)