Tuesday night I spent three hours at the crap table, betting against the shooter, and won two hundred seventy dollars. Eileen wouldn’t take the money.
Wednesday morning Sheila Foney spent an hour on the beach telling me why a Cancer like me was just perfect with a Scorpio like Eileen. Then she told me more about Kenny Bone than I could possibly have wanted to know, including sexual things that were certainly none of my business and even less any of hers. In her version, Kenny Bone emerged as something of a cross between Brendan Behan and Reinhard Heydrich, but with neither Behan’s talent nor Heydrich’s efficiency.
One interesting fact did emerge from that talk: Kenny Bone had not been a member of this social grouping. “You’re certainly better than the first guy she came back with,” was the remark by Sheila that gave me the hint. When I questioned her further, it developed that Eileen had always been slightly out of phase with the rest of the group, “even in grammar school.” She had tended throughout childhood to find her friends elsewhere, in the local public schools, and she’d confirmed this habit later by not going to any of the usual colleges but to Antioch, which Sheila for some reason apparently thought of as Jewish.
Kenny Bone had been one of the results of Antioch. As with her public high school sweethearts, it had been obvious to her in-group friends at once that the relationship could only end badly. “From the time she was twelve,” Sheila said, with strict satisfaction in her voice, “she’s been going away and going away, and she always comes back. Usually with her tail between her legs.”
I doubted that last part; it seemed to me Eileen’s pride would keep her from showing any emotional reaction to failure. But I had to consider Sheila’s own emotional reactions in judging her choice of words. Her own well-guarded pain at these perpetual snubs from Eileen was combined with and shielded by her no doubt sincere belief that the in-group was the best place to be, with the best possible friends, the best possible values, enjoying the best possible times together. Eileen was both an affront and an enigma to Sheila, and no doubt to all the others as well.
Sheila didn’t say so, but the impression I had of her opinion of me — and by extension the group’s opinion, presumably — was that I was not to be taken seriously, since no one outside the group was ever taken seriously, but that I was certainly a step up from Kenny Bone and undoubtedly a therapeutic interval for Eileen until she was ready to settle down at long last with one of the currently available group males. (These people were far enough from their heritage for divorce to be as common among them as in the external society.)
I also learned from this talk that Eileen had not been exclusively alone during her stay down here. In fact, she’d been accompanied by a man until just the day before I’d arrived — not the infamous Alfred Broyle, but somebody named Malcolm Callaban, “a swell guy in television news in the city.” Some sort of raging argument had taken place, lasting the final three days of Callaban’s stay on the island, until he had at last departed in a fury, flying back to New York the afternoon before I showed up. Eileen’s temper was apparently as famous with the group as her failed attempts to live away from them, though I had to say I hadn’t as yet seen it. I would have asked for more detail — was she a screamer, a thrower, a silent seether, an insidious revenger — but Eileen herself joined us at that point, followed by lunch, and the subject was dropped.
“Hey, Charlie, you want a drink?”
“Soon as I finish this one.”
We were alone in El Yunque, Eileen and I, looking at the greenery from the tower there, when next I brought up the subject of the monastery and the sale to Dimp. I hadn’t really thought much about that since coming to this island, though it was certainly urgent enough, with barely a week to go before the sale would be final and all hope gone. But my own chaotic emotional life had driven the question from my mind, and when it had strayed across my consciousness from time to time I’d determinedly avoided it, feeling helpless. The El Yunque tower, though, brought it all back, in a manner too insistent to ignore.
El Yunque is a rain forest in the mountains of Puerto Rico, part of which has been semicivilized by the National Park Service into the Caribbean National Forest (Luquillo Division). One drives south from the main road, and after a mile of ordinary flat scenery the road begins to climb and curve and zigzag and corkscrew up the steep mountain sides into the rain forest. Much of the road is kept in permanent damp twilight by huge overhanging ferns, and eerie trees crowd the blacktop from both sides, their roots coiled above the ground like gray snakes. Everywhere the trees and vines and shrubs are all snarled together like one of Brother Urban’s illuminated manuscripts — twice on the drive up I thought I read “LINDY LANDS” in the vegetation — and from time to time we’d passed narrow, tiny, furious waterfalls rushing down over slick dark boulders.
And five miles in, rounding yet another climbing V-turn, one comes abruptly on the tower. Playful, silent, silly, unnamed, virtually useless, it stands on a rare flat spot in the forest, a round blue-gray tower about forty feet high, topped by a crenellated Camelot fortress wall. There’s nothing around it but the jungle and a smallish parking area, and nothing inside it but a circular staircase to the top, from which it is possible on a clear day to see as far as the Virgin Islands.
Though not today. A notice near the tower entrance had told us that when the tree leaves on the mountainside rising up across the road were all turned over, revealing their pale gray-green undersides, there would soon be rain, and when we reached the top of the tower the leaves were indeed all doing their mysterious flip-flop, looking as though that one mountain out of all the mountains here had been faded by the sun. Southward, thick black clouds like great pillows were humped around the mountaintops, and a damp mildew smell was in the air. To the north and east, the tangled valleys tumbled away, stopping at a narrow tan border of beach before the flat blue ocean.
But it was the tower that held my attention; reminiscent of so many other towers and turrets and castles and yet uniquely and ridiculously itself, in the wrong place and inexplicable and yet calm about its role in the scheme of things. Insistent and rather friendly and faintly comical, how could it not have reminded me of my monastery?
“This reminds me of the monastery,” I said.
“Then let’s leave,” Eileen said. She took my hand and started for the steps.
“No, wait.” I tugged back, keeping her from descending, and the look she gave me was worried and impatient and annoyed. I said, “I want to talk about it.”
Annoyance became dominant. “That’s the past, Charlie. Do I talk about Kenny Bone?”
“But they’re still in trouble, and there isn’t much—”
“All right,” she interrupted. Withdrawing her hand from mine, she leaned her back against a merlon — a crenellated parapet consists of alternating crenels and merlons — and said, “You want to talk about that place, we’ll talk.”
Her face was closing against me; was this the beginning of the famous temper? Nevertheless, I had no choice but to push ahead, and so I did. “They’re in trouble,” I said.
“Uh huh.” The very neutrality of it was hostile.
“If something doesn’t happen by the first of the year,” I said, “there won’t be any hope left at all. The sale will go through, the building will be torn down, and we’ll — they’ll have to move.”