Forty
Chanie,
You turned forty yesterday. You told me what you wanted, the same way you have told me for years.
This year I listened.
You have asked me for this for years.
Three of those numbers you earned.
Eighteen years, five children, and a chair that people wait months for. Nobody handed you a single one of them.
The last one is mine to fix.
You have dreamed about this trip for years. You have sent me the photos, you have pointed at the villas, you have said someday. Every single time I said next year.
You asked me again this year. This time I had already booked it.
One trip. Out of the country.
Just the two of us.
Pack a bag.
It is warm there. It is four and a half hours from Newark. Pack less than you think you need, babe — you will not be dressed for most of it.
Two passports, side by side, finally.
Cancún.
Then forty-five minutes down the coast, into the Riviera Maya.
Banyan Tree Mayakoba
Private villas threaded along freshwater lagoons inside a mangrove forest, an hour south of Cancún.
A full-sized pool. Heated. Ours alone.
Two loungers, an umbrella, and a gate that locks behind us.
A bed with the doors already open.
No lobby. No corridor. No neighbours.
And a bathtub outside, under the sky.
You have earned roughly nine thousand baths. Here is one of them.
You wake up. The water is right there.
A hammock on one side, a pool on the other. And me, already awake, already looking at you.
One villa. Two people. Behind its own wall, at the end of its own path, wrapped in mangrove on every side.
Not a resort pool. Not a plunge pool. A full-sized, heated pool on a timber terrace, with a gate that locks behind us.
You can get in at two in the morning wearing absolutely nothing and there is not one person on this earth who will see you but me.
Stone, open to the sky, filled from a spout in the wall. Just big enough for the two of us with nothing on, which I have measured with my eyes more than once.
Nothing above you but trees and whatever the sky is doing. Fifteen steps from the bed, and I have already decided how that night ends.
Strung between the bedroom doors and the jungle. Rated for one long afternoon at a time and for exactly two people, which we will be testing.
Sunday to Wednesday. Long enough that by the second morning you stop reaching for your phone before your eyes are open, and start reaching for me instead.
That is the whole guest list. No carpool. No school pickup. Nobody who needs a snack, a ride, or an answer.
For the first time in eighteen years, the reservation says two — and for three nights nobody on this planet has any claim on you except me.
Eighteen years on your feet.
Six days a week, standing. Washing, cutting, setting, styling. Somebody else’s hair for somebody else’s wedding, somebody else’s yom tov, somebody else’s big day.
And in all those years, one kind of vacation: three nights in Miami Beach and straight back, before anyone noticed you were gone.
You have never once made it my problem. Which is exactly why I am doing this without asking you.
Two mornings that start on a table, not an alarm.
Banyan Tree made its name on its spas long before it made its name on anything else. The one here has its own garden inside the mangrove, a few minutes from our door. Both bookings are early, babe — before the heat, before the day has decided anything.
Monday we go in together — two tables, side by side, and I finally get to watch you let go of something. Tuesday is ninety minutes that belong to nobody but you, and I will be at the villa when you are done with them.
You don’t choose it, you don’t book it, you don’t look at the price. You put on the robe, you let somebody take an hour and a half undoing eighteen years out of your shoulders, and then you walk back to me half asleep and completely undone.
The tub is still there when you get back.
Open to the sky. Fifteen steps from the bed. Nowhere to be.
Slow. On purpose.
You wake when you wake. Two of them start face-down on a massage table before the heat arrives, and end with warm bread, good coffee and absolutely nowhere to be.
Nothing booked, on purpose. A pool with a wall around it. A hammock. A boat through the lagoons if we feel like moving, which I suspect we mostly won’t.
Dinner late. My hand on your leg under the table somewhere around the main course. Then a gate that locks from the inside and a night that goes on considerably longer than the meal did.
The villa and the spa are locked in. Everything else is just options I have lined up — afternoons worth leaving for, every kosher table in Playa, a number to call for each one. We decide the rest when we get there.
- The six a.m. drop-off
- Carpool
- Your own front desk
- Anybody’s homework
- The group chat
Included: one hammock, two people, a door that locks from the inside, and no reason on earth to get dressed.
and I have counted them more times than I will admit, and not for the flights.
It is already booked.
That number is real. I have checked it more times than I will admit.
Everything here is handled.
The children, the salon, the whole beautiful mess of it. For three nights it all runs without you.
So the only open question left is whether you want three nights of being wanted properly, behind a locked gate, by someone who has been running it in his head since March.
I already know your answer. Press it anyway.
Wet hair, no makeup, my mouth on your shoulder. This is us in December, babe.
Nobody knocks. Nobody needs anything. Just you, held like this.
Here is the truth of it.
It is not the pool. It is not the spa, and it is definitely not the steak. I booked all of that so I would have somewhere to take you.
For eighteen years we have done this in five-minute windows with one ear on the door. Five minutes was never going to cover what I want with you. I want a room with no clock in it. I want to be that far into you, that unhurried, that connected — and then stay there, because for once there is nothing on this earth making either of us get up.
That is the trip, babe. The villa is just where it happens.
Happy fortieth, Chanie.
Pinky
Banyan Tree Mayakoba
Cancún, Mexico