Waiting in Vain

  She felt the first tear when it bounced against her cheek. She’d been studying his face for signs that he understood and believed her.

  She pressed herself against him and cried, while the drumming of the rastamen faded as they made their way out of town, and up the hill. Their departure signaled to Fire that it was time for him to leave. But how could he, when his darling girl was crying? Holding her, he felt her sadness passing into him. But what should he do? What did she want? What did he want? As he considered this, Sarge appeared with the urn in his hand, stopping at a respectful distance to ask with hand signals if he should wait. Fire shook his head and, using signals himself, urged him to go on, indicating that he’d meet him at the beach and wouldn’t be much longer.

  “This is not America,” he told her, feeling the stares directed toward them. They were near to the spot where he and Ian had fought. Everyone would know this was the woman now. “Out here people are not accustomed to seeing this kinda thing in public.” Then he thought of how she’d cared for him when he’d gone to her house after the hellish time in the hospital with Phil.

  “But fuck them,” he added, “let’s find somewhere to sit and talk.”

  Wiping her face quickly, Sylvia ignored the stares and held her pocketbook against her side as she followed him to a corner where the seawall joined the concrete fence of a peach-colored house; there in the overhang of a mango tree they sat side by side and spoke quietly, as the sea continued to hammer rocks below them.

  Unaware that she was leaving that evening, Fire asked her to tell him about her novel and sat with his arm around her as she told him about the love story she was writing, blushing when she described the male protagonist, a novelist from Jamaica, a richly embroidered version of himself. They really wanted to talk to each other about the implications of their unexpected reunion, about the significance of this second chance. But what if I want it more than her? Fire thought. Sylvia was thinking the same about him. Nervous and afraid, but concealing it well, they talked about the things they knew were safe, drawn like magnets to what had first attracted them as they had sat on the Promenade in Brooklyn when he had come to see her from London—books and music. Glancing at her watch, she realized that time was running out, so she dared to be bold.

  She placed her hand on his lips and said, “Do you realize that we’ve never danced?”

  “We can dance tomorrow, if you want,” he said. “Where are you staying? I’ll pick you up.”

  Stroking the back of his neck she said, “But I’m leaving today … in a few minutes.”

  “What?” Fire lost his balance and almost fell over the wall into the sea. He wanted to ask her to stay, but he didn’t feel he had the right. To his knowledge she was still involved. “Where are you going?”

  She told him.

  “And what does that mean?” he asked. He wanted to add “for us” or “for me” but he didn’t feel he had the right.

  She stood up, pulling him to his feet. He sat down again, trying to stall her. She remained standing, holding his hands, willing him to ask her to stay.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess it’s up to us to define.”

  “But we can’t have any more crying now.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t embarrass you.”

  “I’m not worried about you,” he laughed. “I’m worried about me.”

  She gave him her address in St. Lucia and told him to write or call.

  “Tell Walcott to write you a love poem on my behalf,” he said, feigning levity, running his hands along her sides now, feeling the dip of her waist and the flesh on her hips, which felt damp beneath the fabric. “I couldn’t write you the poem you deserve. My brilliance is lament. And I’m happy now. Happy that we’re parting like this.”

  “By the way, I have a bone to pick with you, Mr. Heath. Why didn’t you tell me you were a famous novelist?” Some twenty yards away, in the direction of the church, some boys were pointing toward the star-filled sky, discussing UFOs. She looked back at Fire again and was seized by desire. What if she unzipped him and pulled her come-slick panties aside and sat in his lap? Did she have enough control to do that—to have him inside her and not gyrate or cock her waist and throw it back?

  “I didn’t tell you I was a writer,” he said, “because I was naïve enough to think it didn’t and shouldn’t matter … but ultimately it did, didn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she said, with a sigh. “My head was in a crazy place.”

  “And I guess mine was as well,” he replied, “to believe the world was simpler than it is.”

  Sylvia found herself in a dilemma now. She wanted to make it clear to him that she wanted him now not just because she knew he was A. J. Heath, but because she had discovered her own values and had finally discarded everyone else’s. There was no way to tell him this without telling him how much she wanted him. What if he didn’t want her?

  “How are you getting to the airport?” he asked.

  “I paid a cab to wait for me.”

  He felt the tears well up from his belly and burst into his chest and he said, “I have to go take care of some things down at the beach. Ian’s ashes must be taken out to sea. I won’t be able to walk you to your car.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, sniffling. “Be good.”

  He closed his eyes to hide his tears and felt her lean away. When he opened them she was walking across the street toward the park, her toes pointed outward and her neck held loose.

  “Call me when you get to St. Lucia,” he said.

  She stopped at the corner, next to the rubbish bin, and slowly retraced her steps. “I will,” she said, placing her hands on his shoulders.

  “I know you will,” he told her. “You will, won’t you?” As the hunger railed inside him again, he held her gaze and ran his hands along her legs, then looped his arms around her slender waist.

  “Of course I will,” she said. A breeze began to rustle the tree, spotting their faces with shadow.

  They looked at each other with watery eyes.

  “I have to go,” she said as she used her knees to spread his thighs so she could hold him closer. In her mind her nipples were flickering candles. Extinguish them, she wanted to say to him, use your breath to blow them out. “Your hair is nice,” she said. “Can I touch it?”

  “Yes,” he said, caressing her throat with the tip of his nose. “You can touch it. You can touch my hair.”

  She reached behind his neck and pulled the knot. The locks fell over his shoulders. “Would it be mad,” she said, “if I asked you for a piece of it to keep with me forever?”

  “That wouldn’t be mad,” he said. “That would not be mad at all.”

  “But what would I do with it?”

  “Keep it as a reminder of what if … y’know … what if, what if …”

  “I have to go,” she said as she kissed his forehead. “And so do you. It’s night now. Will you be going out to sea alone?”

  He sighed deeply. “Yes.”

  “Don’t go alone,” she said, stepping away. “Take someone with you.”

  “Like who?”

  She stopped and looked at her shoes. She tried to hint him: “Someone who you could talk to for days and days without getting bored if a wild wind blows you off course to a desert island.”

  “Those kind of people are so hard to come by,” he said, leaning forward to pull her toward him by the flouncy hem of her dress. “This is why these things are so difficult.”

  She kissed him on the lips, suddenly, before he had a chance to stop and think about his neighbors. Desperate now, they searched and found in this mundane inconvenience the wisdom of prophecy, and he said to her, “I’ll go with you to the cab.”

  They walked arm in arm to the common without speaking, zigzagging to draw out the time, their feet falling lightly, their bodies limp, as committed to their journey as sheets of windblown newspaper. The air was wet with the scent of roses, tangy with the smell of the sea, a
nd heavy with whispered words. “Is de girl dat?” “She look nice though.” “Is she make de man-dem fight?” “Me nevah think she woulda mawga so.” “Is a farriner?” “Them look like bredda and sister.”

  At the edge of the common she stopped and pointed to a tan Corolla with rust around the wheel wells. By lamplight a group of men were playing Ludo on a homemade board on the hood.

  “Okay,” Fire said, waving to the driver. “That’s Pan Head. I know him. He’s a good driver.”

  She pressed her ear against his chest. His heart was pumping fiercely and his breathing was very shallow—like a drowning man. And once again, as she had when her plane was coming in to land on the island, she began to think, what if this was her last chance? “You were wearing those shoes when you came to see me from London,” she said, hoping they could draw from the power of memory the energy to struggle for this love that belonged to them by right, but which they seemed so close to losing. “You brought me flowers,” she continued. “That was so nice of you.”

  “Your cab is waiting,” he replied.

  “Is there anything you want to tell me?” Sylvia asked.

  “Like what?” he asked, clenching his jaw as he looked at her, trying to fight the hunger.

  “Do you love me?”

  “I don’t want to tell you that.”

  “Do you?” she insisted.

  “I have to go.”

  “So go then,” she said weakly. “Go.”

  He kissed her palm and stroked her face and walked away.

  “Fire!”

  She was twenty yards away from him, standing on the edge of the grass, with her arms at her sides, her palms facing forward. She watched him turn back, and saw that he was smiling.

  “Was that your smile or the reflection of mine?” she said, pulling him in with the very first question he’d ever asked her. She could see in his face the recollection of that night on Spring Street, when he turned around in his muddy boots and dungarees and saw that she was admiring him.

  “Neither,” he replied. “It’s the reflection of hope.”

  “It was nice to have met you, Fire,” she said, repeating the words they’d said to each other before meeting again at the gallery.

  “It was nice to have met you too, Sylvia.”

  “We can’t just end like this,” she said as he held her and rocked her and called her sweet names. “We can’t just end like this, Fire. We must not end this way. Is there somewhere we could go,” she asked, “and have a last dance?”

  As he led her across the common, beyond the driver’s feeble torch into the womb of darkness, they held each other closer, snuggled into each other’s crevices like twins unborn. Breaching the last of the vehicles on the field, leaving the sounds of the town behind, the blood rushing to the surface of their skin, they began to feel a heightened sense of each other and their surroundings, as the spirit of their passion, dead before, rose again and struck them down to lie in the middle of the open field, on a bed of grass, their sheets the sky.

  As Fire’s kisses fell against her face like melting candle wax Sylvia pulled up her dress to her neck and undid her bra so he could kiss her belly. She felt her body crest and fall like a wave, his fingers hook her panty-crotch, and the wind coming low and cool across the moss-laden stone that hid the spring that trickled out, enriched with natural salts, from the secret cave within her. With the stretch of his entry she gasped, and felt the greater heat of his mouth on hers. He’d kept his pants on but opened his shirt so she could feel the sweat-slicked ridges on his belly slide and tighten as he led her in a dance to a rhythm so primal as to be nameless, the rhythm of tides, of seasons, of phases of the moon. She felt herself becoming one with the earth beneath her and she looked up at him, as her soul left her body and returned, in that brief moment of death in which she screamed and called him “Dada” as she trembled.

  They lay together, panting, dazed, bonded like survivors of an earthquake.

  “I will love you forever,” she said, running her thumb down the dip in his back.

  “Just love me today,” he said. “You know I’m afraid of promises. Promises frighten me. As I told you when we left the concert in New York, I don’t deal with disappointment very well.”

  “I won’t disappoint you, Fire. I won’t.”

  “Promise me you won’t,” he said, hearing his voice thinning out to the one he possessed as a boy.

  “Will you write me in St. Lucia?”

  He didn’t answer. He thought of the letter he’d written to her, the one that Ian had found, the one over which they argued, the one that led indirectly to this moment. Feeling overcome by the burden of free will, he began to retreat to the comfort of his belief in fate.

  “Is there anything you want to tell me, Fire?”

  In his heart he said, “I love you.” To her face he said, “If we’re meant to be, Sylvia, then nothing can stop it.”

  Sylvia grew quiet and did not speak until they arrived at the door of the cab, their clothes wrinkled and flecked with grass.

  “It was nice to have met you,” she said.

  “It was nice to have met you too,” he replied.

  Fire turned and walked away as Sylvia stood with one hand on the car door, smiling, willing him to turn around. Everything else, it seemed—charm, reason, sex—had failed. Turn around, she said to him telepathically. Maybe that will be our sign that we are meant to be. She closed her eyes. Turn around, she continued to say. Turn around. Just turn around and smile at me.

  When she opened her eyes he was gone.

  chapter nineteen

  With the urn tucked between some ropes at his feet, Fire put out to sea in a yellow canoe, the throttle eased back, the motor putt-putting, the prow riding low. Behind him, on the beach, the congregation had put away their dominoes and cups of rum and were holding hands at the water’s edge, their bodies thrown into silhouette by the shimmering flambeaus perched on bamboo poles behind them.

  After clearing the headlands and the reef, he gunned the engine and the outboard diesel sank the stern and raised the bow, and the boat sped toward the horizon pointing to the sky like an accuser’s finger.

  What will happen to us now? he thought as panic rose within him. When will I see her? Where will it be? And what will I say when I call? According to his beliefs, pursuing her was unwise, because fate, which decided all things, punished those who tried to work against it. Look at what had happened to them before. She was obviously not his destiny, because she was involved; but he’d gone ahead and forced it, bringing pain to himself and everyone around him. Why would things be any different now?

  He’d asked himself this question as he walked away from her, and had continued to ask it after he’d dashed around the side of the park and watched her leave, making sure she wouldn’t catch up with him. He was still asking it as he watched the taxi’s taillights disappear around the final bend and he ran to the Land Rover and hurried after her. At the main road he had to guess which way to go. There were two airports and two directions. She could’ve gone to the airport in Kingston by going either east or west. If she was heading to Ken Jones to catch a commuter plane, she would’ve gone west only. West had two possibilities and east only one, so he went west, honking his horn so the vehicles ahead of him would squeeze to the left and let him through. But west was wrong, it seemed. Because he didn’t find them, and the people whom he’d questioned hadn’t seen such a car.

  If they were meant to be, he told himself now, about five miles from shore, wouldn’t he have found her then? And wouldn’t Pan Head have pulled off the road when he saw him flashing his headlights in his rearview mirror so that he could tell her that he wanted her to be with him and offer to give her time to end whatever she needed to end so they could begin anew? Fuck, man! He had tried for it and lost.

  Feeling a swell beneath him he glanced over his shoulder and began to think about the task at hand. He would be stopping ten miles from shore in deep waters patrolled by sharks, and
as he considered this, plus the fact that the beach was already invisible, he acknowledged that he was slightly afraid, for he was not a man of the sea. He’d gone out with Teego many times, but he was not accustomed to being on his own, especially at night in a vessel without a life vest. The fishermen did not carry them because doing so implied a lack of faith in Jah. Because he’d lost time in pursuing Sylvia, he never got a chance to eat, and he’d been too confused and melancholic to remember to carry food or water. He would be okay, though, he told himself; he’d learned to navigate by the stars, and there was a radio on board that he could use to call for help in case of difficulty. For a moment he thought of spreading the ashes closer to shore and turning around immediately. But he believed in the power and meaning of ritual, and understood the need for him to go on: this was not for Ian, but for him, because by forging ahead into the darkness he might meet and slay his own dragon—his fear that Sylvia would disappoint him.

  The rise and fall of the boat on the swells evoked in him the recollection of making love to Sylvia on the common beneath the stars; then a smile creased his face as he thought about his victory over Blanche, who had almost broken his will at a moment of weakness. With the drone of the engine and the heave and crash of the hull as company, he began to feel connected in a new way to writers like Haley, Hemingway, Melville, and Conrad. They had loved the sea for its meditative power and its ability to bring out the best in men—for water, the giver of life, could also take it away. Was he prepared to die? he asked himself. And if he should die right now, what would be his greatest regret? In his head he heard Marvin Gaye singing “If I Should Die Tonight.” He pondered this for the next few miles. His greatest regret? Was it his relationship with his father? Was it his failure to save Ian? Was it not winning the Booker? He stretched his mind across his skull, hoping to net the answer. But no answers were out this evening. His mind was pure water.

  Up ahead the spotlight picked up fins. Were they sharks or dolphins? A pair swept by the bow. Sharks. He was cold now. Was it fear or hunger? he asked himself. He wasn’t sure. He should’ve brought something to drink, he thought, as well as a sweater against the cold. He began to shiver, and he felt himself wobble once or twice in his seat. Looking around for the fins again, he dipped his hand in the water and wet his face. The salt burned his eyes. He shut them till the sting passed away and opened them to see the shark fins sailing off to his left. As he watched them disappear there was a sudden whooshing eruption and he whipped around to see a school of twenty dolphins, curling in and out of the waves. Arcing. Flapping. Splashing. Draining moonlight off their backs. Fire smiled. A half hour later, he’d cut the motor at the place where he would sprinkle Ian’s ashes.