I awoke much later to hear sounds outside, whispering, rustling, a feeling of menace in the air. I opened my eyes but did not move, rigid with fear. I turned toward Micah but an iron hand held me down. I lay still and waited. His hand left mine and all in one motion he turned on his belly toward the doorway; it was then I noticed the gun in his hand. The rustling lasted a few seconds longer and then stopped abruptly. The doorway beyond the burglar bars was wide open to the night. Why, in a country where sudden wealth had brought an avalanche of crime, would he leave himself so exposed? I was afraid beyond all reason, but instinctively I knew that no sound was to be made. He crouched, motionless, for several more minutes, the gun still pointing into the darkness, then he rose decisively, pulled the doors shut, and drew the heavy drapes together. They (who? who? I asked, but no answer came) are gone, he said. It’s all right. He pulled me close and stroked my back, my hair. In comforting me he was relaxing, becoming the master of the situation again. I wanted his touch, I closed my eyes and tried to feel safe in his arms, but just as unerringly as before I knew that these were not burglars and all was not as simple as he wished it to appear.
The next morning it rained and rained. From inside the burglar bars I saw that overnight the carambolas had invaded the tree’s black trunk. Carambolas are strange fruit, alien sojourners from another dimension. Star fruit, five-fingers, carambolas. They lined themselves along trunk and branches like sentries, short, green, and golden, thick and phallic, impervious to rain, thrusting forward dumbly, held securely by their short black stalks. Carambolas resemble cocoa pods in shape, but their surface is succulent crisp, not hard. Cocoa pods, though, hang in some kind of collaborative truce between gravity, the tree trunk, and the leafy earth underneath, eventually ripening and bursting at the seams, the beans leaking out of their sweet cotton wrapping, the collaboration extending to squirrels, manicous, and even the occasional manicou crab. Not carambolas. Carambolas float arrogantly, gold on black, each alone, separate, breaking the even back of the trunk, gloriously wet. I looked at them wonderingly. Life can be this simple; this brutal.
I decided against questioning and accusing and, inevitably, threw myself on his mercy. My questions were now more complex and I hardly knew where to begin. Still I desired him more, even as the vacant days and nights loomed ahead, even as I knew that the maelstrom I sought would come to an abrupt end and I would be disconsolate for days, maybe months afterwards. Any idea of sharing would torture me beyond sanity. The bisexual connection (if it was true, and I would never ask) would be a greater torture. Its secrecy would fill me with contempt, yet if he told me, it would be the end. And my suspicions would not be allayed. The space that I was groping for at the beginning made sense only as I calculated its loss, but the realization left me nowhere. The futility of my needs hit me in the face — mine, his, Ella’s, even the folks at Carrie’s Place — and despair too at my own contempt for people’s struggles. Yet, no way could I have apprehended Micah’s impact on the rest of my life. Not then.
Early the next day he went into Port-of-Spain to take care of urgent matters, he said. The house was busy, filled with people about their daily duties — the maid, the gardener, the workers for the vegetables and orchard crops at the back. “Don’t worry,” he said, kissing me absently and moving to the door without a pause, “nobody will come here in the daylight. And I’ll be back in three hours.”
I hung around all day, listening to his jazz collection, working in my song book, chatting with the maid who showed me her secret ingredient for oil-down, a breadfruit dish I had only heard about but never tasted before, growing up in the southland where Indian food ruled. I felt uneasy in the house as evening drew nearer and the precision of his three hours stretched into the whole day. I locked the back door and went for a walk along the ridge, along a path beaten through the bush so thoroughly that it looked like a clear road, one that I felt had been there for hundreds of years, a natural pass through the impenetrable mountains of the Northern Range down to the sea’s edge. At the top of the ridge I could see the ocean in the distance. The symmetry of the land’s contours was perfect, its equilibrium hammered out over eons of time, and once more I felt a pang of misgiving about the life I had chosen so far from here. I was home again, unafraid of the hidden perils of the place, of Micah’s mysterious expeditions, the whispers in the darkness outside, that outside peering menacingly into the wide-open house.
I struck out through the underbrush on my return, finding another more secret path that was entirely camouflaged from house and ridge and feeling sure that last night’s visitors had come this way. Rounding a curve in the path, I sighted the broken-down gazebo before they could see me, and I stopped in my tracks. Their voices were low, murmuring, and as their figures came into view I saw that they were saying goodbye. The man reached out and his hand ran directly down the length of Micah’s thigh, on the inside, right down the inside from crotch to mid-thigh, and then he half-turned to go. I stepped out sharply. Seeing me midway down the path, Micah waved and called gaily, “Geeta, come and meet Legano.”
Legano shook hands with me gravely, politely, and then said he must go.
“Legano came to help me plan the revolution.” Micah was laughing now, hamming it up too much, I thought. And had I actually seen what I thought I had, from the hand of this man, small, well-built, with a dapper look, a shaved head, an absolutely neutral countenance underneath the striking pallor of his gaunt face?
Legano left and Micah gathered me close as we walked toward the back door of the house. He mentioned that Legano had brought him some papers to be signed but I couldn’t buy that and listened in silence, wondering what the real story was. It was more than paperwork and more than the physical intimacy I thought I had witnessed, my instincts leading me into a cul-de-sac once more, questions and more questions that I knew I should never ask.
The carambolas remained intact and beautiful, stalk and fruit in perfect symmetry, while we continued our holiday antics in between his unpredictable forays to town, always urgent and unplanned. Our lovemaking retained its tacit delicacy, but as we approached the end of my stay, the sex itself got more wild and hectic, frantic even. I forgot all my earlier reservations. It was a roughness as smooth as silk, and savage as waves crashing into the rocks on the north coast. I could ask for nothing more. We had found our own spaces in each other and the simple pleasures of love had changed everything between us.
We drove to the northern beaches, up to Yarra, went by boat to Paria, climbed the hills of Platanal, battled at the mouth of Shark River just where it flowed into the sea at Toco, and lay together on a flat rock at the eastern edge of the island, near the lighthouse where two seas lashed and embraced ceaselessly, throwing up a barricade of cliffs and waves and whirlpools, with tiny cairns of polished stones anchored in coves along the shoreline, amidst the treacherous surf.
I had regained my strength fully. I laughed at his silly jokes, drank his rum swizzles, cuddled with him on mornings. The gaiety in the air was hurried, and almost palpable in its intensity; all the earlier doubts had dissolved into a hoarding of this time, a time I wanted to last forever. My earlier picky attitude to his house, the arrangement of space, his rambling work habits, and my own solitary needs made me more than a little embarrassed and I found the heart to wonder, too, about his irritation at some of my own ingrained habits. I thought a lot about the song, which had turned into “Nowarian Blues,” and even began to hum the melody, but I felt strangely shy about confiding to Micah my desire for mango and zaboca and ackee trees, for a backyard filled with wide arches of drooping branches that you could swing on in perfect safety.