The Papaya Incident

Clara stood at the edge of the infinity pool, the Caribbean sunrise bleeding across the horizon like a bruised peach. She was fifty-three, and this corporate retreat was exactly the kind of bullshit she'd spent three decades enduring. The CEO, a man whose bullish approach to mergers had somehow translated into bullish confidence around women half his age, had been eyeing her since the welcome reception. She'd chosen the early morning swim to avoid him.

The water was glass-smooth, reflecting the palm trees and her own ghost-pale silhouette. Clara slipped in, the cool shock of it rising up her thighs, her waist, her breasts. Swimming had always been her therapy—a silent rebellion against the noise of expectation. She'd met Richard at a pool just like this one, twenty years ago. He'd been married then; she'd been naive enough to believe that love could exist outside the damage people carried.

"You're up early."

Clara's stroke faltered. She tread water, turning to find the CEO standing poolside, shirt unbuttoned to his navel, holding two halves of a papaya on a silver tray. "Thought you might want breakfast."

The papaya glistened in the dawn light, its orange flesh slick and obscene. Clara remembered Richard bringing her papaya in bed, the morning after his wife finally left him. The sweet musk of it, the way he'd fed it to her with his fingers, sticky and worshipful. That was before she discovered he'd been sleeping with his assistant throughout their separation. Before she learned that some men treated relationships like mergers—accumulating assets without ever really valuing them.

"I'm not hungry," Clara said, swimming toward the ladder.

"Clara, wait." He set the tray down on a teak table. "I've been wanting to talk to you about your division. About us."

She hauled herself out of the water, her swimsuit clinging, water streaming down her legs. The bullish confidence again, softened now with something like vulnerability. Or maybe that was just the morning light playing tricks.

"There is no 'us,'" she said, reaching for her robe. "And my division is fine."

"You're unhappy," he said. "I can see it. The way you swim—like you're trying to outpace something."

Clara paused, her hand on the terrycloth belt. Maybe he was right. Maybe she'd been swimming in circles for years, not outpacing anything but simply staying afloat. She looked at the papaya, at the man who thought desire could be brokered like a deal, at the endless water that had held her through divorce, through Richard's betrayal, through the slow accumulation of days.

"We're all trying to outpace something," she said finally, tightening the robe around her waist. "Some of us just do it underwater."

She walked back to her room, leaving him standing alone with the fruit and the sunrise. In the shower, she let the water run hot, washing away the salt and the memory of papaya-thick fingers, preparing for another day of moving forward.