“Please sit down,” he says in what he thinks of as his Hollywood voice. Charming and jaded. “You are beautiful. Absolutely.”
“You such a polite mahn,” Melandra answers coyly. Harter hears the staged quality in her voice but he’s too far gone to infer anything from it. “Shorty say you lookin fah me. True?” She pulls a chair next to his and sits down, crossing her legs so that the skirt of her dress falls away, exposing one leg fully up to her hip, the other almost so, and the elastic fringe of a black G-string. Harter tries to keep his attention from this area, knowing that he must produce some facsimile of romance and sensitivity if this is all going to work right.
Melandra’s surprised that he’s as handsome as he is, and as drunk. She expected some pasty bastard, dressed like an off-duty cop, a good decade older than Harter, sober enough still to enjoy the nasty little routines that men buy women for. She thinks maybe she might be interested in Harter under different circumstances. His eyes aren’t totally cold like she imagined, but green and cautious and lonely. Maybe she can talk him out of this foolishness, let him buy her dinner tomorrow night; Short Shoe can keep his monkey, and she can go home to bed.
Harter unfreezes, reaches over and grabs her arm, not painfully, but hard enough to annoy her. Her first instinct is to slap him. She stops herself—it’s too easy, it might well do more damage to her than put anybody in their place. Harter and Short Shoe would shrug it off, absolved, and she did not want that, she did not want to defer to stalemate or forgiveness. Not this time. Not against a monkey. It’s clear that the only way out of it is her way.
“I—love—you,” Harter says, as though he has searched long and hard for each word.
“Is daht right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, love mus have its way,” she says, throwing her arms around his neck, tugging him forward, smothering his mouth with hers, her tongue driving, she hopes, far enough down his throat to choke him. Harter’s bewildered resistance lasts about two seconds. He never knew he had it in him, that any man had it in him, but he feels as if he’s about to swoon. Melandra is running her fingers through his hair, raking his scalp mercilessly with her sharp fingernails. His lips are being pulped by her forceful kisses. His eyes are closed and feel like they are never going to open up again, as though there’s some electrical glue being pumped into him. It all feels so natural, so deep, so meant to be. He’s lost in what he believes is the sudden inevitably of their passion, lost to the world, sailing on some mythological ghost ship with the Queen of Africa. He slips a hand under the top of her dress and clutches one of her breasts. It is hot. Her nipple feels like a pencil eraser.
Melandra’s hand glides from Harter’s shoulder to the top of his shirt. She pops all of the buttons in one aggressive rip, peeling his shirt back so she can rub and knead his bare chest. A groan hums in the back of Harter’s throat. There’s some thought, some urgent information, trying to form in his head but he can’t make it clear. Baby, he gasps, but then his mouth is locked up again by Melandra’s. Her hand crabs its way down his tan stomach. Before it registers with him, his belt is unbuckled, his fly unzipped. Her hand snakes into his linen pants and grabs him. The vague feeling he’s been trying to define spears through the darkness like a spotlight. Not here, he shrieks to himself. The light dims, the power fails. This is Harter’s last coherent thought of the evening.
Melandra cocks her head slightly, steals a look out of the corner of her eye at the faces gathering around her. They affect her the same as any audience does: A part of her performs for them, a part of her sits back and observes it all ambivalently. She’s as good an actress as she is a singer, lets her imagination accept whatever role is required of her—Shorty’s stupid onstage games have at least given her that. Her hand works deftly, conscientiously; she hopes the rings on her fingers aren’t bruising the man too terribly. She imagines she’s rubbing ointment on a baby’s arm, or milking Momma’s cow, which is easier because of the noise Harter is making. She suppresses the desire to fall out of her chair laughing; Short Shoe’s foul covenant has the right-of-way here. Harter begins to arch his hips off the chair. Melandra stops, but too late, for the spasm has begun. She wonders if she should feel sorry for him for what she’s about to do. It’s a curious thought, and maybe some other time she’ll allow herself to explore it. But right now she imagines the cooking peppers bursting one by one.
You are sulking, having one last Banks before you call it a night and head back to where you’re staying. Most of the jazz musicians have sidled up to the bar around you. Short Shoe’s there with them, showing off the monkey. You’d like to talk to them but you can’t think of anything appropriate to say, something to let them know you’re not just another drunk tourist hanging on the bar. The trumpet player strolls in from outside, a generous grin on his face, and announces loudly, “Look here, check this scene out on the balcony.”
Everybody moves out from the bar and you follow them. Before you can even get outside, Short Shoe is already pushing his way back in, a grim, uninvolved expression on his face, muttering Dread, dread. He hurries for the exit, wearing the skinny string-bean monkey like a necktie.
There’s hardly room for you on the small balcony. Beyond the weak illumination provided by a single, bug-swarmed light bulb above the doorway, the night is at its darkest point. You squeeze through the crowd, excusing yourself, begging the pardon of those you perhaps shove more than you should. You break into the front line. The sight of Melandra fondling Harter before your astonished eyes turns your heart upside down.
“Mmm hmm, lookit that gal bone the chicken,” one of the gray-haired musicians next to you drawls. “Gawddamn, that looks good.”
Harter might as well be knocked out. His head lolls over the back of his chair, his arms and legs sprawl out to the sides. Melandra has moved away from him just enough so the audience can witness this most flagrant of hand jobs, delivered under the auspices of Melandra’s professional devastating smile. As Harter begins to ejaculate, the spectators clap and hoot. Harter reacts to the noise as if it were cold water. His head snaps straight, his eyes click open wide with horror. You watch the stain on his pants spreading and think, oh yes, this is a fine specimen of sin and shame in front of you. Harter stares dumbly down at his lap, at the dark relentless hand that still grips him. He tries to wriggle backward, to get the hell out of there, but Melandra has him tight.
“Fellas,” she calls out triumphantly, “look aht dis little vahnilla bean.” She waves Harter’s prick at them, which can’t seem to lose its erection. “Looks like it might be ready fah busy-ness, if de boy evah grow up.”
She wags him stiffly at one or two faces. “Somebody got a nice disease dey cahn give dis mahn? Something to help him remembah dis ro-mahnce?” Harter struggles up. Melandra plants her free hand on his chest and shoves him back down.
“Monkey,” she hisses, pointing at Harter. “Womahn,” she says, jerking a thumb at herself. She repeats the distinction: Monkey. Womahn. “Lissen to me, fella. Monkey ahnd womahn doan mix. It seem you make a big mistake. Now get you ahss away.” She releases him and steps back, her arms folded over her breasts, glaring at Harter, threatening him with every last ounce of trouble she can.
You shudder, regaining your senses, tasting the bitter-sweetness of such severe and utter humiliation. But you have to hand it to Harter. He doesn’t panic. He composes himself quickly and with, you must admit, a certain amount of dignity. Slowly he puts himself back together, beginning with sunglasses which he takes from his shirt pocket. He lights a cigarette. Only then does he straighten out his torn shirt, and only after his shirt is right does he return himself to the sanctuary of his linens and zip up. When he is finished, he stands solemnly in front of the gathering, exhaling the smoke from his State Express. You suspect he is going to speak, but he only shrugs, offering a half-smile that concedes the evening to Melandra. Then, with athletic sureness, he vaults over the railing of the balcony to the street below and is gone.
>
Months later, in a bar in Mustique or Negril or maybe St. Lucia, you hear the end of the story. Someone who knows will tell you that in Port of Spain, at Short Shoe’s first performance at the Boomba Club, the Calypsonian was attacked by a man in a gorilla suit who proceeded to beat him with a stick. And Melandra, the fellow at the bar will say, has signed a solo contract with Mango Records. They even gave her her own backup band to tour with. She has a new single that’s just been released.
“Maybe you’ve heard it already on the Voice of the Antilles,” the guy says. “It’s called ‘Troff de Monkey.’ ” Sure, you tell the guy, waiting for the foam to settle in your beer. You’ve heard it. Throw off the monkey.
The Heart’s Advantage
Lindy, I said, are you even there? Get up and let me in the door. It was a Saturday morning, not so early. I’d been away in Africa for a month, a hired hand for the government charged with spreading money across the Sahel, the only green they’ve seen there in generations. The ticket was appropriate technology, the words that make clouds of cash wing across oceans to rain change down upon the lives of other men.
I pounded on the door and shouted but it was a full five minutes before I heard her on the other side clawing at the deadbolt. I had been in the air for eight hours. My shirt was like wet celluloid layered to my back, and my intestines gurgled, invaded by microbes. There was a clear joy in me to be back home.
“Lindy?”
“Just a minute. I don’t have my contacts in.”
“What are you doing in there? Were you still asleep?”
Yes, she was. Lindy, a determined early riser, had to be roused. The curtains were still drawn, the house itself in a soporific state. When the door cracked open, I felt an alien proliferation spreading out of the cool dimness beyond. Then she stepped forward and I saw her hair.
For months she had been fussing about a perm, tearing through women’s magazines, pricing some of the shops in Coral Gables, pausing in front of mirrors to study herself. I chastised her for being indecisive and said quit whining and just go do it. I don’t know, she said. There’s no going back once they squirt the gunk on. What if I don’t like it? What if you don’t like it? Take a chance, I advised. You’re adventurous. Only stop throwing yourself around and sighing.
“You don’t like it, do you?”
She looked like a juju queen. Wrapped in the bars of her yellow, blue and green terry robe, she appeared untended, underslept, last night’s makeup rendering her face experimental, ghoulish, asymmetrical. Her myopia gave her an intensely dazed stare, and one smudged eye looked a centimeter or so off from its set. She needed a good wipe.
“Dear God, what have you done?”
I could not speak in a calm voice about her once precious hair. Why is the head of a treasonous woman shaved? Why else butcher and abominate those delicate threads if they are not emblematic of her soul? Women used to bundle, braid and bind their tresses, let them tumble down at night for their husbands, the first gift of bedtime. They washed their hair lovingly with exotic soaps and rare milks, spiced it with mint extracts and herbs, stroked it over and over into glorious waves, scintillating spills, their proud crop, heavenly curtains parted over the cold fact of the face so that even the ugly could take advantage and be redeemed by exquisite curls. So it is that we soon become estranged from women who allow their hair to depreciate.
Lindy had hair the color of an Irish setter’s, a singular color to be envied, no matter that it is the color of a dog. It was as rich in sight as a brogue in sound, a visual lilt. It crowned her in thick and luscious loops that swayed on small shoulders. You can imagine the pleasure of having it fed to your lips, or seeing it glide strand by strand across the taut cone of a nipple and gather between breasts, watch it open and close the rapture of her face. I smelled long life there in Lindy’s hair, good-heartedness and babies. And I felt, as she approached permhood day by day, she will honor her sex.
She did not. To my horror she did not. What I now observed through a dulling shock was a pumpkin-headed debutante of naughtiness, her tresses lopped off inches from her skull and spiked like a guard-dog’s collar. The spikes were needle-tipped and apparently simonized so they would hold their shape, and there was a hatching grid of distasteful white scalp around the base of the roots.
“You don’t like it.”
I said That’s right. I said You bet I don’t. By her tone it was obvious that she knew I didn’t—had known I wouldn’t—and had prepared herself not to be affected by my reaction. She arched her eyebrows defiantly and stepped back to let me in. Her arms were crossed on her chest, but when she moved, her hands dropped unconsciously and the robe fell open.
“You’ve slept in your clothes, I see.”
She glanced down at herself and frowned.
I am a happy witness to the caprice of fashion but I believe each generation identifies itself and marches on, true to its code. Lindy wore one of those crotch-high synthetic knit babydoll dresses—low-waisted to a flounced skirt, a loose bodice shaped like a sack, spaghetti-strapped, the style popular among tough high school girls who gag at the idea of cute. The fabric was the color of spotted banana peel with broad stripes of tinsel running through it. She had gone beyond vogue, gone a step past the glamour of the magazines.
“You look eighteen and dirty.”
She folded her robe closed stoically and tied herself in, the cinch of the belt making the outline of her hips appear. The terry knot bulged with the foretelling of permanence. “Come in,” she said. “The air conditioner’s on.”
There are moments, even days—longer still, phases—when we’re not ourselves, when we inhabit foreign moods and obscure desires. We’re somebody else for the duration. Blame a planet or odd chemicals in the breakfast cereal. I’m not referring here to such temporary phenomena. I’m talking about a genuine change of character, like a color television transmuting to black and white without hope of repair, or a nation falling from the grace of its past. What is Persia today, what is Egypt? That’s what I mean. Something, from all evidence, irreversible. A cheating, a betrayal.
Lindy’s reluctance to let me back in—no hungry kiss, no hug of relief—made me suspect, together with her wretchedly flamboyant hairdo, that she had been unfaithful, not sexually, but to the life we had fabricated as a couple. Decisions with impact had been made that I knew nothing about. Suddenly I was an occupying force, she le résistance. It was a flat way to come home from abroad, dragging my absence like a bum who had attached to me.
She whirled toward the bedroom and I tramped straight for the bath, where I showered petulantly. Not to be found in its dish was my brand of soap. I scrubbed myself with something similar to a hunk of potter’s clay, the lather no more than oily flecks of foam. Searching through the medicine cabinet for a Q-Tip I discovered a sinister rainbow of nail polish, the shades of Lindy’s current fascination—Avocado Whip, Midnight Scream, Angel’s Throat, Chocolate Bunny. A bright undented tube of spermicide mystified me. Lindy had been on the pill when I departed in June. In place of her round hairbrush was a rattail comb and a squat jar of gel treatment labeled Spic n Spike. Whoa, stop, I said, sliding the mirror back carefully, my breathing shallow.
I emerged fresh, clad in navy running shorts, resolved to adjust to Lindy’s remarkable appearance now that the shock had withdrawn, diluted by clean pearls of North American public water, the common blessing of comfort. In the Sahel you go unwashed for as long as you can or people object. Lindy was in the kitchen seated at the table, her eyeballs lacquered into focus, her legs crossed once at the knees and again at the ankles, everything otherwise the same. She blew steam off a cup of coffee. A second cup sat waiting for me. I wrapped my grateful fingers around it, thinking nothing had really changed after all. I lowered my head, waiting for the resolution and the nerve to look at her once again, this time honestly, prepared for kindness. She tapped one foot and sniffed.
“So how’d it go?” she asked.
“I now have seven
native wives.” I diverted a cruel thought—each less garish than you.
“I bet you do.”
“Actually, it went okay. Nobody believed in the windmills. We drilled deeper and I designed a prop that generated more rpms. They now have a few drops of water to fight over, and we have more money for the boat. So goes the division of wealth in the world.”
She sipped her coffee, her expression unchanged. I kept staring at her, the familiar core. Somewhere there beneath the trendy masquerade was my personal historian and bookkeeper, my partner in escape from various numbing realities, the only person in the globe whose ear I dared whisper into, my night-stilled companion, my arm crooked on the future. Nostalgia took its gummy bite. But then I thought, thrill to this, thrill to this, man, she’s a strange presence that bears your mark.
“So how was it for you? Did you miss me?”
“A month’s a long time,” she answered cryptically.
“I missed you. I did. Really.” The emotion stalled in my voice and the words blanched. I regretted opening my mouth—no songbird had flown out, only the processed warbling of mealy notes. I wanted to hear an appetite in her voice. I wanted the distance reconciled, the love more splendid for all the anticipation absence had forged. I want it, I thought, battling resentment, like the last time I came home from who knows where.
She cocked her head. The spikes rotated like a satellite positioning itself to fire laser beams. She grimaced, her eyes showing a small impatience for what I had said or how I had said it. I had been standing, hesitant, but now I sat down next to her at the table.
Easy in the Islands Page 8
