Voyager

by Russell Banks

  On our second day on Bequia, while waiting to catch the freighter back to St. Vincent and our flight from there to Grenada, over lunch at a dockside café Chase brought me back to my account of the decline and fall of my marriage to Becky. It was an unstated clause in Chase’s and my courtship contract, one of my tacitly agreed-upon obligations, that before she and I married, I would explain the end of the three marriages that preceded ours—as if I were applying for a job and needed to explain why I hadn’t lasted in my three previous places of employment. She already knew, perhaps too well, having participated in it herself, the story of the fall of my third marriage following my return to New York from Tuscaloosa. But not the story and causes of its decline, which had presumably preceded and precipitated the fall.

  Chase had not set out to seduce me in Tuscaloosa, nor I her; in fact, we had both gone to great lengths to avoid falling in love with each other that winter and spring. We were temporary English department colleagues who played tennis once or twice a week and went out to dinner a few times and gradually became “just friends” and surely could have left it at that. Sex was not yet a tie that bound. So there must have been something rotten in Denmark to start with, or in New York City, where Becky and I had been living together as husband and wife since 1982.

  The truth is, there was nothing about my marriage to Becky that deserved complaint. It was calm and mutually satisfying and supportive. Many of our friends found it enviable. But the force that holds a couple together is like the force of gravity, spinning the pair in orbit around each other through decades of having and holding from the first day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, loving and cherishing till death them do part. But sometimes the gravitational attraction between two bodies is sufficiently weakened by a difference in mass or momentum, or both, so that the faster-moving of the two bodies breaks free and sails off into outer space alone, or the smaller of the two crashes like an asteroid into the surface of the larger. Perhaps because my love for Becky depended on her need for me, my love contained less measurable mass than her need and greater momentum. Escape velocity was inescapable. And from the day our separate orbital planes first crossed, I knew it. And for the rest of my life I will regret it—not the difference in the force and momentum of Becky’s and my love for each other, but that I recognized it at the time and took the measure of those differences at the beginning, yet nonetheless behaved as if I had no idea such differences even existed. There should be a corollary to Nelson Algren’s advice to young men: Never marry someone who needs you more than you need her. Or him. You’ll cause her, or him, more troubles than your own.

  By this time in our journey—Chase and I were still on Bequia in the Grenadines—I could see clearly that my courtship narrative and this peripatetic voyage through the archipelago ran parallel to each other in ways both exculpatory and condemning, the one reflecting, enabling, and explicating the other. A memoir is like a travel book: whether short or long, it’s a radical reduction of remembered reality and is structured as much by what it leaves out as what it puts in. Just as in my life I must seem here, boy and man, to have only briefly, if serially, touched down in love and marriage, managing throughout to evade both permanent commitment and trivial pursuit, to the reader of this account of my cruise with Chase through the Antilles I must seem less than a travel guide to the islands and more than a tourist. All true, and thus the mutually reinforcing parallelism of its structure—more like a double helix than a string of chronologically ordered narrative beads. And thus, at Bequia, I temporarily abandoned my account of the demise and fall of my marriage to Becky, and we returned to St. Vincent, the Big Island, and moved on from there to Grenada.

  One could not approach the Point Salines International Airport on Grenada in 1988 without imagining how the island must have appeared from the air to the American invasion forces spearheading Operation Urgent Fury in October 1983. Grenada is a glittering green jewel, only twelve miles wide and twenty-one long, about the size of St. Vincent, with not as many people, mountainous in the center and heavily cultivated along the coastal plain with cinnamon and cloves and ginger, the spices for which it was once so famous. There is a small horseshoe-shaped harbor and one town, St. George’s, the capital, a picturesque cluster of old brick buildings spreading from the waterfront up the sides of several steep hills. Grenada is a small place, as Jamaica Kincaid said of Antigua, and pretty, and invading it hardly seemed worth the trouble—never mind the American, Grenadian, and Cuban lives it cost. When our de Havilland Twin Otter DHC-6 taxied up to the large glass-fronted terminal, we checked out the size and length of the runway, built by the Cubans whose presence on Grenada had stoked the Americans’ urgent fury. It made our plane look like a toy. Perfect for Reagan’s locked-and-loaded U.S. Air Force C-141s and C-130s back in 1983, however. And now a perfect fit for the American Airlines Boeing 747 warming its engines to carry three hundred American tourists back to New York.

  There was a great deal of building going on in Grenada, hotels, mostly, and what appeared to be private villas, especially along Grand Anse Bay, where the best beaches on the island were located. This was not yet Barbados or St. Thomas, but you couldn’t say they weren’t trying. We rented a car and in a day circled the whole island, passing through and stopping briefly at a half-dozen crossroad settlements. In a sense, most Caribbean country villages look alike—unpainted one-room houses, dirt yards, a rum shop with six or eight bored adolescent males standing around outside, a bunkerlike cinder-block schoolhouse in the middle of a bare field, a crumbling nineteenth-century cut-stone church. Caribbean country villages were almost all poor, but some, like these, seemed poorer than others.

  One did not need to take this drive, of course. One could enjoy the beautiful waters and sands of Grand Anse instead, as we frequently did. There were a number of fine hotels bellied up to the beach, including the elaborately renovated Ramada Renaissance, which had replaced the old Holiday Inn, used in 1983 as a barracks for the occupying U.S. troops. One might avail oneself of some truly fine West Indian food at Mamma’s, served out of Mamma’s own home near St. George’s—around $30 for two hungry people, ten or more courses, which may include tattou (armadillo), manicou (possum), lambi (conch), flying-fish fritters, rice and beans cooked in coconut milk, and, when available, roasted green monkey.

  Disinclined to hang around St. George’s waiting for the availability of roasted green monkey, we packed our bags and moved south to Tobago, a source of Robinson Crusoe’s story—Defoe’s fictionalized version. In 1988 Tobago was still laid-back and sparsely populated, with lots of well-fed, nearly feral goats roaming the hills, and if today the relationship between Crusoe and Friday seems somewhat more equitable, it’s only because Crusoe eventually hitched a ride home to England and Friday’s descendants managed to sue successfully for the deed to the island.

  Going to Tobago was like returning to St. Vincent, except that Tobago, with Trinidad hulking next door, was the Small Island. And a beautiful island it was, too. Like all the volcanic Antilles, it was mountainous in the middle, with fertile coastal plains, plentiful rivers and streams, numerous bays and small harbors, and, on the leeward side, several brown sand beaches. Tobago was and still is where Trinidadians go to get away from the madding crowds and pollution of Port of Spain and the industrialized west coast. There were some new, self-contained resort hotels—notably Mount Irvine Bay, Kariwak Village, and Arnos Vale—with more under construction, suggesting that in a few years Tobago would go the way of many of its sister islands. But without the white sandy beaches so mysteriously loved by the white foreigners, the limits to tourism here, as on St. Vincent and Dominica, were probably built-in.

  By now, having opened the chapter on my third marriage, I was traveling beneath the full shadow of my separation and divorce from Becky, and it almost didn’t matter where I was, white beach or brown or black, Big Island or Small, resort hotel or B-and-B. I was like Joe Btfsplk, Al Capp’s depressed
comic book character with the gray rain cloud permanently hovering above his head. I had tried to avoid the subject, but once opened, it was hard to close. Chase wanted to know, she deserved to know, why I had been so inclined to fall in love with her, even though at the time I was happily married to Becky.

  I knew the answer but didn’t like it much. One marries for love, and sometimes one divorces for a greater love, as I did, and one is punished for it with a burden of guilt, which one knows is far easier to bear than the pain and humiliation borne by the wife or husband who was betrayed and abandoned. Knowledge of that difference only adds yet another layer of guilt. The wife I left behind may someday forgive me for having fallen in love with another woman, and that will help me forgive myself and alleviate the weight of the guilt I carry to this day, almost thirty years later. But she can never know and therefore can never forgive me for the crime at the heart of the crime.

  Darlene and Christine eventually forgave me for giving up the attempt to make them happy. They both knew by the end that it was hopeless and that I had loved them at least as much as they had loved me and possibly more. Darlene, when she grew older and wiser, forgave me for being too young to marry and too naive and neurotic and egotistical and without any useful self-knowledge. She would find another man who was none of those things. Christine forgave me for being angry and self-protective and afraid of being controlled by her several forms of power. She, too, found another man with none of those limitations and flaws. And possibly, by now, after three decades apart, Becky has forgiven me for falling in love with Chase, and I hope that she, too, has found a man who resembles me not at all and is currently growing old with her.

  For most North American and European visitors to Tobago, on their flight in or home, Trinidad’s Port-of-Spain is just an urban airport stop twenty minutes away, where they switch between an Airbus 380 with five hundred seats from the States and a Twin Otter DHC-6 with nineteen based in Tobago. But in our journey down the Antilles, Chase and I had booked for Carnival, Trinidad’s annual homage to the erotic-sublime. Departing from Tobago, we joined a mob of fellow celebrants headed for Port-of-Spain and made the quick flight over and checked into the Hilton, which, like the entire city, was already packed with revelers from all nations.

  Officially, Carnival is celebrated on the two days preceding Ash Wednesday, when Lent begins. It has pre-Christian European roots in the annual cycle of death and rebirth and in Dionysian rites from the Mediterranean, as well as more recent, colonial-era origins in the slaves’ attempt to preserve African religious, artistic, and social forms within a society intent on suppressing them. Carnival in Port-of-Spain, as in New Orleans, Rio, and elsewhere in the Afro-Latin world, is public and communal, with little distinction made between performers and audience. There’s no fourth wall, and it is deliberately ecstatic—which is to say, Carnival is one hell of a party.

  For me the timing was perfect: I sorely needed a party. For Chase it was different. Her depression, which saps her of energy and laughter, is clinical; mine was purely situational, the depression of a narrator telling a story about a man a lot like himself that causes him pain and makes him feel guilty all over again for long-ago crimes. So while Chase only reluctantly went along with the spirit of Carnival, I hit the streets with alacrity and relief.

  For these few days, social, racial, and even sexual differences are set aside. You can wander the packed streets of Port-of-Spain in a business suit, a costume made of green bananas and tinfoil, or stark naked, and people smile affectionately at you, as if your very humanity delights them. There were parades and all-night and all-day jump-up performances of calypso and soca bands throughout the city, but especially in the huge central park, Queen’s Park Savannah, where there were comfortable viewing stands for those who didn’t wish to march along with the bands.

  The bands themselves were enormous, with five hundred to five thousand members, each crew more or less organized and costumed on a theme and led by a mass of musicians, usually on steel or brass, or by a deejay and a flatbed truckload of two-thousand-watt boom-box speakers playing at ear-shattering volume the three or four top entries in the song competition. The trophy for that year’s top band was awarded to Hero-myth, although I myself preferred the costumes of Tush in the Bush and the concept behind Alkebulan, Reflection of a Sailor’s Vision, which I deconstructed for Chase as a dramatization of the European encounter with Mexico. I agreed with the judges’ choice for Carnival queen, Nicole Cobham, a stunning beauty costumed as a black Pallas Athena, Queen of Spades, but my choice for king was second-place winner Roderick Snell, who, as Hammurabi, the Star Gazer, wore only a silver cape and thong and marched inside an enormous slow-turning silver gyroscope like a hamster in a laboratory treadmill. The winning song, soon after sung all over the United States, Canada, and England, was the soca “Free Up” by Tambu, fought to the wire by Crazy’s “Nanny Wine.”

  One normally could not care less about such things, but at Carnival, for a few days, one cared passionately. And afterward one somehow felt better for it—one felt freed of one’s Yankee seriousness, at least for a while. How can one return to being so somber and self-important and self-analytical and guilty when one has just spent three days dancing ridiculously through the streets with a million or more of his fellow human beings?

  On Ash Wednesday, with shocking ease, everything returned to normal. The city was cleaned up, people, most of them nursing colossal hangovers, went back to work, and the Hilton emptied out. We, too, took our leave, heading for Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire, the cluster of Dutch islands located way to the west, a few miles off the coast of Venezuela.

  As I write this, I’ve recently turned seventy-five, and while I’m not close enough to death’s shore yet to see the waves break, I hear them smack the sand. The mountains in the background loom large and dark. Like a lifelong sailor, I find myself wondering, now that the end of my final voyage is in earshot and sight, how and why I ended up where I have ended up. How did I wash ashore here, instead of somewhere else? It wasn’t intentional, part of a carefully charted plan. And it’s not as though I’ve been on some decades-long Odyssey and am finally returning to my home in Ithaca, to my old arthritic dog, my grown son and beleaguered wife, looking for a land-locked spot to plant an oar.

  My wife Chase’s given first name is in fact Penelope, as Clive Cravensbrooke knew, but despite even that connection, the strained Homeric analogy breaks down. Nowadays I have two homes, neither of them in Ithaca, and am reluctant to call either of them home. Nor are they merely safe harbors or stops on the way to someplace else. While I can easily answer the questions What’s your hometown? (born in Watertown, Massachusetts, raised in New Hampshire small towns and suburban Boston) and Where do you live? (Miami, Florida, and the Adirondack mountain village of Keene, New York), when I’m asked, Where is your home? I have no answer. Miami and Keene are not my homes. Simply, they are where I ended up; they are where in my mid-seventies I seem to have washed ashore. One place is located almost as far south in the United States of America as I can get, and the other as far north. Both lie at the edge of wilderness, the Everglades in the first case and the Adirondack Mountains in the second.

  That’s not a coincidence, I suppose, but it’s not intentional, either.

  Since I was eighteen years old, as if caught by an ocean current, I’ve been drifting south in the direction of Miami, pulled toward the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean by a New England Protestant white boy’s eroticized fantasy of semitropical history and geography and climate and culture and race. How and why I lately ended up wintering over more or less permanently in South Florida is a long, circuitous story of stops and starts, like an imagined current pushing stubbornly south against the northbound Gulf Stream. It’s a coherent story, though, one that I pretty much understand now—a classic, or at least an old-fashioned, American male quest story. I started fictionalizing its early chapters back in the early 1960s, and one day I’ll get around to telling it for its own sake. Pe
rhaps that’s one of the things I’ve been doing here.

  Meanwhile, for the last twenty-eight years I’ve lived seasonally and sometimes year-round in a tiny, remote village in the High Peaks region of the Adirondack Mountains of New York. When asked, How did you happen to pull up and drop anchor there? I don’t have a reliable ready answer or a long or short story to explain it. Not the way I do for Miami. When I arrived in the Adirondacks in the late 1980s, I was following no romanticized vision of the place, no mythologized, projected version of its history, the way I was when I first drifted south to Miami; I wasn’t on a quest and in fact had little knowledge of where exactly the Adirondacks were located and what kind of people lived there. No prior fantasy or projection drew me there from wherever I was before—which happened to be New York City, where I was living with my wife Becky, and Princeton, New Jersey, where I was employed as a professor. I came to the Adirondacks purely by accident. Serendipity. On a rainy night in June 1987.

  I should say that I was following a woman. It would be the basic truth. As I confessed earlier, I’d done it before, back in the early 1960s, when, crazed with love, I followed the young woman named Christine south from where I was working as a restaurant dishwasher in Massachusetts to her family home in Richmond, Virginia. Eventually, as young lovers do, we quarreled, then betrayed each other, and I moved on to Boston, the Florida Keys, San Diego, ending in New Hampshire, where this time Christine followed me, and we forgave each other our trespasses and for fourteen turbulent years lived as husband and wife and raised our three children together.