“Get the fuck out of here before I call the cops,” the girl shouted through the bolted door, and Wilson heard her hard footsteps going upstairs. He rang the doorbell again; she did not answer, then he went across the street and hid behind the Dumpster, where he waited for several hours, squatting in the fetid, rat-infested gloom.
Lights went on behind the faded red curtains about 7:30, and a full moon went up over the Rubicon District. An hour after that, the blond girl came out wearing a black scarf over her head and carrying a black leather backpack. Wilson crossed the street and went into the vestibule. He counted the tile bricks on the floor and found, beneath the third brick from the wall in the third row, his spare set of keys, sealed in a Ziploc bag, exactly where he had left them over two years before.
He unlocked the double locks on the front door and set the bolt behind him, went upstairs and undid the double locks on the apartment door, and went inside. He spent the next hour putting the young witch’s belongings onto the sidewalk out front. There wasn’t much: A closetful of clothes—long Gypsy dresses and cowled cloaks, strange lace-up bustiers, two S&M-type leather harnesses, one red, one black with a steel ring in the crotch positioned to fit directly over the vagina—the usual obscure CDs, makeup, tarot cards, a poster of Satan, and a seventies-era poster of a kittycat hanging from a bar with the logo “Hang In There, Baby,” which Wilson assumed to be ironic. The few sticks of broken-down furniture were Wilson’s own, as were the towels and bed and sheets and television set.
The refrigerator was nearly empty, but Wilson found enough there to make himself a quesadilla and salad, and he watched a little television and changed the sheets and went to bed. The next morning, he was awakened by a fearsome banging and the sharp, piercing sound of a woman’s voice screaming obscenities. He scratched himself, yawned, and went out to the landing window and took out the screen and stuck his head out. The girl stood on the sidewalk amid the pile of her possessions.
“I gave you a chance,” Wilson called down. “Two months was pretty generous, I thought. Now it’s tough luck for you.”
The girl turned up her face, purple with rage. “You fuck!” she screamed. “You lousy fuck! I’m a witch, did you know that? I’ll curse you, I’ll cast a spell on you so your fucking little weenie falls off! You better run because when I’m through with you, your luck will be so fucking bad you will wish you had no luck at all!”
Wilson began to laugh so hard he couldn’t stop himself. He closed the window and doubled over on the floor with the unrestrained glee of a ten-year-old who has just put a frog in his sister’s bed. When he was able to stop laughing, he dried his eyes and went into the kitchen and made some coffee and two slices of cinnamon toast—the kettle and toaster and crockery were all his—and then he washed up and put on jeans and a T-shirt and set about looking for his books and his winter clothes and his pictures, which he eventually found dumped in moidering heaps in the basement. For the rest of the morning he worked on getting the place back together. At three in the afternoon a pickup truck came for the witch’s things. Wilson watched out the window in the kitchenette as the witch and a tall young man wearing black leather motorcycle gear loaded the bed of the pickup. When they drove off, the young man stuck his hand out the window and flashed the finger in Wilson’s general direction, but then they were gone, and it didn’t matter anymore.
Sunday night Wilson stayed in watching television and soaking his mildewed clothes in bleach in the tub. When he woke up Monday morning, he called a locksmith and had all the locks changed. Then he went out to look for a job. He was home.
2
Two months later, on a warm Friday night in late September, a nagging nostalgia brought Wilson out on the ferry to Blackpool Island. He wandered along the boardwalk with the Friday night crowds—the young toughs from Spanish Bend and their hard señoritas; the barrel-chested older men in shorts and sandals with socks, reading the sports pages on benches overlooking the sea; the quiet suburban kids from Glizzard and Point Broome lining up for the Tilt-a-Whirl—and around ten o’clock he found himself on the loggia at Bazzano’s.
Like everything else in the city, Bazzano’s looked pretty much the same. Wilson sat alone at a table beneath the lights and ordered a cappuccino and a shot of whiskey and listened to the wind from the ocean and the sound of the waves against the seawall, and a lump rose in his throat, a longing for something that he could not name. The bohemians with their beautiful lissome women came and went up the pier, and the fragrance of their foreign cigarettes and their laughter and their voices raised in song filled the air as pale stars glided over the dark silhouette of the city across the narrows.
Wilson watched and drank his cappuccino and sipped at his whiskey. He envied their lives, so free from convention and plainness—they were painters or musicians, they didn’t have money, but they had talent and beautiful women and friends—then he looked at his watch, and it was midnight, and he asked for the check. He waited for a while and the check did not come and he turned and shot an impatient glance at the busing station. Wilson’s waitress, a tall, leggy blonde with a nose ring, lingered there involved in an intense conversation with a shorter dark-haired waitress who stood with her back to his table.
“Something familiar about that back,” Wilson mumbled to himself, then the dark-haired waitress turned and approached and sat down across from him.
For a long moment he didn’t know what to say.
Andrea looked like a different person from the harried, quarrelsome career woman he had known, more like the fresh-faced ingenue who had come to the city eight years before, straight from grad school in the provinces. She was about thirty-two now and quite attractive in a sad, urban way, and her eyes were big and moist and expressive. Her dark hair was cut in a sexy 1920s-style shag, with strands curled carefully around her ears. There was no uniform for the wait staff at Bazzano’s. Andrea wore a tight white blouse open a couple of buttons to show a lacy black bra, a black miniskirt, and black hose. Her lipstick, some undefined effervescent color, shone in the yellow light of the loggia.
“You’re back,” Andrea said.
Wilson blinked, remembering their life together in quick, bright flashes.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Andrea said.
“How are you, Andrea?” Wilson said at last.
“Doing well.” Andrea nodded solemnly. “How about you?”
“Do you work here?” Wilson said.
Andrea nodded again, her dark eyes fixed on his face.
“What happened to the Tea Exchange?”
“I quit,” she said.
“You were vice-president,” Wilson said. “Why did you quit?”
Andrea hesitated, glanced at the bohemians at the bar inside. Just then a young man with a ponytail climbed to a table beneath the tin ceiling, saxophone in hand. A second later he began to blow a slow, melancholy tune.
“It wasn’t working out,” Andrea said in a voice that Wilson had to lean close to hear. “After you left, nothing made sense. I got real sick of the grind and realized I was missing my life. I didn’t do anything but work, you remember. Too many twelve-hour days. So I quit and I sold my condo in Pond Park Tower and I bought a little loft apartment in the Bend.”
“The Bend? You’re kidding.” Wilson almost laughed.
“That’s right,” she said, smiling for the first time. “Actually I love it there. I paint now, and there’s plenty of light and space—” Then she stopped and looked away. “I can’t really talk. I’m in the middle of my shift. I was wondering if you wanted to get a drink later at some after-hours place. Unless it’s a problem for your girlfriend or your wife.”
“I don’t have a girlfriend or a wife,” Wilson said. “There’s just me.”
Andrea brightened. “Then you don’t mind? We can catch up. I’d like to hear what you’ve been up to.”
“Sure,” Wilson said.
At 2:15, they caught the ferry to the Bend and went to a smoky little basement
bar called the Last Word that had faux shrunken heads hanging from the ceiling and a 4:00 A.M. license. They had a couple of daiquiris there, but it was too loud to hear each other talk, and the shrunken heads made Wilson nervous. Just after 3:30, they found themselves in the street again, the glimmer of false dawn in the sky.
“Not sure where we can go at this hour,” Andrea said. “Tony’s is closed. The only other five o’clock place is the bar at the Orion Hotel, and that’s such a scene.”
“Not the Orion,” Wilson said.
“I live just a couple of blocks away. Why don’t you come over to the apartment for a nightcap?”
Andrea’s version of a small loft apartment was the whole top floor of the old Castle Lock Building, redone by an architect she had brought over from Italy. There was a polished hardwood floor the size of a basketball court, exposed brick walls, a million glass blocks, and a whole row of arched windows overlooking the lights of the Bend and the slips of the marina to the south. Half the place had been turned into a studio, and a couple of dozen big canvases lay propped against the walls: heroic nudes in bright colors, urban landscapes, an apple, a snake. Wilson liked what he saw immediately. On the easel now was a half-finished portrait of a woman wearing a long pink skirt, naked from the waist up.
“That’s my new friend Pam,” Andrea said. “She has perfect breasts. Don’t you think she has perfect breasts?”
Wilson studied the painting for a moment and had to agree, then he went around the room, looking at the canvases.
“Damn, you can really paint,” he said when he had seen them all. “When did you start to paint?”
Andrea shrugged. “I never told you, but I used to paint in college,” she said. “Actually I was going to major in art, but my dad forced me into finance. ‘Study finance,’ he said, ‘paint on the side.’ Of course all I ever did was finance after that, and I tried to stop thinking about art because it depressed me that I wasn’t doing any.”
“Shit, these are great,” Wilson said, stopping at the painting of the snake. “I really like this one.”
“Some of them are O.K.,” Andrea said, and she blushed and went into the kitchen separated from the living room by a wall of glass blocks. She made two screwdrivers and brought them out. “Thought I had some gin and a bottle of tonic,” she said. “I don’t. I’ve got vodka and OJ.”
“That’s fine,” Wilson said. He took the drink, and they sat on the leather couch in front of the windows and drank for a minute in silence.
Andrea spoke first. “Where have you been these last couple of years?”
Wilson put his drink on the glass coffee table. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me,” she said.
“England, the Azores. But Africa, mostly,” he said. “Bupanda. I’ve even seen Lake Tsuwanga. Been down the Hilenga in a canoe.”
“That’s something,” she said. “I used to have trouble getting you on a plane to Pennsylvania.”
“I know.”
“So what did you do in Africa? Grow coffee?”
“I was married.”
“Oh.” Andrea tried to sound disinterested. “And you’re not married anymore?”
“No, it was a mistake,” Wilson said.
Andrea made a nervous move with her drink, spilled it across the glass-topped coffee table. “Oops!” she said, and went into the kitchen to get some paper towels. She came back with the towels and got on her knees and began to wipe up the orange juice, then she stopped. Orange juice leaked off the table to make a yellow puddle on the hardwood.
“Truth is, I got that job at Bazzano’s because in a weird way, it reminded me of you,” she said in a small voice. “It was the last place I had heard from you. I’ve been there for almost a year and a half now, and I still try to imagine what table you were at when you called me. Or were you at the bar?”
“I was at a table on the loggia,” Wilson said.
“That’s what I figured,” she said. “And you were with her, weren’t you? Your wife. I could tell by your voice that you had someone waiting.”
Wilson was impressed. “Yes,” he said. “She was there.”
Andrea was quiet, then she leaned back on her heels and looked up at him, and there was a flush to her cheeks.
“I want to tell you something,” she said. “You’ve got to promise not to laugh.”
“O.K.,” Wilson said.
“I’ve dated, of course, even lived with this painter for a few months, but there was no one that touched my heart like you. You were a little lost, maybe, but you were kind, gentle. Can I say that? I found out on my own that gentle people are rare in the world. I always thought we were sort of fated to be together. I guess I was wrong.”
Wilson cleared his throat. He started to speak, then shook his head. “Leaving you the way I did was rotten,” he managed at last. “And I want to apologize. I thought about you off and on the whole time I was away. Didn’t really realize how much I missed you until I got back to the city a couple of months ago. That’s the truth. We used to have a nice, comfortable life together. Took me going halfway around the world to realize how good it was. I’m sorry I wrecked things.”
“I’d like to kiss you,” Andrea said quietly. “Is that all right with you?
Wilson felt his ears burning. She crawled around the glass-topped coffee table on her hands and knees and reached up for him and put her hand on his face. Her fingers smelled like orange juice. He remembered her lips when she kissed him.
3
A year passed.
Wilson wanted to forget everything he knew about Cricket and Africa, then suddenly he wanted to remember every detail. This was just about the time news of the British attack on Quatre Sables leaked to the press. Wilson turned on the television one Wednesday evening and saw Acting Captain Worthington on CNN from London: Worthington and a few of the officers of the Gadfly had been cashiered out of the navy for their roles in the affair, but the true extent of the slaving operations at Quatre Sables had become known, and there was a public outcry, and the men were recalled to duty. Worthington and Lieutenant Peavy, the newscaster said, had just been awarded the Navy Cross and were going to be reassigned to a Blockade Squadron expanded to six ships of the line.
Wilson turned off the television set after the report, a tingling like electric currents running through his body. He took out a sheet of white paper and a fountain pen and wrote the following sentence: “Many strange stories have come out of the civil war in Bupanda; this is one of them,” and he kept writing all night and by morning had sixty-five pages. He stopped doing temporary office work and borrowed money from Andrea and locked himself in his apartment for the next four months and wrote a book about what had happened to him in Africa, as his famous ancestor had done. The book—To the Dark Continent: An Account of My Experiences with the Pirates and Slavers of the Brotherhood of the Coast, Including Details of a Journey from the Sea to Lake Tsuwanga and Back Again—made the New York Times Best Sellers list and was optioned by TrueSteel Pictures in Hollywood for a small fortune.
Though Wilson was wary of stepping over the broom a second time, his success left him little choice. He married Andrea the following June. With the money from the book and a good piece of Andrea’s savings, they bought a restored farmhouse in Warinocco County about fifty miles north of the city, on a rise with a good view of the Potswahnamee’s dark waters. The old place had been built in 1790 of sturdy fieldstone, and its six and a half beamceilinged bedrooms, Andrea said, promised plenty of room for a big family. Soon, there were horses in the old stables, a few fields planted with winter corn, and the cool leafy evenings of early fall, frost on the grass in the morning. Andrea set up a studio in the converted barn; Wilson was asked to teach a course on Africa at Jerome Martin Community College and afterward accepted the chairmanship of the International Committee for a United Bupanda, or ICUB, which seeks to put an end to the exploitation of that unhappy nation, where—alas!—the war continues.
&nb
sp; 4
After about a year of this settled life, one morning in mid-November, Wilson went out to the mailbox on the main road and found an unusual letter included with the usual junk mail and business correspondence. This letter, forwarded to him from his publisher, came in a thin envelope of coarse blue paper, torn at the edges and covered with a half dozen colorful stamps from the Republic of Madagascar, that odd paramecium-shaped island floating in the Indian Ocean off the southeast African coast. There was no return address.
A cold rain fell on the stubble fields as Wilson spread the mail across the kitchen table in the farmhouse, his heart beating. He took the blue letter and turned it over in his hands. The faucet dripped portentously in the sink behind him. The old house creaked in the wind. A pleasant yellow light came from the window of Andrea’s studio in the barn. Wilson slit the envelope with a kitchen knife. As his heart had told him, the letter was from Cricket. Also enclosed was a small photo-booth photo of Cricket holding on her lap a young boy, roughly four years old. The child, as was plain to see, had Wilson’s nose and mouth, Cricket’s green eyes and high cheekbones and mop of coppery hair. The rain picked up on the old slate roof and the attic began to leak as Wilson squinted at Cricket’s crabbed, obscure handwriting:
Tananarive, 16 May
Dear Wilson,
I saw your book at Battingly and Sons, the English bookshop in Nairobi, last week. I didn’t buy it, I don’t want to read the thing. But I made note of the publisher and hope they will forward this letter to you because I have some interesting news. You have a son, who I named Elzevir after my father and my ancestor, the great pirate. He was born on March 3, about nine months from the night we made love aboard the Dread on Lake Tsuwanga. I was pregnant when you marooned me on that miserable sandbar, though I didn’t know it at the time.
The boy is wonderful and strong and looks just like you. He has your mannerisms, despite the fact he has never seen you—and I’m also afraid he has your scruples. But he has a lot of years ahead, and we will make a proper little pirate out of him yet. I want you to understand this not to hurt you but to let you know that despite your treachery, our way of life continues. A half dozen of our ships were at sea when the British attacked—six captains and five hundred men. We have founded a new colony somewhere in the vicinity of Madagascar—obviously I’m not going to tell you where—and more join every day to serve under the good old skull and crossbones. You always loved order and the dull charms of middle-class life. I never did. The only way to stand that kind of existence is to swallow so much Prozac you don’t feel your own rage and hope. I prefer fire and the sword, so to speak, and always a sail on the horizon.
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