Voyager

by Russell Banks

  She had a warm, open heart back then and appeared to understand how alone and lonely and lost I was, despite my reckless, self-confident, swashbuckling affect, and seemed to love me for who I really was. I knew that I was alone, yes, but did not think I was in the slightest lonely or lost. No, merely adventurous and artistically intense and literary was all. I believed that I could rescue her from her fate and that I in no way needed rescuing from mine.

  But I had a cold, stupid heart. Without knowing it, instead of loving her for her lovable self, I was deliberately, if unconsciously, casting her in the story of my life solely for the purpose of reenacting my parents’ catastrophically broken marriage, my father’s rampaging violence and alcoholism, his relentless womanizing, and his abandonment of his four children. I was the eldest of the abandoned four, and like so many eldest children of violence, alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, and divorce, I was trying to turn my as-yet-unwritten adult domestic life into a rewrite of the story of my parents’ disastrous marriage and make it into a story with a happy ending. To that cloudy, dubious end, I was a teenaged boy searching for a teenaged girl who seemed in no way to resemble his mother—just as he in no way resembled his father. When he found her he would make her fall in love with him, and he would marry her for it, and they would live happily ever after. He found her standing on a low, carpeted platform like a goddess on a pedestal modeling bathing suits on Friday afternoons on the second floor of the Burdines department store in St. Petersburg, Florida.

  And, Reader, I married her.

  But I could not see her for who she was, or I might have spared her the ordeal of becoming my wife and the mother of my first child. I could not see that in every underlying way Darlene fit my mother’s template exactly: physically beautiful, with perfect pale skin and large blue eyes that opened wide—eyebrows raised—the second that someone, particularly a man, or a camera lens glanced in her direction. She was cunningly intelligent and knew how to light up a room, as they say, but did not possess the physical and emotional energy to pass herself off as charismatic, which kept her from being fearsome, especially to men, which in turn only made her all the more attractive to men, including me, who was little more than a boy.

  At eighteen, my mother must have been a lot like Darlene—the bottomless depth of her insecurity and need for attention not yet hardened into full-blown narcissism; her capacity for love not yet disassembled by rejection; her sexual desires not yet turned strategic. But even then, when still a girl, Darlene was two people, as my mother must have been, one person watching the other, an angry, impossible-to-please ghost keeping track of a wayward chimera. Which made her a sucker for a good-looking charmer like my father.

  Who, your mother? Or Darlene? Were you, at nineteen, like your father? Chase wanted to know.

  Probably. Well, yes. A lot like he was at that same age, I confessed. Thanks to a phony ID I’d purchased the previous fall in Boston’s Scollay Square, I was already, like my father before me, a heavy drinker. There were nights when, driving my green Studebaker at a wobbly drunken crawl from the bars on Boca Ciega back to my rooming house in downtown St. Petersburg, I had to pull over halfway across the bridge and stagger from the car and vomit into the gutter. My nineteen-year-old father and I were barroom brawlers. He was angry for his reasons, I for mine, which weren’t all that different from his, although neither of us knew what those reasons were. Which is why we brawled. Oh, and we were both smooth talkers, good dancers, sharp dressers. We were clever autodidacts and could successfully pass ourselves off as budding intellectuals. We played chess. We read difficult books and could quote from them. We both had good flash-card memories. We made friends and gained the trust of strangers easily. And we were compulsive serial seducers of girls and women, not that we deserved or even wanted their love, so much as we believed that we ourselves were unlovable and needed constantly to test and disprove that belief. Which was, of course, impossible. Thus the seriality of our seductions. And thus the violence of our eventual, inevitable rejection of any girl or woman who turned out to be foolish enough to love us. Like Groucho Marx, we kept applying for membership but refused to join any club that would admit us.

  Darlene was foolish enough not only to love me but to want to marry me, and her parents did not object. In 1959 in the South—and all of Florida was then the Deep South, mired in the Jim Crow apartheid that, once the shock of it had worn off, bewildered and sickened me—it was not uncommon for white working-class boys and girls to marry within a year of graduating high school. Especially if the boy were gainfully employed. From the point of view of her good Christian parents, Darlene was at an optimal marriageable age, ready for connubial sex and motherhood, and I was a good prospect.

  Though by then most of my mind had been swallowed whole by literature and on the basis of no reliable evidence or encouragement I had begun to imagine myself as a writer, I was about to take a position as the display director of a Montgomery Ward store in Lakeland, fifty miles east of St. Petersburg in the cattle-raising, citrus-growing, phosphate-mining center of the state. I would be the youngest Montgomery Ward department head in Florida—hired to oversee only two employees, however, an alcoholic carpenter who showed up drunk every morning and left even drunker at the end of the day and a seventy-five-year-old semiretired sign painter. Nonetheless, Darlene’s parents and Darlene and, for a few months, I myself saw the position as a significant, promising step up the corporate ladder. We all knew that if I left St. Petersburg for Lakeland without first marrying Darlene, she and her parents were likely to lose me, and I them.

  And so in August 1959, there was a wedding. My mother somehow managed to raise the money for plane tickets for her and my seventeen-year-old brother, Steve, who stood nervously, protectively, beside me as my best man, surely more aware than I of what was coming. Darlene was never again as beautiful to me or as happy as she was that day. We gave ourselves a weekend honeymoon in a motel in Sarasota, got crisped by the summer sun lying by the pool, visited the Ringling Circus Museum, and the following Monday moved into our newly rented, freshly painted garage apartment in Lakeland.

  Three months later, I climbed back down the corporate ladder to the ground and quit my job at Montgomery Ward. Darlene was three months pregnant, and we were driving north to Boston in winter with all our worldly goods stuffed into a 1953 Packard the size of a Conestoga that I had bought with my old Studebaker plus five hundred dollars. I was nineteen years old and married and soon to be a twenty-year-old father. I had decided that I was a poet or perhaps a novelist and had typed up a sheaf of manuscripts to carry with me to Boston to prove it. With no idea of how to combine all those warring facts peacefully in one young man’s life—the only life I had—in Lakeland, Florida, I thought that maybe they could somehow be made to blend in Boston, where I knew I’d find other young, impoverished poets, writers, and artists, some of whom were likely also to be married and parents. I could learn from them how to invent my life, the way the young Hemingway learned from Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. I had no intentions of abandoning my teenaged bride and unborn child, however. I was not my father, after all. Nor was I Ernest Hemingway. But late those last nights in Lakeland and during that long drive north, I sometimes caught myself silently moaning, Oh, Lord, what have I done to my life? What am I doing to it now? What will I do with it when the future becomes the present?

  Happily, the moment arrived quickly when Chase and I had to return from Tortola to St. Thomas and catch our scheduled STOL flight to Sint Maarten and resume our Caribbean hegira, and I was able to put a halt to the story of my first marriage. Though Chase was neither interrogator nor priest, but like a reader of fiction was merely a listener, my courtship narrative felt more like a confession than a story. I was glad, therefore, and relieved whenever reality intruded and I was able to switch my attention over to the logistics and exigencies of travel. Which is how I have lived much of my life. My writing life as well. It has allowed me to keep on telling the truth, while avoiding anyt
hing that resembled a confession.

  As Tortola was to the British Virgins and St. Thomas to the U.S. Virgins, the Dutch half-island of Sint Maarten was to a third small constellation of islands. It was where you had to go in order to go someplace else: in this case, we had to fly from St. Thomas to Sint Maarten in order to get to St. Martin, the French half of the island; or to Anguilla, which is a British dependent territory; or to tiny conical Saba, another Dutch island; or over to St. Barthélemy, which is a subpréfecture of Guadeloupe, which in turn is an overseas région of France.

  Like St. Thomas, Sint Maarten was the most populous of its sibling isles and the one most given over to sating the desires of package tourists and cruise-ship passengers. In those strictly commercial terms, it was a success story, a happy hooker. Philipsburg, the capital of Sint Maarten, reminded me of Charlotte Amalie: it was like being caught in a swarm of locusts. Only worse—perhaps especially for me, who had been here fifteen years earlier with my wife Christine and our three daughters and had loved strolling the quiet, clean streets of this sweet little Dutch port. All that had changed. Now huge crowds of confused and suspicious and racially anxious white American tourists just off the boat or tour bus packed the narrow, littered sidewalks and streets, being pecked at by souvenir hawkers and hustlers and barkers perched outside duty-free shops and casinos and bad restaurants. The din of automobile horns and exhaust beat against our heads and made us gasp for breath. Neon and garishly painted signs covered every inch of wall space and shrieked, Buy me! Buy me! Buy me now!

  A single afternoon in Philipsburg sent us fleeing to the French half of the island. In moments, we had passed out of the Dutch side and had made our way to St. Martin, and it was as if we had been transported to another island altogether, one much more to our liking. We put up at a slightly down-at-the-heels hotel that seemed half-occupied, Le Galéon Beach on the Baie de l’Embouchure, ten miles from the airport and Philipsburg and an easy drive to the towns of Grand Case and Marigot, where we planned to eat good creole food and hunt for Haitian paintings, both of which, the food and the paintings, I remembered with nostalgic affection from that familial visit fifteen years earlier. But who was that mustachioed, sideburned man in his early thirties back then? I wondered. The man leading his family down the narrow street. And that dark, long-haired woman striding intently along beside him. Those three little suntanned girls running to keep up. In memory, the man and woman, their breakup and divorce still years away, seem unconsciously estranged from each other, residents of their own private islands, and the three little girls seem to know it better than their parents and are afraid of what they know.

  Despite the blocks of condo construction in and around Marigot and Grand Case and the spanking new resort hotels spreading along the north coast, St. Martin in the intervening years had not changed significantly. Outside the towns, cattle grazed in the wide, pale green valleys, and every farmyard kept its fattened geese, hens, ducks, and a well-fed pig loosely fenced, looking more like family pets than livestock. There was some spillage from the package-tour crowd and the mania for development on the Sint Maarten side, but the French half was still relatively sleepy and laid-back and, except in downtown Marigot, uncrowded, rural.

  And still very French, which meant that when we struggled to speak French, the locals switched to bad English, and if we spoke English, they stuck to French and seemed not to understand us. This would turn out to be true on all the French islands—St. Martin, St. Barthélemy, Guadeloupe, and Martinique—but I was in a good mood, glad to be exactly where I happened to be, if a little agitated by the troubling overlay of freshly unlocked memories of my earlier visit with Christine and the girls—and I found the natives’ perverse condescension somehow amusing, even endearing, as if it were a measure of their provincialism, rather than mine.

  There were many traditional French restaurants in Grand Case and Marigot, and the guidebooks listed them all, and in the interests of the magazine article I was supposed to be writing, we tried a few. But after one meal at a tiny, unlisted bistro called Bistro Nu, we instantly became regulars. It was tucked into a dark alley in Marigot, off rue de Hollande, between rue de la République and rue de Galisbay. We stumbled onto it one night by accident and returned again and again—for the creole food, of course, that syncretic mingle of French and African and Arawak/Carib cuisine with local produce, meat, and fish; and for the nonvintage Rhone wine, which was cheap, more than adequate, what we used to mean by “decent house red.” We returned for the friendly company of our fellow diners, who were local folks, mostly black, enjoying a family night out, and for the nervous, earnest, young white Frenchman named Raoul who acted as headwaiter, waiter, and busboy, with a different posture and patter for each role. We went back for the blaff, the West Indian lime-marinated bouillabaisse, and the black boudins and tiny octopuses called chatrous and the lambi colombo, callaloo, and accras. And to wait for a glimpse of the Haitian chef and owner, also named Raoul, a sweating black behemoth who rose from the kitchen in back every half hour or so and came and stood at the swinging door and glared out at the diners as if we did not deserve his cooking.

  But something more kept drawing us back to Bistro Nu. It wasn’t just the dim light and the ten small, square, cloth-covered tables that reminded us of the perfect French neighborhood bistro, nor the old-style Caribbean building that housed the restaurant, a hundred-year-old daub-and-wattle cabin with a steeply pitched tin roof and an unpainted door on the street and window shutters thrown open to the tropical night and the seaport darkness of the alley and the sounds of young couples talking in low voices as they strolled past. In some crucial way, this generous, intelligent, humorous blend of the best of Europe, Africa, and Mesoamerica, this process called creolization, which we heard in the language and music and saw in the art and architecture and tasted in the food, was embodied in this tiny restaurant itself. Sometimes two people in midlife come together and against all odds their pasts suddenly mingle and blend, as if they had once been young together, almost as if they had shared a childhood, like cousins or even siblings, and though they remember them differently, they remember the same things, especially the moods and atmospheres, the tone and coloration of the past.

  Bistro Nu was Chase’s and my first shared, unspoken, romantic vision of the Caribbean. Bomba’s Surf Shack back on Tortola, despite our initial attraction, was its opposite. For both of us the little St. Martin bistro was based in a private, fondly remembered, literary vision of a Paris we had each visited separately long ago, when she was a teenaged schoolgirl traveling with her schoolmates and twenty years later when I in my mid-thirties arrived in Paris accompanied by my third wife, Becky, for the first publication of a book of mine in France. And now those private images were Chase’s and mine together, regathered, blended, remade—creolized. We wanted only to linger here for as long as we could.

  But one morning, our St. Martin mission accomplished—Haitian paintings bought and shipped home, guidebook-recommended restaurants sampled and evaluated, magazine article notes for the St. Martin paragraphs finished and typed—we boarded a skiff called Big Bird, captained by an Anguillan named Tall Boy, at the pier in Marigot and headed for Anguilla, eight miles north of St. Martin.

  Seen from the bow of Big Bird, Anguilla, a pale pink and light green hummock lying low in the water, resembled not at all the eel that Columbus on his first sail-by thought it resembled and named it after. Like Anegada in the British Virgins, it is a coral island, not volcanic, surrounded by shallow reefs and long beaches with sand as white and soft as talc. The island is windblown and dry, and the economy is defined by the sea—commercial fishing, sailing, and, of course, beaching. There were a half-dozen small hotels and even a few new resorts, like the chic and luxurious Malliouhana, most of them clustered near the settlements of West End and Sandy Ground. In the late 1980s, large-scale tourism had not yet taken root here, and the local population sounded ambivalent about its coming. They needed the income that tourism and new con
struction would bring—every Anguillan male, besides being a fisherman, seemed to be an unemployed stonemason and carpenter as well. But the Anguillans had seen what had happened to Dutch Sint Maarten and were not eager to follow suit.

  The island is, after all, very small—thirty-five square miles, less than the land area of a New England township—with barely seven thousand people back then, many of whom lived off-island, working illegally and sending money back to family in Anguilla, where they fully expected to return in a few years to fish or drive a taxi to the beaches and the hotels from the landing at Blowing Point. All over Anguilla, neat cinder-block bungalows under slow one-man construction attested to young couples’ long-range family plans.

  In the 1980s Anguilla was essentially a country village that happened to be an island with four or five spectacular beaches. But my mood had changed. I was not happy here. If all one wanted out of the Caribbean was a week or two lying in powdery sand and bathing in water clear enough to read through, this was the place to be. But if, like me, one was not a sun worshiper and found Caribbean country villages boring or impenetrable, as they usually are to outsiders, and if an arid landscape with little more than sea grapes, prickly pears, and other types of cacti clinging to it was tedious to one’s eye, then one might want to limit his stay to a day or two before moving on down the archipelago.

  The truth is, while on Anguilla I became inexplicably restless and dissatisfied. When I remembered that I had not finished my account of my first marriage, my mood was no longer inexplicable. Unfinished business: it always makes me restless and dissatisfied. I had not told Chase how my marriage to Darlene had ended and had not acknowledged to myself that I did not want to tell her that story. I was courting Chase, remember? It’s not a good idea when courting a woman to reveal how selfish and hard-hearted one was when young. She might suspect that possibly, even well into deep middle age, one is still selfish and hard-hearted. I did not know if she believed that a man’s character was capable of change. I was not even sure I believed it myself. So I kept silent on the subject and tried to hide my anxiety as much from myself as from Chase, and instead focused on the logistics of the transition from Anguilla back to Sint Maarten and on to Saba.