Daughters of the Revolution (11 page)

That was the first year of CNN—news all the time. Ronald Reagan campaigned for president; a volcano erupted in Washington State; America boycotted the Olympic games in Moscow to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon. News spooled out all year, twenty-four hours of every day. I paid little attention; in fact, the constant stream of news drove me deep into
Moby-Dick
, which turned out to contain some fairly urgent dispatches.

3
.

I took a taxi down a boulevard of dying palm trees and checked into the Hotel Pamplemousse—“the most economical lodging on the island,” according to the brochure. Lizards clung to the stucco walls and occasionally leapt upon cockroaches, which stood like islands in the linoleum sea. Young women swam in the pool all day, or chatted with men, and I realized from their qualities of earnestness and cheerfulness that they were probably prostitutes. While I unpacked, the bellman unlocked and opened the door to the room without knocking. He walked in, farther in than necessary, and held out a thin towel. Unnerved, I sat down at the desk and wrote a postcard to Jess: “The Hotel Pamplemousse is a hellhole. It’s the sort of place where the bellman walks into your room unannounced and without knocking and offers you a towel, then leers into your suitcase. Hope you have better luck in Denver.” Denver … it occurred to me that I did not have Jess’s address in Denver. She hadn’t given it to me; I hadn’t asked.

I left the postcard on the desk and went out, past the lizards on the stucco walls, down some dank steps and into the town, where I walked up and down along the quay. I walked until dusk through a neighborhood of brightly painted bungalows with rotting front steps, losing and then finding my way. Finally I turned into an alley that looked as if it might be a shortcut back to the hotel.

A boy—a man in the provisional way that I was a woman—immediately seized me by the arm. There were other boys in the alley, each of whom looked about twelve years old. They all wore brightly colored print shorts and no shirts. “This is a bad
street,” the boy-man whispered confidentially in accented English, as if he knew all about the possibilities of the humid little city. “The knives,” he said, “are in the pants!”

He walked with me down the alley, past the boys, who whispered suggestively, and into the main street. I’d been right about the shortcut: The Hotel Pamplemousse stood serenely on the corner. We sat in the lobby. He told me his name was Fabio; he came originally from Italy, where he’d been crushed by lack of opportunity. He talked urgently for an hour about the dangers of the island, the sights and his qualifications as a guide: “I am no smoker, no drinker. I employ my time.” He told me about a boat I must take to the island across the bay—the best beaches, the best swimming. “You walk down the beach as far as you like. Nobody there,” he said. “You are solo, alone.” We sat together demurely in the lobby; then Fabio insisted on taking me out to dinner. “It is necessary that you permit me the pleasure,” he said.

We went to a place called La Chatte, where we drank strong rum drinks and ate steaks. It was the best restaurant I had ever been to—white tablecloths, cloth napkins. In one corner of the dining room, near the bar, a dance floor glowed under the glittering facets of a disco light. A beautiful woman, Chinese, dressed all in red, wearing a black eye patch over one eye, danced there alone.

Fabio told me different, slightly conflicting stories about himself: He’d lived on the island for a year; he traveled often; he studied business in Italy and lived with his mother amid the magnificent artistic patrimony of Perugia. His white shirt glowed blue in the light; he smelled of cologne. He ordered for both of us and commanded me in his beautiful accented English to eat and drink. “You must feed
your body
,” he said, as if my body were a hungry animal. Some people expressed themselves sensually, I realized. They tasted their food, enjoyed their bodies,
liked being looked at. As we walked out of the restaurant after dinner, Fabio pointed to the woman wearing the eye patch. “Watch out for her,” he said.

“Why?”

“She is sometimes my lover.”

We walked through the warm, dirty streets back to my hotel. Fabio took my arm, a gesture I didn’t expect, and walked me up the steps of the Pamplemousse. Inside, he steered me into the seedy bar off the lobby, where we sat down on a vinyl sofa and he ordered two coffees. I’d been on the island for about five hours and felt amazed by the progress I’d made.

“What do you do here?” I asked him.

“How do I say? I am sometimes a gigolo,” he said. He took my hand when he said it, his face very serious. “You understand?”

“You mean women pay you to make love to them,” I said.

“Sometimes, yes,” he said, “it’s true.”

“Well, I’m not going to pay you to make love to me,” I said.

“Not necessary,” he agreed.

Ordinary conversation was impossible between us. That helped. He wore his body like beautiful clothing made just for him. He covered me with it, then pulled back so we both could see. It was the first time I felt part of a human transaction, sexually, and not as if I’d simply given over the insistently desired thing. He put one hand between my legs and said, “Show me her.” And I did. A dense, surprising pleasure ran like current between us. Communication improved. Against the silence of the room I listened to the sounds we made—wet, generative sounds, as if we were actually melting into each other. I realized what this was: I invited Fabio to enter me, and he entered the vast, indefinite interior. For a little while the terrible lonely immensity of my body was colonized, filled with Fabio’s uncircumcised and lively penis and something else, my heart fluttering in the dark space like a cornered butterfly. I envisioned
my individual life as a dark belly from whose depths I might occasionally reach a hand to another person. My body spoke to Fabio with thrilling directness. His fingers entered my mouth and ear, and moved communicatively.

In the morning, my new lover was gone. I put on my bathing suit and dropped a towel, suntan oil and
Moby-Dick
into my straw bag. While I brushed my teeth, I found a watch on a shelf above the sink, a heavy, expensive-looking lattice of gold and platinum. It chilled me to find a piece of Fabio left behind, and I left the watch where I’d found it. On the ferry, I wondered, What if the bellman steals the watch? What if Fabio blames me? On the island, a long allée of palm trees led to a loud knot of sunbathers on the beach. As Fabio had suggested, I walked until the bathers were no longer in the picture and laid my towel on the sand.

I opened up
Moby-Dick
and read “not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment.” The line’s delicate resonance induced a pang of complicated pleasure and opened up new vistas in my mind, from which I was immediately distracted by Fabio standing above me, serious in the sun.

He peeled away his jeans to reveal a European bikini. A waiter from the cabana walked the quarter mile down the beach with an empty tray on his palm and offered cocktails. Fabio said no, the beach was not to drink, and the waiter retreated.

“You will have lines on your body if you wear a bathing suit,” Fabio advised.
Your body
. He removed a watch from his wrist and laid it on my straw bag.

“Is that your watch?” I asked him. “You left it in my room.”

“No problem,” he said. “I go there.”

“How did you get in?”

“The bellman is kind and allows me to enter,” he said, and untied my top.

In the afternoon, we walked back to the boat together. Fabio said he had a
faccenda;
he would come to the hotel later. I took myself out to dinner at one of the overpriced cafés along the promenade and read
Moby-Dick
until the words grew too dim to see.

Hours later, the door to my room opened suddenly—a bright window in the dark. I thought it must be Jess just back from her carrel at the library. But Jess turned into the bellman standing in the door. I jumped up and ran at him violently with my fists. “Get out! Get out!” The door closed in my face. “Sorry, sorry—wrong room,” the bellman said, and left me pounding at my own door.

Thereafter, I slept less.

I spent the next day at the same spot on the beach, reading
Moby-Dick
in the sun and vaguely expecting Fabio. The man from the bar walked the quarter mile across the sand with a tray balanced on his palm and asked if I’d like a drink. Out of compassion, I ordered a rum and tonic. (He walked back across the sand, then returned again with the drink, then walked back across the sand to the bar again. Still later, he returned, inquired about my well-being and took the glass away.) I went for a swim. Later, while I ate a conch burger at the bar, the stool next to mine toppled over with a great noise. I’d been too engrossed in my book to see what happened—maybe I had kicked it. I recognized the Chinese woman with the eye patch walking calmly away from me toward the ocean. She wore a red bikini and a rope of pearls around her waist and enormous sunglasses and tall espadrilles. I picked up my napkin and saw that someone had scratched the words
FUCK US
into the wood of the bar with a knife.

At the hotel, I found Fabio sitting at my desk, looking out the window at the swimming pool.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I came to make love to you,” he said.

“You take your work too seriously,” I said. “You’re too used to being needed.” I sat down on the bed and took off my sandals.

He stood up and held out a small box wrapped in paper. “For you.”

I didn’t reach for the box—for some impersonal, irrelevant gift.

“You are married in the U.S.?” he said.

“Of course not.”

“So why do you come to the island, to meet new people?” He ran one finger slowly down my face and put the box in my hand. It wasn’t really wrapped; all I had to do was lift the lid. Chocolates.

“Baci,”
he said. “Sweet kisses to remember me.”

“Thank you,” I said, repelled by all these ideas—chocolate, sweet kisses, Fabio as a memory.

He put his cool hands around my sunburned back. “I don’t want that you forget your boyfriend,” he said. “I want only to feel hot with you.”

Next day the same: Fabio gone when I woke. I took the boat to the island again, walked through the allée of palms and spent the day reading
Moby-Dick
in the sand. I returned to my room around four o’clock and found Fabio sitting in the window, watching the women swim in the pool. He had a kitten in his lap, scruffy and black, wild and terrified—he must have picked it up in the street on his way. “I have you a gift,” he said.

“Are you crazy?” I said. “What am I going to do with a cat? I’m leaving in two days.”

He made a gesture with his hands that demonstrated the infinite possibilities of a kitten. “
La chatte
keeps you company
when you are here, and then you can take it home on the airplane,” he said.

“I can’t take
la chatte
on the plane.”

He shrugged. “When you go, you put it on your little balcony and tell it to find a new house.”

We sat on the bed in our underwear, the kitten purring between us. “I cannot stay with you tonight,” Fabio said. “The Chinese lady feel jealous. This because she have buy me a car, a nice Trans Am.”

La chatte
’s legs and paws stiffened and trembled as it dreamed. Fabio swept it from the sheets with the back of his hand and the creature meowed and ran under the bed. I reached out for him from the dark well; I could almost see my hand rising up from that darkness, groping its way toward Fabio’s skin.

We spent the next day sunbathing. He watched while I read
Moby-Dick
. Fabio never read anything; he was a master of repose. Late in the afternoon, he said, “You became red as a langoustine.” It was true. That night, he stayed in the room and ran ice down my back. The ice felt cold, but Fabio’s body radiated a kind of insistent heat.

When I woke again, dawn had turned the sheets an eerie blue. The kitten mewed from under the bed.

I may have been delirious, sunstruck. Fabio and the Chinese woman seemed to be in my room, the Chinese woman doing exactly the things with Fabio that I had done, and Fabio repeating every gesture: his hand around her hair, his fingers in her mouth. Up close, she and Fabio were not as glamorous as I’d first seen them; they had missing teeth and holes in their heads, skin scraped off, scabs. I realized I had lost my ring of keys, so I climbed into the rickety elevator, which no longer operated smoothly on its pulley, but lurched down. When I went outside the seedy lobby, I saw my keys glowing on the dirty ground before me, a miracle.

It was only a heat delusion. I found my own keys—a different
set from the keys in the dream—safe in my straw bag. I put on my warmest, loosest clothes and kept turning pages of
Moby-Dick
. When Fabio let himself in, I got up from the bed and stumbled into him. He sat me back down and began to pull my sweater over my shoulders.