When in Vanuatu

by Nicki Chen

  “Yes,” Diana said. “Very romantic.” She was picturing Celeste jumping the wake behind a speeding boat, her suntanned body sparkling with spray, blond hair flying.

  “High ceilings, an elegant parquet floor.” Bette’s eyes followed the sound of banging cupboard doors and knuckles knocking on walls. “He’s very thorough, isn’t he?”

  They were about to look at the bedrooms when Jay caught up with them. “We have a problem,” he said. “Termites.” Dusting off his hands, he led Diana back to the pantry. “See.” He knocked on a wall. Knocked again in another place. “Hear the difference? See these little piles of fine sawdust?”

  “Well,” Bette said on their way out the door, “sometimes these charming wood-frame houses do succumb to the exuberance of tropical life.” She closed the door with exquisite delicacy, gave it a pat, and turned around, ready to go. “Now, this next house we’re going to see is brand new. Concrete and masonry construction throughout. A very creative design.”

  The houses in Nambatri, the area developed after Nambatu—“Number Two,” Bette translated in case they hadn’t caught it—were scattered. In the morning sun, the newer ones looked starkly naked. The rental they’d come to see was situated atop a small hill, not so much for the view, it seemed, but to be the view. Its Romanesque pillars and oversized double purple doors screamed pretension and bad taste. The inside was equally overdone—an entry dominated by a large empty koi pond, planters, and a carved floor-to-ceiling wooden screen. On the other side of the screen was an enormous space—a combination living area, master bedroom, and bath without a single wall or privacy partition between them.

  “Doesn’t it just take your breath away?” Bette said.

  Diana wanted to like it, but she had to agree with the look on Jay’s face. “It’s very dramatic,” she said, “but I can’t see how anyone could actually live here.”

  “A rock star and his groupies maybe,” Jay said. “Fill this big open space with cushions and futons.” He shook his head. “Sorry, Bette. Not this house.”

  Bette chuckled and started for the door. “Cushions and futons. You’re absolutely right. I’ll have to find a client who likes to throw parties. Orgies,” she added, cackling and tripping on the purple threshold.

  “This is crazy.” Diana threw her handbag on the table. “Only two houses and neither of them worth considering.”

  Jay raised one shoulder as if to say, “What can you do?”

  “Termites, a bedroom without walls.” She kicked her sandals off and flopped down on the sofa.

  “I’ll call her Monday, tell her to let us know as soon as she finds something.” Jay leaned close and kissed her cheek. “Port Vila is a small market, honey. We just have to be patient.”

  Jasper bent his tail into a question mark and peeped a small meow. “Come on up,” Diana said, patting her knee. She hadn’t thought Maritess would give up her cat so soon, but she’d gone along with Diana’s request without complaint. And now here Jasper was, purring and warm and soft on her lap.

  If she could just stop thinking about Celeste. Sometimes—when Diana was busy with her own life or feeling confident, content to just live in the moment—she could forget about her for months at a time.

  “Juice?” Jay poked his head around the corner and held up a can of pineapple-orange.

  “No thanks.”

  He disappeared into the kitchen, and she heard the rising tone of his juice filling a glass, the suck and rattle of the refrigerator opening, the cushioned thud of it closing. Celeste must have learned to water ski when she and Jay were young, when she could jump a wake as effortlessly as a cat jumps onto a chair.

  Stop. She had to stop thinking about her. That’s exactly what brings her back. Transforms her from a will-o-the-wisp into . . . Diana pressed her lips together. A pebble in my shoe, a burr in my bra.

  Who would have thought the memory of Celeste would turn out to be such a torment? Hearing about her that first time had been a shock, but Diana didn’t make the connection then between Celeste’s one-time existence and her own. She groaned. A first wife, young and beautiful? How could she have assumed that wouldn’t matter?

  Suddenly she remembered one thing Jay had said that day at the Emerald City Café. It was about one of the women he had dated before he met Diana. He said she’d dropped him because she didn’t want to compete with his dead-but-ever-present first love. At the time Diana had scoffed at the woman’s concerns. And yet, here she was, seven years later, still competing with Celeste’s memory.

  She scratched Jasper behind the ears. Then she twisted around so she could watch Jay from behind as he ducked to look in the fridge. In the beginning, the fact that Celeste had been pregnant when she died had been just one more sad thing. But as time passed, the significance of that unborn baby—the baby who would have been Jay’s first child—had grown ever larger in Diana’s mind. And yet, after that day at the Emerald City Café, Jay had never again mentioned the child that might have been. Nor had she.

  “Jay,” she said.

  “Yeah?” He bumped the door shut with his elbow and walked toward her.

  “Do you ever . . .?”

  He opened his eyes wide as though ready to take in anything she might say.

  “Do you . . .?” But it wouldn’t come out. Years of silence had made Celeste and the baby she’d carried a taboo subject. “I mean,” she said, quickly recovering, “that thing with Hoffmann, was that a big disappointment for you?”

  He shrugged. “Those things happen.”

  For some reason, his shrug annoyed her. He didn’t mean it. She could tell from the look on his face. “That should have been your job,” she said, persisting. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t just let it go.

  “Yeah.” He smiled. “That’s what I thought at the time. But, hey, we’re here now. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course not.”

  She nodded. Yes. She had got what she wanted. So what did it matter whether his motives for moving here were pure or, as Abby suggested, mixed? She let the cat down and stood up. “You know,” she said. “It’s still early. Why don’t we go drive around? Get acquainted with the neighborhoods.”

  “Good idea.” He threw back his head and finished his juice in one big gulp. “Sure you don’t want some?”

  32

  Celeste was still in her thoughts as they walked to the car. Jay must have changed by the time Diana met him. Otherwise, wouldn’t he have found a second wife more like his first? But then, what did she really know about Celeste? She’d seen photos of her, so she knew Celeste was blond and petite. And she’d seen the way she smiled when she leaned up against Jay. But all the rest . . . wasn’t that just Diana’s imagination? What made her think that Celeste was idealistic, that she always knew the right thing to say, that children loved her? How did she know that Celeste had no trouble at all finding her place in the world or that she’d never had second thoughts about her chosen profession as a teacher of small children?

  She got in the car and immediately opened the window. This car they’d borrowed would probably always smell of cigarettes and beer. She pulled out a tissue and tried to wipe a stubborn spot off the dashboard. “I’ll be glad when we get our own car.”

  “I have the duty-free form now,” Jay said as he backed out. “I can place our order on Monday.”

  “Carole Anne told me we should order a white car.” Diana smiled and shook her head as they turned onto the side street. “She says Port Vila is a small town and we don’t want to stand out. What do you think that’s all about?”

  Jay chuckled. “I suppose if you were married to Marshall, you might not want everyone checking up on his comings and goings either. Or maybe she’s just a very private person.”

  “Maybe. But I’d rather not fall in line on this one. I love color.” She did love color, she thought. It was one of the great pleasures of life: color and form and everything beautiful. And, if she was going to admit it, the
re was something else behind her opposition. Car color was a small choice, but shouldn’t this small decision be theirs?

  “Fine. I understand we could order silver, white, bronze, black, or sea mist.”

  “Sea mist,” she said without hesitation.

  He grinned and patted her knee.

  There was something else, too, she thought as they rode through Seaside and then up into the French Quarter. She didn’t like being the kind of person who tried to hide her actions from the world. It felt sneaky. They passed a baby blue church with Vietnamese lettering now. A moment later they reached the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart. It was a mixed neighborhood, modest concrete block bungalows next to old colonial-style houses with wooden louvered windows. Nothing was extravagant, but even the smallest dwelling was brightened by the sunshine and softened by the foliage that surrounded it.

  At a high point above the commercial center, Jay pulled over, and they got out. From the side of the road, a stand of African tulip trees covered with brilliant red blooms framed the town’s variously shaped roofs and winding roads. In the curve of the bay, a boat sailed over turquoise water on its way to the Pacific. “If it weren’t for the cars,” Diana said, “this could be 1790 instead of 1990. I almost expect to see an old sailing ship out there by Iririki Island, a seaman scurrying up its mast, whipping out a spyglass to look for friendly natives.”

  “A peg-legged captain with a parrot on his shoulder?” Jay joked.

  They got back in the car and continued exploring, this time in Tassiriki, an area east of town where mostly new houses looked out on the upper reaches of the first lagoon. It looked like a nice neighborhood, but there weren’t any “for rent” signs. The only unoccupied houses were still under construction. Jay pulled over in front of one of them and stopped. “Do you want to look?”

  The house was all empty spaces and concrete blocks—a great gray ship on a grassy green sea. It looked intriguing, though. “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

  The roughed-in driveway was steep, wrapping around to the back of the house where it flattened out. Jay parked next to a maroon pickup and they both got out. Then, in the way of men at construction sites, Jay walked over to the Asian guy who was supervising a parade of ni-Vanuatu workers. The two men stood side-by-side for several minutes watching the workers unload stacks of tile from a flatbed before they exchanged a “hello” and a “bonjour.”

  The man pointed at the tile. “Blong Italia,” he said, switching to Bislama. “Emi gud tumas.”

  Diana walked away, leaving them on their own to supervise the workers and discuss the “very good Italian tile.” She wanted to check out the view. It was hard going, though. The ground was littered with the jagged, cream-colored rock that had been blasted out to make room for the house’s foundation. She edged around chunks of coral rock that were as big as a child and as sharp as sharks’ teeth. She climbed over and around them. Then she waded through clumps of grass and weeds to the side of the house. The view from there was gentle—the land sloping down to one lagoon, a strip of jungle separating it from another, vines and grass and bushes covering every rock and strip of dirt.

  “It looks like a nice place,” Diana said as they drove away. “Too bad it’s not finished yet.”

  “Yeah. It would have been a good house for us. Even if it were finished, though, it wouldn’t be available.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Henri is building it for himself, his wife, his son, and the son’s girlfriend.”

  That night as she climbed into bed, Diana thought about the ancient land hidden beneath the grass and vines. Ni-Vanuatu land, even now. The foreigners who lived there and paid rent for it felt as though it belonged to them, but it didn’t and never would. Pulling the blanket up under her chin, she turned off the light and listened to the soft steady sound of Jay’s shower.

  The water stopped, and the shower door clicked open. His feet padded across the tiles. She heard the towel rack rattle and the whisper of the towel rubbing against his skin. He switched off the light, and as he opened the bathroom door, her heart fell. He doesn’t belong to you, a voice seemed to be saying. You’re the renter, the interloper. The wife who came too late to bear fruit.

  33

  The Cathedral of the Sacred Heart looked like a Catholic Church should—carved pillars, statues, stained glass windows. It had a French priest and even a bishop from Quebec. The one thing it lacked was an English-language mass. If you didn’t speak French, you had to drive to the other side of town where the Anglophone Catholic community gathered on Sunday mornings in a small rectangular cinderblock chapel called Paray.

  Mass was at nine. Diana and Jay arrived at 8:52.

  “We’re early this time,” Jay whispered as they slid into a pew.

  Diana nodded. Last week, for some reason she couldn’t recall, they’d been late.

  She tucked in her feet so Jay could pull the kneeler down and looked around the chapel. All the basics were there—the altar and crucifix, a small plaster statue of the Virgin Mary, votive candles, windows to let in the breeze. And butterflies, she noted as one fluttered through an unscreened open window. She dropped to her knees beside Jay and watched the butterfly zigzag across the side aisle. Dear Lord, she prayed, please bless . . . It lit on a white carnation in front of Mary’s statue, a touch of brilliant yellow in a skimpy pink-and-white bouquet.

  Dear Lord, she prayed, trying again, forgive me . . . She couldn’t think how to continue, but she did seem to need forgiveness. Forgive me, Lord for . . . pretending to sleep when. . . .

  Sighing, she sat back in the pew and crossed her legs. Whatever opportunity she wasted last night, God wasn’t the one she hurt. Of course . . . She pressed her fingers into her temples. A sin against oneself was still a sin. There was no ready-made word, though, for what she’d done, or rather, what she had failed to do. Wasting a fertile day wasn’t exactly on any list of sins she’d ever read. Her thoughts wandered as she sat not praying but mulling over any possible connection between her convictions and God’s will. If she felt so strongly that she needed to have a child, wasn’t that some kind of moral imperative? Didn’t God also want the same thing for her, and . . .?

  Suddenly the overhead projector lit up a screen. Someone straightened the transparency. The song leader’s husband strummed a chord. And as the congregation stood to sing “Gather Us In,” a delicate shadow fluttered over the hand-printed words on the screen.

  During the readings, the butterfly drifted between the carnations and the altar, dipping its filmy yellow wings at one point dangerously close to the balding head of the old Australian priest. During the homily, when the priest stepped down from the altar, the little creature fluttered ahead, making his disjointed sermon even harder to follow. Finally, during the Eucharistic Prayer, she stopped watching her little yellow friend and let the familiar prayers take over.

  “Father, it is our duty . . . always and everywhere to give you thanks.”

  Most Sundays Diana felt the beauty of the mass prayers lifting her beyond whatever blind alley her mind was stuck in. Always. Everywhere. It was like taking a deep breath and discovering more space in your lungs than you felt possible. Like looking up on a starry night, thrilling at the immensity of the universe.

  The priest raised his arms. “We join with the angels and saints,” he said, “in proclaiming God’s glory.”

  They prayed for the pope and the bishop and all God’s people, for their friends and relatives and for those who had “gone to their rest in the hope of rising again.” My father, Diana prayed, and Grandpa Walker. Also Celeste, she added suddenly. Celeste and her unborn baby. May they rest in peace.

  After mass, walking out the door and into the sunshine, Diana felt somehow lighter than when she entered.

  “I liked your homily,” Jay told Father Nolan. “Very thoughtful.”

  “The ageless wisdom of the Church,” Diana murmured, smiling and squeezing Jay’s hand. She was thinking of the mass prayers, ho
w sensible it was to pray for the “faithful departed,” the disembodied souls up there in heaven with “the angels and saints.” She should have put Celeste on her prayer list a long time ago.

  Walking across the grassy parking lot, Diana wrapped her arm around Jay’s waist. “Love you,” she whispered.

  “I love you, too, honey.”

  34

  “They should have a big bell for us to ring,” Jay said. They were standing at the edge of the water waiting for a boat to take them across to the little offshore island tucked inside Mele Bay. The beach on Hideaway Island faced another side of the bay, though. It was a wonder the speedboat operator ever noticed people waiting to be ferried across from the pickup spot.

  “Someone will see us before long.” Diana swished her foot in the water. You couldn’t really complain about waiting for the speedboat when Hideaway Island was only a nine-minute drive from town, so close they’d gone snorkeling there three times in the past month.

  Their first trip to Hideaway Island had been with Carole Anne. Marshall should have been with her, but he’d been at a golf tournament. “He really did want to come,” she’d assured them when they climbed into her car, “but this is an important tournament, one he’s determined to win. Y’all know Marshall. Losing is not an option. Anyway,” she said, as she pulled away from their apartment, “y’all are just gonna love the beaches here.” She raised her hand from the steering wheel and counted them off on her fingers: “White Sand Beach, Black Sand Beach, Iririki Island, British Beach, Erakor Island. Oh, and Eton Beach,” she said, changing hands. “Absolutely gorgeous, and super safe for the kids. We simply must have an office picnic there sometime. Hideaway, of course is much better for snorkeling. And so close—only nine minutes from town.”

  Nine minutes can be an eternity when you’re getting a sales pitch all the way. Carole Anne rhapsodized about the “incredibly” calm, clear water in Mele Bay, the “fantastic” coral reefs, the fish, “every kind you can imagine,” the dive shop and restaurant, the grass-roofed picnic tables on the beach. “And,” she said, “it’s never crowded. Y’all can always find a thatched-roofed beach hut with a table. Fales we call them.”