The Papaya Promise

Margot stood at the hotel buffet, contemplating the papaya. It sat there in its stainless steel vessel, glistening with an unnatural sheen, surrounded by pineapple wedges that looked like they'd been cut by someone who hated fruit. She was forty-seven, senior vice president of something that used to mean something, and she was supposed to be swimming laps in the hotel pool right now. Team-building exercise. That's what they called it.

The corporate retreat had been David's idea. David, with his perfect teeth and his insistence that everyone call him Dave, had organized three days of mandatory fun in Miami. Margot had skipped the morning session—something about trust falls and vulnerability circles—to stand here instead, staring at tropical fruit like it might offer her an escape route.

"You going to eat that, or just interrogate it?"

She turned to find a man standing behind her, perhaps fifty, with salt-and-pepper hair and eyes that suggested he'd seen enough corporate bullshit to last three lifetimes. He held a plate with a single croissant.

"It's a papaya," she said. "I'm trying to remember if I like them."

"They taste like regret," he said. "Sweet, but with this weird aftertaste you can't quite place. Like you should have ordered the waffles instead."

Margot laughed. It surprised her. She couldn't remember the last time she'd genuinely laughed at work. "I'm Margot."

"Arthur. I'm in accounting. Which means I spend my days explaining why we can't expense things people definitely should have expensed."

They ended up sitting by the pool, watching their colleagues splash through what was supposed to be a water polo tournament but mostly looked like elegant drowning. David was there, shirt off, shouting something about synergy, while various VPs flailed around him.

"I had a dog once," Arthur said suddenly, staring at the water. "A golden retriever named Max. Best thing that ever happened to me. Died while I was at a quarterly review meeting. I didn't even know until two days later."

"I'm sorry."

"Yeah. Well. That's corporate life, right? You trade things that matter for things that don't." He gestured toward the pool. "Look at them. Swimming around in circles, pretending this isn't just preparation for the next round of layoffs."

Margot thought about her apartment, empty except for plants she kept forgetting to water. She thought about her ex-husband's last text message, sent three years ago: "You love your work more than you ever loved me." She thought about the papaya she'd never tasted.

"I was supposed to be swimming," she said. "Trust falls. Team building."

"Fuck it," Arthur said. "Let's get papayas. Let's eat them and really taste them. Let's see if they actually taste like regret or if that's just something we tell ourselves."

So they did. They sat by the pool while their colleagues swam and shouted about synergy, eating papaya with plastic forks, letting the juice drip down their chins, discovering that it tasted nothing like regret at all. It tasted like something she'd been avoiding for twenty years.

"You know," Arthur said, "I think this is what they're afraid of. Us sitting here. Actually talking."

Margot looked at the papaya on her fork, then at him. "What do we do tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow?" He smiled, and she realized it had been a long time since anyone had looked at her like she was a person, not a position. "Tomorrow, we go swimming."