by James Morrow
“Quetzie is a handsome devil.”
“There’s no disputing it.”
“Quetzie is a handsome devil.”
“That will do,” Londa said, and Quetzie apparently understood her—at any rate, he dropped the subject.
“I’d like to see your homework,” I said.
Londa sighed and rubbed up against the conquistador’s breastplate like a house cat alerting its owner to the menace of an empty food dish. “Your chapter on the Stoics—I’m not sure how to put this—it simply amazed me. My pathetic essay doesn’t begin to convey what it’s like to meet a mind like yours.”
“Chapter four isn’t about my ideas. It’s about the Stoics’ ideas.”
Quetzie hopped from Londa’s shoulder to the conquistador’s helmet. “Mason is a genius,” the iguana announced from his new perch.
I furrowed my brow and groaned. “Did you teach him that dubious proposition,” I asked Londa, “or is it merely something he overheard?”
She smiled coyly, then approached a massive writing desk, ornately carved with flowering creepers—I imagined some mad Caribbean poet at work there, scribbling the national epic of Isla de Sangre, a phantasmagoria of mutant lobsters, sentient mangroves, talking iguanas, greedy conquistadors, and mysterious concrete walls—and retrieved a printout from the top drawer. Retracing her steps, she transferred Quetzie back to her shoulder and presented me with an essay titled “In Praise of Adversity.”
“While you were slaving away on this, I had something of an adventure,” I told her. “I was hiking along the beach and suddenly found myself facing a high concrete wall. Do you know about it?”
She pursed her lips and shook her head.
“Evidently it runs far into the jungle. I climbed over—”
“I thought it was high.”
“I used a tree. And you’ll never guess what I discovered.”
“The Fountain of Youth?”
“A large house—big as Faustino. Bigger, even. A villa.”
“How strange.”
“A little girl lives there. She calls herself Donya. Is that name familiar to you?”
“I don’t think so. Donya?”
“That’s right.”
“Since I hit my head”—Londa gulped loudly, as if swallowing a horse pill—“I’ve forgotten so many things.”
“Is it possible you have a little sister named Donya?”
She blinked in slow motion. “Mother says I’m an only child. What makes you think this Donya person is my sister?”
Londa’s morality teacher now proceeded to lie to her. “A wild hunch. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“Shit, I hate it when the amnesia takes somebody away from me. I goddamn fucking hate it.”
“For what it’s worth, I believe you’ve never met the child in question.”
“Know something, Socrates? I’m not enjoying this fucking conversation one little bit.”
“Mason is a genius,” the iguana said.
“Shut the fuck up,” Londa said.
Quetzie took flight and landed atop the globe, perching on the North Pole like a gigantic vulture about to devour the rotting carcass of planet Earth. I apologized to Londa for introducing such a painful topic, promised never to do so again, then suggested that while I negotiated “In Praise of Adversity,” she should amuse herself with a book of her own choosing. She ambled to the fiction collection, plucking out Pride and Prejudice, and we sat down together at the reading table.
I was barely two sentences into Londa’s essay before realizing that she was uncommonly skilled at articulating her thoughts on paper: not a complete surprise, given the many acres of text she’d soaked up of late—though, God knows, my Watertown High students had rarely made the leap from reading lucid prose to writing it. Her last paragraph struck me as downright eloquent.
Above all, the Stoics sought wisdom, a condition that I myself hope to achieve after I stop wrecking and burning things. While I can’t claim to understand this philosophy, despite Mason’s dazzling overview, I imagine there must be great rewards in living one’s life by Stoic principles. Am I equal to the challenge? There’s only one way to find out.
During the ten minutes I spent with her essay, Londa reached the midpoint of Pride and Prejudice.
“You’re a good writer,” I told her.
“You think so?” she asked. “How good?”
“Very good. Excellent, really.”
“I’m not as good as this woman,” she said, tapping her novel. “Jane Austen makes me believe that Elizabeth Bennet is fucking alive.”
“A pithy tribute, Londa, but how about curbing the profanity?”
“Okay. Jane Austen doesn’t make me believe that Elizabeth Bennet is fucking alive.”
I rolled my eyes and snorted. “You clearly got a lot out of my Stoicism chapter. But there’s a small problem. From these pages it almost sounds as if you intend to become a Stoic.”
“Of course I do.”
“Stoicism died out fifteen centuries ago.”
“Quetzie is a handsome devil,” the iguana said.
“As a matter of fact, the experiment has already started,” Londa said with a disconcerting grin. “Yesterday at lunch I had a smaller piece of pecan pie than usual, and I passed up the scoop of vanilla ice cream entirely. It’s like I said in my essay. ‘Just as nature abhors a vacuum, a Stoic abhors satiety.’ What’s more, as you may have noticed, I’ve stopped smoking.”
“But not swearing.”
“I’m working on it.”
“And how long do you plan to pursue this project?”
“Long as I can. The hardest part will be to stop masturbating.”
“I see.”
“I’m rather well informed about sex,” she told me, as if I’d said she wasn’t. “I’ve read all the books. Fanny Hill. Justine. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I know there’s a positive side to fucking, but on the whole it’s messy and dangerous, wouldn’t you say?”
I swiped my tongue across the roof of my mouth, as if to detach a popcorn husk. “Messy. Dangerous. Yes.”
“A person could get a venereal disease.”
“This is true.”
“Do you have a girlfriend, Mason?”
“Not right now.”
“What about in the past?”
“Several girlfriends. You wrote a marvelous essay.”
“Did you fuck them?”
“We’re drifting away from the topic.”
She snickered and said, “Stoicism: putting pleasure in its place. The Stoics believed that in bearing pain without complaint, a mortal might transcend the mundane world and enter the eternal matrix of divine thought—so that’s part of my experiment, too.”
“What is?”
“Pain.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Pain is part of my experiment.”
Several harsh and foreign chemicals flooded into my stomach. “Pain has nothing to teach you, Londa.”
“Not according to chapter four.”
“The Stoics did not deliberately hurt themselves.”
“I intend to build on their work.”
The chemicals roiled around, interacting with the native acids. “Listen to me, Londa. You will not, under any conditions, you will not hurt yourself.”
“Last night I snuffed out a candle with my hand.”
She held up her left palm. A shudder of alarm passed through me. At the juncture of her head line and fate line, the very spot I’d massaged twenty-four hours earlier, lay a stark white blister.
“Fuck,” I said, frightened and confused but mostly angry.
“A useful word, huh?”
“I don’t believe this.”
“I moaned and whimpered, but I didn’t shriek. I also did stuff with a rose thorn.” She extended her right thumb. An angry red welt was blooming beneath the nail.
“Christ, Londa, I think it’s infected!”
“It hurts like hell.” She sounded pleas
ed. “Later today I’m going to sit in the conservatory and push a sewing needle through my tongue and open my heart to the divine matrix.”
I clasped Londa’s shoulders and shook her, rhythmically, emphatically, as if I might dislodge her fantasies as I would a quarter stolen by a vending machine. “You will not push a needle through your tongue! Not today or any other day! You have to promise me that!”
“This is really important to you, isn’t it, Mason?”
“Promise me.”
“All right, if that’s what you want, I promise.” She approached the world-eating iguana and gently stroked his tail feathers. “But I don’t see how I’m supposed to get cured if I can’t take my lessons seriously.”
WE PASSED THE REST OF THE MORNING in a heated and unhappy conversation, during which I tried convincing Londa that a person could comprehend a moral principle without becoming obligated to act on it. After a two-hour debate, she finally conceded that self-mutilation was not essential to the pursuit of ethics, but her words sprang more from acquiescence than assent. Before our next meeting, I told her, she must reread chapter four, searching for the nuances she’d missed the first time around, the better to benefit from our upcoming Stoicism role-playing exercise.
I did not so much leave Faustino that afternoon as flee it, seeking the buoyant company of Donya and the Edenic serenity of her tree house. Jogging frantically along the beach, I vowed to begin Friday’s lesson by inspecting Londa’s tongue and every other part of her that lent itself to scrutiny. If I saw the slightest evidence of violence, I would probably conclude that I was out of my depth, return to Boston, and send Edwina an e-mail advising her to replace me with some fuck-the-Enlightenment Lyotard disciple from Vassar.
By the time I reached the concrete wall, a storm had broken over Blood Island, not quite a Gulf hurricane but still fearsome, with lashing winds and sheets of rain, and I was not surprised, after scaling the rampart and surveying the banyan tree, to find Donya’s little elevated cottage empty. I proceeded to the villa. The doorknocker was a brass quoit fixed in the jaws of the same Aztec god who decorated the portal to Faustino. I banged the ring forcefully, thereby setting Donya’s Doberman to barking.
“Omar, be quiet!” came a man’s voice, chirping through the loudspeaker above my head.
“It’s Mason Ambrose. I’m a friend of Donya’s.”
“Your reputation precedes you.”
Omar kept on barking. The door swung back to reveal the frantic dog, bouncing up and down, bellowing madly, not far from canine hysterics. Holding Omar’s collar was a portly middle-aged man who introduced himself as Henry Cushing. His beard was white, his brow sunburned, his manner genial: a Santa Claus for adults, I mused, bringing tax refunds and nonaddictive hallucinogens to good grown-ups everywhere. Whatever explanation this fellow might offer for Edwina’s schizoid approach to parenthood, I would take it at face value.
At last recognizing my scent, Omar grew calm.
“When I saw Donya escorting you to the tree house, my impulse was to run over and check you out,” Henry said. “But she and Omar had obviously found you acceptable”—he released the dog’s collar—“and they’re both excellent judges of character, so I decided not to intrude.”
“She charmed me off my feet.” I staggered into the foyer, carrying with me a condensed edition of the outside storm, the rain spouting from the sleeves of my anorak to form puddles on the stone floor.
“Preschool children,” Henry said, “they’re one of the better things in the world—wouldn’t you agree?—like red wine and New Yorker cartoons and Christina Rossetti. ‘When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me. Plant thou no roses at my head, nor shady cypress-tree.’”
I peeled off my soggy jacket and hung it on the coatrack. “You left out George Gershwin.”
“Don’t tell Brock. He’d never forgive me.”
“My lips are sealed.”
“‘Be the green grass above me with showers and dewdrops wet. And if thou wilt, remember. And if thou wilt, forget.’”
Omar returned to his post, settling down on the rug before the door. Henry led me into a Gothic parlor, its fluted pillars ascending to a vaulted ceiling, its stained-glass windows thrusting ever heavenward like rectangles who’d found Jesus. Dressed in an oilcloth smock and gripping a paintbrush, Donya stood before an artist’s easel, staring at a half-finished watercolor of Deedee the chimpanzee. Her subject sat two feet away on a Windsor chair, self-possessed as only a professional model or a stuffed animal could be.
“Donya, look who’s here,” Henry said.
“Mason!” She dashed across the room and threw her arms around me as if I were Edward Bear himself, dropping by for a game of Candy Land. “I’m so glad to see you! I told Henry and Brock all about our tea party!”
“The social event of the season,” I said.
“Look what Brock’s building for me!”
She led me to the far corner, where a man in his early forties, handsome as Dorian Gray, was methodically adding tiny trees to a miniature amusement park spread across a plywood platform. This raucous and frenetic marvel, as lovingly detailed as the Lionel O-gauge electric train set I’d inherited from my grandfather, featured a Ferris wheel spinning in place like a vertical phonograph record, a six-horse carousel rotating to the tune of “The Washington Post March,” and a roller coaster subjecting a dozen diminutive passengers to its scale-model vicissitudes. As I gaped in appreciation, the tree planter introduced himself as Brock Hawes, “the sensitive half of the relationship, Henry being in charge of dental appointments and balancing the checkbook.”
“Donya, will you excuse us, darling?” Henry said. “The adults need to talk.”
“I want to stay here,” Donya said.
“Sorry, tomato,” Henry said.
“You can’t make me go.”
“Donya…”
“If you try to make me go, I’ll tell Mommy you were mean to me, and I’ll do other stuff you won’t like either—with matches, maybe, or scissors.”
“Know what, Donya?” Brock said. “I’ll bet you a million dollars there’s something yummy in the fridge, second shelf down on the right.”
“You can’t make me do anything. What’s in the fridge?”
“I forget exactly,” Brock said, “but there’s some major yumminess involved, I promise you.”
Donya pirouetted toward the kitchen, moving so gracefully I wondered whether Henry and Brock’s curriculum might include ballet lessons. Omar, stretching, rose from his rug and followed his mistress out of the room.
“The person who hired you—she claims to be Donya’s mother, right?” I asked.
“Edwina Sabacthani,” Henry said, nodding.
“Edwina,” I muttered. So much for my theory that Donya’s mother was Edwina’s twin sister. I could imagine a Monty Python routine about twins with the same first name, but I doubted that the practice flourished on Isla de Sangre. “I’m working for her, too.”
“We know,” Brock said. “Donya told us.”
“Are you by any chance a connoisseur of children’s television?” Henry asked. “Professor Oolong’s Oompah-pah Zoo?”
I shook my head.
“For six years running, I was Professor Oolong on Nickelodeon, but then the ratings went south, and I became plain old Henry Cushing, unemployed actor. This job has been a gift from heaven. Edwina’s nephew used to enjoy my antics every Saturday morning, and that was recommendation enough.”
“I was hired to tutor an adolescent named Londa,” I said.
“Londa Sabacthani,” said Brock. “Seventeen years old. Donya’s got a fabulous memory. She showed you a photograph of her mother.”
“Who looks exactly like Londa’s mother,” I said. “Apparently our students are sisters—half sisters at least.”
“Are you merely tutoring Londa,” Brock asked, “or would it be more accurate to say you’re rehabilitating her?”
“Rehabilitating, yes,” I said. “A div
ing accident resulting in cerebral trauma. The symptoms include severe amnesia plus—”
“Let me guess,” Henry said. “Alienation, anomie, and sociopathic behavior.”
I frowned and nodded.
“In other words, Londa woke up without a conscience,” Brock said. “Donya has the same deficit.”
“So I hear,” I said. “No rectitude. What a strange coincidence.”
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence at all,” Henry said. “It appears that Edwina has been playing games with our heads, and her children’s heads, too, and maybe her own head as well.”
“Did Donya also have a diving accident?” I asked.
“Supposedly she fell off her bicycle,” Brock said.
“Londa has inherited her maternal grandfather’s gift for speed-reading,” I informed my new friends. “And Donya?”
Henry hummed in corroboration. “Yesterday she got through Heidi in fifteen minutes. This morning she devoured The Secret Garden in ten.”
“Did Edwina ever mention a second daughter?” I asked.
Henry and Brock shook their heads in tandem.
“When I had tea with Donya, she told me she’s an only child,” I said. “Londa believes the same about herself. Evidently Edwina makes a point of it.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Henry said.
For the next half-hour, we attempted to construct a coherent narrative that would account for the bizarre domestic arrangements on Isla de Sangre, but far from dissolving the mystery, we only deepened it. Our employer’s nomadism had us especially confused. Just as I’d assumed that Edwina resided exclusively with Londa at the moldering estate called Faustino, so did Henry and Brock believe she was permanently ensconced with Donya at Casa de los Huesos.
“Apparently she spends much of her time on the move, a peculiar lifestyle for a person allegedly in poor health.” Henry flipped back the top of the carousel and removed the mini-CD. “Proposition, Mason. While the cat’s away in Chicago, why don’t we mice spend Saturday afternoon exploring the island?” Receiving my nod, he smiled approvingly, then inserted a disc labeled “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” into the carousel. “I can’t speak for you or Brock, but I won’t rest until I’ve figured out precisely how many daughters Edwina has, and who their fathers are, and why the hell the children aren’t supposed to know about each other.”
