State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [44]
“That’s when she got rid of the phone,” Barbara said. “It happened years before we got here.”
Marina took the slice of pineapple off the edge of her glass, dipped it into her drink and ate it. “Is that really so intrusive? She does work for him after all. He is paying for everything, her research, her apartment, this dinner. Isn’t he entitled to know how things are going?”
Barbara corrected her. “He doesn’t pay for it. The company pays for it.”
“Yes, but the company is his job. He runs it. He hired her. He’s responsible.”
“Is the person who commissions van Gogh responsible for the painting?”
Marina wondered if she would have come up with a similar quip of logic when she was twenty-three or however old Mrs. Bovender actually was. She was quite sure she would have felt the same way. It was exactly Dr. Swenson’s brio she had been drawn to, the utter assuredness with which she moved through the world, getting things done and being indefatigably right. Marina had not met her like again, and she was glad of that, and she was sorry. “I suppose that van Gogh would be responsible for making good on his sale, and that if he didn’t show up with the painting after a vastly extended period of time it would be within the rights—”
Barbara put her cool hand on Marina’s wrist. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Mr. Fox is your boss, Dr. Eckman was your friend. I shouldn’t be running on about this.”
“I understand your point,” Marina said, making a conscious effort to get along.
“We’ll try to find a way to get word to Annick, and if we can’t we’ll just entertain you ourselves until she comes back.”
Marina took a long pull off her drink, even though there was a distinct voice in her head telling her not to. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Of course we do,” Barbara said, and sat back peacefully in her chair as if everything had been decided. “It’s what Annick would want.”
By ten o’clock the world was a furnace cracked open in a closed room, but just outside of Manaus people crowded the river’s bank on a Wednesday to lie across towels spread out in the sand. Children played in the shallows while adults swam wide circles around them. Their voices, the screaming and laughing while they splashed one another, sounded less like words and more like the call and answer of birds. Milton in his infinite wisdom had brought a large striped umbrella in the trunk of his car and stabbed it repeatedly into the sand until it was able to stand upright and provide a circle of shade. It was in that limited field that he and Marina sat on towels, their arms around their knees. Marina had gone to buy a swimsuit from Rodrigo that morning and the only possible option, which is to say the only one-piece, was cheap and bright and had a small skirt that made her look like an aging figure skater. She wore it under her clothes now, unable to imagine what had ever made her think she would go into the water. The Bovenders, who had no interest in the umbrella or its protection, were, without their clothes, unnerving. Jackie wore a pair of cutoff shorts that rode dangerously below the sharp protrusions of his hipbones, while Barbara’s bikini was carelessly tied together with a series of loose strings. It seemed that the desired effect of their swimwear was to make their fellow beach-goers feel a strong breeze could strip them bare. At one point Jackie yawned, tilted forward into the sand, and raised himself into a handstand. The muscles in his arms and back separated into distinct groups that any first year medical student would have been grateful to study: pectoralis major, pectoralis minor, deltoid, trapezius, intercostal. The people on neighboring towels pointed, calling for their children to watch. They whistled and clapped.
“Not sick anymore,” Milton said.
Jackie brought his feet to the ground and sat again. The vine that encircled his ankle was hung with tiny clusters of grapes. “I’m fine.”
“That’s why I married him,” Barbara said, half