She gave me an ironic look. “You’ve been saving up those zingers for years, huh? Just waiting to hit some poor girl with the whole bunch of them at once.”
“I guess so,” I said.
“But the subject,” she said, “is money.”
“And that I don’t have any.”
“You don’t need any.”
“Of course I do.”
“Look, Charlie,” she said, and nodded in satisfaction. “Got it right that time.” Then she went on: “I live off my father, Neal lives off his mother, and Sheila lives off her ex-husband. You might as well live off us for a while, if only to even the score a bit.”
I said, “I can’t take money from a—”
She stopped me with a sternly pointing finger. “I’ll have you know I’m a Ms.,” she said (pronounced Mizz), “and you’d better be very careful how you finish that sentence.”
I closed my mouth.
“I thought so,” she said, got to her feet and gathered up her towel. “Come on, pig,” she said.
“Come on where?”
“First we get you out of the sun while I throw on my city clothes, then we drive to San Juan and get you decently dressed.”
I felt as though there were arguments I should be presenting, but I couldn’t think what they were. Besides, Eileen was already heading for the house, and the sun was in fact feeling very hot on my shoulders. So off I went.
After the shopping expedition, we went to one of the beach-front hotels for a drink. I was dressed now in white slacks, a pale blue shirt and sandals which were much lighter and flimsier than the ones I’d always worn in the monastery. But those of course had been handmade by Brother Flavian, who made all our shoes.
As to Eileen, she was also in white slacks and sandals now, plus an orange halter. The attention she got from other men confirmed my own feeling that she was something special, out of the ordinary.
We sat in a shaded air-conditioned lounge, in a corner with windows on two sides. In one direction we could see the crowded swimming pool and in the other direction the big empty beach. We were both drinking some sort of rum concoction, pink and sweet and full of fruit juice. I was already light-headed, from the sun and the events of the day, and I doubted this drink would have much effect on me.
We seemed to have no small talk, Eileen and I, though that didn’t mean our silences were comfortable. We were both twitchy and nervous, glancing quickly at one another and then away, and abruptly dropping into speech. For instance, after our second drink arrived I said, “What was Kenny Bone like?”
She looked at me. “Was? I’m not a widow, I’m divorced.”
“I meant, what was he like during the marriage?”
“Like you,” she said.
I stared. “What?”
“Don’t take it as a compliment,” she said. “He was an unexpected lunatic, a turn for the worse, a complicated crazy man.”
“Oh,” I said.
She made wet circles on the table with her drink, watching them with great concentration. “I thought I could take care of him,” she said. “Protect him from the world.” Her lips curled in what might have been a smile, and she said, “Be his monastery.”
“What was he?”
“A loony.”
“I mean, what did he do?”
“I know what you meant,” she said, and drank down half of her drink. “Sometimes,” she said, “he claimed he was a poet, sometimes a playwright, sometimes a songwriter. And he could do it all just as well as the real thing, so long as the fit was on him.”
“And in between?”
“Fifty percent mush and fifty percent paint remover.”
“And you think I’m like that?”
“No.” She shook her head, but not very enthusiastically. “I don’t know what kind of hell you are,” she said, “but I have my suspicions.”
“Where is he now?”
She shrugged. “Probably London. But it doesn’t matter, he wouldn’t give me a reference.”
“Did you divorce him or did he divorce you?”
“I divorced him,” she said, “partly because I didn’t want to talk about him anymore.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
She reached over to place her non-drinking hand on my non-drinking hand. “I don’t mean to be bad-tempered,” she told me. “It just seems to come natural, under the circumstances.”
I said, “What are the circumstances? Would you mind telling me what we’re doing?”
“You ask too many questions, copper,” she snarled, and finished her drink. “Come on, let’s drive back to the house.”
It was strange to whiz back and forth in sunlight over the road I had walked in darkness. Strange, but not informative. The light showed me land and swamp and stunted trees and occasional sagging buildings, but it didn’t show me anything I needed to know.
The car we were in, a rental shared by everyone in the house, was called a Pinto, even though it was only one color; yellow. At one point in the drive back I said, “Shouldn’t a Pinto be two colors? This is more a Saffron, isn’t it?” But Eileen didn’t know what I was talking about, so I let it go. Also, I wasn’t feeling very good.
Shortly after we turned off the main road onto the road to Loiza Aldea I said, “Eileen.”
“Yes?” She half-turned her face toward me, but kept her eyes on the bumps ahead.
I said, “Can a grown-up be carsick?”
She gave me a startled look, then braked at once to a stop. “You look terrible!”
“Good. I wouldn’t want to feel this way and look wonderful.”
She touched my wet forehead and said, “You’re all clammy. You’re coming down with something.”
“I’m also coming up with something,” I said, and struggled out of the Saffron and did it.
Maybe there’s something to be said for this business of psychosomatics. If there is, Sheila Foney said it. She told me the whole story, in her brisk argumentative way, when I was once again healthy — that the body’s illnesses reflect the mind’s disturbances. “A runny nose is a way to deal with unexpressed weeping,” she said, with her self-confident face that seemed never to have known either snot or tears.
But maybe so. I’d almost never been sick during my ten years in the monastery, and here I was barely into secular clothing when I got the flu, complete with vomiting and diarrhea and sweating and incredible weakness. Maybe I was, as Sheila bluntly explained, punishing myself with all that, and getting out my grief and confusion as well.
On the other hand, there’d been the night without sleep on the plane, the sudden transfer from the cold of December in New York to the heat and mugginess of Puerto Rico, the twenty-mile walk in the humid night air, the alternations between heat and air-conditioning, my damp robe freezing on me during breakfast, the unfamiliar dip in the ocean...
Well. Whatever the cause, I spent the rest of Saturday, all day Sunday and part of Monday in bed, mostly asleep except for occasional staggering runs to the toilet, and generally feeling like something that had been eaten by a dog. (It neatly, by the way, solved the problem of what I would have done about Sunday Mass, which is another one up for the psychosomatic theory.)
Toward the end I had a dream, in which I was twins, one of me hot and one cold, and when I awoke I was very hot because Eileen was asleep next to me with one arm and one leg thrown over me, weighing me down, and she was shivering with cold because the air-conditioning was (inevitably) on and she was on top of the covers. “Hey,” I said, and she snarfled and moved somewhat, but didn’t wake up, and for a while I didn’t know what to do about it.
Then I took time out to realize I didn’t feel as rotten as usual. I was generally so weak my ears were hanging down, but the clammy perspiration no longer sheathed me, my stomach no longer felt like a sailor knot, and there was no urgent need for me to run to the bathroom. The flu had gone, leaving the local population with the task of reconstruction.