I was standing on the white deck around the blue pool, shielding my eyes from the sun. It was blistering hot, with sweat trickling into my eyes. A few men and women whom I didn’t recognize were sunbathing in chaise lounges scattered around the deck in angles and murmuring words I couldn’t hear.
Her face was too close, and I knew she was staring at me through her black sunglasses, waiting for me to pay attention to her, but the soles of my bare feet were burning on the cement deck, and behind me, there was a very distracting set of two parallel walls that circled around us and the pool area like a corral. It was high enough to block the view of the ocean, but we could hear the surf crashing out on the open ocean beyond them.
“Is the tide coming in?” I asked her.
“Why does it matter?” she said. “God, pools are a lot of trouble. “They seem to work fine when you don’t use them, then they clog up and spew rotted leaves before cocktail parties … or intimate afternoons.”
She daubed her forehead with a tissue, adjusted her sunglasses and began to run through the numbers. “You should see what’s happening to electricity. The jacuzzi’s costing us $100 a month, the pool filter $150, the hot water heater another $200. Not to mention the price of labor.”
“Did I tell you about that? They’re charging $250 just to come out and give it a cleaning. What are they thinking? It can’t take more than two hours, maybe three even if it’s extra dirty. They probably pour all that money down their throat in drink.”
“It sounds very difficult,” I said, nodding and trying to look sympathetic.
The late afternoon sun was setting close to the peak of the house and blinding me with sharp hot rays, so I twisted away from her a bit and raised my hand enough to block it out. Behind me, over my shoulder and beyond the walls, the waves were crashing onto the beach, and I wondered if I could go for a dip.
“Here you are,” she said, to someone walking up to us. “Took you long enough.”
The man grinned at me, shook hands and nodded several times, as if he knew that I knew his secret. We excused ourselves from the pool lady and pretended not to notice that she was still talking as we walked away and headed toward the gates in the double walls and the ocean beyond. He was lithe like an athlete with almost an adolescent enthusiasm for whatever we were about to do. He reached over the top of the gate in the first wall, flipped the latch, swung it open and eagerly motioned for me to step through first. He followed and shut the gate. We stood for a moment between the two walls, standing and waiting, my feet sinking into the smooth, cool, wet sand.
“Let’s go for a dip in the ocean,” I said.
“Why not let the ocean come to us?” he said.
I wasn’t sure what he meant. He was looking down at the swath of sand underneath our feet and waited. So I waited. He didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. Then a surge of water washed underneath the one-foot gap between the bottom edge of the outer gate and the sand. It ran over our toes with an icy froth and disappeared below the inner gate. We heard the squeals of children as the ocean water poured over the white cement deck into the kids’ wading pool.
“It’s cold!” a boy shouted.
“It’s freezing!” a girl shrieked.
He looked up and grinned. “They designed it this way,” he said.
The wave receded and the water drained away over my feet and back out to the ocean. The sand started drying and turning a light tan. “Wait here,” he said and went out through the outer gate to the beach along the ocean. Another wave poured in, shooting up my legs to my knees before disappearing into the kids’ pool. More squeals and splashing.
This is how rich people live, I thought. The ocean comes to them. I waited. I waited for the ocean to come to me. Another wave came surging underneath the outer gate and this time, it carried with it a long, green- and brown-speckled snake as thick as a tree branch and glistening with slime. It had two huge eyes that watched me as it slid effortlessly across the sand between my legs and under the inner gate. You could hear the screams for miles.
<♦>