“Probably not.”
“Unfortunate Negroes in America are more unfortunate than unfortunate white people in America.”
“I’ve heard Abel say that so many times.”
“Now you’ve heard me.”
They flew from San Francisco to Tokyo on a 747 with a staircase that led to a lounge. She drank Baileys Irish Cream in the bar. He drank champagne and orange juice in the big leatherette seats.
Hope had never known, and never was to know, a person who took as much plea sure in commercial aviation as Abel did. To speed on one’s way with a toilet and a kitchen, with pretty women to serve you, in always integrated splendor; to be able to sit in the big seats in the front just because you could pay; to be, takeoffs and landings aside, completely safe, or at least as safe as anyone—these were among his favorite things.
They changed planes in Tokyo and landed in Manila. She woke up the first day with a mosquito bite on her eyelid. Her eye was almost swollen shut. It was as if the planet didn’t want her to be happy or easy.
SEVENTEEN
THEY LIVED IN a compound, owned by the U.S. government, called Sea Front that neither of them quite liked. He found it a bit plebeian and felt slighted that they hadn’t been given a town house, which he understood after a week in Manila to be the compound’s best living quarters; she found the compound confined and militaristic. The fact that a single married marine lived next door irked them both. That first night they didn’t know any of this yet. They just moved into the temporarily furnished apartment on the compound determined to bloom where they were planted and opened the trunk.
She was proud of her trunk. She had black plastic dishes, Hellerware, and some wonderful espresso cups that a friend’s daughter had collected flying on Pan Am in the sixties, and the Lyles’ fat funny little teapot, and packets of tea, and her silver, and even a small tablecloth and napkins, and two hand-embroidered pillowcases, and tins of soup and smoked oysters.
That very first night she was able to make dinner for her husband. They sat out on a screened porch and drank soup and ate smoked oysters and she said, it’s all going to be OK. For after dinner she had a tiny silk nightgown and The Thirty-Nine Steps. They both went to sleep happy. She woke up with the swollen eye and a paranoia that had invaded her with the mosquito juice.
Abel was gone when she awoke. She had slept longer and deeper than she had expected. Quickly attributing her drowsiness to jet lag, she examined her eye. Swollen till it had a single eyelid fold, the eye looked Asian. It was as if she had gone to sleep and half-changed ethnicities. The eye itched; she scratched it. The eye stopped looking Asian and started looking angry and red. Hope found a pair of sunglasses and put them on her face. It was far ruder to eat in public showing that angry eye than to wear sunglasses inside a building.
“Do you think he drugged me?” asked Hope.
“Possibly, but probably not,” said Nicholas.
“Do you think he brought in the mosquito?” asked Hope.
“I think he was a spy and now you’re a paranoid ex-wife,” said Nicholas.
Then there was nothing to do but walk over to the club and order and eat her lunch alone. She took with her the materials provided in the apartment, the papers that had been folded into a welcome basket and that told her all about the club and the women’s club and the shopping.
The club looked like any half-fancy country club built in the sixties, all poured concrete and glass. She was told she could sign her name rather than pay for anything; she was told that this was the one place in Manila where she could drink her drinks iced. When she asked the waiter if there were any local items on the menu, he smiled and said calamansi soda and fried lumpia, and so she had a kind of lemonade and cigarette-slim eggrolls for her first lunch in the Philippines.
It was before cell phones and voice messages, but when she got back the phone was ringing and some local hire, in the administration area, was calling to invite her to the office to pick out things for their new home. The U.S. government in its infinite wisdom had decided it was more efficient to buy them new furniture than to ship their possessions across the world.
All at once they would have everything new and superficially perfect. Someone said it was a little like having rich parents.
From a big book with drawings of furniture and fabric swatches, Hope chose a pink and green Chinese-looking tropical fabric palette and black lacquer furniture. With a living room, dining room, bedroom, guest room, and office to furnish, Hope was finished in an hour. Once the furniture had been chosen, the admin officer was ready to help set up maid interviews. Somewhere distant, but on the compound, was a little warren of rooms where their maid would sleep, after they chose her.
Hope wondered how it could be that she had traveled across the world to awaken in a place where people thought it fine to pay a maid two hundred dollars a month and have her work every day of the week. Going along she hired Ting Ting: the whole thing was too much like West Virginia.
That fall, after the revolution, after falling into friendship with Nicholas, after all that was her Manila, just before she knew she was pregnant, Hope baked Abel a flan for his birthday in Manila. She put sparklers into the pudding.
That night after they made love he kissed her between her legs for an hour. It was the first time after their wedding that he had saluted her sex with his mouth in that most intimate fashion. After that they kissed, mouth to mouth, and she tasted herself on his tongue. When she wiped a tear that ran from his eye off his cheek he said nobody had ever bothered to notice he hadn’t eaten a bite of a slice of birthday cake since he’d turned thirteen years old. “Until you. Until now.” Abel loved Hope that night.
“What happened on your thirteenth birthday?”
“Somebody burned a cross on our lawn.”
“Oh, God.”
“No God. I knew.”
“And you stopped eating birthday cake?”
“I couldn’t swallow it after that.”
Nicholas didn’t know that story. He understood Abel’s atheism to foreshadow and balance Abel’s overzealous evangelical Christian promise keeping. He found it touching. In exchange he told Hope a story he hoped she would find touching. Abel hadn’t destroyed her naked pregnancy-belly photographs as he had promised at the time of the divorce. He had had them photoshopped so that it appeared she was wearing a discreet white Victorian gown and he had kept them in a black portfolio along with pregnancy pictures of Sammie. Hope wasn’t sure whether that was touching or alarming. She decided to let it be touching.
EIGHTEEN
AJAY WAS BORN in Nashville. Three weeks later the little family flew to New York, where Abel was assigned to the United Nations.
They lived in a duplex in Chelsea across two gardens from the famed Chelsea Hotel. Abel was working long hours at the UN, leaving early and coming home late.
After her husband went to work Hope fed the baby, then took the baby on a walk through the garden of the Episcopal Theological Seminary, then fed the baby and put the baby to sleep. While Ting Ting tidied the house and kept watch over sleeping Ajay, Hope would take herself out to breakfast, usually a place called the Chelsea Café, where she saw, or imagined she saw, Kinky Friedman every morning eating breakfast. Not infrequently friends would come to see the baby on their lunch hours. More often friends would come for a viewing and stay for dinner. Ajay, the first baby in their group of friends, coupled to Hope’s home cooking, was quite the attraction.
Except to his father, who left for work before the baby was awake and came home after he was asleep. And when the baby woke up howling in the middle of the night—he slept in a Moses cradle by the side of their bed—Abel didn’t stir. Hope was never alone that fall in New York, and she was seldom with Abel.
It was an overblown time in the life of the world. Banker boys preposterously calling themselves “Big Kahunas” and “Masters of the Universe” attempted to seduce all, indiscriminately, into entering the masculine fairy tale of money mat
tering fundamentally.
Hope had entered into an ancient feminine fairy tale. Her baby was a wilderness and she got lost in it. For her it was a raw and simple time. Her nipples hurt and her cesarean wound itched, but she was enchanted by her journey into the much-charted but still entirely mysterious territory of a baby boy who wakes every four hours hollering for mommy and milk.
Abel missed his own birthday dinner because he was working late. When he finally got home the guests were already gone, and she tried to make a party for two, inviting him to enter her body for the first time since the baby’s birth.
Wanting to spare Abel the sight of stretch marks and pounds that would be shed soon enough, wanting a period of sole possession after having shared her body for forty weeks with the baby, she had not been quick to return to the role of lover.
The birthday was a catalyst. She attempted a seduction. They tumbled timidly.
The coupling only lasted a few minutes but the immensity of the event eclipsed her sense of the immensity of her body and his sense of the immensity of her abandonment. They were doing what had got them the baby and what had got him a birthday. It was a powerful doing and being and knowing. He tried to sip on her breast. She playfully pushed him away and playfully bit his shoulder; she was pulling him back to her, trying to create a gesture that was loverly not motherly, when the baby cried in another room and her milk let down. The sex that had been delicious a moment earlier became for them impossible. When she returned to the bed he was asleep.
On Monday, October 18, 1987, the day appointed for the second attempt at an Abel birthday party, later to be called Black Monday, the financial markets loudly expelled a goodly amount of what ever it was that had been keeping them overinflated.
Hope didn’t notice. She was busy grocery shopping and cooking a second birthday dinner. Come seven, all the regular guests showed back up for Abel’s second bite of the birthday apple— and this time the guest of honor made it.
Stocks and money were the talk of the evening. In his cups, Abel got almost snarky about being “just a government worker, a not-invested nobody,” then he turned bitter, making jokes that weren’t funny about the baby losing all his money and Hope losing all of hers. When the entire table, except Abel, agreed the only thing to do was leave everything where it was, Hope was relieved. First because Abel shut up and second because leaving everything where it was was all she had the energy to do.
After Manila, after the United Nations, after what she thought was some language training in Washington, D.C.—but Nicholas thought probably had been language and other training in Washington, D.C.—Abel arrived in Martinique before his wife and son.
He moved into a rambling bachelor pad overlooking the bay. The apartment that had so thrilled the previous political officer (it was close to the nightlife of Fort-de-France, to the dance clubs where the zouk pulsed until the short hours of the night turned into the long hours of morning) disappointed Abel. He hated the low-walled balcony; he hated the dodgy neighborhood. Nothing about the rooms seemed appropriate to what or how Abel understood his position to be.
He wanted a house in the beke community. He wanted to live among the old money of the place, or so he said, loudly and widely. What Hope understood was that he wanted to live among the white descendants of the aristocratic French planters.
By the time Hope arrived, Abel had a reputation as a braggart, a boozer, a cheat (this third she never knew), and a pretty, pretty boy who knew just how pretty he was.
Even so, Abel was invited everywhere and not just because he was the chief political officer of the Ca rib bean. He was invited because he was chief political officer of the Ca rib bean, because he was serious about nothing but having a good time, and because everybody wanted to be a guest at Hope’s house.
Hope was a surprise. They had taken bets about Abel’s wife. Half the town thought she would be white, perhaps some trippy, tiny California girl, from a rich family, who smoked pot and had had an adolescent crush on Bobby Seale. That kind of white American girl, the kind whose parents had taken her to vacation in Martinique in the seventies and eighties, was the kind of American girl Fort-de-France knew. Others thought he would have married a black woman very much like himself, with very light skin, perhaps with green or blue eyes, a lawyer or a doctor, someone precise and professional, someone to keep him in check.
Black or white, she would be pretty and as stupid as a bright woman could be, an ornament to hang on his arm and look up adoringly in his face. Pretty but thick.
Perhaps she was thick, but only if you were thinking about thighs. By the time she arrived in Martinique, Hope had taken much of her baby weight off. But upon her arrival there was consensus among the chic beke ladies and the chic-chic brown ladies that her curves needed editing.
After a few parties the ladies changed their minds. Too much of Hope turned out to be a good thing. Abundant hair, abundant smiles, abundant laughter, abundant breasts, abundant hips, abundant knowledge, abundant thoughts equaled a compelling diversion. The town stood corrected, and amused Martiniquais enjoyed a surprise. The doors of the city opened wider to Abel.
You are my key. He said this to her a month after she had arrived on the island. He was whispering into her ear. Then he was drawing his tongue across the side of her face, leaving an invisible trail of his saliva from her ear to her mouth that opened wide for him.
When she poked her tongue into his mouth he knew what she wanted, but first he sucked hard on her tongue, like a hungry baby. She didn’t like that but he didn’t notice. She did what she could to make him feel big and clean and significant. She surprised him with flicks and nips till he abandoned every concern but how long he could last before he came and the pleasure ended. She worships me. You are my key, she said to him, spreading her legs.
The black sand of Martinique makes promises it does not keep. It promises that it will never let you go. It promises that it will always call you back. Pays revenants. It promises that you will always be beautiful. It promises that the world does recognize the prize of darkness as equal to, if not greater than, the prize of lightness. And because it makes those promises, and because she did not know that they would be broken, or how soon they would be broken, for a few hours Hope lay upon the volcanic sand and dreamed her last dreams of the bedazzled.
She imagined staying on the island. She imagined speaking a French that her servants could untangle, that her best friend, CeCe, would not mock. She imagined meeting Gauguin’s daughter, or great-granddaughter, who would be brown and round and brilliant and would take Hope into some old Creole house, some abandoned place, and there on the walls would be paintings of a brown round woman who was wholly beautiful in her lover’s eyes— and wholly unconcerned with his judgment.
She read Wide Sargasso Sea and determined that she wanted to write a screenplay of the book, only to discover, in expensive long-distance phone calls that she insisted on paying for out of her own money, that an Australian director had already optioned the rights.
Trying to inspire his wife back to sculpture, after she’d been distracted (by a revolution, an illness, and a baby) away from the work he perceived to be most compatible with his own, Abel told Hope about William Edmondson.
Edmondson, the black Nashville sculptor who had been given a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1937, intrigued Hope immediately.
Hope began to move past imagining herself to be an artist, to being an artist. In addition to her own objets she started sculpting funeral pieces for people who could not afford a monument, and giving them away.
To celebrate their anniversary they took a sailboat, the Seastar, across the Ca rib bean. She danced in Basil’s Bar in Mustique, and climbed over the desert cactus landscape of Little Palm Island. The waters that had compelled Lafcadio Hearn compelled Hope and Abel too.
She liked the Caribbe an better than the South China Sea, better than the Sulu Sea. She had swum joyfully in those Asian Crayola-box blues with the n
eon fish in the southern islands of the Philippines; but she preferred this bleu of Gauguin and Hearn and Césaire, probably because she had not sinned in it. They were no longer brazen enough or simple enough to make love in the water two feet beyond the boatmen.
But more than the colors of the waters it was the colors of the people that compelled her, bronze and black and cream, every shade of chocolate, flavored her evolving sense that the Martiniquais had found some way to be at once wholly African, wholly French, and wholly Creole.
Some days she encountered this as a rebuke not to her experience but to her American people. Where DuBois had spoken of double-consciousness, what she encountered in Martinique, over and over, was something quite opposite: people inhabiting multiple identities at different times.
She had a new ambition: to inhabit, at once, multipleness. She read Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon and thought about her own history in a whole and new way, but this was not the most important thing she had to think about.
Abel was not falling in love with the baby, Ajay. Hope sensed, then feared, then refused to know, that he had concocted a reason for them to travel down on separate planes because he didn’t seem to be able to stand to fly with his child.
He said that the baby’s crying embarrassed him. He offered Hope a hundred foot massages, without question, if she would, without question, fly with the child alone.
“Has it occurred to you that Abel wanted Ajay on a different plane because a different plane was safer?”
“Did it occur to you that Abel wanted Ajay on a different plane because he hated riding in cars with his daddy?”
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