State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [48]
Barbara shrugged. “Sometimes we just move to the guest room. It depends on whether or not she needs us for anything. If we have some time we go to Suriname or French Guiana so Jackie can surf.”
“I need to get to Lima,” he said, glad to have the topic turn in his direction if only for a sentence. “The waves are exploding there, but getting flights from Manaus to Lima is an unbelievable bitch. It would take me about as much time to walk there.”
Marina wandered over to the balcony. She couldn’t take her eyes off the river; that thick brown soup was a mirror in the darkness. “I wouldn’t have expected there would be something like this in Manaus,” she said. She wouldn’t have expected the Meursault either, and she took another sip. She couldn’t help but wonder what all of this was costing. It couldn’t really matter to Vogel. The expense of one apartment in the Amazon for a researcher who didn’t use it was nothing when put against the potential profits of fertility.
“There was a lot of money here once, you have to remember that,” Barbara said. “It used to be more expensive to live in Manaus than in Paris.”
“They came, they built, they left,” Jackie said, dropping himself down on the sofa and stretching his bare feet out on the bench in front of him. “When there wasn’t any money to be made in boiling the rubber out of the jungle anymore that was it, instant history. The people around here were very glad to see those people go.”
“I think there’s a lot about this city that’s still very elegant. This building is as good as anything you’d find in a real city,” Barbara said. “And Nixon takes care of everything at the front desk like a professional. I tell him all the time he could get a job in Sydney.”
“Nixon?” Marina said.
“Seriously,” Jackie said, his eyes lightly pinked.
“Well, he isn’t much for delivering the mail,” Marina said, and then she thought again. “Unless you did get the notes I sent you.”
Barbara stood a little straighter. In her heels she was taller than Marina. “We didn’t. I told you that.”
Marina shrugged. “So much for Nixon.”
“All the mail goes into a box for Annick.” She walked away and came back from another room holding a neat looking steel crate with handles on either side, the kind of thing an idle girl would order from a design catalogue to be delivered to Brazil when putting mail into a cardboard box seemed too messy. “Look,” she said. “I don’t even check it. Annick says straight in the box and so there it goes. I keep it in her office.” She put the crate down on the bench near her husband. There was a pale V marked across the tops of his brown feet where his flip-flops had interfered with his tan. “I used to answer the letters, to tell people they couldn’t come to see her, but in the end Annick decided that any interaction was a form of encouragement so she told me to stop.”
“These people take no as encouragement,” Jackie said.
Marina came and sat beside the box, putting her glass of wine down on the floor. She did not ask. She slipped her fingers into the back and moved the letters forward. She didn’t have to go very far before she found her own handwriting on the hotel’s white envelopes. “Bovender,” she said, dropping the first one on the bench and then going back to find the other two. “Bovender, Bovender.”
Jackie leaned forward and plucked the paper from the envelope. “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Bovender,” he began.
“Please!” Barbara said, and covered her ears with her hands to make her point. “It makes me feel like a total idiot. From now on I’ll look at the mail, I promise.”
Marina looked up at her. “Don’t you pay the bills?”
Jackie shook his head. “They all go straight