The resort was one of the best on an island full of good ones. It had a private beach, walking trails for guests, and prices to match. My wife and I took one of the freestanding cottages and spent several days on the deck doing almost nothing: listening to the surf, the wind, the birds. So this is what people mean when they talk about restoring body and mind, I remember thinking.
On checkout morning we boarded the airport shuttle, a minibus, with time to spare. Nobody else got on. At a place like this, we figured, most guests probably drove or rented cars.
At the exact minute of departure, a middle-aged Japanese couple came scrambling up the steps, out of breath, and dropped into the back row. They were, I realized, the same two who’d been taking photos in front of the giant conch-shell sculpture at the hotel entrance, the one with the beach behind it. I got it. You don’t want to leave, so you squeeze every last frame out of the view, a record that you were really here.
The staff bowed gracefully and waved us off, smiling. I bowed deeply and waved back, big. I’m not someone who does this kind of thing, and it startled me a little. Our driver, an older man, announced without a microphone, in English, that the ride to the airport would take about an hour and a half by expressway, and that we should relax while he drove safely. Out the window, past the coast road, lay a blue tropical sea with whitecaps.
A few minutes later, a voice rose from the back. The woman.
“What the _hell_ is this?”
Her husband didn’t react. She raised her voice and kept going. She was speaking in Kansai dialect, the fast, percussive speech of Osaka and western Japan, where even a complaint tends to have a rhythm. I’ll translate as best I can.
“The conch isn’t in it. Why isn’t the conch in it? We had, like, no time before the bus, and we stopped for that picture anyway, so I could stand there with the ocean behind me and that giant conch thing. I told you. I said I wanted that picture, and I asked you to take it. So why is it just me and the ocean? Where’s the conch? Where did the conch go? Seriously, if the conch isn’t in it, what’s the point? What is going on?”
_Tirade_ is the word. It had gone well past complaint into pure anger. My wife and I stiffened, but in a minibus you hear everything. Up front, the driver’s hands seemed to tighten on the wheel, though a man who presumably spoke no Japanese couldn’t have followed a word of it. Maybe I imagined it. Her husband hadn’t said a thing, so I glanced back. He was staring into the middle distance. She was bent over her phone, still muttering. Then she cranked the volume back up.
“I’ve been asking you why. Answer me. Why. Is. The. Conch. Not. In. The. Picture. Could you please explain.” She had switched, abruptly, to the stiff, formal politeness of Japanese, which somehow made it worse. “Answer me.”
“Well, I was trying to get you with the ocean behind you, and...” the husband began, weakly. She cut him off.
“Oh, so now you’re making excuses? I don’t want to hear it. It just makes me madder. You can’t even take a decent photo, and you’ve got excuses. What kind of answer is that? Honestly. Don’t make excuses, it’s worse. This whole trip, ruined by you. Right at the end, everything ruined. And the conch? What are you going to do about the _conch_?”
She went on muttering for a long time. He said nothing. The air in the bus stayed taut. My wife and I each thought, _It’s just photo, why so much?_, and of course neither of us said it.
Eventually the driver, in the tone of a man tiptoeing, announced a ten-minute stop at a rest area ahead, with restrooms behind the snack shop.
The bus stopped, the door opened with a deflating hiss, and the air inside seemed to let go. My wife and I got out to clear our heads and headed for separate restrooms.
I was washing my hands when the man from the back row stepped up to the next sink. Our eyes met briefly in the mirror, two passengers from the same bus. Neither of us spoke. I assumed he must be relieved to be out of the line of fire, but saying so would have been rude, and so was admitting I’d heard every word, even if it had been impossible not to. Was I supposed to do something here? Offering condolences was out of the question. So was “rough day, huh.”
Then he smiled, bright and easy. “Beautiful day. The blue out there, sky and sea, it’s almost too much. I don’t want to go home.” I was thrown. “Oh. Yeah. It’s a great place,” I said, and walked out ahead of him and back to the bus.
After the rest stop, the two of them slept until we reached the airport. My wife and I didn’t speak either. I thanked the driver and we headed into the airport terminal. The couple must have been on a different flight. We never saw them again.
For a while afterward, whenever we thought of that trip, we’d bring up the shuttle ride. _Quite a couple. Well, quite a woman._ It was a funny travel story, and also a vague, useless aftertaste: she’d gone too far, and poor guy, and there was nothing to be done about either now.
But long after, the mood in that minibus kept nagging at me. What was their everyday relationship like? He’d been too calm for something that had blown up out of nowhere. If that was how they always traveled, together, I couldn’t picture it. (And if it was, I wouldn’t travel with either of them.)
Then it occurred to me that her tone, her logic, the way she went after him might have been her version of letting go on vacation, the way she enjoyed being out of her ordinary life. He knew exactly what he was signing up for and took it as part of the trip. Maybe, in their own way, they were having the time of their lives.
Or maybe it was more than that. Maybe, back home, he was the one who talked over people, who ran the room, with her and with everyone else. And on this trip alone, he’d taken the other seat and absorbed it quietly. If she’d been freed from her everyday self, maybe so had he. Seen that way, the bright, easy smile at the sink wasn’t an act. It was just another side of him. Of course, this is pure speculation on my part. But it’s the version that sits best with me.
I also remember that morning, waving back at the hotel staff, and how it wasn’t like me either. Maybe a trip changes people a little. When I told my wife this, she said, “Could be. Then again, so were you.” Dry as ever. Nobody really knows. Somewhere, that couple may be telling the story right now: _There was this pair up front who waved back at the staff way too politely, and never said a word._
I’ve decided that turning over a small memory with no answer, one that began with a screaming match over a conch, is one of the pleasures of travel. And I suppose we, too, have become a bit of someone else’s vacation scenery.
∎