“You’re Fred’s friend from the mainland,” the proprietor says. (I must be. There are only eight Caucasians on this island, the eighth being me.) “We have some Chab-liss you could try.” So I buy two bottles, along with a Maui onion and some ground beef so that I can do burgers.
“Jeez!” Fred says when everybody arrives. “And you claim to be a cook!”
I wear his dolphin for luck and, although my luggage has shown up, his socks for security. When he mentions the balding man, who he knows was my friend but does not know was my lover, and I start to cry and stop, embarrassed and blaming my tears on overwork and overtiredness and maybe a kind of craziness, he says, “Don’t worry, Mary. My views on craziness are a little different from other people’s. You’re not crazy. Just aim for a selective memory, like mine.”
But I will never have a selective memory. Mine is out of control. It provides me either with everything or with nothing, and is triggered by my senses, which are far keener and far more intractable than my brain.
There is an evening when we are around the kitchen table and I say . . . what, I don’t remember now, but it evokes from Jo: “We’ve got another crazy Irishman on our hands.”
“Who’s the first?” I ask.
“Fred.”
“Fred!” I am surprised, because his surname is as English as, say, Windsor.
“Don’t let my last name—I love my last name—fool you. How I’ve hated being Irish! I’m always trying to disguise it. Phyllis, remember all those clothes I ordered from the Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue? But, Jesus, am I Irish!”
I look at him very hard, past the thick beard and the thatch of gray hair, and see a pair of familiar-seeming, flat brown eyes staring back at me.
“Fred!” I start to laugh. “The beard fooled me. You look like my Uncle Bill. I’ve run five thousand miles and found my Uncle Bill.”
But he was not my Uncle Bill, because my Uncle Bill was not the son of a telephone lineman and a woman who stood behind the steam table in the high school cafeteria. My Uncle Bill didn’t have to have a friend pretend that he, not Fred, was So-and-So’s date for the prom because the girl’s parents wouldn’t have wanted her seen with him. My Uncle Bill knew nothing of the rage that had Fred screwing in adulthood the wives of the boys who had snubbed him in childhood. My Uncle Bill was an executive in a rubber company, not an open wound that could be bandaged only with words. All the time Fred had me laughing and gasping and throwing up my hands, I was wondering why a man who was so drunk was also so curiously clearheaded. That he often struck me as mad was another thing entirely.
I was living in the suspended time that follows grief, when the nervous system shuts down and only the heart and lungs and muscles are working, those and the part of the head that permits dailiness. Except for the moment when Fred mentioned the balding man and a nerve jumped and made me cry, I was insulated. The insulation was not willed. Rather, my body had taken over for my brain and was giving it a few weeks’ peace.
Thrice I was jolted into happiness. The first night on Lanai, before I could move into the guesthouse, Fred gave me his bedroom—iron bed, creaky bedsprings, shabby deal bureau, typewriter on a table, a varnished bookcase jammed with paperbacks, no curtains—but I couldn’t sleep. I was too infatuated with the susurration of banana leaves against the window screens and, at dawn, the roosters’ wakeup calls. I was happy, too, on the afternoon I first dispensed beer and peanuts to the group and thought, “What nice people.” Both times I was also thinking, “And I got here all by myself.”
The third time was the night we had dinner at the young doctor’s house and I sat on the floor eating sukiyaki and drinking warm sake. Beside me sat Phyllis’s father, a barefoot nut-brown man who spoke only Tagalog. He laughed when I laughed, looked sober when I looked sober, showed his appreciation for the food with deep, rumbling burps, and wound me in the peace that comes when there is no possibility of talk. I was, I am, so tired of talking.
Then the newspaperman arrived.
He had been covering what Fred called the year’s major sporting events—the Superbowl, a prizefight in Las Vegas, and Gary Gilmore’s execution—and had called from Los Angeles, sobbing and exhausted. “Come to Lanai,” Fred said. “Leave that fuckin’ job. Take some fuckin’ time off.”
“Poor guy,” he told Jo, Phyllis, and me, “those fuckin’ bastards are squeezing him to death.”
I didn’t like the newspaperman. Perhaps it is simply that I was prepared to resent anyone who pierced that small circle in which I was seeking deafness and blindness, and turned it into what Fred called Payne Whitney West. Or perhaps it is the malice bred from consciousness of one’s self-control that makes me say I wish he had just hung a sign reading I AM A TORTURED PERSON around his neck and let up on the theatrics.
We were in the guesthouse living room when he started telling us about the newsmen near the prison, the television cameras, and, finally, the procession into the execution shed and past the execution chair, led by a tour guide who counted out the five bullet holes. One bullet had been a blank so that the riflemen were all able to participate in one of their fellows’ accidental innocence. The newspaperman acted it out, repeated the dialogue, and paced the living room, pretending to be a television announcer, a guard, the tour guide.
It was ironic. I had run as far as I could from memories of the balding man but was reminded of him time and time again by Fred, who spoke often of famous writers he had known or brushed against, because it made him feel a member of their church. And, horrified that murder was legal again, I had run from all the brouhaha that preceded Gilmore’s death, because it meant that once more I, who had been told by an uncle in childhood that execution meant that someone set your hair on fire, would once again dream of my head bursting into flames. But both had followed me to Lanai.
How could I not hate the messenger with the bad news? Execution was in the room, and with it the photographs I remembered blazoned on the front pages of the tabloids on my first few weeks in New York. The Rosenbergs were to die, and I, just out of college, apolitical, and soon to marry a boy who, though almost as apolitical as I, was Jewish and thus possibly scarred with the mark of Cain, was about to be caught and fried for crimes unimagined as well as uncommitted. I wasn’t crazy. Truly. It was just that young, missing my father, torn (willingly) from the WASPS and laid-back Catholics who had constituted the bastion that was my childhood, I had traveled too far from home.
Fred slept on the guesthouse couch that night; the newspaperman had his bed in Jo and Phyllis’s cottage. Actually, Fred didn’t sleep—he seldom slept—and I heard the pop of beer cans opening and the soft padding of his bare feet as he walked between the couch and the television set.
I was frightened. I had toppled off the edge of the world. I kept seeing the last walk, that last mile, and I was the walker. I remembered lying along the balding man’s magic back, how he moored me as a piling does a skiff. He had said, “Mah Mary, make me a statement. Do you love me?” Was it possible I hadn’t answered? Or had I, and spoken too softly? What else had I done wrong? Was it because I went to Einstein on the Beach on the night he had said he would arrive in New York since I knew him to be unreliable and Einstein was rumored to be unmissable? But he did arrive when promised, and found me, not planted by the phone, as I was supposed to be, but out. Or was it because I hadn’t understood that leaving him in an empty bed was like leaving him in a desert?
I wished I could go into the living room and ask Fred to get into bed with me, to be a stuffed animal I could hold until I slept. But I had never asked that of anyone. Besides, Fred had said once, “I never ball anyone I like,” and might have felt compelled to say no. He might have thought I wanted more than a teddy bear.
When the dark faded to gray, I heard the screen door slam. I got up, dressed, and went back to my work, my old companion. I did that almost every day on Lanai, sitting at a card table with notes and a pile of typing paper. I was sifting through memories—of the way s
now hitting the hot air at the bottom of the air shaft outside our first apartment bounced up again, say, and of B rubbing my back when I was in labor with Snow White—thinking that if I wrote them down, they would form a shape, make sense. I was looking for cause and effect, not knowing then that often there are no links, only happenstance.
At five o’clock every day Fred would arrive in the jeep to fetch me for dinner, restless and anxious to get back to Jo and Phyllis and the kitchen table, where he was safe. I was a nuisance but a diversion, too, and once when Jo said, “Mary, why don’t you move to one of the bigger islands—you can do your editing from there—and take this old goat with you?” I saw a little flicker in Fred’s dead eyes. The promise of normality, of a well-regulated life, always lured him, though only for a second.
With the newspaperman’s arrival the balance of power had shifted. We were no longer four friends at a kitchen table, but three boys sitting in a tarpaper clubhouse and two girls they wouldn’t let in the door. Not that their conversation fascinated Phyllis and me. I doubt it fascinated them.
“What kind of an expense account you got? . . .Yeah? Must be rough out there on the road . . . Yeah? Must be a lot of boozin’ . . .Suppose you have to bury the liquor bills somewhere, huh? . . .Yeah? The fucks!”
Sometimes Jo looked down the table at Phyllis and me. I could tell he wanted to hear what we were saying, maybe even join us, but that would have meant breaking a club rule, so he didn’t.
Fred had taken a walk alone every night before dinner, but no more. After he’d been gone for ten minutes, the newspaperman would say, “Guess I’ll go look for Fred,” and go out, to reappear with him about half an hour later. He was like a sheepdog working a flock, only he was working Fred out, not in. Perhaps if the newspaperman’s wife had been there we would have achieved détente. The girls could have done the dishes while the boys talked. Alone with Phyllis and me, the newspaperman never spoke. I guess he felt we had no common denominator.
I take that back. Once he spoke to me. We were in the back of Jo’s jeep, and he said, “I read your article about Fred. Enjoyed it.”
“Thank you. I’d like to read the one you did on him for-,” and I named his newspaper.
We turned and looked at our mutual subject, the Pulitzer Prize nominee. He was standing twenty feet away, legs spraddled, urinating against a tree. The newspaperman’s face was expressionless. I was trying not to laugh.
Later, returned to New York, I embroidered a dinner party with my anger at the newspaperman—how, working out his formidable angst, he, equipped with a snorkel, had made a Byronic run toward the Pacific and settled instead for a racing dive into a tide pool; how, gypping me of my longed-for place in the fishing boat, he had set out to snare a marlin while stoked on Dramamine.
“Maybe you felt you were half of a couple before he arrived,” a friend said.
I thought about that statement. I think about what anyone says of me with the concentration of a watch repairer looking for a faulty cog. No, she wasn’t right. I was angry because the newspaperman had pushed me into the cold. He was an intruder who hogged the fire around which we were all keeping warm. I was jealous, too, because he and Fred excluded me, jealous the way Jo was the night he ordered Phyllis to bed because he found the two of us speaking low. I think we were talking about children. It didn’t matter. Jo thought we were telling our secrets, and maybe, in a sense, we were.
But the anger evaporated; my anger always does, because I am distracted by small pleasures, as easily charmed as a cranky baby responding to a well-placed tickle. One afternoon Phyllis and I walked along the little beach and across the black rocks to a cliff, down which we climbed to a semicircle of sand called Shark Cove. We didn’t have much in common besides life, I supppose, but sometimes that can be enough. While we waded, the waves curling like cream around our footprints, I told her about the balding man, and Phyllis told me about her first husband and a lover she once had. We scaled the cliff to rejoin the gentlemen and never spoke of those men again. Strangers on a train we were, getting off at our different stops with a little less luggage than when we had boarded.
I don’t know how long I was on Lanai—a week or ten days, maybe—but it was long enough to slip into its spin. I loved shopping in the one store and trying to construct fet-tucini Alfredo out of Japanese noodles and processed cheese, and most of all I liked nodding to people who were beginning to recognize me as I trundled down the aisles with my cart. When the young doctor’s wife came back from one of the big islands with her sonograms, she shared the photographs of the little blob in her uterus with Phyllis and me. Was it a boy? A girl? I often wonder. Did the rich American woman, an anomaly on Lanai, ever get her longed-for hot tub? Are Jo and Phyllis still there? Are the roads still rutted? Is dawn still a matter of crows and hens and the stirrings of banana leaves? Never mind. It will be until my brain shuts down.
My last night on Lanai the newspaperman, dizzied by alcohol and Dramamine, passed out in Fred’s room. Jo, drunk, had gone to bed. Fred had fallen asleep on the living room couch. There was no one to drive the jeep through the dark to the little guesthouse, so Phyllis pulled an air mattress onto the living room floor and gave me a muumuu, which, since she had an Asian’s small bones, I shimmied into like a snake retrieving a shed skin.
Then she, too, went to bed, and I lay on the floor thinking about returning to the mainland—there was no choice nor did I really want one, because all islands are, in the end, too small—and listening to a cacophony of snores.
Fred’s I could endure—they were deep and rhythmic—but the newspaperman gurgled between snorts. I crawled across the room on my hands and knees, V’d my index and middle fingers around the knob, and slowly pulled his door shut.
I was making my way back to the air mattress when I suddenly thought of the sight I must make: sausaged into a muumuu and creeping. I looked around at this latest place to which my feet had brought me. To my left, a small, feisty man and his Filipino wife were snoring in their bedroom. Behind me, the tortured newspaperman was snoring in Fred’s bedroom. To my right was Fred himself, snoring on the couch.
I was, at that moment, literally on my knees. But I was moving. I was laughing, too. “Mary,” I said to this woman I had lived with so long, “I’ve enjoyed knowing you.”
Nine
Not long ago I was standing on the corner of Second Avenue and Fourteenth Street, waiting for a crosstown bus, when the smell of some kind of spicy food curled, almost like a veil, around my nose. It came from one of the nearby restaurants, though I knew neither which one nor which country’s cuisine was on its menu. But I had been in that country, I knew, because the aroma brought me back to twilight and the end of a day’s sightseeing and narrow streets thronged with people on their way home. It was always, I remember, “the hour between the dog and the wolf,” the hour in which I, no matter how pleasant the circumstances, longed for a roof between me and the sky. And for a few minutes, sniffing that spicy scent—a kind of curry, it may have been—I knew again the loneliness I had known so well.
But it was my neighborhood in which I was waiting, my bus I was soon to board, my people, however different their blood and their pasts were from mine, with whom I was sharing complaints about five o’clock traffic and buses in happy herds camping out by the East River. I was going home to my place and my table. I would shut the door on the dark and sink into a cave of my own making. That’s what all houses are really, caves. Of course one reads about houses with big windows and big sliding doors, those houses designed to “bring nature indoors.” But how much do you want to bet that, once the sun goes down, the blinds will be drawn and the curtains closed on those monuments to glass and T-beams? It is pleasant to lie in bed, as I do, with the shutters parted and the moon riding between them. But to sit in a curtainless living room and feel the night pressing in is to realize that the dark can be much stronger than bricks and mortar. Better not to look.
The bus, finally separated from its herd, arri
ved, and I got on to sit next to the window, because I can never get enough of looking at New York City. No matter how often I travel crosstown, for instance, the people are people I have never seen before, the building that was naked on Tuesday is tracked with scaffolding and swathed in orange netting on Thursday. An old sign is scarcely down before a new sign goes up. The seafood place is now a tapas bar, the secondhand bookstore is suddenly a health food emporium. The notion that there are bucks to be made, if one can only find the right angle, the right goods, never goes out of style in New York.
Getting off at Ninth Avenue, I took a short cut to my apartment, past the impossibly long-legged transvestite hookers, who, after the occasional police sweep, invariably migrate back to the meat market district. Because it was chilly, a few fires had already been started in the rusted metal barrels, and I started one myself, in my fireplace, when I got home. Of all the cities in the world, New York is the most sensual. No mangoes or papayas grow here, and oranges are not for stripping from the trees. Summer breezes are humid and laced with the stink of asphalt, low tide, and, if you’re near a subway entrance or a boarded vacant lot, urine. But my senses are enlivened here as they are nowhere else in the world.
The sensuality emerges from disparity. There is a vast distance between the fire in the fireplace and the one in the trash barrel, a million miles between the “ching-ching-chong” (or so it sounds to me) of Chinatown mothers chattering to the babies strapped to their chests and the subdued purr of Upper East Side nannies pushing baby buggies as big and as soundless as Rolls-Royces. A stretch limo, analogous to the motor car in Mrs. Dalloway, in which passersby had “just time to see a face of the very greatest importance against the dove-gray upholstery,” slips down Fifth Avenue. This time, too, mystery—who is it? could it have been . . . ?—brushes the passersby with her wing. One block west, on Sixth Avenue, a woman naked from the waist up sprawls in a doorway, picking lice off her breasts.
Speaking with Strangers Page 12
