by Nicki Chen
He was clutching the steering wheel with both hands, leaning forward as though he could barely see through the rain-splashed window. “Just driving,” he said without inflection.
Giving him a sideways glance, she shook her head and sat back to wait for him to calm down. When she was a kid, sometimes her mom would get cabin fever. Then she’d tell Diana and Andrew to pile into the car. “We’re going for a ride,” she’d say, “just for the fun of it.” And it was fun. When you live in a small town surrounded by fields and forests, rivers and streams, you can just drive and drive, watching the world go by. But where could you go on a small island like this? And why go on a drive when you’re obviously still angry about that consultant?
Within a couple of minutes, the main part of town was behind them. They crested a hill and turned. Oh, great! He wasn’t heading for the Tassiriki house, was he? “Jay, where are you going? Why don’t we just go home?”
“Just give me some time, honey. I need to unwind.”
“But if you think the consultant is unqualified . . .”
“There’s not a damn thing I can do about it. Let’s just drop it.”
Even if he hadn’t been planning on visiting the Tassiriki house, his muscles remembered, and he turned into the driveway, kicking gravel all the way up the hill. Before she could say anything else, he was out of the car, dashing through the rain, balancing on the boards that served as a makeshift sidewalk to the back door. Oh, well. Maybe standing with Henri and watching the guys work would help him get his mind off things that were beyond his control.
Through the rain-streaked windshield, you could imagine the house as it would look when it was finished—the walkway leading to a wide entrance door, the white walls, the kitchen window. Though she’d told herself to stay away from this house, she was here now. And she was curious. Pocketing the car keys, she jumped out and ran through the warm tropical rain, careful not to slip on the boards.
She paused in the doorway, struck by how much the interior had changed since the last time she’d seen it. When Jay was away she’d driven by almost every day, but she hadn’t gone inside. Now, instead of the dull gray of concrete, the house sparkled with the white Italian tile they’d seen the men unload that first day. Perfect squares of white covered the entry, marched down three steps, and spread over most of the dining room where more stacks of tile waited to finish the job.
Diana wiped her feet on a mat and wiped them again. Then she turned into the kitchen. Oh my gosh! The cabinets were already up. A ni-Vanuatu workman was kneeling on the counter concentrating on laying a perfectly even coat of varnish on an upper cabinet. Completing a stroke, he turned and greeted her. “Moning, misis.”
“Moning.” She took a moment to stand where the kitchen sink would be and looked out the window. It was a comforting scene, a flat cleared area bordered by two huge false rubber trees on the right and a strip of jungle climbing the hill behind. A small area outside the window was set off with a low circular curb. If this were her house, she’d turn that space into an herb garden.
Escaping the cutting pungent smell of varnish, she gave a little wave to the worker and left. He really should have a protective mask, she thought.
Jay and Henri were standing in the dining room watching a couple of workers. They weren’t talking. And when they greeted her, both their faces looked drawn. Rainy-day faces. Construction-problem faces. Money-problem faces. Despite their sour mood, she stayed for a while, watching the men work. They were building the stairway to the upper suite, the man below, measuring and cutting the treads and risers; the man above, fitting and hammering them into place. It was an amazing feat, building a stairway in the air.
The living room floor was still unfinished, but the windows were in. One whole side of the room was floor-to-ceiling windows and sliding glass doors facing the terrace and the lagoons. She hoped Henri’s son appreciated all the care his father had put into designing and building this house for their family.
Rain fell in Vanuatu on a whim, Diana thought as they rolled down the driveway and away from the Tassiriki house. No big build-up, just a playful splattering of moisture, and then . . . poof. It was all over and the sky was blue again. At least that’s the way it had been since they arrived. “Henri seemed to be having a bad day.” She glanced at Jay, wishing his mood would blow over as quickly as a Vanuatu rainstorm.
“Yeah. He’s down in the dumps all right. Last night he got a call from his son, Antoine. The kid announced he wasn’t coming back to Vanuatu. His French girlfriend wants to stay in the French territory of New Caledonia, or better yet, move to Paris.”
“Oh!” Diana felt a surge of anger that a child could discard his parents so easily.
Jay sighed. “That’s love for you. Or the result of having a bossy girlfriend. Either way, he turned down a suite in the biggest, most beautiful house Henri ever built. That has to hurt.”
She patted Jay’s knee, as though he were the one who needed comforting.
“I get the feeling,” Jay said, “that Henri considers the house more than a milestone in his career. I think he sees it as a symbol of his plans for his family, for its growth and continuation and its expanding prominence in Port Vila society.”
They stared at the road ahead. She too had left her country with little thought for her mom, half a world away and living alone. Like lightning on a far horizon, the thought flashed past her and was gone. She had something more urgent in mind. She looked at Jay, raising her eyebrows in a silent question.
“Henri and his wife aren’t going to move into the house,” he answered. “He thinks it’s too big for the two of them.”
She frowned. “Did he actually say that?” Every time she saw Jay and the builder together, long silent stretches of time passed between them. They spoke in gestures and half sentences of French, English, and Bislama.
“Yeah. That’s exactly what he said.” He smiled for the first time since he got off the plane. “My high school French is coming back. Better yet, my ear is getting attuned to Bislama.”
Diana nodded. In the past two months, she too was beginning to get the hang of Bislama. “So, Henri isn’t going to move into his house.”
“He’s not.” Jay turned onto the road that led back to their apartment. “The house may now be available, and yes, we both love it. But, no, I didn’t bring up the subject of renting it. How could I? He and I are friends. I wouldn’t feel right jumping in to take advantage of his misfortune.”
37
She supposed it wasn’t surprising that Henri had been the first one to bring it up. His son may have spoiled his plans and broken his heart, but Henri was a businessman. And he liked Jay. A few days later on their next visit, he came right out and asked if they wanted to rent the house.
Still, Diana could hardly believe her ears. They hadn’t had to convince or cajole or even ask him. She wanted to stretch her arms out and twirl, to run up and throw her arms around Henri Nguyen’s neck.
Jay warned her off with a look. “We’ll have to think about it,” he said.
“What?” she whisper-shouted on their way back to the car.
“We should be sure about this, honey, before we sign. That’s all.”
“I’m sure. Aren’t you?” Why did he have to be so deliberate? Some things were just right. No need to think about it.
“Remember,” he said as they drove away, “the house won’t be done for at least another two or three months. If we sign the lease, we’ll be stuck in the apartment until after Christmas.”
It didn’t take long for them to agree that they were willing to wait. And by the end of the week, the lease had been drawn up and signed by all parties.
Diana suggested they celebrate with a dinner at Le Pandanus. She’d been saving the restaurant, said to be the most romantic in Port Vila, for a special occasion. An occasion exactly like this one.
Daylight was fading and the cicadas were already in full chorus when they arrived. “Something smells good,” Jay said
, wrapping an arm around her as they crunched up the walkway.
“Jasmine.” She peered into the garden beyond the torch-lit coral path. “Jasmine and rosemary.”
“Bonsoir, madame, monsieur.” A woman with a sophisticated smattering of white in her dark brown chignon greeted them at the reception desk. “Deux?”
“Oui,” Jay said, “two of us.”
She slipped some menus under her arm and turned, her black dress flashing rich aubergine undertones.
The dining room she led them through was dimly lit with flickering candles. It was still early by European standards, so it wasn’t surprising that most of the tables stood empty. Diana squeezed Jay’s hand and followed the woman out another door onto a patio with only two tables, one on either end. The woman motioned to a table that was close enough to the floodlit lagoon that they could almost dangle their feet in it.
“Cocktails?” she asked when they were seated. “Madame?”
Over the lagoon, the purplish-blue sky was receding, and the moon, still a pale slice of reflected light, was starting to claim its nighttime dominance. “Sangria,” she said, as somewhere in the world a bullfighter twirled and snapped his cape and the crowd yelled, “Olé!”
“I’ll have a scotch,” Jay said. “On the rocks.”
Le Pandanus straddled two great lagoons. The placid, mysterious waters ran for miles to the east and south of town before emptying into the Pacific. Despite the floodlight on the water, their table sat in near darkness, walled off by potted plants on two sides and a canopy of tree branches and hanging vines, so quiet and private they might have been all alone in the world.
“You know,” Diana said when the woman was gone, “this is exactly what I imagined Vanuatu would be like.”
“Eating out at Le Pandanus?”
“This spot, being here with you . . . I don’t know how to explain it. It feels like a scene from an old movie.” Their chairs were on the same side of the round wrought iron and glass table, placed there so they could both enjoy the view. When they turned to face each other, Diana noticed a softness in Jay’s eyes. “It does matter,” she said.
“What matters?” He traced her eyebrow with his finger.
“Our surroundings. The way they make us feel.” She looked up at the white moon, a ghostly cradle rocking above its reflected twin floating serenely on the water below.
Jay smiled and looked away.
“Dr. Feliciano was right. I was way too tense.”
He moaned, a tiny murmur of complaint.
She patted his hand. “The point is, feeling this way has given me hope. It means I’m capable of relaxing.” She paused, waiting for a response. When there was none, she curled her fingers around his hand and squeezed. “When we move into our house. . . .”
He pulled his hand away and sighed, loud and unequivocal this time. “Sweetheart,” he said, shaking his head. “When are you going to stop hanging your hopes on something outside yourself?” In the candlelight, his expression seemed to flicker from sympathetic to annoyed and back again. “It’s just a house. It won’t turn you into a different person.” He looked down and sighed again. “It can’t make you pregnant,” he said finally.
Her mouth fell open. “Why . . . why are you doing this? I thought we were supposed to be celebrating tonight.”
“Absolutely.” He leaned toward her. “But,” he said like a teacher instructing a dull-witted student, “we’re celebrating the signing of a rental contract, not the triumph of all our dreams.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?” Another sigh. “Sometimes, Diana, you scare me.”
“What?” she demanded. “I scare you because I’m happy? Because I have hope?”
“Because you’re obsessed with getting pregnant, because nothing else seems to matter to you.”
“That’s not true.”
He raised his palms in a gesture of disbelief. “Just a few minutes ago you described the house we’re going to move into as though it were a prescription written by your dear Dr. Feliciano, as though it’s nothing but a means to an end, some kind of magic elixir of baby-making.”
The sarcasm in his voice startled her. She sat back in her chair and tried to breathe. Of course she was concerned about getting pregnant. Concerned, not obsessed. And what if she were obsessed? She was thirty-five years old, almost thirty-six. What woman nearing the end of her fertile years wouldn’t be concerned?
“In case you haven’t noticed,” she said, “I seldom mention getting pregnant.”
“That’s just it. You don’t talk about it, but I know what you’re thinking, and you think about it all the time.”
“And . . .” She felt the tears starting. “You don’t think about it at all.”
“You don’t know what I’m thinking.”
She pushed her chair back.
“Diana . . .”
She had to get out of there. She grabbed the armrests, and even as she was rising off the chair, she saw herself running—hair flying, heels clicking on the tiles, barely touching the ground, past the woman at the front desk where she’d call a taxi. And then . . . at the thought of going back to Cloud Nine by herself, she sank down in her seat.
“Your sangria, madame.”
She caught her breath as a silvery-white hand reached past her shoulder with a little paper doily and a chilled drink. “May I take your order?” the woman asked.
For a moment Diana’s mind went blank. Then she picked up the menu and ran her finger down the list of items. “Smoked chicken salad,” she said. “No soup. Just the salad.” She handed the menu back and waited for the woman to leave.
“Beef Wellington,” Jay said. “Medium rare.”
“Ah, bon.”
Diana frowned at her sangria as the woman whirled away in a brief flash of aubergine. Then they were alone, avoiding each other’s eyes and staring at the lagoon. She plucked up the arrogant little straw that had been standing, all rigid and male, in the middle of her sangria, and stirred, beating the ice into a scarlet-tinged froth.
There were people in the next room now. Their voices intruded through the doorway, rumbling and then piercing, a man’s self-satisfied baritone followed by a woman’s annoying waterfall laugh. Diana wished they’d shut up so she could think. Or, better yet, not think. She filled her mouth again and again with the icy sangria, ignoring the freeze that penetrated the roof of her mouth and moved into her brain.
Why the hell didn’t Jay put his scotch down and apologize? She took a quick glance at his profile—the unblinking eyes and jutting jaw. If he didn’t say something soon, she was leaving. She braced her hands against the edge of the table. She needed to get out of there—to run and run and never stop. No taxi, no destination. Circle the island and just keep going.
She sighed and settled back in her chair. It was a satisfying fantasy, but it wasn’t in Diana’s nature to walk in circles, and she knew it. Her life had been all about getting somewhere—to college and then grad school, a good job, a promotion, marriage. And right now she was directed toward one and only one destination: getting pregnant.
She wished he’d stop shaking his ice cubes and look at her. She gurgled air up her straw along with the last of her sangria, and still he stared at the lagoon. Who was this man?
A current of cool air brushed across the back of her neck and over her chest and shoulders. She put a hand up to her neck to warm it, but her hand was cold from holding her drink. She rubbed both hands together. The once-picturesque lagoon was deeply black now, nothing but wild bush on the other side, that and, she supposed, a few natives, descendants of cannibals. She felt her foreign-ness as she hadn’t since they arrived. Without Jay, she was all alone on this strange little island. If he didn’t love her . . . or she didn’t love him . . . and how could she know? She hunched forward and crossed her hands over her chest. How could she conjure up loving feelings when the only things that came to mind were his rants and his devotion to work and the way his eyes glazed over whe
n she talked to him? This was the man she was supposed to be in love with?
Stop, she told herself. Enough. She did love him. She had to.
Oh my god! She took a deep breath. She couldn’t . . . absolutely could not think of him that way. She looked at Jay and then lowered her eyes when he turned to her and smiled. Thank goodness he didn’t know where her mind had been heading. She’d been moments away from casting him as the necessary means of achieving her goal. Maybe he was right to call her desire for a baby an obsession. She couldn’t let go of it, though, not even for a minute. She needed to make it happen.
Over the lagoon, a sinister little cloud floated sideways, its forward end poised to pierce the moon’s perfect curve.
The food arrived. French bread. Sliced tomatoes and garden fresh greens. Diana’s smoked chicken and Jay’s beef Wellington, both of them elegantly presented. Jay picked up a knife. Diana broke off a chunk of baguette.
“Want a bite?” Jay stabbed some beef he’d sliced off and held it out to her. The meat was wrapped in a flaky pastry with a layer of pate that smelled of garlic and buttery mushrooms.
She shook her head. Don’t try to pretend we’re not in the middle of a fight, she thought.
He tried to strike up a conversation about the origin of beef Wellington, who it was named after, and whether or not it was originally a French dish. And all she could do was nod. She didn’t care a fig about the history of his food. He tried again, this time something about Vanuatu’s cattle industry. But she was shaking inside, wondering why she was still sitting there toying with her salad. Wondering how she’d convinced herself that she still loved him. Eventually he gave up trying to engage her in conversation, and they lapsed into silence until they were done eating.
Then Jay pushed his plate back and pointed at the sky. “See that cloud on top of the moon?” It was the same sinister little cloud she’d seen before, but by now it had morphed and moved until it was balanced on top of the moon. He smiled as though everything should be all right by now. “It looks like a visor on a baseball cap,” he said.
