News of the Spirit (20 page)

The man who touched my hair starts playing guitar, some kind of island stuff, he’s really good. Also he keeps looking at me and I find myself glancing over at him from time to time to see if he is still looking, this is just like seventh grade. Still it gives me something to do since the men are basically ignoring me, which begins to piss me off after a while since Mack is
not
ignoring the pretty waitress. The Negro with the guitar catches me looking at him, and grins. I am completely horrified to see that his two front teeth are gold. People start dancing. “I don’t know,” Larry keeps saying to Bruce Ware. “I just don’t know.”

I have to go to the bathroom again and when I come back there’s a big argument going on involving Mack, who has apparently been slapped by the pretty waitress. Now she’s crying and her mother is yelling at Mack, who is pretty damn
mad, and who can blame him? Of course he didn’t mean anything by whatever he did, he certainly wasn’t going to sleep with that girl and get some disease. “Goddamn bitch,” he says, and Bruce tells Larry and me to get him out of there, which we do, while Bruce gets into some kind of fight himself over the bill. These Negroes have overcharged us. Bruce’s behavior at this point is interesting to me. He has gone from his nice Marlin Perkins voice to a real J. R. Ewing obey-me voice.
Thank God there is somebody here to take charge
, I’m thinking as I stand at the edge of the jungle with a drunk on each arm and watch the whole thing happening inside the house like it’s on television. The ocean breeze lifts my hair off my shoulders and blows it around and I don’t even care that it’s getting messed up. I am so mad at Larry for getting drunk.

“You okay, honey?” Bruce Ware says to me when he gets everything taken care of to his satisfaction, and I say, “Yes.” Then Bruce takes Mack by the arm and I take Larry and we walk back down to the beach two by two, which seems to take forever in the loud rustling dark. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if a gorilla jumped out and grabbed me, after everything that’s happened so far! Bruce goes first, with the flashlight.

I love a capable man.

When we finally make it down to the beach, I am so glad to see our Negroes waiting, but even with their help it’s kind of a problem getting Mack into the dinghy, in fact it’s like a
slapstick comedy, and I finally start laughing. At this point Mack turns on me. “What are you laughing at, bitch?” he says, and I say, “Larry?” but all Larry says is, “Sshhh.”

“Never mind, Chanel,” Bruce tells me. “Mack’s just drunk, he won’t even remember this tomorrow. Look at the stars.”

By now the Negroes are rowing us out across the water.

“What?” I ask him.

“Look at the stars,” Bruce says. “You see a lot of constellations down here that you never get to see at home, for instance that’s the Southern Cross over there to your left.”

“Oh yes,” I say, though actually I have never seen
any
constellations in my life, or if I did I didn’t know it, and certainly did not know the names of them.

“There’s Orion right overhead,” Bruce says. “See those three bright stars in a row? That’s his belt.”

Of course I am acting as interested as possible, but by then we’ve reached the yacht and a Negro is helping us all up (he has quite a job with Mack and Larry), and then two of them put Mack to bed. “’Scuse me,” Larry mutters, and goes to the back of the boat to hang his head over and vomit. Some fiancé! I stand in the bow with Bruce Ware, observing the southern sky, while the Negroes say good night and go off with a guy who has come by for them in an outboard. Its motor gets louder and louder the farther they get from us, and I am privately sure that they are going around to the other side of the island to raise hell until dawn.

Bruce steps up close behind me. “Listen here, whatever your real name is,” he says, “Larry’s not going to marry you, you know that, don’t you?”

Of course this is none of Bruce Ware’s business, so it makes me furious. “He most certainly
is
!” I say. “Just as soon as…”

“He’ll never leave Jean,” Bruce says into my ear. “
Never
.”

Then he sticks his tongue in my ear, which sends world-class shivers down my whole body.

“Baby—” It’s Larry, stumbling up beside us.

“Larry, I’m just, we’re just—” Now I’m trying to get away from Bruce Ware but he doesn’t give an inch, pinning me against the rail. He’s breathing all over my neck. “Larry,” I start again.

“Hey, baby, it’s okay. Go for it. I know you like to have a good time.” Larry is actually saying this, and there was a time when I would have actually had that good time, but all of a sudden I just can’t do it.

Before either my ex-fiancé or his associate can stop me, I make a break for it and jump right down into the dinghy and pull the rope up over the thing and push off and grab the oars and row like mad toward the shore. I use the rowing machine all the time at the health club, but this is the first time I have had a chance at the real thing. It’s easy.

“Come back here,” yells Bruce Ware. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“Native,” I call back to them across the widening water. “I’m going native.”

“Shit,” one of them says, but by now I can barely hear them. What I hear is the slapping sound of my oars and the occasional bit of music or conversation from the other boats, and once somebody says, “Hey, honey,” but I keep going straight for the beach, which lies like a silver ribbon around the bay. I look back long enough to make sure that nobody’s coming after me. At least those natives can speak the King’s English when they want to, and I can certainly help out in the kitchen if need be. I grew up cooking beans and rice. Anyway, I’m sure I can pay one of them to take me back to Barbados in the morning. Won’t that surprise my companions? Since I am never without some “mad money” and Larry’s gold card, this is possible, although I did leave some brand-new perfectly gorgeous shoes and several of my favorite outfits on the yacht.

A part of me can’t believe I’m acting this crazy, while another part of me is saying, “Go, girl.” A little breeze comes up and ruffles my hair. I practice deep breathing from aerobics, and look all around. The water is smooth as glass. The whole damn sky is full of stars. It is just beautiful. All the stars are reflected in the water. Right overhead I see Orion and then I see his belt, as clear as can be. I’m headed for the island, sliding through the stars.

I may be old, but I’m not dead.

Perhaps you are surprised to hear this. You may be surprised to learn that people such as myself are still capable of original ideas, intelligent insights, and intense feelings. Passionate love affairs, for example, are not uncommon here. Pacemakers cannot regulate the strange unbridled yearnings of the heart. You do not wish to know this, I imagine. This knowledge is probably upsetting to you, as it is upsetting to my sons, who do not want to hear, for instance, about my relationship with Dr. Solomon Marx, the historian. “Please, Mom,” my son Alex said, rolling his eyes. “Come on, Mama,” my son Will said. “Can’t you maintain a little dignity here?”
Dignity
, said Will, who runs a chain
of miniature golf courses! “I have had enough dignity to last me for the rest of my life, thank you,” I told Will.

I’ve always done exactly what I was supposed to do—now I intend to do what I want.

“Besides, Dr. Solomon Marx is the joy of my life,” I told them all. This remained true even when my second surgery was less than successful, obliging me to take to this chair. It remained true until Solomon’s most recent stroke five weeks ago, which has paralyzed him below the waist and caused his thoughts to become disordered, so that he cannot always remember things, and he cannot always remember the words for things. A survivor himself, Solomon is an expert on the Holocaust. He has numbers tattooed on his arm. He used to travel the world, speaking about the Holocaust. Now he can’t remember the name of it.

“Well, I think it’s a blessing,” said one of the nurses—that young Miss Rogers. “The Holocaust was just awful.”

“It is not a blessing, you ignorant bitch,” I told her. “It is the end. Our memories are all we’ve got.” I put myself in reverse and sped off before she could reply. I could feel her staring at me as I motored down the hall. I am sure she wrote something in her ever-present notebook. “Inappropriate” and “unmanageable” are some of the words they use, unpleasant and inaccurate adjectives all.

The words that Solomon can’t recall are always nouns.

“My dear,” he said to me one day recently, when they had wheeled him out into the Residence Center lobby, “what did
you say your name was?” He knew it, of course, in his heart’s deep core, as well as he knew his own.

“Alice Scully,” I said.

“Ah. Alice Scully,” he said. “And what is it that we used to do together, Alice Scully, which brought me such intense—oh, so big—” His eyes were like bright little beads in his pinched face. “It was of the greatest, ah—”

“Sex,” I told him. “You loved it.”

He grinned at me. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Sex. It was sex, indeed.”

“Mrs. Scully!” his nurse snapped.

Now I have devised a game to help Solomon remember nouns. It works like this. Whenever they bring him out, I go over to him and clasp my hands together, as if I were hiding something in them. “If you can guess what I’ve got here,” I say, “I’ll give you a kiss.”

He squints in concentration, fishing for nouns. If he gets one, I give him a kiss.

Some days are better than others.

This is true for us all, of course. We can’t be expected to remember everything we know.

I
N MY LIFE
I
WAS A TEACHER, AND A GOOD ONE
. I taught English in the days when it was English, not “language arts.” I taught for thirty years at the Sandy Point School in Sandy Point, Virginia, where I lived with my
husband, Harold Scully, and brought up four sons, three of them Harold’s. Harold owned and ran the Trent Riverside Pharmacy until the day he dropped dead in his drugstore counting out antibiotic capsules for a high school girl. His mouth and his eyes were wide open, as if whatever he found on the other side surprised him mightily. I was sorry to see this, as Harold was not a man who liked surprises.