What Drowns in Paradise

The infinity pool at the Palm Springs resort stretched toward the desert horizon, a perfect blue tear in the landscape.

Margaret floated on her back, staring up at the swaying palm fronds that cast shifting shadows across her face. She was forty-five, exhausted, and painfully aware that her marriage had become a series of practiced silences interrupted by occasional explosions.

"Are you going to stay in there all day?" Richard's voice came from the cabana. He was on his third cocktail, his phone still glowing with emails he couldn't stop checking.

"The water feels honest," she said, not moving. "Unlike everything else here."

She thought about dinner the night before—the candlelit restaurant where he'd ordered spinach and ricotta ravioli, gotten a piece stuck in his front teeth, and laughed it off while making eyes at the waitress. Margaret had watched his performance: the charming older man, still relevant, still desired. She'd said nothing, just as she'd said nothing about the credit card charges for jewelry she'd never received, nothing about the late nights that never produced late-night calls.

She'd floated in this pool for three days, letting the California sun bake her skin while Richard attended his "emergency" conference calls. She'd read articles about women who reinvented themselves at forty, who left marriages that had become museums of their former selves.

"Margaret?"

She treaded water, facing him. The palm trees behind him swayed in the hot wind.

"What?"

"I've been thinking," he said. "Maybe we should sell the house. Get a place somewhere warm. Start over."

Start over. The words hit her like a physical blow. She thought of the years, the compromises, the way she'd folded herself into smaller and smaller spaces. She swam to the edge and pulled herself out, water dripping onto the concrete.

She walked toward him, leaving wet footprints that would evaporate within minutes in the desert heat.

"Richard," she said, standing over him. "I'm not starting over with you. I'm starting over without you."

She waited for his surprise, his anger. Instead, she saw something else in his eyes: relief. They'd both been drowning in this pool for years, and now, finally, one of them was reaching for the surface.