Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth Read Free Book Online

Today you are in Syracuse. I want you to pack up that laptop, get on an airplane, and come back to New York. That’s going to be expensive. Same-day fare, few direct flights. I will pay for it. That is my gift to you, my condolence card for your breakup. Get to the airport, come home, come here. Tonight you will stay in a hotel. On us. On me. Dinner too. With me. Bring your laptop. We are here for you in your time of need. Are you hearing this, Myers?
    I am.
    Good, see you this afternoon.
    Okay, sir.
    Don’t call me sir. Call me by my name.
    Myers hung up. He sat in the protective circle of light formed by the hotel and by the present itself and these shone above him and around him but illuminated nothing. He called the front desk.
    I’ll need a taxi to the airport, he said.
    On Gray: Here is a fact Myers couldn’t know or even suspect. At the same moment Myers struck out down the hall for the elevator, suitcase rolling behind, Gray was elsewhere thinking, You know, that Myers fellow could be of some use just now. Gray was far away, stepping over a pockmarked Central American topography. He paused, considered the arrangement of gravel under his feet. Above, the sun soaped the clouds. He pulled some coins from his pocket, turned them over on his hand. Myers slid in and out of his mind like a bird in and out an open window. He went on.
    Gray had had few thoughts of Myers in his life. The first ones had been as a student. He’d observed Myers’s head from the back of the room and studied its odd contours—not outrageous, but irregular. No one knew why. In the dorms the guys discussed whether he’d been in an accident or if it was the result of some sort of careful genetic planning. They were beyond teasing and no one wanted to ask. Myers had no close friends. From some angles the head appeared normal. Such as straight on. If Myers looked in the mirror each day he wouldn’t see anything strange at all. The guys gradually realized he wasn’t aware of it. This was interesting and Gray pondered it in class, but it was only one of many drifting thoughts: girlfriend (gum-chewing), dormmates (loud), the qualities of light in the room (daylight here, fluorescent there), the square of a morning toast, a skyscraper he’d seen in a dream.
    Thus Gray engaged himself through geometry.
    He received a C in the class and for the next six years Gray had no thoughts of Myers. He finished one degree and began and finished another. He married the mintmouth girlfriend and settled down in Syracuse, though he’d never lived anyplace else. He shifted from the back of the room to the front, turned around, gathered papers instead of writing them, faced whichever direction he was pointed with the same dejection, went home and sat through her dejection, back and forth like that until nearly three years ago when he left, finally.
    Before they split for good there was a lot of talk about resorts—not as in sunshine and sea, but as in “last resort”—and Gray and his wife tried them all: time apart, time together, compromise, birthday presents.
    Those are normal, said Gray’s father on the phone, who was, after all, an informed man. You do those anyway.
    Therapy too.
    Normal.
    It was like talking to a telemarketer.
    Telemarketers are normal.
    Yeah, she had her script all right.
    She or the therapist?
    Both. It was like talking to two telemarketers.
    That’s normal.
    So the marriage was over and both sides were banged up about it, but even more they seemed to have a small child from the thing, a girl. It had not yet been decided how that portion would divide up, what days would be his, how often he would see her, whether he would get a holiday and which, and Gray felt worse about that piece of it being broken off and floated away. It was something to try not to think about. She was. His weanling, his springling, his sprout.
    Myers. In Syracuse. The hotel called him a cab and he made it to the airport. He went in, confronted the place, its