“And at least Gordon keeps a roof over our heads, right?” I say.
Mummy shrugs. “Years ago, if only you could have seen him.”
“Right. How about we talk about something else?”
Mummy shrugs again. “Tell me about Rebecca.”
“Right. Well, things at work are going well, she’ll probably get a promotion before long. She just got back from a few days at her parents’—her dad finished up a ninety-day rehab program and she wanted to welcome him home and show her support.”
“That’s nice. And how is everything at your school?”
“Do you even listen to the answers when you ask a question? What if I said, um, Rebecca has a new interest—she thinks processed food is bad for kids so she’s injecting poison into Cheetos which hopefully will make the kids really sick but not kill anyone. To raise awareness and all.”
Mummy looks at me and blinks, then chuckles, which sounds like an old motor about to give out. She’s only in her fifties but sounds a lot older—still has that smoker’s voice even though she quit years ago. “You’re never serious about anything, Wilson.”
“What would you like me to be serious about? I like my job well enough. I love my wife. I’m both extremely excited and filled with dread at the prospect of the baby coming. That’s the report from Berkeley. No joke.”
“I should come visit.”
“Yes. You should.” But won’t, I think to myself but do not say.
“Been to any auctions lately?” I ask. When I was last living here, antique auctions were her main pastime. She spent Gordon’s money so fast on rare sticks of furniture you’d have thought he’d leave her over it, but oddly enough there has never been a whisper of divorce from either of them, for reasons I have never been able to figure out.
“Auctions? No,” she says, looking at me with surprise, as though I had asked her some totally random question that had no relation to her at all. “Fix me a drink,” she adds, waving her hand in the direction of the drinks tray at the other end of the room.
“Alas, no time,” I say, jumping up from the sofa. “I’m meeting Gordon downtown for dinner. See you later. Eat something,” I toss over my shoulder while waiting for the elevator.
But she will not eat. She exists purely on the boxes of milk that she puts her rum in. Possibly Marecita gets some food in her every once in a while, but I don’t think I’ve actually seen Mummy chew in several years.
The elevator is taking fucking forever. We’re still sort of halfway in a conversation, Mummy and I, and I won’t be free until those mahogany doors open and swallow me up.
“Funny you bring up Jamaica,” I say limply. “I’m taking Rebecca there for Christmas. We’re leaving in a couple of days.”
“Montego Bay?”
“Yep.”
“I often think of the poinsettia hedge that went around the yard of our villa that one year,” she says, looking into the distance as though she can see that stupid hedge right here in the apartment.
Blessedly, the elevator arrives and the doors slide open. All of a sudden my head’s filled with those fucking poinsettias Mummy was talking about—a hedge of red flowers so high I can’t see over it. I jump into the car and shut my eyes tight.
“Goodnight, Mummy,” I say, as the doors close and I can breathe again.
15
2000
Jamaica
The Crowe’s villa was part of the quietly swank Tryall Club on the outskirts of Montego Bay. The children were twelve and ten, both accomplished swimmers, and the family no longer had any need for a nanny or au pair, which was a positive development in terms of the potential for family tension, for reasons too obvious to belabor.
Caroline was wild for snorkeling. Every day she begged to be taken to the beach at Negril, where there was little surf, so she could swim up and down with her mask on. At Negril there was not much to look at under the water—a stray angelfish, the odd sea urchin—but Caroline was not greedy for a dazzling multitude of fish. She was happy simply to be underwater, mesmerized by the blue shimmering vistas even if there was not much going on, and soothed by the sound of her breath going in and out of the plastic snorkeling apparatus.
“It’s so boring!” yelled Wilson, when it looked as though for the third morning in a row he was going to be carted off to Negril with his sister, with the handyman/gardener waiting at the bar on the beach to give them a ride back in time for lunch.
“Tough,” said Caroline, in the smug voice of big sisters everywhere who are getting their way.
“I thought we were going to see the banana plantation! What about that? And can I get a machete?”
“The banana plantation is this afternoon,” said Gordon, finishing a tall glass of freshly-squeezed orange juice and wiping his mouth on a starched linen napkin. “So get some exercise in the morning before the sun gets too hot. Then you’ll be under the leaves in the afternoon. A perfect day.”
“You’ll be under the leaves too, right, Daddy? You’re coming to see the banana plantation with us?” said Wilson.
“I’m afraid I have other engagements,” said Gordon, winking.
Wilson rolled his eyes. “That’s what you always say, Daddy! Come on, don’t you want to come with us? Can I have a machete?”
“Certainly not,” said Lillian. “You know I am not in favor of weapons lying around the house. It’s asking for trouble. You never know when someone might lose his head and do something regrettable.”
“I’m not going to whack anyone with it,” protested Wilson.
“That’s correct, you are not. Because you’re not getting one,” said Gordon.
Caroline halfway suppressed a smile as she bit into a piece of buttered toast.
After breakfast, Gordon followed his wife into their bedroom and watched her change into a two-piece bathing suit, which she still looked good in.
“Come here,” he said, tugging on a bow on her hip and then taking her hand and putting it on his crotch.
“Oh Gordon, not on top of an onion omelet,” said Lillian, who was also in the throes of ardent desire, though in her case it was for the family to hurry up and clear out of the house so she could pull the hidden bottle of rum out of the dirty clothes hamper.
Gordon shrugged. “What a waste,” he said, gesturing to his impressive manhood stretching the fabric of his bathing suit to the limit.
Lillian kissed him because she felt guilty, but she was careful not to kiss too enthusiastically since the last thing she wanted to do was encourage him. “Are you sure you don’t want to go to the banana plantation?” she asked.
“I’m sick to death of hearing about it,” said Gordon, banging the door on his way out.
Caroline and Wilson were dropped off at the beach. The handyman/gardener made his way over to the bar, stopping to talk to friends along the way.
“Take turns with the snorkel,” said Wilson as they walked down to the water’s edge.
“No way. You could’ve brought one from the house if you wanted to.”
“Come on, Caro! What else am I gonna do all day, just sit around with nothing to do?”
“Dig a hole.”
Caroline waded into the warm transparent water. She spit in the mask, rubbed it with her fingers, rinsed it out. Squatting down, she leaned her head back to get her hair wet, tasting the salt on her lips. The snorkel had a particular taste of rubbery plastic that she associated with pleasure; she slipped the end part into her mouth, wiggled it around so it didn’t cut into her gums, and set off in a leisurely breaststroke, not giving Wilson a second look. All she wanted to do was exist in the quiet underwater world and leave dry land and everything else behind.
The handyman/gardener took a drag on a joint and laughed at his friend’s imitation of the old white lady he worked for.
Wilson had no shovel so he dug with his hands. For several hours, until Caroline finally emerged waterlogged from the sea and the handyman/gardener came over to fetch them, Wilson dug, flinging handful
s of wet sand up over his shoulder, making a deep hole big enough to hide in, his back fiery red from sunburn.
After lunch and a short enforced rest during which Caroline read and Wilson shot rubber bands at the ceiling light fixture, the children were loaded into a white van and driven up narrow rutted roads into the backcountry of the island. Lillian had intended to come along but at the last minute found herself indisposed. The leader of the excursion was a man who did odd jobs for Tryall named Dibby, and the others in the van were two newlyweds, an older couple, and a father and his teenaged son.
“I’d like to be a banana picker,” Wilson confided to his sister. “They have machetes.”
Caroline sighed and turned to look out the window.
The vegetation was dense, unlike anything she had seen before. Vines, enormous leaves, a million shades of green. The van’s air-conditioning was either broken or absent, and the air was dense too, so humid it took effort to get it all the way down into your lungs. Every so often they passed a small shack, put together haphazardly, looking like it would not keep rain out reliably. Outside one of these Caroline saw a small naked boy, who stared at the van and at her. She held his gaze and then they bounced around the curve and he was gone.
“People here don’t have anything,” she murmured to Wilson.
He shrugged. “They have the beach. They have machetes.”
“Will you get off it?”
“Never.”
Caroline turned back to the window. The newlyweds were in the seat right in front of her and she watched them smooching off and on. She wiped sweat from her forehead. They slowed down at an intersection, then stopped. A group of young men was standing around a metal barrel that had smoke rising from it. Several of the men looked toward the van, their eyes so red that Caroline wondered if they were ill with some kind of tropical disease. Then with a lurch, the van went on, deeper up into the jungle, the road more and more rutted.
“I’m going to puke,” said Wilson, after they slammed over a particularly deep pothole.
“You don’t get carsick,” said Caroline.
“I do now.”
“No, you don’t. You’re not going to be sick.” She spoke with finality, and in fact, the queasiness passed and Wilson reached into his pocket for a rubber band.
“You hit me with that and you’ve breathed your last breath,” Caroline said in a low, menacing voice.
Wilson looked at his sister steadily. He put his pointer finger into the end loop of the rubber band and wrapped the band around his thumb and then his middle finger, ready to fire.
“Last breath,” Caroline repeated.
“Okay mon,” said Dibby, standing up from his seat in the front of the van. “We’re here at the Blue Mountain Plantation. Before we get out, I just want to say a few things. We grow millions of bananas a year. Maybe some of you have eaten them back home in your kitchens when it’s cold outside. You know we don’t get cold here in Jamaica. It’s bad for the fruit. Fifty-two degrees, no less.”
Wilson raised his hand and waved it madly.
“What is it?” asked the guide.
“Will we get to cut down any bananas?”
Dibby chuckled. “Not today, I am sorry, little man. But you will be able to see how the harvest works, from start to finish. There is no banana season, you see. We grow new plants and harvest the fruit all the year round. And I will show the whole thing to you.”
Wilson pouted as the van shuddered to a halt in front of a large building with two open sides. Everyone got up and staggered out of the steaming hot van, finding it no cooler outside.
The guide led them over to the building where they could see enormous stalks of bananas soaking in vats of water. They saw an overhead conveyor belt with hanging stalks of bananas wrapped in polyethylene bags. Everyone marveled at seeing bananas in circumstances other than in a composed pile at the supermarket or sitting on their kitchen counters, as though they had no idea the fruit had another life before reaching those familiar places.
Wilson scratched at a bug bite behind one knee, restless and bored. Mercifully the guide herded the group down a path, away from the building, and soon they were subsumed into the green world of banana trees. No one spoke and they could hear a thwocking sound that Wilson was certain was made by a machete. They saw small trees just taking root and sturdy, older trees covered with stalks of baby bananas, and irrigation ditches running everywhere. They kept trudging on the muddy path, twisting and turning along side-paths until Caroline worried they would never find their way back.
Eventually they came to a clearing where there was a small shack and a fire pit. Everyone breathed in the smell of roast meat. The guide stood on a stump and gave a memorized speech about bananas, talking about the importance of temperature and ventilation, about how the best fruit was shipped overseas and the bruised fruit sold locally for much less money. He talked about mites and fungus, about pesticides and shipping practices. Caroline and Wilson wanted to die they were so bored. None of the group was interested except the older couple, who continually asked questions.
A middle-aged woman with very dark skin, almost black, came out of the shack holding a bundle. She laid the fabric down on the ground and arranged trinkets on it. The newlyweds went over for a look, followed by the man and his son. Caroline and Wilson figured they were allowed to walk away too, and drifted away from the guide, around the side of the shack, looking around with curiosity.
Some children came around the shack from the other direction. They were around the Crowes’ ages, perhaps a bit younger. They laughed and pointed at Caroline. Her face burned and she was confused, not able to understand what they were saying to each other. She turned away, furious. The oldest girl approached shyly and pointed at her mouth, then at her own teeth.
“It’s your braces,” said Wilson.
Caroline could hardly believe that her braces were such a novelty—they were so standard in her world that in the moment, she couldn’t think of a single friend who didn’t have them. She turned back to the group of children, opening her mouth so the children could see. They laughed gleefully but Caroline was not smiling.
Caroline looked at the girl and then behind her, at a broken chair about to be engulfed by the jungle. A single flip-flop lay in the dirt. They have nothing, she thought. Impulsively she pulled off the silver necklace Gordon had bought for her in a gift shop in Montego Bay and dangled it in her hand.
“Let’s see your mouth,” Caroline said. “Open up,” ordered Caroline, and the girl did. Caroline dropped the necklace onto the girl’s tongue, the silver spilling down her chin.
Caroline wanted to say something but she couldn’t find the words or any explanation for what she had just done.
“What did you do that for?” Wilson asked.
Before she was able to get her thoughts in any kind of order, the guide called for them and they were herded back down the path to the van. The newlywed was chattering about the earrings her husband bought for her, and Wilson practiced tongue twisters until Caroline slapped him hard on the leg to shut him up.
They shouldn’t have laughed at me, she thought, watching the many shades of green whip by. I gave her a necklace. Anyway, she’s got nothing to complain about.
Caroline closed her eyes. She tried to count, then count by twos, anything to quiet the squawking that had started up in her head and whose discordant tones she would do anything to escape.
16
Caroline
Paris felt like a betrayal. After the events on the plane, I was looking for distraction, comfort, something to assuage my uncomfortably overwrought feelings about what had taken place—or not—with Morton. I walked and walked under the tenaciously gray skies, my eyes fixed on buildings that always in the past had given me succor. I reminisced about the trip Wilson and I took a few years ago. I stopped in charming cafés, drank coffee and apéritifs, went to the Musée d’Orsay, ate hearty food.
But this time, nothing I did mattered. I kept thin
king about Morton and how it could have gone differently—if I had said something else, done something else, been someone else.
Which is the kernel of the problem, you see: it’s who I am that is the first false step, the essential error from which everything flows. What Morton is, what he offers…I can’t have it, it won’t work. It would be like trying to marry the Wicked Witch of the West off to the Scarecrow, just wrong in every direction. Those earnest Carhartt work pants should have tipped me off, but that’s so often how it works, isn’t it, that the very thing that attracts us should have acted as a warning signal instead.
And incessantly, my thoughts keep circling back to Wilson and Sandie Shearer. Wondering what he is telling her, what he remembers. Trying to gauge just how perilous the situation is.
All any of us can do is try to make the best of things. That’s what I thought to myself, sitting in Café de Flore, watching shivering tourists come in for chocolat chaud out of a drizzling, dispiriting rain. I thought: you made your bed, now lie in it. Funny, isn’t it, how the mind serves up platitudes at the crucial moments in our lives, when we could really use something more substantial?
The head jeerling is doubtless cackling to himself over that one. He sent out a whole fleet of minions with instructions to keep repeating that phrase in my ear for all three days I was in Paris.
You made your bed.
Now lie in it.
On the way back from Kennedy, the nausea began to build until I feared I might actually vomit right there in the backseat of the limousine. For the rest of the ride I was preoccupied with how to manage the situation without utter mortification—I had no plastic bag, I refused to vomit into my handbag, and the only plan I could think of was to roll down the window and gulp in fresh air, and throw up with my head out of the window if retching was unavoidable.
Which blessedly, it was not.
You Made Your Bed Page 8