“No, more than that. I don’t even know what country they’re from, but it’s Deadrock’s sister city. Someplace out in the Pacific with one syllable. Zook, Plock, something, I don’t know. Don’t write that down, for Christ’s sakes!” he said to the scribbling secretary. He fingered the skip-stitching in his lapel.
“Do they speak any English?”
“I don’t know, Lucien. Foreign aid and papaya is their main deal, I guess.”
“Well, we’ll sure try to make them feel at home. If we only knew what home was—”
“I just thought, you being in the State Department …”
“Do you know what letter it starts with?”
“I’ll find out, I’ll find out.”
“Maybe you could go through some back issues of the National Geographic.”
The mayor bobbed his chin and looked off pensively. “I know it’s somewheres out there in the Pacific somewheres.”
Suzanne appeared briefly in the window, her brown eyes bright against a new tan. She gave Lucien a small wave in which he was more than a little suspicious there was flirting. He raised his arm toward the mayor in a kind of stiff-arm gesture and darted for the door. By the time he got out to the pool, Suzanne had gone past the far end, wearing a cotton wrap over her bathing suit. By now she was strolling with a tall young man, a college student possibly; and the two of them turned into the open bar. Lucien would have raced after them and spoken to her, but he knew he had almost no chance of appearing self-possessed; and he had perfect capability for imagining himself looking very awkward indeed in front of … the two of them. He went back into the office.
“Is something the matter?” the mayor asked, his secretary standing by to write down the answer.
“No, someone I know.”
“You look sick.”
Lucien cut through this. “Where were we?” he asked.
“We were through. Don’t let us hold you.”
“I’ve got it all down,” said the secretary. The two of them were ready to go now, but they still seemed to want to watch Lucien. There was something about Lucien they couldn’t keep their eyes off.
When the mayor had gone, Lucien stretched out on the couch. He thought back upon happy times with Suzanne. There had been the fall before James was born when they had the cruising sloop. Lucien worked then in the Dominican Republic, distributing leaflets to Latinos. They spent all their free time sailing, and Lucien took a mail-order course in celestial navigation. He remembered a successful night landing with pride to this day. There was enough moon when they reached St. Barthélemy that they could make Baie de St. Jean by putting the stern on Isle Bonhomme and running for the grove of palms, one of which had been striped white as a monument. Soon they heard the reef pass behind the white of the mainsail. Lucien rounded up and they anchored. Suddenly it was still. The lights from shore caught the curl going down the reef, but the surf could no longer be heard. Suzanne furled the sails carefully and Lucien secured the wheel so the rudder wouldn’t knock in the night. They went below and made love while the VHF radio crackled with island conversations. The riding light appeared and disappeared over one porthole with the slight running swell. Lucien awoke in the morning to see Suzanne making coffee in the small galley wearing only the bottom of her bathing suit. A warm, fragrant breath of the island came down the companionway; from a distance he could hear the small French motorcars. That night they stayed up late in one of the local bars and ended by renting a room in a cottage that faced an old compound of houses. There was a wooden water tower surmounted by a salvaged ship’s water tank, strangely shaped on this support, as it had been made to fit in the bow of a vessel. Water was pumped up to it from a cistern and allowed to fall by gravity into the cottage’s water system. Lucien propped the door shut with a chunk of porous local rock. Trumpet vines lay up against the panes of blueing window glass, and the palm trees moved slowly in the oceanic wind. Suzanne and Lucien lay in each other’s arms.
Lucien was asleep on the couch.
17
Suzanne sent James over to have breakfast with his father. There was an alcove next to the spring, where they sat together and listened in on conversations at the nearby tables. An older lady talked in a high voice. “It was either this place or the QE II. But there had been talk in the press about the stabilizers failing and tummy upset at the captain’s table. So we came here. I like it. I think I like it. Do you like it?” Her companion, another woman her own age, flicked her eyes in Lucien’s direction to signal that he was listening, and things murmured to a stop.
Little James had his head tilted back as though he needed bifocals; he was holding a piece of toast that looked half the size of his head, and he was just smiling at his father without fear for the first time since his arrival. His shirt was one button out of line and Lucien leaned across and made it right. Lucien wondered how in God’s name he could ever leave the boy unguarded even for a moment, much less for the duration of his recent hegira. “Self-discovery,” he thought with loathing, for he was losing interest in himself. He wished now he could install his wasted years as unused time in his little boy’s life. It was a kind of regret.
“I hope we’ll fish a little.”
“That’d be great,” said James anxiously.
“You like sport, though …?”
“Not athletics!”
“This is different. You can go off and be to yourself. When I was your age, people used to hang out gone-fishing signs and they never had to explain anything. Just go look at the air or find out what’s out past the trees. You can still do that.”
“I can?”
“Sure you can.”
From another table came an implacable voice: “When that Ford tipped over, it took a Jaws of Life to set me free. I’m a lucky man to be here to tell about it.”
“If we fish,” said James, knitting his fingers in his lap, “I don’t care if we get one.”
“I don’t either.”
“But I hope we get one.”
“Me too.”
Lucien ate the same thing he’d eaten for thousands of mornings: bacon and eggs and hash browns, with hot sauce on the eggs. He looked at them and wondered if they were the only continuity he had. As he stared down, there was a moment of complete suspension in which the sound of silverware and morning voices poured through eternity like a river. I want an island, he thought; I want an island.
The year Lucien and Suzanne parted, they had gone up to the States for the usual minor supplies: paperbacks, a cordless electric razor, Suzanne’s contacts, ten or twenty movies, a pump for the saltwater aquarium. It was the year they had both come out of the mall with things that seemed to bode ill for the future: Suzanne with a pair of crotchless panties, Lucien with his first corncob pipe. It proved to be a very bad sign indeed, especially since Lucien was in an epoch when it seemed to him there actually were signs, an era in which he could join the rest of the populace in the wonderful ongoing melodrama of inanimate objects. He thrilled to clothes and cars; he sat at an old tropical wicker desk which seemed to guarantee character in his work. It was also the time he began to feel that his dick had rights of its own. He viewed it the way Vasco da Gama viewed the needle of his compass. Wherever he went, he believed it to be one of the leading dicks in the area. He never wanted to be accused of standing in its way. It was an up-market dick even when it spotted his clothes, made a crude lump or pissed through the top of his shoes. Still, the real story lay in his sense of getting nowhere, the functionary blues.
The voice at the other end said, “I’m told you can put me in touch with Suzanne Taylor.” It was a man.