She removed her clothes and waded out into the water, stopping to urinate when she was waist-deep, unable to distinguish a difference in temperature between her fluid and the ocean. The water danced with sparks when she moved, delighting her, as if the sea carried within itself a dust of latent, beautiful fire. The air was resined with salty aridness, and wherever she looked the world was only itself, no other buildings in sight but Coddy’s place, not a telephone pole or highway or electric splash of light to be seen although up north, across the moon-scraped channel, a blue-white mass of storm turtled toward the jagged silhouette of St. Catherine, its gorgon thunderheads blushed with roses of lightning. Aegean was the word she wanted to say, ancient and pagan, but she had never been there, never been anywhere like this, and the pantheon of gods was wrong. A place deserved its proper gods. Who could tell about the gods here?—she wouldn’t presume to know them. Some variation of Neptune certainly. She had forgotten whether Caliban was deity or devil. This night changed nothing but it added volumes, Adrian thought, genuflecting until the water reached her chin, afraid to go deeper. Tiny fish groomed her legs; the bottom felt like granulated silk, plush against her feet. The screen door banged and she pulled her knees into her stomach, floating, and rotated shoreward to observe Johanna, ghostly in her nakedness, at the water’s edge. Venus, as in The Birth of—the updated version, resubmerging, wearied by the mortal price of love.
“Come on in,” Adrian coaxed. “It’s divine.” She let herself sink down into a sightless antinomous space opposite infinity, hearing her own blood, its delicious throb, and in the background just that, the rasping scrape of infinity the ocean produced in her ears, its clicks and creaks, the static of its own weight and the pulsing comfort of her own weightlessness, and then back up to the air again, and again infinity, so close at hand, the whole boggling theater of the universe opened wide, the black expanding expanse and its spill of stars. “We want Big God,” she joked to herself, happy for this moment to celebrate this life. “Where’s Big God?” Without making any noise, Johanna had breaststroked out to her, coming to rest by her side.
Neither of them spoke, as if they knew their words would disappoint. After a while Johanna said, “There’s something going on here with nature.”
“It’s Big God,” said Adrian, giddily. She put her face into the water, giggling bubbles, but then grew serious. “What do you mean?”
“Something mystical. Something spiritual.”
“Something reconciling,” Adrian added, though she wasn’t sure what she meant. “I feel it too. I adore this place.”
Only their heads were above water, their bodies outlined in the shallows by aqueous, smearing flecks of light, like fireflies. Johanna looked so lovely and in her element out here, Adrian thought, her hair poured straight into the water like something metallic, her face shadowed and tender, her teeth so white, her lips and eyes glistening. She wore a puka-shell choker around her throat; it looked ritualistic and it also seemed to cut her off, with the water’s help, below her neck, making of her head a bust, disembodied, a marble face trapped in time, something Adrian might have seen on a pedestal in the Uffizi.
“What I feel,” Johanna said, “is more like anger everywhere, something spiritual but angry. It’s okay though, it’s not scary. The anger keeps the lid on chaos.”
What she was really talking about, Adrian soon realized, was Hawaii, up in the mountains on Oahu, clandestine trails burrowing through the undergrowth to hidden valleys and canyons where she and her friends had cultivated cannabis. It was there she learned about the anger, she said. You had to educate yourself about taboos, leave offerings in front of secret pools and carvings, never tell the wrong people about these places, because those places were sacred, those places would harm you if your heart was bad. Usually such talk made Adrian chary, she wasn’t the right type for the cosmic cheer-leading squad, the steam coming out of the subway grates was sufficiently fabulous for her, but Johanna was being earnest, and this was not the setting for being unreceptive. On forbidden ground she had done forbidden work, Johanna said. Her nostalgia for whatever meaning she found in that was so evident that Adrian wondered out loud why she had ever left the Pacific.
The dark sea lapped against their lips. Johanna seemed lost in thought or just gone but she said, finally, that the scene back there had gotten out of control.
“Scenes come apart, don’t they,” said Adrian. “I think it’s a commandment.”
They bobbed in the water, like children imagining they were dreaming. This was heroin’s platonic cousin. Adrian pretended she was waiting for a signal from Big God. Jung came to mind, because the northern perception of the tropics was feminine, and that struck her now as fallacy. The visual softness, the aesthetics of sensuality, these were illusion; behind the illusion, animus, a devastating virility. My God, she thought, I’ve just argued the psychology of Johanna’s anger principle.
“What I meant was, I wanted to use drugs as a positive thing,” said Johanna, reviving the conversation. “They have a role to play, in society I mean. I think they’re like an evolutionary agent. I think the future will bear that out. I don’t mean heroin. I don’t mean heroin at all.”
“They’re everywhere,” Adrian sighed, “but I don’t know.”
“But my husband,” Johanna continued, “had a different idea about what drugs were for. A very different idea. I don’t even understand it.”
“Wait, you have a husband?”
“He’s got this attitude. He hates America.”
Only a body’s length away, a school of baitfish sprayed through the surface, arcing through the air like a rain of cartoon bullets. Adrian flinched and put her feet gently on the sand. The fish jumped again, twice, each time farther out into the darkness, and then a larger shape came skipping behind them with murderous speed. A chill rippled down the sides of Adrian’s backbone.
“Something’s chasing them,” she said. “Let’s go in.”
“Ex-husband,” said Johanna. “I left him.” Adrian bounced with featherweight lightness on her toes, edging toward shore, stopped by the incredulity of Johanna’s accusation that this guy was responsible for the death of her best friend. “Her name was Katherine, like where we are, like where they’ve made her a saint, except with a K. Isn’t that weird?”
“You mean, accidentally?”
“That’s not what I mean. No. It’s all very very sick. I’m sleepy. Do you want to go back in?”
There was an emerging bathos, a sense of having dropped too far away from the magic, and Adrian didn’t want Johanna to say anything more, she didn’t trust herself to be sympathetic. Is this for real? she wanted to ask yet she couldn’t dare gamble with Johanna’s suffering, if that’s what it was. But if that’s what it was, where was grief? Her revelation was alien and troubling but not poignant, her tone something less than stricken. Tomorrow, Adrian vowed to herself, let’s keep our senses.
From the vantage of the water, Coddy’s place was the epitome of welcome, insular and secure. They gathered their clothes and hurried across the slope of the beach, slapping at no-see-ums that had discovered here were the only two people that had survived the night. On the steps they tried to brush the sand from their feet, quickly, their breasts hopping in the air, leaning on one another for balance, then dashed inside to towel off. The lamplight puddled in the troughs of the bamboo. Gorgeous, thought Adrian, but she was grateful when Johanna extinguished the flame. No matter how many towels she used, she couldn’t get to the point where she felt dry. After the water, being inside the house was unpleasant, the air sticky as glue, and her skin prickled with salt itch, even more so when she slipped on the tee shirt she liked sleeping in. And maybe they had always been there and she hadn’t noticed, but the room was filled with the whine of mosquitoes and they were torturing her.
She groped her way across the room to the bed, her eyes adjusting to the darkness. Johanna lay atop the sheets, nude, her arms wrapped graceless over her face, her wet hair
scattered, her breasts stretched and dispersed, boyish except for the nipples, the string of a tampon hanging out of her like a fuse. Even obscured, her nakedness made an imperishable vision, graphically framed and emphasized by the bed, but this was a night when everything was dissembling, and she didn’t trust Johanna’s body to cling to its identity. It had the power, she knew, to become anonymous, and then what she didn’t want to think about.
Adrian slid in between the scratchy sheets on her side of the mattress, sagging down into a furnace, the sheets like woolen membranes, the mosquitoes shrill in her ears with their shrunken voices. The air refused to move. She pulled the outer sheet up over her, sprinkling sand, buried her head in the foam pillow but the pillow was rank, the sheet suffocating, every evil grain of sand intolerable. While Johanna lay perfectly still, virtually catatonic, she fidgeted and tossed in misery, finally rolling out to peel off her shirt and then she lay back down on the top sheet, gasping, but that was no good either and after a moment she sprang up again to rub aloe lotion on her body and then climbed back into bed, turned away from Johanna, lying on her side, her mind nattering ad nauseam about her penance of discomfort, the bed a crucible slowly devitalizing her, cooking her down with its steam-slick heat into a languorous soup. She was cognizant only of the fact that dawn would soon come and wreck her. Johanna said her name.
“Let me kiss you. Please.”
Adrian’s eyes were open, watching the false, lifeless eyes of the moth, still where it was on the screen, watching her through the phantom mask of its wings. When she didn’t respond, Johanna rolled over next to her, and Adrian felt the broiling heat of her skin near hers, the candescent touch of Johanna’s hand on her shoulder, the sultry imprint of her lips at the base of her neck, chaining her with kisses. Adrian strained to rouse herself out of her sudden immobility and rebuke her, but Johanna’s arm angled over her ribs to cup a breast—Don’t, she whispered feebly—and the kissing continued, passionless but needy, until she felt Johanna’s tears lacerating her spine, the mattress jerked by her mute sobs.
“What’s wrong?”
“I love Mitchell.”
“You love everybody,” Adrian mumbled, in spite of herself, now aware that this was Johanna’s curse, because Johanna was unpossessable. She turned on her back, conflicted by greed for distraction, anything to get her mind off the heat. Everything was simplified by the sexual flux, the only infinity humans might claim being the infinite ambition of desire, and she submitted to a dream that in the morning would be nothing more than a memory of forgetting; private, incorporeal yearning, a dream that would perhaps be stored as the memory of a painting, astral or animal spirits in a flame-tossed void, the enduring images of the magnificence of everything that burns. Her forehead creased as she felt the pressure of Johanna’s hands, easing open her legs. She couldn’t even name a man she wanted there, really, any man would do, anyone, any mouth was every mouth when it was between your legs and your eyes were closed and it was this hot and, you were this restless and your body lay swollen and battered by the sea and moon.
It’s myself, she thought, beginning to writhe, her hands twisted in Johanna’s hair. It’s me, and she opened her eyes, sensing the presence of another being nearby, and looked again at the moth, staring back at her, but it wasn’t the moth, and it wasn’t Big God, and she screamed.
Johanna had to calm her down. She got up, looked through the screens, got back in bed. “There’s nothing there,” she said. “There’s nothing there,” but now they were both trembling.
Chapter 22
Here is Shoovie, Josephine said.
Mitchell had veered in the direction of the taxis up along the road but she nudged him toward the carpark to a crumpled Deux Chevaux, Cinderella’s pumpkin. She took note of his amusement and told him in no uncertain terms not to bore her with commiseration or jokes—Shoovie was her transport, purchased with her own hard-earned money. She didn’t have to defend herself to him, and he told her so. “Ain no limit to me a-tall, darlin,” she said, feisty, snapping open her clutch for the keys. All right then, he said appeasingly. So she was an ambitious girl, she was going places, even if she arrived there in a battered old workboot of a car. Wrong on that, she retorted, challenging him with a face. She had gone places. She was back.
Who would drive wasn’t an issue—he’d rather pay attention to her than the road anyway. They edged up the sandy lane, onto the paved road toward Augustine, then at the crossroads turned inland on a serpentine route that led up into the hills, the road swinging under dark canopies of vegetation. Josephine lobbied him to tell her what George James had said when she had gone off to the ladies’ room with her friend. She suspected something, said her tone. They had discussed this land reform business and the newspaper; she interrupted him to say, No, about me. She cajoled him, going so far as to take one hand off the wheel and put it on his knee, and Mitchell acquiesced, at least to euphemism, telling her that James had said something to the effect that she was all talk and no action. Cockteaser, is what James really said. Mitchell was glad he told her, since it seemed a way to make clear his own honorable intentions, that he had signed on with no particular goal in mind, other than having a type of adventure, an escapade, an interlude, but then he had to wonder how dishonest that sounded, if not to her, to himself. Josephine became subdued, and Mitchell thought she was hurt by James’ accusation, though he couldn’t make sense of it himself, given the image she projected, and regretted being so disingenuous as to actually tell her the truth. Punished by her silence, he fixated on the air freshener card shaped like a Christmas tree that tossed like a hanged man from the stem of the rearview mirror. The card flung out a noxious smell of disinfectant, and he ruminated about just what it was in the black world view that was symbolized by these things.
Gaining altitude, they drove out along a treeless ridge, meandering south to cross over the coastal range that shielded Oueenstown from view. When he felt ample time had passed for her to lay aside her brooding, he asked where they were headed. Once more she told him, a spot, shyly, as though she had embarrassed herself, but she took her eyes off the road, her braids rattling, to beam at him as her enthusiasm for her lark returned.
“You will like it, bwoy, because it is a beautiful spot, a people’s spot.”
Spot, he had to assume, meant trysting ground, and people meant country, rural, basic. I thought you were an uptown girl, he said, and she answered No, what he saw in her was business, she had business to see after, but she was behind it all a simple girl. Hardly, thought Mitchell, cynical about the business she claimed without identifying. Still, she was not remote, only elusive. He wanted to know where she had been and she recited cities in the States, Canada, Europe, semesters at McGill and CCNY, she had been everywhere in the Western world, it seemed, until her father cut the purse strings at the insistence of his second wife, and even then she trouped on as a member of a small repertory group—costume design—until that too became unfunded. Now, no complaints—she was on her own. Dressmaker, costumes—Mitchell was getting part of a picture. The Deux Chevaux farted down a ravine and back up a steep incline, the night air less and less muggy.
“Why did you come back, Josephine?” he asked. How could she endure St. Catherine after she’d been to Rome? It wasn’t the pattern. You rented a tenement in Brooklyn, worked yourself to the bone, didn’t know the names of the few trees dying on the street, froze in the winter, suffocated in the summer, spending the rest of your life in a nostalgic coma, but you didn’t come back. Maybe he didn’t wish to hear why, she suggested, but he encouraged her to speak her mind and she did, focused on the dim illumination of the headlights, her voice lilting with bright high-spirited irony.
“Well, so listen den, Wilson, I come back because it wear me down, nuh? It is bein a nigger I am talkin about, nuh? I was never nigger until I go away, I born too late fah daht in St. Catherine. Here I was womahn, true, but de shit womahn eat taste much de same dis place or daht place. But nigger—no, I was
not daht. Catherinians are proud and it shamed me and I will not speak of it with my own people but I will speak of it with you. You muss not believe I only givin white people hell, Wilson, it’s not so, because even black people in de States treat me third-class. Here is where I think de name Third World come from—we people everyone else in dem better-off places decide to treat third-class.” She shot a glance at him to see how he might be reacting to all this. “You asked, you know, you poke you nose in. Doan be vexed wit me, darlin.”
Swimming in the Volcano Page 41
