Come Together, Fall Apart Read online

  But then, they were out. After checking on the car from their window at least fifteen times during the night, Harvey retrieved it and drove them away. They had come to chase birds, after all. One night in the city was for June, who had said before they left that she wanted it. She wanted to see something in Panama besides birds. And she had wanted the possibility of romance—staying in a hotel in a foreign country with her husband. But Harvey had drunk too much wine with dinner and fell asleep as soon as they returned to their room. There was still time, June reasoned. They were switching hotels but there would still be the romance of a foreign country.

  The air conditioner in the car blasted stale, humid air. June reknotted the scarf in her hair. She had applied lipstick this morning, something she never did. It was a shade of coral and she had purposely kissed Harvey on the cheek and then tried to be coy, saying, Oops, I left a mark, and smudging it clean with her thumb. Harvey had seemed annoyed, rubbed his skin with the heel of his palm, and then went to the checkout desk. As they pulled away from the city limits, June stared at razed red hills; the land in the rain turned to the color of rust. Palm trees hovered over them as they bumped along roads missing chunks of pavement.

  When they arrived in Gamboa it was still raining, long dashes of water impelled from the sky.

  “This is it,” Harvey announced, stopping the car on a gravel pass, the tires crunching as if they were chewing the ground beneath them.

  June craned her neck and looked up through the car window.

  They would be staying in what used to be a radar tower occupied by the U.S. Air Force but had been transformed into a hotel, the rooms flush with the soaring canopy of trees in the rain forest surrounding them.

  “What if there’s lightning?” she asked.

  “Then there’s lightning.” Harvey peered in the mirror and smoothed the hairs of his beard with his fingertips.

  “Do you really think it’s safe?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Harvey.”

  “Safe? No. But that’s the point. It’s a risk, it’s an adventure. That’s why we’re here.”

  He squeezed her arm.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Come on,” Harvey prodded, and before June knew it, he was out of the car.

  This was their first trip together outside of the United States, not including the time they went to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls during their honeymoon three years ago. When she was young, June had vacationed with her parents in places like Charleston, Napa Valley, and Annapolis. Over the past three years, camping had become June and Harvey’s primary lure—June bathing in glassy lakes and drying herself on warm rocks while Harvey hiked and chased birds. She used to ask him to join her, describing how they could paddle out through the water, their chins skimming the surface. He told her simply that he preferred the air to the water, but in time she learned that he said it only because he didn’t know how to swim, one of the few vulnerabilities he would admit.

  Bird-watching in Panama was something Harvey had learned about in an e-mail from American Airlines. The e-mail claimed that Panama was home to over nine hundred fifty species of birds. It said that Canopy Tower in Gamboa, near the canal, was the best place to see them. They bought new luggage and ordered passports and listened to a set of tapes that June had checked out from their local library with the aim of learning Spanish. Now, the only phrase she could remember was “Let’s go to the discotheque.” Vamos a la discoteca. She had been so excited about traveling, though. Excited about a getaway with Harvey. In the beginning, she had thought camping would be that: Harvey and she under crisp black skies dotted with stars, cuddling together in sleeping bags. But it was always more practical than that, less tender. This trip to Panama would be different, she was sure.

  The room was small and clean. It was shaped like a piece of pie with the tip cut off Two twin beds were pushed against the outer walls, following the angle inward until the bottom corners of their mattresses almost touched. A ceiling fan hung overhead and nearly the entire curved wall behind the heads of the beds was made of glass, so that from their perch in the tower the treetops came up to their feet, a luxurious green carpet that stretched for miles.

  “It’s like a tree house,” Harvey said, dropping his suitcase on one of the beds. He was giddy.

  The day was bright despite the rain. June nodded and sat on the opposite bed. Drops of water ran from her wet hair down her neck. Harvey had already located his binoculars. June had bought them for him two Christmases ago, but now she wished she hadn’t. She was surprised at how annoyed she suddenly felt. She watched him draw the lenses within a hairbreadth of the glass wall, and then slowly move his head up and then down.

  “Don’t get too close,” she said.

  “To what?”

  “The glass. I don’t want you to push through.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  She sighed and ran her palm over the stiff bed—spread. “This is a nice place,” she said. “I’m glad we came.” She was trying.

  Harvey lowered the binoculars and turned around. His sunglasses dangled around his neck from a yellow foam strap. “See? It will be fun.”

  “The room is nice.”

  “It has a great view.”

  “Did you ask for a room with a queen bed?”

  “I didn’t specify” He had turned from her again. “There are supposed to be hundreds of tanagers and flycatchers out here. If we’re lucky, we might even see a rufous-breasted ground-cuckoo.”

  The next day, Harvey went out in the rain with the guide, Raul Sanchez de Arenas. Harvey put on a bright orange poncho and stuffed tissues into his shorts pockets to wipe the binocular lenses when they got soaked, but when June suggested he ask Raul about getting some galoshes, he refused and insisted on wearing his loafers. June promised Harvey that she would go out with him tomorrow. The rain would have to let up by then, she said, even though, as she said it, she knew it probably wouldn’t.

  June was pleased to find a library in the lobby, or something that passed for a library in the room that passed for a lobby. She stood in front of the bookcases and ran her fingers lightly over the spines of the oversized volumes. They were mostly ecological guides. A few novels lined the bottom shelves, but they were all in Spanish so she replaced them one by one. Finally, June selected a book with color photographs of moths.

  She had the lobby to herself She stretched open a hammock strung between two poles, pulling its sides out like an accordion, and settled into it cautiously, afraid that it wouldn’t hold, afraid that it would pull the posts down and the entire tower with it. Eventually she relaxed and opened the book, resting it on her stomach.

  A few minutes later, she heard footsteps. She sat up as quickly as she could, the hammock swinging away beneath her and rolling her off. She clutched the book to her chest.

  A hotel employee smiled at her and nodded.

  She nodded back.

  He leaned sideways and peeked at something on the desk, fanning one paper aside to look at the one underneath. Then he walked toward her.

  “You read?” he asked, in English.

  “Yes.”

  “It is good?”

  June moved her arm from where she was still clutching the book to show him the cover.

  “Moths,” she said.

  He appeared only slightly younger than she, thin filaments of silver running through his dark hair. He wore khakis paired with a green polo shirt, the hotel’s logo embroidered on the chest. And he smelled like talcum powder, like something utterly dry in the midst of all this rain.

  “Polillas,” he said.

  He stared at her and she realized he was waiting for her to repeat it, that he was trying to teach her something.

  “Polillas,” she said.

  He smiled again. He didn’t show his teeth when he smiled, but his eyes crinkled at the corners.

  Then, “I see you at dinner,” he said, and walked past her.

  June turned to watch
him. Where was he going? Where was there to go? She sighed and returned the book to its spot on the shelf She wandered to the window to look out. She remembered telling Harvey yesterday not to push on the glass in their room. Out of nowhere, she had the urge to do it. She spread the fingers of her right hand like a web and touched her fingertips to the glass pane. She pushed gently. Then a little harder. Nothing happened. She flattened both palms against the window and leaned her whole weight on her hands, her thin body at an angle, her arms bent until her chest was brushing the glass. When finally she stood up straight again, she felt shaky, not herself, as if she had just walked a tightrope or dashed across a busy street.

  By the time Harvey returned, June was napping on her bed. Harvey woke her when he walked in and stood over her, drops of water sliding off the tips of his poncho and onto her elbow. She had fallen asleep with a butterscotch candy in her mouth and when she opened her eyes, she felt it, stuck to the inside of her cheek. She worked it loose with her tongue and sat up.

  “Hi,” Harvey said, grinning.

  The inside of her mouth felt thready, like a shag carpet.

  “How was it?” June asked. She felt happy to see him.

  Harvey began peeling clothes from his body.

  “It was incredible. If I started to tell you about all the birds we saw, I would be talking until tomorrow.” Harvey propped open his suitcase lid. He rummaged through dry clothes.

  June rubbed her eyes and noted, with vague despair, the sorts of things Harvey had packed: sneakers, boots, a Windbreaker, a multi-pocket vest, field guides, film canisters, binoculars, and extra lens caps. She had packed perfume and lipstick and a new nightgown. “Did you make notes?” she asked. “In your journal?”

  “Of course. Of course I did. But I think you had to be there. It was absolutely incredible.”

  Harvey was sitting on the edge of his bed now, shirtless, pulling off his sopping socks. He propped up one foot at a time on his knee. June stared at the bottoms of his feet. They were wrinkled like the rippled surface of a lake.

  “What have you been doing?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Anything good in those magazines?” He pointed to a short stack of cooking magazines June had brought with her, on the floor next to her bed. She was a chef by trade, though she had worked in a restaurant only briefly and, since then, had taught cooking classes at a community center in Appleton and at private parties. That’s how they had met: Harvey was attending a class under June’s tutelage. Typically when men enrolled in her class, they did so to impress a woman and Harvey was no exception. Because of his age—early fifties, she guessed—June had assumed he was there to learn to make something for his wife. He told her after the first class, though, that he’d been divorced for years—back in the sea, he’d said—though he’d been hooked recently by a French professor at the junior college where he, too, taught. When he said, “You see? It’s like that saying ‘Lots of fish in the sea.’ That’s what I was referring to,” June let out a snort of laughter and then hid her face. “Right,” she said, when she had composed herself But still, she found him attractive, and she was lonely, so when he showed up in her class three weeks later to announce that he’d been released by the French professor back into the sea and to ask if June would like to go out to dinner, she said yes.

  “I learned how to say ‘moth’ in Spanish,” she said.

  Harvey pulled off his wet boxers and sat naked on the bed.

  “What is it?”

  “Polilla.”

  “I think maybe I knew that.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “How do you know whether I did or not?”

  She sighed.

  Harvey shrugged. “Time for a shower. Dinner’s at eight tonight.”

  “I think maybe I knew that,” June said.

  “Funny girl!” Harvey shouted at the ceiling, and walked into the tiny bathroom at the tip of their pie-shaped room.

  When they got to the dining room and sat down, June felt herself looking for the hotel employee. There was something comforting about knowing someone else in this strange country, even if she hardly knew him at all.

  Among the maybe ten people at the table, he sat diagonal from her. The hotel was run like a bed-and-breakfast; everyone, even the staff, ate together. During dinner, while Harvey was preoccupied talking to a guest from Germany, the employee asked her name.

  “Shoon,” he said, after she told him.

  “June.”

  “Choon.”

  “June.”

  He nodded.

  June hoped she hadn’t embarrassed him, but he didn’t say anything else to her after that.

  Later, when everyone had finished, June waited for Harvey in the hallway leading from the dining room. She would have gone to the room herself, but she realized on the way there that only Harvey had a key. She was considering going back to ask him for it when the hotel employee passed her in the hallway. He stopped when he saw her.

  “You are okay?” he asked.

  June nodded. The hallway was a hazy amber color from the dim floor lamps. She could hear Harvey talking from where she stood.

  “It is your husband?” the employee asked, pointing down the hall.

  “Yes.”

  “He is lucky man.”

  June blushed.

  “Where you are from?”

  “Wisconsin.”

  He wrinkled his eyebrows. “You speak Spanish?”

  She shook her head.

  “Little?” He held two fingers close together and squinted, questioning, teasing.

  “Vamos a la discoteca,” June said. She shrugged her shoulders apologetically.

  The man laughed. “Si, vamos a la discoteca. We dance!” He grabbed her by the waist, holding one arm in the air and clasping his hand around hers. As they moved, June could feel the warmth from his soft stomach against hers. He hummed softly and pulled her around. She breathed in his powdery scent as their inner thighs rubbed over each other, as he turned them and hummed. And then he stopped, dropping her hands, laughing.

  “I dance with you anytime,” he said.

  June was beaming. She could feel the heat in her face.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Okay. Bueno.” He reached to her hand dangling at her side and squeezed it. “Shoon,” he said.

  She did not run into him the whole next day. She told Harvey she wasn’t feeling well—just a headache—and that he should again go bird-watching without her. But she wanted to look for the hotel employee. She just wanted to see him at least, even if they didn’t talk.

  She sat in the lobby for hours, but he didn’t appear once. Another couple, traveling from Australia, checked in, but someone else helped them with their bags.

  By dinner, she felt mopey. There was a new forceful-ness in her annoyance when Harvey returned sopping wet, raving about birds. He was so busy bopping around, jotting notes in his journal and making sketches, walking away from the page and squinting down to check their accuracy, as if he were a real artist, that he didn’t even ask how she was feeling. June sat on the bed flooded with irritation, not quite sure where so much of it had come from all at once. She remembered screaming the other night that she wanted to leave. At the time, she had meant Panama. Now if she were to say it, she thought she would mean him. Just like that.

  Later, at dinner, the hotel employee was again diagonal from her at the table. He said, “Shoon,” cordially, nodding at her. Harvey laughed at him, and June eyed Harvey angrily.

  Harvey kept his arm around her until the food came, though he wasn’t looking at her. He was again talking with the German next to him. She was an armrest, sitting silently at a table. She glanced now and then at the hotel employee, but he gave away nothing. Finally, between spoonfuls of rice pudding at dessert, she asked him, “What’s your name?”

  “Diego,” he answered. And then he stared at her, it seemed, for a whole minute, even after she had gone back to eating.

&nbs
p; It would have been easier, weeks later when she was back at home, if she had been able to convince herself that she was up in the middle of the night trying to find ice and she had run into him. Or that she and Harvey had gotten into a terrible fight and she had walked out of their room in a fury, slamming the door behind her, forgetting she didn’t have a key. But the truth was that she went willingly, eagerly. That night after Harvey was asleep in his bed, June re-dressed and padded down the dark hallway. She knocked on Diego’s door and woke him. She was praying he wouldn’t ask how she had found him, because she didn’t want to admit that she had followed him after dinner that night to a different part of the hotel, where a few of the employees stayed during the week.

  When he opened the door, he was wearing athletic shorts and a white undershirt. He said, “You are lost?”

  It was such a simple question.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I take you back,” he said. He started to close the door behind him and step out into the hall.

  June threw her hands on his chest and said, “No.”

  He appeared startled.

  “There is problem?” he asked. “With your room? I get the manager.”

  She felt frustrated. She wanted him to understand her, why she had come. This was the sort of thing she would never do and now that she was doing it, she wanted it to go perfectly, to go better than this.

  “Can I come in?” she asked finally.

  “Yes. Please,” he said, and opened the door for her.

  The room was decidedly small but very neat. He patted the bed and invited her to sit.

  He stood in front of her, his back against the wall. Neither of them said anything. Enormous, bloated minutes passed and then Diego stepped toward her and took her hands in his. She was crying. She felt so foolish. He wiped her cheek with his thumb.