GORGEOUS MISTAKE

He took the picture and then just happened to glance down at her feet, in the sand, at the base of the tree where he had her pose for the photograph.


There was something wrong there but he couldn't place it--her toes--it was like a voice whispering.  That was how remote the thought and the feeling was.  In the distance the sound of children laughing in the surf.  The sun on the Pacific horizon dropped so dramatically it was as if the very noise of it was mixed in there with the small sugary voices, the kid giggles.


You OK? she asked him.  He looked now in her eyes and then at the scar at the center of her forehead, chicken pox, the same way he had a thousand times before.  In one motion he turned the camera off (the lens retracted reminding him of the turtles they had seen that afternoon lounging on logs in the pond by the hotel) and slid it (the camera) into his pocket.  He placed his hand at the center of her arm and the niggling suspicion in his mind was temporarily warded away to some back bench where it would wait certainly, and for the time being wait silently.


They have been married for 24 years and he had just turned 50 and here they were on Maui to celebrate.  He turned her by the elbow and stepped in behind her.  The sun had warmed the skin of her back and it heated his chest even as the cold wet of her bikini bottem chilled his crotch.  With one hand on her stomach, he slid the other arm across her chest and slid his left hand under her right shoulder strap, resting it broadly at the top of her chest, one or two finger tips feeling the slight stubble of her right arm pit.  She rested her head, nestling into him.


Everything was in its place.  This expensive trip was only a financial blip in their bank account six time zones to the east of this beach.  Fifty and comfortable, almost wealthy, and recently promoted at work--a certain corporate confidence had been placed in him and trust flowed freely back and forth, from his employers and to friends and family.  His parents had begun that decline he knew would, over the years to come, turmoil him but at the same time also ultimately dull the forboding he felt about not achieving the dreams of his "better self," teaching him, at close range, to keep his head down maybe, splitting the difference, and not hope for more than warm sand every now and then, a good novel, and a satisfying 18 holes.


His wife's toes were not unattractive the way some older women's were and he never fancied himself the type even to think about feet.  He never noticed when some women in the office wore heels, say, or why that would matter to anyone especially his male co-workers and subordinates.  The sun was dipped now maybe 20% into the ocean, the air around it shimmered red and orange.  Birds flew by in groups like they were on their commute home for the day.  His son Josh floated face down on his surfboard in the shallow water searching the uncoming set.  Smoke from an outside pit floated by scenting the air in a way that made his stomach growl vaguely.  He never noticed her toes nails before.  They had seemed painted almost luridly, at first glance, in a color like the one surrounding the setting sun only brighter and more intense.


She surprised him with a yell off to the distance.  He had been lost in his thoughts and when she called to their daughter Chloe he had a bit of the feeling that you had when you just missed being in an accident, where your body instinctively anticipates trauma.  He felt an ache in his thighs and he could hear his heart beating--it was all about the blood, he thought.  Chloe had allowed the crack of her ass to show again and her mother, his wife, had been chasing her around all afternoon complaining about that little dimple of flesh flashing out to the world.


She stepped away from him to yell into the wind and he dropped again to the blanket they had pulled off the hotel's king-sized bed to bring down to the beach.  The hotel preferred you use the over-sized towels they provided at the entrance to the steps leading down to the sand but they wanted one large blanket the way they always had over the years and hundreds of trips first to Coney Island and then, after some time, all those years at the Jersey Shore.  He raked his stiff and sea-sticky hair feeling the sand graining his scalp.  Josh was paddling into the waves and they bobbed him and his reckless youth almost cinematically.  The sun was down now maybe 40-45% and the sea had begun to boil around it.  His wife was laughing and Chloe crossed her arms over her chest and stared down at her feet.  She gave Chloe a smack on the ass and turned back to him smiling.  Chloe sneered at her mother's back and stuck out her tongue.  He shut his eyes and concentrated meditatively on the wind blowing on his face, moving the whiskers of his beard and the hair on his chest.


When he opened them he was looking right at her left foot planted in front of him as she scanned the water for Josh.  He looked more closely and it was the nail of the smallest toe that really bugged him.  It was tiny, a sliver really, it was hardly even a nail but more like a deposit of hardened calcium in a stony crevice of the foot's poorer neighborhood.  And yet she painted it, or had it painted.  It was just the thinnest stripe of orange, so narrow in fact that the color didn't seem to match the other toes, as if there wasn't enough of the color in one place to help your eye form an impression of the shade in-full, the same way a swatch at the hardware store never really gave you a sufficient enough sense of the color you finally painted on the living room wall and so after it dried you stood with the swatch holding it a different angles, unshading lamps and squinting one eye and then the other and though the swatch seemed to blend in with the finished surface the swatch by itself still looked different from the wall.


Why paint it?  When had the toenail gotten so small, was it always like that?  He remembered, far away now off in the distant past, a weekend in her dormroom when he had kissed her feet, allowing himself a glance up past her spread thighs as she stared down at him over her breasts, gloriously naked, and uninhibedly so and he had quickly and impulsively popped her pinkie toe into his mouth sucking it and sweeping it with his tongue imagining somehow the roles reversed and it being her mouth instead, and his penis, a suggestion maybe, hopefully, to her as they began to wade into the deeper intimate waters of their physcial relationship.  He hadn't thought then to look at it or remark on anything about it, not the nail or even if it was painted.  He didn't really remember anything about it.  Now he stared at it almost 30 years later and looked up at her again.  


She stared out at the water.  Josh was turned toward the shore now looking back over his shoulder at the waves as they came at him and washed over him, unsure in his inexperience which one would be the best to ride.  He had all the equipment and expensive lessons all week, but he hadn't really gotten the hang of it yet.  The sun was almost fully down, just a thin semi-circle staring back at them.  Meat was almost certainly now on the luau's fire pit and something like tropical Hawaiian music was playing, or at least he thought that was what it might be.  He reached out and covered the foot with his hand.  She looked down at him and smiled, almost suggestively, as if she could read his mind and the fact of his hand on her foot also summoned for her the same momery.  She was so happy here he knew.  


I'm gonna get one more swim in he said and stood and ran toward the water as he always did when he went into the ocean.  Ever since he was a boy he approached the waves that same way--he made the committment to go and then ran deciding that there was no changing your mind, just the inexorable physical motion at the water.  As he ran now he felt the camera bouncing against his thigh but he didn't want to stop and he didn't want to go back.  He had drained himself of thought and he had stopped caring about anything other than just in this moment being under the sea.


The water was shallow for a few yards but then dropped off quickly at this part of the beach,  he knew.  A few strides first and then he lunged, diving at a wave, his body slicing under.  The water was just cool enough to chill him but warm enough still to take him in comfortably and he pulled at the tide trying to swim out as far as he could on the breath he had taken in before going under.  He came up briefly for air with his back to the beach and then resubmerged swimming out even farther before surfacing again and finally floating in water in which it was too deep to stand.  


The light now from the set sun was a generalized reflection on sky and water alike, the half-light of dusk still enough as it eased the whole beach across into night.  The hotel had at some point illuminated the patio torches and from across the water he could see the luau pit cast shadows of flame on a corner of the hotel garden.  


His wife and daughter huddled together on the towel.  Josh lay on his board on the sand in the shallows the waves tiding into him and then draining away.  A pair of girls to his right seemed to be approaching him though he lay there seemingly unaware.  He pulled the camera out of his pocket and out from under the water into the air.  Treading water he held the camera in front of his face and pressed the power button.


For a second the picture of his wife by the tree, the last picture he had taken, flashed across the screen.  It glowed slightly green, seemingly suffering from an infusion of water.  Then the screen went black flashing momentarily a jagged lightning blot signfying a dead battery.  The lens blurted out from the camera's front halfway and stopped dead impotently.  He let his arm drop back under the water and let the camera float away with whatever tide there was, in or out.


Chloe and her mother (his wife) seemed to be sparring at this distance.  He could imagine the discussion.  Easily.  Josh had stood and was carrying his board toward the family blanket.  He turned to look at the horizon and to where the sun had been and had set.  He himself sank under the water and he began to swim toward the other side of the world.