A Trip to the Stars

by Nicholas Christopher

  The pathologist and I never once went out that week. From the hospital I drove straight to his house in Lihue. He brought home takeout food. I smoked dope. He drank white wine from an iced glass. We stripped and got into bed in his cluttered bedroom. His skin was very pale, except for his face and forearms, because he rarely went out in the sun. From the constant scrubbing with antiseptic soaps, his fingers were especially soft and white. His dull brown eyes seemed to be floating in his face. I felt utterly removed from my body even while absorbing myself in its rawest sensations: my spasms of pleasure were short-lived, insulated, numbed by pain. He felt and fingered, sucked and licked me, and he fucked me, standing up, lying down, on the floor, on the bed. We exchanged only small talk, and even that in small doses. I felt he could have gone on with this arrangement indefinitely. And me? I didn’t know. Then, on our seventh night together, we woke a couple of hours before dawn, fucked, and sat up in bed talking—a first. This time I drank with him, and as always with wine, two glasses went right to my head.

  He ended up telling me, with sudden fervor, that after cutting all through the human body, exploring the remotest nooks and crannies of bones and organs and magnifying single cells a thousandfold, he had never found any evidence of “what people call the soul. If it’s there,” he added acidly, “its primary trait must be that it evades detection.”

  I was surprised and offended in a way that I hadn’t been by his blunt, nonstop appetite for sex. Despite my general torpor, my detachment from myself, a line had been crossed. His words made me feel, more than ever, that in his embrace my body was no more than its physical components. I didn’t bother to share with this man all those definitions of the soul I had read in Cicero. (What would a pathologist say to Empedocles’s notion that the soul is the blood in our hearts?) I believed I had seen human souls, in all their complexity and elusiveness in the recesses of my X-ray plates. But I was not about to tell him that. So why, I asked myself dully, was I allowing him to enter my body.

  To his bewilderment, I jumped out of bed, gathered up my clothes, and hurriedly dressed. Had he proposed more sex two minutes earlier, I would have acquiesced without a second thought, but the one time he actually revealed something of himself it sent me flying from his door. With tears running down my cheeks, I made my second late-night drive up the coast in as many weeks. I never spoke to him again, and at the hospital he avoided me (no doubt wondering why the raw sensualist he had thought me to be would get so riled up over metaphysics) and looked away when our paths did cross.

  The second doctor, whom I took up with a week later, was the one who had his eye on me from the first, serving on the advisory board when I was hired. That was his first impression of me—all dolled up—and evidently it had stuck. Cat-like, he had been waiting for the moment when I was dazed and disoriented enough so that he could pounce. Unlike his predecessor, he certainly believed in the human soul, and was very interested in mine—but only as something he might devour or destroy.

  His name was Francis Beliar and he was a hematologist. My relationship with him lasted six months—the last six months of his life, as it turned out. In some ways, it was the pathologist redux, but with far more trimmings, more camouflage, and a great deal more surface charm concealing far deadlier manipulative powers. From cheap motels to the luxury resorts in Poipu, his accountant’s office in Kapaa to his cabin cruiser docked at the marina, using elaborate aliases and sometimes even disguises, we shacked up all over the island. Several weekends we hopped interisland flights, and posing as honeymooners, or a doomed couple—one of us dying of a fatal disease—or whatever other deception Francis found stimulating at the moment, checked into a resort. On Oahu, for example, we took a suite at the gaudiest hotel on Waikiki and Francis told people we were a married couple making a last-ditch attempt at staving off divorce, and then for two days we screwed on an oval water bed. It was under such circumstances that I first visited, and promptly forgot, some of the other islands—Maui, Molokai, Lanai.

  I didn’t see Francis daily. Sometimes a week would go by. But when we did meet, the elaborate lies and feints he employed with me, his wife, his longtime on-and-off mistress, and his more occasional and even more secret girlfriends, were sometimes breathtaking in their audacity. Gliding between ever-shifting circles of secrecy was his true pleasure; sex was merely the compass with which he drew those circles. To him, the game was everything, and he liked it best when he could include a cast of supporting players. But in the end it was always a tawdry game. At times, he might have wanted no more than to fuck you in a deserted parking lot in the dark, but he’d get you both there with enough plotting and deception to fill a detective story. By comparison, my “fling” with the pathologist seemed tame. If I hated myself when I first got involved with Francis, by the time we were done with each other, I was pushing the envelope of my self-respect. Hard.

  Francis approached me on King Kamehameha Day in June, the island’s biggest holiday, at the hospital’s annual barbecue. He was holding a sprig of yellow ginger and smiling. I was standing by the entrance to the tent that had been set up on the lawn. The tent was crowded and noisy, and quite openly he held the sprig over my head, told me it was Melanesian mistletoe, and kissed me on the lips. At the time, I thought it was cool. During my first year at the hospital, when he had business in the X-ray Department he would stick his head in my office to offer a pleasant greeting. But that was all. In the corridors, he nodded hello, at most. I knew little about him except that he had an attractive wife with money of her own and two daughters in college. Also, that Dr. Prion didn’t like him, but never told me why. Distinguished looking, slim and tall, a tennis player—doubles always—with a thatch of fair hair going white at the temples, Francis was fifty-two years old, twice my age.

  We slept together the day after the barbecue. And it took less than a month for me to realize just how uncool Francis was when I caught him out in a flagrant lie involving another woman—another man’s wife. Of course I knew he lied to his wife reflexively, and to hotel clerks and friends alike, but it was the first time he had lied to me. Still, it didn’t deter me from seeing him again. What did I care if he saw other women? Or committed adultery. That’s what I was doing, after all. I pretended to discover what I surely knew from the first: it wasn’t that he should not be trusted, but that I ought to distrust him actively. And for whom, for what part of myself, was I pretending?

  Two months into our liaison, he proposed that we take another woman to bed with us. I played his occasional blindfold and handcuff games, but this I declined, and he dropped the subject at once. Soon afterward, when we were registered in a suite at the Hyatt in Poipu as father and daughter—another favorite masquerade—he said he was calling down for a masseuse. I should have known at once that the woman who came up to the suite was not a hotel employee, but I swear that whenever I was with Francis, I didn’t see things clearly. It was as if I always had those ophthalmologist’s orange drops in my eyes that dilate your pupil. But it was worse than that. Francis was a special kind of hematologist, I realized—one who literally got into your blood, like a vampire.

  We had been drinking champagne—he knew it got me drunk right away—and after leaving the masseuse and him in the bedroom, I smoked a joint laced with black hash in the bathroom and took a shower. He had said he’d be waiting for me—loosened up—when I got out. To take my time. When I returned to the bedroom, it was pitch dark. I was very high. Francis called me to the bed. I slipped in beside him, under the cool sheet. He put my hand on his cock, which was already hard, and then another hand—not his—stroked my leg. I cried out.

  “It’s all right,” Francis purred. “Nina is a friend. And she’ll do only what we ask her. Isn’t that right, Nina?”

  And I felt a woman’s breasts press up against my back.

  I’d like to say that was my nadir with Francis. But now I was smoking even more ganja—the strongest I could find—and I had taken up Estes’s drink, Eclipse rum with a dash of
bitters, in a serious way. My other favorite, which I stumbled on in a Honolulu nightclub, I reserved for my solitary drinking: a variation on the White Angels I drank in the navy with Sharline, it was called a White Goddess—gin, Cointreau, lemon juice, and sugar shaken with ice. So I don’t remember a lot of the things I did with Francis. My time with him is a blur, a continuum dotted with unconnected and unpleasant images. After five months, I had grown isolated from my friends. I had given up my kayaking expeditions, and when I did not return a succession of his calls, Val stopped phoning. Seth came to Haena one night and told me flat out that I should not see Francis again. Just put an end to it, he kept telling me. But that wasn’t what I had to put an end to. I thought my year in the Cook Islands had cleaned me out, body and soul, of my grief over Cassiel. What it had done was open me up wide. And now that I was so susceptible to booze and dope, it didn’t take much for me to set my internal wrecking balls in motion. That bottle of bourbon I had poured down the sink in New Orleans—my fear of becoming like my grandmother—had caught up with me after four years. By then the bottle was filled not just with booze but plenty of demons. Francis Beliar in the end was its primary genie, risen in a cloud of smoke to torment me.

  By the time of the New Year’s Eve party in Kilauea when I was swaying before the bathroom sink while the other guests were proclaiming a happy 1972, I was desperate to put the cap back on that bottle and hurl it into the sea. To stop seeing Francis and pull my life together again. That was my New Year’s wish, and it came true—though not in the way I would have liked.

  I tried to clean up the makeup that had smeared under my eyes, but my vision felt off, as it always did when Francis was around—that night, even more than usual. And I had drunk even more than usual. About all I could manage was to reapply my lipstick and rinse out my mouth with cold water before making my way back to the stairway. The music came on suddenly—Hendrix wailing “Hey, Joe”—and under my feet the floorboards were throbbing. Downstairs the lights were dimmed again, and I could barely discern people milling and dancing. I just wanted to make my way through all of them and find the door. I wanted to get out of there. Jeannie was still on the same step, necking with her boyfriend. She didn’t see me until I was past them.

  “Mala!” she cried, pushing him away and rising unsteadily. Coming down five steps, she nearly fell. “I been looking all over for you.”

  It was obvious she hadn’t moved since I went up.

  Her eyes were red and she was slurring. “I got something for you,” she said.

  “First tell me, is Seth still here?”

  She tried to concentrate. “He left.”

  “Damn.”

  “Come on, he doesn’t have any fun, anyway.”

  What she meant was that he didn’t get high.

  “We’ll give you a ride. Your car broke?”

  Just then, three people brushed past us, toward the front of the house. Two tall men and a pretty woman with long braids. One of the men had long brown hair and a moustache. I recognized him at once, even as he stopped and looked at me.

  “Do you need a lift?” he smiled. He had a soft British accent. His voice was kindly, and his eyes, blue as crystal, were equally clear.

  I shook my head. He was wearing a denim shirt, white slacks, and sandals, but his face, deeply tanned, with a long nose and pointed chin framed by the wavy hair, looked to me at that moment like the face of Jesus.

  “You’re sure?” he said, studying my own eyes closely.

  There was all that THC in the joint, I thought, blinking hard, but he really did look like Jesus.

  I nodded. The last thing I needed, I thought, was to get involved with another man.

  He put out his hand. “Alvin,” he said.

  “Mala,” I replied, taking his hand. I didn’t feel he was coming on to me.

  “Mala,” he repeated softly. “Another time, then. That’s an open invitation. I live at Four Crosses in Haena. Come up anytime.” And he was gone.

  I knew where he lived. Most everyone on the North Shore did.

  “Do you know who that was?” Jeannie sputtered.

  Alvin was Alvin Dixon, the Alvin Dixon, a rock star, formerly of a band called T-Zero that had been at the top of the charts all through the late sixties before he quit abruptly two years earlier and settled on Kauai. Now he was a retired millionaire who lived in a huge house on Tunnels Beach. I had glimpsed him in town a few times, like everyone else, but I’d never spoken to him.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t take a ride from him, Mala,” Jeannie moaned. “You must be really out of it.”

  “Yeah, and I’ve got to go.”

  She grabbed my arm. “Wait, I want you to have this.” She took a ring off her finger, a large oval of amber on a gold band.

  “Thanks, but I don’t wear rings. You keep it.” I was beginning to feel dizzy again, and my mouth was so dry it hurt to swallow.

  “See, he’s trapped in there,” she said, holding the ring up into the feeble light. There appeared to be a drop of blood in the amber.

  “Who?”

  “Trapped back when there were dinosaurs.”

  Someone slid between us, going upstairs.

  “Jeannie, I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, turning away.

  “But it’s good luck,” she insisted, pressing the ring into my palm. “Spiders are good luck, you know.”

  “What did you say?” Raising the ring to my face, squinting hard, I finally saw that it was a small red spider suspended in the amber. A female Uloborus frozen at the moment of her death.

  I wanted to scream as I pushed the ring back into Jeannie’s hand, but my jaw wouldn’t open. My look of panic, though, was enough to make her recoil, and this time she didn’t call after me when I twisted through the circle of people around us and plunged headlong across the living room, bumping into couples dancing, knocking a glass out of someone’s hand, tripping on a woman sprawled out smoking. Finally I was out on the terrace, stepping over Olan and Philippe, who were sitting beneath the Japanese fan holding hands in a circle with two girls wearing sunglasses, all of them waiting for the first rushes of the mescaline they had dropped. As I slipped by, Philippe looked up, heavy-lidded, as if he had never seen me before.

  Out on the grass, I was even less steady on my feet. Heavy mist was streaming through the garden. Inhaling the jacaranda scent, I was circling around to where the cars were parked when a man stepped out of the bushes, black against the darkness, and blocked my way.

  “You’re in no condition to drive, Mala,” a familiar voice intoned.

  Seeing me lurch across the living room, Francis had slipped out the front door to intercept me.

  I shoved him as hard as I could. “Fuck you, Francis.”

  Though I considered myself strong, he didn’t budge. “You still shouldn’t drive,” he said.

  “We’re through. As of now. Finito. Kaput. Understand?”

  “Still upset about that girl at the marina?” he said calmly.

  “You must be kidding.”

  “Who else could it be?”

  “Oh. I get it. There’s just one girl. Right. The one at the marina also doubles as the hostess with the mostest at the Green Dolphin—that is, when she’s not your best friend’s daughter who you spoon-feed coke before she blows you.”

  “You’re hysterical,” he said with a harder edge. He didn’t appreciate that last reference.

  “You’re right. Here I thought there were lots of girls. And it’s just one! Now, get out of my way,” I shouted.

  He stepped toward me, and I thought he was going to hit me.

  “Get another playmate to mind-fuck,” I continued to shout, shoving him again.

  But he didn’t hit me. He had no intention of hitting me. In fact, I never knew him to strike any woman. He dealt in violence, all right, he got off big-time on inflicting pain, but he didn’t do it with his fists.

  “Stop shouting, Mala.” There was a trace of mockery in his voice.


  I swung my hand up as fast as I could, to slap him, but he caught my wrist. Immediately he let go of it, and smiled, as if he wanted me to do it again. In my rage and drunkenness I had forgotten that this sort of torment was what he really thrived on: he liked to provoke anger and then soak it back up, as fuel.

  When I took another swipe at him, I missed and fell down hard, and he tried to help me up.

  “Let go of me, you bastard,” I said through my teeth.

  Gripping me firmly around the waist, in his best doctor’s voice he said, “I’m taking you home.”

  “Gonna fuck me when I pass out?”

  He was half-dragging me to a sports car convertible parked under the banyan trees. I really was too drunk to drive, and needed to go home, but not with him. As we reached the car, I tried to pull free one last time. “This isn’t your car.”

  “It’s my wife’s,” he said in his flattest voice.

  “Even better! Bet you love to screw in it—anyone but her.”

  “Come on.”

  The car was Campari-red like the shirt he was wearing. As he leaned over, pushing me into the passenger seat, I smelled for the first time how much booze there was on his breath. His speech didn’t change when he drank, so you couldn’t tell from that.

  “Hey,” I said, groping for the door handle, realizing just how bad an idea this was. But it was too late. He had already turned the key in the ignition, and, throwing the stick shift into reverse, he made a hard U-turn out of the yard, past a long line of parked cars.