The Papaya Summer

The first time I saw Elena, she was standing at the edge of the hotel pool, peeling a papaya with surgical precision. She had this way of looking at everything sideways, like she knew something the rest of us were missing. I was in Cancún for a sales conference—something about regional baseball memorabilia distribution, which sounds ridiculous now, but it paid for the resort's infinity pool and open bar.

"You look like someone who's been swimming upstream his whole life," she said, not looking up from the fruit. Her husband was a pharmaceutical VP, she told me later. The kind of man who referred to himself in third person and called people "chief." He was currently three sheets to the wind at the swim-up bar.

We spent that week like people who knew they were making mistakes but made them anyway. Late nights in the jacuzzi, early mornings with coffee and stolen papayas from the buffet. She told me about her childhood in Miami, about her father who'd played triple-A baseball until an injury benched him permanently. I told her about my cat, Buster, who I'd left with my ex-wife, along with everything else that mattered.

"Why did you let her take him?" Elena asked, her fingers sticky with juice.

"Because I'm stubborn," I said. "Like a bull. I thought I was teaching her a lesson. Turns out, I was just teaching myself how to come home to an empty apartment."

The day before we left, her husband cornered me by the elevators. He didn't know—this wasn't that kind of story—but he could smell something on me. The way men can smell other men's longing. "You're a regional manager, right?" he asked, gripping my shoulder too hard. "I could use a man like you. Bull-headed. That's what it takes."

I watched them leave from the lobby. Elena didn't look back. Some stories are about swimming against the current until you drown. Others are about learning to float.

Back in my apartment, I Googled papayas for weeks. I still don't know if they're in season. Sometimes I think about calling her, but I don't. Some things are better left unfinished—a game called on account of darkness, a bite of fruit you never got to taste, a week that taught you everything you needed to know about being the kind of man who walks away.