Promiscuous Unbound

by Bex Brian

  He frowned but lightened his touch.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I don’t know what state of mind I would be in if I was the one who’d had to cut her down.”

  “It’s not the first time.” Marcel shrugged, regaining his professional comportment.

  “Have you been doing this long?” I asked, trying to help him along.

  “You think it is strange?”

  “No.”

  “It is strange for an Ivorian man to be a nurse, but I am.”

  “I’ve never been to West Africa. Spent lots of time in the east and north, even the south.”

  “I came here when I was fourteen. Now I am twenty-six. So I am a different man.”

  “You weren’t even a man when you left,” I offered. “Just a boy. I wonder if the place where you become a man is what makes you who you are.”

  “I think not. I don’t feel French. I feel African and Christian.”

  “Would you mind dying here then?”

  “No.”

  “It’s terrible to think that the refugee probably didn’t want to die here.”

  “She didn’t know where she was.”

  “So shouldn’t she be forgiven for not knowing what she was doing?”

  “That’s not for me to decide,” Marcel said, finishing up.

  As he opened the door to leave, the faint strains of hymns being sung could clearly be heard.

  Now the door is slammed shut, and I notice it’s raining. From my bit of sky, I can see that it’s a bad rain. A miserable, soaking, freezing rain. Grief is suited to cold like this. I wonder which is better for faith, hot or cold. The one time I thought I felt the presence of God was in the cold. Siberian cold. Tigers we were after. No such luck, so we beat a frosty retreat from the ice-shrouded forest to wait for a little warmth in a small Siberian mining town, where even our watchful Soviet minder felt a distinct chill from those who had forgotten the warmth of human kindness. One morning my father and I ventured out through air the quality of misty sludge to a church sunk deep into the permafrost. Dipping down through a warped doorway we entered an incense-clouded chamber filled with bundled worshipers. The eagle-nosed priest, with his Russian growl, spoke of fear, but he didn’t seem to be penetrating. I turned away to look at some primitive ecclesiastical paintings against the back wall. As I leaned in close to try and see beneath the soot, I suddenly felt as if all the air had been sucked out of my lungs. True terror—mine, and my father’s. The priest came hustling forward and pulled us to the center of the church, where everyone else now stood, smiling. Suddenly we could breathe again. I was ready to believe that the hand of God had been upon me, and then the priest explained: a profound cold descends with certain winds and momentarily robs the atmosphere of all the warm air as it passes. We were all laughing now. Siberians really love their cold.

  But what unknown had led Marcel to God? Funny how my scant images of West Africa are stuck in the nineteenth century: disease-rife, malarial swamps and warring tribal factions just beyond the missionary compound, hard truths that would have made it easy to orient a boy’s thinking toward God. In how many trips to East Africa did I drive past cinder-block missionary outposts teeming with potbellied children, staring from doorways and barren yards? Belief is a small price to pay for a full stomach. But the more likely scenario is probably that of a clean-swept storefront mission buzzing with computers as the bulwark against the honky-tonk hum of Abidjan. Either way, he was indoctrinated.

  Was that thunder? I love that physical menace. Wish I were outside so I could feel it rumbling along my spine as its waves of energy fly toward the unmovable earth.

  In East Africa the rains hardly ever came. No rot, no cleansing. If nothing rots, does that create a perpetual present? Thousands of abandoned birds’ nests nestled in the skeletal limbs of long-dead trees. Some still fuzzy with infant feathers, others almost calcified by the sun and white heat. From birds’ nests to bones. All that timelessness. Or arrested time. I could never decide which. It was the rocks, those cliff faces, striated, all the eons on premanent display, and yet not still. I felt as if I could reach up and swirl the mixture of the past with my finger.

  Where are the refugee’s bones now, I wonder. Burnt? Buried? No chance ever of resting lightly on the sandy surface of the Great Rift Valley, sun-bleached, trumpeting the long line of human history. But perhaps she done something even better. She’s become a ghost.

  My past, her never-to-be-had future, here in this present, inspired and serenaded by the sounds of Sonia blowing Dr. Luc. I want to tell her that you never blow your husband like you do your lover. But she’s only seventeen and has had no husband. How do you explain having lovers in the midst of a marriage? There were always one or two, even in the feverish heat of my new love. They created, for me anyway, a necessary countercurrent.

  I somehow knew the first time I kissed Ralph that it would end in failure. Too much, far too much lay behind that kiss. I felt him spiraling down, down into me, anointing me, and then with dizzying speed I felt his attentions were elsewhere. I was at once wanted and ignored. I was submissive to his soft, early kisses but some latent feeling in me wanted to gouge his eyes out, kick him in the balls. Kissing him, I found I wanted plain, purely physical sex back, without the emotional dross. After we made love, he called me ardent. I looked at him, this man I was consumed by, and wondered why I felt so betrayed. Good God, I can’t tell you how grateful I was then for all the fucks I have had. A perfect antidote to this weird love I now found myself in the midst of.

  But it was a love I wanted and thought I was prepared for. We would bump into each other, the second time accidentally and very weirdly on the small island of Roatán in Honduras, a full year since we’d last seen each other at that Greek restaurant in London. But in all that time he was constantly on my mind. I often marveled at the adeptness with which I managed my two-tiered existence. On the surface, in my lived life, I had spent a busy year. I mourned my father’s death, a process that smacked of playacting, masking an incipient desire to revel in my freedom. I whiled away long days intending to finally move my room out of the maid’s quarters just off the kitchen and make my presence felt throughout the flat, a task I managed only after I was married. I think now that the backstairs smells, the clang of pipes, the stifling closeness of the steam heat were a comfort to me, a buffer against the inflated feel of the rest of the apartment. I designed a slide-show lecture called “Animal Contact” which brought me to nearly every public school in New York City. Lots of brats in those schools, but a few funny kids, good at making me look the fool. Acting on the advice of Alastair to strike while the iron was hot, or newly dead in this case, I negotiated, more quickly than I would have liked, a book about my father. I brought men back to my hot little nest off the kitchen, where they were either charmed by my schoolgirl bed or confused. Either way their ardor was not dulled, and afterward I could conduct, with just half a mind, one of two conversations about what it means for a thirty-year-old to fuck men in her childhood room. I went to lots of afternoon movies, sitting slumped and looking angry to ward off any suitors who might happen along and ruin the trance. I came to memorize the phone numbers for Chinese, for Thai, even for the Greek diner—no moussaka, but a decent burger was possible if you promised to tip the delivery boy more than the price of the meal, provided that he chop-chopped. I daily accepted New York Times ink all over my hands, watched Live at Five, drank the tap water, and hoarded quarters for the laundry. It was as if I’d superseded New York’s being merely my birthplace and finally became a real New Yorker.

  But this entire new “free” life was led with one ear cocked toward my imagined life with Ralph, which was no less rich or real. I felt like a fine illusionist, convincing in the froth of existence. Men fell in love with me even as I was conducting, in my own inner sanctum, a grand love affair with a man I had met but once.

  Of course, when Ralph and I did finally run into each other again in Central America there were some r
eality adjustments to be made. For one thing, he was still married. Not that that had ever stopped me. But the real man was more self-contained than the imagined one and, at first, a little resistant, aloof. He and the film crew spent long days in the island’s surrounding mangrove swamps, trying to capture for all and sundry the teeming life that thrives within the still pools which lie within the arched tangled roots of mangrove trees.

  As for myself, I was excavating my father’s history. My days were spent with the old, white islanders who fondly remembered the time when Roatán was a loyal colonial outpost and my father, a young naturalist, came to see their wildlife. I still have those tapes. My voice sounds agitated and rushed, especially compared with the Old English patois of the islanders. In one, a parrot screeches nonstop. Between him and me, I don’t know who sounds more shrill.

  Then, one day, out of the blue Ralph seemed to hone in on me. I would come to learn well into our marriage the anticipatory angst that came with trying to predict when Ralph might turn his attention to me. It was a Monday. He asked me to dinner on Friday. I extended my trip indefinitely. We began to see each other not only weekends but during the week as well. I was, after all, the daughter of the great Maurice Yellow; my presence on the shoot would be an honor. Sweltering in hip-high rubber galoshes, I showed my mettle as deadly water snakes nudged their noses against my mud-mired boots, as sand flies and no-see-ums feasted on my sweaty neck, as spawning land crabs swarmed over everything between them and the sea, me included.

  When we weren’t filming, we’d sit with the crew in the hothouse antechambers of the swamp, turning our backs on the cool, sparkling Caribbean Sea beyond the fringe, snacking on beef jerky and warm soda. I’d have my own story told back to me by crew members who grew up wishing they could have been the ones to accompany my father on his madcap adventures. They also got a good laugh when I told them that the famous scene of me dancing wildly with Masai tribal women had had to be abruptly cut because I’d suddenly flung off my halter top, letting my bud-breasts jangle to the beat.

  If only I could have left them laughing. But I was stuck. Stuck to Ralph who had a wife. Come Friday we headed away from French Harbour and any pretense of eating supper and drove out to a deserted airstrip. There, against the cacophony of nighttime jungle sounds, we had that first complicated kiss. And for all the eye-gouging impatience I felt, we feel in love.

  By way of escaping what is essentially a multicelled organism, the film crew, a story was made up that Ralph and I were going to collaborate on a documentary about my father. Under the guise of doing research we allowed ourselves the luxury of disappearance: to my room to supposedly look over my gathered interviews; to his room to lie on his bed flipping through his Bromley Boy’s school atlas, his good luck charm, a grossly out-of-date, dog-eared book that traveled with him everywhere, marking the spots on the earth where my father had been and that we, together, would now have to visit. During the day, around the crew, we tried to hold ourselves in check. But an undeniable thread ran between us. Our opinions started to converge, our sentences meld. We became hungry, thirsty, impatient, tired at the same time. We were a closed universe.

  And at times, I must admit, it was overwhelming. There were days when, citing the need to throw the crew off the scent of our affair, I’d beg off accompanying them for a day. But it was really because I needed to escape love. Ralph’s truck would have barely disappeared down the rutted road leading out of French Harbour before I’d leave my room, bikini on under cutoff shorts and a loose T-shirt, and hitch a ride over to one of the newly built tourist hotels, places with blue lagoons stocked with smiling dolphins and a serious attitude toward scuba diving. They even had hyperbaric chambers housed in palm-thatched huts in order to smooth out the bends of those who, like me, were just looking for a quick gulp of air. The bars were always filled with plenty of people, many of them a little too waterlogged to go down yet again for another hallucinatory swim among candy-colored coral reefs. All around the well-stocked circular bars, mingling in with the newly sun-flecked red, raw backs, were the deep bronzed shoulders of beach bums, those who kept claiming to have found paradise. They gave me the creeps, these now native drunkards, and I couldn’t help but flaunt my flirtations in front of them. Under their resentful gaze, I narrowed down the pool of sunburnt holidaymakers until at last one was chosen to take me back to his cabin. Great afternoons. Sea-swollen lips so soft that even with them pressed hard against my mouth, I could breathe. Those hard, spring-break bodies were pure tonic. And afterward a quick dip with Flipper. Clean and pumped full of oxygen, I’d stick my thumb out and hitch a ride back to French Harbour, back to my dank, swampy man or half-my-man. “You are so ardent”—the last sleepy words I’d hear to close the day.

  Words, from the sound of it, Dr. Luc might feel like screaming at this very moment. The refugee should haunt Sonia if she wants sex without memory. I keep clogging up my stories with the story line. Sure, I did what Sonia’s doing. Many times. In. Out. Bing. Bang. But even her deep-throated efforts are a request. I don’t know what she expects, or what she wants. This blow job isn’t happening in a void. Maybe she wants a guarantee of life. A doctor is a good person to be blowing if you’re afraid your heart might stop. The refugee, I presume, wanted freedom. I’ll never really understand what I wanted. Or what Ralph did. Marriage, unfortunately, never edifies. Never quite kills off the primal urges. How I veered between thinking my natural inclinations would destroy my marriage and how they were the only thing that made it feasible, relieving as they did my feelings of claustrophobia, a sensation that would overcome me, strangely enough, most often when truly knowing or understanding Ralph seemed an impossibility.

  Sonia has run away, although I have a feeling she might just be hiding. Either way it’s a relief. I was starting to be worn down by so many contrary demands. Half the time she is nuzzling my neck, shedding tears for this and that. Strange what gets a seventeen-year-old to blubber. Huge is her fear about not being baptized. Devil thoughts and devil actions have to come from somewhere. She is convinced she is possessed. And when Beelzebub hasn’t got her by the throat, it’s old slights, of which she has many. A boy once refused to kiss her because she had a bad case of impetigo. How dare he? She wished him the very worst, and I had to concur. The rest of the time, she is a snot. She’ll fume over from her side of the room and is not above ripping the newpaper out of my hand and crumpling it into a ball.

  What am I to do? I have my own mind and soon I’ll have my own life. This, I think, annoys the shit out of Sonia. Not that she ran away to prick at my conscience. Dr. Luc has gone on holiday with his girlfriend to help her get over her nightmares about the refugee. Last night was a farewell of sorts. Which is why I think Sonia is just hiding. No point in the grand gesture if there isn’t any possibility of its hitting the mark. She told me that herself once. Said the one place she never bothered running away from was home. Her mother wouldn’t have noticed. In the end, it was her mother who ran away, all the way to South America. Never, Sonia sighed, to be seen again.

  I ran away once. A quick dawn escape past inert drunken revelers, my father among them, his lanky frame looking ridiculous sprawled next to a throng of stumpy Guatemalan Indians. Some feast day or another in the northern mountain village of Nebaj. I remember him the night before proclaiming loudly to anyone who would listen that pure cane alcohol doesn’t give you a hangover and then winking at me. I hated him at that moment, all because he had come into my room early in the day, unannounced, and found me sitting forward on a stool, my legs open, my crotch pressed up against the warm rounded leg of my reading table. He said nothing other than to admonish me for not coming to look at the procession. Just then a somber discordant mess of drums, horns, and whistles came around the corner and the bobbing head of a statue of the Virgin Mary being held aloft went past, peeking in my window, the mournful waxy face of my personal savior. Father turned to look, giving me a chance to slide back on the stool and push my skirt back down to my kn
ees. Later, across a bonfire in the village square where the town’s men, their festival clothes hanging limp, danced in formless drunken circles, he winked at me. I thought I would die.

  My dawn escape was not planned. The rough idle of the morning bus to Guatemala City woke me, so I decided to take it. And became, as the bus puttered down from the highlands, the lucky mascot of a bunch of Dutch kids traveling the gringo trail. I remember how hard I tried to get one of them, a scrawny guy named Peter, to pop my cherry, but he was annoyingly content with back massages and make-out sessions. It suddenly occurred to me one day twenty years later as I was buying vegetables at a grocery store that he was probably a virgin too, but at the time it seemed impossible to a thirteen-year-old like me that a seventeen-year-old could be a virgin.

  Once in Guatemala City, we found ourselves absorbed into a large group of hippie kids who flopped at Pensión Meza, a ramshackle boardinghouse where, purportedly, Che Guevara had slept. Our days were spent on the steps of some cathedral or other, sitting cross-legged, listening to a couple of guitar players play over and over that Crosby, Stills & Nash song that ends with a lot of trilling and catcalls, which we, the loyal if somewhat stoned audience, would dutifully join in singing. Nights were passed at the pensión, four to a bed, the sheets thin and despairingly reeking of semen, an homage to the fornication all around, except, of course, for me and Peter. I remember, even then, of being totally surprised at how hierarchal, rigid even, this band of free spirits was. We were bossed out of bed early each morning by a girl whose chestnut brown hair was always shining clean and whose sandal-clad feet were amazingly free of the dust and filth. She was the one who had the tampons, spoke reasonable Spanish, knew what to do if someone was having a bad acid trip. Her boyfriend, one of the guitar players and an object of devotion for the rest of the girls, was kept on a tight leash. The chestnut-haired girl kept close by her a number of attendants, pretty girls who seemed to be devoid of any personality, except at night, the mawkish squeaks accompanying their lovemaking a real testament to how sweet and cute sex could be. I hung with the bottom rung, the foreigners, the junkies, the dowdy kids who gathered farthest from the guitar players. Mostly we sat in sullen silence, only growing animated when we’d stroll over to buy stalks of roasted corn which we’d try to eat a kernel at a time. It was hunger and Peter’s constant lovesick presence that finally made me wander off on the third day. And it was then my father found me, alone, gorging myself on Pollo Comparo chicken, my greasy fingers laden with the cheap tin rings Peter had given me.