ONCE HER sister is asleep, she changes out of her pajamas and into the outfit she decided on that afternoon, her yellow dress with the plunging neckline. She glances one last time at her sleeping sister before closing the door quietly behind her and stepping out into the warm night. The resort late at night is a vacant place—lounge chairs stacked six feet high on the sand, the fertile scent of washed clay rising from the tennis courts, everything dark save the dim illumination of lanterns along the gravel footpaths. The water has changed, too; the ocean is glossy and black as oil, the pool glows ghostly green. Every surface echoes her nervy energy back at her.
She can hear the distant sounds of chatter and merriment at the hotel bar. So satisfied with their margaritas and Marley. She imagines Connecticut sitting at the bar, looking over his shoulder frequently to see if she’s coming. She feels his lips on her neck, dry and nice like warm stones. She sees his blue eyes under the thick fringe of his lashes. She shakes the image away. It is to be expected, this residue of desire, this lazy craving.
What does she want from tonight? She’s not totally sure. She knows only that she wants these men to take her somewhere new, out past the familiar borders of her life. She is only waiting in the parking lot a few minutes when the eggplant-colored car pulls in.
“Look who decided to grace us with she presence,” Edwin says.
“It was a tough decision. There are so many fun things to do at the hotel at night.”
She climbs in the backseat. The car smells strongly of body odor and air freshener. The seats are upholstered, and the fabric is held together with tape where it has ripped open to reveal beige foam. In her head, she’s sitting on her bed in her dorm room, telling Nika, Then I snuck out with them and we went to this great local dive. She loves the feeling that she is doing something she probably shouldn’t with men who scare her a little. Life is about escalation: men instead of boys; a wilder wild night; more and more and more. In her mind, she sends the image of her in the car with these men to Drew. He sees her and is worried, and his worry makes her swoon and long for him. But the feeling passes quickly, and then she pities him. She has left him so far behind that he is nothing but a nice little memory. Besides, what could possibly happen to her on a tiny island where everyone knows everyone?
“What’s this place we’re going to?” she asks.
“Paulette’s,” Edwin says. “Best dance spot on the island.”
“Do you dance, Clive?” she asks playfully.
Edwin palms Clive’s head with his hand and rubs it. “Gogo’s a fantastic dancer. Just you wait to see his moves. Isn’t that so, mate?”
Clive turns to look back at her and makes an expression that is a smile but not really.
Paulette’s is more of a shack, honestly, the exterior strung with orange Christmas lights. Inside, there is a plank floor covered in sawdust, speakers spitting tinny music, the smells of sweat and liquor, an old mutt sniffing the ground for scraps. There are maybe twenty people, some dancing but most just talking. Alison sees a woman she thinks she recognizes as a waitress at the resort restaurant, but she isn’t positive—black people do look similar to her; it’s embarrassing but it isn’t her fault, is it, that she’s been raised in a white place and made white friends and had sex with exclusively white men? Well, three of them, anyway.
Nobody seems surprised to see her here with Edwin and Clive. It occurs to her she is probably not the first girl from the resort they’ve brought here, but did she think she was? She did not. She isn’t an idiot.
“I’ll get drinks,” Edwin says. “You keep the Goges company.”
She stands with Clive at the edge of the dance floor, which isn’t an actual dance floor but an area marked off with yellow electrical tape. She smiles warmly at him and he smiles uncomfortably back.
“Do you guys come here a lot?” she asks over the din.
“Quite often, miss.”
“You don’t have to call me ‘miss,’ you know.”
“I’m sorry, m—” He looks down, shakes his head at himself.
“It’s fine. Seriously.”
He looks out at the dance floor, like it is an absorbing show he doesn’t want to tear himself away from. She knows he’s just trying to fill the time until Edwin gets back. He doesn’t know how to talk to her.
“I brought you something special,” Edwin says when he returns. He hands Alison a shot glass filled with something murky—it looks like the water in Claire’s fish tank when she hasn’t cleaned it in too long. “See if you can guess the secret ingredient.”
Alison holds the glass up to the light. “What is it?”
“Do you trust me?”
Does she?
“Yeah,” she says coolly. She snaps her head back and takes the shot in one gulp. “It just tastes like grass.”
He claps his hands. “That’s a fact. Vodka infused with fine Jamaican ganja.”
“It’s not bad,” she says. She laughs. “It’s actually pretty good.”
“You going to drink any fool thing he hand you?”
She turns. A woman is standing a few inches away from her, looking at her critically. She wonders if the women here all watched her gulping down the mystery drink and thought, Dumb, dumb, dumb.
The woman breaks into a laugh. “I’m just playing,” she says. “He’s all right. He’s real sweet.”
“This is Paulette she self,” Edwin says.
“Nice to meet you,” Alison says reflexively.
Paulette smirks at her, amused. God, she feels clueless.
“She’s bent all the time to messing up my game,” Edwin says.
“Is this your game?” Alison says, eyebrows raised.
Paulette laughs. “She’s a live one.”
She is doing it. She is really doing it. A live one.
“Do you want to dance?” Edwin asks.
“With you?”
“Sassy.”
She takes his hand and pulls him onto the dance floor.
I SEARCHED for Paulette’s Place online but found no trace of it. It must have closed sometime in the intervening years. I do not know what the bar where Alison was seen with Edwin and Clive really looked like. I know only that it was in the Basin and that according to several witnesses, Alison was there four nights in a row, including on the last night of her life. But I have a mental picture of the place to which, in this version of things, Alison reacts. When she sees my Paulette’s, she is pleased by its shabby authenticity, which affirms that she’s found the real fun to be had on the island, something better than the lame hotel bar where empty-nesters stay up past their bedtimes slinging tequila and laughing at their milquetoast naughtiness.
Is the bar I’ve created a terrible cliché? If so, how much does it matter? What happens if you replace the wood floor coated in sawdust with a proper dance floor? What if you nix the mutt and add a cocktail waitress, sub a sound system for the tinny speakers on the bar? Now what does Alison think, say, do? What quantity of truth resides within a story’s details?
ALISON SITS on the putting green at Indigo Bay in her purple bikini and watches Connecticut drive golf balls into the lagoon. They are alone, at the far edge of the property. On the putting green there is a golf bag stuffed with clubs and a tin bucket of balls, special ones that float. At some later time, Alison assumes, a staff member will go out onto the water in a boat to collect them. So much effort so that they may have this moment.
The lagoon is a wide stretch of shallow water separated from the ocean by dunes and a thicket of sea grape. This spot feels private, secret. She understands this is why he has brought her here. She recognizes the strategy of this, but she can still feel the place working on her. It’s quiet. The only sounds are the swoop of the club, the crack as it makes contact with the ball and, after the passage of an impossible number of moments, the distant plunk of the ball slipping into the water.
“You’re good,” she says. She sits with her legs straight out in front of her, leaning back and propped up
on her elbows.
“I’m just okay,” he says with a shrug that makes her heart skip.
She feels him taking in the inches of her. It’s so easy it makes her want to wring the sky—his wanting and her not giving and his wanting more.
It begins to rain. The first drops cool her sunburned shoulders.
“Should we go back?” she asks.
“A little rain never killed anyone,” he says. She can tell he likes how it sounds. He swings and sends a ball whooshing out over the water.
When it begins to pour, he slots the club back into the bag and sits down beside her. He tucks a wet strand of hair behind her ear. He leans in to kiss her, and she kisses him back. Then she pulls away.
What’s wrong with her? Why can’t she give this to herself? Ivy boy and Ivy girl, la-di-da, easy peasy, ashes ashes we all fall down. It makes her … what? Embarrassed? Ashamed? She could kiss him, and then they could have sex in a secluded corner of a resort on a tropical island as the rain falls around them. For a moment she wishes with everything she has that she were a different girl, one who would see this possibility as the pinnacle of something.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
“It’s fine,” he says. “Whatever.”
SHE SEEKS out Edwin and Clive more frequently. In the afternoons, she sneaks away to meet Edwin past the black rocks. She wakes at dawn and swims in the ocean while they set up the lounge chairs on the beach for the day. Before they depart in the evening, she finds them in the parking lot and they pass around a joint. She learns that they have a sideline keeping the guests of Indigo Bay supplied with marijuana and, occasionally, harder stuff—cocaine and Ecstasy, mostly.
“Sometimes we forget to pass on a small amount to our customer,” Edwin says one afternoon.
“So technically this joint is the property of a stockbroker from Millburn?” she says.
“Maybe so.”
“So are you, like, stoned all the time at work?”
“Not all the time, miss,” Clive says with a grin—the first time she’s seen him actually smile.
Her whole body feels charged with the delicious secret they’ve divulged. She has been chosen, brought to the other side of the wall that separates tourist from local. They tell her about the soca band that will be playing at Paulette’s later that week; about the cup of spittle Nestor the bartender keeps under the bar, next to the maraschino cherries. When Clive asks, Alison declares college “pretty boring.” When Edwin prods him, Clive recounts the story of a guest who crashed a Sunfish into a fishing boat in the bay.
“Tourists,” Alison scoffs, then blushes.
Edwin asks her about New York. He tells her he has a cousin there, in Queensbridge.
“Cool,” she says with an air of native authority, as if she has any clue where Queensbridge is; as if, when she was a kid and the school bus took them through Harlem en route to midtown for field trips—museums, Broadway—she didn’t press her face to the bus windows with the other kids and stare at the spectacle of a world of black people. “I was born in the city,” she adds after a pause. “My parents lived in this tiny apartment on the Lower East Side. It’s this immigrant neighborhood.”
Clive and Edwin nod blankly in response. Her face burns. She wanted them to know her family hasn’t always been filthy rich, but it didn’t land how she wanted. What’s wrong with her, bragging about how her parents were poor for, like, five minutes, before she was even born? She’s been doing this kind of thing at college, too. Just the other day she told Nika a story from last summer at her family’s “cottage” at the shore, and now she’s stuck, because she wants to invite Nika out there to visit this summer, but then not only will Nika see just how rich Alison’s family is, she will also know that Alison is the kind of person who refers to a huge freaking beach house as a cottage, which is even worse than the huge freaking house itself. It’s not just her, though. Every rich kid at college does this. They all have a “cottage,” or forebears they seem very keen to talk about who came to America from some shtetl or Irish potato farm, or they’re “from Chicago” when really they live in Winnetka. (In the past three months she has learned the fancy suburbs surrounding all of the major cities in the country.) They are pathological minimizers, telling their half-truths and hoping for some kind of credit.
“It drives me nuts that my parents moved out of the city to raise us,” she says, changing tack. “I mean, you’re in the greatest city on earth, and you leave for some lame suburb?”
“But isn’t New York quite dangerous?” Clive asks.
She shrugs. “You just have to pay attention.”
ONE EVENING when she is standing with them in the parking lot after work, Clive proposes they go down to the water for a swim.
“I’m game,” Alison says.
“Nah, nah. My boy’s stalling,” Edwin says with a mirthful shake of his head.
“Am not. The water’s just looking nice today.”
“Gogo has to go see he baby boy and take the shit from he lady,” Edwin says with a gleam in his eye.
“You have a kid?” she says. She’s been hanging out with them for days and this is the first she’s heard of any baby. The information tickles her. In her head, she tells Nika, Then Clive had to go take care of his son, as if it doesn’t ruffle her at all.
Clive’s face has gone blank. Maybe he doesn’t care about the kid. Or maybe he does care about him and he’s ashamed to be standing here getting stoned with Edwin and some girl while his child waits for him and he doesn’t want to think about it.
“He’ll make three soon,” he says softly.
“Wait. Are you married?”
Clive shakes his head.
“Relax, Goges.” Edwin claps a hand on his friend’s big shoulder. “If Sara never consents to marry you, more time to lime with me.”
Clive nods, his face empty. She can hardly bear it, and at the same time cannot look away from it, his gentle, pained way of being in the world; he reminds her, in a way, of Claire.
She touches his arm. “She don’t know what she’s missing.”
“She don’t know what she’s missing. You’re turning into a proper island girl, now,” Edwin says.
EVERY NIGHT, after her sister is asleep, she crosses the dark resort grounds and meets them in the parking lot and they drive to Paulette’s Place, where they drink and smoke and she and Edwin dance while Clive stands near them on the dance floor, bouncing his large body not quite to the beat. At times it seems clear to her what Edwin wants—he flirts, manufactures opportunities to touch her. One night, his crotch grazes her hip as they dance and she feels that he is hard. Her skin turns to gooseflesh. His erection scares her. Well, Drew’s scared her, too, at first, didn’t it? Connecticut’s hand on her thigh scared her. But she knows it is not the same.
Suddenly she sees John the gardener’s face—his soft lamb’s-wool hair, his dark skin. Is that all this is, what she’s doing with Edwin? An attempt to absolve her frightened child self? And she still can’t do it. She feels him against her and she tenses.
But nothing comes of it. When the song ends, he buys her another round at the bar, complimenting Paulette on her dress while they wait. He is loose and jovial again, as if their pressed-together dancing didn’t happen. She is starting to see something new about him, a controlled aspect simmering just beneath his charming surface. The moves he makes—letting her feel his hardness, then striking up a conversation with Paulette when she fully expected him to lead her off to some dark corner—seem, beneath the offhandedness with which he executes them, studied, like there is nothing he says or does that he hasn’t thought through. Maybe this will go where she thinks it’s going. Or maybe nothing will happen. When she considers this possibility she is humiliated but also, in some way, relieved.
ON A rainy day, after picking up a puka shell necklace for Claire at the gift shop, Alison finds Edwin taking his break behind the restaurant. “No beach today?” she asks.
“Can’t.” He p
oints out to the black rocks. Waves crash against them, sending spray high into the air and blocking the path to his usual spot.
“We could swim there,” Alison says.
“You crazy? Look at that water.”
“Bet you two joints I can do it. Around the rocks, to the beach, and back.”
“I’m not betting your death sentence, miss,” he says with a laugh.
“Suit yourself.” She walks down to the water. She peels off her tank top and shimmies out of her shorts, revealing the new bikini she got for this trip, blue with white flowers.
“What are you doing?”
She dives in. The waves are swollen, but it isn’t as bad as it looks from shore; besides, she’s a strong swimmer. She strokes through the waves, keeping her head when she sees them rise up above her. When she is out past the rocks she begins to arc around. She swims until her limbs are stiff with exhaustion and every part of her tastes salt. She loves this feeling, the rush of hanging off the edge of your comfort zone but still knowing you have a solid grip on it. When she returns to shore she hands Edwin a shard of green sea glass.
“Proof,” she gasps, breathing hard but trying not to show it.
That afternoon in the parking lot, he gives her the two joints she has won. “I think I’ve been underestimating you,” he says.
“Is that right?”
He nods. “You’re a dangerous girl.”
ON THE last night of vacation, she can’t help herself. She goes looking for Connecticut. She finds him by the pool. He wears khaki slacks and a blue-and-white-checked shirt. He is freshly showered. His blond hair still holds narrow ridges from the tines of a comb.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
She reaches into the pocket of her jean skirt. “Want to?” she says, revealing the joint in her palm. Easiest thing in the world. Connecticut goes over to the bar and grabs one of the Indigo Bay matchbooks from the glass bowl. She leads him to the parking lot. She puts the joint to her lips. He strikes the match. When she exhales, she coughs.
“You okay?” he asks, a hand to her back, a show of rather than actual concern—he is a good guy and wants her to know it. It’s nice, though, his hand there.
Saint X (ARC) Page 22