Rebel Yell

by Alice Randall

  Nicholas returned to their nook, bottle under his arm, clean glasses in his hands. They took another moment to settle. This time they made a toast before sipping.

  They lifted their glasses and clinked them together, saying simultaneously, “To Abel.” As Nicholas took longer than Hope to bring the champagne flute to his lips, Hope wondered whether the preposterous man had to steel himself for another encounter with the thick, flat feel of commercial glass between his lips. He took a photograph out of a man bag and placed it on the table. It was a photograph of Abel in lavender swim trunks and sunglasses on a boat. Hope was sprawled across his lap in a hot pink swimsuit. They were both smiling. The sea behind them was Kodachrome blue.

  “Who’s that girl?”

  “That’s how I remember you. The other wives stayed behind their gates, but you came to my house, you went to Divisoria Market, you jogged by the seawall with marines. He was proud of all that and of your breasts.”

  “We were so far from home.”

  “It was good for you.”

  “It was very good for us.”

  “Was it better for him than for you?”

  “Some days I felt naked as those kids shitting in the street. That scared me.”

  “The only things I recall you being afraid of were rats and kids in the street and the sharks off Palawan.”

  “And mosquitoes.”

  “And mosquitoes.”

  “Abel wasn’t afraid of anything.”

  “I think he even ate dog once.”

  “Do not tell me that.”

  They laughed together and it was a familiar thing, almost a family thing.

  “But you left him.”

  “I left him.”

  “Why?”

  “Ajay.”

  “Ajay?”

  “Abel was too removed from Ajay.”

  “He said you left because he hit Ajay once.”

  “Abel lied like a rug.”

  “You’ve become so— American. You and Abel became so American.”

  “What were we then?”

  “Expats.”

  “I haven’t heard that word in a hundred thousand years.”

  Gin, Cointreau, and champagne were scarce commodities in Manila in the eighties unless you were a friend of Nicholas Gordon, in which case there was gracious plenty. Playing bridge and talking books as afternoon odors settled into the walls of the old town, into Intramuros, a place where nobody who was anybody, except Nicholas, lived, was something the prosperous people of Forbes Park liked to contemplate doing and talk about doing— like going down to Mabini Street and watching the exquisitely pretty virgin-whores dance—but few did.

  Hope and Abel were among the few. The weary blaze of after-noon sun that fell each day on the rats of the old town often fell on Hope and Abel as the young couple scurried from the hot of their little Ford Escort—the factory air in sport compacts was no match for the tropical climate; it simply managed to lower the temperature sufficiently for the Joneses to ride across the city with their doors locked and their windows rolled up, past children who pissed in the broad daylight on streets where no dogs ran lest they wind up dinner— to the teak shutters of Nicholas’s door, to the cool of his house between the river and the bay.

  Abel was a college backgammon champ who played a fine hand of bridge; Hope talked books better than anyone in the city— except for Nicholas. They had an open invitation to stop in at Nicholas’s any day between four and seven, except for Thursday.

  Thursdays were sacrosanct. On Thursday Nicholas entertained three priests, said to be fat, old, and wrinkly, who stank of garlic and communism and couldn’t be entertained with ladies, who came once a week to drink questionable (most of the bottles had turned) old wine with Nicholas and play mah-jongg.

  When Abel and Hope found themselves exhausted with the opulence of the pink and vicious city, whenever they could pull themselves away from the pool or the Polo Club, away from tennis and work and calamansi soda, away from the merry-go-round-dull din of expat existence in Manila, they made their way to the hazy dark of Nicholas’s house, where little was abundant and everything was exquisite.

  Nicholas said he lived in the old town because he liked to be near the water. Some people thought he lived where he lived because he was running out of money. Other people thought it was because he didn’t want to run out of money. Hope thought it was because he wanted to be able to see both his guests and his enemies arriving from across a great distance.

  Nicholas’s house, built in the eighteenth century, was a sculptured wood translation of a Gothic manse, erected by a Catholic priest who had arrived in the Philippines just in time to discover, at least in the version of the story Nicholas told to beguile Hope, that he loved women more than he loved God, a day before he discovered, so far from Spain, that he could have them both.

  The priest could tell the very first time he kissed his pagan Indian woman that God didn’t care, or that if God cared, God was pleased. The sun, the day after the priest made love to the woman, seemed an unusually bright red-gold, the sky a purple-blue. Everywhere about him the flowers were colors and shades the priest had never seen. He believed God was winking at him, goading him onward into love. When the woman gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl, seven months later, the priest saw it as a sign of God’s continued favor. He didn’t know a pregnancy lasted forty weeks. Until Manila this man had paid no attention to the bodies or calendars of women.

  As baby followed baby, the priest came to know and count the days he was invited and the days he was prohibited by his woman. He came to see the short season of the first pregnancy as a miracle that had returned the woman’s body to him sooner than would usually be possible, a miracle provoked by the ardor of his wishes.

  Because the woman let him make love to her every day the week before the babies were delivered, none of the mistresses he took in the months between the time she began to swell and the time she allowed him again ever took hold. Between the privilege of lolling in the pleasure of her immensity and the joy of a little baby created by his desire laid into his arms to cry into his ear, between this and the pleasure of suckling at the woman’s breast as if he were the baby, while knowing he was the man who had brought the baby to life, the young priest grew older and happier and wiser, without growing into the knowledge that the father of his twins was his gardener, a man who lived, if not precisely under his roof, in his shed.

  The bishop threatened but never visited; after a decade he sent an emissary. For this occasion the priest built a house for his woman and their children that was separate from the house the church had built for him.

  To keep his lady happy he required that the house he built for her be twice as large as the house the church had built for him. To keep his flock happy, he had required that the house they built for him be quite small. He did not wish to drain too much from the collection plates passed through the aisles of the poor.

  When the impending visit from Spain precipitated the building of the new house, the priest saw the importance of acquiring some sugar lands far to the south in Leyte. In this way he was able to rob poor people he never had to meet, poor people who didn’t love Jesus, and give generously to the poor people who prayed, on bloody knees, to Jesus in his church, and who worked in and about his house.

  Nicholas told Hope the passionate priest story early in their relationship. Hope was charmed but incredulous. She asked a skeptical question.

  “How would you know any of that?”

  “Oh, but she kept a diary,” Nicholas said.

  “She could write?” Hope asked.

  “The besotted priest taught her,” Nicholas replied.

  “And you have her . . . ?”

  “Papers . . . Young wives should never keep diaries or journals. They have a way of showing up at the most inopportune times.”

  “I’m glad she wrote it all down. The story makes your house more beautiful.”

  “I don’t think the descendants would sh
are your opinion, nor the church. They can excommunicate you after death, take away lands as well as laurels. The bastard descendants of gardeners do not enjoy the privileges of the bastard descendants of priests. Young wives must be so careful of what they put on paper.”

  “I don’t commit anything but drivel to paper. I have a more than excellent memory. I inherited it from my Melungeon great-grandfather, a famous moonshiner, who kept nary a note of recipe, still location, or accounts received or expended. Often arrested, never convicted. I take after him,” Hope said rather proudly.

  “Don’t be horrible, Hope,” Abel warned; he had been silent up to that point. He hated it when she talked about her poor white relations instead of her rich white daddy.

  “I quite like her attitude,” Nicholas said.

  “You appreciate the primitive instincts,” Abel rejoined.

  “I have a particular fondness for the primitive passion for secrecy and magic. I won’t have an affair with a woman, can’t even propose an affair with a woman, if I think she’s the kind who keeps a diary, she’d be far too . . . unmagical.”

  “Hope, buy one tomorrow, and promise to make daily entries,” Abel said.

  They all laughed. They drunk more French 75s until the other guests, bridge players, had arrived. When the dealing began, Nicholas called for his maid, Tola. The shoeless and beautiful girl led non-bridge-playing Hope back to one of the guest bedrooms, where her feet would be washed, then massaged before her toes were most delicately polished.

  As Hope left the room, following behind Tola, Nicholas called after her, “Don’t put to night in that diary he buys you. When they look back on our time, don’t make it easy for history to say we were a decadent lot.”

  The banter had been so light and erotically charged, so seemingly translucent, and pleasurable, that Hope hadn’t thought much about it when Abel asked her later that night to destroy the diary she had been keeping.

  “It’s not like you’re in the CIA,” Hope said.

  “I don’t want strangers telling our secrets two hundred years from now,” Abel said.

  “That was rather appalling, unless Nick made the whole thing up,” Hope said.

  “Why would he do that?” Abel asked.

  “To flirt with me,” Hope replied.

  “I should encourage you to keep a diary so I can spy on the both of you,” Abel said.

  They digressed to kisses. When Abel awoke the next morning, Hope was burning the little journal she had been keeping of marriage.

  The day the picture of Abel in lavender and Hope in pink was taken by a waiter who sometimes doubled as an extra boatman, Hope and Abel had set out from their hotel, the Bohol Beach Club— forty thatched rooms set out over a two-mile crescent of chalk white sand— in a small open boat with a single outrigger motor, for a reef off Pamilican Island.

  By noon Hope and Abel were snorkeling and swimming above what the boatman, whose father was a fisherman, had told them was the deepest crevice in the ocean floor. If it was just the deepest tear any of them would ever know it was plenty deep enough. Swimming there was paddling through an aquarium. The fish—barracuda, lapu-lapu, parrot fish, angelfish, and so many species none of them could name in English, only knew as brightly-colored-luminescent-beautiful-fish—were plentiful. Hope and Abel held hands as they swam, her hair trailing in the water shadowing the sea grass.

  Eventually, with the help of life buoys, Hope and Abel made love in the water, off one side of the boat, while the boatman caught an octopus off the other. Later when the boatman showed the young couple his catch, Abel told him he could take the octopus home for his family’s dinner. Later still, the boatman climbed a palm tree on a small islet and brought back coconuts. He hacked off the coconut tops with a machete. They all drank coconut water rich in coconut fat for their lunch. She remembered wondering not if there were sharks in the water, but why it was the sharks didn’t attack, and how it became likely or unlikely that would ever change. It was an exquisite day.

  They were back in the water snorkeling again. As Abel pointed out a barracuda to Hope, she was thinking, Nothing can hurt us here. Her feeling was contagious. She could feel him catch it when he touched her fingertips. Behind her dive mask, defogged with her own spit, she wept tiny tears into the big sea. She was stepping back from a ledge.

  Eventually, Nicholas and Abel had partnered to win the Polo Club bridge championship. After that Nicholas had invited Hope to join the small book club that was more intimate and more bohemian than the elitist English Speaking Union, which many of the other well-educated wives had joined. Nicholas hadn’t wanted Hope to get jealous, bored, or disaffected. He had had other plans for her. And then Hope had been medevaced from Manila to Nashville pregnant and allegedly ill.

  At the time she had burned her journal, Hope had thought Nicholas had had nothing to do with it. Now, staring at him from across the table at the Oak Bar, tapping on a photograph of a best day in her life, she wasn’t so sure.

  “You were dazzled and dazzling.”

  “We liked it that you let us think we were.”

  Nicholas placed a picture of Abel in a suit, standing in front of a flag— what looked to be his official White House or Pentagon portrait— next to the picture of Hope and Abel on the boat.

  “How did he get from that to this?”

  “Was Abel in the CIA?”

  “Yes.”

  “Abel was in the CIA?”

  “Or something very like it. You were at the funeral. Did it look like a civilian occasion to you?”

  “No.”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Why?”

  “How is the CIA any worse than White House special advocate at the Pentagon?”

  “I didn’t put it all together: September eleventh. Waterboarding, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib. Abel.”

  “What did you think White House special advocate at the Pentagon did?” asked Nicholas.

  “I think I thought he dealt with personnel matters. He told me he handled personnel matters. The army has a lot of employees, and provisioning . . . Abel seemed so incompetent,” said Hope.

  She sounded offhand and convincing. It was apparent to Nicholas that Hope had been lying to herself about Abel’s employment. What remained to be seen was how far, in the face of Abel’s death, she would progress toward abandoning denial. For the moment she was looking down and flushing.

  “You underestimated him.”

  “And?”

  “You hear the and. You were always so good at hearing the and. And I was in love with him. I will not divulge whether or not he was in love with me or whether or not we were lovers but I will claim I was in love with him,” said Nicholas. He turned the champagne bottle over into the ice bucket.

  “I thought you were in love with me,” said Hope.

  “There was that too,” said Nicholas.

  “We were very young,” said Hope.

  Hope let her face go soft. Nicholas had provoked her to remember an earlier self she had forgotten. She leaned in and kissed Nicholas on the lips. A woman’s kiss. For Nicholas it was something like tasting the will of the world to keep spinning; so different than what he tasted on the tongue of every man he still knew, the will to keep fighting to the end.

  Nicholas was starting to wonder if it might not be interesting to give women a second chance.

  “I think I might like to stay and see a bit of Nashville. And you,” he said.

  “Go home, Nicholas. I’ve got a family to tend to.”

  “You sound so black and southern.”

  “I am black and southern.”

  “I’m deciding between seeing what Abel would want me to see and seeing what I want to see,” said Nicholas.

  “What do you want to see?”

  “Where Abel grew up.”

  “What would Abel want you to see?”

  “Whatever is shiniest about the place.”

  “That used to be me. May I have the photograph?”

  “Wil
l you play tour guide?”

  “No.”

  “You may still have the photograph.” Nicholas picked up the snapshot of Hope and Abel on a boat in the sun and handed it to the woman who used to be the girl in that picture. Hope put it in her purse. Nicholas put the formal portrait of Abel back into his breast pocket.

  “Was that story about the priest and his concubine true?” Hope asked, but that was not what she was thinking about, not as she spoke, not as he gave his answer.

  “Of course. We wouldn’t have persuaded you to burn your writings and to stop writing with a lie. It’s a true story, just not the story of my house,” said Nicholas.

  Hope was thinking about perversions. And politics. It was hard to think about Abel and Manila without thinking about politics and perversions. Rebuff. Break my mind. How was all of this connected?

  Just as once upon a time someone had figured out that bright young women who had been sexually exploited by powerful, well-educated men, particularly fathers, would have both the temperament and the opportunities to make very successful assassins, someone had figured out that black southerners had a very complex relationship to law.

  People who have been tortured by the state make ideal just-inside-the-law torturers, just as people who have been tortured by people they love make excellent executioners.

  Children who have been hurt by strange and extreme acts grow into adults who want to believe that certain strange and extreme acts are not strange and extreme. An abused black southerner presented all kinds of interesting political possibilities.

  Who had exploited the possibilities? Hope didn’t know, but she suspected Nicholas might. Tomorrow she would try to find some time to squeeze him in maybe in the late afternoon if Ajay wanted to see friends and Waycross went out to his office. Hope wished she could meet Nicholas for breakfast. Once upon a time champagne in the early morning light with Nicholas had been a very good thing.

  Nicholas was thinking about the same very good thing. And he was thinking about marrying a woman. Maybe even having a child. An old man with a pocket full of money and a will to write can get a young and pretty wife in any nation of the world. Comes a time we all stop thinking about joy and love and start thinking about progeny.