John leaned against the lectern for balance, trying to think of interesting memories to relate. “The seafood,” he began to say, but stopped himself. It all seemed so trite. “Why tell stories?” he wondered aloud. “As soon as something is over, that’s it. Why revive it constantly? Things happen, and then more things, inevitably, happen next. So?” He shrugged. His hands trembled. He tried to smile, but he was now, indeed, terribly overcome. He left the lectern, tripping down the shallow steps. He felt as he did when he was gassed at the dentist’s office—disoriented, befuddled. “Eduardo?” John called out. He staggered drunkenly. His secretary came up and guided him back to his seat.
Maureen took the stage next and recited what she claimed was one of Marcia’s favorite poems. John pulled the last crumpled tissue from his breast pocket. He found a tiny wishbone wrapped up inside it. He recalled a dermatology-conference dinner, where quail had been served, a few years earlier. He’d planned on bringing the wishbone home so that he and Marcia could make a wish together. John always wished for whatever Marcia wished for. “This way, we both win,” he said. Now he pulled the bone from the tissue and held it in his hand as he dried his tears. Poor Marcia, he thought. She could have wished for everlasting life.
“We passed the fields of gazing grain, we passed the setting sun,” Maureen was saying, her voice swelling and shaking in a way that she must have rehearsed for days, John thought. He’d always secretly hated Maureen. Her tireless obsession with rain-forest conservation confounded him. The woman was from White Plains, for Christ’s sake. He would not miss Maureen, or any of Marcia’s friends, for that matter. “Poor Marcia, she really loved you, you know,” Barbara had told him before the memorial. Of course he knew that Marcia loved him. They’d been married for nearly thirty years. People feel so special, so wise, when somebody they know drops dead. “We’d just seen her at dinner,” he’d heard Maureen telling someone. “And to think, just a few hours later, she was gone forever. Isn’t life strange?”
But life wasn’t strange at all. Marcia’s sudden death was the strangest thing that had ever happened to John. And even that wasn’t very strange. People died all the time, in fact. As he crushed the tiny wishbone in his fist, it cracked into pointy shards that poked into the skin of his palm like needles. “Since then ’tis centuries; but each feels shorter than the day,” Maureen continued. John shook his head at this nonsense. Listening to the stupid woman revel in the spotlight made him ill. He held his bleeding hand over his heart, feeling it pound like an ax through a thick wooden door. His throat clenched with what—sorrow? Was that all it was? He scoffed at how small that seemed. Then something seemed to break inside him. His breath caught. He choked and coughed. The wild thumping of his heart stopped. He belched loudly, from the depths of his gut, as though releasing some dark spirit that had been lodged down there his whole life. His secretary laid a hand on his shoulder. “Excuse me,” John said, wiping saliva from his mouth. When he looked up again, Maureen’s poem was over. He straightened in his seat and felt his heart start back up. Its beat was now soft and aimless, like a baby’s babbling. He was calm, he thought. He was fine.
Next, Marcia’s choir group took the stage and began to sing an old Negro spiritual. They sang lifelessly, as though the song didn’t mean anything to them. Perhaps it didn’t. John rose and walked up the aisle to the bathroom at the back of the chapel. He blew his nose for a while in the stall, urinated, defecated, then flushed the broken wishbone down the toilet.
• • •
A week later, John still had not returned to work. He spent his days in silence, eating duty-free Ferrero Rocher chocolates and bouncing the strings of Marcia’s squash racket against his skull. He paced the apartment, his mind empty but for the bits of music he heard from cars passing on the street outside. Or he sat on the leather sofa in front of the muted television, which was showing back-to-back episodes of true-crime docudramas. People liked to kill one another, it seemed, on speedboats. Aliases, disguises, offshore bank accounts—these notions began to pepper John’s mind. With Marcia gone, perhaps he could fill his remaining years with criminal pursuits, he thought. He was too clumsy to be a cat burglar. But couldn’t he stalk someone? Or vandalize something? Library books? The backseats of taxis? Easiest would be to send death threats to someone he despised—Maureen, perhaps. He could do that without even leaving the apartment. He winced at his cowardice. At every stage of his life he’d been reasonable, dutiful. He’d prescribed creams, lanced cysts, cut plantar warts out of the rubbery soles of smelly feet. Once, he’d pulled a seven-foot coil of ingrown hair from an abscess on the tip of a patient’s tailbone. That was as wild as it got for John. He’d never been in a fight. His body bore no scars. The hands now folded in his lap were bland, beige, wrinkled in all the predictable ways.
The spot he’d chosen for the urn of Marcia’s ashes was on a shelf in the kitchen, next to the coffee grinder and the mini food processor that she had used expressly for guacamole. “The secret is to freeze it first,” he recalled her saying. Or was that something else? John didn’t care. He’d had enough of what people said, tips and tales, theories, tidbits. If he could have it his way, nobody would ever say anything again. The entire world would go silent. Even the clocks wouldn’t tick. All that mattered would be the beating of hearts, the widening and narrowing of pupils, the whirling of ties and loose strands of hair in the wind—nothing voluntary, nothing false. He opened the fridge and peeled back the tinfoil from a dish one of the friends had brought over. Fat from the chicken had congealed into a dun-colored jelly. He stuck his finger in it, just to feel the cold gunk.
Then the phone rang.
“And?” is how John answered. The voice on the line was a recording from the local convenience store. Marcia’s photos had been printed and were ready to be picked up. She’d used a disposable camera on their trip to the island. John hung up the phone. Marcia’s purse was where she’d left it, on the table in the hallway. He rifled through and found the claim stub in her wallet. Without changing out of his pajamas, he put on a jacket and shoes and went down to the lobby.
“How are you, Mr. John?” Eduardo asked. He followed John to the door and opened it, his black rubber shoes squeaking on the polished marble floor.
John didn’t answer. He had nothing to say. He let his head hang and plodded slowly down the block. He didn’t care if people thought he looked forlorn or deranged. Let them judge. Let them entertain themselves with their stories, he thought.
At the convenience store, he went to the counter and pulled out the claim stub. When the shopgirl asked for his last name, he handed over his business card.
“Can you confirm the home address?” she asked.
John shook his head.
The girl rolled her eyes. “Are you deaf or something?” she asked.
“Maaa, haa,” John said. He ground his jaws and pointed to his ears.
“OK,” the girl said, softening. She held up a finger. “One minute.”
John nodded. Why would she need to confirm his address, anyway? What kind of impostor would want someone else’s photographs? Someone with a speedboat, perhaps. John laughed at himself. “Maaa, haa,” he said again.
“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t understand you,” the girl said. She slid the packet of photos across the counter and pointed to the glowing numbers on the cash register’s display screen. She held up her forefinger and thumb and rubbed them together. “Money,” she said. “Dinero.”
“Gaaah,” John said. He handed her the cash, then grunted. The girl waved good-bye cheerfully. If Marcia could see him now, acting like some kind of Frankenstein, she’d laugh, John thought.
He pulled the photos from their sleeve and shuffled through them on the way home. There were half a dozen shots of ocean waves, the horizon, and several street scenes, each interrupted by the splatter of bird shit on the car window through which they’d been taken. Nothing looked as beautiful
as it had in real life. The people, the buildings, the beach—it was all flat and dull, despite the glossy finish of the photo paper. There was a close-up of cocktails served in coconuts and decorated with toothpick-speared chunks of pineapple and orange slices and Maraschino cherries, colorful paper umbrellas, curlicue straws. On either side of the frame were the brown, deeply lined hands of the server holding the raffia tray. There was a shot of Marcia’s ankles, her feet plunged deep into the pale-gray sand. It had been gritty, soft, dry volcanic ash, like what was left of Marcia in the urn in the kitchen, John supposed. There were a few photos of the pool snapped from the balcony of their hotel room, a blurry shot of John on his cell phone in the lobby, one of John shaking hands with a tiny monkey in the forest, John shaking hands with the nature guide, John eating a platter of crabs. There was only one photo of Marcia, a self-portrait taken in the reflection of the vanity mirror in the hotel bathroom. She smiled coquettishly in her berry-colored lipstick, her face a floating mask above the white orb of the flash.
The final photo in the set seemed to be an extra, a half exposure at the end of the roll. The right side of the picture was gray, empty. A red line went down the center like a burn mark. The left side showed the grainy landscape of the beach at night, and, in the bottom corner, the top half of a face. It belonged to a local, a native. A beach boy, John presumed, one of those male prostitutes. The dark skin appeared almost black in the dimness of the picture. Only the whites of the eyes glistened, almost yellow, like hanging lanterns. Marcia had taken the photo by accident, John supposed. But when had she come so close to a beach boy? She’d made such a fuss about keeping her distance. During that first walk, when the beach boys had followed them, Marcia had hurried back to the hotel grounds and insisted vehemently that John look away. “If you make eye contact, it’s like an invitation,” she’d said.
“To what?” John had asked.
“To a party you wouldn’t like,” she’d answered, “and that you’d have to pay for.”
“Would you like it?” he’d asked. He’d been joking, of course. Marcia had said nothing.
“Hello, nice people? Hello?”
At home, John found Marcia’s magnifying glass in her bedside drawer. He sat down, turned on the lamp, and held the magnifying glass over the beach boy’s eyes, hoping he might find some kind of explanation reflected in them. Had Marcia been unfaithful? Had she been pretending, as long as John had known her, to be a prude? He craned his neck and brought his own eye closer and closer to the photo, squinting, straining every muscle until he found something he took to be a sign, an invitation—a single red pixel in the darkness of the boy’s right pupil.
Back on the island, John stood once again in the hotel lobby. The overnight flight had been bumpy. He hadn’t slept at all. The radio in the hotel shuttle from the airport had warned of hurricane-force gales, possible flooding, thunder, lightning. A murky bank of clouds crept slowly but steadily across the sky.
“Will we have to evacuate?” John asked.
The desk attendant rubbed her eyes. “Maybe, sir. They don’t tell us anything.” She slid John’s room key across the counter. Behind the check-in desk, the clerks were talking and yawning and sharing small cookies from a grease-soaked paper bag. John remembered the cookies from a tour of the market on the other side of the island. The guide had explained to him and Marcia that the cookies were made not from flour but from some native root vegetable, molasses, and butter that came from goat’s milk. A sack of twenty cookies cost less than a dollar.
“Can you imagine?” Marcia had whispered.
John had hoped that the guide would arrange for them to try some, but they’d simply idled by the vendor’s cart, Marcia covering her mouth and nose with a tissue, while the guide chatted with a passerby in the local patois. Rife, John recalled now. The sights and sounds and smells of the market came back to him. There were bowls of spices and beans of every hue, hot goat’s milk poured from dirty metal teapots atop charcoal briquettes into small plastic cups like the ones John used at the dentist’s to rinse and spit. Hot smoke from cauldrons of roasting meat roiled across baskets of nuts and fruits, stacks of woven shawls that the women used as slings to carry their babies on their backs, pyramids of pastel-colored toilet-paper rolls. In a dark corner of the market, they’d passed an old man, his eyes sky blue with cataracts. He sat behind a table full of empty Coke bottles and tin cans. Beside him was a rickety chest of drawers. When John asked what the man was selling, the guide answered “spiritual medicine,” twirled his finger in the air, and widened his eyes, as though to make fun of the crazy old man. “People in the villages believe in that nonsense,” the guide said. “They believe in magic. Evil.” He crossed himself and laughed, then yelled at a young girl who had splashed dirty water on his shoes while rolling her bike through a puddle on the path. One of Marcia’s photos had been of that market. The royal-blue plastic tarps covering the stalls appeared nearly black, like funeral shrouds. Recalling that image now gave John the chills. He’d told everyone back home that he was going to the island to scatter Marcia’s ashes. That was the excuse he gave.
As John unlocked the door of his hotel room, a family passed by him in the hall—parents with three sleepy children.
“Last flight back to the mainland,” the father said with a British accent, his arms full of gape-mouthed, plush toy monkeys.
John wasn’t very worried. The beach boys would not get swept away in any flood, he knew. He had spotted a few of them already on the drive from the hotel. For prostitutes, he thought, they seemed so relaxed walking along the road, so casual in their sun-bleached striped T-shirts, their rubber sandals grinding over the gray dirt. His plan was to find the boy from Marcia’s photo and do whatever she had done with him off in the dunes at night while he was sleeping. That would be revenge enough to set his heart at ease, he thought. It would be the strange thing that gave his life some meaning at last. It would be his life’s one adventure.
He inspected his hotel room, approving of the lone queen-size bed, the flat-screen mounted on the wall, the small window that looked out onto the beach. The sky had an eerie, vapid whiteness. John could see the red-tiled roof of the hotel’s al-fresco dining area and one corner of the fence that partitioned the beach. To get to a private spot where he could dump the ashes in the water, he’d have to go beyond that fence. A few beach boys sat perched in the dunes beyond the hotel, like exotic birds in their bright-colored shorts. Even with no sun to reflect off their taut dark-brown skin, their bare backs gleamed. If only he had Marcia’s opera glasses, John thought, he could see their faces.
The heavy-duty black plastic bag containing Marcia’s ashes had passed through customs undetected. Of course, John had left the metal urn at home. He figured that if anyone asked what the bag contained he’d say that it was medicinal bath salts to soak his feet in. But nobody questioned him. He took Marcia’s ashes out of his suitcase, carried the bag down to the empty dining room, selected a stale roll from the breakfast-buffet table, sat and ate it, and pocketed a knife from the place setting. He nodded and smiled at the hotel workers, who were busy shuttering the windows in preparation for the storm.
Outside, the wind whipped at John’s face, forcing him to pitch his head forward as he walked along the fence. Sand pricked at his skin like needles. As he approached the waves, the sky flashed. A moment later, thunder pealed long and deep, and a few cold drops of rain fell on his back. He crouched by the water and took out the knife. It was a cheap knife, with dull, wide serrations. The plastic of the bag was so thick that he had to place it on the sand, hold it down with one hand, and stab at it repeatedly. To keep the sand out of his eyes, he shut them. He thought one last time of Marcia, pictured her clucking her tongue at this indecorous ceremony. He thought of all the wishbone wishes he’d wasted on her petty desires: good seats at the movies, a trip to Vermont to see the foliage, a sale on cashmere sweaters or towels. And, secretly, all along
she’d been a whore, he thought, a deviant, a pervert, carousing with prostitutes right under his nose! Meanwhile, she’d shushed him every time he’d said anything remotely off-color, as if anyone were paying attention, as if it even mattered. John tore at the hole he’d made in the plastic bag, crawled over the sand on his knees, felt for the water, and dumped the ashes out.
• • •
A mere hour later, the storm was over. The sky was gray, but the rain had stopped. Little damage had been done to the island, though the hotel had lost electricity. John’s room was dim. From his window, he watched the ocean pounding the beach in tall, floating waves, as the wind howled like a cartoon ghost in a haunted house, comically persistent. He stood and uselessly pressed the buttons on the TV remote, then stared at his reflection in the rectangular black screen. He was still wearing what he’d worn on the overnight flight: his gray summer-weight wool trousers and a white linen dress shirt. The shirt was now crushed and wrinkled, the collar warped around his neck. His face was swollen, his ears full of sand. His graying hair lay in waxy tendrils around his face. He laughed at his slovenly appearance and tried to smooth his hair back, but the rain and the salt air had dried it into straw. He didn’t care. Marcia was gone for good now, and he felt like celebrating.
Downstairs in the empty restaurant, John took a seat on a bar stool. Outside, workers were unfolding the shutters from the dining-room windows. The clouds over the ocean were paler and thinner than before. He ordered a Glenfiddich, saluted the bartender, and drank. “How much for the whole bottle?” John asked. “No, don’t tell me. Just charge it to my room.” He flashed the number on his key. A whole bottle just for him, out from under Marcia’s shaming gaze. Why had he let her control him like that? He’d lived his entire life on his best behavior, a slave to decorum. For what? John shook his head and poured himself more whiskey. He could do whatever he wanted now. He could buy a hundred goat-butter cookies. He could make all the crass jokes he liked. Through the windows, he saw the clouds part and the sun shine. The staff began to drag the lounge chairs and tables and umbrellas back onto the deck. A few large gulls coasted back and forth, low across the beach. John smacked his lips, slid off his bar stool, and took the bottle of Glenfiddich down to the sand, carelessly kicking off his salt-stained leather loafers and peeling off his socks on the way. He walked around the hotel fence and along the shoreline for several minutes, well past the spot where he’d dumped Marcia’s ashes.
Homesick for Another World Page 14