by John Updike
“She still keeps putting away that créme de menthe.”
“She’s a little heedless but that’s how you are at that age. You think whatever happens, you can manage; the Devil won’t touch you.”
He nudges her elbow with his comfortingly, to show he remembers. The Devil touched her twenty years ago. The guilt they share rests in their laps like these safety belts, holding them fast, chafing only when they try to move.
“Hey you two lovebirds.” Ronnie Harrison’s loud shallow voice breaks upon them from above; he is looking down with his boozy breath from the backs of their seats. “Deal us in, you can neck at home.” For the rest of the flight’s three droning hours they party with the other four, swapping seats, standing in the aisle, moving around in the 747’s wide body as if it were Webb Murkett’s long living room. They stoke themselves with drinks and reminisce about times they have already shared as if, were silence and forgetfulness once to enter, the bubble of this venture together would pop and all six would go tumbling into the void that surrounds and upholds the shuddering skin of the plane. Cindy seems, in this confusion, amiable but remote, a younger sister, or another passenger swept up into their holiday mood. She perches forward on the edge of her reclined window seat to catch each gust of jocularity; it is hard to believe that her outer form, clothed in a prim black suit with a floppy white cravat that reminds Harry of George Washington, has secret places, of folds and fur and moist membranes, where a diaphragm can go, and that entry into these places is the purpose of his trip and his certain destination.
The plane drops; his stomach clenches; the pilot’s omnipotent Texas voice comes on and tells them to return to their seats and prepare for arrival. Harry asks Janice now that she’s loose on booze if she wouldn’t like the window seat but she says No, she doesn’t dare to look until they land. Through his patch of scratched Plexiglas he sees a milky turquoise sea mottled with purple-green shadows cast from underneath, islands beneath the surface. A single sailboat. Then a ragged arm of rocky land in a sleeve of white beach. Small houses with red corrugated roofs rise toward him. The wheels of the plane groan and unwind down and lock in place. They are skimming a swamp. He thinks to pray but his thoughts scatter; Janice is grinding the bones of his fingers together. A house with a wind sock, an unmanned bulldozer, branchless trees that are palms flash by; there is a thud, a small swerve, a loud hiss, and a roar straining backwards, a screaming straining. It stops, they slow, they are on the ground, and a low pink air terminal is wheeled into view as the 747 taxis close. The passengers move, suddenly sweating, clutching their winter coats and groping for sunglasses, toward the exits. At the head of the silver stairs down to the macadam, the tropical air, so warm, moist, and forgiving, composed all of tiny little circles, strikes Rabbit’s face as if gusted from an atomizer; but Ronnie Harrison ruins the moment by exclaiming distinctly, behind his ear, “Oh boy. That’s better than a blow job.” And, worse even than Ronnie’s smearing his voice across so precious a moment of first encounter with a new world, the women laugh, having been meant to overhear. Janice laughs, the dumb mutt. And the stewardess, her enamel gone dewy in the warmth by the door where she poses saying goodbye, goodbye, promiscuously smiles.
Cindy’s laugh skips girlishly above the others and is quickly followed by her drawled word, “Ronnie.” Rabbit is excited amid his disgust, remembering those Polaroids tucked in a drawer.
As the days of the vacation pass, Cindy turns the same mahogany brown she wears in the summer, by the pool at the Flying Eagle, and comes up dripping from the beryl Caribbean in the same bikini of black strings, only with salt-glisten on her skin. Thelma Harrison burns badly the first day, and has some pain connected with that quiet ailment of hers. She spends the whole second day in their bungalow, while Ronnie bounces in and out of the water and supervises the fetching of drinks from the bar built on the sand entirely of straw. Old black ladies move up and down the beach offering beads and shells and sunclothes for sale, and on the morning of the third day Thelma buys from one of them a wide-brimmed straw hat and a pink ankle-length wrapper with long sleeves, and thus entirely covered, with sun block on her face and a towel across the tops of her feet, she sits reading in the shade of the sea-grape trees. Her face in the shade of her hat seems sallow and thin and mischievous, when she glances toward Harry as he lies in the sun. Next to her, he tans least easily, but he is determined to keep up with the crowd. The ache of a sunburn reminds him nostalgically of the muscle aches after athletic exertion. In the sea, he doggy-paddles, secretly afraid of sharks.
The men spend each morning on the golf course that adjoins the resort, riding in canopied carts down sere fairways laid out between brambly jungles from which there is no recovery; indeed, in looking for lost balls there is a danger of stepping into a deep hole. The substance of the island is coral, pitted with caves. At night, there is entertainment, set in a rigid weekly cycle. They arrived on a Thursday, the evening of the crab races, and on the next night witnessed a limbo dance, and on the next, a Saturday, themselves danced to a steel band. Every night there is music to dance to, beside the Olympic-length pool under stars that seem closer down here, and that hang in the sky with a certain menace, fragments of a frozen explosion. Some of the constellations are strange; Webb Murkett, who knows stars from his years in the Navy - he enlisted in ‘45, when he was eighteen, and crossed the Pacific on an aircraft carrier as the war was ending - points out the Southern Cross, and a ghostly blur in the sky he says is another galaxy altogether; and they can all see that the Big Dipper stands on its handle here in a way never seen in southeastern Pennsylvania.
Oh, that little Cindy, browner at every dinnertime, just begging for love. You can see it in her teeth, they are getting so white, and the way she picks an oleander blossom from the bush outside their bungalow every night to wear in her hair all fluffy from swimming so much, and the swarthiness of her toes that makes the nails look pale as petals also. She wears on her dark skin white dresses that shine from far across the swimming pool - lit from underneath at night as if it has swallowed the moon - when she is coming back from the ladies’ room beyond the bamboo bar. She claims she is getting fatter, too: those piña coladas and banana Daiquiris and rum punches, all those calories, shameless. Yet she never turns a drink down, none of them do; from the Bloody Marys that fortify the golfers for their morning on the course to the last round of Stingers after midnight, they keep a gentle collective buzz on. Janice wonders, “Harry, what’s the final tab going to look like? You keep signing for everybody.”
He tells her, “Relax. Might as well spend it as have it eaten up by inflation. Did you hear Webb saying that the dollar now is worth exactly half what it was ten years ago in 1970? So these are fifty-cent dollars; relax.” The expense in his mind is part of a worthy campaign, to sleep with Cindy before their seven days are over. He feels it coming, coming upon all of them, the walls between them are wearing thin, he knows exactly when Webb will clear his throat or how he will light his cigarette, eye-glance and easy silence are hour by hour eroding constraint, under sun and under stars they stretch out their six bodies on the folding chaises, with vinyl strapping, that are everywhere. Their hands touch passing drinks and matches and suntan lotion, they barge in and out of one another’s bungalows; indeed Rabbit has seen Thelma Harrison bare-assed by accident returning their Solarcaine one afternoon. She had been lying on the bed letting her burned skin breathe and hustled into the bathroom at the sound of his voice at the door, but not quick enough. He saw the crease between her cheeks, the whole lean sallow length of her fleeing, and handed the Solarcaine to Ronnie, himself naked, without comment or apology, they were half-naked with each other all the day long, but for Thelma huddled under the sea-grape: Janice rubbing Coppertone into the criss-crossing creases of Webb’s red neck, Ronnie’s heavy cock bulging the front of his obscene little European-style trunks, sweet Cindy untying a black string to give her back an even tan and showing the full nippled silhouette of one boob when she
reached up for her Planter’s Punch from the tray of them the boy had brought. These blacks down here are silkier than American blacks, blacker, their bodies moving to a gentler beat. Toward four o’clock, the shadows of the sea-grape coming forward like knobby fingers onto the sand, the men’s faces baked red despite the canopies on the golf carts, they move their act from the beach (the rustling of palm trees gets on Harry’s nerves; at night he keeps thinking it’s raining, and it never is) to the shaded area beside the Olympic pool, where young island men in white steward’s jackets circle among them taking drink orders and the hard white pellet of the sun slowly lowers toward the horizon of the sea, which it meets promptly at six, in a perfunctory splash of purples and pinks. Stupefied, aching with pleasure, Harry stares at the way, when Cindy rolls her body into a new position on the chaise, the straps have bitten laterally into her delicious fat, like tire treads in mud. Thelma sits among them swaddled and watchful, Webb drones on, Ronnie is making some new friends at the bamboo bar. It’s the salesman in him, he has to keep trying his pitch. His voice balloons above the rippling as a single fair child, waterlogged and bored, dives and paddles away the time to dinner. Janice, much as he loves her now and then, down here is a piece of static, getting between Harry and what signals Cindy may be sending; luckily Webb keeps her entertained, talking to her as one member of the lesser Brewer gentry to another, about that tireless subject of money. “You think fourteen per cent is catastrophic, in Israel they live with a hundred eleven per cent, a color television set costs eighteen hundred dollars. In Argentina it’s a hundred fifty per cent per year, believe me I kid you not. In Tokyo a pound of steak costs twenty dollars and in Saudi Arabia a pack of cigarettes goes for a fin. Five dollars a pack. You may think we’re hurting but the U.S. consumer still gets the best deal to be had in any industrialized nation.” Janice hangs on his words and bums his cigarettes. Her hair since summer has grown long enough to pull back in a little stubby ponytail; she sits by his feet, dabbling her legs in the pool. The hair on Webb’s long skinny legs spirals around like the stripes on a barber pole, and his face with its wise creases has tanned the color of lightly varnished pine. It occurs to Harry that she used to listen to her father bullshit this way, and likes it.
By Sunday night they are bored with the routine around the resort and hire a taxi to take them across the island to the casino. In the dark they pass through villages where black children are invisible until their eye-whites gleam beside the road. A herd of goats trotting with dragging rope halters materializes in the headlights of the taxi. Shuttered cabins up on cinder blocks reveal by an open door that they are taverns, with bottle-crammed shelves and a sheaf of standing customers. An old stone church flings candlelight from its pointed windows, which have no glass, and the moan of one phrase of a hymn, that is swiftly left behind. The taxi, a ‘69 Pontiac with a lot of voodoo dolls on the dashboard, drives ruthlessly, on the wrong side of the road, for this was an English colony. The truncated cone-shapes of abandoned sugar mills against the sky full of stars remember the past, all those dead slaves, while Janice and Thelma and Cindy chatter in the surging dark about people left behind in Brewer, about Buddy Inglefinger’s newest awful girlfriend with all that height and all those children, Buddy’s such a victim-type, and about impossible Peggy Fosnacht, whom rumor has reported to be very hurt that she and Ollie weren’t asked along on this trip to the Caribbean, even though everybody knows they could never afford it.
The casino is attached to another beach resort, grander than theirs. Boardwalks extend out over the illuminated coral shelf. There are worlds within worlds, Harry thinks. Creatures like broken bags of noodles wave upward from within the goldengreen slipslop. He has come out here to clear his head. He got hooked on blackjack and in an attempt to recoup his losses by doubling and redoubling his bets cashed three hundred in Traveller’s Checks and, while his friends marvelled, lost it all. Well, that’s less than half the profit on the sale of one Tercel, less than three per cent of what Nelson’s pranks have cost. Still, Harry’s head throbs and he feels shaky and humiliated. The black dealer didn’t even glance up when, cleaned out, he pushed away ‘from the garish felt of the table. He walks along the boards toward the black horizon, as the tropical air soothes his hot face with microscopic circular kisses. He imagines he could walk to South America, that has Paraguay in it; he thinks fondly of that area of tall weeds behind the asphalt of the lot, and of that farm he has always approached as a spy, through the hedgerow that grew up over the tumbled sandstone wall. The grass in the orchard will be flattened and bleached by winter now, smoke rising from the lonely house below. Another world.
Cindy is beside him suddenly, breathing in rhythm with the slipslop of the sea. He fears their moment has come, when he is far from ready; but she says in a dry commiserating voice, “Webb says you should always set a limit for yourself before you sit down, so you won’t get carried away.”
“I wasn’t carried away,” Harry tells her. “I had a theory.” Perhaps she figures that his losses have earned a compensation and she is it. Her brown arms are set off by a crocheted white shawl; with the flower behind her ear she looks flirty. What would it be like, to press his own high heavy face down into those apple-hard roundnesses of hers, cheeks and brow and nose-tip, and her alert little life-giving slits, long-upped mouth and dark eyes glimmering with mischief like a child’s? Shpslop. Will their faces fit? Her eyes glance upward toward his and he gazes away, at the tropical moon lying on its side at an angle you never see in Pennsylvania. As if accidentally, while gazing out to sea, he brushes his fingertips against her arm. An electric warmth seems to linger from her Sunday in the sun. Kelp slaps the pilings of the catwalk, a wave collapses its way along the beach, his moment to pounce is here. Something too firm in the protuberances of her face holds him off, though she is lightly smiling, and tips her face up, as if to make it easier for him to slip his mouth beneath her nose.
But footsteps rumble toward them and Webb and Janice, almost running, their hands in the confused mingled lights of moon and subaqueous spots and blazing casino beyond seeming linked, then released, come up to this angle of the boardwalk and announce excitedly that Ronnie Harrison is burning up the crap table inside. “Come and see, Harry,” Janice says. “He’s at least eight hundred ahead.”
“That Ronnie,” Cindy says, in a tone of girlish dry reproach, and the casino lights glow through her long skirt as she hurries toward these lights, her legs silhouetted beneath her dark wide ass.
They get back to their own resort after two. Ronnie stayed too long at the crap table and wound up only a few bucks better than even. He and Janice fall asleep on the long ride back, while Thelma sits tensely in Rabbit’s lap and Webb and Cindy sit up front with the driver, Webb asking questions about the island that the man answers in a reluctant, bubbling language that is barely English. At the gate to their resort a uniformed guard lets them in. Everything down here is guarded, theft is rampant, thieves and even murderers pour outward from the island’s dark heart to feed on its rim of rich visitors. Guest bungalows are approached along paths of green-painted concrete laid down on the sand, under muttering palm trees, between bushes of papery flowers that attract hummingbirds in the morning. While the men confer as to what hour tomorrow’s golf should be postponed to, the three women whisper at a little distance, at the point in the concrete walk where the paths to their separate bungalows diverge. Janice, Cindy, and Thelma are tittering and sending glances this way, glances flickering birdlike in the moon-glazed warm night. Cindy’s shawl glimmers like a splotch of foam on surging water. But in the end, making the hushed grove of palms ring with cries of “‘Night. ‘Night,” each wife walks to her own bungalow with her husband. Rabbit fucks Janice out of general irritation and falls asleep hoping that morning will be indefinitely postponed.
But it comes on schedule, in the form of bars of sunlight the window louvers cast on to the floor of hexagonal tiles, while the little yellow birds they have that song about do
wn here follow the passage of clinking breakfast trays along the concrete paths. It is not so bad, once he stands up. The body was evolved for adversity. As has become his custom he takes a short, cautious swim off the deserted beach, where last night’s plastic glasses are still propped in the sand. It is the one moment of the day or night when Harry is by himself, not counting the old couples, with the wives needing an arm to make their way down across the sand, who also like an early swim. The sea between soft breakers seems the color of a honeydew melon, that pale a green. Floating on his back he can see, on the roads along the scraggly steep hills that flank the bay, those to whom this island is no vacation, blacks in scraps of bright cloth, strolling to work, some of the women toting bundles and even buckets on their heads. They really do that. Their voices carry on fresh morning air, along with the slap and swoosh and fizz of warm saltwater sliding and receding at his feet. The white sand is spongy, and full of holes where crabs breathe. He has never seen sand this white, minced coral fine as sugar. The early sun sits lightly on his sensitive shoulders. This is it, health. Then the girl with the breakfast tray comes to their door - their bungalow number is 9 - and Janice in her terrycloth bathrobe opens the louvered door and calls “Harry” out across the beach where an old black rummy in khaki pants is already sweeping up seaweed and plastic glasses, and the party, the hunt, is on again.
He plays golf badly today; when he is tired he tends to overswing, and to flip his hands instead ofletting the arms ride through. Keep the wrist-cock, don’t waste it up at the top. Don’t sway onto your toes, imagine your nose pressed against a pane of glass. Think railroad tracks. Follow through. These tips are small help today; it seems a long morning’s slog between hungry wings of coral jungle, up to greens as bumpy as quilts, though he supposes it’s a miracle of sorts to have greens at all under this sun. He hates Webb Murkett, who is sinking everything inside of twenty feet today. Why should this stringy old bullshitter hog that fantastic little cunt and take the Nassau besides? Harry misses Buddy Inglefinger, to feel superior to. Ronnie’s sparse scalp and naked high forehead look like a peeling pink egg when he stoops to his shot. Swings like an ape, all the hair off his head gone into his arms, how can Thelma stand him? Women, they’ll put up with anything for the sake of a big prick evidently. Harry can’t stop thinking of that three hundred dollars he blew last night, that his father would have slaved six weeks for. Poor Pop, he didn’t live to see money get unreal.
